by Jane Smiley
I went into the barn. I saw Abby walk over to Ruthie. She pointed toward the mares and the geldings, and shook her head one time, and I was sure she was telling Ruthie not to go into the pastures by herself.
After I was tacked up and mounted and I had Tater in the ring with Abby, she said, “What do you want to do?”
She’d never asked this question before—always she’s had a plan for me.
I said, “What did I do wrong at the show?”
“Not much.”
“Then why didn’t I win?”
“It wasn’t that you didn’t win, it was that Tater didn’t win, because you didn’t do equitation classes.”
This was true. If we could only afford one class a day, I wanted to do something interesting, and, in my opinion, walk, trot, canter, now walk again, now halt, now trot to the left is not interesting. It’s like taking an arithmetic test. You are almost falling asleep and you only wake up if you get an A. Hunter and jumper classes are like taking a social studies test—you have to think about what happened and who did it and why it happened, and you have all these pictures in your mind of pioneers or Christopher Columbus in the middle of the ocean or Lewis and Clark climbing the Missouri River, even though, of course, the Missouri River is flat, because it has to be in order to be a river, but there’s the map and the river looks like a long hill. Even if you only get a B+, at least there was something to imagine.
“What does Tater need to do to win?”
“He needs to show off a little. Let me demonstrate.” She said this in a deep voice that made me laugh. Now she turned and walked across the arena in front of me. She looked like Abby. She went maybe ten yards or so, then turned around, and when she walked back past me, she was standing up straighter, her eyebrows were lifted, she was smiling, and she was taking bigger steps as well as swinging her arms. She turned to me and said, “What’s the difference?”
I thought about it for a minute, then said, “The second time, you look like you’re the boss.”
“That’s what the judge notices.”
I glanced at Jack, who was now staring toward the mare pasture. Ruthie was curled over her pad, scribbling away. When he turned and went back to his hay, she flipped the page and started scribbling again.
I said, “I don’t know how Tater is ever going to look like the boss.”
“Well, let’s try a few things.”
I turned Tater and started to walk him around Abby in a big circle. It wasn’t as hard as usual, because they’d put the jumps at one end of the arena, so I didn’t have to avoid them. Abby said, “Keep a light rein—”
“Light as threads.”
“Yes. Now use your inside leg to push him forward, and when you feel that he’s stepping under, let go of the inside rein a little bit.”
I tried this three times. The first two times, nothing, and then on the third time, I did feel a bigger step underneath my inside leg, and his head dropped. I let the rein slide a little bit, and he took maybe five bigger steps before he went back to normal. I said, “I felt that.”
“I could see it, too. Keep trying until you get him to take bigger steps all the way around the circle.”
The more we tried it, the more I enjoyed it. Finally, we made it all the way around the circle, head lowered, bigger steps—and then, as if it was something Tater wanted to do, he went up into the trot, and the trot felt different, too. His head stayed down. Abby said, “That’s the interesting thing about horses. When they’re relaxed, they move forward more easily, so it’s actually more fun to ride them.”
I said, “This is a tune-up, then. My dad talks about that all the time.”
Abby smiled and said, “Well, yeah.”
I worked on this a little longer, at the walk and the trot, and then the fun part, the canter. Even at the canter, I could feel a difference—Tater seemed to be rolling more, and he was also going around his circle like he was a merry-go-round horse. We cantered both directions and came down to the walk. I said, “He likes it.”
“It’s relaxing.”
I can see why Abby’s dad and Abby herself ride horses year after year. They are always interesting, especially just after you thought they were boring. This reminded me. I said, “What was going on with Gee Whiz at the show?” I paused. “You looked scared.”
She pursed her lips. “I was. But he wasn’t.”
“Maybe Sophia should be riding him over the higher jumps.”
“Sophia made sure to tell me that.”
“She could buy him.”
“She has more than she can handle as it is.”
Sophia is a friend of Abby’s who shows a lot and, as far as I can tell, gets to have any horse she wants. She’s nice, though. We walked toward the jumps. I said, “But what was going on?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
So I did. I looked up the hill, and inside my own head, I said, “Gee Whiz, what was going on at the show?”
And he said, “The faster I go, the higher I can jump.”
Up the hill, he tossed his head, as if to say, “So there.”
I said, in my head, “No one agrees with you. It’s not a steeplechase.”
He said, “What’s a steeplechase?”
I said, “A race over jumps.”
And now, I kid you not, he whinnied loud and clear, as if to say, “Show me the way!”
I said, “You’re too old for that.”
And then he kicked up and ran across the hillside, and I didn’t know what to think. I was glad that the jumping part of our lesson was just trotting over some cavalletti. I said nothing to Abby. I knew all of this was in my head, I knew I wasn’t really talking to Gee Whiz, but it seemed like it, and I felt a little crazy.
Now Mom showed up beside the arena. When she drives me to Abby’s ranch, she likes to go for a little walk. She says that even though she grew up in the town where we used to live, which is only twenty miles away, living here is like moving across country, and taking me to lessons at the ranch is like a vacation—she loves the sunshine and the chaparral and grass in the spring, and even the brown hills in the fall. If you went for a walk in our old town, you would be going up and down hills every step of the way. Here it is flat and then mountainous. She was also carrying her book, which she likes to read if my lesson is really long. I looked at it when she first bought it, but there weren’t any horses in it, even though the title is The Pale Horse. I wanted to read it, but Mom says I’m too young. So of course, I want to read it even more. What will happen is that she’ll finish it, and stick it in the bookcase, and I will sneak it out when she’s busy and read it bit by bit. Thinking about this made me feel less crazy. Abby had me trot a few more cavalletti, but she still seemed distracted. She went out of the arena and I walked Tater here and there to cool him out. I did say to him, in my mind, “You were really good today. I think we learned something,” but he didn’t say anything or do anything, unless reaching his head around to shoo away a fly counts as a reply.
I also looked up the hill at Ned, and I spoke to him, too. I said, “I miss you. How are you?” But he didn’t lift his head and look at me; he only swished his tail. Then I said, to myself, “Forget about it, forget about it, forget about it.”
Ruthie had done seventeen pictures of Jack—his foot, his rump, his shoulder, his tail, his ears, his face from the front and the side, his hock, his knee, his eye, his nostril. She showed them to me as we were driving home. Some of them were almost finished, some of them just a few lines, but even with only a few lines, I could tell what she was trying to show. I draw pictures of horses all the time—at least, pictures of their heads. I used to get in trouble in third grade for drawing them when school got so boring that I thought I was going to fall out of my chair. I especially drew pictures of Ned’s head, and I was always trying to get the
m right. I never did—sometimes his eye or his mouth looked like Ned, but other times, not. Ruthie’s weren’t like that. You could see the quickness of what she was doing right there on the page, and somehow it made the horse, which didn’t look a lot like Jack, seem more alive. I told her I thought they were really good. She said, “Oh. Thanks.” But she did smile when we dropped her off at her house.
As we pulled away, Mom said, “She is a strange one. But sweet.”
I said, “She is a conundrum.”
Mom laughed.
After the big show, everyone needs a rest. Normally, my lessons are on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday—the Saturday lesson is where I help clean stalls and tack and carry bags of feed. Mom or Dad drops me at Abby’s and I stay there most of the day. Lots of times I eat lunch there, which I like, because Abby’s mom is a good cook.
We skipped the Wednesday lesson to give the horses their rest. My plan for that day was to go to the library and get some books, crawl under my bed and pull out everything I’d shoved there in the last two months (Mom said I had to do this), draw a few pictures of horses the way Ruthie did, and, if it got really hot, go to the swimming pool, which isn’t as fun as the beach in our old town, and much farther away. But if I had to make a choice between the beach and Abby’s ranch, I would choose the ranch. Dad says we should get air-conditioning, but Mom doesn’t like it, and they only talk about it every so often, because it’s only really hot every so often.
Another thing I like to do is cross the street to the park and run around it on the sidewalk, pretending that I’m a racehorse. I got Dad to drive around the park in one of the used cars and measure it. It is four-tenths of a mile, which is just under four furlongs. The lengths of horse races are measured in furlongs. A furlong is an eighth of a mile. I did go to the library and look up “furlong.” It is a really old word, and is partly made up of the word “furrow,” which is the line you get when you plow a field, and partly made up of “long,” of course. Just about every word is interesting, but “furlong” is especially interesting—and I think about that word every time I run around the park. Horse words are interesting, like “fetlock,” “withers,” “stifle,” and a bunch of other names of the parts of a horse. Abby and Jane say these words as if they’ve never ever thought they were weird, but they are.
So, after I sat in bed for a while and thought about words and what I was going to do all day to pass the time, I ate my breakfast, went outside, and did a completely new thing—I walked down the street toward the school and around the block that goes past Ruthie’s house. And then I walked around it again. It’s a short block between the middle school and the high school, and since there are a lot of playgrounds and fields, kids are over there all the time, and so, yes, I could walk around it all day long and no one would ever ask me why, except maybe Ruthie, but since she hardly says a word, she probably wouldn’t ask. Maybe she would draw a picture of me.
Of course I kept my eyes and ears open, but at Ruthie’s house, there was nothing to see. The shades were down (the shades at our house are down, too, to keep out the sunshine—Mom puts them up and opens the windows at night). The doors were closed. I don’t think they have a car, so there was nothing in the driveway. There were two pots of leafy stems and there was a tree hanging over the front door. I didn’t go up to it—from the sidewalk, it looked like a ceanothus, one of my grandmother’s favorites. At our old house, there was a garden in the back that had dozens of different plants and flowers in it, and green green grass. That was the part I hated to leave behind. Mom likes a garden, and she’s working on starting one in our new yard, but she hasn’t gotten very far. I kept walking. Now I sort of hopped from one shady spot to another. If the tree was big and it was really shady, I would stand there and count to twenty. When it happened, I was all the way around the block from Ruthie’s house (I could see the back porch through the two yards). I was counting, and had reached fourteen. A voice said, “Tomorrow.”
I looked around. There was a kid across the street, about my age, carrying a tennis racket, but he wasn’t looking at me, so I didn’t think he was the one who had spoken to me. I looked around again. No one. I finished counting, because I always finish what I start, and then I started walking again. I went around the block next to Ruthie’s and then I went home. When I let myself in the door, Mom and Joan Ariel were tossing one of Joan Ariel’s toys back and forth, something Joan Ariel likes to do, and she can catch it most of the time, which, of course, makes her laugh. Mom said, “You want some water?”
“Why?”
“It’s hot. Your face is red. You look a little sweaty.”
She handed me the toy, a small stuffed dog, and Joan Ariel threw her arms in the air. I tossed it. She caught it. Then she fell down like she wanted to and rolled on top of it. She said, “Bob.” All of her toys are named Bob, even her Raggedy Ann doll that used to be mine.
I drank the glass of water down to the last drop, and then Mom went into the kitchen and got some pancake batter out of the refrigerator and made me pancakes. When they were cooking, she handed me a bowl of blueberries and I dropped them into the pancakes, five in each one, so twenty blueberries in four pancakes, and then she smeared each one with a little butter and stacked them and set them on the table next to the maple syrup. When I sat down, she handed me a glass of orange juice. I started eating. Out back, the trees were creaking and the shadows were flickering along the window screen. A couple of flies hit it. I wondered what book I would read that afternoon—the library is a good place to go in the summer, and it occurred to me that Grandma and Grandpa might come to dinner, and I was about to ask, when that voice said, “Tomorrow” again. And right there, as if projected onto the wall like a movie, was Ned’s face turned toward me, his ears pricked, a tree behind him that looked just like one of the trees in our backyard, so I glanced out the window again, looked at that tree (a Japanese maple), and then back at the wall. No Ned.
When I used to talk to Ned in third grade, it was almost always at night, just before bed, and now I think that it was probably a dream. I’m a good dreamer. My dreams go on and on and they stick with me for a long time. Sometime in the winter, I asked Mom if she has good dreams, and she said, how would she know, she can’t remember them except for an occasional image. The kids at school sometimes talk about nightmares—Mary Logan, who sat next to me in the spring, dreamt that the ceiling fan in her bedroom broke away and flew like a bird out of the window, and then she wouldn’t let her mom turn on the fan for the next week even though it was hot. I overheard Jack Lawrence tell Bertie King that he dreamt that he got a new bike and then rode it down six flights of stairs. A few nights ago, I’d been looking at the atlas on our coffee table, and then I dreamt all night of flying here and there—I would see the names and then fly in close and see the landscape. The first name I saw was “Sahara,” and then I floated over a gold, sandy, flat place with the wind blowing the sand into little swirls. Then I dreamt the word “Aegean” and saw a really blue ocean dotted with shiny rocks. As soon as I woke up, I knew it was a dream—it was still night, there was a little breeze blowing. I lay on my back with my eyes closed and made myself remember my dream as best I could. But back in third grade, it could have been that I didn’t know the difference, really, between a dream and reality.
I finished my pancakes, scraped the last of the maple syrup off my plate with my finger, and stood up. I carried my plate to the sink, ran a little water over it, and the voice said, “Bring a carrot,” which made me laugh out loud.
Nevertheless, the first thing I did when I got up Thursday morning was go to the vegetable bin and look for the two biggest carrots, and yes, as I set them on my bed next to my riding clothes, I said, “I’ve got ’em.”
When we got to the barn, Mom parked under a tree, opened her windows, and said she was going to finish that Pale Horse book. I took the carrots and went looking for Abby. All of the horses
were way up the hill, out of sight, except Jack, who was in the round corral, and Tater, who was staring at me from the moment I walked into the barn, and came to the stall door. The top part was open, and he stuck his head out and whinnied, and I said, “So, is it you who’s talking to me and not Ned?”
Abby said, “What?”
She stood up. She was in the stall across the aisle.
I said, “Oh, nothing.”
She said, “They may not be able to talk, but they sure can communicate!” And Tater banged his knee against his door, and didn’t settle down until I gave him the tip of the carrot.
We had a lesson. Abby seemed less frantic, the weather was still and warm, and the lesson was one of those good ones that you don’t have to concentrate on—you can look up the hill or smell something sweet or hear a horse whinny and recognize that it is Gee Whiz or enjoy cantering around the arena, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, like a waltz, and then remember to loop, change leads, and go the other way without actually thinking about it. Maybe those are the best lessons, in some ways, because you learn that enjoying yourself is the point, after all.
Then the geldings galloped down the hill, kicking up and bucking. Ned whinnied. Abby looked up the hill. I halted Tater, who didn’t care about the geldings, and looked up the hill, too.
Abby said, “What’s that?”
I said, because I’m farsighted, “It’s a lynx.”
The lynx sashayed down the hill, then turned left and walked along below some brush. I could see the long back legs, the short tail. It paused, looked down the hill again, then ran along the hillside. It ran like a wave over the surface of the ocean. Tater tossed his head. The geldings didn’t seem scared. Gee Whiz took a drink, Ned glanced up the hill, and Beebop went looking for grass or weeds or bits of hay, anything—Beebop is a great bucker, but a food horse first and last.
