“You are either going to have to be really good or really bad today,” I told the mare. “Because otherwise you won’t be able to stay with us. Okay?”
I thought about the girl who used to own her. The one who’d had to flee the country, and wondered if she cried herself to sleep at night, missing her beloved mare. Then I remembered that today was supposed to be fun. A light hearted schooling show so that I could make sure I still had my show nerves, Faith could get some more experience on her new pony and Cat could feel included. I don’t know why I’d ever thought any of that would actually be fun.
CHAPTER FORTY SIX
The show was at one of the cute little farms that we hadn’t been to before but as soon as we pulled up, I knew I was going to like it. Because they didn’t have extra stalls available for the show riders, they’d set up temporary pens under a line of trees in the shade and this made me really happy because nothing got me more nervous than tying horses to the trailer, especially when we had this many of them. Plus, Sunny would feel right at home.
I got to work settling in the first bunch while Dad went back for the rest. Bluebird, Arion and Socks were all wide eyed and full of themselves until I hung their hay nets. Then they were just as happy as though they’d been back at home and I even started braiding their manes, since I had extra time. It may have just been a schooling show but that didn’t mean that presentation wasn’t important. I already had two out of the three done by the time Dad came back with Falcon, Sunny and Canterbury and just as we got them settled, Faith showed up, running over to her pony and smothering him with hugs and kisses. He got mad and shoved her into the metal gate.
“Are you okay?” I asked as I pulled her to safety.
She nodded but looked a little shell shocked.
“You have to remember,” I told her gently. “Falcon is not Macaroni and all this is new to him. You can’t just treat him like a seasoned pony. You have to be ready for him to freak out or be naughty and you have to reassure him or reprimand him depending on what he’s done.”
“I know,” she said meekly. “I just forgot for a second.”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I don’t want to get hurt either,” she said. “Breaking bones hurts a lot.”
Which made me think of Grace and how much pain she must be in. But as the show got busier and more people arrived, I didn’t have much time to think about Grace or Cat or feeling sorry for myself. I was too busy trying to keep it all together.
Sunny, despite having been touted as an experienced show horse, was acting like she’d never seen so many horses in her whole life. She paced back and forth in her pen and completely ignored her hay. I had to wonder if she’d even been shown at all. Maybe she was never even owned by a girl who had to leave the country. Perhaps that was just the lie they’d told to get people to feel sorry for her and end up adopting her but we knew she was good under saddle. I just wasn’t sure how good.
In the end, tying Patrick to her gate was the only thing that kept her settled and I wanted to tell Dad to please not change the class because I was pretty sure that walk and trot was all her fragile brain could handle right now. It was a good thing that Cat hadn’t come to the show after all. She never would have been able to control the mare. But it was too late. Dad had switched Sunny into a low jumper class, which would have been great because we knew she could jump but right now the only thing on her mind was run away as fast as you can.
Then, Falcon decided that he’d had enough of all this standing around in a pen thing and jumped out of his. One-minute I was finishing up braids on Arion while Faith hung on the fence watching me and the next minute a chestnut pony with two hind stockings was streaking past us at the speed of light.
“You left his gate open?” I cried.
“I didn’t,” Faith yelled back.
And she was right. She hadn’t. The gate was closed. The little stinker had just jumped over it. We ran after him, yelling out ‘loose horse’ which was completely embarrassing because people would think that we’d just let him go. No one would believe that a pony like that could jump out of a pen from practically a standstill. When Faith got a handle on his idiosyncrasies, he was going to turn into one heck of a jumper.
We followed him to the ring where a nice looking woman had caught him just as he was trying to impress a flashy young mare.
“Thank you,” I said as I clipped a lead rope on his halter. “He jumped out of his pen.”
She raised an eyebrow like she didn’t believe me.
“He did,” Faith added, still out of breath from running so fast.
“Well then I’d say you’ve got yourself a rather talented pony,” she told her.
That made Faith happy. She couldn’t stop going on about how talented Falcon was until I reminded her that jumping out of his pen wouldn’t win him any ribbons and could get him hurt. It was what he did in the ring that counted.
After that we tied him to the gate but I still kept an eye on him because I had visions of him jumping over it anyway, dragging a broken gate behind him. I didn’t know why horses had to be so destructive. Was it really that difficult to just stand in the shade in a nice little pen and eat your hay? At least my three were behaving but I didn’t dare take my eyes off them for a second because I knew that the moment I did, they’d prove me wrong and do something stupid.
“I really wish Cat was here,” I said. “I could have used an extra pair of hands.”
“Well she’s not,” Dad said as he braided his own big chestnut horse. “And that is her own fault.”
Which I knew but still felt bad about. I wondered if she was still up in her room, sobbing into her pillow. Whether my mother had taken her tea or soup. Maybe they were sitting in the kitchen, discussing her future. Mom talked to Cat more than she ever talked to me and Cat not being allowed to come and ride would have made her very happy. She seemed to relish other people’s misery. I’d never noticed that before but now it was clearer than ever. I wondered if she was some kind of psychopath.
“Ready to walk the course?” Dad said.
“Which one?” I asked.
I felt completely unprepared. I had too many horses to ride, too many courses to remember and I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.
“And who is going to watch the horses?” I added.
“I will,” Faith said.
“Your class is up first,” I said. “I think.”
I really needed to get organized. I felt like I needed someone to just get me ready and point me in the direction of the ring at the appropriate time. And I had to pee.
CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN
“Need a hand?”
I was standing there starting to freak out, that feeling rising up from my stomach where I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be sick or not when I heard a familiar voice. I spun around to see Duncan standing there with both Rose and Andy. I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my entire life.
“What are you guys doing here?” I said, dashing over to hug them.
“We thought you might need a little help,” Duncan said. “When I told you to carry on jumping, I didn’t exactly mean ride four horses at a show all on the same day.”
“I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew,” I admitted. “Are you guys here with your horses?”
“No.” Rose shook her head and smiled. “Today is all about you. We are your grooms.”
“Slaves more like,” Andy said but he was smiling as well.
I had to blink back the tears. I couldn’t believe that they’d done this, giving up a Saturday just to come and help me. It was the nicest thing that anyone had done for me in a long time.
“Who told you?” I said. “Dad?”
“Don’t look at me,” my father replied gruffly as he walked by but I knew that it had to have been him.
There was only so much a father could do and there was only so much a trainer could do and combined? Well I t
hink Dad knew he was in over his head if I suddenly had a meltdown in the ring and with Duncan there watching me and my friends and teammates standing by, I was far more likely to keep it together. The only thing that would have been more certain would have been if Jess had shown up, glaring at me and daring me to fail. But I suddenly felt so loved and cared for that I almost forgot about Grace and Cat and everything else bad that had happened.
“So what can we do?” Rose said.
“Well that pony over there already jumped out of his pen. Arion has a mystery stain on his butt. Bluebird has already popped a braid and we have to go and walk our courses,” I said, feeling a little overwhelmed as the words all came tumbling out. “Oh and Sunny is having some kind of nervous breakdown, just like me.”
“We’ve got this,” Andy said. “Go and walk your course.”
And in the end Rose fixed the braids, Andy cleaned the stain and Duncan actually came and walked my first course with me.
“Thank you for doing this,” I told him as my father helped Faith walk her course in a separate ring.
“You are a part of our team and a team looks out for each other. Besides, I’m really proud that you are putting yourself out there again,” he said as we counted strides between jumps. “It takes guts to get back on the horse.”
This I already knew. It had been harder than I’d ever imagined it would be. I bounced back from getting hurt myself all the time. When I almost broke my ankle falling off Socks, the numerous other bumps and bruises I’d gained in the years I’d been riding and never once had I even considered giving up. But the fact that a horse got hurt. That was enough to make me seriously think about throwing in the towel and it was only the support of my trainers and my friends that had got me through it.
Without them I’d still be hiding up in my room under the bedcovers, crying my eyes out. So even though I was stubborn and thought I could do everything myself, it turned out that you did actually need friends after all. A support team to get you through the tough times and even though I hadn’t planned on getting one, somehow I was lucky enough to have one anyway. Who stuck with me even though I could be weird and stand offish and kind of selfish. But I was trying to change and be better. And my new friends were helping me be better too.
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT
My first class was with Sunny, which wasn’t good. She was nervous. I was nervous. The whole thing was a mess. We made it around a course of jumps that were barely two feet and all the while I kept thinking that we were going to crash and burn. Amazingly we didn’t but we didn’t win any awards either. We had three rails down and they were all my fault, probably because I was too busy clutching handfuls of mane and closing my eyes right before the jumps.
“I let her down,” I told Duncan as we came out of the ring.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he told me. “You faced your demons and you went in there anyway. You didn’t grab the mare in the mouth or let her refuse any fences. It wasn’t pretty but it will get better.”
“Thanks,” I said.
It wasn’t the sort of praise I was used to. My father would have grunted something about bringing horses to shows and not getting ribbons being a waste of time but Duncan seemed to think that anything done at the show was a learning experience for either the horse or the rider or maybe both and so it couldn’t be a waste of time. My father used to think like that too but I guess the pressure of having our own farm had robbed him of some of that happy go lucky spirit. It wasn’t so easy to be cool about losing when your bills being paid depended on you doing well.
In the small ring Faith wasn’t doing much better. Falcon was a handful. He was too much pony for Faith. I knew eventually she’d get the hang of him but for now he was like a kite in the wind, cantering wildly this way and that in a wiggling line before the jumps. Faith set her jaw and used her legs to force the pony in the direction she wanted but he kept refusing to jump and so she was eliminated. She came out of the ring with tears in her eyes.
“I’ll do better next time,” she said, her voice wobbling. “But I miss Macaroni.” Then she burst into tears.
“You need to school that pony,” Duncan told me.
So I did. I took Falcon into the warm up ring and worked him through his wiggles and his wobbles and then I jumped him and didn’t even let him think for one second about refusing. By the time I was done with him the pony was tired, I was tired and I still had three more horses to ride. Three horses I could count on because I’d ridden them longer and knew them better. They wouldn’t let me down. At least that was what I thought.
CHAPTER FORTY NINE
I couldn’t exactly blame Socks, his work schedule had been unpredictable at best and he’d had a lot of time off what with the sheath swollen as big as a melon ordeal. But over the last week he’d been amazing. He’d jumped great at home but somehow that translated into him forgetting everything I’d ever taught him or that Missy had taught him or basically everything he’d ever learned in his entire life.
I’d entered him in a speed class because he was a speed horse and that was what he did best. I’d also entered Arion. Let them duke it out and see who came out on top. Apparently neither of them cared enough to even come close to getting a ribbon. Socks was uncontrollable. I literally felt like I had no brakes. He bolted into the ring and from that moment on I was just along for the ride. At first it wasn’t so bad, in fact we were fast and clean until he decided that he’d had enough and bolted out of the ring before we’d jumped the final fence.
“What was that?” Andy said, laughing.
I just put my head in my hands and shook my head. I was so embarrassed. It had taken all the way to the paddocks to get Socks under control again and when I did he stood there, rubbing necks with Arion over the fence, who was already tacked up and waiting to go thanks to Rose.
“My horses are teaching me a lesson,” I said.
“What lesson?” Andy said. “How not to jump a course?”
“Humility,” Duncan said as he finally appeared, having followed our blazing trail back to the paddocks at a lazy walk.
“And the fact that you shouldn’t show if you’re not prepared,” I added.
“But sometimes you have to show despite the fact that you are not prepared,” Duncan said.
And I knew he was right. My horses were giving me a crash course in getting my nerve back. While I was riding them I didn’t have time to think about being nervous because I was too busy making sure they didn’t do anything stupid, or getting carted along for the ride when they did do something stupid. It maybe wasn’t the best way to get my nerve back but it was certainly the fastest.
And where Socks had been fast, Arion was slow, like he was a hunter just out to show how pretty he could jump. I couldn’t fault him. We were in fact clean and maybe if I’d pushed him more we would have been fast but either through his fault or mine, we were slower than molasses as Esther used to say. Then again, at least he hadn’t tried to kill me by bolting from the ring.
Neither of my horses placed in that class.
“See?” I told Faith. “You’re not the only one who is having an off day.”
“But you still have Bluebird,” she said. “He won’t let you down.”
“Want to bet?” I told her. “He knows what’s been going on and I don’t think he’s about to let the side down.”
“Horses three, Emily zero?” Andy said as he walked past hauling a bucket of water.
“Exactly,” I said with a smile because although my horses were giving me a tough time, I totally deserved it.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Lunch was from a food truck that sold hamburgers and hot dogs and some sort of mystery barbeque slop that Andy declared was the best thing ever. We ate in the shade by the horse’s paddocks and even though it was only a schooling show and a lot of the competitors were backyard horse owners or riders that took lessons at some of the smaller barns in the area, a few people came up to me and said that they were sorry about
Grace.
I smiled and told them she was going to be fine, even though I didn’t know for sure. But in my mind I’d concocted this fantasy where Grace’s leg healed and she went on to have an amazing foal that one day competed in the Olympics. It was better to believe that than the truth that she would maybe never make it out of the vet clinic or that she would be lame for life. Sometimes you had to believe the impossible dream, even if it was delusional, just so that you didn't go mad.
“This is nice,” Rose said, laying back on the crushed grass, her blonde hair fanning out like a halo around her head.
“Yeah, I like not having to ride at a show for a change,” Andy agreed, his mouth still full from his second helping of barbecue pork.
“Too bad we all suck today,” Faith said.
I knew that she was disappointed in her pony’s performance and her own. It was a crushing blow to come to a show with a new pony, only to be eliminated before you could even jump anything. The only saving grace was that Faith’s parents hadn’t been able to stay and watch. I wasn’t sure what they’d say about the fact that they had just bought a pony that was not going to be a champion any time soon but I knew they weren’t going to be happy about it.
“I wish there was another class we could enter,” Faith said sadly. “I’d really like a second chance.”
“Well,” Duncan said, pulling the prize list out of his pocket and flattening it. “This is a schooling show and you guys are here to have fun, right?”
“I guess,” Faith said warily.
“Yeah we are,” Andy said, fist pumping the air. Rose looked at him and rolled her eyes.
Lead Change (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 29) Page 10