Horse

by Talley English

  She decided that he was probably trying to figure out how he could hypnotize her and drink her blood. She wouldn’t look him in the eye anymore. She looked at her knees instead and replied with fact, again, trying to keep her information as straightforward as possible.

  “I’m moving back with my mom,” Teagan said.

  “You’re leaving your school?” he asked.

  She realized he was probably noting that he would have one less potential blood bag in his office.

  “There are other schools,” she said.

  “And what about your friends?” he asked.

  “I have other friends,” Teagan said. It was true.

  Run

  Girls were supposed to ride in pairs during their free time on the weekends. Teagan trotted over to a girl on a small, light brown horse. She was feeling unusually friendly. The horse was a school horse. It had an overworked look about it, and the saddle and bridle seemed frayed and mismatched. The little horse looked spry enough, though. The weather was crisp. It was the middle of November. Smells of rotting leaves and a hint of snow carried through on the breeze. The girl introduced herself as Claire.

  “Is he a warmblood?” Claire asked.

  Teagan stroked Ian’s neck. “No. All Thoroughbred as far as I know.”

  “He looks big for a Thoroughbred. They’re supposed to be fast, aren’t they?” Claire said. She was reining in her little horse, who was trying to trot.

  “Yes. I’ve never let him go flat-out. Want to race?” Teagan said.

  “You know we’re not supposed to,” Claire said.

  “I know,” Teagan said. She wouldn’t push, but she would do it if the girl would.

  “Okay,” Claire said.

  It wasn’t a fair matchup. If Teagan had thought it through she wouldn’t have suggested it in the first place. They didn’t have a course; they just let the horses run. Little horses are surprising in how fast they can be, and at first Teagan thought Ian might be beaten, but then she realized that he was just keeping pace with the other horse. A sickening feeling went through her when she realized that Ian had gears she didn’t even know about. She let the reins slide, loosened her seat in the saddle, and Ian took off.

  She didn’t know where the little horse was except that he was behind her. The cold air hit her face so sharply her eyes blurred. She willed Ian to slow down because she couldn’t make him. He did finally slow, feeling her stiffen and pull back on the reins, and the tears fell out of her eyes and she could see again. She stroked his neck and patted him and stroked him again. She circled him back to speak with Claire, who was a good sport, even if she seemed dispirited. Teagan’s horse had won.

  Return

  A new prepaid calling card in hand, Teagan stretched the white cord of the hallway phone into the cleaning closet. She crouched, her back to the wall, surrounded by mops. She punched in the series of numbers and waited. She was glad Grace answered the phone.

  “Hi, Grace, it’s Teagan.”

  “What’s up? How’s your school?”

  “Okay. Okay, it’s not so good. I’m going to leave.” Teagan felt a huge relief, telling Grace that she wanted to come home. She breathed heavily.

  “Oh. Are you going to come back?”

  “I think I will. I mean, I am,” Teagan said.

  “Great. We’ll be in school together,” Grace said. There was a pause. “You were kind of stupid to leave.”

  “Yeah.” Teagan laughed and her eyes teared.

  “You’re coming back—soon?” Grace guessed.

  “Yes. I’m coming back for next semester.”

  “Great,” Grace said.

  “Great,” Teagan said.

  The silence was awkward. “I’ll see you soon, I guess,” Teagan said.

  “Call me when you’re back in town.”

  “I will.” A mop fell sideways and hit Teagan on the head. She made a noise.

  “What’s that?” Grace said.

  Teagan said, “Mop.”

  THREE

  Ian (Obsidian)

  The horse comforted her. She stood in front of him and used the soft brush on his face. She put her nose right up to his big velvet nostril and exchanged breath with him. She pushed the stiff brush over his hair, making it glossy. She lay her cheek against his warm neck and felt the wire hair of his mane. His impatience kept her moving and working. If she lingered too long, leaning on his round side so that she could feel his big ribs lift with his breath, he stepped away from her, or tossed his head, or sometimes stamped a hoof. She cuddled him needlessly anyway, wrapping her arms around his broad neck to hug him until he tried to shake her off. When he was really annoyed, he tried to nip her.

  She got to work, checking his hooves, untangling knots in his long tail, pushing dust off his back with the brush, breaking up dried mud on his shoulder with a currycomb. When she fit the bridle on his head, she made sure that each strap of leather lay flat, that the skin around his ears wasn’t pinched and that the browband settled in a way that wouldn’t pull his mane. She slid the saddle into place so that his hair wouldn’t be rubbed the wrong direction. When the girth was cinched she picked up each front hoof in turn and stretched the leg so that the loose skin of his armpit wouldn’t pinch. If the tack fit comfortably, then he would go better. She led him into the yard and cinched the girth one more time once she was in the saddle. She liked to start out with a loose rein, letting him walk out and stretch his legs and long neck, before she gradually began to gather him, taking more weight in her hands through the reins, fitting her calf tightly against his side, until they were one total package so that she followed his movement and he responded to the signals she gave him, as if they spoke to each other.

  On the Bit

  Now that she was home, Teagan started training with Hope again. Hope suggested that Teagan prepare for a combined training event and found one that offered dressage and cross-country. Teagan agreed to enter. She would not miss the third phase, stadium jumping. She felt she could do without jumping in an arena altogether. It was technical and she didn’t have the horse for it. Ian was used to taking jumps at stride, launching himself in a long arc over a wooden coop. In foxhunting, jumping was a means of getting from one field to another. The setting-up that jumping in an arena required, the way a horse needed to carefully balance in order to make a tight turn and jump within a limited number of strides, made Teagan anxious. She worried that she would make a mistake. Jumping in the ring meant it was her job to ride technically, to be aware of her next move so that she could help Ian set up for each jump. She hated hearing his hooves knock against a pole when they didn’t jump well. The sound was louder than the stroke of a hammer. In the hunt field, Ian never made that kind of mistake.

  Riding in the woods, Ian was always eager, but Teagan knew that he wouldn’t make the same effort in the ring. The difference was obvious. Riding out, Ian felt light and powerful, as though the reins she held connected her to a perfectly tuned engine. In the ring, Ian could feel so slow and clumsy it was as though he had forgotten how to walk. Teagan had to keep pushing him forward, and sometimes he would even stumble, as if he was dragging his feet, which she guessed he probably was. She knew that the moment she turned him toward the gate, his head would lift. In the field he would move forward so readily that Teagan’s work became to hold him back instead of push him forward.

  In the lessons with Hope, they focused on dressage, because Teagan and Ian needed more practice in it than in cross-country. Teagan knew that if Ian could choose his own horse life, he would not mess with dressage, but she had begun to appreciate the focused work. For all of Ian’s resistance, she noticed that, through practicing dressage, he had become more flexible, and stronger on his left side. He had always favored his right side because he was stronger to that side.

  Dressage built Teagan’s strength, too, and taught her to be a quiet
er rider. The biggest challenge for Teagan and Ian was learning how to collect. Hope had offered the metaphor of a tightly coiled spring. She also talked about putting a horse in an imaginary box that traveled around him as he moved. Don’t let him run out the front, or fall out the back, she would say. Teagan could hear Hope’s voice in her own mind, and although now Teagan knew how to do the work, actually doing it was the hard part.

  “We’ll work a little bit, and then maybe we’ll head out,” Teagan said aloud to Ian, scratching his mane, because she wanted to head out, too. Ian made no change in his unenthusiastic plodding along the fence line. “C’mon now, you can do this,” she said aloud, but she thought, Even if you don’t want to. She pressed her lower legs into his sides. His head lifted and he responded for a moment, but she could feel him immediately falling behind again, as though his long torso was slipping backward behind the position of her leg. “No you don’t,” she said, encouraging herself, and she shifted her leg back and tried to gather him again. Ian picked up his momentum only a little so Teagan didn’t have to work quite as hard to keep him going. All of this work and we’re only at the walk, Teagan thought.

  She wasn’t strong enough to make her riding look effortless, though the goal in dressage was that the rider should appear to move very little. The movements of her hands, the use of her legs and back should be an unobservable conversation between her and her horse. It took so much effort to get Ian into proper form, her problem was that, once he was collected, moving the way he was supposed to move in dressage, or close enough, she couldn’t always summon the endurance to keep him there.

  When they moved together in the way they should, she had to carry the weight of his motion in her back and arms. When Ian was on the bit, which meant his neck appeared slightly arched, he was light in his steps, his powerful hind muscles were engaged, and it was as though each step carried him into the air as well as forward. He balanced between his front and back ends and didn’t favor one side or the other. It took strength to maintain, and Teagan needed to be strong to keep him that way.

  Hope explained to Teagan that she might carry ten to twenty pounds of pressure in her hands as she held Ian in proper form. Now, after twenty minutes of work, Ian was starting to be more engaged, and Teagan prepared to set herself against the burning in her muscles that she knew would start. It would have been difficult for her to explain to someone watching how much work she was doing, steadily supporting the weight of her horse’s momentum with her own body.

  Her eyes trained on a point traveling slightly ahead of them. For a matter of moments, they accomplished it and moved beautifully. Ian crossed lightly over the ground and they seemed to float. Teagan was quickly exhausted, and the relief she knew she’d feel if she let Ian abandon the work won over her wilting determination to keep on. The reins slipped in her fingers and she relaxed her back, and Ian was released. He had been going at the trot, and he quickly fell into the walk, as though Teagan had shifted from fourth gear to first, entirely skipping second and third.

  She let out a breath of exhaustion, kicked out of her stirrups, and dropped the reins. She tipped her chin to the sky and reached her arms over her head, stretching. She knew they should keep working, but the shade of the woods was too tempting, and Ian’s immediate switch in attitude was too joyful to ignore. Past the gate she pointed him toward the woods, and suddenly she was a lightweight passenger carried by an energetic horse who flowed forward across the field like a tide that had no ebb.

  Sift

  The rain made the cardboard smell even more like cardboard. The container for glass stunk with an old sweetness from soda bottles and yeast from beer bottles. The steps to the metal box were made of steel in an open weave to let water through. When the back of my car was empty, I felt damp and hungry, even though I hadn’t been outside long. As I was pulling away from the recycling center, my favorite bakery came to mind like a vision.

  Sift sat on a corner. I circled the block to look for street parking. I almost closed my eyes and wished as I walked in the door, and I saw they were there, the almond macaroons. There wasn’t a huge pile. Other people had been buying them, but there were enough. I asked for three. I knew that if I bit into one I would eat them all, so I waited. I wanted to sit down and enjoy my little feast.

  Outside the rain had calmed to a drizzle, but there was a rivulet along the curb. I walked to my car. Macaroons were a discovery for me. I did not eat them as a child.

  A woman pushed a double stroller toward me. By the time she was near, I realized I should step aside because there was a low place in the uneven sidewalk where a large puddle had formed, and one end of it looked too deep to want to walk through. She was at the puddle when I crossed through the shallow end and stood by a building so that she could have an easier path.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she said and smiled, and directed the stroller around. I could see that the infants were the same age. Twins. I wanted to ask her which one was born first. The wheels of the stroller cut through the edge of the puddle, and there was enough water that they sent ripples to the deeper end. I watched the puddle until the surface was smooth again. A person stepped in the edge, and the surface broke again, and re-formed. The rain had stopped. The puddle wouldn’t last, but it was big enough to seem a surprise. I thought of a larger puddle, an obstacle, that I once rode Ian through. There was a low wall purposely constructed so that horse and rider had to drop into water and go through, then over a little wall on the other side. As happens to me sometimes, for a moment I felt I deeply missed the horse. I was broken and then smoothed myself again.

  Ponying

  The day was going to be hot, but it felt less humid. Teagan didn’t wake up feeling groggy like she did when the humidity was high and her room baked in the early sun. She quickly went downstairs.

  “Where’s Mom?” Teagan asked.

  “Vermont,” Charlie said.

  “When did she leave?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” Charlie said, looking at her and eating toast.

  “Oh, right,” Teagan said, but really she’d forgotten that her mom had planned the trip.

  That meant she was visiting the nieces and would see her sister. Susanna and her sister hadn’t kept in close touch. Teagan saw her aunt only every few years. It seemed that all of a sudden Susanna wanted to visit her. Charlie was packing up to go back to college. Teagan was supposed to get through a lot of summer reading to catch up with her class for sophomore year. There was also an optional paper. She didn’t know why it was optional, so she decided to option out. She’d read a few pages of The Scarlet Letter and then left it on the floor of her room. It was boring.

  Charlie finished his toast, took a swig of a soda, and then hefted a huge green duffel bag, a giant limp slug, onto his shoulder and carried it out to his car. He was moving to a shared house in town with some college friends. Teagan realized she hadn’t been aware that he was leaving so soon.

  He walked back in and took out a brown leather wallet, opened it, and handed some twenty-dollar bills to Teagan. She took them but didn’t know why he was giving them to her.

  “When are you leaving?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow afternoon. I have to pick up keys at three.”

  Teagan neatened the bills in her hands.

  “But I’ll come back to say hi. I’m not far.” Charlie smiled.

  “What’s the money for?”

  “Food. It’s from Mom. Don’t spend it all at once,” Charlie said.

  “I can’t drive,” Teagan said.

  “Then don’t eat all of the food at once,” Charlie said.

  He smiled but Teagan didn’t.

  “Mom’ll be back next week. If you need anything call Grace’s mom.”

  “Call Grace’s mom? Shouldn’t I call you?” Teagan said.

  “No. I’m busy,” Charlie said. “You’ll be fine. I’m going to
go drop some stuff at Nick’s. I’ll bring back supper. What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” Teagan said.

  “I’ll get pizza,” he said. He shut the kitchen door behind him.

  Through the window she watched his car until it was out of the driveway. She was still holding the bills. She shoved them in a drawer and in ten minutes was dressed to go riding. Charlie had told her that she wasn’t allowed to ride by herself while Susanna was away. Teagan had said nothing, which was her way of saying that she would ride anyway.

  Her plan was to just give Ian a little exercise, working him in a forty-meter circle in the field, like she had at Hunting Hill, but Duchess came to the fence with him, as if she wasn’t going to let him out of her sight, so Teagan opened the gate for them both, and the mare followed. Teagan brushed Ian, breathing in his familiar scent, stopping to lay her face against his smooth neck. He tossed his head a little. She finished grooming. She briefly went over Duchess, checking her hooves, which were clean because the ground was dry. She was not planning on saddling the mare.

  Teagan took both horses off Blue View Farm, down a dirt road into a piece of woods she was pretty sure Susanna had permission to ride in. A lead rope trailed from Teagan’s hand, and Ian didn’t seem to mind having Duchess’s head at his rump. She wore only a nylon halter. When the trail in the woods widened Teagan pushed Ian into a trot. Duchess started a step or two late and the rope jerked in Teagan’s hand, but she closed her fingers. Ian, maybe because Duchess was so close behind him, began to canter, and, trying to keep hold of Duchess’s rope and the reins of her own horse, Teagan couldn’t get organized to slow him down, so she let him keep going, holding him at an even pace, and Duchess, cantering, caught up so that the horses were side by side. Teagan looked at the mare, bare but for the halter, keeping pace, and smiled. She reached out and briefly stroked the mare’s mane. Teagan stood a little over the saddle, off Ian’s back, and he kept his even, smooth, and steady stride.