by Gigi Amateau
“He’s awfully big,” warned Mrs. Maiden.
“I know!” Claire practically sang.
“During summer camp, you’ll have to take care of Mac all by yourself. That means getting a mounting block so you can brush him and tack him up. And, at the end of the week, when we go camping, up at the top of Saddle Mountain, you’ll be in charge of Mac.”
“Mrs. Maiden, I’ve been waiting all year just to take care of Mac during camp.” Claire smelled my neck.
“What are you doing, Claire?”
“Nothing, giving Mac a good sniff.” She smelled me again.
Mrs. Maiden kissed the top of Claire’s head. “You are too cute. All right, Mac is yours. If he gets to be too much, let me know, and you can switch to Daisy.”
She ran to the tack room for my brush box. “No way! It’s Mac and me all the way! Thank you, Mrs. Maiden.”
During camp we rode in the riding ring in the morning, went out on a trail ride across the Maury River and up Saddle Mountain after a short rest, and, sometimes, in the afternoon, played Chase Me Charlie in the ring.
Claire was not a fussy camper like some of the children who complained about dirt and sweat and hard work. She didn’t mind picking rocks and gravel from my bare feet with her fingers. She would set the hoof pick down and explain, “I don’t want to hurt your frog. That’s a very sensitive part of your foot, I know.” And, when it was too hot to ride, Claire was as happy to sit and read a book on my back as she was to get me all tacked up.
The highlight of riding camp for Maury River Stables campers was an overnight trip to the top of Saddle Mountain. The horses were packed with food and shelter for the campers and first-aid supplies for all of us. Stu loaded the truck with hay and grain and a barrel of water and drove our supplies up the logging trail, nearly to the crest of Saddle Mountain.
We reached the top with just enough daylight left for the children to pitch tents and for Stu to start a campfire. Long after nightfall, the campers were still swapping stories and songs. For the first time in my life I stood atop Saddle Mountain. The night sky glittered with stars, and I missed Izzy.
Claire loved the night sky just as my boy did. While the other campers and Mrs. Maiden slept inside their tents, Claire snuck outside with her sleeping bag, surrounded by the stars. Izzy would have done the same.
When Claire could not sleep, she grabbed my mane and hoisted herself up. She stretched out on my back, in much the same way Izzy had when I was still a colt. “See, up there’s my favorite moon — and my dad’s, too. A crescent moon.” She sighed, as if waiting for something.
Claire pointed up. “There! Look! Mac, tonight is the peak of the Perseids.” The fire stars came fast and near, just as they had when I was a colt in Alberta. “My dad told me to stay awake tonight. Oh, Mac, Dad was right. I’ve never seen anything like this. Let’s count them! I bet there’s a million an hour, or at least a hundred. I call them shooting stars. My dad says they’re meteors.”
The stars seemed to descend, almost within reach. I hadn’t made a wish in a very long time.
Claire knelt on my back, like in our vaulting lessons. She raised her hands high above her head, then stood up tall. When she could not reach the stars with her hands, she rose up on the very tips of her toes. She turned around and around, swaying her hands with the wind, dancing soft circles with her feet.
Between the two peaks of Saddle Mountain, I held Claire amid the Perseids. Quietly, she performed her freestyle routine. With no bridle, no surcingle, and no side reins, I stood square while Claire practiced leg passes with pointed toes, swung high up into scissors, and landed softly on my back. I imagined my back as broad and strong as the barn, and I imagined that like the great horse in the stars, I had wings, too. Wings to soar high enough to let Claire reach any dream.
The silence of Saddle Mountain settled into us. The Perseids, as Claire called the sky’s display, began to fade. I dared wish nothing for myself.
For a year, or more, it was as if Claire was my girl and I was her pony. True, when she competed, it was more often with Daisy, the Welsh, than with me. After the two returned to the barn from a hunter show — always with winning ribbons — haughty Daisy liked to trot over to the mare-gelding fence.
“Whose girl is Claire, again? Take a look at the blue ribbons on my stall door the next time you’re allowed into the barn, Macadoo.”
The bar across Daisy’s stall door held so many ribbons that they often fell onto the floor and got trampled by girls and horses. “I won those ribbons for Claire,” Daisy reminded me. “Not you.”
Those ribbons were only the spoils of competition; they were not the spoils of the heart. When Claire wanted to catch the wind coming off the Maury River, she came to me. On the days that Claire felt like watching the clouds shift between the splendid mountains, she sat on my back in the field. And, most of all, Claire knew that one horse stood at the fence, always listening for Mrs. Maiden to call out, “Claire! Helmet!” To me, that was like “Tallyho!” was to the beagles and the hunters. I had only to hear “Claire! Helmet!” and look up from my hay, or grass, to see Claire sprinting toward my field. And, Mrs. Maiden right behind her with a riding hat in hand.
“Mac, right here, my big boy.” Claire clucked me over to her.
I was already there.
Claire would hop from the fence onto my back, grab mane, and we’d canter through the gelding field, around the run-in, down the line of cedar. She greeted every gelding we passed. The mares called to us from their field, and Claire would call back.
“Daisy! Princess! The fair Gwen!” She’d sing each of their names. She even knew the names of the boarders: “Secret! Lilac! Raven!” The mares raced beside us, though they did not outrace us. Claire liked to end our bareback adventures by galloping to the gate. Then, she’d slide to the ground and pat my neck. “What a good pony,” Claire told me each time.
One day Claire arrived for her lesson and seemed a different girl from just a day earlier. Without a word, she groomed me. Without a pat to my shoulder, she tacked me up. She even forgot to offer me the carrot in her pocket.
In our riding lesson, Claire missed her diagonal. She got her hands all tangled up in the reins and fell out of her two-point and onto my neck.
Mrs. Maiden stopped the lesson. “Claire, what’s going on this morning? We have a show to get ready for, and you’re not paying attention. You’re taking Mac like you wanted this time, but you’re letting Mac carry the full load of the work for you today.”
Claire steered me to the middle of the ring, where Mrs. Maiden stood. I felt the child shrug. “My st-stomach hurts,” she complained.
“Are you sick?” Mrs. Maiden asked.
She started to cry and shook her head. “My mom and dad are getting a divorce. My d-d-dad moved out of our house. I don’t want to show. I just want everything to be the same.”
Mrs. Maiden touched Claire on the shoulders. “Oh, sweetheart. It really hurts bad, doesn’t it?”
“So bad,” Claire said, and wrapped her arms around my neck. She pressed her face to my mane and I could feel her tears through her fluttering eyelashes. A butterfly’s kiss. I whickered and even more tears came, and she stopped trying to stop them.
Mrs. Maiden tried consoling her. “Listen to me, Claire. What your family is going through is hard. I understand if you don’t want to show right now. Just remember that Mac is always here for you, darling, and so am I.”
Claire skipped her next lesson and her next. I waited at the fence line, hoping for her return. Canada geese honked overhead in the fall. Some of them dropped out of formation, landed in our field, and lingered all the mild winter. In the spring, yellow warblers and indigo buntings arrived for nesting. Cabbage butterflies spiraled through our field in search of dandelion nectar. Stu repaired fences and jumps. New cars brought new students to the Maury River Stables. I listened for Claire or the sound of Mrs. Maiden reminding her, “Claire, helmet!”
How could I always be t
here for someone who might never return?
With the warmer weather, I missed Claire sitting on me in the field when she felt lazy, or walking with me by the river when she went looking for phoebes and kingfishers. I wanted to canter around the pasture with her and race the mares again.
All during Claire’s absence, Eric Sand still attended his weekly lessons, and he needed me not to miss Claire when I was with him.
Maybe, I thought, I can always be there for Claire by always being there for Eric.
I made sure to greet Eric every time with a soft whicker.
“Mac,” he would say. “We’re best friends now.”
He had grown in strength and improved in horsemanship. He held the reins himself and rode tall, and alone, in the saddle. When Eric said, “Whoa,” and pulled back on my reins, I stopped and waited. He learned to hold the reins lightly, and, though he could not squeeze his legs with great control, his seat and his trunk instructed me when to go. So I did as he asked; I walked on. All the while, Claire stayed away from the Maury River Stables.
When the horse center in Lexington hosted a dazzling moonlight show to raise money for therapeutic riding, Eric Sand showed me.
Mrs. Maiden insisted that every pair representing the Maury River Stables be impeccably turned out. She braided my mane and tail, so that I would dazzle the judges. I had grown to love Mrs. Maiden and cherished those rare moments when it was just Mrs. Maiden and me.
“What would I do without you, Macadoo? Every child at the barn loves you! Just look at how you’ve helped Eric. And not just in the saddle; he’s developed more strength and control than anyone thought he could. And he is forever smiling, too! Why do you think that is?” she asked me.
I whickered for Mrs. Maiden to tell me the answer.
“Because of you, that’s why. Because that little boy loves this Belgian. And, I do, too.” She kissed my check and finished the last of the braiding. “Now you’re ready! I predict we’ll be coming home with a slew of ribbons.”
At the horse center, Eric wore the crisp blue jacket of a hunter and a black velvet hat, just as Claire wore when showing with Daisy. Everyone called us a handsome team.
In our classes, Virgil Sand, and his wife, walked beside me. Eric listened to the judge, as did I. I waited for Eric, though, to ask me to walk, to halt, to reverse, to back up, and to trot. At the end our first class, we lined up in a row and waited for the judge’s decision. Eric waved to Mrs. Maiden; she gave us her thumbs-up. When I heard the announcer say, “First place goes to Eric Sand on Macadoo, owned by the Maury River Stables,” I bowed my head.
Eric Sand won two blue ribbons, one red, and one white; he won them with me. He took the ribbons back to the barn and placed them on my door. Virgil Sand brought me a basket of apples.
The boarders in the barn — Cowboy and Charlie and Jake George — moved out. Mrs. Maiden moved Gwen and me into stalls next to each other. It was hard for us to really visit when we were always turned out in separate fields, so I was glad to have her near me.
When Claire first left and I felt the first strain of tangles starting again, I reached out to Gwen for help. “Is this what Mamere meant? Will I always long for someone I love to come back to me? Is missing someone the Belgian way?” I asked my friend.
“I suppose that is our way — all of us — not just Belgian horses, but any horse who must both let go of and hold on to a person.”
“Why does it hurt so much when someone you love goes away?”
As Mamere and Job often did, Gwen shared her grain with me. “Oh, Macadoo, remember love comes back in ways and at times you least expect. Do you believe this?”
I ate the grain. I inhaled it and wished I had left some for later. Grateful that the top part of our wall, made of bars, allowed us to see and nuzzle each other, I blew onto Gwen. “I would like to believe it, but how?”
“Look around you.” She offered the last of her grain. “Look around. We are home, and we are loved. Every day we are loved.”
Neither of us wore blankets that night. Spring had come early, yet the night was so warm it seemed that even spring was keen to move on. I stood guard at my window, wondering if learning to love my work might mean never again giving a child my whole heart. Whenever I did love a child, that child moved on, and then my heart ached.
Will every child I love go away? I wondered. If I offer my service but not my heart to my students, I thought, maybe the separation I know is coming won’t hurt so bad.
Then I realized that to build such a wall was not at all the Belgian way. My heart belonged already to Eric Sand, too, and also still to Poppa and Izzy, Naomi, and Claire, and already to those new friends I had yet to meet.
Early one day in March, nearly a year after Claire had gone away, Mrs. Maiden came with breakfast and with news. I heard Stu hammering fence posts and car wheels crunching on the gravel drive.
Mrs. Maiden stepped into my stall, gave me my grain, and tossed in three flakes of hay, and I nickered for a fourth. I finished before anyone else, and, eager to be in the sunshine, I stuck my head out the window to smell the apple buds. Mrs. Maiden interrupted my daydream of eating all the young buds on Saddle Mountain.
“Hello, Mac. Guess what! Claire’s come back.”
I looked around to find the girl.
Mrs. Maiden set down my brush box, took out the comb, and started pulling the briars out of my forelock and mane. “Claire’s not the same little person we knew last year. I know she’ll be glad to see you. Let her know you remember her. Remind her that her old friends at the Maury River Stables still care for her,” she said.
But it was Ann, a new girl, whom I had just met, not Claire, that led me into the riding ring for a lesson, taught by Stu. Claire stayed close by Mrs. Maiden and didn’t join the other students. Mrs. Maiden was busy welcoming a new horse.
“He’s beautiful,” I heard Claire say, though the horse was anything but. The gelding was dim and drained of life. Sunken and hollow. Covered with cuts and scrapes. His hooves overgrown and splintered.
He struggled to lift his head. Dehydration, I thought, had set in. His bones stuck out. He had hollows and crooks where I had muscle and mass. He bled from deep cuts that made his legs shaky, but Claire saw something more.
In a small voice that also sounded drained and dimmed, Claire now stuttered. “Ch-Chancey’s b-beautiful.” She kissed the new old horse on his cheek. He nuzzled her and nickered.
And then I saw something in him, too. His heart. Despite all the old App had been through, he was rallying to receive and return the love of the child who stood before him.
The paper birch quivered in the spring breeze and drew from me a buried memory of a season past at Cedarmont, when a boy reached out for my cheek in much the same way.
“Everything will be okay.” I heard Claire try to reassure Chancey like Izzy had done for me.
The other students didn’t see Chancey in the same way.
“Ewww, he’s ugly. What’s wrong with him?” I heard Ann say.
Mrs. Maiden defended him. “Give Chancey some time. His owner lost her land, her barn, and all of her horses. For the last six months, Chancey’s been left out in a pasture with no one to feed or water or care for him. Had to fight his way through barbed wire for fresh water. He’s a tough old Appy; he’ll be fine, especially if we give him lots of love and care.”
“If he’s an Appaloosa, where are his spots?”
Stu laughed. “He’s got no spots! He’s what you call cremello. Like a partial albino. That’s why Isbell — Mrs. Maiden — put the fly mask on him. See how his skin is pink?”
Mrs. Maiden turned Chancey out into our paddock. The other geldings, led by Dante, crowded around the gate to watch. The Appy squealed when she turned him loose, and he tried to run. Dante pushed him into the fence; Chancey squealed, again, and slipped in the soft mud — another signal of spring’s arrival — that had formed around the gate.
Claire ran into our field, flinging her arms at Dant
e. “Leave him alone, Dante!” She chased the Thoroughbred away. Chancey followed Claire back to the gate, and long after she had left, he stood up to his hocks in standing water and mud, waiting until after dark for her return. When he realized she wouldn’t return until daylight, he grazed alone and kept to himself, well out of the way.
Where am I needed most? How can I best serve Claire, Mrs. Maiden, and the Maury River Stables today? I asked myself. And, the answer came to me: Chancey.
From down at the water tub, I heard a squeal. Dante had Chancey’s fly mask in his teeth. He cantered and bucked and tossed it to the ground. Napoleon picked it up. Chancey did not give chase, for Chancey could hardly see. Years of standing unprotected in the sun had damaged his fair eyes.
I raced down the hill to defend him. “Go away,” I told Chancey when I reached him. “Follow your nose to the hay ring!”
It had been a long, long time since I had raced. I galloped straight for Dante. “I am Macadoo, Draft King of the Maury River! Try to beat me if you dare!” I cried out.
As I reached Dante, I galloped the last few strides to bolster the sound of my two thousand pounds. I stopped short in the Thoroughbred’s face.
“I want his fly mask.” I pinned my ears and flared out my nostrils. “Go and get it from the Shetland,” I demanded.
Dante snorted and turned his back to me.
I knew he could trace his hot-blooded lineage back hundreds of years to the stallions of the Orient. All Thoroughbreds can. Dante had won a fortune on the track and then lost his way. He had something to prove to everyone he met, but he still hadn’t proven himself a dependable school horse. Only the most advanced students at the Maury River Stables dared to mount him. Few of them, even, stayed with him for long. Mrs. Maiden had not given up on him, but Dante didn’t make it easy on her. I would not make it easy for him, I decided.
The Thoroughbred pressed his mouth into my maimed ear, but I did not quiver.
“No man could break me on the ground, though many tried. I was broke in the Maury River because only the water could quell my fire.” He pawed the ground and boasted, “I am King of the Maury River! Not you.”
