Champion Horse

by Jane Smiley

  The important thing, I came to realise, was following instructions exactly. When he said, ‘Canter at the light pole,’ your horse had to go into the canter as your leg was passing the light pole. When he said, ‘Rein back four steps,’ you had to know how to count to four, not five. It was surprising how hard this exercise was. When he asked for a figure of eight, first at the trot and then at the canter, you had to make circles and change direction right in the middle. Thanks to Danny, Blue could do this, with a flying change of lead in both directions. I did not get a compliment, but I didn’t get what Nancy got, either. Parisienne changed only her front legs, not her back legs, for the flying change, and went on like that for four strides without Nancy realising it. Peter Finneran exclaimed, ‘Nancy! Is there a brain in that blonde head? Oh, these California girls!’

  Yes, I was lulled. After exactly fifty minutes, we lined up at one end of the arena, and Rodney and another groom set up some cavalletti – four in a row. One by one, we trotted down over these. Onyx went first, which was probably bad for the rest of us, because he sparkled through, springing his body and lifting his legs. I could see that he was thinking, At last the jumps! Everyone after him looked a little clumsier and not as attentive. Blue knocked the first one with his hoof, but then got the others right. Peter Finneran exclaimed, ‘You girls know how they did this at Fort Riley? Nose to tail! If you did that, these horses would fall over. Pick it up, ladies!’ We tried again. After four times, everyone was fine. Peter Finneran was staring at Onyx and Sophia. I was sure he thought they were the best.

  Now Rodney and the other groom came out and removed the cavalletti, then set up two small jumps in the centre of the arena, end to end, sort of the way they would be in the warm-up at a show. Both were simple verticals. Then they put poles in front of each of them – for one, there were two poles on the barn side, and for the other, there were two poles on the woods side. We were to trot down over the poles and jump the first fence, then turn and canter the poles and jump the second fence. The fences were about two-foot-nine. Without me trying to remember, I thought of those pictures in the cavalry manual, of the horse who looked just like Blue cantering down to the fence, jumping it, and cantering away. I made myself get straight like the soldier in the picture – lifting my hands a little bit, pushing my heels down, tucking my chin. When it came to my turn, I picked up the trot and headed for the first jump. After three strides, I was the soldier in the picture.

  Unfortunately, Blue was not the horse in the picture. He trotted the poles, but stared at the vertical, then hesitated for just a moment and finally popped over. I went on, but I was really embarrassed – I could feel that my face was red. When we made the loop, Blue tossed his head and picked up the wrong lead. I had to stop him and start again, which made me feel even more awkward. Then he half stumbled over the canter poles, and hesitated again before the jump. He did jump it, though. I glanced at Peter Finneran. He was shaking his head.

  But there were other horses, and we had to finish the class. For the next twenty minutes, each of the horses did the same exercise. We all did it three times altogether. I can’t say that Blue was perfect or even good, but he did get better each time. At exactly 10.30, Peter Finneran lined us up and dismissed us. We would get our group assignments after lunch.

  The afternoon class, which only lasted forty-five minutes, was pretty much fun. There were four of us in it – not Sophia and not Nancy, just me and three other girls on young horses (a four-year-old and a couple of five-year-olds). One of them was something called a ‘cob’, from England, which was wide and woolly like a pony, but a normal horse size. The girl who was riding him, Lucy, had an English accent. She was down from Woodside and was training the horse, Donegal, for the hunt field. Peter Finneran seemed to like him. He said he was ‘old-fashioned and unpretentious’.

  Our exercises were much simpler, all over poles on the ground. Rodney and the other groom set up the poles to look like jumping courses, but they were only poles, so we trotted and cantered and galloped over them, made our turns, and practised our lead changes and trot diagonals without being nervous about the jumps. The biggest jump we had was two poles next to one another. I have to say that Blue noticed the two poles, and made a little bigger jump than he did with one pole. I wanted Peter Finneran to see this and to say something nice about how observant Blue was, but he just nodded and turned to the next horse. However, I enjoyed myself (mostly because we got to canter a lot) and by the end of the day, I felt pretty good. Not everybody did. One girl in our class, who was riding a tidy little chestnut, the four-year-old, started crying as we walked back to the barns, and I heard Lucy say to her, ‘Now, don’t be at that, Monica. He can hear you, and it just makes him worse.’

  Monica said, ‘Who does he think he is?’

  Lucy said, ‘He thinks he’s an Olympic horseman, and he is.’

  ‘She’s four years old.’

  ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have brought her, then, if she’s not ready.’

  Monica sniffled a few more times but didn’t say anything. At the barns, they were stabled pretty far away from me, so we didn’t talk. I untacked Blue and brushed him down, then gave him a couple of carrots and his hay and water and put his sheet on him. Rodney was supposed to look in on him at the evening feeding time. When Mom picked me up and asked me about the clinic, I said it was fine. Fine is a good word, because you are not actually lying and saying that it was fun or good or enjoyable. You might just be saying that you could stand it. Mom didn’t press me. Since Dad was coming to watch the next day, I guess she thought she would find out then.

  When we got home, it was only three-thirty, so I changed into jeans and cowboy boots and took Oh My for a walk down to the creek. It was totally relaxing, and I was reminded how nice it is to ride a horse out for a walk. Rusty came along with us, and I’m sure Rusty had business of some sort, since she kept racing away and then circling back, and looking up into the trees and off towards the horizon. Rusty always felt she had two jobs, one of which was to protect the ranch and the other of which was to keep her eye on Mom in case Mom wanted to pet her. Oh My was a little like Rusty in the sense that she enjoyed getting out and having a look at things. She was one of the few horses I’ve known who wanted to investigate. For example, let’s say you were passing a stump among the trees. Oh My would look at the stump, then she would go over to the stump and stand there sniffing the stump for a while. Every time you passed the stump after that, she would glance at it to see, I suppose, if it was the same as it had been the time before. Dad said that this was a sign of intelligence, and it was no surprise that Oh My had made herself the boss of the mare band in the space of about five minutes when we turned her out in the pasture.

  After I came back with Oh My, I put Jack in the pen and worked him for twenty minutes. He could do all sorts of things, now – walk, trot, canter in both directions for however long you wanted, come, pivot both directions, back up, touch his nose to his side. I had also taught him a trick that I’d taught Blue – to see a treat, but then to turn his head away in order to get it. I’d taught Blue a second trick, which I called ‘Where’s the carrot?’ I would do what grown-ups used to do when we were kids, show him the bit of carrot in one hand, then pass it back and forth and put my hands behind my back. Then I would say, ‘Where’s the carrot?’ and Blue would nudge my right arm and I would give him the carrot. That was because the carrot was always in my right hand, but I played it up by pretending he had picked the proper arm. I hadn’t taught Jack that trick yet. Dad said not to teach them tricks like bowing or rearing, because you could be trotting along out there, give a mistaken command, and suddenly he’d bow.

  I put Jack in with the others and got the wheelbarrow and the hay. Of course, I still had to clean my boots and iron my other shirt. By bedtime, I was actually looking forward to the next day. I’d decided that maybe Peter Finneran hadn’t been that bad. The horses, including Blue, had improved, and the exercises had been fun.

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  Since we were the lowest-level group, we were to be on our horses and lined up by nine, but then we would be out of there by ten-thirty, so Mom was planning to take me clothes shopping for the school year – high school would be starting one week after the clinic. I had spent the entire summer not thinking about high school, even though that was all that Gloria and Stella talked about. Gloria had already bought all of her new clothes, and had shown them to me the last time I spent the night at her house. Gloria had grown, too, and now she was about a quarter-inch taller than I was, and ‘developed’, as her mom said. She had worn the same shoe size for a year, so she was ‘done’ and her mom decided to splurge on some ‘classics’ for Gloria. I thought they seemed a little fancy for high school, but I had no idea, really. She had also had her hair cut in what she called a ‘five-point’ style. It was short and thick, and it came down over the forehead and in front of her ears, and then in a point at the middle of her neck in back. She had to get up and style it every morning, but that was like her hobby, and she didn’t mind. Stella I hadn’t seen except at the Goldmans’ party. Gloria said that Stella was planning on wearing her French twist every day. I didn’t really have a hair plan for high school, which made me a little nervous. Anyway, because Mom was taking me to the department store, she decided to stay and watch the clinic.

  We lined our horses up at the end of the arena, because four jumps had been built in the middle in an X. Two arms of the X were verticals – the east arm and the north arm; the west arm was an oxer, and the south arm was a brush.

  There were poles in front of the verticals, but not in front of the oxer or the brush. Blue did very nice flat work – precise and energetic – so Peter Finneran actually said, ‘Abby, you or someone has done a good job with this horse.’ I didn’t answer, but I smiled the way you are supposed to when you get a compliment. The same could not be said for Monica. At one point in the flat work, her mare grabbed the bit, tossed her head, and started bucking. Peter Finneran began shouting, ‘Kick her on, Monica! Make her go forward! Doesn’t she know the most basic things? Don’t you?’ Penny and her five-year-old brown gelding always got the same response: ‘Okay. That will do.’ He continued to like Donegal – at least he would smile when Donegal was slow in his responses, and say, ‘Well, he’s a bit thick, but he’s doing his best.’ Lucy scowled, which indicated to me that ‘a bit thick’ wasn’t a compliment. However, when the jumping started, Donegal went first and he just galloped down over the fences, not looking right or left. I guess that was why Peter Finneran liked him.

  Our job over the fences started easy and got hard. First we were to trot and canter over the smaller vertical, then to canter that same vertical, turn right, make a loop, and canter the larger vertical. Then we were to do these two, canter out, come back over the brush, turn right again, and canter down over the oxer. I saw that by the end of the lesson, we would probably be approaching each of these fences from both sides, making a course of eight jumps with lots of turns and loops. Really, it was like the day before with the poles. The jumps themselves were not terribly hard, and the turns were not tight. The ‘courses’ Peter Finneran made of these four jumps were smoother and less complicated than show courses, and there was a part of me that really liked the idea. There was not a part of Blue that really liked the idea. All of the other horses were better than he was, even the four-year-old. After the first two-jump section, for which Blue was his nervous self, Peter Finneran handed me a whip. When I took it by the handle with the lash pointing down, he took it back and turned it so the lash pointed upward. Then he said, ‘This is a whip. If your horse doesn’t go willingly to the jump, then you must actually use this implement to remind him of his job. With this animal, I think once will be enough, but you have to mean it.’

  I said, ‘To mean what?’ But I knew what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to take my reins in my left hand and smack Blue a good one on the haunches as soon as he shifted his weight backwards or showed hesitation. Dad would have certainly agreed, but he would have used a quirt, not a whip. That was what the expression ‘the carrot or the stick’ was all about. If a horse didn’t understand something, then you made him understand it, either by showing him some food or giving him some pain. The problem was that I had decided in the spring, when we first got Blue, that he liked the carrot and hated the stick. I had never whipped him because I thought it would just make him more nervous. I looked Peter Finneran in the eye, and I almost said, ‘He won’t like it,’ but thinking about what he had said to the other girls, and the fact that his mind was not going to be changed by a thirteen-year-old, I nodded. Holding the whip as he had shown me, I turned Blue away from him, picked up the trot, then the canter, and went down to the jump. When Blue pricked his ears and hesitated three strides out, I brought the whip down on his right haunch, and a moment later over he went, high and fast.

  Peter Finneran waved me over to him. He said, ‘Now, you do the exercises, and you make sure you carry that whip the way I showed you, so that he can see it. He’s felt it once. Maybe he’ll need to feel it again, but maybe not. But he does need to see it.’ He stared at me until I nodded.

  After that we did all our jumping exercises the way we were told to do – over, turn, back, over, out and around, over, turn the other way, back, out and around. Over. Every time fast and high. When ten-thirty rolled around, I was a little surprised. I was also breathing hard, and Blue was sweating and panting. Donegal, by contrast, was cool and dry.

  I saw Mom from time to time as I went around. She met me when we came out of the gate and walked with me back to the barns. She held Blue while I hosed him off, and she put his sheet on him. She gave him two carrots and fluffed up the straw in his stall. But she didn’t say a word. And when we went shopping, she let me pick my own clothes – two sweaters and two skirts, a jacket, a pair of brown loafers, and two shirts. I also tried on this A-line black-and-white geometric dress with short sleeves and a square neckline. We both really liked it, but it cost forty dollars and we could not imagine where in the world I would wear it.

  When we got back to the stables in the afternoon to check on Blue and give him his hay and water for the night, Jane came running up to us and said, ‘Peter Finneran has told me, Abby, that he would like you to ride a more experienced horse tomorrow. Sophia and her dad have agreed to let you ride Pie in the Sky.’

  ‘That’s the chestnut?’

  Jane nodded, then said, ‘You’ll do fine on him, Abby. He’s been waiting for someone like you, to tell the truth.’

  I didn’t know if that was a good thing.

  She must have read my expression, because she said, ‘Come out early and ride him for a bit. Sophia won’t be here until the afternoon, and if you’re going to ride him for Peter Finneran, you need to get used to him.’

  I said, ‘What time?’

  ‘Eight would be good.’

  I saw what she meant. Colonel Hawkins would not be around at eight.

  Chapter 5

  When I first saw her, Sophia had two horses, a grey mare and Pie in the Sky. The grey mare won a lot, but she was a hunter, and after getting Onyx, Sophia had decided that riding jumpers was more interesting. Also, as Jane had told me, ‘they got a nice piece of change’ for the grey mare, who ended up down in Los Angeles. Sophia didn’t seem to like Pie in the Sky, but he had won a few classes, including, Jane said, an important one at the recent show. I had seen Pie in the Sky jump several impressive courses, but I had also seen him refuse. Once he refused so sharply that Sophia slipped forward and had to grab his neck not to fall off. This did not make me want to ride him, so that night I called Danny.

  He sounded kind of sleepy when he answered, but I ignored that and said, ‘Can you come to the stables and help me with Pie in the Sky?’

  ‘Who’s Pie in the Sky?’

  ‘He belongs to that girl, Sophia, who bought Black George. He’s her other jumper. I’m supposed to ride him in the clinic.’

  ‘Why?’
/>   ‘Because they want me to jump big jumps, I guess.’

  ‘I gotta work.’

  ‘Can you please call Jake and ask if you can get there at nine-thirty or something? I am a little scared of him. He’s tricky.’ Then I thought of something. ‘He cost them fifteen thousand dollars.’

  ‘He did?’

  I said, ‘Mmmp,’ which I knew Danny would think was a yes. I was sure Danny would be very interested in a fifteen-thousand-dollar horse. Of course, I had no idea how much Pie in the Sky had cost, but I also thought that Sophia wouldn’t look at a cheap horse, or even a rather expensive horse. Only a very expensive horse would be allowed to hang around if Sophia didn’t like him.

  He said, ‘Okay. Forty-five minutes. I’ll pick you up and we’ll drive out there and you’ll have exactly forty-five minutes of my precious time.’

  Well, it was precious, at least where horses were concerned.

  *

  Jane, of course, had told Rodney when we would be there, and Pie in the Sky was tacked up and ready, with his own Pariani saddle, running martingale, breastplate, and jumping boots. He looked like he was about to go into battle. Rodney seemed to know perfectly well what we were doing there – he pointed to one of the far-off smaller rings and said, ‘Well, miss, I’m guessing you’ll have that spot all to yourselves.’

  I said, ‘Thanks, Rodney.’

  He said, ‘Watch yerself, then, miss.’ Rodney had never cautioned me before. He and Danny exchanged a glance.

  But I don’t know if there was a horse that had ever made Danny nervous – and it wasn’t just because he would ride anything. It was because he wasn’t too lazy to take his time and be careful. In this case, as soon as we got to that small arena, with Pie in the Sky snorting all the way, he took all that tack off the horse and let him skitter around on his own for five minutes. Then he stepped forward and began to direct the skittering, so that Pie in the Sky could still be moving, but he had to move because Danny told him to, and in the direction Danny indicated. In another five minutes, Pie in the Sky was no longer skittering – he was trotting around and then cantering around, smooth, though fast, with big strides, and with his neck arched and his ears forward. Danny stepped over to him, put the bridle back on, and asked him to step under. He didn’t know what we were talking about, but he was willing. I saw that he was pretty supple, either from training or naturally; stepping under was something he could easily do.