by Jane Smiley
These were not the things I was thinking about when I refused to ride Ornery George, but I thought about them later, that night in my bed. Danny and Daddy had been “cut from the same cloth” for so long that our house was quieter and more peaceful without him, and sometimes I was glad of that, or at least relieved. But Danny had always been fun for me—never (well, hardly ever) the kind of brother who hits or teases, more the kind of brother who teaches you to play checkers and pick-up sticks, or helps you saddle your horse, or lets you have the last cookie if you really want it. I missed him, but it was hard to get to see him, so I tried not to think about it. Daddy said that it was the job of the prodigal to return, not the job of the righteous to go after him.
The next day, of course, I had school again. I sat through math (unilateral equations), science (the cell), English (Hard Times), social studies (the Pharaohs), health (protein, fats, and carbohydrates), and homeroom. Through all of these classes, the Big Four (Linda, Mary A., Mary N., and Joan) sat in a single row in the front, passing notes when Mr. Jepsen wasn’t looking and poring over their books when he was. They weren’t actively mean to me, but I had known since fifth grade that they would be if they thought I was acting “weird” or “stupid,” so I sat across the aisle from them, beside the window, not looking out, but thinking of the foal. Already, after only a single day, he was stronger and more inquisitive. When I went out to feed that morning, he had been peering over the top of the stall door, just to see what he could see, and though I didn’t touch him, he looked as though he would have let me if I’d tried. His eyes said, “Who are you? What do you want?” I just murmured in a low voice, “You’ll see, little buddy, you will certainly see.”
Stella and Gloria sat with me at lunch, no problem. Stella was extra nice to me. “Oh, Abby. I know you like oranges, and I don’t care. Here’s mine. I’ll eat your apple.” While I was sharing the orange with Gloria, Stella leaned toward us and said, “He called me again last night. We talked for half an hour.” She glanced over her shoulder at Brian Connelly. Brian Connelly was a boy Gloria and I had known since kindergarten, who had spent the first four years of elementary school picking his nose. He was now kind of good-looking. His mom let him grow his hair long, for one thing, and he also liked to talk to girls, which was a rarity among the boys we knew.
She whispered, as if it were a secret, “He says he got a stereo of his own for Christmas! So did I! We both thought that was such a coincidence. And I got a Dusty Springfield album and he got a Rolling Stones album. And you know, Dusty Springfield and the Rolling Stones are both English, so we thought that was a coincidence. He doesn’t like the Beach Boys at all.”
Gloria rolled her eyes, but discreetly, as if she were sort of laughing at Stella, but not really. At my house, at any rate, we didn’t listen to the Rolling Stones or Dusty Springfield or the Beach Boys. More Bob Wills and Porter Wagoner on the radio or on Mom’s old record player that only played 45s. Danny probably listened to all of those English bands now, but I didn’t know. Even so, I said, “My brother likes Dusty Springfield.”
“She’s really pretty,” said Stella.
“Yeah,” I said.
Gloria made a face.
Stella went on, “I love the way she does her makeup.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” said Gloria.
I said, “We had a foal.”
“What’s that?” said Stella.
Gloria snorted, but I decided to be nice. I said, “It’s a baby horse.”
“I thought that was a colt or something.”
“It is a colt. Our foal is a colt. A colt is a male and a filly is a female, and a foal is just a baby.”
“Is it cute?”
“Really—” But the foal wasn’t cute, I thought, he was … stirring. I said, “I don’t know if—”
“You know what Brian told me?”
“What?” said Gloria.
“He said that Martin Selden likes you.”
“Who, me?” said Gloria.
Stella nodded excitedly.
“I think I’m going to puke,” said Gloria.
I said, “Right now?”
“If I have to.”
“But—” said Stella.
Gloria turned her back on Stella and leaned toward me. She said, “Can I come home with you on the bus and see the foal? My mom wouldn’t mind. She’d like to see it when she picks me up. I can call her from your house.”
Over Gloria’s shoulder, I could see Stella looking a little surprised. I didn’t know what I thought about that. I would have expected to be happy, but I wasn’t, really. Gloria could be pretty mean if she lost patience. I said, “Not today. Not till he’s three or four days old, my daddy says.”
Gloria flipped her hair over her shoulder, practically in Stella’s face, and said, “Okay, we’ll come over the weekend, then. That will be fun.” She didn’t say a word about Stella coming along, and neither did I, since it was Gloria’s idea. But when the bell rang, and they went to their sixth period, they were laughing.
That afternoon, I rode the pony, the chestnut George, and the Jewel. All three were extra good, and Daddy even dragged out some poles and tubs and had me jump the pony over some cross-poles. Every time the pony jumped, Daddy laughed and said, “Look at those knees! Right together and up around his chin.” Then he went inside and got a tablecloth. To tell the truth, it was the very one that we were eating off of that week, but Mom must have been somewhere else. Anyway, Daddy set a pole so that it was straight across two of the smaller tubs and draped that tablecloth over the pole so it fluttered a little in the wind. He said, “Now take him over that.”
I was sitting on the pony about twenty paces from the jump, just beginning to wonder whether I liked that idea, when the pony picked up a trot and trotted right down toward the fluttering cloth. I sat tight, not knowing what he would do, but I didn’t kick him or turn him off. I just looked over the top of the jump at the peak of the barn roof, and sure enough, he picked up a canter and popped over that square of fabric like he’d done it a hundred times. Daddy said, “I bet this little guy’d jump anything, really.”
I knew what that meant.
Now Daddy got a bee in his bonnet. For the next few days, he went looking for anything you could possibly jump. Not only the tablecloth, but a couple of kitchen chairs, a row of wastebaskets, the wheelbarrow, a low clothesline hung with dish towels, a length of picket fence, two hay bales with a place setting of dishes on them. The pony jumped everything. Daddy got happier and happier and said that in the spring, he would take me to the coast, where they had the English-style horse shows, because that pony was like gold coins in the bank, and he was pretty, too, gray with black points and a black mane. Every day I was to brush him all over and then rub him with a folded-up piece of an old woolen sweater to make him shine.
The pony didn’t seem to mind the foal, so after I rode, when I was doing the extra grooming, I cross-tied him in the aisle outside the stall where the mare and foal lived. The foal would stand there, looking at us and flicking his ears back and forth and ruffling his nostrils. He had a high whinny that made me laugh, and sometimes he just whinnied all at once for no reason, even though his mom was standing right behind him, eating her hay. Then the foal would give a high squeal and lift up on his hind legs for a moment and toss his head like he had more energy than he knew what to do with. But I still didn’t go up to him or pet him, even though it seemed to me that he was saying, with every look and every whinny, “Come here! Come here! I want to get to know you!”
Chapter 4
ON SATURDAY MORNING, THE FOAL WAS FIVE DAYS OLD. IT WAS a nice day—not wet and almost warm—so after breakfast, we went out to the barn, all three of us. Mom got a halter and lead rope and took the other Jewel out of the big mare corral and led her into one of the stalls. Then she put the halter on the foal’s dam, opened the stall door, and brought her out. Daddy and I stood to either side of the door, ready to guide the foal if he went the w
rong way. Mom stopped with the mare about ten feet out into the yard, and we waited for what seemed like a long time. The foal stood in the doorway with his nose poked into the sunlight, snorting. A couple of times, he struck out with his front hooves, as if he were a big tough guy, and then he jumped through the doorway, jumped up to the mare, and pressed himself against her for a moment before Mom led her on to the corral. The mare went quietly. The foal leapt and bucked in the breeze. His ears flicked back and forth. After we closed up behind him and then shut the gate to the corral, he reared straight up into the air and galloped for about ten strides. I guess he just couldn’t believe how free he was. The mare trotted after him, nickering.
Even though I had horses to ride, I stood by the fence, watching him play and laughing. Finally, I heard Daddy say, “Abby! I’m talking to you! If your friend is coming over, you’d better get started.”
I turned to him. “I don’t want to name him George.”
“‘Little George’ is fine. We’d know him perfectly well by that.”
“No, Daddy. He’s not a George. He’s too bright and—”
“Cocky?”
This was a dangerous word. Daddy hated a “cocky” horse, but I said, “Well, yeah.”
Daddy sighed, took out his handkerchief, wiped his nose. Then he said, “Okay, child, I see the handwriting on the wall.”
The handwriting on the wall was something in the Bible. It said, “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” and I didn’t know what it meant really. In our family it meant “Watch out, you’re in trouble.” But Daddy put his handkerchief back in his pocket and said, “If we’ve got him, we’d better do a good job with him. So name him what you like.”
The colt skittered around the mare, his feet fluttering. He stopped dead and stared at us, leapt up again as if we were just too much, and then settled down and began to nurse. We both laughed. I said, “Jack is okay. Jack is better than George.”
“As in Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean?”
“No, as in Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick.”
“Okay, but let’s go for Little Jack Horner, who said, ‘What a good boy am I.’” Daddy ruffled my hair, and I gave him a hug.
The pony had been jumped a lot, so we gave him the day off. The chestnut George had a long work—walk, jog, lope, a few sliding stops, some spins, and some gallops around the barrels, though not at top speed. It was fun. I worked on his manners—sidestepping to the gate so I could open it, going through, sidestepping the gate closed and waiting until I was ready to go. He was supposed to wait quietly, no shuffling his feet or trying to put his head down, and he did. He was ready to sell, really. He was just waiting for a buyer, and truly, a little girl could ride him. After I got off him, Daddy took him over to the washstand and combed out his mane and tail, which were long and full, then he trimmed his whiskers and the hair in his ears. You could just see him in a parade down Main Street, his tail flowing behind him.
In the meantime, I got on the other mare. At first, she kept taking me to the end of the ring nearest the corral where the foal was. She would stop and prick her ears. She had that stiffness in her body that sometimes means a horse is going to pull away and run off, but she didn’t. She got used to the foal, and pretty soon, she was passing that end of the ring without a look in the foal’s direction, though if he squealed or whinnied, she would flick her ears. She had her normal work. She wasn’t as far along as the chestnut George, but she was willing enough most of the time. When I kicked her or flicked the quirt at her, her usual response was “Do I have to, well, okay,” which is fine for a riding horse. That means more people who don’t really know what they are doing feel safe. She was already starting to shed, so when I was finished with her, Daddy and I each took currycombs and curried off the dull winter hair. Underneath, that Jewel had a regular bay coat, red enough. She had a kind eye and a very pretty head that would make her valuable.
So, we put her away in the stall and looked at each other.
Daddy hadn’t made me ride Ornery George after I refused. Probably he complained about me to Mom, and she recommended patience, because look what happened with Danny, and Daddy didn’t know how to back off, and I would change my mind in a few days—I knew all the arguments. Now, as we looked at each other, I was trying to decide how stubborn he was going to be, and he was trying to decide how stubborn I was going to be, and, to be honest, I myself didn’t know how stubborn I was going to be, but then he said, “Let’s put him on the line.”
This meant we would take him into the arena with his saddle and bridle on and run a long tape through the ring of his bit and then up over his head behind the ears and attach it to the ring on the other side. He would then trot or canter around Daddy and get rid of some of his extra energy. Usually, Daddy wasn’t a big fan of using the line, because he thought it just made them fitter and fitter without teaching them much, so I knew he was exercising mercy—after some time on the line, Ornery George would be too tired to buck, and we might get a session in during which he didn’t misbehave. Part of the problem with a misbehaving horse was that the more he misbehaved, the more he got into the habit of misbehaving, and, as Daddy often said about just about everything (but mostly about smoking, which he had once done), “Old habits die hard.”
Ornery George looked okay. He was a brown horse with a smallish head, good legs, an arched neck, and a short back. He had great feet, which was why Daddy had liked him in the first place—no foot, no horse. He didn’t have to be shod at all, just rasped every six weeks. But he didn’t ever look at you, or if he did, it was only secretly, when you weren’t looking at him. Most horses, when they came from the sale barn, didn’t make eye contact for a while, but then, after days of hay and grooming and talk, they would begin looking for you and at you—not only did you have feed or a carrot, but also, what were you doing? But Ornery George didn’t seem to care. The whole time I was grooming him and tacking him up, he pretended that I wasn’t there.
Daddy led him into the ring and went to the big end, which was empty. He stood there with the looped line in one hand and a long whip in the other, and he flicked the whip so that Ornery George would turn and trot away, which he did. The way he trotted away showed us pretty clearly that he knew what he was supposed to do, and for one circuit, he did it. But then, as he was coming around the second time, he threw up his head and spun outward with his shoulder, taking the line through Daddy’s hands, then trying to gallop to the other end of the ring. Daddy dropped the whip, set his heels, and leaned back against the line. Ornery George came to a stop and tossed his head again.
“Now, Abby,” Daddy called, “this is a perfect example of why you always wear gloves when you are working a horse on a line.” He pulled Ornery George back to him and returned to the end of the ring, where he got George on a shorter length of tape and made him go around in a smaller circle, closer to the fence so that the fence could control him a little. Ornery George looked grumpy, but he went around on the line, making quite a few circuits. After a while, Daddy changed the attachment and sent him in the other direction. Then he said, “Well, he doesn’t make you happy to be in his company, does he?”
“His jog is smooth. In fact, all his gaits are smooth. I like that part.”
“He has his good qualities. But I admit they aren’t mental ones. He’s quiet now, though. You want to get on him?”
This wasn’t a question.
“We’ll stay at this end of the ring. Just do a few things to remind him what a good horse is like.”
The worst thing that could happen was for a purchase to be a complete bust. It was bad for us, because it was a loss of money as well as hay. And it was bad for the horse, because if he was untrainable, he might have to go to the knackers. That was where horses were killed and turned into dog food and other things. We had only ever sent one horse to the killers, a mare that was given to Daddy as a last resort, for a dollar. She was fine for a few days, and then, after s
he reared up on the cross-ties and struck out at him with both front feet, Daddy took her out to the ring and put her on the line. The first thing she did was not, as Ornery George had done, trot off. That mare had backed up and then run toward him where he was standing in the center, her teeth bared and her ears pinned. When he put his arm up to protect himself, she bit him through his jacket. It was kill or be killed with her, and she went off two days later.
I didn’t think Ornery George would ever be like that. But if a little girl couldn’t ride him, then I didn’t know what would happen to him. He was the first one Daddy bought after Danny left that a kid, namely me, had not been able to manage.
I stepped up to the horse, took the reins in my left hand, put my palm on top of his neck, and bent my knee. Daddy threw me into the saddle. Ornery George didn’t do anything, but he gave me a look out of the corner of his eye—“Oh, it’s you.” I settled into the saddle and gave him a little nudge. He walked a step or two but then stopped. Daddy had his back turned, rolling up the line. I gave Ornery George another nudge and, when he didn’t move, a little kick. Then he gave a kick, just a little kick out with his right foot, quick. What it said was, “I’m the boss. Watch your step.” I kicked him again, and he started walking forward. By the time Daddy was watching, Ornery George was going along. Daddy said, “He looks okay today.”
So, Ornery George and I had a secret. It was that he was going to do things his way, and I was going to let him, and we were going to get along more or less on that basis. This is not a good secret to have with your horse, because it gives him the upper hand. You always know that there might be something you could ask him to do that he would say no to, but you don’t really know what it’s going to be, and you’re a little afraid of finding out. But I was too chicken to argue, either with Ornery George or with Daddy, so I kicked him into the trot and went around well enough while Daddy said, “He’s not a bad horse. Good-looking, nice mover, a little on the dull side. I think I made a good deal for him. He’ll work out.”
