Emma and the Cutting Horse

by Martha Deeringer

  When he tossed an armful of fresh hay into the pen, the mare shied and snorted loudly. He checked to see that she had a full tub of water; then they climbed wearily into the truck and drove up to the house. When she got out of the truck, Emma heard the fence ring again.

  * * *

  It was after nine when she opened her eyes the next morning. She could hear her father talking to someone outside. Emma pulled the curtain back and saw that Kyle had arrived to help with the chores. Kyle lived just down the road and helped with feeding and watering livestock, and sometimes with building fences, although her father said privately that when it came to fence building, Kyle was only worth about half of what he got paid. He was sixteen, two years older than Emma, and had sandy blond hair with cowlicks in his hairline that defied combing. She had known him so long he was almost like an older brother.

  Emma pulled on old jeans and a sweatshirt and hurried out to see how the new mare had survived the night. Her parents and Kyle were already down at the horse pens leaning on the fence. Six welded pipe pens stood in a long row a hundred yards below the house, each with a small shed built into a back corner for protection from the sun and inclement weather. The towering old hay barn, which had once held horse stalls, stood off to the north.

  The mare was standing in the far corner of her pen watching them suspiciously. When Emma leaned on the fence beside Kyle, he nudged her with his elbow and said, “Hi, Linda!” Since Emma was a scrawny ten-year-old, Kyle had teased her by calling her the wrong name. The first few times she had corrected him politely, but now she just punched him on the arm when he did it.

  “That sure looks like a high society horse you brought home,” he said. “Course, I don’t know much about horses.”

  Emma looked at the mare carefully for the first time. She was a plain red sorrel, with no white markings anywhere. She had a small, pretty head and finely shaped pointed ears, but her eyes weren’t soft and friendly like Ditto’s. Her legs were slender and her feet small, but now Emma could see what her parents had been saying about the mare’s knees. They were a tiny bit out of alignment when viewed from the front; although the defect was so slight it was hardly noticeable. Emma wouldn’t have seen it if her parents hadn’t mentioned it at the sale.

  “Are you going to ride her today?” Emma asked her father.

  “Not today. The man who talked to me about her at the sale said she had been saddled but not ridden yet. We’ll give her a few more days to settle down and then we’ll see how she does when we handle her. She’s not a very big two-year-old. It wouldn’t hurt her to grow a little more before she carries much weight.”

  “Emma will get on her,” Kyle volunteered. “She doesn’t weigh much.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Emma’s dad replied. “Whoever gets on her first might need to have a parachute attached.”

  “What are we going to call her?” Emma asked.

  “Her registered name is Miss Dellfene, so I guess we’ll just call her that unless something else occurs to us. When we get to know her better, she may earn herself a new name. I just hope it isn’t profane!”

  When Miss Dellfene got close to Ditto, she still laced her ears back and squealed at him. Ditto had given up trying to be the welcoming committee and ignored her now for the most part.

  In the thin afternoon sunlight, Emma took Ditto out of his pen. When she patted him on the shoulder, a puff of dust rose in the air from his shaggy winter coat. She brushed him and combed his mane, but he still didn’t achieve the classy look of the heartbreaking palomino mare at the sale. She put her arms around his neck and pulled his whiskery head against her. He might not have a gleaming golden coat, but he was a handsome, good natured, honest horse. Throwing her saddle on, she cinched it up and slid the bit in his mouth. Emma’s saddle was worn and stained by sweat and it lacked the silver ornaments that had decorated every piece of horse equipment she had seen yesterday at the sale. When she swung on and started him out into the back pasture, Ditto walked quickly with his ears pricked forward, reminding her again of how much she liked his cheerful, willing disposition. Some horses needed constant correction and were hard work to ride, but Ditto seemed to know what she wanted before she did. His soft, floating trot covered the ground, and soon they came to the trail that led to Emma’s hideout, a place she had discovered years earlier on one of her first solo rides. It wasn’t a secret, just a grove of oak trees with a big rock to sit on in the middle of a clearing in the oaks. Harley, her Sheltie, was buried next to the rock. It was a quiet place to sit and think. Emma sometimes brought her diary and wrote in it here, but today she was content to sit on Ditto soaking up the silence. Tomorrow was Monday and there wouldn’t be many more peaceful moments once she got back to school.

  * * *

  Scanning the crowd of kids in the bleachers for a glimpse of Hannah and Katie, Emma couldn’t wait to tell them about the odd little mare her parents bought at the horse sale on Saturday. Spotting Katie’s curly blonde ponytail near the top of the 9th grade section, she climbed through the sea of students to the empty space they had saved for her.

  “Was the horse sale as cool as you thought it was going to be?” Hannah asked.

  “Better,” Emma said. “The people at the sale dripped money. We stood out like a bunch of country singers at the opera. You should have seen all those brand-new trucks and horse trailers, and the horses were selling for a fortune.”

  “I guess your dad didn’t buy one, then,” Katie observed.

  “Actually, he did, but not for a fortune. I was so surprised I think my mouth hung open. He bought a plain little mare with crooked knees. Well, they’re just a little bit crooked. She sold really cheap right near the end of the sale even though she has a fancy pedigree.”

  The bell rang to go to first period and Emma stood up and swung her backpack to her shoulder. It bumped against the knees of the girl sitting in the row behind her.

  “Oh, sorry,” Emma said.

  “Watch it, Cowgirl!” the girl snapped angrily, brushing off her knee as if Emma’s backpack had soiled it. She turned away from Emma and spoke loudly to the boy who sat beside her on the bleachers.

  “She never talks about anything but horses. What a hayseed.” Her voice dripped with disdain.

  A small shock wave twitched up Emma’s spine. She stood with her backpack hanging from one shoulder as the girl and her boyfriend got up and tramped noisily down the bleachers.

  “Man...I just barely bumped her. It was an accident,” Emma protested, staring after them.

  “I know,” Hannah said. “She must already have a bee in her bonnet about something.”

  Emma walked down the hall to her locker and then on to Algebra, her first class. A niggling little worry stayed with her through most of the morning, eating away at her excitement about the new horse. At lunch she got in the snack bar line with Hannah and Katie, bought a burrito and some fruit punch, and tried to stop thinking about the incident. Winding their way through the tables toward the corner where they usually sat, Emma saw Katie scanning the room in an effort to spot Joe, a boy whose charms had recently captured her attention. Joe sat behind Katie in science, and her grades plummeted when she decided she adored him. She told Emma and Hannah that he had only spoken to her twice, but she remembered every word of the two short conversations.

  “Uh, oh,” Katie said softly, nudging Emma with her elbow. “Someone’s glaring at you. So are her friends at the snobby table. She may be putting the word out that you attacked her with your backpack this morning.”

  “That’s not fair,” Emma said, glancing in the direction that Katie indicated. “I barely touched her. She can’t be that desperate for someone to bad mouth.”

  “Hope you’re right,” Hannah said, “but I’ve heard that most kids are careful not to cross her. Her name is Candi Haynes, in case you’re interested.”

  Just then Joe came into the cafeteria, and Emma’s possible problem took a backseat while Katie recounted every word Joe
had spoken in class that day. None of the words had been directed at her.

  Emma passed by Candi Haynes and her friends when she took her tray to the cafeteria window on her way out. She forced herself to look straight ahead, but in her peripheral vision she could see the girls elbowing each other. As she handed the tray through the window a chorus of whinnies followed her. Emma felt her ears reddening and struggled to keep from hurrying out the door. Cascades of laughter reached her as she headed down the hall to her locker. A red cloud of humiliation and rage rose in Emma’s chest. Maybe instead of an accidental bump she should have smashed Candi Haynes over the head with her backpack; then at least Candi would have a reason to harass her.

  * * *

  Katie stopped Emma in the hall between classes the next morning.

  “Come check out your name on the bathroom wall,” she said. She guided Emma into the girls’ restroom and pointed to a message just above one of the sinks.

  “For a GOOD time on the farm, call Emma,” it read. Her phone number was written under the message.

  “There’s another one in the last stall.”

  Emma had to wait for the stall to empty. The girl who came out was someone she knew from P.E. class.

  “Yikes, Emma, you must have gotten crosswise with somebody,” she said.

  Emma went in. This one was written in huge, angry letters with a black marker: EMMA IS A HEIFER.

  “Do you know who’s doing it?”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” Emma said crossly.

  “You should get your dad to drag her off to jail,” Katie snarled between her teeth. “He could file charges of harassment or verbal abuse or something. Having a dad who’s a deputy sheriff ought to have some perks.”

  On the bus ride home, Emma sat alone in one of the back seats. The incident with Candi Haynes buzzed around in her mind like a swarm of angry bees. Sometimes she wished she were back in the safety of her small middle school. There were lots of kids she didn’t know in high school, and some of them seemed to be growing up a lot faster than she was. A few treated other girls like freaks if they didn’t move in the fast crowd. One or two were downright scary, using filthy language and smoking in the bathroom. She would never be allowed to wear the clothes some of those girls wore, even if her parents could afford them. Skin-tight pants and miniskirts were taboo at Emma’s house. So were men’s sleeveless underwear shirts and short tops that showed your midriff when you bent over or reached up to the top shelf of your locker. Emma’s dad had always been a take-charge kind of guy. Once he had made up his mind, there was little point in arguing. Now that Emma was in high school, she didn’t feel relaxed and safe at school like she had at her old middle school. Lately she had begun to think of herself as two different people, the quiet, withdrawn Emma everyone saw at school, and the real, outgoing Emma she became at home. This whole scene with Candi could have been avoided if she had just kept her mouth shut like she usually did at school.

  Chapter Three

  “Emma...Emma...this is your stop,” the bus driver hollered as he sat with the door open waiting for Emma to get off.

  “Oh, sorry,” Emma mumbled, grabbing her backpack and heading for the door. “I guess I was daydreaming.”

  As soon as Emma got off the bus, the incident with Candi Haynes began to recede to a small dark corner at the back of her brain. Since daylight savings time ended, she had to hurry down to the horse pens and feed and water the horses as soon as she got home. If she didn’t, darkness caught up with her before she was finished. Filling water tubs and scooping out feed was just that much harder when you couldn’t see what you were doing. There were only four horses in the small pens below the house: Scout, her father’s roping horse, Ditto, the new mare, and Camaro, a two-year-old filly that Emma had fallen in love with on the day of her birth.

  The daughter of Taffy, a mare her dad had ridden for many years, Camaro was born with a buttermilk coat, a wispy black mane and tail, and an independent attitude that exhausted her patient mama. Before she was two hours old, she wandered away from her mother’s side to tickle Emma’s neck with her curly whiskers as Emma knelt on the ground. By the following day, she galloped ahead of her mama in the pasture as Taffy trotted behind, whinnying for her to stop.

  As she rinsed out the water tubs, Emma heard her mother’s car coming up the lane. By the time she finished with the horses her mom would have changed out of her scrubs and started supper. Her dad didn’t get home until after dark, so he took the morning shift with the horses. Most mornings he was out before dawn, hauling large round bales of hay to the cows with the tractor, and feeding the horses so Emma wouldn’t have to go out before school.

  The phone was ringing when Emma finished and pulled off her boots on the back porch. She heard her mom say, “Hello...hello?”

  “Who was on the phone?” Emma asked as she came in the back door.

  “I guess it was a wrong number. It sounded like somebody was there, but then they hung up.”

  For a moment, the specter of Candi twitched in the back of Emma’s mind, but then she dismissed the idea. Candi wouldn’t be dumb enough to start bothering her at home. She was making a big deal out of nothing.

  * * *

  Hannah and Katie occupied a new place on the bleachers the next morning. It took Emma a minute to spot them, waving at her from the far end of the 9th grade section. She walked toward them, weaving through the milling students who stood at the bottom, looking for an empty seat.

  “We decided to put some distance between ourselves and the social elite,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes as Emma climbed up to sit with them. “We were afraid your vicious backpack might get out of control again.”

  Emma grinned and felt a rush of affection for Hannah. It was great to have friends who knew you well enough to tease you and always took your side.

  Emma glanced over toward the spot where Candi sat with her friends. To her horror they were looking at her. A smug smile spread across Candi’s face when she caught Emma’s eye. Above the din of hundreds of voices Emma heard a high-pitched whinny followed by gales of laughter.

  “She makes me sick,” Katie spat. “Don’t give her the pleasure of seeing that she’s getting on your nerves.”

  Emma forced herself to turn toward Katie. “I can’t believe she’s still mad. It’s not like she was really hurt or anything.”

  “She’s not mad,” Hannah said. “As a matter of fact, I think she’s very happy. She’s chosen another victim, and you’re it.” Sensible Hannah, with her long, dark hair and serious brown eyes, always seemed to see straight to the heart of the matter.

  When the bell rang, Emma gave Candi plenty of time to get on her way to class before she got up and started for her locker. Rounding the corner to the 9th grade wing, she noticed a group of girls talking in the hall. When Emma approached her locker, they stopped talking and watched her pass by. A prickly sensation swam up the back of her neck. Taped across her locker door was a large, hastily drawn picture of the rear end of a horse. Its wide rump filled the page, its tail hanging down between stick-like hind legs. “Emma”, was written in huge black letters across the horse’s butt.

  Angrily, Emma ripped the picture from the door of her locker, wadded it into a ball and threw it on the hall floor. When she looked over at the group of girls, they quickly looked away, but not before Emma saw embarrassment and something else that could have been pity on their faces. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she clenched her teeth together tightly to keep them back.

  “You girls get to class, now,” Emma’s algebra teacher said as she stepped out into the hall to pull the classroom door shut. The group of girls gave Emma one more sympathetic glance and scurried away.

  “Is something wrong, Emma?” the teacher asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Emma muttered as she pulled her algebra book from the stack in her locker. But she was lying. Something was wrong. Real wrong.

  * * *

  A week passed before Emma’s dad found time t
o work with Miss Dellfene. Winter’s short days didn’t allow much time for working with horses except on weekends, and Emma knew her father planned to “tune up” Scout before the local rodeo taking place just after the first of the year. One of her dad’s friends had talked him into entering the team roping and Scout hadn’t practiced since early fall. A bright leopard Appaloosa, Scout towered above the other horses and had the weight needed to stop a galloping steer when it hit the end of a rope.

  Emma’s father asked her to come down to the pen and help him with Miss Dellfene. In spite of the extra time to settle in, the mare still eyed them with suspicion. When they came in the gate, she retreated to the far corner, snorting loudly at them. Emma’s dad slipped a halter and lead rope over his shoulder and began to approach the mare slowly, talking softly to her. She stood perfectly still with her head up until he got almost close enough to touch her, and then pivoted with cat-like grace and raced away, bucking and snorting like a just-penned mustang.

  “Stand outside the pen, Emma,” her father said, “at least until we’re sure she’s not going to run over anybody.”

  The next few times he approached, the mare repeated the same maneuver; but Emma’s father wasn’t one to give up easily. He asked Emma to hand him his lariat, built a large loop, and tossed it over her head as she dashed past. When she reached the end of the rope and felt the noose begin to tighten, she turned to face him. She seemed to know that the game was over and gave up without a fight. Emma’s dad walked up to her slowly, but when he reached out to put the halter on her, she jerked her head away. It took several attempts to get it on.

  Emma came back in the gate bringing a brush and curry comb. She handed one to her father.

  “Easy, girl,” Emma said soothingly. “You’re going to like this part.”

  The mare was so tense she jumped every time Emma touched her with the brush. She was especially unnerved when they got on each side of her, and she stepped around to avoid the unwanted attention.