by KT Sparks
“This is Poppy, and Poppy is a pony,” said Kim, gathering her long hair in one hand, twisting it into a scrunchie with the other. She bounced on the toes of her hip-high riding boots and tugged at her tight purple and white T-shirt. It read “PPHS Girls Volleyball 2012.” She couldn’t have been over twenty years old. “Poppy’s going to help me teach you today.”
As the girls cried, “He’s a baby!” and Kim explained the difference between ponies and horses, Martin circled the little beast. He couldn’t figure out how anyone might find it cute or think it young. He certainly hoped he would not be expected to ride Poppy or any of its brethren. He had not considered there might only be a string of bitter Poppies from which to choose.
Of course, Martin had not expected that any municipal animal could measure up to Hero, the Cowboy Poet’s mount, the horse against which Martin judged all other horses. He didn’t know what Hero looked like in the flesh. He’d only seen the promo pictures, most taken through a wide-angle lens on Vess Guffry’s Colorado ranch. The poet rarely brought the mustang with him to the weekly tapings of the Cowboy Poetry Hour, which was actually two hours, recorded on Friday nights and aired live on public radio stations across the nation. Sometimes, when the show was performed in larger venues, Hero joined Guffry on stage, Pyrois to his Helios.
Of course, the radio couldn’t capture Hero’s radiance, and most of what Martin knew of Hero’s looks came from the verses of the Cowboy Poet himself:
He’s as blond as the sun.
He’s as broad as the skies.
As mighty as a gun,
Like a bullet he flies.
That particular ballad went on for multiple stanzas and added ample physical detail—for instance, Hero’s forehead was emblazoned with heaven’s own star. Martin had many times imagined himself on the mustang, staring off into a fiery Western sunset, both man and horse alert to the coyote’s call, his evening song of loneliness, one that only a cowboy poet could fully capture and repeat in rhyming iambic pentameter.
Kim had moved on to assigning horses to the class, all of whom but Martin squealed and bounced each time a horse name was announced, as if they were going to be mounted atop the front men from a hot new boy band.
“Maribeth on Streamers. Vanessa on Beaucoup. Ellen Catherine on Tigerlily. Maguire on Sunshine, Vivian on Whiskey, and Martin on…” Had she really paused or was it just Martin’s nerves slowing time? That often happened to him before minor traffic accidents or great humiliations.
“…Zach.”
A gasp went up from the crowd, both the mothers along the fence and the daughters already straddling their ponies. Another instructor, almost identical to Kim down to the hip boots and the high school athletics T-shirt, led out a colossal black draft horse, a Percheron. Martin gasped too. Even he recognized Zach. The horse was famous in Pierre: hauling the float for the queen’s court every Blossomtown parade; pulling the cart with the pretend dead Union cavalry generals every Memorial Day; serving as pace horse for the Pierre Penny-Farthing Bike Festival every July; hauling Santa’s sleigh down Main Street every Christmas. Zach was not Hero, but he was a storied, even legendary, steed, and Martin stood a little taller knowing they had been paired.
“He’s the only horse we have that can carry your weight,” said the second instructor as she dragged a stepstool over to where Zach was accepting pats and apples from the mothers. Martin recognized most of them. He’d written their grandparents’ obituaries for the Leader Telegram, covered their graduations from PPHS, and interred their parents’ last Irish setters. A six-foot-plus freckled dirty blonde, Susie Coyne, gave him a small wave. He had buried her ferret just a couple of weeks ago.
He didn’t think he needed the stool to mount Zach, having imagined many times swinging into the saddle with the grace and ease granted by the extra room in the thighs and seat of his Wranglers. But then again, Zach was taller than any of the horses on which he had mentally practiced.
Martin put his left foot in the stirrup and reached for Zach’s mane with his right hand, as he had watched the girls do. A single, festive bell tied on the horn with green ribbon jingled softly, and Zach snorted, reared his head back, and sidestepped away from the fence. The horse’s momentum caught Martin mid-leg-swing, and he ended up, his stomach on the saddle, flopped crosswise to Zach’s body. Zach continued to wriggle and throw his head.
“Quit kidding around,” Kim said over her shoulder as she strode after the line of ponies and their riders walking placidly into the arena. The mothers followed outside the fence, each tossing a piece of advice to Martin as she went:
“He likes his ears rubbed,” said Clarissa Bottom, Flip’s granddaughter.
“Sing to him in Spanish,” said Flower Parrott, the second wife of Pierre’s municipal attorney.
“Don’t touch his rump,” said Jeanne Belski, the Lincoln Elementary school secretary.
Zach had probably, at some time or another, at some civic event or another, carried each and every one of these women and their daughters and the instructors at the stables today. Carried them without incident. Martin feared he was about to become the first resident of Pierre ever carried with incident by the great and gentle Zach.
By inching on his stomach forward and left, forward and left, forward and left, Martin managed to smash his right testicle onto the back of the saddle and his left ear into the horse’s coarse mane. Balanced on those pinpoints, he leveraged himself up and into his seat. He grabbed the thick leather reins, but before he could set his feet in the stirrups, Zach took off at a full and lopsided gallop after the line of girls.
Zach’s front and back legs churned as if controlled by two different nerve centers. The front pair would skitter left while the back pair stumbled right. His back buckled and swayed, he reared and bucked. Martin gave up trying to fit his feet into the stirrups and concentrated on hanging onto the saddle horn. His rear end swung with Zach’s gyrations, and Martin worried his shifting mass was further unbalancing the canting equine.
“Remember what I said to do if a horse starts rolling,” yelled the instructor, both hands now tugging on her ponytail.
“Calm DOWN, pull UP, get ready to get OFF,” chanted the girls. Martin did not recall that chapter of the prelaunch briefing.
“He’s not rolling,” Martin yelled back, “he’s convulsing.”
And then, Zach was rolling.
At first, this appeared a welcome development. Zach stopped yawing and fell to his front knees. Martin pulled up on the reins, which moved the titanic horse’s head not one whit. Zach’s belly heaved with irregular gasps. He threw his head up and rolled his eyes. He collapsed onto his right shoulder and, like a glacier beginning to calf, crumbled onto his side. Martin pushed away from the dropping animal and rolled clear. He lay panting in the dirt, eye-to-eye with Zach.
“Zach, Zach, Zach.” Martin could hear the girls wailing somewhere deep in the arena.
“Off your horses for safety,” the instructor wailed back. “Zach is just trying to cool off.”
Martin stared into Zach’s white, blank eye. He didn’t have the look of one indulging in a refreshing dust bath. He had the look of one dying, if not already dead. Martin knew companion animal remains when he saw them.
Or maybe not. Zach pulled back his lips, exposed a row of chipped and bloodstained teeth, and blew a raspberry at Martin. Perhaps there was a chance to exit this day with some grace, even honor. CPR. Did not Martin have a card, somewhere between his AAA membership and his Kroger’s valued customer credentials, that certified him to perform CPR on adults and children? Sure, this was neither a human adult nor a human baby, but the card was expired anyway. The principle was the same. Martin had seen it done on Animal Planet.
Martin would save Zach’s life. He would become a hero in the town, a legend as great as Zach himself. Ballads would be written, were Pierre the sort of place where ballads were written,
which it was not, so keys to the city would be handed out. Martin would ride Zach in town parades. Business would pick up at Final Paws. He would give Annie a raise. He would save up for his move west. He’d pay Julie back for all she had invested in his bid to recite at Elko.
He would have a true and personal story of redemption and resurrection to versify in his cowboy poetry.
Zach rotated onto his back, slowly bicycled his hooves in the air, as if shooing flies. Martin crawled toward the beast’s massive left breast, scrambled onto his knees and pounded on the horseflesh, one, two, three, was it five or ten pumps? Three or five puffs? Horse sweat sprayed from under his fists and burned into his eyes. He skittered up to Zach’s mouth and puffed into an opening in his black lips that Martin widened with his fingers. One, two, three, had to be enough. Martin tasted hay and something sour, like regurgitated aspirin. Skittered back to the chest. Pounded five times.
“Stop hitting him, stop hitting him, stop hitting him,” the Greek chorus of girls moaned in the distance.
Zach lifted his great head and neck, whinnied, rolled one eye back toward Martin. He grabbed at the front of the horse’s mouth, a last kiss of life to seal the deal, to make Martin the hero of Pierre. He pressed his lips to the horse’s lips.
The Percheron heaved an oaty breath and life departed with a shudder, a roll, and a spray of blood-specked spume.
The Fourth Horse: Hero
d. 2016
March 21, 2016
Dear Mr. Oliphant,
Thank you for again for sharing your cowboy poetry and your recitation videotape with the 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence Selection Committee. Your work and your reading impressed us all. We particularly admired “When My Midwestern Heart Does the Western Two-Step.”
But as you know, the key criteria the committee considers are quality of performance, quality of writing, appropriateness of genre to the event, and the connection or deep understanding of modern-day ranching and cowboy culture. As in years past, your work has fired mightily on the first three cylinders but petered out on the last. We do understand that you are employed in a profession that requires harmony with animals, some of which might be found on ranches (though it is a stretch to compare burying cats to driving cattle, poetic license notwithstanding); that you attended and enjoyed a dude ranch in Arizona as a young man; and that you have heard almost every show recorded by this year’s keynote speaker, Vess Guffry, the Cowboy Poet. You surely have the heart of a cowboy poet, Mr. Oliphant. But I have an old three-legged dog with the heart of a stallion, and I won’t be breeding him to my mares anytime soon.
So I am afraid we again cannot invite you to perform at the Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. As a longstanding member of our sponsor, the Western Folklife Center, you will, we hope, take advantage of early tickets sales and join us in the audience at the end of May. And feel free to submit again for the 33rd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence should you manage to pick up some hands-on cowboy and ranching experience by then.
See you in Elko!
Sincerely,
The 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence Selection Committee
12
Martin tried to tell Julie about the letter the day he received it, a chilly March Wednesday. He punched her cell number as soon as he saw the FedEx envelope in the pile of crematory urn catalogues and utility bills on top of his inbox. Perhaps it had been foolish to pay the extra $12.95 for the selection committee to send their decision overnight, but he was so sure it would be good news.
For the last six months, nothing could shake his certitude that he had turned the herd toward Elko and was finally headed home. Not even Zach’s death. He had not been blamed. In fact, he was chosen to preside over the Percheron’s funeral, held at the Pierre Bandshell-by-the-Lake and attended by half of Pierre. USA Today had printed a small article on the service, mostly favorable and scarcely tongue-in-cheek, which was picked up by the Niles Township Tattler, a weekly and the closest thing these days to a local paper.
The call went to voice mail, and Martin clicked off the phone without leaving a message. He wanted to take his time, rolling this moment over his taste buds like a pretentious sommelier with a 2008 Spottswoode Cabernet. He pulled the golden package out of the orange, white, and blue mailer. A firm hand had addressed the internal envelope with a fountain pen. He could see three or four infinitesimal ink splatters that gave it away. This must be what letters that travelled by pony express looked like, the letters bringing news of deaths or marriage proposals or new lands ranched or new ranges rode. He held the envelope to his nose and inhaled: dust and desert and horse manure and nervous cattle and saddle leather. Also Old Spice. Old Spice was the FedEx guy’s aftershave.
Martin slit the envelope with a silver-plated opener. The black brand of the Thirty-Second Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence marked the upper corner, and the text of the missive paced across the page in elaborate cursive. By the time he got to the final decisive no, tears fogged his vision and he put the paper down. He felt the floor beneath him turn to sand, then quicksand, then straight-up abyss. He would not go to Elko. The application, thanks to Julie, was stronger than anything he had submitted in the past and was stronger than anything he could imagine compiling in the future. What had gone wrong? Had he misheard the dots and dashes coming in over the telegraph? Misread the smoke signals floating on the horizon? Had he led his entire adult life faithful to a code he didn’t really understand? This was his truest shot. And he missed.
His cell trilled out “Streets of Laredo.” Julie. He picked up and croaked a “hello,” not in the voice of a cowboy poet. The western song within him was already on the retreat. He greeted her as a fifty-two-year-old Midwestern pet mortician.
“Howdy, cowboy,” said Julie. “So? What’d they say? Do you know which group you’re in? Is it like college, where you find out who your suitemates are so you can decide who brings the chaps and who’s in charge of the barbequed pork rinds?” She giggled, and what sounded like a basset hound kept up a steady bay in the background. “Can you hear me? Shut up, Winston. I wish I was there with you, we could celebrate proper. Shut up, Winston! Christ, you would think I was pulling out his toenails. I bought my tickets for the confluence yesterday, all four days. I need to get a hotel reservation. Where do they put up the performers?”
“I don’t know,” said Martin.
“We ought to coordinate travel. Don’t book anything without me.”
“I won’t,” said Martin.
“Goddamn it, Winston. I gotta go. He’s bleeding on my smock. But I’ll call. I love you. Thank you for this. We did it! You don’t know how much that means.” His screen flashed back to Julie’s contact page, and he considered it for a second, thinking how many problems he could solve by blocking her number.
Because he did know how much it meant to her. Because he didn’t know how he could tell her. As she had nurtured his confidence, hers had flourished alongside, a symbiotic relationship, like the basil that thrives under a tomato plant, enjoying the shade and repelling the hornworms. She credited all that was positive in her new Colorado life to her collaboration with Martin. And though he couldn’t see the connection, she believed in it mightily, and he hadn’t argued. A win-win. She was happy. She’d found free housing with her boss, who traveled often with Critter Clinicians without Borders and needed a housesitter. She made a new set of outdoorsy girlfriends in Conifer and started hiking fourteeners. And Martin thought she might be dating again. She rarely spoke to him of her day-to-day realities, and he rarely asked. She just thanked him, every call. He had shown her what was possible; he had taught her to breathe the air of lyricism and hope again; he had let her be a part of a beautiful dream.
So of course, he couldn’t just blurt out the news of his rejection. He would need to be careful, sensitive. But. He looked down at the letter and felt the rising burn of resentment creep through his ch
est and up his esophagus. But here he was again, pushing aside his own considerable injury to minister to the wounds of another. Julie had barely been grazed, while he had taken a Winchester .44 round to the chest. And yet it was he who was supposed to drag himself, bleeding in the dust, to help her open up a Band-Aid packet.
He couldn’t do it, maybe not for a while. He needed a proper period of solitary bereavement. He wouldn’t answer the phone or look at email. He’d write her when he was ready. He’d mourn what he had lost—Elko, Beaufort, Ginger, even his mom, his dad, the Leader Telegram, his move West, Ginger, cowboy poetry.
You think of things he did and said, and of the ways he had.
And now to think that he is dead. It makes you feel plum sad.
It brings the old days back again, you live them one by one.
You think of things that happened then, and what you should have done.
Bruce Kiskaddon understood. Grieve alone, take as long as it takes.
You do it when you’ve time enough to make a quiet ride.
To see the fleecy clouds above and watch the shadows glide.
The phone twanged again. Julie again. Martin muted it, slipped the letter from the committee into his top desk drawer, put his head in his hands, and cried.
Two months later, three weeks before the kickoff of the Thirty-Second Annual Cowboy Poetry Confluence and on the day Vess Guffry brought his Cowboy Poetry Hour Farewell Tour to Pierre’s Theater-on-the-Lake, Martin arrived at Emilio’s to meet Julie. He still hadn’t told her about his rejection, despite his every intention. But whenever he’d tried to bring it up, she hijacked the conversation with her own announcement of plans for their trip to Elko.
First, she informed Martin that she’d procured them tickets for the Pierre stop on the Cowboy Poetry Hour Farewell Tour, the show’s only Upper Midwest engagement. She got them through one of her mountain-climbing friends, who hosted a syndicated preschool counting program on Denver Public Television. WBEZ, the Chicago public radio station of which Martin was a sustaining member at the booster level, had sold out their allotment to those in giving circles several grades above his.
