Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Another thing her mom always said was “Good-looking ain’t necessarily good-acting.” She usually said this in reference to guys Tiffany had turned up here and there, and in reference to Iona’s father and Tiffany’s brother, Roland. But often Tiffany expected that she was saying it in reference to her, because everyone said, and Tiffany herself knew, that she was a knockout, a fox, a babe, you name it. She was so used to being a drop-dead gorgeous black woman no matter what she wore or how she did her makeup that she didn’t even care anymore. Where had it gotten her, now that she was twenty-one with very little to show for it? Iona was drop-dead gorgeous, too, the way tiny things are especially gorgeous because you can’t believe they are so small and perfect, but Tiffany never complimented her. Drop-dead gorgeous was just a thing, like sleet or snow or flowers, that happened. And you had to be drop-dead gorgeous to know what a trivial thing it was. Tiffany often wondered what she would exchange her looks for, if she could. Something more interesting to do than working as a checker at Wal-Mart would be one thing, but the fact was, she couldn’t think of what that interesting thing to do would be. That was her problem, she thought. She knew perfectly well what others wanted her to do and what she didn’t want to do, but when she tried to pull up from her depths something she herself wanted to do, the bucket came up empty. Once in a while she did some research. There were programs on TV that showed you what other people did. They worked in offices or police stations or bars. Lots of them worked in show business. But none of them really did anything except sit around and make jokes, which was what Tiffany herself did all day at Wal-Mart, and so all of them looked as idle as she felt herself to be. Or she bought a magazine, but all the women’s magazines made it seem as though everyone was either working full-time on her appearance, which Tiffany could afford to disdain, or else making different recipes all day, which seemed nearly as boring. There was a channel on the TV called the Discovery Channel, which Tiffany sometimes monitored, but those shows didn’t focus on what the people did, only on the results of what they did. She didn’t ever see how they had made the move from, say, Lowell, Massachusetts, to the plains of the Serengeti. If those people were calling out to her, then they were calling across an abyss of space that she didn’t see how anyone could cross. Especially now that she had no money at all, not even bus fare to get to work tomorrow. She turned off the TV and went into the living room to check on Iona. Here Iona was, already three, already having her own ideas about stuff she wanted to do that weren’t the same as your ideas about stuff Iona was supposed to do. That sort of thing made you think about how fast time went. But, then, here she was, here her mother was, doing the same things year after year, having the same arguments, not getting anywhere. That sort of thing made you think just the opposite, that time went all too slowly. She covered Iona and picked up the girl’s shoes, which she set on the corner of the table so she could find them easily in the morning.

  After she had gotten into bed and turned out the light, she thought that all she had was the same prayer she had uttered before. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. She whispered, “Please make something happen here.” Tiffany sighed. This was a prayer that always worked. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work as she hoped. For example, she had prayed for a job, and gotten hired at Wal-Mart. She had prayed for a boyfriend, and attracted the deathless interest of Lindsay Wicks, her dampest, palest co-worker. She had prayed for a couch, and her mother had decided to buy a new one, passing the seventeen-year-old brown thing on to Tiffany, who was required to appear grateful. She continued, “This time, I mean it.”

  4 / A USEFUL ANIMAL

  NOT LONG BEFORE Thanksgiving, Joy Gorham, mare manager at Tompkins Ranch, The Breeding Operation, Fine Thoroughbreds, A Subsidiary of Tompkins Worldwide Racing—Only the Best, found a note in her box from Mr. Tompkins’ secretary. It read, “Take care of this, honey,” and was attached to a letter. The letter was neatly typed on a computer, but in a cursive, girlish font, on stationery scattered with pictures of horses. It read,

  Dear Mr. Tompkins,

  My Mom uses your almond throat cream. She likes it very much. Thank you. There is a horse here in a field by my school. I give him some carrots every day, and I bought a rubber curry and a body brush and a soft brush and a hoofpick out of my own allowance. I also groom him every day. He is a very nice horse. I call him Toto. But my Dad showed me how to write to the Thoroughbred Protective Association, and find out about a horse because I made out his tattoo on his upper lip. I found out that his real name is *Terza Rima, and that he came over to this country in 1985 to run races for you. He was bred in Germany and raced in France. He is a stakes winner. You owned him for five years and raced him at Hollywood Park, Del Mar, Gulfstream, and Saratoga. He won seven races out of fifty-two starts, and was on the board twenty-two times, then you sold him and now he is here.

  The thing is, my Dad is an army officer, and now we are leaving this base to go to Washington, D.C. I can’t take care of Toto any longer, and I think he will die, because he is very skinny—you can see his hip bones and his ribs and his neck is very thin. Also, all the other horses bite him, and because he is gray with black skin, the bites show. He has a very short tail. I think the other horses in the field are very mean to him. His owner has too many horses. He is a bad man, and last summer he forgot to fill the tanks for three days when it was hot. My Mom and I filled the tanks ourselves, with a hose from the school. He thinks the horses are eating the grass, but there isn’t any grass. All the horses are very unhappy.

  I think that since *Terza Rima won $300,000 dollars for you, you should take him to your farm and keep him there. My Dad says that that is what a decent person would do, but he doesn’t think very many horse people are decent. You are in California. We are in Texas. That isn’t very far. I will be leaving here on December 1st. I look forward to hearing from you.

  Yours very truly,

  Audrey Schmidt, aged eleven

  512-969-5225

  Joy turned the letter over, and saw on the back a drawing in crayon of a white horse and a little girl, blue sky, yellow sun, green grass. Then she went over to the file cabinet and looked up *Terza Rima. Gray gelding, by Luciano, out of Templeogue, by Prodomo, turf horse, imported at five by Tompkins Racing. Everything Audrey said was true. Tompkins Racing had raced him steadily through his nine-year-old season, then sold him off at a dispersal sale for seven thousand dollars. All in all, Terza Rima had been a profitable investment for a horse who couldn’t reproduce, though, of course, on every sector of the Tompkins Ranch, reproduction was the short-term, long-term, and interim goal.

  A week later, two men in Tompkins white coats, driving a Tompkins Horse Transport Van (“Air Ride Perfection, 48 States, Weekly Runs from Kentucky to California”), handed Bucky Lord a check for a thousand dollars, one dollar a pound, and loaded the sorriest-looking animal they agreed they had ever seen onto the van with three yearlings from Kentucky. On the way out of town, the driver called the SPCA and the state police, and reported Bucky Lord for cruelty to animals. Every time they stopped the van and checked the horses, the emaciated gray had eaten all his hay. That night, when they stopped and gave him, along with the yearlings, a large bran mash, he inhaled it as they watched and nickered for more. Toward morning they pulled into the ranch, put the yearlings into paddocks, and put the old gray into an isolation stall, until the vet could look at him. It was a big stall, maybe sixteen by sixteen, bedded two feet deep in straw, with windows in every direction. When the driver led the old gelding into the stall, the horse’s eyes actually widened in surprise, he thought. The driver shook his head, and paused to scratch the old boy on that spot in front of the withers where horses can’t scratch themselves. The horse’s head swung around in wonder and he looked right at him.

  Joy didn’t think the horse should have to be her responsibility. It wasn’t like she didn’t already have enough to do. The weanlings had to be handled daily, and mares who were put under lights to bring them
into season early had to be blanketed and taken in and out. Soon the breeding season would begin again. Every day, she got to the farm at seven and stayed until at least seven. It wasn’t until almost dusk that Joy got a look at the old gray gelding.

  Well, it was quite a change from his win pictures that were still in the file. Accustomed as she was to well-cared-for animals, Joy found the gelding’s condition startling, almost an optical illusion. He had the head, the neck, the tail, the legs, the body of a horse—but it was all stark and skeletal, especially the neck, which looked like it hadn’t been very cresty to begin with. Joy entered the stall and walked around the animal, gazing at him from the side, the front, the other side, the back. He regarded her calmly, his dark eyes almost triangular in his white face, smudged around the edges where the black of his skin showed through the white of his coat.

  His feet were a mess, cracked and uneven from bad shoeing or no shoeing, whichever would be worse. His skeletal structure stood out like a picture from a manual. His spine ran from his withers to his tail, bony and prominent. The saddest part was his haunches. The atrophied muscles fell away from the spine in hollows; the croup, that rounded, shining world of power in a fit horse, was an unsoftened rocky prominence in this guy. And floating on the white like islands were black jagged shapes where other horses had taken nips and tucks. The black was the animal’s skin underneath the white hair, but it seemed to lift off the surface and made Joy close her eyes and shake her head. The gelding was a good seventeen hands, and weighed maybe nine hundred pounds, when his natural weight would have been something like twelve to thirteen hundred pounds.

  She looked down. All that was left of the horse was his legs. They were long, etched, muscular, and clean. He was a textbook example of how the column of the leg must stack exactly true, how the big, flat knee must face front, how the fetlock joint must rest in the hammock of the suspensory ligament but never stretch it too far, how the tendons must be straight and tight and (she felt them) cool. He was equally right in his back end. His hocks were plumb below the point of the gluteus, his pasterns straightened by the slightly deep angle of the hock joint. From behind, the points ran down in a line, glute, hock, fetlock, with the tail centered between them, ticking back and forth. His legs were a picture of how a horse’s body should meet the ground, a stable system of springs and pendula. No doubt he was sound, in spite of seventeen years, fifty-two starts, and God knew what else. Joy got a little interested in him. He stepped across the stall toward her, and after a moment, bumped her with his head. She saw that he was a little interested in her, too.

  “Terza Rima,” she said. “Toto. Well, you seem a little too beat up for the one and a little too grown up for the other. I think I will just call you Mr. T.”

  He nuzzled her hands with his whiskery nose.

  The problem with Thanksgiving, now thankfully past and so why should she still be thinking about it, Joy thought that evening as she was eating her supper at the Tompkins Ranchhouse Restaurant, Succulent Perfection in Beef, was not that she hadn’t been invited anywhere and had thus been forced to eat alone in her efficiency guesthouse, it was that, although she had been invited two places, she had chosen to eat alone at her efficiency guesthouse, and now she would have to tell her mother that, and her mother would start looking at this as a symptom. You could take your pick of symptoms—no friends was one, not enjoying the acquaintances she had was another. With symptoms you could not win. If your mother was determined to see your life choices as a set of symptoms—depression, isolation, horse-obsession, overwork, no love life—then it was very hard to convince her that what these really amounted to was a sense of calm and peace, lively interest in a fascinating animal species, plenty to keep you busy, and a choice not to repeat old mistakes. But it was true that she had not enjoyed her solitary Thanksgiving very much, and, she thought, perhaps a friend would be an interesting change, if the friend were a sort of quiet, peaceful, non-intrusive woman of about her own age, someone not unlike herself. There, she would say to her mother, I have perfectly adequate self-esteem—my ideal friend would be just like me.

  She looked around the restaurant. None of the dozen women were sitting alone—all were sitting with men, most were sitting with children. That was her problem in a nutshell. She finished her meal and went home. Her home, she thought, was just about the size of a nutshell, and she had given up years before the idea of finding something larger or more convenient. It had nothing to do with pay or scarcity of places to live. It had to do with being content to nestle like a nut inside her nutshell. And she was content—time was when she, too, would have been sitting with a man, her old boyfriend Dean, and she would have been listening to him go on and on about some 100-percent unnatural animal-breeding project he was trying to get funding for, and she would have been smiling and nodding, and, taken all in all, a nutshell was preferable.

  Mr. T., of course, had to be isolated for at least a week, because there was no telling what he might have picked up at Bucky Lord’s equine establishment, but after that, Joy didn’t know quite what to do with him. On the broodmare side of the farm, the pastures were filled with broodmares and weanlings. Broodmares tended to be very firm in the standard of behavior they required of a male horse, and Mr. T. hardly needed any more of that. On the stallion side of the farm, the stallion paddocks happened to be full—the year before, Mr. T. might have gone over there, but Mr. Tompkins had brought a four-year-old and a five-year-old back from the track to give them a try this year. The training center was clear across the ranch, and Joy didn’t want to put the old horse in a pasture with young ones. In fact, the vet said he shouldn’t be put in with anyone at all, but given a rest from equine society, then maybe introduced later to a single friend, another older gelding, if possible. So he stayed in the isolation barn, which had no paddocks, and every day Joy led him out for a half-hour to eat grass. Right away he started noticing her and nickering for her. It was flattering. She started bringing him carrots, even though she didn’t believe in hand-feeding treats. But the animal was the opposite of pushy. He took the carrot out of her hand only when she offered it, and then gently. He didn’t bump her or look in her pockets, or even play his lip over her hand. If she didn’t offer, he didn’t ask.

  There was another letter from Audrey. It read,

  Dear Miss Joy Gorham—

  Please write to the following address and tell me about Toto. We went to California to see my grandparents and I made my Dad take me three times to Hollywood Park, and I bet all the grays. We had one winning day and two losing days. I did hit the exacta on two long shots, 15-1 (Bimini Baby) and 18-1 (Gimme Ago), on five dollar bets, and I came home with $170. This is equal to a six lesson package at my stable. My Mom said that we could not go to the racetrack again until the spring, and that she will pay for the riding lessons if I would stop betting, but my Dad said that betting is really money management, and that is something that everyone should learn. I don’t care about betting. I just care about the horses.

  I miss Toto. I know he was a good racehorse. Please give him a kiss for me, and say my name to him, so that he knows who the kiss is from. Now it turns out we are going to France after Christmas.

  Yours Very Truly,

  Audrey Schmidt,

  14578 Eglantine Street

  Pokerville, Maryland

  Joy could not help imagining Audrey as herself, twenty-five or thirty years ago—a wiry, blonde little tomboy, standing on her pony’s haunches while he grazed and trying to reach an apple hanging from a branch. When the pony walked away too quickly (as he always did), Joy would slide to the ground and jump up, hurt, unhurt, who cared? Whatever the pony did was fine by her, because he was her very own pony, and if you were a certain kind of little girl, a pony of your very own was the world’s finest treasure, and no matter how many times over the years your mother said, “It was that awful pony that started all this. I mean, he wasn’t even pretty or nice! I told your father—,” he still remained in your mind a
s the ultimate good thing.

  She photocopied Mr. T.’s best win photo—the Warren Beatty Handicap at Arlington Park in Chicago, by four lengths—and sent it off to Audrey with an Almond Perfection Skin Nurturing and Refinement Moisturizing Sample Pack (Every Tompkins Skin Blessing Product in Convenient Trial Sizes) and a Tompkins Perfection Prime Steak Sampler (Shipped Frozen for Your Delectation and Enjoyment).

  DECEMBER

  5 / ROSALIND

  ONCE, WHEN Rosalind Maybrick was still Rosie Wilson from Appleton, Wisconsin, on a school trip to New York City, she had seen a sight that changed her life. What happened was, the teacher who was leading the trip gave Rosie and her friend Mary permission to stay behind at the hotel because their hair was still in rollers and the teacher, even though he was a man, had sense enough to know that sixteen-year-old girls were literally not capable of leaving their room with bad hair. So he had told them what bus to take to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they could meet the rest of the class in the Etruscan collection. Rosie and Mary had taken only a 10-percent advantage of this privilege—they were three minutes late leaving their room and took the second bus that went past rather than the first, just so they could feel themselves standing at a bus stop in Manhattan, New York, surrounded by people who were short, dark, and voluble rather than tall, blond, and silent. The fatal part was the bus they got on. They of course stood, because they had been taught to do so, out of respect to everyone else in the whole world—they were from the Midwest, and deference was their habit and training. On the bus was a very well-dressed woman with a two- or three-year-old boy in a stroller. She wore a dark, slim fur coat and leather gloves. The boy had on a wool coat and a wool hat. The stroller took up a lot of space. Both woman and boy sat calmly as the bus crossed town, and then the woman pulled the cord and stood up. That was when things began to go wrong. The stroller caught something and began to fold. The boy began to cry. The driver opened the door and shouted angrily, “You gonna get off, lady? I got traffic here.”