Emma and the Cutting Horse

by Martha Deeringer

  “I don’t know,” said Emma. “Candi really looks different than she used to. She wears even more makeup now and her clothes don’t look real clean. Some of her friends from last year don’t hang out with her anymore. I’d feel sorry for her if she wasn’t so mean.”

  “Everybody has their troubles,” Emma’s dad said, “but the kind of trouble her family’s having rates a ten on the troubles scale.”

  Emma couldn’t stop thinking about how much peoples’ lives could change in one short year.

  * * *

  Low, gray clouds hung ominously in the sky when they returned to Ft. Worth in the late afternoon. John was waiting near Miss Dellfene’s stall. He handed Emma’s dad two business cards.

  “Here’s two fella’s who were asking if you want to sell your mare,” he said. “They wrote their phone numbers on the back of the cards and told me to have you get in touch with them after the futurity.”

  “Even if she doesn’t win?” Emma’s dad asked.

  “Yep. But she’s gonna win,” John said. “She’s full of beans today, and unless our luck runs out she should give us a great performance. I have a lot of faith in her.”

  “I’m glad you do,” Emma’s dad replied. “She doesn’t get along with many people.”

  John chuckled. “Most trainers believe that single-minded horses like her make the best cutting horses.”

  “You can call her single-minded,” Emma’s dad said, “but I always called her hard-headed.”

  In the stands, Emma looked in amazement at the size of the crowd. She was even more amazed when she noticed Sarah and Sandra coming up the steps with their father behind them.

  “What are they doing here?” Emma asked her mom as she pointed them out.

  “Uncle David called your father this morning and he told them about it. Try to be nice! After all, Uncle David is your dad’s brother.”

  “I’m not the one who has trouble being nice,” Emma muttered.

  Sarah and Sandra threaded their way down the row in front of them and took the two seats in front of Emma and Kyle. They glanced briefly at Emma and said, “Hi.” With that out of the way, they immediately turned their attentions to Kyle.

  “Are you riding the cutting horse tonight?” Sarah asked him. “Dad said that no one in the family was riding it. I really thought Emma would be riding. She lives for horses.”

  “Not me!” Kyle said. “Emma could ride her, but the trainer who has been working with her all this time is the one who’ll be riding her tonight.”

  Emma made a mental note to thank Kyle later for sticking up for her.

  Sarah and Sandra continued plying Kyle with questions about cutting horses and how much money the horse was going to win. Sarah listed the things she would buy if she won a quarter of a million dollars, beginning with a brand new red Mustang Cobra. Emma turned her attention to the arena, where the grounds crew was preparing for the final competition, but felt momentarily sorry for Kyle who was trapped into listening to Sarah’s pipedream.

  Finally, the far gate opened and a larger than usual herd was driven through the arena toward the front. As they approached, Emma noticed that they looked different from the cattle that had been used earlier in the week. They were bigger and there were quite a few gray ones and white ones in the herd this time.

  Emma’s dad leaned forward to talk to his brother in the seat in front of him.

  “John told us that they would be using a bigger herd and heavier cattle for the finals. These are the fifteen best horses out of over three hundred that started in the Futurity, so they want to really put them to the test. The light colored cattle are Charolais crosses. They have a reputation for being harder to handle than other breeds.”

  The announcer began introducing the judges and explaining the scoring system again, and the fifteen horses came in through the back gate and began to warm up. As Emma watched Miss Dellfene loping around in a circle with the other horses, she realized that what she felt when she looked at the mare was the kind of admiration she would feel for any great athlete. She had made it to the finals in spite of her small size, crooked knees, and owners who could barely afford to pay for her training, and she deserved respect for that.

  At last, the Finals began. Miss Dellfene would be the eighth horse to work, but Emma’s hands were already clammy, and she had trouble sitting still.

  “Don’t talk while the horses are working,” Kyle told Sarah and Sandra. “I have to concentrate.”

  He pulled out his catalog and his pen to record the vital statistics. In spite of her nervousness, Emma hid a smile.

  The third horse to work was a beautiful, sorrel stallion owned by the King Ranch.

  “My research shows that this is the one to beat.” Kyle told Emma. “His scores are very consistent and the man who is riding him has already won the Futurity four times.”

  The flashy stallion pulled out all the stops in his performance. He was always in exactly the right position and had astonishing athletic grace. The crowd called out their approval and the scoreboard registered 220 ½.

  “That will be hard to top,” Emma’s dad said, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair.

  “Number 8 is Miss Dellfene, owned by the Eagle Springs Ranch and ridden by John Brown,” the microphone blared.

  Emma was surprised; as she had been each time she heard the familiar names spoken by the announcer.

  The high scores of the horses that had worked before her did nothing to intimidate Miss Dellfene, and it was impossible to tell from a distance if John was nervous. His hat, the dusty gray one he always wore in winter, was pulled low, as usual, hiding his eyes. The mare’s red coat gleamed, and she entered the herd in her typical businesslike way and drove a big, red steer out into the arena. Then she outmaneuvered him with joyful exuberance and the same elegant footwork that had drawn cheers from the crowd the day before. She appeared to know which way the steer was going to turn before he did, and blocked his moves expertly. Her movements were as graceful as the dance steps of a ballerina, and her long red mane flew around her neck and head like the flowing tresses of a model on the cover of Vogue. The audience shouted in approval.

  When the red steer turned away, John took the mare back into the herd for a second cut. This time a heavy, white steer galloped into the open, and almost immediately Emma could tell that it wasn’t reacting like the other cattle. When it turned back toward the herd it crowded very close to the mare, and didn’t seem intimidated by her dancing presence. The big steer stood only a few inches shorter than the mare, and carried his head up, blowing angrily through his nose with bovine arrogance. Emma felt her hands and feet begin to tingle.

  Miss Dellfene laced her ears back along her neck, but as the steer turned and ran toward the side fence, it crowded closer and closer as though the dancing horse was no threat to him whatsoever. When they reached the side fence, the steer turned to face her, put its head down and flung itself into the few inches of space between the mare and the fence. A collective gasp issued from the crowd. Emma heard her father murmur, “Oh, my God!” Miss Dellfene leaned against the monstrous steer squashing it against the fence, but it shoved its great bulk through the tiny opening, nearly knocking the mare off her feet. She staggered sideways, pushed off balance by the steer, which squeezed past her and dashed back into the herd.

  Miss Dellfene and John took several seconds to recover, as though they didn’t believe what had just happened either. John slowly reached down and touched her on the neck and then turned her back toward the herd to get another calf out; but the buzzer sounded before she had time to separate one from the others.

  “Does that count?” Emma asked her father desperately.

  “I’m afraid so,” he answered. “The steer got past her. I don’t think it matters how he did it.” His face looked shocked.

  Emma felt Kyle put his hand on top of hers and squeeze it. His rough, callused fingers felt friendly and warm, and she turned her hand and laced her fingers through his.


  John rode to the far end of the arena with his head bent and his shoulders slumped. Some of the people in the audience clapped to express their regret.

  The scoreboard showed a score of 203.

  * * *

  Emma couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the horses. She felt numb. Sandra turned around to face Kyle.

  “Did she lose the money?” she asked.

  “Yep,” Kyle answered. He continued to hold on to Emma’s hand resolutely.

  “That is so wrong! That cow was too big. Can’t you protest or something?”

  “Nope,” Kyle said, keeping his eyes on the arena.

  At the end of the finals, Miss Dellfene placed thirteenth. She received the mandatory fifteen-point deduction for losing a calf. Emma’s dad walked down into the arena and accepted a check for six thousand and twenty-two dollars in winnings. A photographer took his picture with Miss Dellfene and John.

  “She just won at least twice as much money as we have invested in her,” Emma’s mom said.

  Somehow that knowledge didn’t make Emma feel any better.

  Waiting for Emma’s father to come back up to the stands, time crept slowly. No one could think of much to say. The awards continued for the Non-Pro Division. Finally, Emma’s cousins got up to leave with Uncle David.

  As they gathered up their jackets, Sarah turned to Emma.

  “Sorry about your bad luck,” she said.

  Life was full of surprises.

  “Thanks,” Emma said.

  When he finally returned, Emma’s father carried a box that held a large silver and gold belt buckle with a cutting horse on it and a tiny ruby mounted in the center.

  “If I wore it, I wouldn’t be able to bend over and pick up anything I dropped on the ground,” he joked as he passed it around. “John has one just like it.”

  “Where are John and Miss Dellfene?” her mom asked.

  “They’re not leaving for home until morning. John is really down about what happened. He blames himself for not recognizing that the white steer was ‘sour’, as he put it. I sure don’t blame him though. He said from the start that a big part of winning the Futurity was luck, and we just ran out of it today. She still made it farther than I ever dreamed she would.”

  “What happens now?” Emma asked.

  “I’m not sure. First, John will take her back to his place. Next weekend a man is coming from Houston to look at her. He’s bringing his vet to get an x-ray of her knees. If the vet thinks her knees are sound, he’s offered us twenty-five thousand dollars for her. He wants a horse for his teenage son to ride in youth cutting competitions.”

  “Wow,” Kyle exclaimed. “Are you going to sell her?”

  “I guess we’ll have to. She’s worth too much to just put her in a pen and look at her, and we sure don’t need a cutting horse. If we kept her, she’d probably get struck by lightning or something.”

  For a moment, disappointment coursed through Emma. Her feelings for the little mare had come a long way from the day they brought her home from the sale snorting and kicking at Ditto. She would never really love Miss Dellfene... not like she loved Ditto, but there was something so beautiful and determined beneath her plain sorrel coat, some special talent that Emma was sure she would never find again in a horse. She knew she would remember watching the mare’s ballet-like performances with her heart in her mouth for as long as she lived.

  “Let’s go home,” Emma’s mom proposed. “I’m tired and wrung out, and I want to sleep in my own bed.”

  Most of the crowd was already gone when they started down the steps toward the ground floor. Emma glanced over her shoulder at Kyle, who was bringing up the rear.

  “Sarah and Sandra think you’re ‘outta sight’,” she whispered, rolling her eyes.

  “That’s nice,” Kyle answered quietly behind her, “but I’m waiting for you, Imogene!”

  * * *

  The rest of the weekend felt like the day after Christmas. The effect of the days of unrelieved excitement took its toll, and Emma slept late Saturday morning. When she woke up, she lay curled under the covers, hesitant to face the chilly bathroom and the normal chores of the weekend. She could hear her parents talking in the kitchen although it was long past the time when her father was usually outside tending to the never-ending job of caring for livestock. Scenes from the Futurity played over and over in her head; the hoots of excitement from the crowd, and the awful hush that fell over the coliseum when the white steer pushed past Miss Dellfene and disappeared into the herd.

  Footsteps came down the hall toward her bedroom and Emma’s mother stuck her head in the door. When she saw that Emma was awake, she came into the room and opened the curtains, admitting a shaft of sunlight that hurt Emma’s eyes.

  “I made you a cup of hot chocolate, Sleeping Beauty,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pushing Emma’s hair back from her forehead. “The paper has a story about the Futurity on the front page. Want to get up and read it?”

  LOCAL HORSE MAKES GOOD, the headline shouted, and a picture of Miss Dellfene pivoting gracefully in front of a calf at the Futurity filled the entire top half of the page.

  “Must have been a slow news day,” Emma’s dad said, chuckling. A smaller picture below showed Emma’s dad and John standing in front of the mare as he accepted the belt buckle and the check for her winnings.

  Emma scanned the story, written by a reporter who had attended the finals.

  “Many veterans of cutting horse competitions felt that Miss Dellfene, owned by Justin and Stephanie Dean of the Eagle Springs Ranch just north of town, was the most talented horse at the Futurity. Unfortunately, Lady Luck threw her a curve in the finals in the form of a huge, belligerent steer. Still, it is rare for a horse owned by someone outside the cutting horse business to progress so far in this stiff competition that draws the best cutting horses from all over the world.”

  Sipping her hot chocolate, Emma felt a secret rush of pleasure; at least part of this year of wild dreams had come true. Her gaze wandered over the rest of the newspaper, lying scattered across the table. LOCAL BUSINESSMAN SENTENCED, a small headline announced. Emma pulled the section closer.

  “William T. Haynes was sentenced Friday to twenty years in the state penitentiary following his conviction on two counts of child abuse,” the article began.

  “I noticed that article, too,” Emma’s mother said. “Our own little problems certainly take on a different perspective when something like that happens.”

  * * *

  Hannah and Katie were waiting in the bleachers with extra copies of the newspaper on Monday morning. As Emma worked her way up through the crowd, several kids slapped her with high-fives as she passed.

  “Congratulations, Emma,” one of the teachers on duty in the gym commented. “You’ll have to tell us all about it.”

  As Emma turned to smile at the teacher, she heard a crash and someone bumped hard against her back. Books and papers flew in all directions. She stumbled and then caught herself, turning to find Candi on her knees, her purse and books scattered across the bleachers. Candi scrambled to gather up the contents of her purse, stuffing lipstick, folded notes, pencils and hairspray back inside. Emma reached down and picked up a handful of books and scattered papers, handing them to Candi. Their eyes met, and the din of the crowded gym faded for a moment as they stared at each other.

  “I’m...I’m sorry...about your father,” Emma said quietly, holding her gaze.

  For a fleeting instant, she thought she saw a flash of pain behind Candi’s eyes, but then it was gone, and she glanced around at the kids sitting nearby, as though searching for something to say. Then she turned to Emma again.

  “Me too, Cowgirl,” she said, as she stood up and pushed past Emma to climb up to the top row.

  Bibliography

  Travis, Byron, “Fun, Footwork and Fantastic Cash”, The Quarter Horse Journal, Volume 30, February 1978, pp 108-114

  2005 Official Handbook of Rules
and Regulations, National Cutting Horse Association, Issue no. 58

  Handbook, Twelfth Annual NCHA Cutting Horse Futurity Sale, National Cutting Horse Association, 1977

  Will Rogers Memorial Center,

  http://www.fortworthgov.org/publicevents/wrmc/index.asp

  About the Author

  Martha Deeringer writes for children and adults from the back porch of her home on a central Texas cattle ranch where she lives with her husband, two grown children and an assortment of grandchildren. Her history articles and personal essays have graced the pages of many regional and national magazines. Martha loves kids, horses, dogs, books, gardening and chocolate chip pizza. Occasionally she has embarrassed her grandchildren by writing magazine articles about them.

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/deeringerm

  Website: www.marthadeeringer.com

  Turn the page for more books available

  from Fire and Ice

  Also Available

  From Fire and Ice

  No Time For Horses

  Shamrock Stables #2

  by Shannon Kennedy

  Sixteen-year-old Vicky Miller feels overloaded since her parents filed for divorce. Her mother got the house and a new job. Her step-dad has the new car and a new girlfriend. Vicky has the five kids, her younger half-brothers and sisters who range from 18 months to 10 years old to look after and her own life now comes second to their needs and wants.

  It's been six months of house-cleaning, baby-sitting, cooking, non-stop laundry and Vicky is through waiting for her life to improve. She has plans for her sophomore year at Lincoln High and they don't include being an unpaid servant. If it takes a constant battle to attend her riding classes and complete her internship at Shamrock Stable, she's ready to fight for her goal to be the best natural horse trainer around.