Shaper

by Jessie Haas

  “Good! Jackpot!” David said, and walked toward the step, beckoning with one finger for Julia to follow.

  He sat beside Louise, squashing her over tight against Chad. Thank you, David!

  “Lecture,” he said, and looked around at all of them. “Some bad stuff has been going on with this horse, I gather—no, no!” He held up his hand to silence Julia. She subsided miserably. “Look at him!”

  Tiger stood with his head low. His eyes were wide and thoughtful. “He’s fine,” David said. “He’s going to be fine.”

  “But I’ve—”

  “You’ve been rough with him.” David sounded exceptionally gentle. “You were like a drowning person. They’re very dangerous, people who are drowning.”

  Julia bowed her head. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  David said, “He likes and trusts you, by and large, because by and large you bring good things. Some things make you crazy, that’s all. He jigs on the way home; you can’t stop him, and you feel helpless. He only knows that going home gets you upset. That makes him nervous, so he jigs—see? Like a dog chasing its tail.”

  Julia gulped back a sob. “But I’ve ruined him, haven’t I? Horses remember the bad things forever!”

  “Nonsense! A horse is just as relieved as anyone else to have a misunderstanding cleared up.”

  “Really?”

  “A horse remembers a blow when the blow stays latent in the handler. But you’re going to change, and he’ll be the first to notice.”

  “I’ve tried—”

  “This is not about trying,” David said. “This is not about whether or not you’re a good person. It’s about know-how. When things go wrong, you’re going to stop and think because thinking’s going to work for you. You’ll have a toolbox full of options that will let you do anything with this horse—as long as you’re willing to start here, where you are.”

  For a guy who doesn’t believe in words … Chad meant to say it aloud, but perhaps he didn’t. Moments later Louise’s whisper seared into his head. “Chad! Wake up!”

  Chad jerked upright, eyes flying open. Jeep’s pickup had just passed the driveway. The brake lights glowed a moment but blinked out almost immediately.

  CHAPTER

  25

  CHAD WALKED UP the hill, going slower and slower. The air felt thick, like syrup. It forced down his eyelids. He dragged himself up the deck stairs, up the inside stairs, and collapsed diagonally across his bed.

  When he awoke, the light was different, and he felt ravenous. He went downstairs to make a sandwich. There on the table was the flashlight he’d left in Jeep’s barn. In the cellar, where they packed lightbulbs for shipping, he heard his parents’ agitated voices.

  He walked with his sandwich to the sliding glass door and looked out. Above the level of Queenie’s nose and Sky’s hands the glass was clean. He could see the garden, the heap of rocks beneath which the coon was buried, and, not far from it, Shep’s grave. Shot and buried, while Chad tried to paint a clump of sumacs. He would never see Shep again, and he’d never had a last look. He’d never be able to paint or draw or pat Shep or say his name and meet the dog’s warm eyes.

  Usually his heart hurt when he thought that. Right now it was just true. His breath made a cloud on the glass door. He pulled it open and, as he stepped out, heard a familiar sound from below, at the barn. Click!

  Julia had brought home the milk jug. Tiger nudged it eagerly, swung his head. Julia fed him something and explained to Jeep, “He’s learning to target on this, and then I can teach him to target longer and longer, so he’ll stand tied.”

  Tiger nudged the jug. Jeep said, “Figured out which button to push, hasn’t he?” Chad couldn’t see Jeep’s face, but he heard the smile. Jeep’s hand cupped Queenie’s head, his fingers massaged the root of her ear. Ginger, in the driver’s seat of Jeep’s truck, looked intently out the window. To his surprise Chad knew exactly how she felt: jealous.

  He opened his mouth to call Queenie and couldn’t force his voice out, didn’t want to announce his presence. Jeep put a hand on Julia’s shoulder, that quick, hard squeeze that almost hurt. Chad remembered it, the without-words way Jeep reconnected.

  Jeep turned toward his truck now. Chad made himself stay where he was. Jeep’s glasses glinted as he looked up and away. No hesitation, no pause to consider, as there had been for months. Chad understood. Jeep had given up on him. “Let him go,” Jeep had said last night, his words blurred by no teeth, and Helen had put her arm around him.

  When he was small enough that it was a big deal to stay overnight at the farm, one of the great treats had been seeing Jeep take his teeth out at night, put them in a glass of water beside the bed. Chad remembered the clear water, the grinning teeth, so different from Jeep’s real smile. Tiny bubbles rose from the dentures, and he used to lie beside Jeep and Helen in the early mornings, gazing at them.

  He had learned a lot about Jeep since those days. Out of the hard upbringing had grown a hard man, one who could shoot the creatures he loved. Jeep loved every pig and every steer, and he’d loved Shep, and still he could get his gun off the window rack and …

  That was too hard to think about. That brought back the iron grip of pain. Chad breathed into it, as the truck started below, as a dog came upstairs and around the corner.

  Queenie. Not Shep. Not ever—

  “You know what?” he said to himself. Queenie’s big ears pricked, and her eyes met his. “You’re trying to make yourself feel bad! How sick is that?” He bent to welcome the dog he did have.

  It was hard to know where to be right now. His job was on hold while David worked with Julia, who had the urgent near-term goal of not dying in the show ring at the county fair next Saturday.

  The fair was almost the end of August. One week later Louise would go.

  Chad waited, mornings, to see if she would come play with Sky. Twice she did, and he stayed home, too, worked on Sky’s door, and listened to the ambush game. Then he’d walk down the hill with her or show her another trail. The days she stayed home Chad went down to the white house to join her in watching Julia and Tiger. He made guesses about what was going on. Louise would only answer “hotter” or “colder,” but at home Julia explained it all fully.

  “His ear thing,” she told Mom. “I was always trying to hold his ear, so of course he wouldn’t let me! David says just touch it for a second, just brush it, so it’s no big deal. I mean, I’m touching his ear for a second, but I’m not going to keep it, so he lets me.”

  “David said, ‘Ride where you can, not where you can’t,’” she told Jeep. “It’s what John Lyons, the horse trainer, says. So I’m riding here in the pasture right now, and it’s such a relief!”

  “The click stops the behavior,” she explained to Gib. “It’s so great. I click him for a nice slow canter, and he’ll automatically stop to get his treat!”

  “But you want him to keep cantering,” Gib said. “Right?”

  “Eventually, but I don’t have to get there all at once.”

  “All along,” she said to Chess on the telephone, “I’ve been watching for things he’s doing wrong. Now I look for what he’s doing right. It’s so incredible!”

  Chad had been learning these concepts half the summer and had never brought a word of it home. Julia’d been at it less than a week.

  But that was what Julia did: amplify things. Not even tie-dye was enough for her. She had to add polka dots and purple fringe. “What a pain!” Chad said to himself, crouching to paint cobblestones on Sky’s door. He more or less expected this attitude from himself. But when Louise didn’t come up Friday morning, he was glad to go down again and see what they were doing.

  It involved riding circles in the pasture. That seemed to be what riders did with horses: go in circles. Tiger was supposed to carry his head lower, a posture that automatically calmed him.

  After a while Louise got on Rocky bareback; Chad was allowed to make a stirrup with his hands so she could mount. He took her whol
e weight for a moment, and her leg brushed his cheek. Then she rode Rocky up behind Tiger at various paces, and Tiger got clicked if he stayed calm.

  Jeep should be here. Chad couldn’t help thinking that. Jeep would be fascinated, and relieved to see Julia making progress. But he wouldn’t come. He was never in the same place Chad was, these days. Only now could Chad see how continually Jeep had tried, one way and another, to mend the breach between them.

  No more. Let him go, Jeep had said, and he was doing that.

  “I think you’ll live!” David said at the end of the session. “If we had another week, you might even win a ribbon!”

  “Living is enough!” Julia said, her face tightening as she thought about tomorrow.

  What about after the fair? Chad wondered, startled. Would David want to go on working with Julia? He probably ought to, but what about Chad’s job? What about Queenie? Chad was progressing on his own, teaching her to follow her target stick to the left, to the right, or in a complete circle around him, but what for? He wanted to do something with her, the way he wanted to paint when he saw something beautiful. She was too good not to do something with. But what? He couldn’t see either of them at an obedience trial; he had no livestock for her to herd; he couldn’t make her into a rescue dog or a drug sniffer.

  Too early to worry, he decided, taking this moment while the others talked to scratch Tiger’s neck. He’d get Julia through the fair, live through Louise’s departure, and then see where that left them all.

  He and Julia walked home, not talking. Jeep passed, going downhill, and nodded. The darkened glasses made it impossible to tell if Chad was included in the greeting, or only Julia. Sky waved from the seat beside Jeep; going out to lunch again.

  That had been awfully convenient, Chad realized suddenly. Almost too convenient. Had Mom asked? Or did Jeep just know how much Chad had needed Sky out of the house?

  Would Jeep do that?

  The moment he knew to ask the question, Chad knew the answer. Jeep would do anything, for any of them. It was an unspoken constant of their lives. They could count on Jeep. Who had bought a horse for Julia after all? And when Sky was born, and Mom was exhausted and Gib worried and Julia Julia, and there was no space for Chad anywhere in the family, it was Jeep who had rescued him, had him up at the farm every single day working on something, as if his help were essential.

  And that meant … didn’t that mean—

  “Listen,” he said to Julia. “Listen. What happened?” She looked at him in confusion. “When Shep …”

  Julia’s face went yellow as the blood drained from under her tan. She stopped walking. “We’ve told you what happened,” she said in a thin voice. “We’ve told you a hundred times.”

  “But … was Jeep … right? Did he do the right thing?”

  Julia closed her eyes. “God. Yes. He did the right thing.”

  “But was Shep—”

  Julia shook her head, the tiniest shake, barely visible. “Don’t ask, Chad. Don’t. He was … alive, and he shouldn’t have been. I don’t know if he really … he was faraway already, but he was breathing, and—” Julia swallowed. “It was horrible. One minute he was there, the way he always was, and then … He looked the wrong way. He was so smart, but just that one time he looked the wrong way.”

  For a moment Chad could see it: the dark red tailless dog standing in the road, head turned, robust and intelligent and full of life. He could hear a car coming, and he couldn’t see what happened next.

  Julia said. “Jeep cried. After he did it. He sat on the truck bumper … And the man cried. The driver. But Jeep … and then he put Shep in the truck. ‘I don’t want Chad to see this,’ he said.”

  Chad looked around for something to sit on. The stone wall was too faraway. He collapsed at the edge of the ditch, and Queenie came up, wagging slightly. He wrapped his arms around her. “God. God … Jeep cried?”

  “I’m so sorry, Chad. Shep caught up with me, and … it was always all right before. I’m sorry …”

  “He could open the door,” Chad said. His voice sounded dull to him. “I should have taken him with me. But he drank the paint water. Remember when he came home with a blue tongue?”

  Julia gave a hiccup of laughter. Chad hugged Queenie tighter, into the wound in his heart. He bowed his head on top of hers. After a moment he heard Tiger’s hooves crunch and felt Julia’s hand awkward on his back.

  He could look up and blink, say something light, and put this all back in its box. Or he could be like Jeep. Just cry. “God,” he said, and then he didn’t have a choice anymore.

  CHAPTER

  26

  THEY ARRIVED EARLY at the fairgrounds. Jeep’s truck rumbled softly over the grass near the horse show ring. Gib parked the van beside it. Chad got out into the cool morning air, feeling that familiar tingle of fair day excitement.

  In a roped-off ring near the parking lot some people were setting up bright plastic tunnels and a seesaw. “What’s this?” Mom asked, heading that way.

  “No!” Sky yelled. “Beans!”

  He had a yogurt container full of green beans he’d planted. Gib had gotten him to weed them maybe twice all summer, but now that fair day had arrived Sky was very attached to them. Mom had been reading him Farmer Boy, and Sky was sure his beans, like Almanzo’s pumpkin, would win a large cash prize.

  “Let’s get the beans settled in,” Mom said.

  Chad went with them, as a way of not staying here with white-faced Julia, and Gib, and Jeep. They climbed the dirt road to the upper plateau, to the cattle barn, the rides, and the food booths. Mom poked her head into the kitchen to say hi to Helen, who’d been working there since dawn. Sky grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the Exhibit Hall.

  The long tables were bright with jellies, peaches in glass jars, cookies and cakes and quilts and flowers and paintings. Sky found the vegetable section and arranged his beans on a glossy red plate. A nice color for green beans. If only they hadn’t been so large and tough-looking, so bruised by affectionate handling.

  Almanzo Wilder had seen the ribbon pinned on his pumpkin. Sky wanted nothing less. He watched his beans proudly, pointing whenever a grown-up approached.

  “It may be a long time before the judges come,” Mom said. The Exhibit Hall was her least favorite part of the fair; now it looked as if she might be here all morning.

  At last merry-go-round music started. Chad said, “Want a ride, Sky? I’ll go on with you.”

  “Thank you,” Mom breathed.

  They were the only riders. Around them the empty horses cycled up and down, and the fairground spun. Sky grinned tightly, gripping the handles that stuck out of his horse’s neck. He looked small. Chad wanted to stand beside him, make sure he didn’t fall off the slippery wooden saddle. But Sky would yell.

  The ride finished. Mom pointed to a little boy near the cattle barn: Sky’s loudest, wildest friend. “Isn’t that Boone?” When Sky darted away, she jerked a thumb at Chad. “You’ve been a saint. Now beat it.”

  The food vendors were starting their stoves. Smells of garlic and frying filled the air, strange and not quite tempting this early in the morning. Chad passed the booth where you paid to shoot at tin ducks and win things no one in his right mind would want. A tinny sound system crooned the fifties song “Teen Angel.” He found the booth where the old couple sold fried dough. With a hot sugared plateful he went over to the cattle show.

  This was the slow, clean part of the fair. In the open-sided barn cows stood on bright sawdust. Their white markings sparkled. Even their tails were combed.

  In the ring kids led calves around. Once Chad had shown a calf of Jeep’s. He could feel in his bones the way the calves resisted, leaning back on the halters at every step.

  Suddenly, with a little skip of heart, he noticed Jeep across the ring. Had Jeep seen him? He was talking to someone, teeth gleaming, hardly seeming to notice what was in the ring, let alone on the other side of it.

  But as a Guernsey calf bogged
down in front of him, Jeep reached over the rope and pressed her in the ribs with one finger. For a few steps the calf hurried; the little girl leaning on the halter rope nearly fell down. A moment later, still talking, Jeep prodded another calf.

  So Jeep might have seen him, too. He saw more than he appeared to. Chad walked a quarter turn around the cattle ring, out of Jeep’s line of sight. There he watched and tried to pick the winner, without knowing at all what made a good cow. When the ribbons were given and the ring emptied, Jeep was opposite him again.

  Chad slipped away, to the edge of the plateau. Below him in one ring, massive work teams hauled a sled full of stones. In another tiny riders tried to steer disobedient ponies. Way over to the left a loose dog ran through one of the blue tunnels.

  Should have brought Queenie, he thought.

  A throng of little people, two brushstrokes each, streamed in the fairground gates. Chad saw two of his classmates and three people he’d played baseball with, the deputy fire chief, his third-grade teacher. But where—

  There! Two pairs of long, slender legs and sandals, David reaching into the pocket of his shorts, Louise looking around as if searching for someone. Inside the fence David studied an orange map, then headed toward the horse show ring as the announcer said, “The next class is English Pleasure.”

  A motion to the left caught Chad’s eye: Jeep again, hurrying down the crowded dirt road toward the show ring. Chad watched him take a place along the fence. Off in another corner was Gib, a bright splash of tie-dye.

  The ring filled with horses. Not good! Last year Tiger had run away with Julia, galloping around this ring like a car in the Indy 500. The fewer horses in with him, the better.

  Julia rode in last, her face pale between dark hat and dark coat. She passed David and Louise, wedged in near the rail, and smiled for a second, smiled again at Gib and at Jeep. Chad slithered down the steep slope to a place at the fence, to provide another spot of encouragement.