Horse Sense

by Bonnie Bryant

  “You mean it couldn’t happen that way?” Lisa asked.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Well, maybe she forgot. After all, she was pretty little, but she wasn’t so young when she was taking care of Napoleon when he was sick and he threw up on her. That just happened last year!”

  Stevie’s heart went out to Lisa. It was hard to believe anybody could have been taken in by these stories, and because Lisa was such a trusting person it seemed especially cruel of Estelle. “She’s told you another tall tale,” Stevie began.

  “How do you know?” Lisa asked.

  “Because horses don’t throw up. I mean, they can’t. Physically, they don’t work that way. It’s one of the reasons a colicky horse is such a problem. They’d be better off sometimes if they could just get rid of what’s causing the stomachache, but they can’t.”

  “Why would Estelle say something that wasn’t true? She doesn’t have any reason to lie to me. After all, she’s the one with the glamorous life, the fancy schools and friends, the country estate.… ”

  “Oh, you think so?” Stevie asked.

  “I don’t think we’ve been fair to Lisa,” Carole said to Stevie. “Both you and I knew right away that she was a phony—at least when it came to horses—because she couldn’t ride very well. We assumed that Lisa would recognize that, too.”

  “Isn’t all the trouble she’s had riding just because of adjusting to American horses?” Lisa asked, defending herself.

  “We joke about it, but Max is really right that horses don’t speak English, you know,” Carole said. “There’s no difference among good riders throughout the world.”

  “How could I know that?” Lisa asked.

  “Of course you couldn’t,” Carole consoled her. “You’re such a good natural rider that we sometimes forget what you don’t know. That’s kind of our fault. What you have, though, is really much more important than a lot of facts—you have a real feeling for horses and for riding. Stevie said it a few minutes ago. It’s horse sense. You’ve got it. Estelle doesn’t.”

  “Thanks,” Lisa said. “I appreciate your vote of confidence, but the fact remains that as of Friday night, Estelle Duval is a member of The Saddle Club.”

  “Not for long,” Stevie said. “Or else I’m not.”

  They were just words that Stevie had spoken, but they felt like a bomb to Lisa. As sure as she’d ever known anything, she knew that Stevie meant them. She looked to Carole for consolation, but there wasn’t any there.

  “Lisa, I think it’s up to you,” Carole said. Lisa didn’t know what to say then. She only knew how she felt and it was bad. She was going to have to choose between her friends and her mistake. What good was horse sense if you could still get into messes like that?

  Carole started to speak. Lisa thought maybe she had a suggestion, but before she really got going, Stevie’s parents and all three of her brothers bounded into the tack room.

  “Can I see the baby?” asked her younger brother, Michael. “Please?”

  Stevie was actually happy to see them all. She knew that what she’d said about The Saddle Club was upsetting both her friends, so a change of subject right then was a good idea. But just because she didn’t want to talk about her announcement anymore didn’t mean she wasn’t serious about it. She didn’t want any part of Estelle Duval. Ever.

  “Come on, guys, let’s introduce my family to Samson.” She linked arms with Carole and Lisa and led everybody on tiptoe to see the newborn.

  When the girls had left Samson only a half hour before, he’d been sleeping soundly. Now, just a short time later, he was back up on his feet, walking around on his spindly legs and checking out his surroundings.

  Michael climbed up on the slats of the stall’s wall to see better. Samson glanced up at him, his soft brown eyes decidedly curious.

  “Wow!” said Michael.

  Stevie couldn’t have said it better.

  LISA KNEW SHE ought to feel really excited, sharing in the fun of Samson’s birth, but when the sun woke her up the next morning, all she actually felt was dread. Stevie and Carole had made their positions clear. It was Estelle or them.

  At first, she thought maybe she could bring her friends around, but when she’d tried to raise the subject once again on the trip home it became clear that Carole and Stevie were totally together. Lisa had made a mistake, a bad one, and she was going to have to correct it.

  Correcting mistakes was sometimes impossible and never any fun. Lisa pulled the pillow over her head to shut out the sunlight. Maybe morning would go away.

  “Lisa! Breakfast is on the table, dear,” her mother called up. “I made you some oatmeal.…”

  And now she had that to contend with, too!

  By the time she arrived at the stable, she found that she didn’t feel any better at all. She didn’t much want to see Carole and Stevie and she certainly didn’t want to see Estelle. In fact, she didn’t much want to be there at all. Lisa knew that some people would have pretended to be sick, but if she’d done that her mother would have known something was wrong and then she’d have had to answer dozens of questions from her.

  Lisa was relieved to find that the locker area and the tack room were completely empty. Not surprisingly, everybody was hanging around by the foaling stall, looking at the new baby. Lisa would have joined them, but for three things: Stevie, Carole, and Estelle.

  She stowed her lunch in the little refrigerator and lingered in the tack room.

  “Aren’t you going to see the foal this morning?” Mrs. Reg asked.

  “I guess so, in a minute. The whole wide world is there now, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they are,” Mrs. Reg said, laughing. “Say, while you’re waiting, will you give me a hand with something?”

  “Sure,” Lisa agreed, wondering quickly if maybe, just maybe, Mrs. Reg’s chore might take all day.

  “I seem to have a whole lot of little pieces of tack and other stable hardware that need to be sorted and stored. Can you do that while I work on the schedule for the three-day event?”

  “Oh, I’d be glad to,” Lisa told her. She found herself looking at a jumble of metal rings, loops, hooks, bits, and stirrups. She began sorting them into piles of like items. “This is neat stuff,” Lisa said, gazing at all the hardware in front of her.

  “It’s a mishmash of things—harness hooks, rings, double-end snaps, S-hooks, cross-tie chains. All of those are used in the stable, but none of them can be used if we don’t know what we’ve got.”

  “How do you know what all these things are and what they do?” Lisa asked.

  “Oh, you learn, Lisa. After all, you’ve just started riding. You can’t expect yourself to know everything right away.”

  “That’s what you think,” Lisa said. Just when she wanted to think about it the least, Mrs. Reg had reminded her how little she actually knew about horses.

  “You know, there was a boy here once, a new rider …”

  “Who was that?” Lisa asked, making a chain of S-hooks. Mrs. Reg was famous for her riding stories. This could be fun.

  “He was a youngster. He came into the stable knowing almost nothing about horses or riding or anything, but he was very eager to learn. It was okay when he first began. He knew he didn’t know anything, so he asked questions all the time and tried to learn as much as he could. After he’d been riding here a few months, though, he got into some trouble.”

  “How’s that?” Lisa asked.

  “Well, he started thinking he knew a lot more than he did and he stopped asking questions. One day, he wanted to ride a particular horse, nice little bay gelding we had named Hickory. My husband was watching Hickory, though. He thought he showed signs of lameness. This young rider thought he knew more than my husband and took the horse out anyway—without even asking why he’d been put in a different stall. Within fifteen minutes, the horse was so lame that the rider had to get off him. Took him hours to walk him back to the stable. Vet’s bill was something awful,
I’ll tell you. He had a bowed tendon, and even after he’d healed, he was never as good as he had been.”

  “But how did that happen? Did the young rider hurt the horse?”

  “In a way,” Mrs. Reg said. “It turned out that all that had been wrong in the first place was that he had a stone in his shoe. My husband needed a better light to find it and that’s why he’d moved him to another stall, intending to check the hoof when he had time. Then, when this young rider took poor old Hickory out on the trail, the horse favored his sore foot. He stumbled, and gave his own leg a good kick, tearing his own tendon.”

  “You must have been furious,” Lisa said.

  “Oh, we were,” Mrs. Reg said. “It’s awful when things go wrong with a horse.”

  “I bet you never let that rider back here, did you?”

  “We couldn’t do that,” Mrs. Reg said.

  “Why not?”

  “It was our own son, Max, who did it!”

  “Max? My teacher?”

  “The very one,” Mrs. Reg said. “Of course, he’s learned a lot since then—and he’s never stopped asking questions, either. Once he got an idea of how much he didn’t know, and understood that it was all right not to know, things went much smoother for him.”

  “I think you’re trying to tell me something, Mrs. Reg,” Lisa said.

  “You almost finished with the sorting?” Mrs. Reg asked.

  “Just about.”

  “Max used to like to play with this stable hardware when he was a boy. He’d make chains just like the one you made with the S-hooks, and he’d put a dozen rings on a crop and ride around trying to keep them all on.”

  “He was a little devil, wasn’t he?” Lisa asked.

  Mrs. Reg chuckled. “It’s almost class time now, Lisa. You’ll have to saddle up. Thanks for your help.”

  Lisa put the sorted hardware into buckets and then stood up to leave. She looked slyly at Mrs. Reg, who was so busy jotting notes on the paper in front of her that she appeared to be unaware of Lisa at all. Lisa doubted that. In fact, Lisa strongly suspected that Mrs. Reg never missed anything at all. Not a thing.

  A few minutes later, Lisa was in Pepper’s stall, lifting his saddle on. She heard Estelle next to her, working with Patch. Max had let her switch from Nero to another horse. Estelle was having a terrible time with the bridle. She spoke rapidly to the horse in French, but it wasn’t doing any good. Estelle was clearly getting angrier and angrier.

  As soon as Lisa finished smoothing a wrinkle in the saddle pad and tightening Pepper’s girth, she went to Estelle’s aid—Patch’s, really. Patch was happily walking backward in circles while Estelle chased him with the bridle in her hands. She’d never get the tack on that way.

  “Here, Estelle, I’ll give you a hand,” Lisa offered.

  “Oh, this dumb horse. He just wants to give me trouble.”

  “No, I think he’s having too much fun with the game. You can’t let a horse get away with that kind of stuff, you know. Here, you hold him. I’ll put the bridle on. If he keeps backing up, you should just cross-tie him. Otherwise, you’re just teaching him bad habits.”

  “This horse already knows bad habits. I never had such trouble with horses before I came here.”

  “Perhaps that’s because you never rode before,” Lisa said.

  “Moi?” Estelle asked. “But I have been riding since I was a little girl—from before my seventh birthday.”

  Something about the mention of her seventh birthday rang a bell to Lisa. She began remembering two other stories Estelle had told her, and they didn’t fit at all.

  “Was that the seventh birthday you spent in the hospital, or the seventh birthday when you got Napoleon and rode him for hours?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Estelle said.

  “Estelle, what I mean is that you’ve been lying to me. You really don’t know the first thing about horses. You’ve hardly ever ridden before and you didn’t want to admit it, so you made up stories. You probably made up all the other stories about yourself, too. Your princess friend and your four languages, and your country estate. As a matter of fact, considering the lies I know you’ve told me, I’ve begun to suspect that you’ve never told me the truth at all, have you?”

  Estelle looked so shocked that Lisa knew that finally she had found the absolute truth.

  “You know, there’s nothing wrong with being a beginner at riding. I’m a beginner myself. Sometimes I hate how much I don’t know, but I’m not ashamed of it. You can’t learn if you can’t admit what you don’t know.”

  “I have studied riding with the finest instructors in Europe!” Estelle proclaimed. “But riding here is very different, and not nearly as good.”

  “If you want to be that way, Estelle, okay,” Lisa said. “But I know—”

  “What do you know? You and your silly friends and your club! I don’t want to be in your club and I don’t want to wear that cheap pin! Here, take it back!”

  Estelle fumbled in the pocket of her breeches and pulled out the silver horse head. Glaring at Lisa, she threw it into the soiled bedding in Patch’s stall. Carefully, Lisa handed Patch’s reins to Estelle. She turned and retrieved the pin from the straw. She wiped it off, opened the clasp, and put it on her blouse. It was just as beautiful to her now as it had been the first time she’d seen it in the jewelry store showcase. She’d wear it with pride.

  She turned and walked out of Patch’s stall. It was time for class and it was time to get back to her horse crazy friends, Stevie and Carole.

  Lisa didn’t speak to Estelle again that day. The next time she saw her, in fact, Estelle was carrying all her belongings to the car, where her mother was waiting for her. Just at the moment when she might possibly have been ready to be a beginner—an honest beginner—she was quitting. Lisa certainly wouldn’t miss her and neither would her friends. It was just too bad, Lisa thought, that Estelle would never really know how much fun riding could be. That was Estelle’s loss, but for now, it was The Saddle Club’s gain. Lisa could hardly wait to tell Stevie and Carole.

  “THAT’S GOOD NEWS,” Stevie agreed as the three of them ate their sandwiches together. They were sitting on the grass by the paddocks, enjoying the fresh breeze. “But here’s the bad news …”

  “What’s the matter?” Carole asked. It was unlike Stevie to be serious, but the look on her face said she was just that.

  “The bad news is that Mrs. Reg and Max are going to be furious with me when I tell them that I haven’t come up with one decent game for the gymkhana.”

  “But you had such neat ideas,” Lisa said. “There’s something the matter with them all?”

  “None of them works, that’s what’s the matter. I really want this gymkhana to be new and different, and unless I get on it right away, it’s not only not going to be new and different, but it’s not going to be—at all!”

  “Wait a second,” Carole stopped her. “Nobody here has ever been in a gymkhana before, except maybe me. It’s all new and different to all of us!”

  “Don’t tell me the one about the eggs,” Stevie groaned.

  “What’s the matter with an egg race?” Lisa asked. “Boy, I bet it’s funny if somebody drops an egg and it breaks.”

  Stevie tilted her head and looked at Lisa. “Think it would be funny?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Lisa said.

  “Me too,” Carole told her.

  “Okay, I give up. We’ll have an egg race. What else?”

  “What about Laser Tag?”

  “I can’t borrow it from the Zieglers, so that’s out.”

  “If we can’t play Laser Tag, which, by the way, only two people could play at once anyway, how about shadow tag?” Lisa asked.

  “Hey, shadow tag? That would be great! But what if it rains?”

  “Well, then how about some kind of musical chairs? The riders go around a bunch of chairs and when the music stops, they dismount—you get the idea.”

  “I like it!” Stevie said.
>
  “You know what makes a neat relay race?” Carole asked. “The one where people put on costumes. Everybody looks so silly.”

  “My mother has saved all the Halloween costumes each of us ever wore,” Stevie said, suddenly very excited. “That would be just great—pirates, ghosts, all that stuff.…”

  “I was in Mrs. Reg’s office today,” Lisa said. “She has buckets and buckets of hardware, like S-hooks and rings and things like that. There are zillions of things you can do with that sort of stuff. How about stacking rings on a riding crop, or keeping a chain of S-hooks from breaking up while the horse gallops. You know, two riders could be sort of attached to each other with some sort of chain and have to follow a certain course—”

  “That’s the old rope race,” Stevie said, disappointed.

  “Sounds to me like a new and different version of ‘the old rope race,’ ” Carole said.

  “It does, at that,” Stevie agreed. “Listen, I’ve got an idea, if you don’t mind.”

  “What’s that?” Lisa asked.

  “I know we were going to practice our drill exercises today, to music, but do you think we could put that off a day or two and work out the fine points of some of these races? I could really use some help with it.”

  Carole and Lisa exchanged grins. “What else are friends for?” Carole asked.

  “What about Simon Says on horseback?” Lisa asked. “And you know what else might be fun? Like maybe as a finale or something, how about a scavenger hunt? Hey, would a horse be spooked by a bouncing ball? I mean we could have a basketball-dribbling race. Imagine how it would look with the balls bouncing all over the place. I think a blind man’s bluff would be dangerous, but how about some kind of, say, Pin the Tail on the Pony? It would have to be a picture of a pony, of course. All this stuff’s old hat when the kids are on the ground, but they’re really different games on horseback, right?” Lisa was about to go on. She hadn’t even gotten to her idea about the tennis ball on the racket, but she noticed that both Stevie and Carole were staring at her. “Is something wrong?” Lisa asked.