A Horse to Love

by Nancy Springer

  “When you get your horse,” said Marcy Gilmore, “can we come see it?”

  “Can we ride it?” asked Mikkie Orris.

  Hope had made her reckless. “Sure,” she said grandly.

  When she got her horse. When. Oh, when.

  Chapter Three

  The vet said he might get out to see the mare on Thursday, or, if not, then the first of the next week. It was foaling time. Calls that were not emergencies sometimes had to wait. Erin felt as if she herself might soon become an emergency. Her mother said she was more of a headache than she had been since her terrible twos. Sometimes her parents yelled at her, more often rolled their eyes and let her alone. Shut in her room, she would do drawing after drawing of the mare, drawings of a pretty white horse with finely pricked ears and a charcoal-gray nose, drawings of a neat, compact little horse with a long, full tail shading from white to gray.

  Aunt Lexie had little time for her. Five mares had foaled within the past ten days, and Aunt Lexie was tired and grouchy from nights spent on the cot in the tack room. Erin continued coming to the farm every day, helping with the routine work, looking at the foals lying with their mothers in the big, deeply bedded box stalls. Sometimes Aunt Lexie would let her handle one of the week-old ones, stroke it and coax it to follow, pick up the tiny hooves. But most of the time she was on her own. She rode William when it wasn’t raining, once up along the road, more often down the lane and into the woods. Riding William was like riding a rented horse. She was only a passenger to him.

  She wanted her own horse. Snowbird? Cinderella? Shady Lady … Moon Dream … None of the names seemed to fit.

  The phone rang on Monday night, a week after Erin had ridden the mare. Mrs. Calahan answered it, but Erin could tell at once that it was Aunt Lexie—the older woman’s voice crackled out, as always.

  “Vet called,” she heard Aunt Lexie say. “Mare’s sound. Shall I go for her tomorrow?”

  Erin was capering around the room in silent agony. “You’d better,” said Mrs. Calahan dryly.

  “All right. Tell that girl not to expect to hop on her right away. And not to bring a swarm of kids over to see her either.” Aunt Lexie hung up, abruptly, as always. Tawnya Calahan turned to her daughter.

  “She says tell you—”

  “I heard,” Erin interrupted. “Yaaah-hooo!” She ran out into the yard and turned several cartwheels.

  School the next day seemed endless. Usually a good student, Erin was corrected by her teachers several times for daydreaming. She wanted to revert to her kindergarten habit of chewing her hair, but it was cut too short to reach her mouth, so she chewed her sleeve instead. She did not say anything about the horse to her friends—she was not to bring a swarm of kids, and they were not real friends, anyway, none of them special, just the kids she knew. But she jittered all day, and on the bus, at last going home, she could barely sit still. Coming up to Mrs. Bromer’s—

  “Is that your horse?” Marcy Gilmore exclaimed, leaning across the aisle to speak to her.

  Erin jumped up, disobeying bus rules for the first time in her life. A white horse with dark points was standing in the small canter ring near the stable. There was an uproar from the eighth graders within earshot.

  “Is that him?”

  “Oh, wow!”

  “He’s fat!”

  “She!” Erin had to shout to make herself heard above the racket. “She’s a mare!”

  “How about a ride?”

  “How about it? Today?”

  “No.” But they hadn’t heard her, or were ignoring her. “Mrs. Bromer says not today,” she tried again.

  At the mention of Old Baggy Bromer everyone quieted somewhat. “Can we at least come and see her?” Marcy Gilmore asked.

  “Not today,” Erin said, then remembered that she had promised them all that they could come and see and ride her horse. “Maybe someday soon,” she mumbled, and tore away as soon as she got off the bus at the Terrace Heights stop.

  Moving at Saturday-morning-cartoon speed, she let herself into the house with the key she always wore around her neck, dumped her books, and ran out to the garage. That morning she had made sure to wear her jeans to school, so there was no need to change clothes. Before the bus was out of sight, and before most of her friends had reached their houses, she was on her bike and pedaling hard toward Willow Hill Farm.

  Bianca was every bit as pretty as Erin had remembered her. Puffing, Erin let her bicycle flop in the grass and leaned against the boards of the canter ring, calling to her. The mare paid no attention. Head high, eyes wide and showing their whites, she bugled a long, loud neigh out over the fields of this place that was strange to her. Then she trotted around the ring with short, choppy strides, stood still, and neighed again. Erin saw that her nostrils were flared into large ovals and she was all shiny with sweat, even her legs. Aunt Lexie came out of her house and walked over to stand beside Erin, looking tired.

  “They must never have trailered her anywhere. She went in, no problem, but once we were moving she about kicked the trailer to bits. Got herself all in a lather. I’ve been trying to cool her off for a couple hours. Had a blanket on her for a while, walked her for a while, but she just keeps carrying on.”

  “Here, girl,” Erin coaxed again, holding out a handful of lush spring grass, but the mare did not even look at her.

  “You heave the water bucket out of her stall,” Aunt Lexie said, “and I’ll put her in there and she’ll calm down after a while. No use trying to do anything with her today.”

  Aunt Lexie could not lift the heavy, full bucket herself because of her back. Erin wrestled it off its hook, and Aunt Lexie put the mare into the dim, quiet stall. She and Erin stood watching for a while as the mare explored around and around the sides of the box, snuffling, blowing through her nostrils with a startling noise, pawing and fussing.

  “Don’t you figure on riding her for at least a week,” said Aunt Lexie, “till she gets used to it here.”

  The mare flung her head up and whinnied, her nostrils moving like a beating heart.

  “And don’t let anyone else on her,” Aunt Lexie added, “not ever, not unless you’ve got one doozy of a good reason.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t let anybody else ride your horse. It’s up to you to take care of her, do what’s best for her. Somebody gets on her that doesn’t know what they’re doing, somebody with hard hands or some fool who wants to ride like a cowboy, they can really mess her up. Break your heart.” There was an edge to Aunt Lexie’s tone, as if to say, “I found out the hard way.”

  “Oh.”

  “People say they can ride, and they really don’t know diddlypoop.”

  Silence for a while.

  “It’s a big responsibility having a horse,” Aunt Lexie added.

  Erin felt some new emotion that was both gentle and fierce. “Well, they can all just stay away,” she said softly. “She’s my horse.”

  “That she is, kiddo.”

  Pawing, the mare wobbled her knees, dropped to the stall floor and rolled over on her back with a heave, coating her sticky body with sawdust. Aunt Lexie nodded and gave a satisfied grunt. “Huh. She’ll settle down now. Stay if you want, but let her alone. Don’t give her water or anything to eat except maybe some hay. I’ll take care of her later. Got to go make supper.”

  The old woman went into her house, leaving Erin in the barn with her new horse.

  Erin pushed a mounting block over to the stall and stood on it so that she could see better. Silently she watched. Little by little the mare quieted, accepting the stall as a safe place. Her nostrils stopped fluttering, went back to their normal size and shape. Her ears relaxed, and she stood still, with her head dropped to chest level, resting.

  Erin went and got a flake of hay from the end of the bale, took a handful of it, and offered it to the mare, reaching through the stall oars. “Here, girl,” she called. “Come here, nice babe.”

  The mare looked at her for only a moment, and
did not move.

  Erin opened the stall door and put the hay in the net, then closed and latched the door. Once the girl was out of her stall, the mare came over to eat. Erin watched through the bars as Bianca munched her hay. The horse did not yet seem real to her. As if trying to bring a hazy daydream into focus, she noticed details. Part of the mare’s deerlike beauty, she saw, was because of areas of dark skin all around her eyes. Charcoal-gray eyelids blended into her white face, almost as if she were wearing makeup. But no mascara—Erin saw with a small shock that the mare’s eyelashes were pure white and very long, curling far out over her large eyes.

  “Snowflake,” Erin muttered. “Ivory. Gray Lady. Gypsy Girl. Snow Queen. Ermine White. Twilight.”

  She had read somewhere that the Indians said, or the Gypsies or somebody, that a horse wasn’t really your own until you had given it a new name. But no name she could think of seemed good enough. She loved horse names, loved to look at the names in horse magazines, loved the names Aunt Lexie gave her colts and fillies—even though most of them meant nothing to her. Go Back, Pandora’s Pride, What the Heck, Scalawag’s Revenge, Son of a Gun, Amy My Heart, Knock ’Em Out. But those were names for registered horses. Once given, they were never changed, and the horse was always its own animal, or so it seemed to Erin. She had heard of registered horses that different people rode at the horse shows, like passengers. Good thing Bianca was not a registered horse. She was more like an Indian pony or a Gypsy mare, a horse that could be made her own with the proper name.

  “Misty. Snowdrift. Snow Rose, Snowdrop, Lily White—yuck. Ummmm … Dusky, Pretty Girl, Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Crazy Daisy—Oh, gross. I give up.”

  Softly Erin got down off her mounting block and opened the stall, slipped in. She knew she was supposed to let the horse alone, but there was something she had to do while Aunt Lexie was not looking. She had also read somewhere that the Gypsies said the best way to make friends with a horse was to blow into its nostrils, the way horses themselves greeted one another. She was a stranger to the mare. She had to trade her scent with the new horse.

  Busy at her hay, the mare let her approach. Her head was just about at Erin’s head level. Erin puffed softly into the dark paisley shape of the nearest nostril, and Bianca snorted as if hay dust had tickled her. Nothing else happened.

  After waiting awhile, Erin sighed and went out.

  She double-checked to be sure the stall was latched. “’Bye, girl,” she said. “I have to go home for supper.”

  The mare did not look at her.

  “Well, ’bye,” Erin said, and she left the stable, very slowly.

  She said nothing at home—Erin generally expected her parents to read her mind. But she was silent at supper that evening, and did not eat well. Her parents looked at her curiously. After all the uproar of the past week, they had been hoping for some happy smiles.

  “So, how’s the horse?” Mr. Calahan asked at last.

  They had noticed. About time. Erin was often disappointed when no one noticed her silences. “Okay,” she said dully, meaning “terrible,” and her father’s eyebrows shot up.

  “You don’t like her now?”

  “She doesn’t like me! She hates being at a new place, and she hates me. For bringing her there.”

  “Jeez,” Mike said scornfully. His mother glared at him to shush him.

  “Erin,” said Mrs. Calahan, “she can’t possibly hate you. She doesn’t even know you. She’s just upset.”

  “I guess,” Erin muttered.

  “She’ll get over it soon.”

  “She needs a new name,” Erin said.

  Her mother looked puzzled. “A new name? I think Bianca is a pretty name. It means white in Spanish.”

  Erin shrugged. The name Bianca meant nothing to her.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier on the horse to keep the same name?” her father asked.

  She shrugged again, picked up her fork and started eating so that they would not ask her any more questions. It was no use trying to explain to them how a new name changes the luck of the horse.

  After supper and clearing away, Erin went into her room to do homework. She could have done it at the dining room table, where she had more space, but she always did it in her room. Math, civics, world history, yuck. Once done, Erin stretched out on her bed with her new library book. Since she had already read every horse book in the school library at least three times, she had found herself a different sort of animal book, one about wolves. About a kingly male wolf and his nearly pure-white, playful mate … her fur flying like spindrift.…

  Erin sat up abruptly, staring. What did that mean? It was a beautiful word.

  She left her book and went out to the tall bookshelf in the living room to use the dictionary. Then, taking the stairs with a marching step, she went down to the basement TV room where her family was gathered.

  “Spindrift,” she told them. “Her name is Spindrift.”

  “Huh?” They all three blinked at her, taking a moment to come out of the show and see her, and a moment longer to understand that she was talking about her horse.

  “Oh,” said Mr. Calahan finally. “Spindrift? What does that mean?”

  Mike, a high school sophomore, crazy about cars and in a sweat to get his learner’s permit the instant his sixteenth birthday arrived, jumped up to show them. “It means she drifts into a spin! Yowwwmmm!”

  “It means,” said Erin coldly, “the white spray on the tops of waves. Like during a storm, on the ocean.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Mr. Calahan. “Sit down, Mike.” His eyes were already fixed blankly back on the TV screen.

  “It’s a lovely name, hon,” Tawnya Calahan said.

  Erin went back up to her room, sat at her desk, and wrote the name several times on a piece of paper. Spindrift. It was a wonderful name, and it would make her horse hers, all hers. Her friend of friends. Who needed regular friends? she thought fiercely, remembering Mike’s comment that she had none. Her horse would be better than any human friend. Spindrift would carry her through wilderness at a tireless gallop, jump rivers, rescue her from forest fires.…

  Thinking faded into daydream as Erin got ready for bed.

  “At least she came out of her burrow long enough to tell us the horse’s name,” Don Calahan remarked to his wife after Mike and Erin were asleep. Sitting by the fireplace late at night, they both felt relaxed. It was a good time to talk.

  “Are you comparing our daughter Erin to a mole?” Tawnya gave her husband an amused glance.

  “More like a scared rabbit. Good grief, what does she think we’re going to do to her if she talks with us?”

  Erin’s mother said, “I guess we shushed her too much when she was little. We were used to Mike.” Both parents smiled, remembering. Mike had always shouted out whatever he was thinking, and as often happens, their younger child had turned out to be just the opposite.

  “It’s not just us,” Mr. Calahan pointed out. “She’s shy with everybody. But talk about horse crazy. Then she goes and makes friends with Mrs. Bromer, of all people.”

  “That’s what I keep telling you,” Tawnya said. “If the horse doesn’t bring her out of her shell, nothing will.”

  “Well, I hope it works.… She’s still off in dreamland half the time.”

  “Give it a chance.”

  “Yeah, I know. She does seem to be a little more willing to speak up, at least about the horse.” Don Calahan stood up, yawning. “Let’s get to bed.”

  “Don, if she does start to open up,” Tawnya told him, “let’s make sure we don’t squelch her.”

  “Good grief.” Mr. Calahan stared sleepily at her. “What do you expect, she’ll grow fangs or something?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Chapter Four

  “What are you going to call her for a barn name?” Aunt Lexie asked. “Spinner? Spindly? The poor thing.”

  Erin stared. “Why does she need a barn name?”

  “She’ll end up with one, you
wait and see. No problem for me—I’ll just call her Babe.” Aunt Lexie called half her horses either Babe or Boy. “Come on, Bianca—Spindrift, I mean. Let’s see if we can get you groomed.”

  Erin had been saving her allowance for weeks, and recently she had spent it, knowing that her horse would come with nothing but the halter on its head. Laid out along Spindrift’s stall ledge were dandy brush, body brush, soft brush, shedding comb, currycomb, and hoof pick. Aunt Lexie brought the mare out of the stall and cross-tied her in the aisleway, where she stood with sawdust and the sweat of yesterday’s lathering dried on her, making her hair lie in coarse clumps. Erin picked up her new currycomb.

  “Let her sniff it before you touch her with it,” said Aunt Lexie.

  Erin did. Spindrift blew suspiciously at the currycomb.

  “Doesn’t look like they ever did much with her,” Aunt Lexie added. “Even that currycomb might be strange to her. Move slowly and try not to scare her.”

  Erin stepped behind the cross ties, standing close to the mare’s body, so as not to be injured by a kick, and began to work, moving the currycomb in circles to loosen the dried sweat and dirt. She rubbed very gently at first, and then, as Spindrift seemed not to mind, harder.

  “There,” said Aunt Lexie, sounding relieved. “She’s a good girl, after all.” She got her old black-leather-bound record books from the tack room and sat on the bench just outside the stable door, bringing them up to date.

  Erin let Spindrift sniff the dandy brush, then swept away the loosened crud with it, starting at the upper neck and working her way to the hindquarters. The body brush came next, to take away more. Erin had to knock a load of dirt loose from it every half minute or so. Then the soft brush, for the face and legs and to put a finer shine on the body. With the dandy brush again, standing to one side, Erin brushed the long, coarse tail.

  “There’s all sorts of colors in it,” she said dreamily. Aunt Lexie, hearing her, snorted softly, a cranky, contented sound. Spindrift liked being groomed. She had relaxed almost to the point of dozing, standing with one hind foot drawn up a little and her hip sagging. Erin was humming to herself. She laid a forearm along the mare’s neck so as not to irritate it when she brushed the mane. Like the tail, Spindrift’s mane had white hairs and black in it, and gray, yellow, and a few that were reddish brown. Erin counted the colors. She studied the patterns of hair growth, like frost on a windowpane, the whorls and wheat ears along Spindrift’s crest and under her throat. She brushed the long cat hairs, winter growth, that made a thin beard under the mare’s chin. A warm, warm feeling filled her, and she suddenly reached up and rubbed the mare’s neck just behind her ears. Horses were supposed to like having their necks and withers rubbed.… Spindrift put all her feet down flat and swung her head away as far as the cross ties would allow. Erin stopped humming and let her hand drop to her side.