Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  It was obvious that Peter’s height came from his mother, a brisk brown woman with the soldierly posture of self-confidence. Katherine Karlson looked both older and younger than her forty-two years, because of her skin, which was ridged and freckled by the sun, and her eyes, which were bright blue and undefeated, perhaps untouched, by the pain of four difficult childbirths, a six-month tangle with tuberculosis, and a thrice-broken left arm (broken by MacDougal all three times).

  She went on (as usual, thought John): “If I were to go up to this horse,” she stepped up to her daughter Margaret’s bay Anglo-Arab, “and push him here in the withers with one finger,” she did so, “he would stumble.” Herbie caught himself and jangled his bit in surprise. “Ellen.” Kate turned to one of the lesson girls. “What would happen to your viola if you unwound all the strings at one time and then tuned them all up together?”

  “I guess it wouldn’t be very good.”

  “Would you do it?”

  “Oh no, ma’am.”

  “Well, a horse is a more delicate instrument than the very best viola. His back heels are tuned to his lower jaw, his tail bone is tuned to the tips of his ears. He is alive! Alive! Everything is connected!” She beamed. “You, my dear children, distort and interrupt the connections by merely sitting there, let alone trying to ride.” She looked them over, feeling pleasingly stern and sternly pleased. A group of modest talents stood before her, some of them awkward, but all of them neat and ready, devoted.

  “Horses in the wild,” she continued (John coughed), “are lazy, like people, and they only use the muscles they have to. They have more, many more muscles, with which they can do many more things than a horse by himself would ever think of. Beautiful, graceful things! This is what riders are for, because in training a horse to carry him safely and soundly a rider can also train a horse to use his body like a gymnast.

  “Today we begin the extended trot.”

  Actually, they had begun the extended trot numerous times in previous years. Every horse was fully trained, if not entirely willing, to lower his croup, engage his back legs, and charge forward, his fore fetlocks snapping and his lower jaw working against the bit, but Kate rather liked ritual methods of reminding her children and her students that summer vacation, which was just beginning, meant the hardest work of all.

  Dear Lord, she thought as she walked behind the ten horses filing to the training field, please protect and preserve my eldest boy, and give him the tact he needs to ride my horse without getting hurt or hurting others. Even she herself had not always possessed the tact necessary to ride MacDougal, and doubted if anyone she’d known was that infallible. Since Easter, the occasion of a rash half promise that Peter could try the horse over the summer, she had prayed about and pondered the idea. Now he seemed to be doing moderately well. It was, in fact, a tribute to his agility or luck that the horse was saddled at all on the first day, much less mounted.

  MacDougal: the most beautiful two-year-old Kate had ever seen when she bought him, a toast-colored bay with black stockings above the knees, a long silky tail, and haunches that even then had promised five-foot fences with six-foot spreads. She had underestimated. Sometime during Henry’s second year and MacDougal’s sixth, when Axel and she were still sharing secret plots, they had gone out one dawn and put the horse over a five-and-a-half-foot course ending in a six-three oxer with a spread of seven, if you included the water, which he did not touch, even with the twinkling tip of his back toe.

  Kate set up her folding chair on the grassy and fragrant Irish Bank, as yet untrampled by slithering hooves. The line of students circled her untidily, bunching, then straggling apart, horses jerking the reins out of their riders’ fingers, relaxing into lazy ambling, side-stepping, or throwing their heads. Although she pretended to be watching everyone (her admonitions about spacing, after twenty years, flowed ceaselessly), really she was watching only MacDougal and hoping to tire him with extended trot, an exercise he did not especially mind. Miraculously, he was moving forward, and Peter seemed relaxed, light-handed, and alert.

  Once a United States Equestrian Team rider had asked to borrow the horse, and, flattered, Kate had let him. They had done a sinuous, nearly perfect collected trot into the dressage ring, and had pulled up in an absolutely square halt before the judge. The rider, a flamboyant Californian, swept off his cap and made a deep bow, not realizing that MacDougal was unaccustomed to men, and therefore to a preliminary hats-off salute. When given the signal to canter away, MacDougal had ignored it, maintaining his square, proud halt, a most beautiful horse among many beautiful horses. Again the signal, still immobility, and again the signal, this time with the minutest shadow of exasperation on the part of the foolish horseman. Kate closed her eyes. According to Axel, the man flicked his whip, the horse flicked his tail, the man applied his spurs, the horse twitched his ears, and then both exploded into the air. Three wrenching bucks brought them back to the gate, where Mac simply lay down. In front of the entire audience, Kate had had to remove all his tack and lure him to his stubborn feet with not just oats but sweetfeed and apples. The member of the Team had never spoken to her again.

  She shouted, “Walk, please!” and Peter eased him down, almost successfully, although he laid back his ears momentarily and gave one annoyed little buck. Peter glanced at her. She nodded. One by one, the other riders considered, and then, with painful slowness, produced the series of movements that would bring about a walk. How far even the best of them were outstripped by Kate’s vision of what they should be! Even MacDougal was out of shape and out of practice, reluctant and bumpy in his gaits, resistance tightening his whole body. And yet he knew everything. More than once in the old days she had finished a workout on him with tears on her cheeks from the perfect joy of it. He was a genius and she loved him.

  “Let them relax!” Peter loosened his reins too suddenly, with too much relief. MacDougal gave a grunt, and Kate was about to speak, but then the horse dropped his head and chomped his bit, content for a moment. “Thank you, Lord,” whispered Kate.

  Margaret was on course. Only the hay bales, then the little brush, the crossbar (which she took very neatly), and the stone wall, but when she had finished even so brief a performance, she found Kate’s eyes turning perfunctorily back to her from Peter. Kate did not look at her precisely in the way she had never not looked at her before her embarrassing return from college after just one semester. “O.K.,” she said, a phrase and an abdication from criticism that Margaret had rarely heard before this last spring. Margaret nodded and took her place with the other riders. Her mother’s indifference had settled over her like a plastic bubble, and its effect was unexpected. Suddenly (at last?) she and her horse were alone. Even in the smallest classes, the difficulties and pleasures of small circles to the left or two-tracks from A to K were of consequence only to them. It was lovely. It was relaxing. She forgave Herbie his occasional impatience. When she walloped him with her whip at a refusal, she did so out of benevolence, not anger. Gallops around the outside course, over the lip of the home field and under the verge of the woods, seemed like vacations. She allowed him the infrequent leaf, pulled for him an occasional handful of grass, and though she was too old and too experienced for equine infatuations, she imagined friendship between them.

  Letting go the stirrups and giving Herbie the whole length of the reins, Margaret allowed herself a wide uncovered yawn and restrained stretch. Mother was urging one of the Pony Clubbers not to lean into her turns, shouting lurid descriptions of horses falling over and breaking their knees. It was mother’s favorite nit for picking, and the repetition lulled Margaret pleasantly. She felt that she could go on for a lifetime of summer days, listening to mother dispense information in her precise, peculiar, redundant way. When Herbie put his nose down to snuffle the grass, Margaret was visited with the sudden odor of camomile and something else, summer savory, perhaps, and then with nostalgia for previous summers, when the treasury of odors and repetitions, of herself and her b
rothers just beginning and still enthusiastic, had not been broken into. The coziness of summer was what she had missed at college, and what she was looking forward to now.

  One year all their mounts had been ponies, and every day mother had helped them trot over a grid of poles on the long side of the barn ring. Henry’s pony was on the lead line, and Henry was instructed to hold tight, then praised lavishly after the pony hopped the final foot-high jump. Each summer they had formed a tight knot of a group, each one visible to all the others almost every hour of the day. There was a good deal of chatter, frequent bumping into one another, and much teasing and fighting. In her yellow dormitory room at college, with her roommate gone to the library or out on a date, Margaret had cried and longed to get back into the knot, and now here she was, in spite of mother’s indifference, closely looped about and held. Mother informed the Pony Club girl that she was riding like a bowl of spaghetti, and tears sprang into Margaret’s eyes.

  “All right!” began Kate. “Assume a single-file line, Peter in the lead. . . .” And the accident befell John. He had turned to speak to one of the girls, throwing his horse off balance, and the horse stepped into a hole. John tumbled off onto his helmeted head, and Freeway bobbed and halted, holding his leg off the ground in pain. Kate ordered immediate hosing with plenty of cold water, and pretended unconcern, but as always with accidents of whatever nature, the lesson was ruined. “Trot!” she snapped. “Serpentines across the hillside, down and back, four times!” When he thought he was out of her sight, John yanked the horse angrily in the mouth. Kate bit her lip.

  “Margaret’s bawling again,” said Henry, seated at the kitchen table.

  She had set the milk on the table for lunch and found the paper napkins, then Margaret felt tears coming again and ran into the bathroom. They were by no means uncommon, in fact had been daily of late: inconvenient, embarrassing, inexplicable. They’d begun at college, but hadn’t ended upon her return. She had good days and bad, all of them with periods in the downstairs bathroom, a towel in one hand and a blurry Catholic Digest in the other (reading seemed as though it ought to distract her, but never did). Once in a while she looked in the mirror and tried to penetrate whatever it was that made not just each member of her family and every living thing on the farm so poignant (she’d wept four times at the blossoming apple trees alone) but also the gallons of milk, the pile of boots and shoes by the back door, the pictures on the walls, and the matched wing chairs in the living room, to name a few of her recent crises. Mother was wonderful about it, and said nothing. The boys too: if Henry announced to everyone that Margaret was bawling again, John usually told him to shut up. Thoughts of their goodness stole all control from her, and she sat on the sink counter, trying to muffle this abandoned boohooing in two towels and the shower curtain. She felt not happy or sad, but fleeting.

  “Shut up.” John poured milk down the side of his cereal bowl so that it ran under his Cheerios and lifted them up.

  “Huh?” said Peter.

  “I said, ‘Margaret’s bawling again.’ ” Henry repeated himself only out of his tragic distaste for the foodstuffs before him (Cheerios, cornflakes, Lucky Charms, Wonder bread, nameless cheap cookies, and milk).

  “And I said, ‘Shut up,’ ” remarked John, to whom this lunch was as good as any other.

  “Oh.” Peter threw the boot he’d just pulled off into the corner and disappeared toward the living room without bothering to eat at all.

  Henry chose cornflakes. “They’re both getting weird,” he said. “Weird, weird, weird.”

  “No weirder than you, bean brain.”

  “Duck face.” More than anything, Henry wanted to know what John had been up to the night before, but John’s face fell into a scowl as he spooned up the last of the milk in his bowl, so Henry said, “You’d think she’d dry up.”

  “You dry up.”

  “Hey,” said Henry.

  “What do you want?”

  “I got up last night to get a drink of water.”

  John’s eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t raise his glance from the funny papers he had taken up. “So what?” Henry poured milk over his cereal, afraid suddenly to ask any questions. “So what?” repeated John, now looking at his brother, his chin thrust out, and his voice edged.

  “Nothing,” said Henry.

  John stood up.

  Henry said, “Frog scrotum,” and giggled at his brother’s wished-for smile. John smacked the top of Henry’s head. “One mortal sin,” he announced. “I fine you ten Our Fathers and the Spaghettisburg Address.” Unconsciously, they both looked toward the back door. Mother did not come in, however.

  “Four more than eleven steers afloat,” recited Henry. John had made up the words years before.

  “Our fathers sought Fords upon this continent.”

  “A one-car nation.” He leaned back in his chair and peered at his brother, who was, thank heaven, smiling as he put on his boots. When John went out, Henry turned back to his cornflakes. Soggy already. While he was dumping them into the garbage can, Peter came in, saying, “Think of the Chinese.” He mimicked mother’s voice perfectly.

  “The Chinese are weird.”

  “No weirder than you, bean brain.” This he said in John’s voice, then he reached for the cookies.

  The sun shining on them as they glanced at her would have flooded Margaret again had she not been exhausted. It almost annoyed her. After all these years, why did she have to rejoice in Peter’s arched eyebrows and planed cheeks? Why did she have to see so clearly Henry’s thick hair and his eyelashes that lifted like velvet curtains on a stage? They were only her brothers. “What a mess,” she said aloud, referring to the kitchen.

  Henry looked for the family bicycle that afternoon, and there was no transgression in it, though there seemed to be. Each of the children had flirted with the old one-speed, but each in turn had decided that a self-propelled machine without personality was nothing compared to the mysteries of a living horse. So the bicycle came to Henry, who wheeled it out of the garage and wiped it off. The decision to him was hardly as clear, although the driveway was the only place to ride.

  Unpaved, it was nearly a mile long, curving away from the house in a wide S between two pastures, then dropping through thick woods to a small creek. The hill from there to the main road was the terror of all haulers of horse trailers who exhibited in the summer horse show. In consideration of the more timid, Axel had built a row of standing stalls in the shade of two boxelders beside the entrance. Here Henry rested after his first arduous climb, tired already from the incline, the heat, and the deep gravel.

  He returned to the house and started again. It was very simple. First he sat back on the seat for a quarter of a mile, pedaling steadily and holding the front wheel in a rut. Around the waves of the S he shifted his weight slightly from side to side. He watched his knees and feet rising and falling, usually driving the pedals, but sometimes propelled by them, and he watched the staccato fenceposts and the easygoing Thoroughbreds in their pastures, strolling from knoll to knoll. Starlings and bluejays perched on the fence, and a red-winged blackbird rose out of her nest at his passage, squawking and feinting toward him. At the edge of the woods he pedaled for a second or two, then the road fell steeply, so he leaned forward, steering hard and pretending not to be afraid. He aimed for the bridge. There was the exciting possibility, which came to seem with each second a probability, that he would miss it, crash into one concrete abutment or the other, smash the bicycle, and kill himself. He did not, however, press the foot brake. Instead, he lifted his feet clear of the spinning pedals and shot through, frozen and senseless; the toil up the far slope, with its frustrating drag of gravel and dirt, was mitigated by relief and exhilaration. The bike slowed, Henry’s legs shook. He gave up and walked the rest of the way, promising himself as if he were grown up that the day he pedaled to the top he would ride off down the road and never return.

  The vet came before dinner. He checked the two pregnant mar
es and declared that either of them could deliver at any time, then he had John bring Freeway out of his stall, although the beautiful chestnut could barely walk. He felt for heat and swelling in the shoulder, the elbow, the knee, the ankle, the foot. He set up his portable x-ray machine, thinking resignedly that it would be years before he would see payment for this expensive bit of diagnosis, and told John to stand back. John stood back, quiet, anxious, resentful. The machine buzzed. Freeway lowered his head, taking weight off his leg. The vet packed up his machine, then felt the knee and ankle again, probing with his finger between the tendons and the bone. “Keep hosing,” he said, “and tell your mother I’ll call in the morning.”

  “It won’t be worth it if I can’t ride him this summer.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  John stuck the horse in his stall without looking at him or speaking to him, and went in to supper. It was open-faced grilled cheese, and mother had forgotten to toast the bottoms again.

  2

  ELLEN Eisen’s father, who knew nothing of horses, came to Kate the next morning and made an offer for Spanky. Ellen was elated and ashamed. “This is him, daddy,” she said, shyly patting the neck that, by herself, she would have embraced. Mr. Eisen cleared his throat repeatedly, embarrassed by Ellen’s needs and his own, too formal, “country” clothes. He was about to spend lots of money on a mystery.

  He had met Kate once or twice, and when he was shown into the shabbily elegant living room to talk about finances, he found himself at ease. Kate was brown and frank: Mr. Eisen perceived her stiffened arm as reassuring human fallibility and not a sign of the danger he was purchasing for his daughter. How courteous and comradely Kate was, and though he might have mistrusted courtesy and camaraderie over a board table, Mr. Eisen believed in Kate. “Just a moment,” she said, smiling brightly. She went to the sliding glass door, opened it, and shouted, “I said that Peter was to drive the tractor, and you know better!” Her voice, never shrill, deepened and carried commandingly. Outside, the tractor came to a halt. One boy (Mr. Eisen didn’t know them apart) got down and another got into the seat. But Kate was smiling at him, recalling his attention to herself. In a maelstrom of snaffles, dandy brushes, overreaching boots, running martingales, and expense, he was glad to give it.