The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  In the morning, when at last she found the courage to look at him, she saw no betraying trace of what had passed between them. No secret glance, and, when he spoke, no layer laced beneath his words for her alone to understand. In fact his manner, like everyone else’s, was so seamlessly and happily the same as before that Annie felt almost disappointed, so utter was the change she felt in herself.

  As they ate breakfast, she looked across the meadow for the place where they had knelt, but daylight seemed to have altered its geography and she couldn’t find it. Even the footprints they’d made had been scuffed by the cattle and soon were lost forever under the morning sun.

  After they’d eaten, Tom and Frank went to check the adjoining pastures while the children played over by the stream and Annie and Diane washed up and packed. Diane told her about the surprise she and Frank had lined up for the kids. Next week they were all flying down to L.A.

  “You know, Disneyland, Universal Studios, the works.”

  “That’s great. They don’t have any idea?”

  “Nope. Frank was trying to get Tom to come too, but he’s promised to go down to Sheridan to sort some old guy’s horse out.”

  She said it was about the only time of year they could get away. Smoky was going to keep an eye on things for them. Otherwise the place would be empty.

  The news came as a shock to Annie and not just because Tom had failed to mention it. Maybe he expected to have finished with Pilgrim by then. More shocking was the message implicit in what Diane had said. In kinder words, she was clearly telling Annie that it was time to take Grace and Pilgrim home. Annie realized how, for so long now, she had deliberately avoided confronting the issue, letting each day pass untallied in the hope that time might return the favor and ignore her too.

  By midmorning they were already down below the lowest pass. The sky had clouded over. Without the cattle, their progress was quicker, though in the steeper parts descent was harder than the climb and crueler by far to Annie’s battered muscles. There was none of the exhilaration of the day before and in their concentration even the twins grew quiet. As she rode, Annie reflected long on what Diane had told her and longer still on what Tom had said last night. That they were just two people and that now was now and only now.

  When they broke the skyline of the ridge up which Tom had wanted her to ride with him, Joe called and pointed and they all stopped to look. Far away to the south, across the plateau, there were horses. Tom told her they were the mustangs set free by the hippie woman, the one Frank called Granola Gay. It was almost the only thing he said to her all day.

  It was evening and starting to rain when they reached the Double Divide. They were all too tired to talk as they unsaddled the horses.

  Annie and Grace said their good-nights to the Bookers outside the barn and got into the Lariat. Tom said he’d go and check that Pilgrim was okay. His goodnight to Annie seemed no more special than the one he gave to Grace.

  On the way up to the creek house, Grace said the sleeve of her prosthetic leg felt tight on her stump and they agreed to have Terri Carlson take a look tomorrow. While Grace went up for the first bath, Annie checked her messages.

  The answering machine was full, the fax machine had spewed a whole new roll of paper over the floor and her E-mail was humming. Mostly the messages expressed varying degrees of shock, outrage and commiseration. There were two others and these were the only ones Annie bothered to read in full, one with relief and the other with a mix of emotion she had yet to name.

  The first, from Crawford Gates, said that with the greatest possible regret he must accept her resignation. The second was from Robert. He was flying put to Montana to spend the coming weekend with them. He said he loved them both very much.

  FOUR

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TOM BOOKER WATCHED THE LARIAT DISAPPEAR OVER THE ridge and wondered, as he had so many times before, about the man Annie and Grace were going to collect. What he knew of him he knew mainly from Grace. As if by some unspoken consent, Annie had talked of her husband only rarely and even then impersonally, more of his job than of his character.

  Despite the many good things Grace had told him (or perhaps because of them) and despite his own best efforts to the contrary, Tom could not fully dislodge a predisposed dislike that was not, he knew, in his nature. He’d tried to rationalize it, in the hope of finding some more acceptable reason. The guy, after all, was a lawyer. How many of them had he ever met and liked? But of course, it wasn’t that. There was sufficient cause in the simple fact that this particular lawyer was Annie Graves’s husband. And in a few short hours he would be here, openly possessing her again. Tom turned and went into the barn.

  Pilgrim’s bridle hung on the same peg in the tack room where he’d put it the day Annie first brought the horse out here. He took it down and looped it over his shoulder. The English saddle too was on the same rest. There was a thin layer of hay dust on it which Tom wiped away with his hand. He lifted the saddle off with its rug and carried them out and down the avenue of empty stalls to the back door.

  Outside the morning was hot and still. Some of the yearlings in the far paddock were already seeking the shade of the cottonwoods. As Tom made his way down toward Pilgrim’s corral, he looked at the mountains and knew from their clarity and a first wafting of cloud that later there would be thunder and rain.

  All week he had avoided her, shunning the very moments he had always sought, when he might be alone with her. He had learned from Grace that Robert was coming. But even before then, even as they rode down from the mountains, he’d decided this was what he must do. Not an hour had gone by that he hadn’t remembered the feel and smell of her, the touch of her skin on his, the way their mouths had melded. The memory was too intense, too physical, for him to have dreamed it, but he would treat it as if he had, for what else could he do? Her husband was coming and soon, in a matter of days now, she would be gone. For both of their sakes, for all of their sakes, it was best that until then he keep his distance and see her only when Grace was there too. Only thus might his resolve endure.

  It had been sorely tested the very first evening. When he dropped Grace back at the house, Annie was waiting out on the porch. He waved and would have pulled away but she came toward the car to speak to him while Grace went off inside.

  “Diane tells me they’re all going to L.A. next week.”

  “Yes. It’s all a big secret.”

  “And you’re off to Wyoming.”

  “That’s right. I promised a while back I’d go visit down there. Friend of mine’s got a couple of colts he wants starting.”

  She nodded and for a moment the only sound was the impatient rumble of the Chevy’s engine. They smiled at each other and he felt she was equally unsure of the territory they had stepped into. Tom tried hard to let nothing show in his eyes that might make things difficult for her. In all likelihood she regretted what had happened between them. Maybe one day he would too. The screen door banged and Annie turned.

  “Mom? Okay if I call Dad?”

  “Sure.”

  Grace went in again. When Annie turned back to him, he saw in her eyes that there was something she wanted to say. If it was regret, he didn’t want to hear it so he spoke to stem it.

  “I hear he’s coming out this weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grace is like a cat with ten tails, been going on about it all afternoon.”

  Annie nodded. “She misses him.”

  “I’ll bet. We’ll have to see if we can lick old Pilgrim into shape by then. Get Grace up there riding him.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Don’t see why not. We’ve got some hard work this week but if things work out, I’ll give it a go and if he’s okay with me, Grace can do it for her daddy.”

  “Then we can take him home.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tom—”

  “Of course, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Just because we’re all away, does
n’t mean you have to leave.”

  She smiled bravely. “Thank you.”

  “I mean, packing up all your computer and fax and all’s going to take a week or two.” She laughed and he had to look away from her for fear of betraying the ache in his chest at the thought of her leaving. He shoved the car into gear and smiled and bade her goodnight.

  Since then Tom had done better in avoiding being alone with her. He’d thrown himself into the work with Pilgrim with an energy he hadn’t been able to summon since his earliest clinics.

  In the mornings he worked him on Rimrock, moving him around and around the corral until he could go from a walk to a lope and back again as smoothly as Tom was sure he once had and until his hind feet fit faultlessly the prints of his fore. In the afternoons Tom went on foot and worked him on a halter. He worked him in circles, stepping in close and turning him, making him roll his hindquarters across.

  Sometimes Pilgrim would try and fight it and back away, and when he did this Tom would run with him, keeping in the same position until the horse knew there was no point running because the man would always be there and that maybe after all it was okay to do what was being asked of him. His feet would come still and the two of them would stand there awhile, drenched in their own and each other’s sweat and leaning on each other and panting, like a pair of punched-out boxers waiting for the bell.

  At first Pilgrim had found his new urgency puzzling, for even Tom had no way of telling him there was a deadline now. Not that Tom could have explained why he should be so determined to make the horse right when in so doing he would deprive himself forever of what he most wanted. But whatever he made of it, Pilgrim seemed to draw on this strange and relentless new vigor and soon he was as much a party to the endeavor as Tom.

  And today, at last, Tom would ride him.

  Pilgrim watched him shut the gate and walk to the middle of the corral carrying the saddle with the bridle looped over his shoulder.

  “That’s right old pal, that’s what it is. But don’t you take my word for it.”

  Tom laid the saddle down on the grass and stepped away from it. Pilgrim looked off to one side for a moment, pretending it was no big deal and he wasn’t interested. But he couldn’t stop his eyes from coming back to the saddle and after a while he stepped forward and walked toward it.

  Tom watched him come and never moved. The horse stopped about a yard away from where the saddle lay and reached out almost comically with his nose to sniff the air above it.

  “What d’you reckon? Gonna bite ya?”

  Pilgrim gave him a baleful look then looked back at the saddle. He was still wearing the rope halter Tom had made for him. He pawed the ground a couple of times then stepped in closer and nudged the saddle with his nose, With an easy movement, Tom took the bridle off his shoulder and held it in both hands, sorting it. Pilgrim heard it clink and looked up.

  “Don’t you go looking all surprised. You saw this coming a hundred miles away.”

  Tom waited. It was hard to imagine this was the same animal he’d seen in that hellish stall in upstate New York, severed from the world and all that he was. His coat gleamed, his eyes were clear and the way his nose had healed gave him a look that was almost noble, like some battle-scarred Roman. Never, Tom thought, had a horse been so transformed. Nor so many lives around one.

  Now Pilgrim came to him, as Tom knew he would, and gave the bridle the same ritual sniffing he’d given the saddle. And when Tom undid the halter and put the bridle on him, not once did he flinch. There was still some tightness and the faintest quivering in his muscles, but he let Tom rub his neck and then move his hand along and rub the place where the saddle would go and neither did he step away nor even toss his head at the feel of the bit in his mouth. However fragile, the confidence and trust Tom had been working for were set.

  Tom led him around with the bridle as they’d done so often with the halter, circling the saddle and stopping eventually right by it. Easily, and making sure Pilgrim could see his every move, he lifted it and placed it on the horse’s back, soothing him all the while with either hand or word or both. Lightly he fastened the cinch, then walked him to let him know how it felt when he moved.

  Pilgrim’s ears were working all the time but his eyes showed no white and every now and then he made that soft blowing sound that Joe called “letting the butterflies out.” Tom leaned down and tightened the cinch, then laid himself across the saddle and let the horse walk some more to know his weight, all the time soothing him. And when, at last, the horse was ready, he eased his leg over and sat in the saddle.

  Pilgrim walked and he walked straight. And though his muscles still trembled to some deep untouchable vestige of fear that perhaps would always be there, he walked bravely and Tom knew that if the horse sensed no mirrored trace of it in Grace, then she might ride him too.

  And when she had, there would be no need for her or her mother to stay.

  Robert had bought a travel guide to Montana at his favorite bookstore on Broadway and by the time the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign pinged on and they started their descent into Butte, he probably knew more about the city than most of the thirty-three thousand, three hundred and thirty-six people who lived there.

  A few more minutes and there it was below him, “the richest hill on earth,” elevation five thousand, seven hundred and fifty-five feet, the nation’s largest single source of silver in the 1880s and of copper for another thirty years. The city today, Robert now knew, was a mere skeleton of what it then was, but “had lost nothing of its charm,” none of which, however, was immediately apparent from the vantage of Robert’s window seat. It looked like someone had stacked luggage on a hillside and forgotten to collect it.

  He’d wanted to fly to Great Falls or Helena, but at the last minute something had cropped up at work and he’d had to change his plans. Butte had been the best he could do. But even though it looked on the map a huge distance for Annie to drive, she’d still insisted on coming to meet him.

  Robert had no clear picture of how the loss of her job had affected her. The New York papers had slavered over the story all week, GATES GARROTES GRAVES, one of them blazed, while others gave new spin to the old gag, the best of which was GRAVES DIGS ONE FOR HERSELF. It was odd to see Annie cast as victim or martyr, as the more sympathetic pieces had it. It was even odder how nonchalant she had been about it on the phone when she got back from playing cowboy.

  “I don’t give a damn,” she’d said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. I’m glad to be shut of it. I’ll do something new.”

  Robert wondered for a moment if he’d called the wrong number. Perhaps she was just putting on a brave face. She said she was tired of all the power games, and the politics, she wanted to get back to writing, to what she was good at. Grace, she said, thought it was terrific news, the best thing that could have happened. Robert had then asked about the cattle drive and Annie said, simply, that it had been beautiful. Then she’d handed him over to Grace, fresh from her bath, to tell him all about it. They would both be there to meet him at the airport.

  There was a small crowd of people waving as he walked across the asphalt, but he couldn’t see Annie or Grace among them. Then he looked more closely at the two women in blue jeans and cowboy hats who he’d noticed laughing at him, rather rudely he thought, and saw it was them.

  “My God,” he said as he came up to them. “It’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid!”

  “Howdy stranger,” Grace drawled. “What brings you into town?” She took off her hat and threw her arms around his neck.

  “My baby, how are you? How ARE you?”

  “I’m good.” She clung so tight Robert choked up with emotion.

  “You are. I can see. Let me look at you.”

  He held her away from him and had a sudden memory of that limp, lusterless body he’d sat watching in the hospital. It was hardly credible. Her eyes brimmed with life and the sun had brought out all the freckles on her face. She seemed
almost to glow. Annie looked on and smiled, clearly reading his thoughts.

  “Notice anything?” Grace said.

  “You mean apart from everything?”

  She did a little twirl for him and he suddenly got it.

  “No cane!”

  “No cane.”

  “You little star.”

  He gave her a kiss and at the same time reached out for Annie. She too had taken off her hat now. Her tan made her eyes seem clear and so very green. She, too, seemed transformed. More beautiful than he could ever recall. She stepped in close and put her arms around him and kissed him. Robert hugged her till he felt he had control of himself and wouldn’t embarrass them all.

  “God, it seems a long time,” he said at last.

  Annie nodded. “I know.”

  The journey back to the ranch took about three hours. But though she was impatient to show her father around and let him see Pilgrim and introduce him to the Bookers, Grace enjoyed every mile of it. She sat in the back of the Lariat and put her hat on Robert’s head. It was too small for him and looked funny, but he left it perched there and soon had them laughing with an account of his connecting flight to Salt Lake City.

  Virtually every other seat had been taken by a touring tabernacle choir who had sung the entire way. Robert had sat squeezed between two voluminous women altos with his nose buried in his Montana guidebook while everyone around him boomed “Nearer My God to Thee.” Which, at thirty thousand feet of course, they were.

  He got Grace to rummage in his bag for the presents he’d bought for them both in Geneva. For her, he’d got a massive box of chocolates and a miniature cuckoo clock with the strangest-looking cuckoo she’d ever laid eyes on. Its call, Robert conceded, was more like a parrot with piles. But it was absolutely authentic, he swore; he knew for a fact Taiwanese cuckoos, especially hemorrhoidal ones, looked and sounded precisely like that. Annie’s presents, which Grace also unwrapped, were the usual bottle of her favorite perfume and a silk scarf all three of them knew she’d never wear. Annie said it was lovely and leaned across and kissed him on the cheek.