Tommy’s uncle pressed Tommy’s lower back with his hand, making Tommy stand in a respectful, upright posture. “Well,” Tommy said, “this girl rode up on her bicycle. She said she’d been swimming in the polio pond.”
“Which you actually believe threatened Marcia’s life?” the judge said.
“Yes, I did believe it,” Tommy said.
“And still believe it?” the judge said, shaking his head slowly back and forth, as if suggesting that Tommy say “No.”
Tommy looked at Marcia.
“If you swim in that pond, you definitely could catch polio,” Tommy said. “Marcia, there, swam in it, and I think you should order her to have a checkup, just in case.”
“I see,” the judge said. “Well, stupidity and good intentions notwithstanding, I am sentencing you, Mr. Allen, to sixty days at the Kent County Camp for Delinquents. It’s not jail, mind you. It could have been jail.”
“Thank you, your honor,” Tommy’s uncle said.
Tommy’s uncle pressed Tommy’s back hard. “Yes, thank you, your honor,” Tommy said, half mumbling.
“And as for you, Mr. Norman,” the judge said. “You should not have been left alone on the bookmobile in the first place. I have already reprimanded Mr. Oler for such an oversight. Mr. Oler and I have settled this matter. I hope your mother’s already given you a good talking-to, as well.”
The judge struck his gavel. As the court officer led him from the room, Tommy turned and gave me a nice, forgiving smile, which I thought was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for me. He was forgiving me, I felt, for not shouting out, “He tried to save the girl’s life!” Because I knew that was the truth.
I was allowed to go back to work on the bookmobile. Mr. Oler never mentioned the incident to me. I never mentioned it to him, either. Later, I heard that the place they sent Tommy to was a farm about twenty minutes south of Grand Rapids. Tommy had to slop pigs and feed cows and chickens, and rake out a barn. I heard that he wore his black tee shirt, black jeans, and black shoes every day. Plus, he wore sunglasses, even in the farmhouse at night. It is true that he took the tractor out for a spin when he was not supposed to even touch it. They added a week onto his sentence for that. I also heard that everyone at the correctional farm got to like him a lot.
Mr. and Mrs. Oler had a baby girl.
“I chose this particular story to tell because I really never forgave myself for not speaking up in court that day, and because I feel that sometimes life just sparks moments of great drama. Such moments haunt you, and if you can detail and animate them on paper in a way that emboldens and honors the memory, you have become a writer. I never much wanted to write about my childhood, though I like to tell stories of what happened when I was young, especially to my daughter Emma, who is always saying, ‘Okay, tell me what happened to you when you were — ,’ and then picks an age. In the case of ‘Bus Problems,’ what I wanted most to do was show how one minute day-to-day life can be so familiar, and then suddenly everything changes! Also, I wanted to write about Tommy Allen, who more than any TV or movie character, was a real ‘action hero.’”
This is a true story about a horse. It’s also a mostly true story about the horse’s rider, me, but I can hardly distinguish what I remember from what I’d like to remember — or to forget — about myself the summer that ended as I entered seventh grade.
Outside school, I did two things better than most kids (and doing better probably meant as much to me as it meant to everyone else): swimming and horseback riding. Yet without a pool or a stable at school, I could never prove those talents to anyone. But the day camp I attended each summer provided for both.
Oh, one year, I did compete on a swim team with my best friend Johnny. I swallowed a teaspoon of honey-energy before each event with the others in my relay. All season, my eyes bore raccoon rings from the goggles. Ribbons hung from my bedroom corkboard. But I hated it, hated it just as I hated every sport that had fathers barking advice from the sidelines, or hot-shot classmates divvying the rest of us into shirts and skins, or coaches always substituting in their favorite players, and team members who knew every spiteful name for someone who missed a catch, overshot a goal, slipped out of bounds, fouled, fumbled, or failed them personally in any of a zillion ways.
But I didn’t give up swimming, as I had baseball, football, and basketball. (Their seasons were so brief, how could a person master one skill before everyone switched to the next sport?) And I devoted myself to horseback riding.
The whole idea of camp, which represented the whole idea of summer, hinged on those few hours each week at the camp stable, just as the whole of the school year merely anticipated the coming summer vacation. At camp, it was simply me against — against no one. It was me with the horse. The two of us composed the entire team, and we competed with greater opponents than just other kids. We outmaneuvered gravity, vanquished our separate fears, and mastered a third language: the wordless communication of touch and balance.
Still, I never completely lost my fear of this massive, nearly unknowable animal who was fifteen times my weight, and l don’t know how many times my gawky human strength. “Keep in mind, the horse perceives you as the bigger animal,” our riding instructor Ricki would always remind us, though not one of us believed her.
I had taken lessons from Ricki during five previous summer camps — how to read a horse’s ear positions, conduct each movement with the reins, maintain posture and balance through each gait — yet the only thing I remember is that I loved riding. Maybe I loved it because I excelled. Maybe I excelled because I loved it. I’d climb in the saddle, and instantly, other riders, other horses in the ring, whatever it was I didn’t want to do after camp or beginning in September at junior high — it all ceased to exist, along with the rest of my life on the ground, shrinking, fading behind the trail of dust the horse and I made heading to the horizon.
Curiously, most of the obnoxious kids, the ones who did the harassing and teasing during baseball or football practice, spent their hours on horseback jerking the reins to stop their horses from munching ground clover, or thumping their boots into the sides of their uninspired horses. Not that I deliberately rode circles around them, but . . .
On those Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays when we rode at camp, I insisted my mother pack carrots for my lunch (for my horse — I hated carrots). I pulled on long pants and boots even when the temperature soared into the nineties. I slipped dimes in my pocket just to buy a soda in the tack room after lessons. And most mornings, I bugged my favorite-counselor-of-all-time Mitch: Can I skip capture-the-flag and go help the younger kids saddle their horses? Can our group have our lunch at the stables? In short, can I exchange everything else camp offers for more time with the horses?
Since I was turning thirteen, this was my last summer of camp. Ricki allowed us, her senior riders, to choose our own horses. She guided us along the line of readied, haltered horses, describing each animal, hinting at its possible challenges:
“Now, Smoky, here — he’s a Tennessee walker, pretty gentle, though a bit hard-mouthed. Good for one of you stronger boys. Maybe you, Allen?”
Mitch would nod in agreement, or look down the row for a more suitable match. He’d ridden most of the horses. He’d even owned a horse of his own before coming to Ohio for college.
Appaloosas, quarter horses, pintos, buckskins. Braided manes, palomino coats, legs with white stockings, faces marked with moons or stars — but really, personality was all that mattered: skittish, poky, docile, bullheaded, rascally, distracted. Some horses kicked when another horse came too close; some had to be neck-reined, others tightly reined; some wouldn’t put up with a rider’s mixed signals, and some, well, you couldn’t always predict.
It was up to each of us to say how much spirit or obstinacy we could handle. Twenty-four riding sessions lay ahead. Almost seventy-five hours with that one chosen horse.
“Now Sparky’s a girl who likes to move,” Ricki said, as she swatted flies fro
m another horse’s eyes. “Used to be a jumper, too. Needs someone to keep her in check, who’d enjoy her spunk.” Maybe because Ricki looked straight at me, remembering me from other summers; or maybe because of the horse’s color (a flecked white coat that Ricki called “flea-bitten gray — and, no, that doesn’t mean she has fleas”); or maybe because of Sparky’s blue eyes that sparkled as the sun shined in (was that how she got her name?): whatever the reason, I walked right up and took Sparky’s halter. Mitch gave me a quick pat on the back of my neck, which I took to be his approval.
For each riding session, we’d saddle and bridle our horses with the stable assistants’ help, and then ride into the ring to practice figure eights, pivoting, cantering left and right — whatever maneuver Ricki had planned. Then it was out the gate and over a long plank bridge that spanned a marshy, spring-fed creek. As if walking a giant xylophone, the horses’ hooves struck each board, and the hammered notes echoed through the hollow. Then, single file, we’d follow forest trails barely wider than a horse. Mitch would call over his shoulder to point out a horned owl’s nest or the sort of tree from which baseball bats are made, or to warn us of an especially slippery embankment. Across hoof-muddied creeks, through shallow ravines, over rotting white pines and oaks, the horses performed almost without us. We simply leaned forward going under trees and backward heading down hills.
Eventually, we’d arrive at the meadow for “open practice,” which mostly meant a chance to break loose. Though Ricki hadn’t instructed us in any gait faster than a canter, some horses, Sparky included, just longed to gallop — it seemed more natural. Suddenly the one, two and three, four of her cantering hooves vanished into a lift-off, a levitation I could feel the way you can feel the instant a plane lifts off or a roller coaster dips, and I’d be weightless, hardly resting in the saddle, my heart clop-clopping its own rapid gait as I hovered at a velocity only the tears that the wind jerked from my eyes revealed. In those moments — how long did they last? No more than a minute or two — Sparky and I flew and the earth vanished entirely beneath us. She had become Pegasus, the winged Greek horse, and I, a twelve-year-old mortal, by some miracle, had been chosen to ride her.
And then, by accident, honestly, when we’d be heading back toward the barn, some horses (Sparky included) would shift from a gallop to a dead run, which, of course, was absolutely forbidden. It was too uncontrolled, too dangerous even for us advanced kids. It was too risky to allow a charging horse to stampede into the yard, careening into the barn and startling the tethered horses and the bystanders. And it was too thrilling — countless times more thrilling than anything else I’d ever experienced — to stop.
Lessons ended inside the stables, heaving loose the impossibly heavy saddle, slipping out the grassy, frothy bit, brushing and carding the horse. It meant coming down to earth and I could clearly recognize the odors: the horse’s short damp hair, scratchy wool saddle blankets, the warmed worn leather, sun-parched manure, sweet hay and oats.
And finally, before leaving, I took my own reward: a bottle of orange soda from the tack room cooler.
Sparky performed like no other horse I’d ever ridden. Even Ricki told my mother on parents’ night, “Those two have a special rapport.” At every session, I sensed improvement. Sparky’s trot smoothed out, though that probably meant I was learning to settle into her stride. She understood the instant I reined, leaned, and thumped my heel to move us into a canter. With Sparky, I finally understood what Ricki meant about how the horse and rider work in such harmony that they merge powers and thoughts to become a single creature. On the other hand, almost every lesson Ricki would pull me aside to say something like, “The two of you ought to try a little more this or that.” I knew that “the two of us” actually meant the one of me.
Every day of the July Fourth week, it thundershowered and lessons had to be held indoors. The horses liked this as little as we did, but even worse, the storm distracted them, unsettled them — Sparky’s ears continually flicked forward and back, fixing on whatever the wind knocked, wherever the thunder cracked.
That Friday, riding our horses into the stalls, this one kid Brett let his appaloosa named Choco drink at the trough with two other horses, though Brett knew that crowding made his horse nervous. And sure enough, another horse nosed in, and Choco bolted backward, and started bucking. The nearby horses jolted away, whinnied, and toppled a cart of straw.
“Stop, you idiot son-of-a-bitch horse!” Brett shouted in panic. (While only the counselors minded the cussing, the horses, we all knew, did not like shouting.)
“Clear out,” Mitch said, as he pulled campers from the area. “Brett! Quit screaming!”
Brett hunkered down, both hands clinging to the saddle horn, both feet flopping free of the stirrups. Then Choco’s hooves fired into the stall door, knocking the gate from its hinges, and Brett toppled to the floor, wedged between the wall and his spooked horse.
Mitch snatched at Choco’s whipping reins, which stopped the bucking for a moment. Ricki inched along the wall to help Brett slide out of the way. Mr. Olmstead, the stable owner, appeared, too, and seized Choco’s bridle, while Ricki darted in to grab Brett. But then Choco reared, trying to yank his head free, and he did, his front legs boxing in the air. But since Mitch still tugged at the reins, Choco was off-balance and heaved himself backward, battering the rear of the stall, ramming his flank right into Ricki’s chest, and pinning her momentarily against the wall.
And then there was screaming — whose? Brett’s, no doubt, since he’d just missed being crushed. And probably everyone else’s, too, as we crowded around. Ricki slumped to the straw floor as Mr. Olmstead and Mitch yanked Choco out of the barn.
Another counselor ran to call the ambulance. The stable hands hurried the horses into stalls or out into the field to make room for the medics. Mitch treated Ricki for shock — he draped a saddle blanket over her body and pulled bits of straw from her hair. Ricki squinted from the pain. Her mouth stayed open as though trying to get the air back into her lungs. I crouched beside her and talked in a low voice, repeating over and over — everything will be all right, the ambulance is coming, just relax — trying to keep her from nodding off. People were always doing that on television. Our bus idled right outside the door, ready to take us home. But we were going to be late. We had to wait, find out what was going to happen. A horse had hurt not just someone, but Ricki. We were in a different kind of shock.
A dazed weekend ended with Mitch’s announcement at flag-raising, Monday morning. “It could have been much worse. That horse could have crushed more than a few ribs. She’s got four broken ribs — did you know you don’t wear a cast for ribs? But it also means no riding for Ricki, and probably no camp for her.”
A few of us made Ricki cards or wrote letters. Mitch gave us her address and brought stamps to camp. It turned out that she lived on the same street as my grandmother, so I biked over three days that week to visit. There were always different cars in Ricki’s driveway, so I’d ride over to Grandma’s and have one of her ice-cream floats, then ride around the block a few more times, and then, convinced that Ricki was busy and didn’t really want camp kids bothering her, race home for dinner. I also thought I’d tell my parents I wanted to stop going to camp; I circled that topic for three days as well, before dropping it.
The owner’s youngest son, Gibby, took over for Ricki. We sort of knew him — he was the one who slapped the horses’ rears to move them in or out of their stalls. Gibby didn’t know our names. He didn’t bother to use the horses’ names. For three straight sessions, Gibby had us circle him in the ring while he pelted dirt clods at the horses that weren’t keeping in step, until the time ran out.
Then someone besides us kids must have complained, because with only a few sessions left, Gibby brought out his own horse, Striker, told us to march behind him “in a perfectly straight line, one horse’s-length apart,” and led us to the meadow.
“You’re on your own,” he said. “Just don’t run
’em.” Then he dismounted and gathered dirt clods.
Mitch and I and a few other kids turned our horses away from the group, just as Gibby called out to someone, “Keep that blind mare to a trot.” I leaned into a canter, and Sparky responded as though she, too, had been waiting for free practice. Behind us, Gibby shouted his warning again: “I said, don’t race her. Take the field at a trot.”
Just as I completed one half-circle, passing Mitch on his horse Paintbrush, a dirt clod whizzed past my chest. “You, for crying out loud! Listen to me!”
“You want me?” I called back as I jerked the reins to bring Sparky to a halt. Horses crisscrossed the field between Gibby and me.
“No, I want to talk to myself all day!” he shouted, even though he’d come close enough to just talk. “Yes, you. Too many holes and burrows to be running a blind animal! Trot her. Got it? Trot.”
“What do you mean? Sparky’s not blind.”
“Right. She’s not blind, and you’re not stupid. Look, kid, just keep it slow, got it?” And then Gibby turned to yell at another kid who’d dropped his reins over his horse’s grazing head.
I hopped down and stood in front of Sparky. Her enormous eyes gazed to each side, blinking, wondering, no doubt, why we weren’t flying, what I was doing on the ground. I moved to stare into her right eye, at the sun breaking from clouds that were as much in her eye as in the sky. And I shuffled over and stared into her left eye, at the herd of tiny horses and riders veering toward the woods. I pressed my face to her velvet muzzle, and I held my breath, trying not to cry, trying not to let my eyes water or my breath leak even a sob, but I couldn’t. How many times had Sparky walked me through those woods, never once stumbling as she lifted her hooves across the gullies and rotting trees? She had always dodged slower horses and obstacles in the ring. She recognized me. Even Ricki said she did. A blind horse could do all that?
Before long, Mitch came to see what was wrong. I shook my head to answer his questions. No, I wasn’t hurt. No, I wasn’t scared. No, nothing happened. No, I’m not going to just hop on and ride on home. No, I don’t care if the other kids see me crying. Ultimately, I said that I hated Gibby, I hated him, I hated camp, and everything else because how could I like anything if, if Sparky was blind! If the whole world was this unfair! Blind? How could I not have known that? Seen that? Felt that? Gibby was right: I was stupid — and I was blind.
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two Page 7
