The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  “Is he dead,” I shrieked, “is he dead?” and Mother hurried to me, stopped when she reached the railing.

  “No,” she whispered, but in a shout, “no, he’s not, but he’s hurt, and what happened, Thea?”

  I said nothing.

  “Thea,” she said again, and her voice was so sympathetic. I didn’t deserve that voice, and I knew it was the last time she would ever offer it to me. When she spoke to me again, her voice would have turned ugly.

  She couldn’t stand there forever, and as the other adults passed she reentered their assembly. I turned my face into Sasi’s slick neck, I felt his dusty sweat on my forehead and tried not to look at my cousin.

  {20}

  I sat on my bed with a letter in my hand. Mr. Holmes was expecting me; if I waited any longer he would start to wonder.

  I touched the handwriting on the envelope. Theodora Atwell, it read. Care of the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. The letters my mother sent were perfunctory, and she never addressed me as Theodora. She told me that she was packing all our things, that she and Sam and Father would live in a hotel while they looked for a house, that Father would go early to set up his new practice. I suppose I was glad for the letters, that she was preparing me for my new life, that I was able to imagine their life while I lived my own, here. She implied, but never stated, that I’d live in this Orlando house with them.

  But this letter, which I held in my hands, bore Sam’s handwriting. It seemed sometimes that God was toying with me. The day before the show, and a letter from my brother, who hadn’t sent a single word since I’d been here.

  Dear Thea,

  I know you want a letter from me but why? By the time you read this it will already be old. You know we’re moving. Everything is the same here but without you. But it won’t be the same soon, because we’ll be gone. The family that is going to live in our house has five children. Five. Think of it. You would like some brothers and sisters and like others less. That would just be the way of it. Father has given me more work to do. I think he thinks the busier I am the better. I don’t know what to write, Thea. You said you wanted a letter but what do you want it to say?

  There is something wrong with Georgie. Mother and Father won’t tell me but I hear them talking. It’s not hard, they think I’m a fool who doesn’t know how to listen at a door but they’re the fools. Father has said the same thing about him for months—“that he is not quite right.” What do you think that means? Do you know that the police interviewed me? I wasn’t scared, but Mother and Father were. We haven’t seen Aunt Carrie or Uncle George since you left. I think Father has seen Uncle George, but I don’t know for sure. We’re paying for everything. I know that. The Orlando house will be smaller. That’s what Mother says. But we haven’t bought one yet. They’re still looking. They wouldn’t tell me this but I think we can’t afford to buy a new house just yet. I think they have to wait.

  I am bored here. I wish I had a friend.

  Your Brother,

  Sam

  I folded the letter into a hundred squares, until it wouldn’t fold anymore, and then I unfolded it and looked at all the words, read it and reread it until I had it memorized. By accident; I would have preferred my brother’s voice not be stuck in my head, a record playing the same song over and over and over until I wanted to scream. But I did not want to scream. I wanted to cry. To weep, like heroines did in novels. Mother had lied. Georgie was not fine. But I had wanted to believe her, and so I had.

  I didn’t know what it meant, his letter, except that he was lonely and angry. He hadn’t been an angry person; all of this had made him angry, changed him into a different boy. I felt selfish, small, mean: I’d been sent away to a place where it was impossible to feel lonely. And Sam, well, he’d been made to stay, to be the only child in that world. And Georgie—how long had Sam known? How long had he borne that burden alone?

  His letter, I decided, was a way to ask me to return. And at first I had wanted to go back. But now I did not. There was no future for me at home.

  I rose and took Mother’s earrings out of their red velvet box. They hurt to put in, but I had expected that. I hadn’t worn earrings in months, not since I’d tried on Sissy’s rubies. And then I hurried across the Square to Masters, where I knew Mr. Holmes would be waiting.

  At Masters, Mr. Holmes led me to his library, but I did not follow.

  “I want to go out back,” I said, “like we did last time.”

  “All right,” he said, “whatever you wish.”

  I led him through the house, and out the back porch. It was sunny, like it had been that other day, and I hoped the sunlight wouldn’t be ruined for me forever. I hoped I would someday be able to not remember that day so clearly.

  We walked up a steep trail, and I felt Mr. Holmes touch the back of my thigh. I turned and smiled at him but kept walking. I knew he was wondering about my silence. But he needn’t have. I knew where I wanted to go. I knew what I wanted to do.

  With Georgie it had felt like a violation, a thing we should not have done. A violation of what, I did not know. I knew that Georgie would never be the same again. I had known all along; Sam’s letter had simply confirmed what I had suspected. A series of events. At first I thought I might have changed things, prevented the Atwell tragedy: there were so many ways it could have all been stopped. If I had not ridden, that day. If I had simply taken another route. If Sam had refused to go hunting with Georgie. If I had not cried like a little girl.

  But I saw now that it had all started before I was even born. With two brothers, and their sons. A daughter, the odd girl out. And then we were all pressed on by circumstances that, at first, had nothing to do with us. Circumstances we responded to, badly, but did not create. The Miami land boom, which preyed upon my uncle’s hopefulness; the Depression, which amplified my family’s sense of being better than the rest of the world.

  So to say it could have all turned out differently: only God could say that. It was like saying I should never have been born, which was the only way, I saw now, that all of this could not have happened. One of us would have had to go: me, Georgie, Sam.

  I stopped at the clearing and turned to face Mr. Holmes. “Thea,” he said, “Thea.” He touched my earrings, the earrings that had been a gift from my mother. That Mother and Mr. Holmes had touched the same thing without knowing seemed outrageous, sad, but also comforting.

  Nearly a year ago, what had he seen when he approached the car? He had been waiting for us, for me. Watched my father, who seemed hesitant; watched him hesitantly wind his way behind his automobile, filthy from the journey; then me, I sprang out of the car before Father could open my door. Did he think that I was bold? That I was impertinent? Theodora Atwell, from Florida, who behaved indiscriminately—worse than that, very badly, and so was sent away. First my legs emerged from the car, a girl’s legs. Then me, smaller than he thought, and pretty, with perfect posture. Or if not pretty, interesting-looking. Saw all this through the gloom of dusk. And then realized he had watched too long and hurried outside to greet us.

  “Thea,” he said again. That was all he would say. Everything came to me by some sort of instinct I hadn’t known I’d possessed. I had done things, of course, but never this confidently, this easily. There was an ease between us, now, that felt so correct, and it seemed impossible that anyone other than he and I had ever felt like this before. I had never wanted Georgie like this.

  I kissed him, hard, held his cheeks between my hands.

  Then I pointed to the ground, and he understood, he understood exactly what I wanted and he lay down on the ground, on the dirt, and I unbuckled his belt and helped him slide out of his trousers.

  I lowered myself onto him, and he was so large and solid inside me, and I didn’t want the feeling of that to end. The feeling that seemed to give me a reason for everything that I had done, starting with Georgie: for this, for this feeling t
hat I was not alone. And even while the feeling burned bright in my brain I was sad, for I knew that this would be the first and last time we ever did this. And it did not seem possible, in this moment—I gripped his shoulders, and he pushed up my blouse and sucked my breasts, and pressed me to him—it did not seem possible that I would ever feel this way again. I stilled my hips for a moment, leaned down, and kissed him. Both our bodies were slick with sweat.

  “Don’t stop,” he murmured, and I promised I wouldn’t.

  I watched his face, his half-lidded eyes; what had he loved when he was a child? Had he held his mother’s hand as they navigated an icy street and been comforted by her touch? Had he loved his father’s voice as he recited the blessing? He must miss these things now, the touch and sound that slipped so quickly from memory.

  I moved faster, and he put his hands on my hips and pushed me down, down, down, into him; and then I was angled differently on top of him and closed my eyes against the pleasure of it, that feeling of hopefulness.

  I didn’t want to remove Georgie from my mind. I wanted to remove that night, the following day. And that, I saw now, was impossible. The pain was part of the pleasure, and both were my memory of my cousin.

  —

  It was a beautiful morning the day of the show, the kind of morning that anticipates a beautiful day. If I often call the days here beautiful it’s because they were, because I can think of no other way to describe them accurately except to simply call them beautiful, like a postcard, a painting, a thing not real.

  I walked into the forest path with Sissy on one side, Mary Abbott on the other, her breeches sagging at her knees. Sissy had wound her limp hair into a tight knot. My show coat felt tight across my back when I lifted my arms. In two months I would have outgrown it. But I wasn’t thinking of that, I wasn’t thinking about a year from now, or even a day: I was thinking about the next hour, when I would jump in front of all these girls, and Mr. Albrecht, and Mr. Holmes.

  Mr. Holmes was standing at the gate with Decca. My body responded to him, now; it felt like there was a magnet embedded in my skin, telling me to go to him. But of course I would not, could not. I held my hand up in a wave, and looked away. I saw Leona’s blond hair, woven into her tight braid; she counted the steps between a double.

  I fell into place behind Leona, who was walking the course a second time. This irritated me; etiquette dictated it was someone else’s turn. I counted the strides between each jump and tried to see the course from Naari’s perspective, tried to anticipate what might frighten her—the potted plants that bookended each jump, the tents at the far end of the ring that shaded our lunch tables, the mere presence of all the people—so many things.

  I was sore between my legs, but I knew from last time that the soreness would disappear quickly. And then all I would be left with was a memory, which would fade and fade and fade until I only had a memory of that memory. But Mr. Holmes had changed me. I was a different girl, because of him.

  I tried to focus on the jumps. I was impressed by the course, which Sissy’s group had designed. The trickiest jumps in the advanced course were a water jump, which led into a wide oxer, two jumps next to each other; and a triple combination that ended with a wall of bricks. The wall was the tallest and last jump of the course, designed as a final test. The bricks were fake, made out of lightweight wood, but the horses didn’t know that: to them it was a solid obstacle.

  Mr. Albrecht blew his whistle, and Leona passed by and her cheeks looked pinker than usual, and I was actually shocked—she didn’t seem the type to wear rouge.

  I knew I should let her win. Sissy had even hinted as much. And I had laughed, told her that Leona would probably beat me fair and square. But I hoped that wasn’t true.

  Qualifying rounds went quickly. I warmed up in the adjoining ring and watched as the water jump claimed three girls before it was my turn: two third-years from Louisville and Martha Ladue. I’d drawn the third-to-last slot. Mr. Holmes still held Decca; I couldn’t see them very well, only their profiles, Mr. Holmes’s blocked by Decca’s. There had already been one fall, a girl I didn’t know well tossed after her horse refused the oxer.

  There was a break halfway through the qualifying rounds. I tried to make my breathing even, tried to relax Naari with consistency. This was not a speed round—I needed to focus on accuracy. I closed my eyes and pictured each jump, counted the strides in between them.

  When it was my turn, I timed my start perfectly; when Mr. Albrecht’s whistle blew, I was lined up with the first jump. Naari rolled her eye at one of the pots, but I pushed her through my legs and she cleared it. I jumped like I always did: everything, everyone else disappeared. All the people watching were a blur. I focused on the sharp smell of Naari’s sweat, her trembling movement between my legs.

  I knew we had the last jump, I knew it for a fact, but then the bricks tumbled beneath us and I cursed Naari under my breath. She hadn’t picked her legs up high enough. But we’d been fast.

  Leona flew by us in a trot, so close she created her own private breeze as she passed. Naari wanted to trot, too, was nervous and wound up. I wanted to ask Mr. Albrecht what my time was and I spotted him, his back turned, gesturing. He was talking to someone but I couldn’t see who until I walked past, and when I did I saw that it was Mrs. Holmes.

  I watched Leona from a safe distance. My head throbbed, and my mouth was bone-dry. It’s over, I whispered to Naari as we watched, but even then I did not quite believe it. Perhaps my eyes had deceived me. Perhaps my mind was playing tricks. But I knew the truth, which was simple: Mrs. Holmes had come home a day early. People came home early all the time.

  King cleared every jump, including the last combination, as if they were tiny playthings. His legs were miles long; he barely had to exert himself.

  Sissy found me in Naari’s stall, where she stood with her head hung low, exhausted. Sissy slipped in and swung the gate shut behind her. I patted Naari’s rump. She would have a few hours to rest. The advanced class went first, and then last, so that their horses would have the most time to recover.

  “Why are you down here?” Sissy asked. Her cheeks were red, and her hair had fallen out of its bun. She was dressed completely in white, like we all were. I wasn’t competing against Sissy, but she wasn’t a threat to anyone. She wasn’t good enough. She didn’t care enough.

  “I’m tired.”

  “But there’s lunch. Aren’t you hungry?”

  I followed Sissy’s finger and saw girls in white, milling around. “What kind of lunch?” I hated how plaintive my voice sounded.

  “Sandwiches. But they’re good.”

  “Mrs. Holmes is back.”

  “I know.”

  I held my throbbing forehead in my hand and would not look at her.

  “I’m sad,” I said, finally.

  “But you knew she would come back.” Her voice was soft.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. But isn’t that always how it is? You can see it coming, but you can’t stop it.”

  She drew me to her in a hug, and I noticed how fiercely she did this, as if she was afraid I would refuse her. But I didn’t. Nobody had hugged me last year, after Georgie. Nobody had touched me.

  —

  The three top finishers—me, Jettie, Leona—were in the jump-off. I was first, not an enviable position, but I was glad to go. We had to be fast. I knew it would be between me and Leona; I had always known that. King was bigger, a more gifted athlete, but Naari was faster, as she’d proved that night long ago; and more than that, she was smarter. King was dull, unflappable. But if I could make Naari nervous enough, she would go as fast as she had that night, and we would win.

  In the warm-up ring, I kept my eyes on the tips of Naari’s ears and walked her in circles, smaller and smaller until she was practically pirouetting. I wouldn’t let her trot—I wanted to reserve every bit of her energy. I hadn’t looked
at Mr. Holmes but, oh, how he watched me. I could feel it. Mr. Albrecht looked at me curiously as I passed him. I should have been warming her up slowly, gradually working into the course, but in the end, rules were rules, and we both understood that. I could handle my horse however I pleased.

  I wrapped the reins around my hands, something I had only heard about. It was stupid; if Naari refused a jump at the last instant, I would be pitched over her anyway, still attached to her by the reins; at the very least, I’d break both my arms. But I felt my old fearlessness rising up, as I always did before a difficult course. As I always did, when people were watching. And now this crowd included him and I felt so reckless; reckless, as I wrapped the reins so tightly around my hands the leather bit into my skin; reckless, as I heard Mr. Albrecht’s whistle and pressed Naari into a gallop.

  I liked the fierce leverage wrapped reins brought; I bent my elbows and Naari slowed, quickly, and then I turned my toes out and dug my spurs into her sides, and I had her trapped, I had all her power harnessed between my legs and hands, beneath me. I’d never felt such energy, roiling beneath me like a violent wave.

  We were going much too quickly; in a lesson Mr. Albrecht would have shouted at me to reduce our speed by half. All the white-clad girls were a blurry crowd, interrupted every few feet by a house mistress’s hat. If I’d wanted to find Mr. Holmes in the crowd I couldn’t have.

  I cleared the water jump, felt Naari change her footing, and knew, as she collected herself in preparation for the oxer ahead of us—and then as she soared over it, her ears flat against her head in concentration—that we understood each other: I wanted to win, and she wanted to be rid of me, this confusing girl on her back, goading her forward with sharp pains on her flank, then holding her back with a terrible yank on the corner of her mouth; she tasted blood from the pressure of the seesawing bit, which flattened her tongue against her teeth, made it difficult to breathe.