Borrowed Horses (8 page)

Zip had required me to prove myself. By the end of the sixth canter cue, he was bringing his legs underneath himself and balancing like the dressage horse he was.

I dismounted and handed the reins back to Jenny. “Every time you get on a horse, you train it,” I recited Eddie’s doctrine in his own words. “Zip’s had a bunch of people on him—a bunch of kids—so he’s learned he doesn’t have to do what you say. He’s learned that, more often than not, the rider is going to be too nice or too scared to ask him to work. He’s learned he can ignore you. Your job is to train him, to remind him that he can’t.”

Jenny smiled warmly, accepting my unsought advice with grace. Zip turned, looking for the carrots that usually came at the end of lessons. Empty-handed, I scratched him behind the ear instead.

“Is that your horse?” Jenny asked. Foxy paced his stall, whinnying, jealous.

I nodded. “Foxfire.”

“He’s beautiful.”

I smiled. She’d said the words that guaranteed I’d like her. It was true; Foxy was beautiful. Even still. “Have you met Dawn yet?” I asked.

Jenny’s brow bent with thinking.

“On the short side,” I offered. “Tall hair and tight pants—usually Wranglers. Rides a bay Quarter Horse named Sunny. Cleans stalls.”

“I haven’t met too many people here yet. Connie says she’ll introduce me around, though.”

“You’ll meet Dawn sooner than later. She practically lives here. We usually meet up for a trail ride on Saturday mornings at ten. If you don’t have plans, you should come.”

“I’ve never taken Zip out of the barn,” she said, doubtful.

“Dawn and I will look out for you.” Jenny looked at me full of trust. How could she do anything but believe? I’d just performed the miracle of Zip.

An Eddie and an Eddy

I
n the dream, I was back in the cramped, century-old barn in New Jersey where cobwebs laced every corner. I stood with my arm resting on Foxfire’s withers, talking to a black-haired, faceless vet in his stall. I dropped into myself from above, falling into the bones of a body already in action.

The stall was dimly lit with moonrise. Foxfire rested his head against my chest, softly pressed his blaze against my sternum, letting me share the weight and warmth of his body the way horses do. I let him rest easy there. His long ears flopped lazily to the side, ambivalent to the soft hooting of an owl outside.

“It’s time,” the faceless vet said, and his words had nothing to do with clocks. He opened an old-fashioned black leather medical bag and prepared a shot in a glass syringe. “You needn’t stay,” he said. I recognized his voice as Dave’s, comforting and familiar.

“It’s O.K.,” I said. The words didn’t feel right, like they were moving my mouth to speak, rather than my tongue and lips giving them shape. I ran my tongue over my teeth and swallowed. The vet
was
Dave now, in flesh as well as voice. I reached to stroke his cheek, but he smiled and turned to slide the syringe into Foxy’s vein. As he depressed the plunger, I thought only of the way his hands once moved on my skin, when I suddenly knew what was happening.

I had to stop him. I had to pull out the poison syringe, to smash it to the ground and crush it under my boot heel, to reduce it to harmless glittering dust, but my hand fell, heavy with dream’s enormous gravity.

Dave put the emptied syringe into his black bag, chuckling softly. The weight of Foxy’s head pressed more heavily on me, like he was trying to push himself into my body. I could no longer bear it. I staggered back. He dropped to one knee, then the other. He groaned like he always does when dropping to the ground to roll. I reached out and eased his head to the ground.

Cradling his jowl, satin-soft in my hand, I realized we had done this in the wrong place. We’d never get him out of the stall door. Dead horses are not easy to move. The two people I’d known who had to put down their horses did it outside, right next to the grave itself. They bulldozed the body in afterwards with a small Cat. I bent and shook Foxy’s shoulder to wake him like a mother trying to rouse a child for school, but his eye was distant and glassy. He was gone.

My eyes opened. Beneath my head, my pillow was hot and wet, and I was choked with the sadness of the vision of what would inevitably come to pass. I rose quickly, tearing away the covers as I wished I could tear away the dream.

I made coffee, strong and black, and washed my face. The dream gravity remained. My bones felt over-dense; my skin, too—like it was weighing against cheekbone and temple. Something as real as Foxfire could not just stop. I splashed cold water on my cheeks, rubbing it into my eyes to get the sand out, trying to wash away the vision of a dead Foxfire.

I needed advice, so I went to Connie. I’d heard her say she rode before she walked, and I didn’t doubt it. She didn’t look like a rider—at least, she didn’t look like the riders in magazines. She was a short, solid woman whose flaming hair flew from the back of her helmet like a fox’s brush. Her large, red hands were the type Palmolive calls dishpan hands, but I knew these hands were roughened by dirt, not soap—a far more respectable way to ruin your skin. We were all ruining our skin together out there, exposing our hands and faces to the harsh white sun, the chapping wind, the dust that never settled but only changed colors: the August dust turning our snot hard and black, the white snow dust of January stinging our cheeks and crusting our eyelashes. Idaho’s alchemy turned skin to leather, but we were not dishpan girls.

Connie’s husband died four years earlier. Pancreatic cancer. He was thirty-seven years old. Back then, she owned twelve of her own horses: brood mares, geldings in training, mostly Quarter Horses she’d trained for the hunter ring. Her husband’s death left a stack of medical bills that her PacBell paycheck couldn’t cover. There was nothing to be done. She sold all the horses except for a brood mare pregnant with Soldier Bill, the colt she would name for her dead brother, and Zip, the pony she’d bought for the child they had been trying for when the cancer diagnosis came. She opened the old stalls to more boarders and made Zip into her lesson horse until she realized that she didn’t like kids enough to teach and leased him out instead. If her face was a little ruddier than it had been, if the Jim Beam slid down a little easier each night, not one of us faulted her for it.

Still sweaty from my morning run, I arrived before the sun had come up. Connie was in the arena working with Bill, now a lanky three-year-old and saddle-broke.

In the quiet of the morning, the barn was all her own again. Connie free-walked across the diagonal, allowing Bill to stretch his neck out and down, then collected the reins in the corner and asked for the canter at C, a pattern I recognized from a training level dressage test. When she finished the test and halted square at X, she looked over.

“I need advice,” I said and told her about Foxfire, about his increasingly dangerous tripping, about how he pulled his hind legs away from me now when I lifted them to pick his hooves, about how he leaned on the bit when we worked, putting his weight in my arms, protecting his sore hocks, asking me to carry him.

Connie was one of the faithful, but the faith of riding was seldom spoken. She said, “You thought about retiring him?”

“Thought about it,” I conceded.

“He’s got pasture turnout. It’s not like he won’t get any exercise if you stop.”

“If I don’t ride Foxy, I can’t ride at all, but you know me, I need to do more than just ride. I need to jump.” I wouldn’t whine—not to Connie of all people—but the facts needed to be clear. Bill stretched his nose out and shook his neck, unimpressed. He stomped his foot to shoo an imagined fly and snorted to blow the dust in his nostrils. “Anyway, I thought I’d ask you if you had any advice for me. You’re the only one around here who knows jumpers, the only one who knows enough not to trash on Eddie.”

“That’s who you should talk to.” Connie picked a stray piece of hay from her sweater. The stern face she wore when working was both thoughtful and impassive.

“Who? Eddie?” It was a strange piece of advice. “I don’t even know where he is. Dawn just said he’d moved.”

“Only for a sabbatical. He’ll be back.”

Years ago, Dawn had taken one lesson with Eddie. He’d told her she had a chair seat, her weight too far back in the saddle, and he wouldn’t let her jump until she learned to balance. He made her work on basic two-point position trotting over cavaletti for the whole lesson. When I saw her later, she was fuming, ranting that he’d charged her thirty bucks for a baby lesson, teaching her what she already knew how to do. She’d been riding her whole life, and she was damned if she’d let anyone treat her like a novice.

“When’s he get home?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Anytime now. Julie’s teaching in Southern California somewhere for a year, and the whole family went.”

“Dawn told me that, only she made it sound permanent. She said he’d sold his horses.”

“Leased them. One’s with Pam Westerfelt in Lewiston and the other is with some woman I don’t know in Walla Walla.” Connie tucked one of many stray hairs back into her helmet, but it immediately sprang out again. “They would’ve been back already but Julie got offered some summer course or other, and then they were traveling around a bit. Rough life, right? Those beaches? I told Eddie not to get too tan.”

It was difficult to imagine Eddie more tan, brown as he was from a life among horses, and impossible to imagine him on vacation.

Bill turned to look back at Connie, and she rested her mild, loving eyes on his. “They’ll be back for fall term.”

“I should’ve kept in better touch,” I muttered.

“You should have. We were all wondering what happened to you out there.”

“I’m not much of a phone person.”

“Or a writer.”

“Yeah.” I allowed my voice to drift off as I stared into the dark corner where words and dust drifted. The silt in the corner swirled, plumes of oracular smoke, but I had no eyes to read it.

Dawn and Jenny had already introduced themselves when I arrived on Saturday. I did not mention Eddie or ask Dawn to tell her half-truths. Picking that fight would only spoil a beautiful morning.

Sun-warmed horses move slowly. On the hills, green wheat had began to dull. Soon, it would tan then fade to the ever-lightening blondes of Indian summer. Wind washed through the tender blades in currents and shushed the birds’ morning songs. Along the roadside, wild apple trees began to droop with porcupine and early fruit.

Foxfire flicked an ear and a fly buzzed away lazily into the sunlight. Joan of Arc could have turned her back on angels. Instead, the divine call to cross-dress and fight a senseless war had become a Catholic miracle. For my mother, dreams were a gift from God, and only faithlessness constituted failure. But Mom’s calling to marry my father and return to Idaho seemed an easy one to follow.

I had seen two visions: Olympic glory and Dave. They were both compelling and contradictory, and each had led to failure. Overhead, the dry heat stretched Idaho’s big sky thin as muslin. Its blue faded to a sullied white; dusty, untouchable, distant. It was not a sky to reach for. Perhaps glory was over-rated.

Looking at Dawn and Jenny on their small horses, I was thankful for the mundane and heavy things that ground us. We rode mostly on gravel roads, dusty as they were. Foxy wore shoes that summer only for this, the hammered iron easing the way for his tender feet. In fall, when the harvest’s cut stubble was turned and folded back into the earth, he would go barefoot again. No need to shoe a horse that couldn’t jump.

A red-tailed hawk watched us approach, wearily rising from his weathered post when we drew near. The only sounds were the flap of his wings, our idle chatter, and the crunch of hooves on gravel. I inhaled, wanting to breathe it all in, dusty as it was.

“You’re quiet today,” Dawn said, turning to me. Foxfire and I followed the smaller horses, allowing their gait to naturally check his longer, marching stride.

“I’m always quiet. I’m the strong, silent type.”

Dawn laughed, but Jenny, bless her, said, “I thought that was just guys who were strong, silent types.”

“Could be guys,” Dawn said, reflecting and serious. “Could be guys, could be gals. Why not?”