by Jane Smiley
Chapter 14
SOPHIA DIDN’T COME TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY she told Leslie, Stella, Gloria, Mary, and Luisa all about it. I didn’t say much, just watched her as she smiled and talked and drew a picture of the chute on a page of her notebook. I had never seen her so bouncy. Gloria kept looking at me and saying, “You did this, too? Why didn’t you call me?”
“We didn’t know what was going to happen. Next time we will. I’ll tell you when they come back.”
“Where are they going?”
“Down south. Los Angeles.”
“And she—”
“Daphne,” said Sophia.
“And Daphne just goes to various schools?” said Leslie.
I nodded. Then I said, “They are not like anyone we know.” I described that day on the bus when the paper wad flew and Daphne caught it without even looking, as far as I could tell.
Leslie said, “I want to watch, too. You know, there’s this sport called pentathlon. You swim, fence, shoot pistols, run cross-country, and ride.”
“What do you shoot?” said Stella.
“Targets,” said Leslie.
“You are so weird,” said Stella.
But she meant it as a compliment.
Dad didn’t say anything about the clinic, and all Mom said was that the Carmichaels seemed like a very interesting family and she hoped to have them for supper sometime when they came back. But as the week progressed, I noticed that our arena started looking like a good place to lunge a horse over a few jumps and even make a chute, if only a small one. Daddy stacked all the jump poles in one place, and when I counted them, I saw that we had about sixteen. But I had another idea. On Thursday, I set up a fairly low jump right next to the fence, maybe two feet, and I gave it a very long wing on the other side, three poles end to end, maybe forty-eight feet.
I hung my tack on the gate and went to get Blue as if there were nothing special going on, then I brushed him off and brought him into the arena and let him go. Even though he had been out all night with Jack and the others, he was happy to play, and in the meantime, I fiddled with this and fiddled with that, pretending that his sniffing the hay bales and the cones and inspecting the jumps and my line of poles was not really my business. I did have the flag with me, and from time to time I waved it. At first, he took this as an excuse to bounce around and kick up his heels, but pretty soon he was just walking around, putting his nose under the fence, and looking here and there. When he came over to me the next time, I showed him a carrot. But I didn’t give it to him.
Instead, I walked briskly over to the chute I had built, not paying any attention to him. He followed right behind me. I picked up the trot, and without looking at him, I jumped over the jump, trotted another ten feet, and turned around. Blue was on the other side of the fence, but when I waved the carrot, he hopped over it and came to me. I said, “Yup!” and gave him a piece of the carrot.
We did this about six more times. I would walk Blue around to the beginning of the chute and stand him there, then walk to where I had been standing before, stepping over the jump, and I would call, “Hey, Blue! Jump!” And lo and behold, here he came, trotting to me over the jump, looking for his carrot. It made me laugh every time.
When I brushed him and tacked him up, we went over the jump twice without doing anything else ahead of time—I wanted to do it while it was still in his mind, and he went straight over, no problem, seeming to enjoy it. Each time, I gave him a piece of a carrot. It wasn’t until after I had gone on to other things like circles and transitions that I noticed Daddy watching. When we came up to where he was leaning against the fence, he said, “He seems to like that.”
“Almost as much as I do,” I said. But we didn’t talk about it anymore. Daddy did leave the chute in place, though.
That night, Jane called. She told me that Melinda could not make her lesson Saturday, so Ellen would be there half an hour early, and asked if that was okay with me. Next she said that she didn’t know if I would be disappointed or not, but Sophia had ridden every day that week and was signed up for a lesson on Pie in the Sky with the colonel Saturday. Since I would be there already, I was welcome to ride Onyx, if only hacking around. Sophia seemed to want the company. I said, “She should trailer him out here and ride with me. Onyx knows all the trails and they’re really nice.”
There was a pause, then Jane said, “I’ll suggest that. I think she would like that. I think she should do that. I’ll tell her dad.”
I laughed out loud.
Then her voice got serious. She said, “Abby.”
“Yes, Jane?”
“I have been thinking about our clinic all week, and I have to tell you one thing.”
“What?”
“Ralph Carmichael is not like any horseman anywhere else that I know of. He does things his way, and he’s been doing them his way for years and years. I would not, and I think that the colonel would not, send a herd of horses pell-mell down a line of jumps. Too much potential chaos. Ralph is able to control the chaos, but I’m not sure someone who didn’t know his methods inside out could do the same. Do you know what I mean?”
I did, and said so. Then I added, “He’ll be coming back. I won’t do anything really weird until I take some more lessons from him.”
“Okay,” said Jane.
“But I got Blue to jump for a carrot today.”
Jane said, “Well, dear, he is a carrot sort of horse rather than a stick sort of horse. That seems obvious.”
After five days, I still felt good, though, and what good felt like was that I could think about Peter Finneran without grinding my teeth. I could see that he had his ideas, and they were meant to work in a certain way, and the real problem when I took Blue to his clinic was that Blue wasn’t ready for Peter Finneran’s ideas. He knew some things, but not enough things. Who had been prideful? Well, me, for one. Without knowing anything about what Peter Finneran was going to do, I expected to do it all perfectly, and for everyone to admire Blue, and me as well. Maybe I had been going to the clinic not to learn but to show off.
We all knew where that would get you.
And there was another thing about pride, I realized. If you were really having fun, then you didn’t have time to be proud. I guess even Sophia had learned that. But even if she hadn’t, she had had some fun, and I thought we both would always remember that better than we would remember the bad times.
That night, before I went to bed, I went out to check on the horses and give them a last bit of hay. When Blue and Jack came over to the fence, I said, “Let’s start over. Whatever we do now, we do it because we like to do it.”
Blue tossed his head, and Jack nickered, and I took those responses to mean “Yes.”
About the Author
Jane Smiley is the author of many books for adults, including Private Life, Horse Heaven, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.
Jane Smiley lives in Northern California, where she rides her horses every chance she gets. She is the author of three other novels for young readers, The Georges and the Jewels, A Good Horse, and True Blue, all featuring Abby Lovitt and her family’s ranch.