The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  It had been the same a few weeks ago when she’d tried to get Grace to talk about Pilgrim. He was maimed and useless, just like Grace, and every time she thought of him, all she could see were those terrible eyes cowering in the corner of that stinking stall at Mrs. Dyer’s. How on earth could it help to think or talk about that?

  The elevator stopped at the floor below Grace’s and the two younger girls got out. She heard them immediately start talking again as they went off down the corridor.

  When she got to her own classroom it was as she’d hoped, nobody else had yet come up. She got her books out of her bag, carefully concealed her cane on the floor under the desk, then lowered herself slowly onto the hard wooden seat. In fact it was so hard that by the end of the morning her stump would be throbbing with pain. But she could handle it. That kind of pain was easy.

  It was three days before Annie was able to speak to Tom Booker. She already had a clear enough picture of what had happened at the stables that day. After watching the taxi go away down the driveway, she’d gone into the yard and got most of the story just from the faces of the two Dyer boys. Their mother had told Annie coldly that she wanted Pilgrim out of the place by Monday.

  Annie called Liz Hammond and together they went to see Harry Logan. He had just finished a hysterectomy on a Chihuahua when they arrived. He came out with his surgical gown on and when he saw the two women he said “Uh-oh” and pretended to hide. He had a couple of recovery stalls behind the clinic and, after a lot of sighing, he agreed to let Annie put Pilgrim in one of them.

  “For one week only,” he wagged a finger at her.

  “Two,” Annie said.

  He looked at Liz and gave a forlorn grin.

  “She a friend of yours? Okay, two then. Absolute max. While you find somewhere else.”

  “Harry, you’re a sweetheart,” said Liz. He put up his hands.

  “I’m an idiot. This horse. He bites me, he kicks me, he drags me through a freezing river and what do I do? I take him in as a house-guest.”

  “Thanks Harry,” Annie said.

  The three of them went up to the stables the next morning. The boys weren’t about and only once did Annie see Joan Dyer, looking out from an upstairs window of her house. After two hours of bruising struggle and three times the amount of sedative Harry felt happy giving, they got Pilgrim into the trailer and drove him back to the clinic.

  The day after Tom Booker’s visit, Annie had tried calling him in Montana. The woman who answered the phone—Booker’s wife, Annie assumed—told her that he was expected back the following evening. The woman’s tone was none too friendly and Annie thought she must have heard what had happened. She said she would tell Tom that Annie had called. Annie waited two long days and heard nothing. On the second night, when Robert was in bed reading and she was sure Grace was asleep, she called again. Again, it was the woman who answered.

  “He’s having his supper right now,” she said.

  Annie heard a man’s voice asking who it was and the ruffling sound of a hand being put over the receiver. Through it she could hear her say, “It’s that Englishwoman again.” There was a long pause. Annie realized she was holding her breath and told herself to calm down.

  “Mrs. Graves, this is Tom Booker.”

  “Mr. Booker. I wanted to apologize for what happened at the stables.” There was silence at the other end so she went on. “I should have known what was going on up there but I suppose I just closed my eyes to it.”

  “I can understand that.” She expected him to go on but he didn’t.

  “Anyway. We’ve moved him to another place, a better place, and I wondered if you could . . .” She realized how futile, how stupid this was even before she said it. “If you would consider coming back and seeing him.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do that. Even if I had the time, frankly I don’t know how much use it’d be.”

  “Couldn’t you spare just a day or two? I don’t care what it would cost.” She heard him give a little laugh and she regretted saying it.

  “Ma’am, I hope you don’t mind if I speak plainly with you, but you’ve got to understand. There’s a limit to the amount of suffering these creatures can take. I believe this horse of yours has been living in the shadow for too long now.”

  “So you think we should put him down? Like everyone else does?” There was a pause. “If he was your horse Mr. Booker, would you put him down?”

  “Well ma’am. He’s not my horse and I’m glad it’s not my decision. But in your shoes, yes, that’s what I’d do.”

  She tried again to persuade him to come, but she could tell it was no use. He was courteous and calm and totally unmovable. She thanked him and hung up, then walked down the corridor and into the living room.

  The lights had all been turned off and the top of the piano shone dimly in the darkness. She went slowly over to the window and stood there for a long time, looking out across the treetops of the park toward the towering apartment blocks of the East Side. It was like a stage backdrop, ten thousand tiny windows, pinpricks of light in a fake night sky. It was impossible to believe that inside every one of them was a different life with its own special pain and destiny.

  Robert had fallen asleep. She took his book from his hands, turned off his bedside light and undressed in the dark. For a long time she lay on her back beside him, listening to his breathing and watching the orange shapes made on the ceiling by the streetlamps spilling around the edges of the blinds. She already knew what she was going to do. But she wasn’t going to tell Robert, or Grace, until she had it all arranged.

  TWELVE

  FOR HIS TALENT IN NURTURING YOUNG AND RUTHLESS recruits to run his mighty empire, Crawford Gates was known, among many names less flattering, as The Face That Launched a Thousand Shits. For this reason Annie always had somewhat mixed feelings about being seen with him.

  He was sitting opposite her, eating his seared swordfish meticulously without taking his eyes off her. And as she talked, Annie was intrigued by how his fork kept finding the next piece, homing faultlessly in on it as if drawn there by a magnet. It was the same restaurant he had taken her to almost a year ago when he’d offered her the editorship, a vast soulless space with minimalist matt black decor and a floor of white marble that somehow always made Annie think of an abattoir.

  She knew a month was a lot to ask but she felt she was owed it. Until the accident she had barely taken a day off and even since then she hadn’t taken many.

  “I’ll have the phone, fax, modem, everything,” she said. “You won’t even know I’m not here.”

  She cursed to herself. She’d been talking for fifteen sminutes and was getting the tone all wrong. It sounded like she was pleading. She should be doing it from strength, just telling him straight what she was going to do. There was nothing about his manner that so far suggested disapproval. He was just hearing her out while the damn swordfish autopiloted into his mouth. When she was nervous she had this stupid habit of feeling obliged to fill the silences of any conversation. She decided to stop and wait for a reaction. Crawford Gates finished chewing, nodded and took a slow sip of Perrier.

  “Are you going to take Robert and Grace too?”

  “Just Grace. Robert’s got too much on. But Grace really needs to get away. Since she went back to school she’s started to sink a little. The break’ll do her good.”

  What she didn’t say was that even now neither Grace nor Robert had the faintest idea of what she was planning. Telling them was almost the only thing left to do. Everything else she had done, with Anthony’s help, from the office.

  The house she had found to rent was in Choteau, which was the nearest town of any size to Tom Booker’s ranch. There hadn’t been much choice, but the place was furnished and from the details the real estate agent had sent, it seemed adequate. She had found a physical therapist nearby for Grace and some stables who were prepared to take Pilgrim, though Annie had been less than frank about what the horse was like. The worst par
t was going to be hauling the trailer across seven states to get there. But Liz Hammond and Harry Logan had made calls and fixed a chain of places they were welcome to stay en route.

  Crawford Gates dabbed his lips clean.

  “Annie my dear, I said it before and I say it again. You take all the time you need. These children of ours are precious, God-given creatures and when something goes wrong, we just have to stand right by them and do what’s best.”

  From someone who’d walked out on four marriages and twice that many children, Annie thought that was pretty rich. He sounded like Ronald Reagan at the end of a bad day and the Hollywood sincerity only served to sharpen the anger she already felt at her own miserable performance. The old bastard would probably be lunching at this same table tomorrow with her successor. She’d been half hoping he would just come right out with it and fire her.

  Cruising back to the office in his absurdly long black Cadillac, Annie decided that tonight she would tell Robert and Grace. Grace would scream at her and Robert would tell her she was crazy. But they would go along with it because they always did.

  The only other person she needed to inform was the one upon whom the whole plan hinged: Tom Booker. It would seem to others curious, she reflected, that this of all things worried her least. But Annie had done it many times before. As a journalist, she had specialized in people who said no. Once she’d traveled five thousand miles to a Pacific island and turned up on the doorstep of a famous writer who never gave interviews. She ended up living with him for two weeks and the piece she wrote won awards and was syndicated all over the world.

  It was, she believed, a simple and unassailable fact of life that if a woman went to epic lengths to throw herself on the mercy of a man, the man would not, could not, refuse.

  THIRTEEN

  THE HIGHWAY STRETCHED STRAIGHT AHEAD OF THEM between converging fences for miles too many to ponder toward the thunder-black dome of the horizon. At this most distant point, where the road seemed to climb into the sky, lightning flickered repeatedly, as if reatomizing blacktop into cloud. Beyond the fences, on either side, the ocean of Iowa prairie spread away flat and featureless to nowhere, lit fitfully through the rushing cloud by vivid, rolling shafts of sun, as though some giant were searching for his prey.

  In such a landscape there was dislocation both of time and space and Annie felt the inkling of what could, if she were to let it, become panic. She scanned the skyline for something to latch on to, some sign of life, a grain silo, a tree, a solitary bird, anything. Finding none, she counted fence poles or the marker stripes on the road that streamed at her from the horizon as if blazed there by the lightning. She could picture the silver Lariat and its missile-shaped trailer from above, swallowing these stripes in steady gulps.

  In two days they had traveled more than twelve hundred miles and in all that time Grace had hardly spoken. Much of the time she had slept as she slept now, curled up on the back bench seat. When she woke she would stay there, listening to her Walkman or staring blankly out. Once, and only once, Annie looked in her rearview mirror and saw her daughter watching her. When their eyes met Annie smiled and Grace looked instantly away.

  She had reacted to her mother’s plan much as Annie had predicted. She had screamed and shouted and said she wasn’t going, they couldn’t make her and that was that. She got up from the dinner table, went to her room and slammed the door. Annie and Robert sat there for a while in silence. Annie had told him on his own earlier and bludgeoned every protest he made.

  “She can’t go on avoiding the issue,” she said. “It’s her horse for Godsake. She can’t just wash her hands of it.”

  “Annie, look at what the kid’s been through.”

  “But walking away from it isn’t helping her, it’s making it worse. You know how much she loved him. You saw how she was that day at the stables. Can’t you imagine how the sight of him must haunt her?”

  He didn’t reply, just looked down and shook his head. Annie took his hand in hers.

  “We can do something about this, Robert,” she said, gentle now. “I know we can. Pilgrim can be alright again. This man can make him alright. And then Grace can be too.”

  Robert looked at her. “Does he really think he can do it?” Annie hesitated but not enough for him to notice.

  “Yes,” she said. It was the first time she had actually lied about it. Robert naturally assumed Tom Booker had been consulted about Pilgrim’s trip to Montana. It was an illusion she’d also maintained with Grace.

  Finding no ally in her father, Grace gave in, as Annie knew she would. But the resentful silence into which her anger evolved was lasting much longer than Annie had expected. In the old days, before the accident, Annie could normally subvert such moods by teasing or blithely ignoring them. This silence however was of a new order. It was as epic and immutable as the enterprise on which the girl had been forced to embark and, as the miles went by, Annie could only marvel at her stamina.

  Robert had helped them pack, driven them to Chatham and gone with them to Harry Logan’s on the morning they set off. In Grace’s eyes this made him an accomplice. While they loaded Pilgrim into the trailer, she sat like stone in the Lariat with her earphones on, pretending to read a magazine. The horse’s cries and the sound of his hooves smashing against the sides of the trailer reverberated around the yard but never once did Grace look up.

  Harry gave Pilgrim a hefty shot of sedative and handed Annie a box of the stuff along with some needles in case of emergencies. He came to the window to say hello to Grace and started to tell her about feeding Pilgrim during the trip. Grace cut him short.

  “You better talk to Mom,” she said.

  When it was time to go, her response to Robert’s farewell kiss was little more than perfunctory.

  That first night they had stayed with some friends of Harry Logan’s who lived on the edge of a small town just south of Cleveland. The husband, Elliott, had been to veterinary school with Harry and was now a partner in a large local practice. It was dark when they arrived and Elliott insisted Annie and Grace go in and freshen up while he saw to the horse. He said they too used to keep horses and he’d prepared a stall in the barn.

  “Harry said to leave him in the trailer,” Annie said.

  “What, for the entire trip?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  He cocked an eyebrow and gave her a patronizing, professional kind of smile.

  “You go on in. I’ll take a look.”

  It was starting to rain and Annie wasn’t going to argue. The wife’s name was Connie. She was a small, subdued woman with a brittle perm that looked as if it had been done that afternoon. She took them in and showed them to their rooms. The house was large and filled with the echoing silence of children grown up and gone. Their faces smiled from the walls in photographs of high school triumphs and sunny graduations.

  Grace was put in their daughter’s old room and Annie in the guest room along the corridor. Connie showed Annie where the bathroom was and left, saying supper was ready whenever they were. Annie thanked her and went back down the corridor to look in on Grace.

  Connie’s daughter had married a dentist and moved to Michigan, but her old room looked as if she’d never left. There were books and swimming trophies and shelves herded with little crystal animals. Amid this abandoned clutter of a stranger’s childhood, Grace stood by the bed and rummaged in her bag for her wash things. She didn’t look up when Annie came in.

  “Okay?”

  Grace shrugged and still didn’t look up. Annie tried to look casual, feigning interest in the pictures on the wall. She stretched and groaned.

  “God, I’m so stiff.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  The voice was cold and hostile and Annie turned and saw Grace staring at her with her hands on her hips.

  “What do you mean?”

  Grace took in the whole room with a contemptuous sweep of her arm.

  “All this. I mean, what are we doing
here!”

  Annie sighed, but before she could say anything Grace said forget it, it didn’t matter. She snatched up her cane and her wash bag and headed for the door. Annie could see how furious it made the girl that she couldn’t storm out more effectively.

  “Grace, please.”

  “I said forget it, okay?” And she was gone.

  Annie was talking with Connie in the kitchen when Elliott came in from the yard. He looked pale and had mud all down one side of him. He also seemed to be trying not to limp.

  “I left him in the trailer,” he said.

  At supper Grace toyed with her food and spoke only when spoken to. The three adults did their best to keep the conversation going but there were long spells when the only sound was the chink of cutlery. They talked about Harry Logan and Chatham and a new outbreak of Lyme disease that everyone was worrying about. Elliott said they knew a young girl about Grace’s age who’d caught it and her life had been completely wrecked. Connie darted a look at him and he flushed a little and quickly changed the subject.

  As soon as the meal was over, Grace said she was tired and would they mind if she went to bed. Annie said she would come too but Grace wouldn’t let her. She said polite good-nights to Elliott and Connie. As she walked to the door, her cane clunked on the hollow floor and Annie caught the look in the couple’s eyes as they watched.

  The next day, yesterday, they’d made an early start and driven with just a few short stops all the way across Indiana and Illinois and on into Iowa. And all day long, as the vast continent opened up around them, Grace kept her silence.

  Last night they’d stayed with a distant cousin of Liz Hammond’s who’d married a farmer and lived near Des Moines. The farm stood alone at the end of five straight miles of driveway, as if on its own brown planet, plowed in faultless furrows to every horizon.

  They were quiet, religious folk—Baptists, Annie guessed—and as unlike Liz as she could imagine. The farmer said Liz had told them all about Pilgrim, but Annie could see he was still shocked by what he saw. He helped her feed and water the horse and then raked out and replaced as much of the wet, dung-soiled straw as he could from under Pilgrim’s thrashing hooves.