by Jane Smiley
I was now used to the darkness and the cold, and I was rather enjoying being outside by myself after all the “discussions” of the day. I wasn’t sleepy. That was not what happened. I was on my feet and I was walking and I had just finished checking the water troughs (which were fine) and making sure the gates were locked (they were). I turned back toward the house. Daddy’s light went out as I did so, but the porch light was still on, now rainbowed in mist. My next job was to close the barn door for the night so skunks and raccoons didn’t get in. I was walking toward the barn.
Here is what the ghost did—she whispered in my ear. And then she touched my shoulder, my left shoulder. The only way I knew it was the ghost right then, since I wasn’t thinking of her, was that a shiver ran down my spine, and when that happened, a picture of her came into my mind. I knew it was her.
I whipped around. I didn’t see her.
But the horses did. Jack and Blue, and even Jefferson and Lincoln, were standing in a group, staring toward me and snorting. Jack’s tail was up and so was Blue’s. Blue suddenly gave a sharp whinny, which made me jump and go, “Ahh!” This wasn’t a scream or anything, just a breath—I must have been holding it.
My first actual thought was to wonder what she had whispered in my ear. It was as if I could almost hear the words, but not quite—I could only hear that they were words, three or four of them, no more than that, “Go into the house,” or, “He’s still my horse.” As I thought this phrase, it seemed to me that that was what she had said. Now the shivers that had run down my back ran down the front of my legs, and I felt cold and scared all over. I ran toward the house. As I lifted my foot onto the first step of the porch, Rusty came up behind me and leapt up all three steps and ran to the door and stood there, staring. She gave a whine. I opened the door, and even though she had never been in the house, I let her in, and then I let her come through the kitchen with me. The living room was empty. I turned out the light by Daddy’s chair. Rusty and I went into the hall by the stairs, where Spooky was sitting up in his box. I turned out the light in the hall so I wouldn’t have to look at him, and then Rusty and I went up the staircase, me with my hand on her collar so she wouldn’t run ahead and wake Mom and Daddy. We were quiet, though. She stuck right with me up every step, and when I took her into my room, she went straight over to the side of my bed and curled up on the rug. All through the night, I knew she was there, and lots of times, I reached out from under the covers and scratched her ears.
Boots with Boot Tree
Boot Tree
Chapter 18
USUALLY, WHEN YOU WAKE UP AND THE DAY IS ALREADY SUNNY, especially after a big rainstorm, you can’t help feeling fresh and happy, and it is true that when I opened my eyes the next morning, the first thing I saw was Rusty sleeping on her back with all four legs in the air, and I laughed, which woke her. She rolled onto her chest and wagged her tail, as if to say, “How did this happen?”
I didn’t dare let her be found in my room, so I immediately threw off the covers, but just then the door to my room opened, and Mom said, “Honey, Daddy is really feeling—” She certainly saw Rusty, since Rusty turned her head and looked at Mom and brushed her tail against the floor again, but she hardly paused before continuing, “Like he’s got a bad cold or something, so I’ll help you feed the horses, and then if you miss the bus, I can drive you.” Not a word about Rusty, but she smiled as she closed the door. I looked at my clock. It was twenty minutes since the alarm should have gone off, which was why it was so light. I yawned and got up, petting Rusty several times as I pulled on my jeans.
We went down the front stairs and right out the front door. As soon as we were outside, while I was slipping on my shoes, Rusty went bounding away down toward the road as if plenty of things might have happened in the night, and she needed to sniff out what they were.
The horses were lined up by their respective gates, waiting for their hay, looking entirely as if they had not seen any ghosts. I had gotten pretty good at pushing the wheelbarrow with one and a half arms and tossing flakes of hay over and not into the fence. In the bright sunlight, I saw nothing at all weird, only that the grass was sparkling green and the lupines that we had seen driving toward the coast Saturday had now begun to spread over our own hillsides in a lavender wave.
The back door opened, and Mom came out, waving to me and saying, “Oh, what a beautiful morning! We deserve this!” She trotted over to me, and took the handles of the wheelbarrow and said, “I’ll push and you throw, or whatever you want.” As it turned out, she pushed and we both threw. I said, “How’s Daddy?”
“Stuffed up and headachy. Not much fever, so I may have to tie him to the bed. He’s already saying he’s got too much to do to lie around all day.”
I got a flake way past the fence, behind Jack. He turned and started to nose it apart.
“I’ll give him breakfast in bed. That will keep him there for a while.”
“What time is it?”
“I already put yours on the table. If you eat it now, you can make the bus.” She picked up the next flake and threw it past Jefferson. That was the fifth flake, so he went to it, which meant that the other three horses all had to switch places, too. She started pushing the wheelbarrow toward the mares.
On the table, she had set out a bowl of Cheerios, a banana, a hard-boiled egg, and my lunch, which was always a peanut butter sandwich with strawberry jam, an orange, and some carrot sticks. This reminded me that Gloria had opened her lunch on Friday, and it smelled so strange that Stella and I asked her what it was, and she said, “Tongue.” We could not believe that, but it was. Her dad had bought it in San Francisco, and the whole family actually liked it.
I knew the ghost had been out there, and I knew she had tapped me on the shoulder, I knew she had said to me, “He’s still my horse,” and I knew that the horses, or at least the geldings, had seen her. Maybe Rusty had seen her, too, since she was so eager to get into the house. But I also knew that if I kept myself thinking about other things—anything, even peanut butter or the boys on the bus who were sitting down every time the driver looked in his mirror, but jumping up every time he looked out at the road—I would not have to think about the ghost, and I didn’t really, all the way until French class, which was so boring that the ghost came right into my head and sat down.
My earlier sightings of the ghost—sitting on her trunk, floating around the corner of the barn, even passing through my room and out the window, holding a black cat in her arms—were not so frightening in comparison to what had happened the night before. Those earlier times, she was just a misty thing, like a cloud, and even though she had a face and seemed to be wearing things—clothes, those black boots—it was still like seeing something that in fact had nothing to do with you. A bobcat crossing the hillside might be dangerous to moles or ground squirrels, but really, it had nothing to do with you—you could watch it, be interested in it, even take a picture of it if there were film in the camera, and it still had nothing to do with you. It could look at you (and bobcats often did turn their heads and lock your gaze) and it still had nothing to do with you. It would soon get up and walk away, disappear into the grass or the trees.
It now seemed as though I had been afraid of the ghost just because it was strange and I’d never seen one before. It now seemed as though I could have gotten used to the ghost if she had just kept to herself and pretended I wasn’t there. What you didn’t want a ghost to do was to decide that you were its enemy. As I sat there in French class with my book open on my desk, repeating the French words (sort of) along with everyone else (it was a long chapter of dialogue, and we were going around the room, reading and translating each line), I said, “Oui. Même les fleurs qui ont des épines,” but I wondered if the ghost’s tapping me on the shoulder and whispering in my ear might be just the beginning. This made me shiver. Leslie said something about “the flowers” and “the thorns.”
Madame said, “Bon.”
Then everyone read, “
‘Alors les épines, à quoi servent-elles?’ ”
And Madame said, “Mademoiselle Lovitt, votre traduction, s’il vous plaît.” She gave me that very courteous smile that she always used when she knew that you weren’t paying attention.
I said, “ ‘So, the thorns, which they serve to them? The sheep?’ ” I knew we were talking about sheep. Madame’s courteous smile got larger, and she dipped her head. That’s what she did to trick you into thinking that you had gotten lucky. Then Madame turned to Kyle Gonzalez and said, “Monsieur Gonzalez, avez-vous une autre traduction de cette passage?”
Kyle, of course, said, “Oui, Madame. ‘Then the thorns, what are they?’ ” He paused. Madame nodded, and he went on, “ ‘I do not know. I was very busy trying to unscrew a very tight bolt in my engine. I was very worried, because my failure was beginning to seem very serious.’ ” And even though the ghost was in my mind, I did pause long enough to reflect that Kyle’s proper translation didn’t make much more sense than my bad one.
A moment later, we mumbled on, “ ‘Le petit prince ne renonçait jamais à une question, une fois qu’il l’avait posée. J’étais irrité par mon boulon et je répondis n’importe quoi—’ ”
I understood that the prince didn’t understand the question and was irritated with his bolt, and I went back to thinking about the ghost. The important thing about the whole incident was Rusty. Rusty wasn’t afraid of anything. Before we got her, she lived for who knew how long in the wild, by herself. She was a big dog and fast. Before we got her (or, before we knew we had already gotten her), she had chased Jack and one of the adult horses, and on the night the Brahmas broke through the fence, she herded a cow and a calf up the hill back onto the Jordan ranch. I had actually seen her take down a bobcat—a small bobcat, maybe a year old, but nonetheless a bobcat. For Rusty to run onto the porch and act like she had to get into the house was far more strange than the horses spooking, but the four geldings spooking was strange, too. Maybe the mares were also spooking, but when I saw Rusty, I got too scared to turn and check.
I heard Maria say, “Um, let’s see. ‘Flowers have thorns just because. Because of just naughtiness.’ ”
Kyle raised his hand and said, “Madame, je ne crois pas que les fleurs ont les intentions.” I understood that—flowers don’t have intentions.
Madame smiled and said, “Monsieur Kyle, ceci est seulement dans un roman, une fable.” I understood that, too—it’s only a story. Grown-ups were always telling you that.
But of course that was not enough for Kyle, who began drumming the desk with his fingers. The thing about Kyle was that though he didn’t like to argue, he did like a straight answer. I wondered if he believed in ghosts. If he did, then he would have all sorts of good reasons, and if he didn’t, he would have good reasons for that, too. Madame looked at him for a long second, then said, “Peut-être que ça suffit pour l’instant. Nous avançons! Mademoiselle Linda, s’il vous plaît.” (Enough of you, Kyle; let’s get moving, Linda.)
Linda A. read, “ ‘Oh! Mais après un silence il me lança, avec une sorte de rancune.’ ” I stopped listening, and then about five minutes later, we all heard the bell. Madame looked a little relieved. As we rushed out, I saw Kyle go up to her.
When I got off the bus and went in the house that afternoon, Daddy was still sick—even sicker, in fact. He had tried to get up before lunch, gotten as far as the barn, and then come staggering back in the kitchen door and gone upstairs to sleep. Mom had ridden Lincoln and Jefferson, and also gotten on Foxy, but only after letting her run around with Blue in the pen for half an hour. Mom didn’t look unhappy or upset, I have to say. She said, “Oh, I like Foxy. I should’ve ridden her before this. I think she’s my new favorite.”
I sat down at the table and she poured me a glass of milk. I picked a banana out of the fruit bowl. “Barbie likes her, too.”
Mom laughed. “Those girls are so interesting. They do everything, it seems like.”
“They have their own bathroom, and their mom let them paint it themselves, so the wall is covered with pictures. One looks just like Spooky.”
“They have cats, right?”
“Two black and one orange. The orange one is huge.”
Mom went into the living room and came back with Spooky on her arm. He was yawning. She said, “If you have three, I don’t know that you notice a fourth one.”
“I thought he was going to be a barn cat.”
“And I thought Rusty was an outside dog.”
We smiled at each other. Then I had a bad thought. “Is that what’s making Daddy sick?”
“Oh, goodness, no. Dogs make him sneeze and clog his sinuses. He’s got a fever and is throwing up. This is surely the flu.”
“Are we going to get it?”
“Well, you stay away from him. I am washing my hands a lot.”
I drank the rest of my milk and ate another piece of banana. Mom had set Spooky on the floor, and then wrapped him very loosely in a dish towel. He was jumping around trying to get out of it. When he did, she dragged it across the floor, and let him pounce on it and kill it. I thought about telling Mom about the ghost Rusty and I had seen the night before. I looked at her. She was laughing and bending down to toss the towel over Spooky, and I wondered why I didn’t. Normally, I had no trouble talking to Mom. She didn’t like complaining, but if you phrased your complaint as a question, she never minded that. I had told her about lots of things over the years, and when I had gotten in big trouble in seventh grade for maybe stealing an add-a-pearl necklace (which I didn’t do, but it looked like I did until Kyle Gonzalez spoke up), Mom had only been mad for a few minutes. Afterward, I thought maybe she wasn’t mad at me as much as she was mad at the school, though she didn’t say anything about that. I kept looking at her.
The thing was, I didn’t know whether Mom believed in ghosts. If she did, maybe I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that we now had one, because if it scared her, then it would scare me more. And if she didn’t, well, sometimes it’s harder to tell your mom that you are stupid than it is to tell her that you’ve been naughty. I didn’t even know if I myself believed in ghosts. At times during the day, I had been completely sure that ghost had tapped me on the shoulder and told me Blue was her horse and then chased Rusty into the house, and other times I thought I was crazy. But another thing was true, too—it’s not so embarrassing to think crazy thoughts as it is to express them. So I didn’t say anything, except, “I wish I could ride.”
“How is it feeling?”
“Boring. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“It will when you take the cast off and start using it. Just don’t do one thing that Nancy Hazen’s nephew did when he broke his arm and had a cast up past his elbow.”
I said, “What was that?”
“Stick a penny down there, so far that he couldn’t get it out. It kind of ate into the skin.”
I said, “Oh, yuck.”
“Yup,” said Mom.
After that, all there was to do was homework, so I got some carrots out of the refrigerator and cut them into pieces, then I put them in a bag. This way, I figured I could put off Le Petit Prince and the Mexican War for at least a half hour.
Because of all the rain, there was slop everywhere, so I paused to put on my rubber boots, which were sitting outside the back door. In California, you have to always look into your boots in case a spider has taken up residence since you last wore them, so I did that—I knocked each one against the step, turned it over, and shook it. Nothing came out. I stepped into them. And then there was a whinny—it was Blue, standing by the gelding gate and calling to me. I called back, “Blue, Blue, how are you?” And he whinnied again. I guess it was right then that I remembered that I had paid for him, yes, but the way that you make a horse your own is by doing something with him.
I ran to the gate and unbuckled one of the four halters that were buckled to it. Since Blue was already paying attention to me (in fact, he was hanging his head over the gat
e), I didn’t open the bag of carrots, and so the other geldings didn’t come over, even Jack (which would have bothered me, but just this once I didn’t want to deal with anyone else). I got the halter on Blue (I was getting better at it, but it was still hard to do this one-and-a-half-handed), opened the gate, and led him out. He stood there while I closed the gate and did the lock. I had set down the bag of carrots, but even when I picked it up, he didn’t nose it, or act as though it was his business.
I took him to the pen. He walked along politely, and when my boot got stuck in the mud for a moment, and sort of slid off, so that I had to stop and pull it back on, he stopped. Then we walked on. It was at that point that I remembered how nice he was to groom—always staying out of your space, but responding to the brush as if he actually felt it—and I realized that in spite of his worries, he was a very attentive horse. It was probably true, as Daddy and Danny both said, that he didn’t know much because he hadn’t been asked to do much, but he did know something that many horses did not—how to be with his person in a courteous way, except that was not really it, either. Horses are often praised for having good manners—just the way a person is supposed to know to say please and thank you and to knock before entering, a horse is supposed to know to stand still while he is being mounted and to trot when he is asked to trot and to halt when he is asked to halt. But Blue had something more than that. He had a way of paying attention to me rather than to everything else. It was as if he was wondering about me, and waiting to see what I was going to do, but not making suggestions or demands. When we got through the gate of the pen, I unsnapped the lead rope, but before I waved him into a trot, I opened the bag and gave him a piece of carrot. It was then I thought of the trick.
