Centaur Rising

by Jane Yolen

  * * *

  After dinner and all the excitement and worry and hard work of the day, I fell asleep in front of the television in the middle of Mom’s favorite show, Mister Ed. She sure loved that talking horse. Laughed even when it wasn’t funny, sometimes saying things like, “I swear that if Bor could talk, he’d sound like that!”

  She woke me and sent me up to bed.

  “I’d have carried you upstairs if you were still small,” she said, her eyes suddenly pooling.

  “Mom?” I wondered what she was crying about—all the tension of the day, the memory of me as a child, long before anything bad had happened to our family …

  She wiped a hand across her face, and her eyes were clear.

  “Dr. Herks?” I mumbled.

  She shook her head. “Emergency surgery on a pony hit by a car.” She shrugged. “He’ll be over later if he can. To check on Kai.”

  I nodded, thinking, And check on us, too. And then I went up to bed, where I dreamed about geese flying over the farm, and each one had the head of my dad on its shoulders. Down below, armed with a rifle, Dr. Herks was getting ready to shoot. In the dream, I was shouting at him. When I woke, I didn’t know if I’d wanted Dr. Herks to shoot or was trying to stop him.

  13

  Lull Before the Storm

  WE HAD A WONDERFUL WEEK AFTER THAT. Kai might have been only twenty-eight days old, and while still clearly a foal from the waist down, his human part already looked six or seven. He seemed to become less horselike every day, spending time with Agora when he needed to nurse or sleep, but when Robbie or I were around, always paying attention to us, our words, our gestures, the way we laughed.

  Martha had given him some of her rubber bands to tie his hair back with. He preferred the blue ones. And she’d taught him how to make the ponytail himself.

  Ponytail! We all had a good giggle about that. Even Kai.

  He was playing a lot with Robbie every day, imitating Robbie’s speech, listening hard as Robbie read him books. And he was starting to read himself, though he didn’t like the baby picture books, preferring history and stories about myths—Greek and Roman and Viking were his favorites.

  He went back to Agora only when he napped or when he wanted to nurse. If Agora was worried or unhappy or upset with him, she didn’t show it.

  Early on, Dr. Herks had pointed out that Kai was having a growth spurt. “As if the boy Kai has to keep up with the horse Kai.”

  In fact, boy Kai had gone from infant to toddler in the first couple of days, and then from toddler to something like a three-year-old by the end of the week. He got all his baby teeth, then lost his first and then his second. When I tried to explain the tooth fairy, he had just giggled and said, “Not true!” As if only he was magic and he couldn’t believe anyone else was. I wondered what would happen when we got to Santa Claus or the Bible.

  Meanwhile, his hair was growing in thick and shaggy like a mane, with an odd waviness once the curls had grown out. His large eyes always seemed to be searching for something new to do. And he repeated absolutely everything anyone said in a voice that Mom called flutelike, meaning—I think—it was high-pitched and full of music.

  His vocabulary grew quickly. During his first few days, he had added words like doh for the stall door and dink for wanting a drink—whether water or milk. He rubbed his eyes, repeating seep, seep, seep when he was tired and needed to nap.

  I was “Ari,” Robbie was “Brob,” and Dr. Herks “Dada.”

  But by the end of that week, he was already talking in short sentences—“Kai wants more” and “No, don’t want to” were favorites. And “Ari, gimme.” The start of the second week, he was speaking in longer sentences, and in between, there were whinnies and snorts, which he directed at Agora. Occasionally he spoke to Martha that way, since she clearly understood Horse. So by the third week, we were all having actual conversations.

  Sometimes I’d just go into the stall and read aloud to Robbie and Kai. I was really into my new favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time, and Robbie had decided that he wanted to be called Charles Wallace and eat bread and jam for breakfast the entire week. Kai tried to copy him, but he spit out the jam until Mom gave him apple butter on his bread. After that, he couldn’t get enough.

  Kai didn’t understand much about the story, of course. He might have been growing fast, but he wasn’t ready for science fiction. Still, he loved hearing the words, and he repeated tesseract over and over, as if it had some kind of meaning that none of us could understand.

  Robbie made up a little song that he taught Kai:

  Tesseract folds the space,

  Keeps the magic in its place.

  Tesseract holds the key

  To a father’s memory.

  Ali, Ali, home free.

  Ali, Ali, home free.

  Ali, Ali, home free,

  We all fall down.

  Each time Robbie sang the word tesseract, Kai would shout it out in his high-pitched voice and then giggle through the next line of the song. It kept them entertained for hours.

  I could only stand the song about five times through before I had to close the book and leave. Sometimes I took Agora out with me. She always seemed happy to go as well. I’d let her run around the paddock for a bit, and she kicked her heels up like a colt, all that old arthritis strangely gone. More magic, I suppose.

  * * *

  In the fourth week, a few of our riders came to work their horses or to help out in the barn, but most of the time we had the farm to ourselves. It was grand, even with the extra work, because it seemed as if the worst of our worries about Kai were over. The people at the farm were the ones who knew about Kai, but they were keeping it quiet. We became a family and not just a business with a secret at its heart.

  Mom seemed more relaxed since … well, since I couldn’t remember when. She even started baking again, cupcakes and angel food cake (my favorite) and a honey cake that proved to be the one Kai liked best. He could eat an entire cake by himself. Well, a small cake, anyway.

  * * *

  Once during that fourth week, on a break from the two boys, I went to help Martha with Professor Harries’ gelding. He’s not neat at either end.

  “Isn’t the farm wonderful, this quiet?” I said as I mucked out my side of the stall.

  “Lull before the storm,” Martha replied tartly, a blue rubber band holding her hair straight back. She said the words as if she was biting each one in half, so I didn’t dare ask her what she meant.

  Later, I found Mom with Bor and asked her to explain what Martha said.

  “Martha’s a pessimist, and I’m an optimist.”

  “Mom!”

  She gave an exaggerated shrug. “Martha is sure this peace—the lull—won’t hold and that someone will tell, and that will put us in the middle of the biggest storm ever.”

  “Dr. Herks thinks so, too.”

  “Well, I have more faith in people than that. Martha’s faith is only in horses. They’re simpler. It’s an easy choice.”

  “And Dr. Herks?”

  She turned back to Bor and held her hand out, and he nuzzled her palm contentedly, never pulling his lips back, just his hot breath sending her warm love. “Gerry saw a lot of awful stuff in ’Nam, and he’s dealing with it slowly.” Her voice was soft. “But he is dealing with it.”

  It turned out that Mom was right for the entire week and a bit more. And Martha was right afterward. But for that time before the storm, Robbie and I spent hours and hours in Agora’s stall. With how quickly Kai was growing, we didn’t want to miss anything.

  * * *

  By the end of the week, Dr. Herks had set up a run for Kai by blocking both ends of the corridor outside Agora’s stall, saying, “He needs the exercise.”

  It turned out Kai had an absolute passion for speed, all his little hooves sometimes lifting off the floor at the same time. But because both ends of the corridor were blocked off, gated and locked, he couldn’t run away.

  Kai wants to g
allop, he would beg when he wanted to go out, and as soon as he was let loose in the corridor, he raced up and down, incredibly pleased with himself and screaming in delight.

  Agora would walk sedately behind him. Of course she couldn’t keep up. Well, who could? But whenever Kai became too boisterous, her whinny always brought him galloping back to her side.

  “I wish I’d been able to discipline you two that way,” Mom said that first morning we watched Kai and Agora in their run.

  “Mom!” Robbie and I said together.

  She put out her hands to us, and we each took one.

  “Love you, too, Mom,” I whispered.

  “Me three,” said Robbie, and sang out:

  Me three,

  We three,

  That makes

  A family!

  “It sure does,” said Mom.

  “And there’s Kai, too,” Robbie said. “Or Kai four.”

  “And Martha,” Mom reminded him. “So five.”

  I almost added Dr. Herks’ name then, but instead bit my lip to keep myself from jinxing that dream.

  * * *

  Later, watching Kai sleeping in the stall, Dr. Herks remarked, “I think he’s only got an on and off switch, nothing in between.”

  That made Mom laugh so loud, she snorted. Then Dr. Herks started laughing as well, as if he’d caught the laugh flu. Soon the two of them were like little kids, snorting and giggling and unable to stop.

  “Cut it out, you two,” I said.

  Robbie added, “You’re gonna wake the baby.”

  That started them laughing all over again, and I had to shove them out of the stall as if I was the mother and they the naughty children.

  * * *

  Besides cake and apple butter on toast, Kai adored apples and carrots, though we had to cut them into small pieces because he didn’t yet have all of his permanent teeth.

  “And because we don’t want him choking,” Dr. Herks said.

  Kai also loved peanut butter and bolted down oatmeal in the mornings as long as there was plenty of raw milk and cooked McIntosh apples mixed in.

  Dr. Herks warned us we had to keep him on a vegetarian diet. “We’ve no idea if his body can process meat products,” he said. “Horses don’t eat meat.” Then he mused, “Maybe if he has two stomachs the way he has two hearts…”

  However, without actually x-raying Kai, we couldn’t be sure, and we weren’t about to get him an X-ray because then his “oddness” would be revealed.

  So we kept the secret and the lull that went with it. We thought it was for Kai’s sake, but a good part was for our own sakes as well.

  * * *

  The first sign of the oncoming storm was a phone call from Mrs. Angotti. I picked up the receiver in the living-room phone the same time Mom picked up the one in the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry, so very sorry, because I didn’t want this to happen and I promise you she’ll be punished for letting it out, but Angela told her best friend, Zoe, who swore she’d say nothing, but you know teenagers and she had a fight with Angela over something, which if I ever find out what it is, heads will roll or at least bounce a bit, but they’re friends again so it’s no use following that particular trail!”

  Clearly Mrs. A had lost her ability to punctuate in her rush to get everything said, I thought. She continued in that same breathless manner: “Because of that fight, she wrote something for a paper in her summer psychology class, I mean Zoe, not Angela, who doesn’t take psychology but physics in summer school, but where she gets the brains for that, it’s not from me or her father, I’ll tell you, neither one of us can balance a checkbook. You see, her father has an accountant do that for him in his business, that is, not at home.” She finally took a breath.

  Mom said quickly, “What did she say?”

  “Who?” It was the shortest sentence I ever heard Mrs. Angotti utter, which just goes to show how sorry she was.

  “Zoe.”

  “Zoe didn’t say anything, she wrote it, in her paper like I told you, which the teacher said was the best essay in the summer class even if it was only science fiction, and she sent it to the Boston Herald’s kids’ writing contest and—”

  Mom said again, “What did Zoe say in the essay?”

  Mrs. Angotti took a big breath this time, as if getting a hurricane’s worth of wind. “She said that a friend of a friend had a horse farm where a centaur was born that was half child and half horse, and then went into a full analysis of the kind of emotional problems such a child would face, calling it liminality. I had to look up the word and I still don’t get it but evidently Zoe says it’s the very latest thing in brain work, whatever that is.”

  Mom interrupted her, “Science fiction? Space walks? Twilight Zone? John Carter of Mars? Then that’s okay. Nobody really believes that stuff.”

  I hung up carefully. I knew it wasn’t okay. I ran into the kitchen just as Mom was putting the phone back on its stand.

  “What should we do?”

  She looked up, startled. “Why, nothing, my little eavesdropper. Stay off the phone when I’m on it. That way you won’t hear silly talk from Mrs. Angotti. And stop worrying. Nobody in his right mind will believe for a minute what that girl wrote. She said it was science fiction!”

  Kai, at least, was real.

  Very real.

  But I knew it wouldn’t be long till we had people lining up outside our barn door for a glimpse of him. And when they came, the reporters wouldn’t be far behind.

  14

  Under Siege

  THE VERY NEXT MORNING, even before I got downstairs for breakfast, the phone rang. After the third ring, Mom picked it up.

  I could hear her shouting into the phone, saying, “Yes, yes, no—and where’d you get that … well, it’s wrong. Don’t you understand these two words? Science. Fiction. Yes, science fiction. Little green men. Forbidden Planet. The Twilight Zone. No!” And she slammed the phone down so hard, it made me wince.

  “That’s nine words, Mom,” I said as I walked into the kitchen. “Or maybe eleven.”

  The phone began ringing again. Mom stared at it as if it were a rabid dog getting ready to bite her. Then she turned and went into the bathroom without saying a word. I could hear the water running, and I figured she was throwing cold water on her face, so I sat down at the table and grabbed a blueberry muffin, ignoring the phone until the Ansafone, our brand-new answering machine, picked it up.

  An accusing voice left a simple message. “Nobody hangs up on me, lady.”

  The phone rang twice more.

  “Don’t answer it,” Mom called out.

  The minute a fourth call came in, I waited till the caller hung up, then picked up the receiver and phoned Martha and then Dr. Herks.

  Mom came back into the kitchen, two red spots on her cheeks as if she’d scrubbed away tears.

  Five minutes later—a long five minutes—Martha showed up in her bathrobe and boots, hair pulled back in two green rubber bands. Dr. Herks arrived soon after.

  Mom pointed at the phone and said one word. “Monsters.”

  As if encouraged by that, the phone rang again.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said.

  But the phone was already in Martha’s hand. She listened for a minute, said, “Horse pucky!” and hung up.

  “That’s not going to slow them down at all,” Dr. Herks said. “Time for Plan B.”

  But we didn’t have a Plan B. We didn’t even have a Plan A.

  “I’ll watch at the barn,” Martha said.

  “Get some proper barn gear on first,” Mom told her. “If…” She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “If there are photographers…”

  Martha got a hard look on her face and pinched lines all around her eyes. “It’s not like I’m any kind of a model,” she said, shrugging, but she went back to her house to get dressed.

  “I’ll guard the barn till Martha gets there,” I said.

  “No, Arianne, I will.” Dr. Herks squared his shoulder
s. “I’ve got a parade-ground voice and a hard hand.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but nodded.

  “Your mother needs you here,” he added unnecessarily, and was gone.

  * * *

  The phone rang five more times, and Mom answered them all in case they were our riders. Mostly she spoke in monosyllables—“Yes. No. No. Yes”—slamming the phone down each time until I was worried she was going to break it.

  I went into Robbie’s room to get him up and dressed, if necessary, but he’d already managed it himself. He does that most days. It always takes him longer than it would if I dressed him, but Mom says that it’s important to let him do it because it builds confidence. I didn’t believe that for a long time, but now I know she’s right.

  When we returned, Mom had the phone in her hand and was clutching it so hard, her knuckles had gone white. I wondered if it was the Monster again.

  “Golly, Mom, are you okay?” Robbie asked. I pushed him over to her, and he grabbed her free hand.

  Just then, Dr. Herks came back in, saying, “Martha’s holding the fort. She’s got a shovel and pitchfork by her side. She even scares me and—” Then he saw how stricken Mom looked and how white Robbie’s face was. Taking the phone from Mom, he hung it up.

  “No one says you have to answer, Hannah. But if you find it impossible not to let the phone just ring, we can take it off the hook.”

  “Thank you, Gerry.” Her voice was shaky, low. She looked up at the ceiling, as if catching his eye was the last thing she wanted to do. She talked to the ceiling, too. “I’ll be okay in a minute. We need the phone. This is a business after all. But you see, everybody promised not to … science … fiction … essay … Boston Herald … confirmed sources…” And then she began to cry softly.

  Robbie had never seen her cry before, and he started whimpering. I pulled him over to me. “Not to worry, Squinch. Just someone stupid on the phone hurt her feelings.”

  “I hate stupid!” he said. And then sang a couple of lines of a made-up song to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”