The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  “I want to say good-bye to him, Daddy. Could we go see him this morning? Before I go back to the hospital?”

  Annie had spoken just once to Harry Logan. It had been an awkward call and though neither mentioned her threat to sue him, it had hung heavily over their every word. Logan had been charming and, in her tone at least, Annie got as near to an apology as she ever got. But since then, her news of Pilgrim had come only through Liz Hammond. Not wanting to add unduly to their worries over Grace, Liz had given Annie a picture of the horse’s recovery that was as reassuring as it was false.

  The wounds were healing well, she said. The skin grafts over the cannon bone had taken. The nasal bone repair looked better than they had ever dared hope. None of these was a lie. And none of them prepared Annie, Robert and Grace for what they were about to see as they came up the long drive and parked in front of Joan Dyer’s house.

  Mrs. Dyer came out of the stable and crossed the yard toward them, wiping her hands on the sides of the old blue quilt jacket she always wore. The wind whipped strands of gray hair across her face and she smiled as she tidied them away. The smile was so odd and out of character that Annie was puzzled. It was probably just awkwardness at the sight of Grace being helped out onto her crutches by Robert.

  “Hello Grace,” Mrs. Dyer said. “How are you dear?”

  “She’s doing just great, aren’t you baby?” Robert said. Why can’t he let her answer for herself? thought Annie. Grace smiled bravely.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Did you have a good Christmas? Lots of presents?”

  “Zillions,” said Grace. “We had a fabulous time didn’t we?” She looked at Annie.

  “Fabulous,” Annie endorsed.

  No one seemed to know what to say next and for a moment they all stood there in the cold wind, embarrassed. Clouds barreled furiously overhead and the red walls of the barn were suddenly set ablaze by a burst of sun.

  “Grace wants to see Pilgrim,” said Robert. “Is he in the barn?”

  Mrs. Dyer’s face flickered.

  “No. He’s out back.”

  Annie sensed something was wrong and could see Grace did too.

  “Great,” said Robert. “Can we go see him?”

  Mrs. Dyer hesitated, but only for an instant.

  “Of course.”

  She turned and walked off. They followed her out of the yard and around the old row of stalls at the back of the barn.

  “Mind how you go. It’s pretty muddy back here.”

  She looked over her shoulder at Grace on her crutches then darted a look at Annie. It felt like a warning.

  “She’s pretty darn good on these things, don’t you think Joan?” Robert said. “I can’t keep up.”

  “Yes, I can see.” Mrs. Dyer smiled, briefly.

  “Why isn’t he in the barn?” Grace asked. Mrs. Dyer didn’t answer. They were at the stalls now and she stopped by the only door that was closed and turned to face them. She swallowed hard and looked at Annie.

  “I don’t know how much Harry and Liz have told you.” Annie shrugged.

  “Well, we know he’s lucky to be alive,” Robert said. There was a pause. They were all waiting for Mrs. Dyer to go on. She seemed to be searching for the right words.

  “Grace,” she said. “Pilgrim isn’t how he used to be. He’s been very disturbed by what happened.” Grace looked very worried suddenly and Mrs. Dyer looked at Annie and Robert for help. “To be honest, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for her to see him.”

  “Why? What—?” Robert started to say, but Grace cut him off.

  “I want to see him. Open the door.”

  Mrs. Dyer looked at Annie for a decision. It seemed to Annie that they had already gone too far to turn back. She nodded. Reluctantly Mrs. Dyer drew back the bolt on the top half of the door. There was an immediate explosion of sound inside the stall which startled them all. Then there was silence. Mrs. Dyer slowly opened the top door and Grace peered in with Annie and Robert standing behind her.

  It took a while for the girl’s eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Then she saw him. Her voice when she spoke was so small and frail that the others could barely hear it.

  “Pilgrim? Pilgrim?”

  Then she gave a cry and turned away and Robert had to reach out quickly to stop her from falling.

  “No! Daddy, no!”

  He put his arms around her and led her back to the yard. The sound of her sobbing faded and was lost on the wind.

  “Annie,” Mrs. Dyer said. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have let her.”

  Annie looked at her blankly then stepped closer to the door of the stall. The smell of urine hit her in a sudden, pungent wave and she could see the floor was filthy with dung. Pilgrim was backed into the shadow of the far corner, watching her. His feet were splayed and his neck stretched so low that his head was little more than a foot above the ground. His grotesquely scarred muzzle was tilted up at her, as if daring her to move and he was panting in short, nervy snorts. Annie felt a shiver at the nape of her neck and the horse seemed to sense it too, for now he pinned back his ears and leered at her in a toothy, gothic parody of threat.

  Annie looked into his eyes with their blood-crazed whites and for the first time in her life knew how one might come to believe in the devil.

  FIVE

  THE MEETING HAD BEEN DRAGGING ON FOR ALMOST AN hour and Annie was bored. There were people perched all around her office, locked in a fierce and esoteric debate about which particular shade of pink would look best on an upcoming cover. The competing mockups were laid out before them. Annie thought they all looked vile.

  “I just don’t think our readers are Day-Glo kind of people,” somebody was saying. The art director, who clearly did think so, was getting more and more defensive.

  “It isn’t Day-Glo,” he said. “It’s electric candy.”

  “Well I don’t think they’re electric candy people either. It’s too eighties.”

  “Eighties? That’s absurd!”

  Annie would normally have cut it short long before it got to this. She would simply have told them what she thought and that would have been that. The problem was, she was finding it almost impossible to concentrate and, more worryingly, to care.

  It had been the same all morning. First there had been a breakfast meeting to make peace with the Hollywood agent whose “black hole” client had gone berserk at having his profile canceled. Then she’d had the production people in her office for two hours spreading doom about the soaring cost of paper. One of them had been wearing a cologne of such dizzying awfulness that Annie had needed to open all the windows afterward. She could still smell it now.

  In recent weeks she had come to rely more than ever on her friend and deputy, Lucy Friedman, the magazine’s resident style guru. The cover they were now discussing was tied to a piece Lucy had commissioned on lounge lizards and featured a grinning photograph of a perennial rock star whose wrinkles had already been contractually removed by computer.

  Sensing, no doubt, that Annie’s mind was elsewhere, Lucy was effectively chairing the meeting. She was a big, pugnacious woman with a wicked sense of humor and a voice like a rusty car muffler. She enjoyed turning things upside down and did it now by changing her mind and saying the background shouldn’t be pink at all but fluorescent lime-green.

  As the argument raged, Annie drifted off again. In an office across the street, a man wearing spectacles and a business suit was standing by the window, doing some kind of tai chi routine. Annie watched the precise, dramatic swooping of his arms and how still he kept his head and she wondered what it did for him.

  Something caught her eye and she saw through the glass panel by the door that Anthony, her assistant, was mouthing and pointing at his watch. It was nearly noon and she was supposed to be meeting Robert and Grace at the orthopedic clinic.

  “What do you think Annie?” Lucy said.

  “Sorry Luce, what was that?”

  “Lime-green. With pi
nk cover lines.”

  “Sounds great.” The art director muttered something that Annie chose to ignore. She sat forward and laid her hands flat on the desk. “Listen, can we wind this up now? I have to be somewhere.”

  There was a car waiting for her and she gave the driver the address and sat in the back, hunched inside her coat, as they wove across to the East Side and headed uptown. The streets and those who walked them looked gray and dreary. It was that season of gloom, when the new year had been in long enough for all to see it was just as bad as the old one. Waiting at the lights, Annie watched two derelicts huddled in a doorway, one sleeping while the other declaimed grandly to the sky. Her hands felt cold and she shoved them deeper into her coat pockets.

  They passed Lester’s, the coffee shop on Eighty-fourth where Robert used to take Grace for breakfast sometimes before school. They hadn’t talked about school yet but soon she would have to go back and face the stares of the other girls. It wasn’t going to be easy but the longer they left it, the tougher it would be. If the new leg fit alright, the one they were going to try today at the clinic, Grace would soon be walking. When she’d got the hang of it, she should go back to school.

  Annie got there twenty minutes late and Robert and Grace were already in with Wendy Auerbach, the prosthetist. Annie declined the receptionist’s offer to take her coat and was led down a narrow white corridor to the fitting room. She could hear their voices.

  The door was open and none of them saw her come in. Grace was sitting in her panties on a bed. She was looking down at her legs but Annie couldn’t see them because the prosthetist was kneeling there, adjusting something. Robert stood to one side, watching.

  “How’s that?” said the prosthetist. “Is that better?” Grace nodded. “Alrighty. Now see how it feels standing.”

  She stood clear and Annie watched Grace frown in concentration and ease herself slowly off the bed, wincing as the false leg took her weight. Then she looked up and saw Annie.

  “Hi,” she said and did her best to smile. Robert and the prosthetist turned.

  “Hi,” Annie said. “How’s it going?”

  Grace shrugged. How pale she looked, thought Annie. How frail.

  “The kid’s a natural,” said Wendy Auerbach. “Sorry, we had to start without you, Mom.”

  Annie put up a hand to show she didn’t mind. The woman’s relentless jollity irritated her. “Alrighty” was bad enough. Calling her “Mom” was dicing with death. She was finding it difficult to take her eyes off the leg and was aware that Grace was studying her reaction. The leg was flesh-colored and, apart from the hinge and valve hole at the knee, a reasonable match for her left leg. Annie thought it looked hideous, outrageous. She didn’t know what to say. Robert came to the rescue.

  “The new socket fits a treat.”

  After the first fitting, they had taken another plaster mold of Grace’s stump and fashioned this new and better socket. Robert’s fascination with the technology had made the whole process easier. He had taken Grace into the workshop and asked so many questions he probably now knew enough to be a prosthetist himself. Annie knew the purpose was to distract not just Grace but also himself from the horror of it all. But it worked and Annie was grateful.

  Someone brought in a walking-frame and Robert and Annie watched Wendy Auerbach show Grace how to use it. This would only be needed for a day or two, she said, until Grace got the feel of the leg. Then she could just use a cane and pretty soon she’d find she didn’t even need that. Grace sat down again and the prosthetist bounced through a list of maintenance and hygiene tips. She talked mainly to Grace, but tried to involve the parents too. Soon, this narrowed down to Robert, for it was he who asked the questions and anyway she seemed to sense Annie’s dislike.

  “Alrighty,” she said eventually, clapping her hands. “I think we’re done.”

  She escorted them to the door. Grace kept the leg on but walked with crutches. Robert carried the walking-frame and a bag of things Wendy Auerbach had given them to look after the leg. He thanked her and they all waited as she opened the door and offered Grace one last piece of advice.

  “Remember. There’s hardly a thing you did before that you can’t do now. So, young lady, you just get up on that darn horse of yours as soon as you can.”

  Grace lowered her eyes. Robert put his hand on her shoulder. Annie shepherded them before her out of the door.

  “She doesn’t want to,” she said through her teeth as she went past. “And neither does the darn horse. Alrighty?”

  Pilgrim was wasting away. The broken bones and the scars on his body and legs had healed, but the damage done to the nerves in his shoulder had rendered him lame. Only a combination of confinement and physical therapy could help him. But such was the violence with which he exploded at anyone’s approach that the latter was impossible without risk of serious injury. Confinement alone was thus his lot. In the dark stench of his stall, behind the barn where he had known days far happier, Pilgrim grew thin.

  Harry Logan had neither the courage nor the skill of Dorothy Chen in administering shots. And so Mrs. Dyer’s boys devised a sly technique to help him. They cut a small, sliding hatch in the bottom section of the door through which they pushed in Pilgrim’s food and water. When a shot was due they would starve him. With Logan standing ready with his syringe, they would put down pails of feed and water outside then open the hatch. The boys would often get a fit of giggles as they hid to one side and waited for Pilgrim’s hunger and thirst to get the better of his fear. When he reached tentatively out to sniff the pails, the boys would ram down the hatch and trap his head long enough for Logan to get the shot into his neck. Logan hated it. He especially hated the way the boys laughed.

  In early February he called Liz Hammond and they arranged to meet at the stables. They took a look at Pilgrim through the stall door and then went to sit in Liz’s car. They sat in silence for a while watching Tim and Eric hosing down the yard, fooling around.

  “I’ve had enough Liz,” Logan said. “It’s all yours now.”

  “Have you spoken with Annie?”

  “I called her ten times. I told her a month ago the horse ought to be put down. She won’t listen. But I tell you, I can’t handle this anymore. Those two fucking kids drive me nuts. I’m a vet, Lizzie. I’m supposed to stop animals’ suffering, not make them suffer. I’ve had it.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, just sat there, gravely assessing the boys. Eric was trying to light a cigarette but Tim kept aiming the hose at him.

  “She was asking me if there were horse psychiatrists,” said Liz. Logan laughed.

  “That horse doesn’t need a shrink, he needs a lobotomy.” He thought for a while. “There’s this horse chiropractor guy over in Pittsfield but he doesn’t do cases like this. Can’t think of anybody who does. Can you?”

  Liz shook her head.

  There was no one. Logan sighed. The whole thing, he concluded, had been one goddamn miserable fuckup from the start. And there was no sign he could see of it getting any better.

  TWO

  SIX

  IT WAS IN AMERICA THAT HORSES FIRST ROAMED. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.

  Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he’d struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.

  Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered,
there were those among men who understood this.

  They could see into the creature’s soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.

  For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, these men were known as Whisperers.

  They were mainly, men it seemed and this puzzled Annie as she read by hooded lamplight in the cavernous reading room of the public library. She had assumed that women would know more about such things than men. She sat for many hours at one of the long, gleaming mahogany tables, privately corralled by the books she had found, and she stayed until the place closed,

  She read about an Irishman called Sullivan who lived two hundred years ago and whose taming of furious horses had been witnessed by many. He would lead the animals away into a darkened barn and no one knew for sure what happened when he closed the door. He claimed that all he used were the words of an Indian charm, bought for the price of a meal from a hungry traveler. No one ever knew if this was true, for his secret died with him. All the witnesses knew was that when Sullivan led the horses out again, all fury had vanished. Some said they looked hypnotized by fear.

  There was a man from Groveport, Ohio called John Solomon Rarey, who tamed his first horse at the age of twelve. Word of his gift spread and in 1858 he was summoned to Windsor Castle in England to calm a horse of Queen Victoria’s. The queen and her entourage watched astonished as Rarey put his hands on the animal and laid it down on the ground before them. Then he lay down beside it and rested his head on its hooves. The queen chuckled with delight and gave Rarey a hundred dollars. He was a modest, quiet man, but now he was famous and the press wanted more. The call went out to find the most ferocious horse in all England.