The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  They ate supper at, a long wooden table with the couple’s six children. They all had their father’s blond hair and wide blue eyes and watched Annie and Grace with a kind of polite wonder. The food was plain and wholesome and there was only milk to drink, served creamy and still warm from the dairy in brimming glass jugs.

  This morning, the wife had cooked them a breakfast of eggs, hash browns, and home-cured ham and just as they were leaving, with Grace already in the car, the farmer had handed something to Annie.

  “We’d like you to have this,” he said.

  It was an old book with a faded cloth cover. The man’s wife was standing beside him and they watched as Annie opened it. It was The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Annie could remember it being read to her at school when she was only seven or eight years old.

  “It seemed appropriate,” the farmer said.

  Annie swallowed and thanked him.

  “We’ll be praying for you all,” the woman said.

  The book still lay on the front passenger seat. And every time Annie caught sight of it she thought about the woman’s words.

  Even though Annie had lived in this country for many years, such candid religious talk still jolted some deep-seated English reserve in her and made her feel uneasy. But what disturbed her more was that this total stranger had so clearly seen them all as needing her prayers. She’d seen them as victims. Not just Pilgrim and Grace—that was understandable—but Annie too. Nobody, nobody ever, had seen Annie Graves that way.

  Now, below the lightning on the horizon, something caught her eye. It started as little more than a flickering speck and grew slowly as she watched it, assembling itself into the liquid shape of a truck. Soon, beyond it, she could see the towers of grain elevators then other, lower buildings, a town, sprouting up around them. A flurry of small brown birds erupted from the side of the road and were buffeted away on the wind. The truck was nearly up to them now and Annie watched the glinting chrome of its grille get larger and larger until it passed them in a blast of wind that made the car and trailer shudder. Grace stirred behind her.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Just a truck.”

  Annie saw her in the mirror, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

  “There’s a town coming up. We need gas. Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  The exit road traveled in a long loop around a white wooden church that stood on its own in a field of dead grass. In front of it a small boy with a bicycle watched them circle by and as they did, the church was suddenly engulfed in sunshine. Annie half expected to see a finger pointing down through the clouds.

  There was a diner next to the gas station and after filling up they ate egg-Salad sandwiches in silence, surrounded by men who wore baseball caps emblazoned with the names of farm products and who spoke in hushed tones of winter wheat and the price of soybeans. For all Annie understood, they might as well have been speaking some foreign tongue. She went to pay the check then came back to the table to tell Grace she was going to the rest room and would meet her back at the car.

  “Would you see if Pilgrim wants some water?” she said. Grace didn’t answer.

  “Grace? Did you hear me?”

  Annie stood over her, aware suddenly that the farmers around them had stopped talking. The confrontation was deliberate but now she regretted the impulse to make it so public. Grace didn’t look up. She finished her Coke and the sound her glass made when she put it down punctuated the silence.

  “Do it yourself,” she said.

  The first time Grace had thought about killing herself was in the cab coming home that day from the prosthetist’s. The socket of the false leg had dug into the underside of her thighbone, but she’d pretended it felt fine and had gone along with her father’s determined cheerfulness while wondering which would be the best way to do it.

  Two years ago a girl in eighth grade had thrown herself under a downtown express on the subway. No one seemed able to come up with a reason for it and like everyone else Grace had been shocked. But she had also been secretly impressed. What courage it must have taken, she thought, in that final, decisive moment. Grace remembered thinking she herself could never summon such courage and that even if she could, her muscles would somehow still refuse to make that last launching flex.

  Now though, she saw it in an altogether different light and could contemplate the possibility, if not the particular method, with what amounted to dispassion. That her life was ruined was a simple fact, only reinforced by the way those around her sought so fervently to show it wasn’t. She wished with all her heart that she had died that day with Judith and Gulliver in the snow. But as the weeks went by she realized—and it came to her almost as a disappointment—that maybe she wasn’t the suicide type.

  What held her back was the inability to see it only from her own point of view. It seemed so melodramatic, so extravagant, more the sort of extremist thing her mother might do. It didn’t occur to Grace that perhaps it was the Maclean in her, those cursed lawyer genes, that made her so objectify the issue of her own demise. For blame had ever flowed but one way in this family. Everything was always Annie’s fault.

  Grace loved and resented her mother in almost equal measure and often for the same thing. For her certainty, for example, and for the way she was always so damn right. Above all for knowing Grace the way she did. Knowing how she would react to things, what her likes and dislikes were, what her opinion might be on any given subject. Maybe all mothers had such insight on their daughters and sometimes it was wonderful to be so understood. More often though, and especially of late, it felt like a monstrous invasion of her privacy.

  For these, and a thousand less specific wrongs, Grace now took revenge. For at last, with this great silence, she seemed to have a weapon that worked. She could see the effect it was having on her mother and found it gratifying. Annie’s acts of tyranny were normally executed without a hint of guilt or self-doubt. But now Grace sensed both. There seemed some tacit and exploitable acknowledgment that it was wrong to have forced Grace to join this escapade. Viewed from the backseat of the Lariat, her mother seemed like some gambler, staking life itself on one last desperate spin of the wheel.

  They drove due west to the Missouri then swung north with the river snaking broad and brown to their left. At Sioux City they crossed into South Dakota and headed west again on Route 90 which would take them all the way to Montana. They passed through the northern Badlands and saw the sun go down over the Black Hills in a strip of blood-orange sky. They traveled without speaking and the brooding sorrow between them seemed to spawn and spread until it mingled with the million other sorrows that haunted this vast, unforgiving landscape.

  Neither Liz nor Harry knew anyone who lived in these parts, so Annie had booked a room at a small hotel near Mount Rushmore. She had never seen the monument and had looked forward to coming here with Grace. But when they pulled into the hotel’s deserted parking lot it was dark and raining and Annie thought the only good thing about being there was that she wouldn’t have to make polite conversation with hosts she’d never met and would never meet again.

  The rooms were all named after different presidents. Theirs was Abraham Lincoln. His beard jutted at them from laminated prints on every wall and an extract from the Gettysburg Address hung above the TV, partly obscured by a glossy cardboard sign advertising adult movies. There were two large beds, side by side, and Grace collapsed on the one farthest from the door while Annie went back out into the rain to see to Pilgrim.

  The horse seemed to be getting used to the rituals of the journey. Confined in the narrow stall of the trailer, he no longer erupted when Annie stepped into the cramped, protected space in front of him. He just edged back into the darkness and watched. She could feel his eyes on her while she hung up a new net of hay and carefully pushed his buckets of feed and water within reach. He would never touch them until she had gone. She sensed his simmering hostility and was both scared and excited by
it so that when she closed the door on him her heart was pounding.

  When she got back to the room, Grace had undressed and was in bed. Her back was turned and whether she was asleep or just pretending, Annie couldn’t tell.

  “Grace?” she said softly. “Don’t you want to eat?”

  There was no reaction. Annie thought about going alone to the restaurant, but couldn’t face it. She took a long, hot bath, hoping the water would bring her comfort. All it brought her was doubt. It hung in the air with the steam, enfolding her. What on earth did she think she was doing, dragging these two wounded souls across a continent, in some gruesome reprise of pioneer madness? Grace’s silence and the remorseless emptiness of the spaces they had crossed made Annie feel suddenly, terribly alone. To obliterate these thoughts, she slid her hands between her legs and felt herself, worked at herself, refusing to concede to the initial stubborn numbness until at last her loins twitched and swam and she was lost.

  That night she dreamed she was walking with her father along a snowy ridge, roped like mountaineers, though this was something they had never done. Below, on either side, sheer walls of rock and ice plunged to nothingness. They were on a cornice, a thin overhanging crust of snow which her father said was safe. He was in front of her and he turned to her and smiled the way he smiled in her favorite photograph, a smile which said with total confidence that he was with her and everything was alright. And as he did so, over his shoulder she saw a crack zigzagging toward them and the lip of the cornice start to split away and tumble down the mountainside. She wanted to cry out but couldn’t and the moment before the crack reached them, her father turned and saw it. And then he was gone and Annie saw the rope between them snaking after him and she realized the only way to save them both was to jump the other way. So she launched herself into the air on the other side of the ridge. But instead of feeling the rope jolt and hold, she just kept on falling, free-falling into the void.

  When she woke it was morning. They had slept late. Outside it was raining even harder. Mount Rushmore and its stone faces were hidden in swirling cloud that the woman in reception said wasn’t going to clear. Not far away, she said, there was another mountain carving they could maybe get a glimpse of, a giant figure of Crazy Horse.

  “Thanks,” said Annie. “We’ve got our own.”

  They had breakfast, checked out and drove back up to the interstate. They crossed the state line into Wyoming and skirted south of Devil’s Tower and Thunder Basin, then over the Powder River and up toward Sheridan where at last the rain stopped.

  Increasingly the pickups and trucks they saw were driven by men in cowboy hats. Some touched their brims or lifted a hand in grave salute. As they went by, the sun made rainbows in the plumes of their tail-spray.

  It was late afternoon when they crossed into Montana. But Annie felt neither relief nor any sense of achievement. She had tried so hard not to let Grace’s silence beat her. All day she had hopped stations on the radio and listened to Bible-thumping preachers, livestock reports and more kinds of country music than she’d known existed. But it was no good. She felt herself compressed into an ever-shrinking space between the weight of her daughter’s gloom and her own welling anger. At last it was too much to bear. Some forty miles into Montana, neither looking nor caring where it led, she took an exit off the interstate.

  She wanted to park but nowhere seemed right. There was a massive casino standing on its own and as she looked, its neon sign flickered on, red and lurid in the fading light. She drove on up a hill, past a cafe and a low straggle of stores with a dirt parking strip in front. Two Indians with long black hair and feathers in their high-crowned cowboy hats stood beside a battered pickup, watching the Lariat and trailer approach. Something in their gaze unsettled her and she kept on up the hill, took a right turn and stopped. She switched off the ignition and for a while sat very still. She could sense Grace behind her, watching. The girl’s voice, when at last she spoke, was cautious.

  “What’s going on?”

  “What?” Annie said sharply.

  “It’s closed. Look.”

  There was a sign along the road that said NATIONAL MONUMENT, LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD. Grace was right. According to the opening hours it gave, the place had closed an hour ago. It made Annie even angrier that Grace should so misjudge her mood to think she had come here deliberately, like a tourist. She didn’t trust herself to look at her. She just stared ahead and took a deep breath.

  “How long is this going to go on, Grace?”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean. How long is it going to go on?”

  There was a long pause. Annie watched a ball of tumbleweed chase its own shadow down the road toward them. It brushed the side of the car as it went by. She turned to look at Grace and the girl looked away and shrugged.

  “Hmm? I mean, is this it now?” Annie went on. “We’ve come nearly two thousand miles and you’ve sat there and you haven’t spoken a word. So I just thought I’d ask, just so I know. Is this the way you and I are going to be now?”

  Grace was looking down, fiddling with her Walkman. She shrugged again.

  “I dunno.”

  “Do you want us to turn around and go back home?” Grace gave a bitter little laugh.

  “Well, do you?”

  Grace lifted her eyes and looked sideways out of the window, trying to seem nonchalant, but Annie could see she was fighting tears. There was a clumping sound as Pilgrim shifted in the trailer.

  “Because if that’s what you want—”

  Suddenly Grace turned on her, her face savage and distorted. The tears were running now and the failure to stop them doubled her fury.

  “What the hell do you care!” she screamed. “You decide! You always do! You pretend you care what other people want but you don’t, it’s just bullshit!”

  “Grace,” Annie said gently, putting a hand out. But Grace smacked it away.

  “Don’t! Just leave me alone!”

  Annie looked at her for a moment then opened the door and got out. She started walking, blindly, tilting her face to the wind. The road led up past a grove of pine trees to a parking lot and a low building, both deserted. She kept walking. She followed a path that curved up the hillside and found herself beside a cemetery enclosed by black iron railings. At the crest of the hill there was a simple stone monument and it was here that Annie stopped.

  On this hillside, on a June day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred soldiers were cut to pieces by those they had sought to slaughter. Their names were etched in the stone. Annie turned to look down the hill at the scattered white tombstones. They cast long shadows in the last pale reach of the sun. She stood there and looked out across the vast, rolling plains of wind-flattened grass that stretched away from this sorrowful place to a horizon where sorrow was infinite. And she started to weep.

  It would later strike her as strange that she should have come here by chance. Whether some other random place would have brought forth the tears she’d stemmed for so long, she never would know. The monument was a kind of cruel anomaly, honoring as it did the agents of genocide while the countless graves of those they had butchered elsewhere lay forever unmarked. But the sense of suffering here and the presence of so many ghosts transcended all detail. It was simply a fitting place for tears. And Annie hung her head and wept them. She wept for Grace and for Pilgrim and for the lost souls of the children who’d died in her womb. Above all, she wept for herself and what she had become.

  All her life she had lived where she didn’t belong. America wasn’t her home. And nor, when she went there now, was England. In each country they treated her as if she came from the other. The truth was, she came from nowhere. She had no home. Not since her father died. She was rootless, tribeless, adrift.

  Once this had seemed her greatest strength. She had a way of tapping into things. She could seamlessly adapt, insinuate herself into any group, any culture or situation. She knew instinctively what w
as required, who you needed to know, what you had to do to win. And in her work, which had so long obsessed her, this gift had helped her win all that was worth winning. Now, since Grace’s accident, it all seemed worthless.

  In the past three months she had been the strong one, fooling herself that it was what Grace needed. The fact was, she knew no other way to react. Having lost all connection with herself, she had lost it too with her child and, for this, she was consumed with guilt. Action had become a substitute for feeling. Or at least for the expression of it. And this was why, she now saw, she had launched herself into this lunatic adventure with Pilgrim.

  Annie sobbed until her shoulders ached, then she slid her back down the cold stone of the monument and sat with her head in her hands. And there she stayed until the sun dipped pale and liquid behind the distant snowy rim of the Bighorn Mountains and the cottonwoods down by the river melted together in a single black scar. When she looked up, it was night and the world was a lantern of sky.

  “Ma’am?”

  It was a park ranger. He had a flashlight, but kept its beam tactfully away from her face.

  “You okay there ma’am?”

  Annie wiped her face and swallowed.

  “Yes. Thank you,” she said. “I’m fine.” She got up.

  “Your daughter was getting kind of worried down there.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I’m going now.”

  He tipped his hat as she went. “Night ma’am. You go safely now.”

  She walked back down to the car, aware he was watching. Grace was asleep, or perhaps she was only pretending to be. Annie started the engine, switched on the lights and made a turn at the top of the road. She looped back onto the interstate and drove through the night, all the way to Choteau.