A Good Horse

by Jane Smiley

  Of the five mares in the pasture, four were rather young. The fifth was sixteen years old and in foal to one of the stallions standing at the ranch. Although she was a particular favorite of Mr. Matthews, she was the least valuable of the five mares, and, fortunately, she was the first to be found. It is possible that she was left behind by the thieves, because she was discovered not far down the road, nuzzling some other mares across the fence at the far end of the ranch. She was in good shape and not injured in any way.

  In addition to Alabama Lady, the other three mares were a chestnut with a white blaze and one white foot, named Lucy Lightfoot, in foal to a Kentucky stallion named Dedicate; a gray mare named Morethanenough, in foal to Sword Dancer; and another chestnut mare with a star and an idiosyncratic snip that ran up between her nostrils, then around the side of her face, named Leonia, also in foal to Dedicate. The fourth, of course, was Alabama Lady, the largest of the five mares, in foal, as I have said, to Jaipur. That the thieves should have focused on these four mares could indicate that they knew their way around Mr. Matthews’s operation. We have pursued a number of leads in this regard, and of course, every large business must have disgruntled former employees to watch out for.

  Mario Marquez reported the theft before seven a.m., and police arrived at the scene by eight. Mr. Matthews was informed of the theft by telephone in London, England, where he had traveled on business a week earlier. When the police could make no headway in finding the four younger mares in the subsequent forty-eight hours, my firm was enlisted to help in the investigation.

  Because the older mare was found, the local police assumed that the theft was actually an act of vandalism and spent most of the next two days looking around the area for the four mares. As you may know, the area is ranch country, with few roads and lots of rangeland for cattle. It was thought likely that the mares would have taken refuge somewhere nearby, where there was hay and water. Local ranchers were enlisted to help with the search, and one man offered his small crop-dusting plane, but the mares were not found. At this point, I think it was likely that they were hidden somewhere. Perhaps you never realize how huge a landscape is until you are looking for several horses under a tree or down in a draw.

  As soon as my firm entered the investigation, we decided to treat the disappearance as a theft. The difficult question is, what could a thief do with four expensive Thoroughbred mares in foal to four expensive stallions? and the answer to that question is, not much. All Thoroughbreds have pedigrees, and all Thoroughbred pedigrees are unique. All breeding stallions and mares are registered, and a stallion and a mare can only come together one time in a single year, and so any attempt to sell these mares and these foals as themselves would result in their being identified as stolen animals. Nor could they be raced anywhere in the world, since the system of Thoroughbred racing is worldwide, and registration papers with the various jockey clubs of the various racing countries are required in order for a horse to go to the racetrack and be entered in races.

  The only hope that a thief would have of putting these mares’ offspring to use would be to use them as ringers—that is, to substitute these well-bred foals for other foals similarly marked but of lesser breeding, and to put them in races at long odds in order to make money on large bets, but although this is a possible plot, it seems like an expensive and elaborate one not guaranteed to result in rapid or certain reward. I confess that given the nature of Thoroughbred horse racing, I was perplexed as to the motive of the thieves, if, indeed, they were thieves rather than vandals.

  My firm did, of course, contact every horse auction facility and sale barn in Texas, and we also perused periodicals devoted to horse trading. On the thirtieth of October, we were alerted to the presence of a mare in an auction in West Texas, and a representative of our firm did go to that town and identify the pregnant mare as Mr. Matthews’s mare Leonia by the snip that curls around her nose.

  She was not in as good a condition as we would have wished, and the manager of the horse auction said that he had received her from a man of average height and build, with a northern accent of some sort, who said that he had run out of money and could no longer feed his horse, and so he had to sell her for what he could get. The auction manager gave him two hundred dollars, thinking that he got a good deal for a nice mare who just needed some weight. The unknown man left in his truck, with his trailer. The auction manager did not think to get his license plate number. The man did sign a paper, but he scribbled the name “Sonny Liston,” obviously not his own.

  Leonia was quickly returned to Wheatsheaf Ranch and is in good health. She produced a filly in March of this year. After her reappearance, Mr. Matthews decided to offer a reward for the return of the other mares, five hundred dollars apiece. For one week, we heard nothing of note.

  It was the fact that we found the mare Lucy Lightfoot at a farm in Arkansas that alerted us that the thieves, whoever they were, had abandoned the mares. The mare seemed to have been left by the side of Route 375 and to have wandered about before showing up at the farm of Walter Brinkhorn, near the small town of Mena. She was discovered one morning foraging in a harvested cornfield. She was in somewhat worse condition than Leonia, with an injury to her eye and another injury to her left ankle that looked like it had been caused by barbed wire. After we were satisfied that Walter Brinkhorn had indeed found the mare, we paid him his reward. Unfortunately, the mare suffered a tetanus infection from neglect of the wound to her ankle and could not be saved. She died at the ranch shortly after returning home. The foal, of course, could not be saved, either, as it was only at a gestational age of six months.

  Two days later, the third mare, the gray mare Morethanenough, also turned up, but her fate was happier than that of Lucy Lightfoot. She was found near Fort Worth, on a horse farm, in a pasture with twelve other mares. The owners had been out of town for two weeks, leaving the care of the farm to a manager and two grooms. The groom in charge of the mare pasture did not notice the addition of a thirteenth mare, especially as four of the mares were gray and one of them looked rather like Morethanenough. When they did notice her, it took several days for them to connect her with the reward notices for Mr. Matthews’s lost mare, but they turned her over readily, and there is no reason to doubt either the story of the farm owners (respected members of Dallas–Fort Worth society) or the grooms. Morethanenough was not as far along in her pregnancy as the others, and she produced a healthy colt last May.

  The remaining mare, Alabama Lady, has simply disappeared from view. My guess is that the thieves, realizing that they could not profit from their theft, drove around Texas and abandoned the mares in widely separated regions, and that the mares then foraged on their own for days or weeks. Leonia was found hundreds of miles from Lucy Lightfoot and hundreds of miles from Morethanenough. If, indeed, Alabama Lady is the mare that you purchased from By Golly Horse Sales, then that location is, once again, hundreds of miles from both Wheatsheaf Ranch and the locations where the other mares were found.

  Records at By Golly Horse Sales indicate that a brown mare was purchased on November 6 from a man who found her in Cheyenne and Arapaho country. She was in bad shape, so he sold her to By Golly Horse Sales for $125. The young man who received the horse and paid for her did not remember to ask for a receipt for the cash he paid, so there is no record of who sold her to By Golly. She was turned out with the other mares, and the young man does not remember anything specific about her, except that “she seemed real hungry and thirsty.” Once she was turned out with the other twenty mares at the horse sales, no one noticed her in particular. She was one of four brown mares with no white markings. These were dispersed by the end of November.

  I have since driven around the Cheyenne and Arapaho country. As you may know, that area is arid and in many ways desolate, with few towns. I did not expect to find the man who sold the horse to By Golly Horse Sales, and I did not find him. My work on another investigation may bring me to California in the near future. If so, I would like
to visit you at your ranch and discuss your memories of Alabama Lady at the time when you saw her at By Golly Horse Sales and bought her. I would also like to have a look at her colt. I hope that this is acceptable to you. Please let me know.

  Yours truly,

  Howard W. Brandt

  While I was reading this letter, Mom was finishing cooking dinner—macaroni and cheese. She didn’t make me set the table; she just let me read the letter. When I was through, I put the pages together and laid them on the sideboard. I thought it was sad, thinking of those mares being driven all around the countryside, and maybe not fed, and then just being let go, one by one, far away from each other so they didn’t even have friends. I had read a book once in which a girl wants a horse, so she tames a white mare who happens to be running around the neighborhood of her family farm. I must have been ten when I read that book. When I was ten, I thought the part that was hard to believe was that if she wanted a horse and she lived on a farm, why didn’t she just go to a horse auction and buy one? But now that I was thirteen, I knew that not everyone can have a horse, even if they live on a farm. Now I thought the part that was hard to believe was that the horse would be by herself, that she would not want to make friends and be taken into the barn and given some hay and a brushing.

  Thinking about that book made me think about Brown Jewel, and thinking about Brown Jewel made me think about that book—that lonely horse running around, not really knowing what to do.

  When we sat down at the table, I asked Daddy what the Cheyenne and Arapaho country was like. He said, “Well, it’s plains. Arid and dry. Good farming country in places, though. Good wheat country.”

  “But if Brown Jewel was lost there—”

  “Well, maybe she wasn’t lost for very long.”

  “If they stole her on October fifteenth, and the first mare was found before October thirtieth, then they could have been abandoned for two or three weeks.”

  “They could have,” said Daddy. “But by the time I saw her, she didn’t look as thin as that. I don’t know that she got the kind of feed we would give her, but she must have gotten something.”

  “Yes,” said Mom. “I don’t think you should think of her as wandering around lost. Besides, we don’t know that the mare we had was the mare that was lost. Mr. Brandt says that a couple of times. Our mare could have been just a mare that a rancher had and needed to get rid of, like all the others we find. Like Black George and Happy. The world is full of people who realize all of a sudden that they have too many horses.”

  I almost said, But what about the cowlick? I didn’t say that. It seemed like Mom and Daddy were interested in the mare, but that they really, really were not sure that Pearl was this Alabama Lady, while I was really, really sure that Pearl was Alabama Lady and Jack was the son of Jaipur. I didn’t want to be sure of that, but I was.

  But I also didn’t want to persuade them that what I thought was true, and after this, I shut up, and we talked about taking Black George out to the stable for a training session in a week, when we had a day off school for teacher training.

  I knew about Oklahoma—or I knew about the part of Oklahoma where my grandparents lived, which was more to the east, and pretty green, with lots of cricks and rivers, and much more rain than we had in California, at least in good times. Even though my father and his brothers grew up ranching, riding, and roping cattle, not everyone they knew had ranches—some had farms and grew crops, and what you did depended a little on what sort of land you had and a little on what you liked to grow. My grandparents Lovitt sometimes talked about the Dust Bowl, when it seemed like all their neighbors left Oklahoma for somewhere else, and they would say, “Well, it was bad, but we survived it, and thank the Lord for that.” My uncle Luke liked to tease Daddy by saying that the only reason he moved to California was that he had missed the train the first time around because he was only a baby when it left before, and he was too little to climb the step. Mom’s family was from farther east, really green country with woods, almost to the Ozark Mountains, and the way Daddy teased her was to say that her grandfather never did realize that he’d got out of Missouri all the way to Oklahoma—he died thinking he was still twenty miles from Springfield. All of these things were completely familiar to me.

  After supper, I did my usual things—I studied le subjonctif—“J’aimerais que vous m’appeliez demain,” which was, “I would like for you to do something or other tomorrow.” I read about the Ohio River Valley and Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. I looked at pictures of the circulatory system. And I solved eighteen math problems, such as “John is two years older than three times Joe’s age. If Joe is x years old, how would you calculate John’s age?” I didn’t have to read Julius Caesar because we were going to finish that Saturday at the Goldmans’ house, and actually, I was looking forward to that.

  It was a cool night, so I put on my jacket and went out to say goodnight to Jack, Black George, Happy, and Sprinkles. Lester was gone—he had left that day. The gelding pasture looked a little empty without his bright buckskin beauty. By the time I got to bed, I thought I had forgotten completely about that letter—I didn’t feel bad and I went right to sleep, but in the middle of the night, I dreamt about Pearl.

  She was on the hillside above the ranch, not far from where the cows had broken through the fence. Even though I knew that she was there, I also saw that the hillside was much bigger than usual—it was a real mountain, like in the sierras or something. Pearl was crossing it, not going up or down, but making her way along it, stopping from time to time to taste the grass. The grass was brown and thin, almost just dirt. She was above the gelding pasture, in a way, but instead of our geldings in it, there was just the stubble of some harvested crop. In the dream, I knew it was “peat,” but I had no idea what “peat” was—something not very edible, since Pearl didn’t even try to get to it. She stopped under a tree, but the tree got smaller, so she walked on. I knew in the dream that there wasn’t any water anywhere, and that she was thirsty—she hadn’t had water in three weeks. A voice that sounded like mine in the dream said that that was impossible, that she couldn’t be walking if she hadn’t had water in three weeks, and then Mom’s voice said, “Well, you’d be surprised.”

  She walked, and then she stumbled and went to her knees, and then she got up and walked again, but she wasn’t getting anywhere—the hill just seemed to go on and on. In the dream, I thought she should come down the hill and get some water at our place, but there was no way to tell Pearl this. As I watched her in the dream, I didn’t see anything else—no cows, no other horses, no people, and no dogs or coyotes—no one. And then she fell again, but this time she rolled down the hill, she rolled and rolled over and over (though I don’t know how a horse could do that—it was as if she were a stuffed animal), and I was shocked and upset. At the bottom of the hill, she stopped rolling, and she lay there, and as she lay there, she looked exactly the way she had when we found her the day she died, stretched out on the ground, the hair rubbed off her forehead, her tongue hanging out of her mouth just a little bit, and her eyes half closed. Jack wasn’t born, or wasn’t around, or something. She was completely alone.

  I woke up from this dream crying. I was heaving deep breaths, and the tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I could hear myself and feel how wet my face was, and it took me a few minutes (I don’t know how many) to realize that it was a dream. I wiped my face with the corner of my sheet.

  My clock read four a.m. I was still taking deep breaths. Pearl lying there was so in my head that I felt like I had to get up and look out the window, try and look across the gelding pasture and just see for myself whether she was really not there. But actually getting up and checking seemed bad, like giving in to temptation, so I lay there with my arms outside the covers, holding myself in the bed, and I told myself that my dream of Pearl had nothing to do with what had happened to her, really. There was no way of knowing what had happened to her, or rather, what had happened to her was that Daddy bought her,
and she came to us, and for almost two months, she had plenty to eat and other horses to be with and us, Daddy, Mom, and me, who treated her kindly and were just waiting for things with the other horses to slow down before riding her. But then I remembered that what really happened to her was that she gave birth and a month later colicked and died, and we had been unable to save her or even to help her, and then I felt like no time had really passed since that day, and then I was crying again.

  So now I did get up, and I went to the window and looked out. There was no moon, and I couldn’t see the horses except as dark shapes not very distinguishable from other dark shapes, so I opened the window, and in rolled the fragrance of the ranch—of the wind off the hillside, of the paddocks and the horses, of some additional freshness that I couldn’t identify. It was cool—or cold—and it woke me up. I felt Pearl go out of my head, and I knew that rolling down the hill hadn’t happened. A horse whinnied, and then another one whinnied back, then another one snorted and another one groaned the way horses do when they are getting up from lying down. Sure enough, I could just make out one of the horses in the gelding pasture pulling himself to his feet and then shaking himself off and blowing air out of his nostrils. He must have been asleep. Just looking at the geldings in the pasture, all of them doing this and that, no big deal, made me feel calmer. It was now almost four-thirty. I yawned and went back to bed.

  Oxer Jump