A Good Horse

by Jane Smiley

  “Oh my goodness,” said Jane. “That boot is killing you! Why didn’t you say anything?” She led me over to the mounting block and sat me down, then started pulling off the boot. It wasn’t easy, and once Rodney had put Black George in the stall, he had to help. It felt like they were pulling off my foot. They pressed on the toe, then pulled on the toe, then wobbled the heel, then pressed on the toes, then pulled on the heel. Rodney finally stood with his back to me, bending over and holding the heel. Then he said, “Put yer foot right on me arse, lass, and give me a push.”

  Jane said, “Rodney!” But she laughed.

  I did what he told me, and he managed to pull the boot off. Then Jane slipped off the stocking, unbuttoned my breeches leg, and began to rub my calf. It started to tingle and then started to burn, and then Rodney started slapping the bottom of my foot and rubbing my ankle. First it felt normal, and then the muscle down the side of my leg started to hurt. Miss Slater said, “You need to walk around. Get the circulation moving! I’ll go to the office and get your things.” While she was doing this, Rodney got Black George out of the stall and took him over to the hose. There was something very nice about sitting on the mounting block and having someone else take care of the horse. I thought I could get used to that really quickly.

  Jane came back with my jodhpur boots and the World War II twill jodhpurs, and I went into Black George’s stall and changed. Then I walked around, as she had told me to do, until my leg was no longer throbbing, just aching a little bit. Then she said, “Abby, you must be starving,” and took me to the food tent, where she bought me a cheeseburger and fries and that Coke that I had had in the back of my mind since breakfast. Mom and Daddy and I were not the kind of people who went to the food tent—we were the kind of people who packed along some sandwiches and fruit and drank from the drinking fountain—so sitting in the food tent with a juicy cheeseburger and some very crisp fries was fun. I said, “Thank you for everything, M—Jane, but I am a little afraid of getting used to this.”

  “You mean, getting to be like Sophia Rosebury. I know. That girl hasn’t cleaned a stall in her life.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean that, exactly, only that if I get used to this, then—” But at that moment I thought about my regular life, the life of the geldings and the mares and rubbing down Jack and having lessons from Jem Jarrow and riding down to the crick and up to the cows and calves, and I realized that this was fun, but a whole life of it wouldn’t be. So I said, “You should come visit us sometime.”

  “Try it your way? I would like that. I could wear jeans instead of breeches and high boots all the time.”

  I nodded. Then I said, “Does Rodney ride?”

  “Oh, my dear. Makes your hair stand on end. He’ll ride anything. I think he was born riding chasers in Newmarket.”

  “Chasers?”

  “Steeplechasers. They race over jumps.”

  “Like in National Velvet.”

  “Exactly. Did you like that book?”

  “I liked the parts I understood. I couldn’t picture some of it.”

  “Very English. Did you see the movie?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t see movies or have a TV.”

  “Well, the riding parts were filmed right around here. That was twenty years ago, but you can tell. The sunlight is not like England, that’s for sure. Anyway, Rodney had a bad accident and lost his nerve a bit, so Colonel Hawkins got him over here to do something different.”

  “He seems nice.”

  “It’s been two years and he still rides, but I don’t know if he’ll ever race over fences again. Anyway, here’s a Rodney story. There’s a lady who has a stud farm out in the valley. She breeds racehorses. She had a very tough two-year-old that they had not been able to break, and her farm manager happened to meet Rodney at a party. The two of them had had a lot to drink, and Rodney started to boast about how he could break anything, horses in England are a lot tougher than in California, et cetera. Then he woke up the next morning to a phone call taking him up on his boast—which he could not remember, in fact. But he got up and went out there.

  “They had the colt in a stall. Rodney got on him in the stall, and at once, the colt leapt up and bashed Rodney’s head into the ceiling. Fortunately, he had his hard hat on, but it sort of knocked him out and pushed the hard hat so far down on his head that he couldn’t get it off. Then the horse leapt forward and rammed his own head into the front wall of the stall, and knocked himself out—he went to his knees and sort of reeled around, but he didn’t fall over. A minute or so later, both Rodney and the horse came to, and Rodney was still sitting on the horse. After that, the horse was broke—Rodney stayed on, the horse was convinced, and he was good. Rodney has been a little more cautious since then, I must say.”

  I was impressed by this story—it reminded me of Uncle Luke. I said, “That lady should get to know Jem Jarrow.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He helps us with the difficult horses. He lives on a ranch.”

  “Hmm.” But I could see that she had lost interest already.

  After we threw our paper plates into the trash can, Jane said, “What time do you expect your dad?”

  “Church is over about four. Sometimes, if the singing is really good, they go to almost five.” Suddenly, I hoped that the singing would not be really good today. It made me sad to miss it. Jane looked at me for a long moment, then said, “How many hours are you at church on Sunday?”

  “About seven, including dinner. Dinner takes about two hours.”

  “I never heard of that before.” She looked at me and then at her watch. We walked back to the stall in silence, and I did wonder what I was going to do for the rest of the afternoon. I guessed I would wander around, looking at the horse show. She said, “Want to go in another class?”

  “Do I have to wear the boots?”

  “Oh no. You are a real hero for wearing that boot. I had no idea. No. You can wear your own boots.”

  “What kind of class?”

  “A jumping class, not a hunter class. Just to try it out. A more twisty course, and bigger, but some horses like it better because it’s more interesting. Come on over here. I’ll show you.”

  We went to a ring I had seen from afar but hadn’t really looked at. It was bigger and had a few trees growing right in it. The jumps, I have to say, were more like the ones Daddy had set up for Black George at home—though no stuffed animals and no rows of books. But they were much more lively and interesting than the jumps I had been jumping, with different kinds of gates and brush, and several things set together. The other thing was that there were a lot of them in the ring. While we were standing there, a class began. The first rider was a man on a big bay. He walked into the ring and immediately started to trot. He made his circle and then, as far as I could tell, jumped every single jump from a different direction. And the course was longer—ten jumps rather than eight. The horse did not jump nicely at all—his head was up and his eye was rolling. He went fast and made tight turns. His tail waved this way and that, and even, over one jump, flipped upward. I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not, but he did get around without a refusal or a knockdown. Afterward, the announcer announced that he had no penalties and he was within the time. Then the next person went, a woman on a nice paint horse. They had a knockdown, for four faults.

  After they came out of the ring, I said, “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Oh, Abby!” exclaimed Jane. “But doesn’t it look like fun?”

  “If I could find the way around, it might be fun.”

  “Well, let’s see what happens in the jump-off.”

  The jump-off, it turned out, was when the horses who had no faults and were within the time had to come in, one by one, and jump another, shorter round, this time against the clock. If I had thought that the first horse was going fast and rolling his eye the first time I saw him, then that was nothing compared to the way he went the second time. I didn’t see how the rider could stay
on, actually, the turns were so tight, but he crouched there with his legs clamped to the horse’s sides and his arms and hands following every move of the horse’s head and neck. Sometimes, it seemed as though the horse had only one or two strides to gather himself and jump the jump. But it was as if he were on springs. After the last jump, though, the rider sat up, let go of the rein, and walked out of the ring as if they had just been strolling about. That was what impressed me. Jane said, “That’s Saint Joe. He’s famous. He was on a Nations Cup team seven or eight years ago, but he’s, what, nineteen or twenty now. He still likes it, though. A course like this is easy for him after what he used to do. He was always best in the jump-off. Sometimes a little careless in the first round.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  The next horse in the jump-off had a knockdown, and the third horse was clean, but two and a half seconds slower. Jane said, “Should have gone to the next jump in front of that oxer, not around it. Distance is time in show jumping. Let’s get Black George out.”

  I must have gone white, or something like that, because she laughed and said, “No, Abby. I changed my mind. I’m not going to enter you in a class like this. But I’m glad you saw it. This is where the glory is if you have a great jumper. I do so want to know what his pedigree is.”

  “We don’t even know what his breed is.”

  “A mix, maybe, but lots of Thoroughbred, judging by his looks. Let’s get him out for a bit. But no class.”

  I relaxed. The show went back to looking colorful and fun. When we started walking back to the barn, I said, “You should see our foal, Jack. He’s—Well, the mare came to us pregnant, without Daddy knowing, and now they’re saying she was stolen from a ranch in Texas, and that she was in foal to a horse named Jaipur. A private detective named Brandt has been sending us letters.”

  “Jaipur!” She stopped, turned, and looked at me. “He won the Belmont Stakes three years ago! And the Travers. He won the Travers by a nose, and it was in course record time!”

  “But what if they take him back from us?”

  As we turned down the aisle toward Black George’s stall, she stopped and looked at me, then put her hands on my shoulders and said, “All of these things are very hard to prove. Really, it is so hard to tell two horses apart, unless they have quite distinctive markings.”

  “Jack doesn’t have any markings at all.”

  “Well, then, no doubt things will be fine. My goodness, Abby, you and your father are the most mysterious horse people I ever met! It’s like you pull these wonderful rabbits out of your hat. You know no one, you drive an old truck and trailer, you live nowhere, and you’ve got horses people like Letitia Merton would kill to have. It’s very fun and interesting!” She laughed and exclaimed again, “Jaipur!”

  I could see Rodney, his cap pushed back on his head, sitting outside Black George’s stall, cleaning tack. I was going to say more—I always liked to talk about Jack—but all of a sudden I didn’t want to. “Goodness me,” Jane said to herself. Rodney glanced at her.

  Even though Black George was eating his hay, as soon as he saw us, he came to the door and put his head over and bumped me with his nose. There were some carrots in a bucket of water nearby, and I got one and fed it to him. He nodded his head while he ate it, which made me laugh. I thought I would like to get on him, if only to be around someone that I was real friends with. It seemed like days since I’d left home, even though it was only six or seven hours. I opened the stall door to get him out, but Rodney was there ahead of me. He said, “I’ll do it, lass. You never know what trouble I’m going to get into if I don’t keep busy.” He laughed.

  Jane said, “Isn’t that the truth.” But she was grinning. Once Black George was tacked up, I put on my hard hat and Rodney threw me into the saddle again—I was expecting the launch, so I landed a little better this time—and I followed Jane. We went past the hunter rings and the jumper ring we had visited, and came to a ring that looked like a show ring—all sorts of jumps were set up—but was not being used that day, though I had seen horses in it the day before.

  Jane walked with me to the gate, then leaned her elbows on the fence while I went in. Black George seemed to be happy he was out of his stall—without me asking, he went up into a big, happy trot, and we trotted round the ring on a fairly loose rein, big strides, weaving in and out around the jumps. I picked up the reins and asked him to bend around those turns, and he did that, no problem. We trotted past the judge’s stand (no judge) and a square bank, like the one on the outside course, only smaller. One side of the bank was about six inches higher than the other side—it was a neat little jump, and I thought it would be fun to try it. There were also coops and brushes and gates and oxers—both the kind where the back pole is higher than the front and the kind where the two poles are the same height. There was also a jump made of three poles, where the center pole was higher and the two side poles were lower. This was called a hogback, according to Jane. There was also a painted wall and something that looked like a quarter of a giant oil drum, called a “rolltop.”

  I trotted around and then cantered around, and then I stopped in front of Jane. She said, “I think Black George needs to have some fun.”

  This immediately made me think of that big ditch on the outside course, which had been, yes, fun in its scary way. My heart thumped, just once. But then, Jane pointed me down over a vertical made of natural poles, and it was just the same as usual, and my heart went back to its regular okeydoke sort of beat. There was no course to remember—down over the vertical, back up over the oxer, around and over the wall, then up and down the bank (which was just about the same height as jumping into and out of the crick at the bottom of the mare pasture), and so forth. Every so often, she went to the jumps and raised them a hole or two. Black George cantered everything, even the hogback, which seemed scary as we were heading toward it but not at all scary as we were going over it. Around and around.

  The most fun was an in-and-out, two strides, made of a brush and then a gate. Jane raised the poles on top of these a couple of times. The key was to keep my heels down and stay still all the way to the in-and-out and then through it and away. My reins were fairly short, and so I could feel Black George gather himself under me, but the jump itself was smooth. I tried to remember all my rules—ride the path, not the jump; go to the center of the fence; look where you’re going; don’t lean into the turns. But mostly, I concentrated on looking up and keeping my heels down.

  Finally, she waved me down to a walk. I couldn’t tell how long we’d been jumping. In a way, it seemed like forever, and in a way, it seemed like no time at all. But even though I wasn’t panting, and Black George wasn’t panting, Jane was. She said, “My goodness, Abby. That horse makes these look easy as pie.”

  I said, “How high are they?”

  I shouldn’t have asked.

  She pointed to the in-and-out. “The brush is four feet. The gate a little over.”

  My heart started thumping again. I wished she hadn’t told me. I said, “You’re kidding me, right? I don’t think he’s ever jumped over three feet before.”

  “Abby! He doesn’t care how high it is. Some horses are like that. They’re picky about how it looks or how they get to it, or how fast or slow they’re going, but the height doesn’t matter. You know that horse Jaipur?”

  I nodded.

  “His sire is a horse named Nasrullah. One of Nasrullah’s first sons, oh goodness, twelve or thirteen years ago now, was a horse named Independence. He must not have been much of a racehorse, so he ended up a chaser. He won some big steeplechases and made some track records. He would just jump anything, anything, and with joy. We don’t know where that comes from, but once I had a horse who, if you put him out in a field with jumps, he would go jump them. Not to get out of the field or for any reason. Just because he liked it.” She walked around with me as she said this.

  I was still nervous. Four feet! I knew I would tell Daddy, and he would be impressed
, and I knew I would tell Mom, and she would be upset. I was upset.

  But I was excited, too. Just the way I had felt after the big water jump—the jump itself didn’t scare me, but knowing that it was fifteen feet wide did. Jane went over and sat on the bank while I finished walking Black George around. I could see her staring at us, then she got out a little notebook and a pen and started writing things down.

  When we were cooled out, I got off and led Black George back to his stall. As we were walking along, she said, “Why did you name him Black George? That sounds like a pirate’s name, and he’s so sweet.”

  “We used to call all the horses George or Jewel, because Daddy didn’t want us to get attached to them. So that was his name after we got him. Then I renamed all the others, but I still liked that name.”

  “I think you should name him Heart of Gold, because that’s what he has.”

  Since I didn’t have a watch, I had no idea what time it was, but as we were walking past the rings, I could see that the hunters were finished in our ring—the judge had left the judging stand—and the jumpers were getting their championship ribbons. At the show barns, trailers and trucks were pulled up, with their ramps down and their doors open. Various piles of tack trunks and other pieces of equipment were waiting to be loaded. I had no idea when Daddy would show up, but when we were almost to the barn, I saw him. There he was, over in the parking lot, hitching up the trailer. Mom was backing up the truck. I saw him raise his hand and the truck stopped, and he started to crank the trailer hitch down over the ball that stuck out from the back of the truck. I was really glad to see them. And Black George was, too. He whinnied loud and clear. Even though Daddy would not have called this love, I thought it was.

  Saddle Bag

  Mounting Block

  Stall Door

  Chapter 8

  AFTER THEY HAD THE TRAILER HITCHED UP, IT TOOK DADDY and Mom a while to find a spot. Fortunately, we didn’t have much to load—Black George didn’t even have a blanket and had been using one of Jane’s. But there was so much stuff lying around, and so many people and horses everywhere, that Rodney decided he had better bring the horse out. I carried my saddle and bridle. Even though I hadn’t worn my raincoat since morning, I had it on now because it had started to drizzle. Rodney led Black George up to the back of the trailer, and then it was funny—he and Daddy did a little dance about who would load the horse. They looked each other right in the eye, and you could almost see their backs go up—it was like watching two dogs sizing each other up. Finally, Rodney said, “There ya go, guv’nor” as he patted Black George on the rump in a way that suggested that he was better friends with the horse than Daddy was.