Chasing Painted Horses

by Drew Hayden Taylor

  “So, you gonna come over?”

  Behind Ralph, the school bell rang, signalling the start of a new day of education. All around them kids began running, not wanting to be late for another lacklustre day of sitting in a room, listening to their teachers drone on about insignificant facts and formulas.

  “Well?” asked Ralph.

  At first, Danielle wasn’t sure she had heard properly. “You want me to come over?”

  Ralph nodded, like it meant nothing.

  “Okay then.” She managed another smile, a bigger one this time, one of almost pride and a certain amount of eagerness. “I will! I will!”

  “Great. I’ll let my sister and mother know. Better hurry. You don’t want to be late for class.” Delighted, Ralph started trotting towards the school, knowing William was somewhere inside waiting for him.

  It had been a long time since Danielle had been invited anywhere, so she was quite excited. The second bell rang, indicating there would be no more bells. Danielle sped up, smiling to herself and feeling oddly pleased. She would get to draw the Horse again, and, almost as amazingly, she might actually have friends. Her left hand was already twitching at the thought of picking up that chalk again. She almost didn’t feel hungry now.

  The day passed slowly with class periods of geography, history, and science. But finally the end of the day came, and, like water from a ruptured container, all the children of Otter Lake spilled out of the one-storey school en masse, making their way home, where family, television, and homework awaited them — not necessarily in that order. This flood of Aboriginal adolescents included William, Ralph, and Shelley, making their way down the frozen streets of the village.

  “She’s coming over? Today? Did she say today? What time?” Shelley was anxious to see the little girl in action.

  “I didn’t ask specifically.”

  “Oh, Ralph. You can be so useless sometimes. I could have gone over to Julia’s this afternoon instead of walking home in the cold with you two, but I thought you said Danielle was coming over this afternoon. Brothers!”

  “She is! She told me she was.”

  Trailing about a foot behind, William seemed oddly uninterested in the conversation. “I’m bored.”

  Used to his friend’s occasional moody moments, Ralph tried to engage him in the banter. “How come you’re not excited about seeing Danielle draw her Horse?”

  “It’s just a stupid horse.” The memory of what had so dazzled the young boy had evaporated over the last few days. Personally, he hoped he’d never see the Horse again. After all, it wasn’t that amazing. Boats could go a lot faster than horses and were far more amazing. “I don’t know why you want to see it now. You didn’t last time.”

  “Last time we didn’t know. What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

  William shrugged. Idly, he picked up an icy chunk of snow and threw it at the stop sign, missing. Picking up another one, he noticed Shelley was smiling. “What?” This time he flung it harder, and it hit the sign with a palpable bang, exploding in a shower of snow and ice.

  “It’s because she’s better than It. I bet that’s why It’s acting all funny like this. It’s jealous of the way Danielle can draw and all the attention we’re paying to her.”

  “Stop calling me It!” William lashed out, pushing Shelley’s shoulder, knocking her into Ralph, who grabbed her instinctively. At the same time, both siblings let out a “Hey!” He had pushed Shelley. All their squabbling over the years, all the fights, all the disagreements had never resulted in any form of physical interaction. This was new, and they all recognized that it was something different. Shelley and Ralph stared at their so-called friend, still processing the push. Realizing he had crossed a line, William tried to explain his actions.

  “I’m not jealous of that little weirdo. So she can draw a stupid horse. Big deal. There’s more to life than drawing a horse.”

  Shelley faced the boy, equally angry. “Then let’s see you draw one like hers,” she said, still smiling, but this time a little more coldly. Shelley’s attitude and physical stance seemed to dare him.

  “Shut up!” William was fairly sure he wasn’t jealous. That was for kids. But he wasn’t sure how he felt or why he had pushed his best friend’s sister. This was all new territory for him.

  For practically everybody.

  Once again the mediator, Ralph was relieved to see that just a dozen feet or so ahead was their house. Refuge from the present group friction might not be total, but at least it would be warm, with refreshments.

  “Stop it, both of you. Geez, sometimes I don’t get you two. Everything I know about brothers and sisters says me and Shelley should argue and fight the way you two do. I don’t get it.”

  Once more William shrugged. “Whatever.” He let himself inside the Thomas house first.

  “And he calls Danielle weird. I don’t know why he’s your friend, Ralph.” Shelley disappeared into the house, following William.

  Ralph, alone on the steps, mumbled to himself, “Sometimes I don’t know either,” before entering and closing the door behind him.

  With their boots and coats removed, William and Ralph lost themselves in some reruns on the television in the living room. Disagreements such as the one that had occurred on the way home from school were frequently forgotten in the search for distractions. Still keeping her distance from William, Shelley caught up on her homework at the kitchen table.

  Almost an hour passed before Liz Thomas came home.

  “Your father won’t be home till later tonight. He’s going to some junior hockey thing in Baymeadow. So it’s just us.” Her news elicited a round of grunts. “I see the village school system is doing an excellent job teaching you the fine art of communication.” Once more a series of grunts acknowledged her observations.

  “William, are you staying for dinner?”

  Shelley mumbled to herself, well aware all could hear her. “Well, duh!”

  “Yes, ma’am!” William’s train of logical thought followed with an immediate, “What are we having?”

  “Well, let’s see … somehow I knew you might be staying, so I got us some —” Liz was interrupted by a soft knocking at the door. She paused for an instant, not sure if she had indeed heard what she’d heard. “Did somebody just knock?! I’m not sure …” Instantly, Shelley and Ralph’s heads turned towards each other, then to the door on the other side of the Everything Wall.

  On the far side of that same door stood an excited Danielle, fidgeting in her boots. She was here at her friends’ house! It was so odd to think that. She had friends. And on top of that, she was here to draw her precious Horse. She knew her mother wouldn’t miss her if she came home late. She seldom did. And this place was always so warm and smelled so nice. Danielle definitely liked coming here. The only problem was that eventually she had to leave.

  The door opened in front of her, and there on the other side, smiling, was somebody new, not Shelley, not Ralph, not even that mean-looking kid. But a woman who, for some reason, seemed delighted to see her.

  “You must be Danielle. I have been so looking forward to meeting you. Oh, sweetheart, we loved your Horse.”

  One by one, Shelley and Ralph came up behind the woman. “I’m Liz, the mother of those two, and welcome.” Liz opened the door wider and ushered in the little girl, who was clearly unprepared for such a welcome.

  “Th … th … thank you.”

  “Hey, Danielle,” said Ralph and Shelley in unison.

  Danielle nodded as her jacket was suddenly and forcibly removed from her back by an enthusiastic Liz, almost lifting the tiny girl off her feet. Noticing the worn quality of the young girl’s coat, Liz made a mental note to see if she still had any of Shelley’s outgrown coats in the basement. Looking around, Danielle noticed William a distance away, leaning against the archway separating the kitchen from the living room. He h
ad a nasty look to him, like he smelled something bad. Quickly, she decided not to look at him anymore. That was probably the best thing to do. If she pretended he wasn’t there, he might go away. The opposite of the way she called her Horse. She pretended it was there and it came.

  To her right, she noticed the Everything Wall, clean and pristine except for small, unimpressive drawings scattered around its edges. The centre, a good three-quarters of the Wall, was empty. That was where the Horse would be. That’s where it had been before and where she would call it forward again. Danielle could almost feel it right now, nudging her to begin.

  “Would you like something to drink first or do you want to draw?! I think we have some ginger ale?!” Shelley pulled out a can from the fridge. “It’s diet?! Want that?!”

  Not really knowing the difference in ginger ales but nodding appreciatively, Danielle took the can. Liz couldn’t help thinking that perhaps she should buy some fully sugared drinks specifically for Danielle. If there was ever anybody who needed the extra calories, it had to be the tiny waif who stood in front of her. Her fingers looked as skinny as the pieces of chalk. But for now, her daughter was acting as an excellent host, and the mother decided to let the rest of the afternoon play out by itself.

  Opening the can of ginger ale, Danielle noticed everybody was looking at her. This made her uncomfortable. She froze, unable to drink. There was a little tremble to her frame, but not so little that Liz didn’t notice it.

  “All right, everyone, let’s let the girl alone. I’m sure she doesn’t want us all looking at her, do you, hon? When you are ready, the chalk is there in the box on the shelf.”

  They all went back to what they’d been doing. Supposedly. Liz disappeared upstairs while the two boys went back to the television. Shelley sat herself back at the table and turned her attention to the math book lying open before her. Algebra — the math from hell. If A equals algebra, and B equals Shelley, then C must equal all the lost hours in her life that she’ll never get back. Why would somebody invent this and teach it to Native kids? Shelley found herself mumbling her father’s favourite phrase as she sat there, waist-deep in algebraic formulas: “White people sure are strange.” But between logarithms and equations, the corner of her eye still wandered over to where Danielle stood in front of the Everything Wall.

  Soon only the muffled sound of the television in the other room could be heard, along with the occasional turning of a page and the glug-glug of pop being drunk. Though Danielle couldn’t see her, Shelley was smiling. Good, she thought, and I’ll have to make sure she eats something before she leaves. She was so thin! Too thin. Shelley Thomas had a remarkably developed mother instinct even then, barely a year after puberty.

  Sipping her pop and now relatively alone, Danielle turned her attention to the Wall before her. Scouting the borders of available space, the girl gingerly picked up the container full of chalk, a multitude of different colours with which to explore the universe. Today, she felt the Horse wanted more blue. She never knew what the colours meant in the creation of the Horse, but the Horse knew and that was good enough for her.

  Putting the box on the floor near the Wall, she picked up a white chalk stick first, then looked at the flat surface in front of her. She didn’t move for five seconds, a look of deep concentration taking shape on her face as her imagination spread across the black paint. Her focus was so deep she didn’t hear the small sound of a twelve-year-old girl turning slightly in her chair to look over her shoulder. Or a slightly younger boy getting up off the couch in the other room to hover just outside the entrance to the kitchen, or the huskier boy who followed him. They were all silent, waiting, wanting to see the creation of the Horse and learn how such artistic magic was accomplished.

  Danielle wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the chalk. Putting the pop on the floor to her right, she gripped the chalk between her thumb and index finger. Clenching her right hand and resting it against the Wall, she used it to balance herself as she crouched into position. Her hand opened and, for a second, expanded against the wall itself, as if to feel it.

  Then she began. Deep in her mind, she called. Almost immediately, she knew the Horse was waiting. Coming.

  One individual’s creation is often hard for others to witness and appreciate, let alone understand. Michelangelo was supposedly once asked how he could carve such beautiful sculptures, to which he replied that he simply imagined what he wanted to create deep inside a block of marble and then removed everything that didn’t resemble what he had envisioned. Coming from such an artist, the process sounded surprisingly easy.

  What Danielle saw on that Wall, or perhaps even behind it, none of the other kids could fathom. They could only watch, gathering a hint of what she was doing. She sketched the outline of the creature, moving sometimes swiftly, other times so delicately and precisely that the observers were left aching for more active and broad creation. After the red came more white, then the blue, and finally the brown. She used yellow to highlight certain areas of the Horse’s body. She used her hand to blend the colours together by smudging them in just the right way. Somehow this added shadow and depth, texture and grain. Minute by minute, the Horse took shape on the Thomases’ wall in Otter Lake. It was like a portal that magnificent creatures would pass through, granting those precious few a brief audience.

  How a ten-year-old girl could know the detailed musculature and anatomy of a horse in such detail was surely a mystery. Even if asked, it was doubtful Danielle would give a sufficient answer. She just did what was necessary. The hooves were delicate, as were the ears and the nostrils, flared, expelling air. She spent ten minutes on the mane alone, making it seem like the Horse was running in full gallop, perhaps down a beach somewhere with an ocean gale chasing it, as in those photographs in the book they had seen the other day. Danielle saved the eyes for last, which many philosophers believed were the windows to the soul. Tongues and ears might lie, but never the eyes. And like the version that had been created last week, they were fierce and protective, almost as if they were warning people away from both him and Danielle.

  All three children watched the creation from start to finish, never uttering a word. At one point, her neck hurting, Shelley turned completely around on her chair, but Danielle didn’t hear her or the creaking furniture; she was too busy communicating with the being on the Wall. Her body was here, but everything that made Danielle Danielle was somewhere on the other side of that black plywood. Shelley’s breathing gradually became shallower, almost as if she was afraid her very breath would disrupt the little girl’s act of creation. The only time she’d ever felt remotely like this had been a year ago at the arena in town, where her parents had taken her to see some figure skating. Seeing a beautiful young girl, dressed so pretty, dancing on the ice as if gravity and friction were figments of the imagination had made her briefly imagine a world where she could be that graceful and talented. Here, now, in front of her, was something completely different yet so similar. Danielle’s hand, gliding across the plywood wall, creating things that ninety-nine percent of the population could never imagine, never mind create.

  Shelley felt honoured to be able to watch.

  The two boys, with differing opinions on the girl, shared a mutual amazement at what they were witnessing. William watched Danielle’s hands like a hawk, hoping against reality that he might be able to, in the way young children (and a few adults) believe is possible, re-create or imitate what the little girl was doing. He had hands. He had imagination. He had chalk and a flat surface to draw on. But that was where the similarity ended. His sense of astonishment was slowly turning into something darker: envy.

  Ralph, on the other hand, could almost see where Danielle’s hand was going to flow. It was like he could see what part of the Horse she was going to draw next. The Horse was taking shape, and he could almost see it three-dimensionally. Even though he didn’t know how, Ralph understood that Danielle felt the Ho
rse was real. And, for that short period of time, the young boy didn’t think he could argue against the young girl’s belief. Each chalk mark was a caress, each straight line was a map Ralph followed to aid him in understanding what was happening on his kitchen wall.

  Now familiar with her medium, Danielle incorporated more of the environment in her conception. There was a mild warping in the wood that Danielle used to her advantage by placing where the head joined the neck of the Horse over the dent. The result was that the head seemed to follow Ralph when he moved. Had somebody taught her that, or was that something instinctive? Or maybe it was in reality part of the Horse, not the Wall.

  It may seem exaggerated to describe the sense of captivation the diminutive girl had on the other three children in the room. After all, in the larger context of the world, this was just a small girl drawing on a wall with chalk. For hundreds, maybe thousands of years, children had got in trouble for simple variations of this very same act. But all three were somehow aware that Danielle was taking them someplace, using some power that very few had access to. And they knew they were privileged to be along for the ride.

  It was Ralph who, once again, had been fully enveloped by Danielle and her chalk Horse. In ways he was not able to describe, he thought he could see the little girl riding atop that Horse, somewhere in a land far away — the creature carrying her, she holding on tight and caressing its powerful neck. He saw them, horse and girl, together, interacting as more than a drawing and its drawer should. Perhaps there was indeed a crack between the worlds, and somehow he was peering between the two, looking at what Danielle was seeing. Had Ralph Thomas been able to express himself at that moment, he would have said, “It was truly weird.” But in a positive sense.

  Danielle began to slow down. She was adding finishing touches, details in the tail and around the shoulder to indicate motion. More to the nostrils to make them seem like they were actually quivering in exertion as it ran faster than could be imagined.