The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  Dear Thea,

  I was so very sorry to drive away from the camp. Although I must say that it is a beautiful place to spend some time. Before your mother knew me, she loved to be around other people; her coming out lasted nearly a year. I see so much of her in you.

  We all love you very much. Take care of yourself at the camp. Think of it as an opportunity to learn more, from different (perhaps better) teachers. It bears repeating that your family is your tribe; this is but an interruption in our lives. We kept you too secluded at home. We should have sent you away sooner. You will learn how to behave around other children there, Thea. I hope that is not too much to ask. We know what’s best for you, though at this moment you may believe, very fervently, otherwise. That is the way of parents and their children.

  Love,

  Father

  He had called it a camp, not a school—I was here until the end of summer, no longer. I placed the letter back into its envelope and slid it under my pillow, next to Sam’s handkerchief. I was not a child. And it was a punishment, to be sent here, even though he and Mother had said it was not; he had as good as admitted it in his letter. Anyway, he was just parroting what Mother had said. She was the one who had always decided what to do with us.

  But mostly, I missed Father. I could hear his voice, softly reading the words. Miss Lee would have told him to speak up.

  My cabinmates were whispering about an announcement Mr. Holmes had made at lunch; Sissy told me I was lucky, here one week and already a dance to attend. Most of the girls waited months and months for a dance, the bright spot of a boy turning the winter months bearable.

  I closed my eyes, even though no girl used rest hour to nap. But I was exhausted: I’d stayed up last night memorizing a Robert Frost poem, “The Cow in Apple Time,” for elocution. I’d read Frost before, at home, but Miss Lee was only interested in how we pronounced each word, how we measured our voices, not in what the poem might have meant.

  Though Yonahlossee was an odd place to me, it was quickly turning familiar. Not missing home had at first seemed inconceivable, but I understood how the human heart operated, that it was fickle, capricious.

  —

  I was born in the house my parents sent me away from, built by my father as a gift for his new bride. My mother’s family was New Florida, as those families were called, those that went there after the War Between the States when Georgia was no longer a tenable place to live. My great-grandfather, Theodore Fisk—for whom I’m named—decided on Florida because it was close, and he had heard the land there, worthless, was for the taking.

  He and his wife were crackers first; wealthy landowners later. When the railroad was built—Henry Flagler was said to have been entertained and wooed in the Fisk family home—my mother’s family’s fortune multiplied exponentially. Mrs. Fisk served Mr. Flagler a piece of key lime pie, a delicacy the Northern man had never tasted. Citrus was from then on shipped by railroad, and an industry was born.

  My father’s family was Old Florida, of Spanish descent. They weren’t as wealthy as my mother’s side: they’d herded cattle on land that no one owned until Florida began to sell this land, and then it became impossible to drive the cattle south, through newly erected fences and homesteads, toward the coast, where they would be shipped to Cuba.

  Florida was a different place then. My father and his older brother, George, would require a new way of life. My father, Felix, went to Atlanta Medical School on scholarship; George, to law school in Illinois, but they both came back—each with a new wife. My mother, Elizabeth, was in her second year at Agnes Scott College and was expected to find a husband in Georgia when she met my father at a semiformal dance. She was twenty years old; he five years older. It was a perfect match.

  George and his new wife, Carrie, settled in Gainesville, a stone’s throw from Emathla. My father could have practiced medicine anywhere, but he wanted to help people, so he went to a place where he was the only doctor for miles and miles. This was how it was always explained to me and Sam, anyway: we could have lived anywhere, but lived here because of my father’s goodness. And at first Mother, accustomed to the bustle of Miami, thought she would be lonely in such a rural place. But the magic of our home was that it destroyed loneliness. You could see other people—and Mother did, once every few weeks, tea with a neighbor, a Camellia Society meeting—but other people and places only made you love your home, your people, more.

  These were my people: Sam, my mother and father; Uncle George and Aunt Carrie and their son, my cousin, Georgie.

  That was our first story, how we had come to be situated in this little piece of heaven carved from the Florida wilderness. Luck, partly, but also love: Mother and Father had become engaged two weeks after meeting. George and Carrie and Georgie were part of this story, of course, not central to it but it is easy now to see how the story would have collapsed without them. We needed them in Gainesville to illuminate our own lives.

  —

  The bell rang, signaling the end of rest hour, and I woke with a start.

  “Finally!” Gates said. She liked to ride as much as I did. Everyone else was already pulling on their breeches and boots. This was the first time I was going to ride with everyone else, and I was both nervous and excited, a combination I loved. I tugged my boots on with boot hooks, and saw Sissy out of the corner of my eye, watching. She smiled, I smiled back. I was eager to please her.

  I tucked my shirt into my breeches. We wore white breeches here; even the suede at the knees was white. Our clothes were laundered by the maids so it didn’t matter to us how dirty we got, but it seemed silly to dress us exclusively in white.

  When I walked outside the cabin into the smell of pine trees and sunshine, I saw Sissy had waited for me.

  “A letter?”

  “From my mother.” I remembered from my snooping that Eva and Sissy’s fathers had not written to them, only their mothers.

  “My mother writes me,” Sissy said, “three times a week. But her letters are so boring. My sister, hardly ever, only when she’s made to.”

  Other girls flocked around us, all identically dressed. They waved at Sissy, and because I was with her, at me. I smiled back. I’d never smiled at so many people in my life.

  “I hate writing letters,” I said, “it takes so long to write what you could say in half the time.” There were butterflies in my stomach; I was glad Sissy provided a distraction.

  Another girl walked by, so close she grazed my arm. I started to say something, then stopped. She was the girl with the white hair I’d seen bathing in the bathhouse. And, I realized with the small, pleasurable shock of recognition, the girl from the horse photograph, from the Castle. I knew even before Sissy said her name.

  “That’s Leona.”

  We both watched Leona disappear around a bend. We had passed the privies, now we were almost at the stables. Leona was a giant, her strides covered twice the ground of my own. Her white-blond hair was pinned into a tidy bun. Her boots were navy blue, the only girl among us who didn’t have black boots.

  “She’s from Fort Worth,” Sissy said. She said Fort Worth as if she were saying some other, more improbable place—Constantinople, Port-au-Prince. She was whispering now, even though Leona had disappeared. “Her father is an oil speculator who made it big, her mother is royalty. She has her own horse, shipped by train. She’s trained by masters. The shipping costs were more than her room and board.” Leona had not said hello to Sissy. I wondered if Sissy meant that Leona’s mother was truly royalty, and decided she must not. I didn’t know very much about the world, but I didn’t think there were any princesses in Texas. “She ignores everyone, mostly.”

  Leona from Fort Worth, Thea from Emathla. Out of all the places in this world, I was at the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. It was half past one in the afternoon. I was one among dozens of girls on our way to our daily riding lesson. Sissy had threaded
her arm through mine; her skin was soft, she smelled faintly of rosewater. At home, Mother would be out in the garden, a towel around her neck to soak up the sweat, a worn, floppy hat on her head to protect her fair skin. My father would be working. Thursday was one of his traveling days, so he would be at someone’s house, giving an injection, listening to an account of pain. And Sam.

  He would be feeding his squirrels. They had to be fed often, more often than a human baby—which was what Mother always said, that Sam tended to his animals more faithfully than most human parents did their children. And he was faithful, my brother, faithful and good. It was not the first time Sam had raised a litter of squirrels—raccoons got their mothers all the time. Their nests were always hidden in nooks that only Sam was patient enough to find.

  When I had said good-bye, after everything had happened, he was out back on the porch, holding one of them.

  “It has hair now,” I said, because I did not know what else to say. It was early in the morning, but still hot. The squirrel was less ugly than it had been a week ago. It looked so vulnerable; I could see why Sam loved it.

  He wore his clothes from yesterday. His hair was wild, stuck out in all directions from his head. It scared me a bit. I wanted to smooth it down, but knew not to touch him. The rims of his eyes were pink. In that moment, his hazel eyes were so dark they almost looked brown. I knew in full sunlight they would look light again, translucent. Our eyes were different. Mine were plain brown, like Father’s.

  “Did you sleep?” I asked, though I knew the answer. I had not slept, either; in fact, I had gone into Sam’s room, hoping to find him. Instead, in the dim room, I could faintly see the outlines of his made bed, which looked so perfect and untouched I started to cry, though I could not say why. The sight of his perfect bed, made first by Sam, then straightened later by Mother, disturbed me. His electric fan was trained at the space where he would have slept, and it droned on and on, cooling nothing.

  I switched it off and went to his window, which provided a view of our backyard. But to call it a backyard was false; it was the beginning of our thousand acres. There was no fence, no border. Mother’s gardens ran into the orange grove. These oranges weren’t for sale, but for my mother, who loved them, said she could not live without them.

  Sam sat in the grass, next to Mother’s rose garden, which was blooming. I could not smell it from here, but he could. I watched him for a long time; he didn’t move, sat still as a statue. He had always been able to sit still for longer than I; I was fidgety, restless.

  I could not see his face. Only his narrow back, his skinny arms. His voice was beginning to change. I knew what happened to boys’ voices; Georgie was two years older and his had changed a few years ago. I could hear Sam’s voice right now, a child’s voice, so pretty and light. I wished I could make a recording of it before it was gone.

  If Sam had turned to face me, I would have seen his bruised eye, the small cut above it. Minor injuries, healing quickly. Father called them superficial. This was the first time I could remember seeing Sam hurt. I tried very hard to remember another time but could not. I had broken my arm, twice, and bruised myself more times than I could count. That was what happened when you rode horses. But Sam did not court danger. It was not his way.

  He turned his head as if he had heard something, and he probably had: the rustle of an animal in the bushes. I saw his profile in the moonlight. We both had Father’s nose, which was strong but handsome. I thought for a second that he could feel me watching him. I put my hand to the window.

  “Sam,” I murmured.

  He peered down at something, and I knew he held one of the infant squirrels; how unmoored he was, how badly I must have hurt him, was confirmed. Because how many times had he told me not to touch a baby wild animal, that if I did, it would become accustomed to human scent and, once released into the wild, be unafraid of humans. And wild animals needed to be afraid of us, to survive.

  “Thea?” Sissy asked. “Have I lost you?”

  I looked sideways at her. She did not know the dark recesses of my heart. I knew Sam thought of me as often as I thought of him; that when he was not asleep I was on his mind. On it, threatening to displace everything else like a weight dropped in water. But he could not imagine my life here, which might be a curse or a blessing. I did not know.

  Soon we arrived at the barn and parted ways. I took a deep breath: the smell in a barn was always the same, hay tinged with manure. It was a smell you either liked or did not. A groom—the handsome one Eva had mentioned my first night here—showed me to my horse: Naari, a flea-bitten gray mare with a pink muzzle.

  “Thank you,” I said to the groom, “I’ll tack her up.”

  I clicked my tongue and Naari looked up from her hay. There were hundreds of brown dots scattered across her white coat, hence the term, which I’d always thought was an ugly way to describe such a beautiful pattern. I was excited, though I tried not to be. I did not want to get too attached to Naari, because I would have to leave her here when I left.

  After I had tacked her up, I stood in a single-file line with the other girls in my group, the horses so close Naari’s muzzle almost touched the reddish tail of the chestnut in front of her. Leona stood at the front of the line, the de facto leader of my group. Her gelding was huge, like his owner. He was beautiful, a big bay with white stockings and a white blaze down his face. I also recognized him from the picture.

  Sissy was in the intermediate class; I could see her in the next ring on a skinny Appaloosa, her brown bob flying in her face as she posted. I was in the advanced class, with twenty or so other girls, among them Gates, Leona, and a girl named Jettie, who sat at my dining table. The advanced class was the smallest class, and the privilege of being in it was enormous: you did not have to share your horse. All the other horses were shared except for ours.

  Sissy was the weakest rider of her group. I realized it would be easier to be friends with her because I was better, much better, on a horse.

  I watched Mr. Albrecht shout out instructions in his quiet, firm way. I liked him. Mother had taught me less and less about riding as the years passed, and though she occasionally offered advice now, I mainly schooled myself. Mr. Albrecht was a jumping master trained in Germany, he had won an individual bronze medal in the 1920 Belgium Olympics, and a team silver. He had already helped me with my seat, taught me a new way of sinking into the saddle that I found most effective. The Yonahlossee horses were all purebred; our courses designed by a jumping consultant, a friend of Mr. Albrecht’s from Germany; the barns were almost nicer, at least as nice, as our cabins, their corridors lined with bricks, the stalls with two windows each for ventilation and thick, sturdy shutters for the winter. Despite Mrs. Holmes’s best intentions, the rest of our education was secondary to horses, as I’d learned my first day when I’d skipped morning classes for my riding evaluation.

  At home, Father tutored us from seven in the morning until ten, when he left to see his patients. Idella, our maid, served us breakfast while he explained ideas from books to us. The girls in my cabin thought it odd that I had never been to a real school before, but they didn’t know: we were lucky to be tutored by Father, who was brilliant, who was certainly smarter than the Emathla schoolteacher. I rode all afternoon, and Sam played tennis against the garage wall, and tended to his terrariums, his rescued animals.

  “Advanced!” Mr. Albrecht called. “Come!” He clapped his hands.

  Leona mounted, and for an instant she and her horse looked like a centaur: part horse, part girl. Then the rest of us swung up into our saddles. Gates cut a pretty figure on a horse, slim and elegant and ramrod-straight. Jettie, short and stocky, looked powerful in the saddle.

  We stood on our horses for a moment while the first group filed past us, their horses’ chests flecked with white spit. It was summer, in the early afternoon. In Emathla you stayed inside during this part of the day, when the sun
was high. It would have been dangerous to ride right now; you might kill your horse. During the summer I rose before anyone else and rode at dawn, before our lessons, and even then I had to carry an old handkerchief to wipe Sasi’s sweat from the reins. Sam and I would go out anyway, sometimes in the afternoon, and then we were giddy from the heat and danger of it—Mother would be furious if she knew—our brains boiled in our heads, the sun was so powerful it felt like we were lit from the inside. We would climb oak trees, me coaxing Sam higher and higher, and then lie in the embrace of a branch for hours, watching for some sign of life below—only the reptiles, impervious to the heat, presented themselves: thick black snakes, harmless, and bright green, darting lizards.

  I bet it never got that hot here. These girls—they wouldn’t know how to survive in such heat. Then Leona’s enormous horse—he must have been over eighteen hands—began to walk, and Naari moved beneath me. We circled the ring in a single file, and then, one by one, as if orchestrated, the horses broke off and carved out their own space; I headed toward the far end of the ring, closest to the mountains. I was a Florida girl, used to hazy skies and flatness; the mountains were like clouds to me, so large and expressive they seemed like something you could reach for.

  Naari was twitchy and quick; I knew immediately I would like her. She was too smart, I could already tell that by the way she tested me, twisting her barrel so she could carry her weight unevenly, tugging on the left side to see if I would notice. I did notice, I corrected her sharply, tugged back on the left rein, squeezed my calves against her sides so she’d speed up and straighten out. She was intelligent but fearful, two traits that always seemed to accompany each other in horses. A squirrel climbed up onto a post and Naari skittered sideways.

  I thought about the future weeks, when we would know and understand each other, and I was nearly lifted out of the saddle in anticipation. Sometimes anticipation affected me in this way, as if I could feel it coursing through my veins. I suppose it was a girlish habit.