Gee Whiz

by Jane Smiley

  Halfway there, it got light enough that I could see that it was a beautiful day—completely clear and bright, and the air had an extra sparkle that it sometimes gets in December. When we drove down the road that led to Vista del Canada, we kept seeing scarves of fog wafting against the mountainsides, and the mountains themselves looked like flat cutout layers receding against the pale sky. Everything was sleepy along that road until we went through the Vista del Canada gate, and there everything was busy as could be. Horses, riders, and grooms were everywhere. At the upper barn, all three wash racks were busy—cross-tied horses being sprayed, the spray foaming up in the morning sunlight, and the horses shaking their heads. In the hillside pastures, the mares were grazing.

  Encantado was trotting back and forth in his paddock, staring at the four horses and riders making their way around the big white oval, one at the trot and three at the gallop. The trotting one slowed to a walk, then went out the gate, and one of the cantering ones eased to the trot. Yet another was being ponied—a man on a palomino was trotting around the track, holding the lead rope of a bay, who was trotting next to him. The center of the track was empty. In the walking area, three grooms were leading their horses, who were enveloped between their ears and their swishing tails by swaying yellow coolers with green trim that had VISTA DEL CANADA embroidered into one corner and LEAMANN RACING embroidered into the other corner.

  Danny parked and we jumped out. I followed him to a pen not too different from our training pen at home—a little smaller, with perfectly smoothed footing, as if one of the grooms had raked it by hand. Right when we got there, three guys came over, leading Jack, and he had a saddle on his back.

  Yes, he whinnied when he saw me, and Roscoe Pelham and the other two brought him over to the fence so that I could pet him. I tickled him the way he always liked it, around the eyes and underneath his cowlick, and then down his cheek. It was really strange that he was wearing a bridle. It was a racing bridle, simple, with no noseband, but strange anyway. His mouth worked a little around the bit, but he seemed more interested than uncomfortable. Roscoe said, “Here’s the owner, boys, Abby Lovitt. Abby, this is Wayne Griffin, the rider, and you know Ike.”

  I nodded. Wayne Griffin was not as tall as I was, but bald and strong-looking. When he smiled, I saw he had about eight teeth. He said, “Nice colt. Nice colt indeed.” Then he stuck his hand out for me to shake. His hand was twice as big as mine and his forearm bulged with muscles.

  Roscoe said, “Ready?” and Ike started leading Jack around and around the little pen, just walking. Roscoe and Wayne walked alongside Jack, step by step, with Roscoe occasionally patting Jack on the shoulder or putting his hand on his haunch. For a while, Jack was looking around—either over at the track or, when Encantado whinnied, in his direction. But he got bored with that.

  Danny said, “He’s been in here every day for the last three days. Yesterday, Wayne walked alongside him for twenty minutes.” Danny leaned his elbows on the railing and stared.

  The three of them stopped and stood there for a moment, then Roscoe and Ike stepped away from Jack, and Wayne started petting him and leaning against him. Jack didn’t seem to care. All of a sudden, Wayne jumped on top of him, his chest in the saddle, his feet dangling, and his head on the other side. He stayed that way for a moment, petting Jack on his far side with his hands—Jack moved around, then stood still, and Wayne slid off. Then Wayne and Jack walked a little more, and Wayne did it again.

  They came around to our side of the pen, and Wayne got on him a third time, but this time, he swung a leg over, and lay there, his feet hanging down and his chest along Jack’s neck. Jack walked forward about three steps, but didn’t make a fuss, and Wayne slid off again.

  The reins were loose. Roscoe stayed near them.

  Now they walked around again, and Roscoe and Wayne both stayed close to Jack, petting him sometimes and otherwise chatting and walking like there was nothing happening. Finally, they stopped, and Wayne petted Jack on the shoulder and the haunches, then launched himself again. He was a small guy, but he had a lot of spring. Now he lay forward for a few moments, and as Jack walked, he sat up and picked up the reins, and let Jack keep walking. Jack’s ears were flicking back and forth, but he was walking easily—I was sure there were some horses who would stop or balk in surprise, but not Jack—his idea would always be to go go go. And now Wayne was going with him. That, I could see, was the perplexing part for Jack. Roscoe walked alongside for a few steps, then Jack and Wayne went around on their own. Just before Jack had the thought of “I don’t like this,” Wayne slid off, and they kept walking.

  A few minutes later, they stopped, and Wayne jumped on again, but that didn’t mean Wayne landed with a thump—he landed easy as you please, sat up, found his stirrups, walked along. There was nothing difficult about it. It was boring. It was supposed to be boring. It was only exciting if you thought about one of two things—the day you found that foal in the lower pasture, standing by his mom in the half darkness, or what it meant to be a racehorse, to have a name like Jaipur or Nasrullah, who was Jaipur’s sire, or Bold Ruler, who was Jaipur’s brother, or Yardstick, who was Mr. Matthew’s horse. Danny and I had never seen a race, but Mr. Matthews had sent us some pictures after visiting us, and they were all of Jack’s relatives getting to the finish line, their heads down and their noses out, galloping as hard as they could and beating some other horse. They didn’t have to be moving in order to be exciting—a plain old black-and-white picture was enough. We’d looked at them then and forgotten about them, but now, between Jack and Gee Whiz, the whole thing seemed much more real and much more present.

  “You brought him along nice,” said Wayne as he passed us. “Don’t nothin’ excite him but his own self.”

  Roscoe laughed and they all kept walking. I didn’t ask a single question, only watched them. After Wayne got off, he walked around on the other side from Roscoe, also giving some pats, and then they led Jack out of the pen to his stall, where they took off his saddle and bridle.

  I followed them over there and gave him some carrot pieces. He took them and went back to his hay. He may as well have been talking—“No big deal. No big deal. What’s the big deal?”

  As we were leaving, Roscoe fell into step with us, and said, “Well, I hope Whiz is a good boy for you. When he started out, I thought he might be one of the big guys, but he bowed a tendon early in his three-year-old season. Not bad enough to end his career, but bad enough to end his Derby hunt. He came back as a four-year-old, and he’s definitely been both useful and sound. Since he’s a gelding, I let him go on as long as he seemed to like it, and that’s been a long time. Can’t count the occasions when Billy, that’s our trainer down south, sent him out with one of our younger horses. His job was to set the pace and fade so the younger horse could come on and win. There were a couple of times he didn’t fade!” Ross laughed. “But his last two races, Billy said, old Whiz seemed to be getting bored with the whole thing. We’ll see what’s next.” He shook my hand again, and headed for the upper barn, where, I think, the mares were.

  On the way to the stables for Ellen’s lesson, I thought I would have her mount a few more times, and tell her all about Wayne. Ellen liked to know what was possible.

  We were there by eight-thirty, and for once, Ellen wasn’t there ahead of us. Danny dropped me off, and I walked over to the main arena. The show season was over. The jumps now in the arena were not the freshly painted fancy ones but the day-to-day practice ones, which had scratches here, and missing branches there, and faded paint. For some reason, they weren’t as imposing as the fancy ones. They seemed to say, “It’s okay not to jump us perfectly. Lots of horses and riders have been over us hundreds of times, and they all got better eventually.” Maybe that was reassuring.

  Jane came up behind me, and said, “Oh, good. You’re here. I have something to ask you. I’ve got some hot chocolate in my office, if you’re chilled.” She took my hand and felt it, then said, “Yes, you are.
I could tell.” I followed her into the office, and it was warm in there. She poured me a cup from a pot on her hot plate, and I closed my hands around it. She went behind her desk and sat down.

  I sat down.

  She said, “Melinda’s mother called me.”

  I began to worry.

  “She doesn’t want her to stop taking lessons, but someone told her they could get quite a pretty penny for Gallant Man, and she wants to take advantage of that opportunity.”

  “Not Ellen’s mom.” This wasn’t a question.

  She shook her head.

  “A pretty penny is not something the Leinsdorfs could afford. And I do believe that Melinda would be devastated if she couldn’t take lessons. Her mother knows that. Anyway, the prospective buyer is in Los Angeles.”

  I must have sighed.

  She said, “You should take that as a compliment. A reliable pony is a rare and valuable thing, and his fate is to move from child to child.”

  I nodded.

  She said, “Anyway, I’m just warning you. The prospective buyer is coming to have a look this week, but there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip.”

  I said, “People always say that, but I’ve never seen a single person pick up his cup and spill it before drinking it.”

  Jane laughed, then said, “Don’t tell Ellen for now. Buyers from LA are very picky, and their vets never overlook the slightest thing. It’s like they want it new out of the box but with years of experience and no mistakes. If they get to the vetting, I’ll tell Mrs. Leinsdorf.”

  As I went out, I thought how different that was from the way my dad did it—he never called the vet. He went over the horse himself, with his own hands and his own eyes, checking for bumps and swellings and heat, looking for lameness, awkwardness, bad conformation, bad temperament. The people he sold horses to sometimes had them vetted, but usually everyone agreed that no horse was perfect, and if there was some problem, the question was, could you live with it? Dad had a whole list of things he could live with, and a whole list of things he could not live with. But he never asked a vet, and we rarely called the vet, except for vaccinations and tooth-floating. Those were expensive enough. Some people would say it was luck, but Dad would say it was caution, plus letting horses live out the way they were meant to do, and added to that a diet of good hay and grass. And the grace of the Lord.

  Outside the barn, Ellen was standing with Gallant Man and Rodney. She said, “I didn’t let Rodney give me a leg up, because I practiced when I came out Wednesday.” She turned around, gathered the reins, reached for the mane and the cantle of the saddle, and stepped onto Gallant Man. Then she said, “I’m getting good.”

  I said, “Yes, you are,” and Rodney said, “You are, indeed, miss.”

  Ellen said, “Rodney, how old were you when you started to ride?”

  “I was two, miss. Fell off and broke my leg out in a field when I was five. Took ’em three hours to find me.”

  I said, “What did you do all that time?”

  “Oh, I stared at the clouds and sang some songs.”

  Ellen said, “When did you learn to mount from the ground?”

  “Well, miss, for a long time, I was too small to do that, so I got my pony to side up to the fence, then I got on from there. I could stand with one foot on the post and one on the rail, and slip down onto the young fella.”

  Ellen said, “I don’t believe you.”

  Rodney shrugged, then he said, “I practiced walking the fence rails after I saw the tightrope walkers in a traveling circus. For years, I planned to join the circus.”

  This shut Ellen up for at least half an hour—she did everything I asked as well as she could, and did not praise herself. When it came time to jump, I went over to the pony and put my hand on his neck. I said, “Did you believe what Rodney told you?”

  She looked at me, then said, “I’m nine! That’s old. I should have started as a child.”

  I said, “Well, you’ve made a good start, though.”

  She said, “Yes, I have, but still …”

  I let her jump her little course five times, and she felt better.

  The afternoon was cloudy and gray, but we had to get the horses ridden in case rain came and they were idle for days at a stretch. I went back and forth all afternoon fetching horses, putting them in the arena or the training pen, carrying tack, riding here and there, especially up along the hillside and on the trail to the Jordan Ranch, and I found that my eye was drawn to Gee Whiz time and again.

  He certainly was a striking sight. We had put him with the other four geldings Friday morning, and he wasn’t bad with them. It was more like he couldn’t or didn’t want to relate. He kept to his own pile of hay, kept to his own area of the pasture. Jack the Pest was no longer there, and the others saw the pinned ears and the raised hoof and understood their instructions—“Leave me alone.” He did stand by the fence and watch the mares sometimes, his ears forward and his nostrils wide. Otherwise, when he wasn’t eating, he was wandering around the pasture as if, actually, he was exploring it. He walked along the back fence line, sniffed the fence posts, nibbled the grass, looked up the hillside. He stood in the farthest corner, where no horse ever went, and stared off toward the Jordan Ranch. When birds landed on the fence or in the trees, he looked at them. He watched Rusty.

  The other thing he did was roll. Every horse loves to roll, and every horse does so several times a day, but Gee Whiz rolled frequently, and always back and forth, from one side to the other, flailing his legs like a dog. As a result, he was dirty—his favorite rolling spots were the wettest ones. After two days, he was dirty from nose to tail. I pretended that this was not my business—this was not my horse, and no one was riding him, and so he didn’t need to be cleaned up—but the fact was, I was like Dad. I preferred a clean horse, and there is no horse that shows the dirt more than a white one.

  By suppertime, it was really gloomy, and then Dad said that he had heard on the radio that there would be snow.

  Mom shivered and made herself a cup of tea. I wondered if I should suggest putting at least a few of the horses in for the night. I finally said, “That horse Gee Whiz doesn’t have much of a coat.”

  “That’s probably why they didn’t clip him at the track. Good thing, or we would be blanketing him and unblanketing him all winter.”

  “But maybe he should go in a stall for the night.”

  Dad gave me that look that said, “How many times do we have to talk about this?” then said, “It’s not his hair that keeps him warm. It’s his body and the soles of his hooves. If you went out there with just a little coat on, you would freeze to death, but that’s because your surface area is very large compared to your weight. A horse is like a big football. His volume is huge compared to his surface area, and when he gets cold, he trots around. The trotting makes the soles of his feet vibrate, and they push the blood back up his legs and to his heart. If he’s getting plenty to eat, and our horses are, he’s warmer if he can move around than if he’s stuck in a stall. That one can curl up pretty good, too. I saw him last night when I went outside—he was so bright you could hardly miss him. He had his legs all tucked up and his head and neck curled around. He’s healthy. He’ll be fine.”

  And, I thought, he has a nice coat of dirt on him to break the wind.

  Chapter 5

  SUNDAY MORNING, WHEN WE DROVE OFF TO CHURCH, WE DID see snow—not around us, but on the highest peaks, crusting the grass and edging the tree limbs. Our oaks don’t lose their leaves in the winter, so to see the green and white sprinkled together is oddly beautiful. It was our turn to bring some of the food, so Mom had made two pecan pies and a pork roast. They filled the back of the car with fragrance as we drove to church, and the fragrance itself was warm and cozy.

  Brother Abner was sitting in his seat when we got there, smiling, holding his Bible. He stretched out his hand to me as I walked past, and said, “Well, Ruth Abigail, it’s nice to see you again.” I smiled and gave him
a little hug, but Mom and I exchanged a glance. He looked pale and thin. He didn’t sing along with the hymns, and when it came time for him to read his passage, he didn’t stand up, the way he always had in the past. There was a long silence while everyone waited for him to open his Bible and start reading. Usually, Dad prepared his passage the night before, but Brother Abner always let the page present itself. I looked at Mr. Hollingsworth, who kept smiling, and at Dad, who continued to stare at his own Bible, and at Sister Larkin, who seemed worried. But finally, he let the Bible drop open and put his finger on the page, took a breath, and read, “When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called Esau his older son, and said to him, ‘My son’; and he answered, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Behold, I am old; I do not know the day of my death. Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field, and hunt game for me, and prepare for me savory food such as I love, and bring it to me that I may eat; that I may bless you before I die.’ ”

  We knew this story—what happened next was that Esau’s mother ran and got Jacob, her younger son, and had him kill a pair of goats, which Rebecca then cooked just the way Isaac liked them. She had Jacob take the dish of food to Isaac while wearing a piece of goatskin so that Isaac would touch him and think he was Esau, who was hairier than Jacob. When Isaac had eaten the food, he gave Jacob the blessing—that is, all of his things. Then Esau came back and found out that he was too late, and cried. I’d always thought this was a sad and confusing story, but after Brother Abner read his part, he paused a moment, and started laughing. Everyone smiled, the way you do when you are uncomfortable. Brother Abner finished laughing, coughed, and said, “Now, we all know what happened. There was a big fight, and it lasted for years and for generations. That’s what happens when there is a big fight in the family—everything just feeds it, and pretty soon, no one knows why they’re mad, they are just mad. Well.” Now he shifted around in his chair, dropped his Bible, and reached down, very slowly, to pick it up again. I could see the sisters exchanging looks. He said, “What would have happened, I ask you, if Esau had done what old Isaac told him to do? If he’d taken his bow and his arrows and headed out into the wilderness, and made a new life for himself, instead of stewing and fussing? Or what if Jacob had stuck around, and had that fight with Esau, and taken his punishment and gotten it over with? What would have happened then? I tell you, everything seems important at the time, so important that you can’t stand it if you don’t do something, anything, to show how angry you are, how insulted you are. But then you get to be an old man, and you can’t remember for the life of you what you were so mad about. An insult isn’t an insult, you ask me now, it’s just something that happens, most likely pretty funny, if you think about it.” And then he got a little breathless, and sighed, and stopped talking. After another long pause, Brother Brooks stood up and read his passage, which was about Paul’s epistle to the Romans.