The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  They talked about school and Grace told her how, on the mornings she didn’t have to come in to the clinic, Annie made her do schoolwork. Diane agreed that was tough.

  “How does your dad feel about you both being out here?”

  “He gets a little lonely.”

  “I bet he does.”

  “But he’s got some big important case on at the moment so I maybe wouldn’t see too much of him anyway.”

  “They’re a real glitzy pair your mom and dad, huh? These big careers and all.”

  “Oh, Dad’s not like that.” It came right out and the silence that followed made it sound worse. Grace hadn’t meant to imply any criticism of her mother but she knew from the way Diane looked at her that this was how it had sounded.

  “Does she ever get to take a vacation?”

  The tone was knowing, sympathetic and it made Grace feel like a traitor, that she’d handed Diane some kind of weapon and she wanted to say no, you’ve got it wrong, it’s not like that at all. But instead she just shrugged and said, “Oh yes, sometimes.”

  Grace looked away and for some miles neither of them spoke. There were some things other people could never understand, she thought. It always had to be one way or the other and it was more complicated than that. She was proud of her mother, for heavensakes. Although she’d never dream of letting her know, Annie was how she herself wanted to be when she grew up. Not exactly maybe, but it seemed natural and right that women should have such careers. She liked the Way all her friends knew about her mother, how successful she was and everything. She wouldn’t want it any other way and though she sometimes gave Annie a hard time for not being around as much as other people’s moms, if she was honest, she never felt she was missing out. It was often just her and her dad, but that was okay. It was more than okay, sometimes she even preferred it that way. It was just that Annie was, well, so sure about everything. So extreme and purposeful. It made you want to fight her even when you agreed.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Diane said.

  “Yes.” Grace had been staring out at the plains but she hadn’t taken anything in and, now that she did, pretty didn’t seem the right word at all. It seemed a desolate kind of place.

  “You wouldn’t dream there’s enough nuclear weapons buried out there to blow up the entire planet would you?”

  Grace looked at her. “Really?”

  “You betcha.” She grinned. “Missile silos all over the place. We may not have too many people out here but bombs and beef, oh boy, we’re second to none.”

  Annie had the phone tucked into her neck and was half listening to Don Farlow while she played around on the keyboard with a sentence she’d just typed. She was trying to write an editorial, the only writing she got to do nowadays. Today she was rubbishing a new street crime initiative just announced by the mayor of New York City but she was having trouble finding the old mix of wit and vitriol that used to characterize Annie Graves at her best.

  Farlow was getting her up to speed on assorted things he and his legal hitmen had been working on, none of which interested Annie remotely. She gave up on the sentence and looked out of the window. The sun was getting low and down at the big arena she could see Tom leaning on the rail talking with Grace and Joe. She saw him throw his head back and laugh at something. Behind him the barn threw a long wedge of shadow on the red sand.

  They’d been working all afternoon with Pilgrim, who now stood watching from the other end of the arena, the sweat shining on his back. Joe had only just got back from school and had as usual gone right out to join them. Every now and then, over the past few hours, Annie had looked down there at Tom and Grace and felt just an inkling of something that, if she didn’t know herself better, she might have mistaken for jealousy.

  Her thighs ached from the morning’s ride. Muscles she hadn’t used for thirty years were making their complaints known and Annie relished the pain like a keepsake. It was years since she’d felt the exhilaration that had been there this morning. It was like someone had let her out of a cage. Still excited, she’d told Grace all about it as soon as Diane dropped her home. The girl’s face had fallen a little before clicking on the disinterest with which lately she greeted all her mother’s news and Annie cursed herself for blurting it out. It had been insensitive, she thought; although later, on reflection, she wasn’t quite sure why.

  “And he said to call a halt,” Farlow was saying.

  “What? Sorry Don, could you say that again?”

  “He said to drop the lawsuit.”

  “Who did?”

  “Annie! Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m sorry Don, I’m just fiddling around with something here.”

  “Gates told me to drop the Fiske case. Remember? Fenimore Fiske? ‘And who, pray, is Martin Scorsese?’ ”

  It was one of Fiske’s many immortal gaffes. He’d dug himself in even deeper some years later by calling Taxi Driver a squalid little film from a trifling talent.

  “Thanks Don, I remember him well. Gates really said to drop it?”

  “Yes. He said it was costing too much and it would do you and the magazine more harm than good.”

  “That son of a bitch! How dare he do that without talking to me. Jesus!”

  “For Godsake don’t tell him I told you.”

  “Jesus.”

  Annie swung around in her chair and her elbow knocked a cup of coffee off the desk.

  “Shit!”

  “You alright?”

  “Yeah. Listen Don, I’ve got to think about this. I’ll call you back, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She hung up and for a long moment stared down at the broken cup and the spreading stain of coffee.

  “Shit.”

  And she went off to the kitchen to get a cloth.

  TWENTY

  “I THOUGHT IT WAS THE SNOWPLOW, YOU SEE. I HEARD it a long, long way off. We had all the time in the world. If we’d known what it was, we could have taken the horses right off the road, out into the field or somewhere. I should have said something about it to Judith but I just didn’t think. Any case, when we were out with the horses, she was always the boss, you know? Like if there was a decision to be made, she’d be the one who got to make it. And it was like that with Gulliver and Pilgrim too. Gully was the boss, the sensible one.” She bit her lip and looked away to one side so that the light on the back of the barn caught the side of her face. It was getting dark and a cool breeze was coming in off the creek. The three of them had put Pilgrim away for the night and then Joe, with no more than a look from Tom, had made himself scarce, saying he had homework to do. Tom and Grace had strolled over to the back pen where he kept the yearlings. Once she’d caught the foot of her false leg in a rut and stumbled a little and Tom had nearly reached out to stop her from falling, but she’d righted herself and he was glad he hadn’t. Now the two of them were leaning on the fence of the pen watching the horses.

  She’d taken him step by snowy step through the morning of the accident. How they’d gone up through the woods and how funny Pilgrim had been, playing with the snow and how they’d lost the trail and had to make that steep descent beside the stream. She talked without looking at him, keeping her eyes on the horses, but he knew all she saw was what she’d seen that day, another horse and a friend both now dead. And Tom watched her talk and felt for her with the whole of his heart.

  “Then we found the place we’d been looking for. It was like this steep bank leading up to the railroad bridge. We’d been up there before, so we knew where the path was. Anyway. Judith went first and you know, it was weird, it was like Gully knew something was wrong because he didn’t want to go and Gully isn’t like that.”

  She heard her own words and how she’d got the tense wrong and she looked at him briefly and he gave her a smile.

  “So up he went and I asked her if it was okay and she said it was but to be careful, so I started up after her.”

  “Did you have to make Pilgrim go?”

 
“No, not at all. It wasn’t like with Gully. He was happy to go.”

  She looked down and for a moment stayed silent. One of the yearlings nickered softly at the far end of the pen. Tom put a hand on her shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Then Gully started to slip.” She looked at him, earnest suddenly. “You know, they found out later that the ice was only on that one side of the path? If he’d been like, a few inches to the left, it wouldn’t have happened. But he must have just put one foot on it and that was it.”

  She looked away again and he could tell from the way her shoulders moved that she was fighting to calm her breathing.

  “So he started to slide. He was trying so hard, you could see, jabbing his feet to try and make them, hold but the more he did it the worse it got, they just wouldn’t hold. They were coming right at us and Judith yelled for us to get out of the way. She was like clinging on to Gully’s neck and I tried to get Pilgrim to turn and I know I did it too hard, you know, really yanked on him? If only I’d kept my head and done it more gently, he’d have gone. But I guess I scared him even worse than he was already and he wouldn’t . . . he just wouldn’t move!”

  She stopped for a moment and swallowed.

  “Then they hit us. How I stayed on I don’t know.” She gave a little laugh. “Would’ve been a whole lot smarter not to. Unless I’d got hooked up like Judith. When she came off it was like, you know, somebody was waving a flag or something, like she was all flimsy and made of nothing. She kind of flipped as she fell, anyway her leg got caught in the stirrup and down we all went, together, sliding on down. It seemed like it took forever. And you know? The weirdest thing, as we went down I remember thinking, with all this blue sky above us and the sun shining and the snow on the trees and everything and I’m thinking, my, what a beautiful day it is.” She turned to look at him. “Isn’t that the weirdest thing you ever heard?”

  Tom didn’t think it was weird at all. There were such moments, he knew, when the world chose thus to reveal itself not, as it might seem, to mock our plight or our irrelevance but simply to affirm, for us and for all life, the very act of being. He smiled at her and nodded.

  “I don’t know if Judith saw it right away, the truck I mean. She must have hit her head really hard and Gully had totally freaked and was just, you know, thrashing her all over the place. But as soon as I saw it, coming through that place where the bridge used to be I thought, there’s no way this guy’s going to stop and I thought if I could just get hold of Gully I can get everybody out the way. I was so stupid. God I was stupid!”

  She clamped her head in her hands, screwing her eyes shut, but only for a few moments. “What I should have done was got off. It would have been a lot easier to get hold of him. I mean, he was freaked alright, but he’d hurt his leg and he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. I could have given Pilgrim a whack on the butt and sent him off and then led Gully off the road. But I didn’t.”

  She sniffed, regathered herself.

  “Pilgrim was incredible. I mean, he was pretty freaked too, but he got it back together right away. It was like he knew what I wanted. I mean, he could have stepped on Judith or anything, God, but he didn’t. He knew. And if the guy hadn’t blown his horn, we’d have done it, we were so close. My fingers were that far away, that far. . ..”

  Grace looked at him and her face was all distorted with the pain of knowing what might have been and at last the tears came. Tom put his arms around her and held her and she placed the side of her face against his chest and sobbed.

  “I saw her face looking up at me, down by Gully’s feet, just before the horn sounded. She looked so little, so scared. I could have saved her. I could have saved us all.”

  He didn’t speak, for he knew the futility of words to change such things and that even the passing of years might leave her certainty undimmed. For a long time they stood that way, with the night folding around them and he cupped his hand on the back of her head and smelled the fresh young smell of her hair. And when her crying was done and he felt her body slacken, he asked her gently if she wanted to go on. She nodded and sniffed and took a breath.

  “Once the horn sounded, that was it. And Pilgrim, he kind of turned to face the truck. It was crazy, but it was like he wasn’t going to allow it. He wasn’t going to let this great monster come and hurt us all, he was going to fight. Fight a forty-ton truck for heavensakes! Isn’t that something? But he was going to, I could feel it. And when it was right in front of us he reared up at it. And I fell and hit my head. That’s all I remember.”

  The rest Tom knew, at least in outline. Annie had given him Harry Logan’s number and a couple of days ago he’d called and listened to the man’s account of what happened next. Logan told him how it had ended for Judith and Gulliver and how Pilgrim had run off and how they’d found him down in the water with that great hole in his chest. Tom had asked him a lot of detailed questions, some of which he could tell Logan found baffling. But the man sounded bighearted and patiently catalogued the horse’s injuries and what he’d done to treat them. He told Tom of how they’d taken Pilgrim to Cornell, whose fine reputation Tom knew of, and all they’d done for him there.

  When Tom said, in all truth, that he’d never heard of a vet being able to save a horse so sorely injured, Logan laughed and said he dearly wished he hadn’t. He said things had gone all wrong later at the Dyer place and the Lord only knew what those two boys had done to the poor creature. He said he even blamed himself for going along with some of it, like trapping the animal’s head in the door to give him those shots.

  Grace was getting cold. It was late and her mother would be wondering where she was. They walked slowly back to the barn and passed through its dark, echoing emptiness and out the other end to the car. The beam of the Chevy’s headlights tilted and dipped as they bumped along the track toward the creek house. For a while the dogs ran ahead, throwing pointed shadows before them and when they turned their heads to look back at the car, their eyes flashed ghostly and green.

  Grace asked him if what he now knew would help him make Pilgrim better and he said he’d have to do some thinking but that he hoped so. When they pulled up he was glad to see she no longer looked like she’d been crying and when she got out she smiled at him and he could tell she wanted to thank him but was too shy to say it. He looked beyond her to the house, hoping he might see Annie but there was no sign of her. He gave Grace a smile and touched his hat.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said and swung the door shut.

  By the time he got in, the others had already eaten. Frank was helping Joe with some math problem at the big table in the living room and telling the twins for the last time to turn down the sound on some comedy show they were watching or he’d come and switch it off. Without a word, Diane took the supper she’d saved him and put it in the microwave while Tom went through to the downstairs bathroom to clean up.

  “Did she like her new phones then?” Through the open door he could see her settling herself back at the kitchen table with her needlework.

  “Yeah, she was real grateful.”

  He dried his hands and came back in. The microwave was pinging and he took his supper out and went to the table. It was chicken potpie, with green beans and a vast baked potato. Diane always thought it was his favorite meal and he never had the heart to disabuse her. He wasn’t at all hungry but didn’t want to upset her so he sat down and ate.

  “What I can’t work out is what she’s going to do with the third one,” Diane said, not looking up.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s only got two ears.”

  “Oh, she’s got a fax machine and other things that use lines of their own and with people calling her all the time, that’s what she needs. She offered to pay for the lines being put in.”

  “And you said no, I’ll bet.”

  He didn’t deny it and saw Diane smile to herself. He knew better than to argue whe
n she was in this kind of mood. She’d made it plain from the start that she wasn’t crazy about Annie being here and Tom thought it best just to let her have her say. He got on with his meal and for a while neither one of them spoke. Frank and Joe were arguing about whether some figure should be divided or multiplied.

  “Frank says you took her out on Rimrock this morning,” Diane said.

  “’That’s right. First time since she was a kid. She rides good.”

  “That little girl. What a thing to happen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She seems so lonely. Be better off in school, I reckon.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She’s okay.”

  After he’d eaten and gone out to check the horses, he told Diane and Frank he had some reading to do and bade them and the boys good-night.

  Tom’s room took up the whole northwest corner of the house and from its side window you could look right up the valley. The room was large and seemed more so because there was so little in it. The bed was the one his parents had slept in, high and narrow with a scrolled maple headboard. There was a logcabin quilt on it that his grandmother had made. It had once been red and white but the red had faded a pale pink and in places the fabric had worn so thin that the lining showed through. There was a small pine table with one simple chair, a chest of drawers and an old hidecovered armchair that stood under a lamp by the black iron woodstove.

  On the floor were some Mexican rugs Tom had picked up some years back in Santa Fe, but they were too small to make the place seem cozy and had more the opposite effect, stranded like lost islands on a darkstained sea of floorboard. Set into the back wall were two doors, one to the closet where he kept his clothes and the other leading to a small bathroom. On the top of the chest of drawers stood a few modestly framed photographs of his family. There was one of Rachel holding Hal as a baby, its colors now grown saturate and dark. There was a more recent one of Hal beside it, his smile uncannily like Rachel’s in the first. But for these and the books and back issues of horse magazines that lined the walls, a stranger might have wondered how a man could live so long yet own so little.