Emma and the Cutting Horse

by Martha Deeringer

  “Are you up to riding Rosie in the arena with Camaro and me?” Emma asked Kyle as Thursday approached.

  “Sure thing, Susie,” he said. “If you’re not afraid we’ll outclass you.”

  “Actually, I’m hoping that having you in there will help convince Camaro to lope. I’ve been drumming on her ribs with the heels of my boots, but she just trots faster. She’s definitely not one of those super sensitive horses that comes unglued when you kick her.”

  Thursday arrived with a rare summer breeze from the north, and all the horses were energized by its relative coolness. Camaro had known Rosie all her life, and gently touched noses with her when Kyle led her into the arena.

  “Let’s get them warmed up first,” Emma said, “and then I’m going to try to get Camaro to lope behind you and Rosie.”

  “Okay,” Kyle said. “If she throws you way up in the air, I’ll try to catch you.”

  When Kyle signaled Rosie to lope, Emma lifted her reins, leaned a bit to the left and said, “Canter.” Camaro jumped forward to follow Rosie, and cantered behind her for several strides, but then she began to toss her head and crow-hop. Emma didn’t have any trouble staying on board, but she pulled the mare in a small circle to the left as she had seen Gary do with Miss Dellfene and then squeezed her into a canter again. Kyle was too busy checking Rosie’s lead to look back.

  There was no recurrence of the crow-hopping behavior as they repeated the maneuver in both directions, and Emma concentrated on keeping Camaro’s lope slow by staying behind Rosie and bumping the reins. Emma could already tell that she was going to love riding this mare, although it would be a long time before she was as reliable as Ditto. A few more successful sessions like this and she would be ready for a pasture ride.

  * * *

  August came, and school started again. To Emma’s horror, Candi Haynes was in her American History class. She sat in a back corner with one of her snooty friends, whispering and laughing. The whispering continued, even after the teacher came in and called the class to order. The teacher, Coach Davis, directed a withering glare at the girls, which quieted them temporarily. Emma took a seat on the other side of the room near the front. She had only glanced at Candi for a moment, but something about her seemed harder and angrier. Emma decided to ignore her unless she was provoked, and bent over to fill out the endless first day of school forms that were handed out in every class. When the bell rang at the end of the period, she took her time gathering up her books and papers. She didn’t want to appear to be racing out of the room to avoid a confrontation with Candi. To her surprise, Candi and her friend were already strolling out the door when she looked up.

  At lunch, Emma could see them in the cafeteria, but the population of Candi’s table had diminished. The girls who were still sitting with her were louder than ever, but some of her friends from last year could be seem scattered out among the other tables with new friends.

  “What happened with Candi’s father?” Emma asked Katie and Hannah when they joined her.

  “My mom said he got out on bail, but his trial hasn’t started yet. I don’t think he’s living with Candi and her mom and sister anymore, though,” Katie said. “I really haven’t heard anything about them lately. He still has the car lot, I guess. My mom saw him there this summer.”

  Katie was suddenly distracted by Joe, who put his tray down on their table.

  “Can I sit here?” he asked Katie.

  “Sure,” Katie said, patting the seat beside her.

  He sat down, and smiled at Hannah and Emma. An awkward silence descended, but it was relieved when one of Joe’s friends came and sat down across the table from him. They struck up a conversation about football practice and gradually the tension dissipated. Emma noticed that Katie could hardly eat, even though Joe wasn’t talking to her.

  * * *

  Emma’s father suggested that she and Kyle not talk too much about Miss Dellfene and the Futurity at school.

  “You’ll be embarrassed if you make her sound like a sure-fire winner and then something goes wrong. The Futurity is the big time for cutting horses. There will be over a quarter of a million dollars in prize money awarded. You can bet your bonnet there will be some tough competitors there.”

  Emma saw the sense in her father’s words and tried to put the whole business out of her mind, at least while she was at school. She sure wasn’t planning to discuss anything about horses in a public setting again. She studied hard. Nothing could interfere with her father’s promise to take her out of school so she could watch Miss Dellfene compete.

  Kyle’s riding lessons continued, but they were becoming less like formal lessons and more like riding with a friend. Riding in the arena, she coached Kyle in keeping Rosie’s trot slow and making sure she loped in the correct lead.

  “Push your heels down and sit up straight,” she reminded him over and over.

  One Saturday in early fall, Emma’s father asked them both to saddle the horses and help him move some cattle to a different pasture. He drove his truck and opened and closed the gates, while Emma and Kyle waved their arms from the backs of their horses and hollered to shoo the cattle through. Emma rode Ditto, who wasn’t getting as much attention as he thought he deserved while Emma was training Camaro.

  “This is not the NCHA Futurity,” her father grinned. “Move them slowly and stay back a ways from them so they don’t split up and start to run.”

  The only problems were with the younger calves; so full of themselves in the chilly sunshine that they curled their tails up over their backs and dashed around the herd in circles.

  “Let them go!” Emma’s dad called. “Their mamas will call them back before they get too far away!”

  When the last calf galloped through the gate, Kyle smiled across at Emma.

  “That was fun! You’re going to make John Wayne out of me yet, Pilgrim.”

  * * *

  The approach of Thanksgiving was an afterthought with the Futurity just a few weeks away. The marathon of cooking and cleaning went on as usual, but Emma and her mother went through the beloved routines with preoccupied minds. Emma baked an extra pecan pie, her specialty, for Kyle and his family, and took it out as Kyle was getting into his father’s old truck to go home.

  “Wow, thanks, Jennifer!” he exclaimed. “Did you bake this all by yourself? I never dreamed you had domestic tendencies.”

  “You bet I do,” Emma said, “and if you can’t be nice, I hope you break a tooth on a piece of pecan shell.”

  “You mean you put the shells in there too?” Kyle fixed her with a look of mock horror.

  Thanksgiving Day arrived in a blur of eating, dishwashing and relatives. Emma’s grandparents came, along with Uncle David and his two teenaged daughters, Sarah and Sandra, who sat in the living room in irritated silence while Emma and her mom prepared food and set the table.

  “Can we go down and look at the horses?” Sarah asked after dinner was over.

  “Sure. Emma will show them to you,” her father said.

  Emma walked with them to the horse pens and bit her tongue when she felt the urge to tell them about Miss Dellfene and the coming Futurity. She knew that they weren’t really interested in horses, anyway, and remembered her father’s comments about the embarrassment of having to admit that they had not won. Sarah and Sandra were older than Emma. Their knee high fashion boots looked out of place tromping through the dead grass around the pens. Emma hoped neither of them stepped in any horse manure. They talked to each other, not to her, and the subject of their conversation was a boy named Jimmy, who was “outta sight”. Emma felt awkward and leaned on the fence rubbing Ditto’s chin and looking at her scuffed ropers. Sarah, the oldest, glanced toward the house and then pulled a small metal bottle from the pocket of her jacket, unscrewed the cap, and sipped from the contents. She offered it to her sister, who also took a sip. From their demeanor, Emma suspected that their parents would not approve of what was in the bottle. They must have known that Emma would n
ot tell on them, and they were right. One thing she didn’t need right now was to be in the middle of a big family squabble. Suddenly her pleasure at getting away from the stuffy house and polite conversation evaporated.

  “I’m going to fill the water tubs while we’re down here,” Emma said.

  She walked off down the row of pens to turn on the hose, and busied herself with rinsing out the tubs and refilling them. Before long, she saw her cousins strolling back toward the house. They had not spoken a word to her during their visit to the horse pens, and in their company, she had felt invisible. She vowed that when she reached their age she would remember that younger kids had feelings, too.

  It was early evening when the last carload of relatives left and the house was quiet again. Emma’s mom looked around the room at all the empty glasses and wadded up napkins and sighed.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to be thankful for all this work, isn’t it?”

  Then she caught Emma’s arm and pulled her close, wrapping her arms around her in an affectionate hug.

  “One thing I am thankful for is that I’ve got you! That Sarah and Sandra are a real treat, aren’t they?”

  “That’s the truth!” Emma replied, returning the hug.

  Chapter Eleven

  Emma’s father wrote a note to her teachers on the Monday after Thanksgiving. It briefly informed them that Emma would miss school for a part of the following week because her family was going out of town. The note requested that she be given her assignments early or allowed to make them up when she returned, so her grades would not suffer. She handed the note to each teacher as she got to class. Her teachers read it and nodded without questioning her. The rest of the week she did homework assignments from supper until bedtime. She knew that Miss Dellfene would only work one time in the first go-round, which would take three days to complete. She would have some time on her hands then, but she didn’t want anything to interfere with watching the horses.

  Her father surprised her by asking Kyle if he wanted to go to the Futurity with them. He offered to pay for an extra room adjoining theirs if they stayed overnight.

  “I figure I owe you something for working nearly a year without pay,” he told Kyle. “If you want to go, I’ll go home with you to ask your parents’ permission.”

  Kyle was so astonished, he couldn’t think of a single snappy retort.

  “That would be so cool,” he finally managed, “but I’m not sure my parents will let me.”

  Emma’s father followed Kyle home that evening in his truck. When he returned, he took one look at Emma’s questioning face.

  “He can go. I promised his parents that we would keep him with us every minute while we are in Ft. Worth. His mom said that he talks about Miss Dellfene and the Futurity constantly and that going along would be the best present he could imagine. I think he’s earned the right to go. He sure has picked up a lot of knowledge about horses in the last year. I made him promise that he would not go off alone for any reason other than the bathroom.”

  The weekend dragged by and the overcast skies and freezing temperatures did nothing to dampen Emma’s enthusiasm. She packed a suitcase with jeans and several new shirts her mom had bought her and emptied the jar that held her savings, stashing the money in her suitcase. After nearly a year of waiting, it didn’t seem possible that the Futurity was about to start. On Monday morning the National Cutting Horse Association officials would draw numbers to determine the order in which the horses would work, and the first go-round would begin.

  “We won’t be able to watch Miss Dellfene’s last workout,” her father said on Saturday morning. “John is taking her to Brownwood to work in an indoor arena. He wants her to get used to strange places and the way the noise echoes in a covered arena. He’ll take her on to Ft. Worth tomorrow so she’ll have time to settle in and rest before the competition. It may be a good thing that he’s going to be there by Sunday afternoon. There’s snow in the forecast for Sunday night.”

  “Snow?” Emma said. “It never snows in Texas.”

  “Never say never,” her father replied.

  The snow hadn’t listened to the weather forecast. It started Sunday morning.

  A snowstorm was a rarity in central Texas and this one didn’t last long. The dime-sized fluffy flakes that fell in the late morning turned to tiny ice pellets by lunchtime. They formed a thin white dust on the sidewalk like powdered sugar sprinkled on top of a cake. The temperature rose in the early afternoon and the ice pellets dissolved into freezing rain. Emma’s mom put on her big, pink sweater and spent quite a bit of time gazing out the frosted windows. By four o’clock, ice began to form on tree branches and power lines.

  Emma put on her down jacket and turned up the collar. Her dad was already down at the horse pens filling the water tubs in case the pipes froze. Emma ducked her head against the freezing drizzle and hurried down to help out with the hay and feed for the horses. They were huddled in the sheds that were built into the corner of each pen. Gusts of icy wind tossed the branches of the trees, and their coating of ice made a metallic clicking sound.

  “If you can put feed in their tubs, I’ll take care of the rest,” Emma’s dad called to her across the pens. “I’ll have to drain this hose first before it freezes. Give them a little extra grain since it’s so cold.”

  Emma was already sorry she hadn’t put on a hat. The frigid rain was soaking her hair as she rushed back and forth between the feed shed and the horse pens. The latches on the gates were frozen and she had to chip the ice off each one with a rock to get them open. The horses were desperately hungry and nearly pushed her aside in their rush to get to the feed. By the time she put the bucket away and latched the feed shed, icy water was dripping down the collar of her coat and the frosty ground had penetrated the soles of her boots numbing her toes.

  “Go on,” her dad called. “I’ll finish up.”

  Gratefully, she headed for the house. The mud was beginning to develop a frozen crust that cracked when she stepped on it.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Emma. Why didn’t you wear a hat? Your ears are bright red and your hair is soaked.” her mom said when she came in the kitchen door.

  A pot of chili simmered on the stove, and Emma held her frozen hands over the pot to warm them.

  “The ground’s starting to freeze,” she said. “What will happen if the roads get icy and we can’t get to Ft. Worth tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” her mom answered. “I just hope John and the horse get there before this gets too bad. I guess the Futurity will just go on without us if we can’t get there.”

  “No,” Emma moaned. “We have to be there!”

  The ten o’clock news was almost entirely weather related. Weather advisories ran across the bottom of the screen warning of ice on bridges and overpasses, and advising people to stay off the roads except in extreme emergencies. There had already been several traffic accidents, and announcements of school closings were starting to come in.

  “We might as well try to get some sleep,” Emma’s father said. “Watching all this gloom and doom develop won’t change anything.”

  Emma had just gotten into bed when she heard the phone ringing. She got up and went out to the living room just in time to hear her dad saying, “I’m glad to hear you made it. We’ve been pretty worried. It doesn’t look like we’ll get there tomorrow; the roads are already icy here.”

  He listened for a minute and then said, “Will you try to call us when you find out the working order? There’s no point in our driving to Ft. Worth on slick roads if she’s not going to work on the first day.”

  Disappointment flooded through Emma. She had waited so long for this, and now a freak ice storm was going to ruin it. It was so unfair! She got back into bed and lay there listening to the faint clicking of sleet against her bedroom window. Sometime later she was startled out of a light sleep by the sound of her parents’ voices. Her room was dark and cold, but a faint flickering light came through the crack under the bed
room door. Shrugging into the hooded sweatshirt she had left on the foot of her bed, she followed the light to the kitchen, where two thick candles were burning in the middle of the kitchen table. Her parents sat huddled over steaming cups.

  “What are the candles for?” she asked, pulling out a chair and settling in it with her knees pulled up under the sweatshirt.

  “The electricity’s off. Ice must have knocked the wires down,” her dad replied.

  “At least we have a gas stove. Do you want some hot chocolate?” her mom asked.

  Emma nodded and got up to get a cup from the cabinet.

  “The floor is freezing,” she said, wishing she had put something on her bare feet. “How long do you think the electricity has been off?”

  “Don’t know for sure. It was still on when we went to bed about midnight.”

  Emma poured some hot chocolate into her cup from the pan on the stove. Outside the kitchen window, the ground was completely white.

  “What time is it now?” Emma asked.

  “About five,” her dad answered. “Another two hours before it’s light enough to see outside. I’ve already called the electric company, but there are so many people without power that it may take them a while to get to us.”

  Daylight came slowly under the slate gray sky. Tiny snowflakes fell sporadically and a soft blanket had formed over last night’s coating of ice. Emma dressed in several layers and went out to explore this foreign world. Frost had formed on the horses’ whiskers and their breath came in white puffs. The sidewalk and driveway were slick as a wet mirror; and the air was so cold it felt brittle.

  Emma’s father started his truck and sat listening to the radio while it warmed up and the ice melted off the windshield. Emma climbed in with him to get warm. The weather updates said that the Interstate was closed north of Waco. Road crews were spreading a mixture of salt and sand in an effort to get traffic moving again, but advised drivers to stay off the roads if possible. Most schools and businesses were closed.