by Jane Smiley
I said, “How’s Ned feel about being the lead horse?”
“Not happy, but willing.”
I didn’t volunteer. We walked back the way we came, a little more carefully, which you do when you’re going downhill, and I watched the geldings some more. Someone else was watching them, too, and that was Jack So Far. He stared at them and whinnied, pawed, tossed his head, trotted the circle of the round corral waving his tail. I said, “Jack seems ready to get out there.”
“Confinement is driving him crazy. But the vet says another week. He was on a tranquilizing drug, but we weaned him off that.”
“Is he going to get along with Gee Whiz?”
Abby said, “I hope so. He did before.”
Ned said, “No.”
I said, “I thought Gee Whiz was for sale.”
“Of course he is. Someone came to look at him after the show. They’re coming back next week.” She sighed. “The trainer thinks he has potential. He shows down in L.A., in the big shows. Since Gee Whiz raced down there, he’s used to the weather and the heat.”
“Why didn’t they just buy him?”
Abby didn’t say anything, and in my mind, Ned said, “Dontcha wonder. Ha.”
Now Da piped up. I’d practically forgotten him. He said, “You should show him to Colonel Dudgeon. His whole life is buying and selling show horses. And”—in his Colonel Dudgeon voice—“I know what I’m doing and don’t you forget it, young man!”
We laughed. Ned seemed calmer heading back to the barn.
Later, during our lesson—me on Tater and Da on LB—I kept my mouth shut. Since Da likes to talk, he would ask Abby questions even when she was telling us to circle at the walk, then the trot, then the canter. It was like riding came so naturally to him that he didn’t have to think about it, so he could keep on talking even when he was doing just the right thing (and LB was, too). He asked her about Jack’s racing record, about how much money he won, about his breeding (that is, his sire and dam), about who trained him and who broke him, and all of that. She told him about how Jack was orphaned as a foal and how sad that was. As for me and Tater, we were like the quiet kids in the back of the classroom who keep our eyes open and do what the other kids are doing. Every so often, Abby would tell me to lift my hands a little or put my outside leg back a little farther to get Tater to step over behind. Or she would tell me my canter depart was good. But mostly, she and Da talked about Jack, which was fine with me, because, since Tater was being very good, I kept my eyes on the gelding pasture.
Ned was exactly right. We had given them their noon hay, which is grass hay, not very exciting. For a while they ate; then for a while they argued. One of the boarders chased Ned away from his hay, then trotted back to his own hay. Mordecai kept his eye out. He’s small, so the others bothered him, too, but he didn’t seem to care, though when one of the boarders came too close, he leapt forward and kicked out with both hind legs as if he really meant it. That boarder trotted away. Abby and Da kept talking. It was like I had instructed Da to distract Abby so that I could proceed with my investigation into why Ned didn’t like the other geldings. The mares had come up from the creek and were eating their hay, too, but nothing. Just nothing. They ate. That was all.
Da said, “What’s the most number of times you ever fell off in one day?”
Abby said, “Once.”
Da said, “I fell off four times in one day when I was seven.”
“Because you asked the horse to rear up four times, and then you slid backward?”
“No. I only just learned to do that.”
I said, “Why bother?” I threw myself off a pony once to show Mom that falling off isn’t that bad, to get her to let me take jumping lessons, but it did hurt (elbow and wrist), though I kept that to myself.
He didn’t answer. He said, “They were real falls. Mom was giving me a lesson.”
I said, “My mom says little kids bounce.”
“Well, I didn’t bounce. I sort of flopped. That makes the landing easier.”
I tried to understand what this meant, and then he showed us. He got Mordecai to trot toward the gate, then dropped off like a rag doll and landed on his back. Mordecai trotted two more steps, then halted, looked around, and headed for the grass that grew along the edge of the arena. Da jumped up and went to catch him, but Mordecai wasn’t having any of that—he tossed his head and trotted away. It took ten minutes to catch him, and we only managed to do it after Abby went and got some oats in the bucket. When Da was back on him, I said, “I guess you learned your lesson, huh?” and Da said, “Never.” We both laughed. I realized that I liked Da because he showed me lots of new things, including ones I would never dare try.
Egg salad sandwiches and Gravenstein apples for lunch, and the Gravensteins, of course, got me talking about Grandma’s apple pies, which are best with Gravensteins. They come from around here and ripen in the summer, which means that since you haven’t had an apple pie in a really long time, it’s the only thing you could possibly want for dessert, and that includes chocolate cake. Abby’s mom said that she’d always wished for some apple trees, then we talked about apple names—pippin, russet, Pink Pearl, Arkansas Black. Abby’s mom said that her favorite was Lord Peckover, and Da said that his mom had one of those trees. After lunch, it was already two and it was hot hot hot. I kept my eye on Da, and went over to the bookcase, where I had left the Sherlock Holmes book, and then I sniffled and sighed and made some other noises as I walked through the room, out the door, and over to the shade of the big tree. I looked at my watch. It took Da six minutes and four seconds to find me.
I already had the book open, but since I didn’t want to read ahead, I was looking around and of course over to the gelding pasture, where Gee Whiz whinnied three times. Then Jack, in the round corral, whinnied back three times. The first thing Da said when he sat down was, “Colonel Dudgeon better find a home for the gray, because I think there is going to be a big fight if Jack gets turned out with the other geldings.”
“Abby’s dad says that Jack and Gee Whiz will work it out once they’re turned out in the same pasture.”
“But if you have two talented horses that could sell for a lot of money, I don’t think you want them to work it out.”
And Ned said, “Yes.”
I read for maybe half an hour—until the shade of the tree slipped away from us, and we were squinting in the sunshine. I started where the man who owned the “stick” returns and brings a “manuscript,” which he reads aloud in a “high, cracking voice.” I tried to do the same thing. At first Da was grinning, but then I saw him close his eyes and pay attention. The manuscript is about a very bad man named Hugo from the old days, who kidnaps a girl, and she escapes by climbing down some ivy and running home, “there being three leagues betwixt the Hall and her father’s farm.” I said, “I wonder how far that is.”
Da said, “I think a league is about three miles.”
“How would you know?”
“My grandfather uses that word, and once I asked my mother what it meant.” He closed his eyes again.
I read the rest. The bad part was that this Hugo swore that he would give himself over to the powers of evil if he didn’t catch the girl, and then a shepherd told his friends that he had seen Hugo’s hounds, and then Hugo on his “black mare” going after the girl, and then another hound, much bigger and scarier, silently chasing Hugo and the mare. They found Hugo, dead on the ground with his throat torn out.
I put my finger on the page, and said, “Do you think it’s okay if we read this?”
“You’ve read ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ right? Or ‘Hansel and Gretel’? What’s the difference?”
I said, “Okay. But what I want to know is what happened to the mare, and what she thought about all of this.”
“If he was that bad of a person, I’m sure she thought
she was better off, especially if for the rest of her life she was free to gallop around on the moor.”
I then read the next part, which was a newspaper article about the death Sherlock is supposed to investigate, in my flat newspaper voice. After that, the man who is visiting Sherlock tells him the “private facts,” and the most important of them is that right by the man who was killed in a “yew alley” were some footprints. The last sentence of the chapter, which I read in a scary voice, was “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
I could see Abby walking toward us, for sure coming to tell us that we had tack to clean or stalls to muck out. Da said, “No surprise there.”
I said, “Yeah, but what’s a yew alley?”
“Probably two lines of yew trees leading away from the house. I’ve seen some of those. They are huge and old. The trunk looks like it’s been woven out of some other tree trunks. That’s the spooky part, if you ask me.” I made up my mind to go to the library and look yews up. Maybe Ruthie would draw me a picture of one.
I closed the book.
Yes, Abby wanted us to do some work, but it was to help her carry the hose around to the tanks, fill them to the brim, and give the horses some cooler water to drink. The hose is long. There are three different faucets. One of them is on a post at the far end of the gelding pasture. She had put Jack back in his stall—all the hay was eaten—and maybe because it was hot, all the horses, even Gee Whiz, were just standing around, finding whatever shade they could. When we were in the middle of doing this, she said, “Well, listen to this.”
I said, “What?”
“My dad’s truck broke down in Arizona.”
“Are the horses okay?”
“He wasn’t hauling the horses. A guy in the hauling business is going to bring them next week. I guess he bought two. Both geldings.”
Da and I looked at each other.
“But he’s got to wait a few days to see if they can fix the truck.”
I did not say what my mom would say, which is, “Can he afford to fix the truck?” because my mom is always worried about what things cost. I said, “He should trade it in. My dad could get him a good deal.”
“He was going to trade it in last spring, but then decided that he likes it too much, and didn’t. It isn’t that old—only about five years. I guess he ran over something in the dark that broke an axle. Anyway, I hope he doesn’t decide that he loves Arizona so much that we have to move there.”
And I hoped that she was kidding.
And what popped out of my mouth was, “Can I spend the night?”
Abby said, “You should. You can stay tonight and tomorrow night.”
“Can I sleep in the barn?”
Abby laughed. She said, “You can sleep in my room. I have a trundle bed that you pull out from underneath mine. Da is in Danny’s room.”
“How’s Danny?”
“He’s okay. He’s up in Oregon, near this town called Ashland. He told Mom that he’s shoeing horses again, but who knows. I guess there are lots of forests up there, so maybe he’s hiking all the time. I think he’s written Mom twice since he got back.”
I knew where he had gotten back from—Vietnam. But that was all I knew. Da and I helped her coil the hose and then she carried it back to the barn and set it off to one side, by the barn faucet. I went into the house. Abby’s mom was sweeping the kitchen floor, and after I walked in, she swept right behind me. I said, “Abby said I could spend the night, tonight and tomorrow night.”
She said, “That’ll be fun.”
“Do you mean that?”
She smiled and patted me on the head, then said, “Yes, but only if you like corn on the cob.”
“I love corn on the cob.”
“Well, there you go.”
I looked at my watch, then said, “I’d better call Mom.”
Mom hadn’t left to pick me up yet, because Joan Ariel was still napping. She said, “That’s fine. Do you need me to bring you some clean clothes?”
I thought of Da, who seems to wear the same thing every day. I said, “No. Let’s see how dirty I can get.”
Abby’s mom was behind me. She said, “I can loan you a nightgown. Abby has some things she’s outgrown.”
So there I was, on a sudden horse vacation. I was very happy.
I looked at my watch. Before I got the chance to spend the night, the day had seemed as though it was coming to an end. Now it stretched ahead of me like a long road. At least three hours until dinner, and then more reading, I thought, and then lying in the dark near Abby, with the windows open, listening to the horses, and maybe sneaking out of bed and looking for them in the moonlight.
Right then, because the back door was still open, Rusty, their dog, came trotting in with something droopy in her mouth, looking very proud of herself. She laid it gently on the floor at the feet of Abby’s mom. I’d never seen anything like it—it had really long legs and long ears and a black tail. Abby’s mom said, “Wow.”
Rusty sat down and gazed at it.
I said, “Is that a rabbit?”
Abby’s mom said, “It’s a hare. A jackrabbit.”
“How did she catch that?”
“I don’t think she knows. Open the door as wide as you can.” The hare’s ears were flicking. I didn’t see any blood on the hare or on Rusty’s mouth. Abby’s mom said, “I think she surprised it. She’s fast and she’s quiet.”
The hare moved again.
I sneaked around it and pushed the door against the wall.
Abby’s mom looked at Rusty and said, “Rusty, stay!” Then she took the broom and very gently eased the hare toward the door and out onto the back porch. By the time she got it through the door, it was turning its head back and forth. She said, “Close the door.”
I did, and we watched it through the window. Rusty watched, too. The hare rolled around for a bit, then seemed to come to, as if it had fainted. Then it sat up, the way Easter bunnies sit on their haunches, and flicked its ears again. Then it seemed to look around and say, “What just happened?” It jumped down the steps. Rusty had her paws on the windowsill and she gave one bark, and then the hare was gone—around the house to the left, fast as lightning. I saw that my horse vacation was going to be very interesting.
I said, “Why didn’t she kill it?”
“Well, for sure she’s not hungry. But it’s more like she hunts for sport. A few months ago, I was over in the hay barn and she was with me. A bird had been looking for oats, and it flew out. She leapt into the air and caught it without even thinking about it. It was just a natural movement.”
“Did you let the bird go?”
“Of course, but it didn’t survive.”
“What kind of bird was it?”
“A sparrow.”
She went into the closet and got a mop, then mopped the spot where the jackrabbit had been, and I went out the front door to look at the lemon tree and smell the blossoms.
When I came back in, Abby was lying on the sofa. She said, “Mom is going to the market. You want anything?”
“Gravensteins.”
“She’ll look for those. I am going to take a nap.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“Don’t get into trouble.”
“I’ll read a book. I’ll read Charlotte’s Web.”
She nodded and her eyes closed.
I found the book and went out to the back porch. No sign of the hare. I decided to read the part where the spider, Charlotte, starts writing words in her web. I wished she would write “deduction,” but I don’t think Charlotte ever read any Sherlock stories.
From Abby’s back porch, I could see part of the mare pasture and part of the gelding pasture, the front of the barn, and the strip of land between the two pastures. Everything was still. I read a c
hapter, then I heard a little noise, so I kept quiet and stopped reading. I thought maybe the hare had come back, had decided that I could be its friend. I’d heard of people having pet bunnies, and even walking them on a leash. I could go into the house, if I was quiet enough, and get a carrot. I set the book down. There was another sound, and then Da eased out of the barn, just like he was sneaking somewhere. He was carrying a lead rope and a halter, and he had his hard hat on. I opened my mouth and then closed it. He was also carrying an apple, which I hoped was not a Gravenstein. It took a long time, but he did walk all the way to the end of the gelding pasture, where he climbed over the fence. I stood up so I could see better. Ned was a little way up the hill, picking out leaves or something. Da looked at him, and a moment later, Ned picked up his head and looked at Da, then trotted toward him, halted. Da held out his hand, giving him the apple. He put the halter on Ned, which was not a problem, because Ned dropped his head and was quiet. Then he led Ned to the fence, climbed to the top rail, and slipped onto Ned’s back. I watched for about ten minutes, then I stepped quietly off the porch and headed to the far end of the arena.
I might have noticed Da, but it didn’t seem like he noticed me. He was sitting bareback on Ned the way he always sits on a horse—as if he were glued there. His legs hung down, and his back was straight but flexible. He was holding the lead rope with his right hand and petting Ned with his left, first at the base of his neck and then just behind where he was sitting. When I got closer, I heard that he was humming, and the song he was humming was “Waltzing Matilda.” His humming was slow and soothing. Ned walked here and there. I would have expected him to try and put his head down and graze or to look around, but he just walked here and there. Da would shift his weight a little from side to side, or push one leg against Ned’s ribs, and Ned would turn. Finally, when I was about four steps from the fence, he saw me. Ned pricked his ears, and Da made a funny face and said, “You caught me.”