Borrowed Horses (26 page)

I moved to Foxy’s side and he rested his heavy head on my shoulder, his windpipe against the side of my neck, our jugulars communicating warmth as his hot breath wafted over my back in its ancient rhythm. One of the heard.

Leaving the Comfort of Fire

M
y parents had a fire going in the wood stove, warming the house. Mom had wheeled her chair next to the sofa we had forever. The patchwork slipcover she made years before was soft with time and the slow wear of bodies. It was threadbare at the seams, the batting visible through thin fabric—particularly in the corner under the lamp where she had spent so many nights sewing. I collapsed in her old spot, tracing the pink vines of a favorite bit of calico with my hardened fingers. I hated to see her in that chair.

“You look tired,” she said.

“Tired of this town.” My tone was too harsh, but the knitting needles stayed busy in my mother’s hand. How often I’d seen her just like this, inscrutable, her wild hair frizzing and glowing with fire. She’d never aspired to anything more than this, but the chair was never part of the dream. I stared hard at the wheel inches from my leg. I said, “I’m thinking of moving again.” I realized even as I said it that I was testing the idea out, that I needed to know if that escape was still possible.

“Back to Jersey?” Her knitting needles kept going, but in the flick of her eyes, I knew she was reading me, my expression, the slope of my shoulders, my casual hands.

“Maybe not so far.” I hadn’t understood Jersey, and it hadn’t understood me, but maybe Spokane or Seattle had something to offer. Her chair was every reason I had to stay and a good part of the reason I wanted to leave. She’d learned to do everything without me. She wanted me to succeed where she could not. If I was going to have a shot at success as an athlete, hadn’t I better find a way to that success? Wasn’t that what my mother wanted?

But even as I’d said I might go, I knew I couldn’t. Not now. It didn’t matter whether Mom needed me. I needed her, and I needed Dad, and I needed Idaho. I needed its coldness and its open spaces. I leaned back and stared at the fire flickering in the grate. “It’s just tiredness talking. I’m not going anywhere.”

“If you need to go, you know you can.” She stopped and looked at me, assessing, then returned to her knitting. For now, at least, her hands were working. MS was fickle. She stopped and laid a hand on mine. “Either way, you’ll make the right decision.”

“Which decision is the right one?”

“The one your heart tells you to make.” Souls and hearts: She was as bad as Timothy. She patted me on the shoulder and wheeled away to help my father in the kitchen. My heart was silent on the matter.

I traced the stitching on the sofa arm. My mother spent months piecing the squares: driving her slender silver needle through all these hearts and roses, stabbing the iconography of love to make something real and functional and lasting.

Pilate nudged his cold nose under my hand, and I slid to the floor to pet him. His fur was soft and clean as always, but it had grown coarser with age. I remembered the loft of his first fuzzy puppy coat, and the silk that grew in its place, and it seemed unfair that I should witness the whole of his life, that he should age so much faster than I.

Dave talked of my intelligence. If I was so smart, what the hell was I doing?

Pilate looked at me with absolute adoration and trust, like he knew I’d always come back to love him. His gaze was wise and patient. The white blaze that ran down his nose reminded me again of the miracle of animals.

I hoisted myself up. In the kitchen, Dad was layering lasagna noodles with his famous spinach, tofu, and feta blend and ladles of thick marinara. Mom grated mozzarella and Parmesan into a steel bowl in her lap.

My father glanced at me. “You want garlic bread?”

“Do you really need to ask?”

Dad nodded to a stick of butter, bulb of garlic, and a homemade baguette. I smashed a dozen cloves of garlic under the flat of my knife with a fist as swift as justice, peeled them, and diced them into a pulpy mass. It was good to smash something. I beat it into the softened butter and added salt and pepper. The bread knife slid through the loaf with the ease only a good knife can provide. I’d been wrong to think Jenny’s choice of life at home was necessarily that of a caged bird who doesn’t know how to stretch her wings. A house isn’t always a quiet prison. My mother looked at me and smiled. Housewives and eagles. She’d found all the food she needed in this small habitat.

This is what “home” offers: a tattered quilt, a warm dog, the functional violence of cooking.

My routine swallowed each day, chewing through the hours with the patient persistence of a grazing horse; it should have been easy to forget Timothy. He owed me nothing. I had made sure of that, putting Dave between us, building him rail by rail, a wall so thick that he couldn’t see through.

But, by God, Timothy
did
owe me something. If souls could connect, like he said, then surely ours had. And if he couldn’t feel my need, then all his soul theories exploded. Romantic pap and bullshit. Hearts and flowers—the things that die.

I rode Zephyr more in his absence. I needed a good dose of Zephyr. If nothing else, the mare knew how to protect herself. She knew how to persist. Whatever they’d done to her, her previous owners had eventually given up because she simply and forcefully refused.

All in all, she was coming along well. We stayed inside and did our homework as instructed: circles, transitions. Her bones were becoming less visible now that muscle rounded to cover them. With the added strength in her back and neck, she’d began to round up into the saddle rather than shrinking from it, and she gave to the bit for longer stretches. Her trot was becoming steady and scopey, her legs reaching endlessly forward with each stride. If she didn’t succeed as a jumper, she’d have a decent shot at dressage. Her athleticism and movement suited that disciplined sport, even if her temperament did not.

A series of sounds wafted through the open barn door with fall’s crisp breeze: heavy wheels crunching the gravel outside—a truck, weighted. The engine cut. Car doors. Voices. The long, complaining screech of metal doors opening. A horse trailer. Hooves and feet scuffling. Light and shadows poured through the barn door.

Eddie led Hobbes in, followed by Jenny.

“Hey there,” I called.

“Hey yourself,” Eddie called back. “And how’s our girl today?”

“A champ. You know, I doubted you when you said she’d show by spring, but I’m converted.”

“Ah, Joannie,” he smiled under his mustache. “Your faith in me should never falter.”

I did a few more transitions. I said, “She’s smart, this one.”

Eddie snapped Hobbes into the cross ties while Jenny ran to tell Connie that her new horse had arrived. Zip would return to pasture now, and Hobbes would take his stall.

“Vet check done already?” I asked.

“This morning,” Eddie said. “Pam offered Jenny a two-week trial, and we decided to go ahead and start it.”

The gelding was looking better than I remembered. Even after a half hour trailer ride, his coat shone deep red, lustrous as mahogany. If we did show in spring, I was looking at the competition. The realization came like a pistol report, sudden, arresting: I might lose to Jenny. Jenny! Only months ago, I showed her how to ask for a canter, but Hobbes would soon carry her over the same rudimentary fences I would have to train Zephyr to cross. In her custom boots and new breeches, Jenny looked like a winner.

I cued Zephyr to halt, then canter. She sprang like a coil, driven by the haunches.
We wouldn’t lose. Not if I could help it
. But no sooner had I thought this than Zephyr planted her front feet and ducked her head, nearly succeeding in dumping me. I slid onto her neck, but grabbed her mane and kept myself from being pitched headlong.

At that moment, Jenny returned with Connie. “What are you doing?” Jenny asked, laughing, as if this was some crazy new drill she hadn’t run across yet. My cheeks flamed with anger and embarrassment, the grasped handful of hair the only thing that had kept me from the dirt.

Eddie only chuckled. “Dropped our guard, did we? Keep that leg on.”

I shot him a nasty look but didn’t comment. Zephyr trotted off and I slid back into the saddle. “How was the vet check?”

“Good. She said he’d popped his left splint at some point, but she and Eddie said that’s nothing to worry about.”

Connie laughed. “You’re starting to sound like a real horsewoman. Popped splint. Doc’s right—that’s nothing. Half the horses in this barn have a popped splint, including Foxfire if I’m not mistaken.”

I nodded, irritated that I had, once again, to concede that Foxy was anything less than perfect.

Point Hobbes at a fence, and he’d find the distance and make the jump. Jenny had months to build the balance and strength to hang on. While I was slowly building Zephyr’s fundamentals, Jenny would be clipping along on her living hobby horse, collecting blue ribbons. It was a lesson I learned in Jersey: Money always beats talent.

“What’s the scowl about?” Eddie was smiling.

“Nothing.”

Transitions. Trot to halt to canter. Canter down the long side. Extend the stride. Think of Timothy—the death of his father, poverty, the childhood on the reservation, the quiet fight for an education, the channeled rebellion. Halt. Transition to walk. I had nothing to complain about. These were only fences to cross. Half halt to collect, and canter. Extend across the diagonal. Watch for Zephyr to plant herself. Hear her thinking it. Flick the whip when she does.

Zephyr reared in response, but I kept my seat this time. Eddie watched from fence-side, his eyes crinkled with amusement and pride. “Very good. Remind her now so she keeps going forward when the fences come.” We trotted, and walked. I gave her her head.

She had the bone structure; she had the bravado. If she knew she could jump a big fence, would she? If so, how long until she was out of my hands and on the market, priced where I couldn’t afford to dream of her again?

Jenny brushed Hobbes and led him into Zip’s newly vacant stall. Out with the old, in with the new. I was as bad, putting Foxy out in Zephyr’s paddock so I could ride in peace.

Eddie unlatched the arena gate and walked over, patting Zephyr on the shoulder. He looked her in the eye, then smiled and looked up at me. “How are things?”

“With me or Zephyr?”

“I already asked about Zephyr.” He smiled and shook his head. “You’re scowling again.”

“Things are fine.”

He looked at me sideways, determining his line. Finally, he said, “Still too much tension in the shoulders and elbows. Keep working on that.”

Zephyr wouldn’t love jumping like Foxfire did. That part of her heart was too scarred to beat again. Maybe she was never that kind of horse. Instead, I hoped she’d see each fence as an affront and jump it with the disdain it deserved. I hoped she’d see herself as better than all of it, constantly proving herself superior to the striped wooden poles, to wooden boxes painted to look like brick or stone, to artificial flowers, and to shallow blue liverpools. I wanted to harness her anger and put it to work.

All that week, I dreamed of Mouse, the same recurring dream. I was alone, sitting in the passenger seat of the Pod, a seat that, in the entire time I owned the Pod, I never sat in. Its worn vinyl seats were cool to the touch, its blue dashboard dulled with sun and dirt. Timothy pulled the latch to the driver side door, and had just moved to climb in when Mouse appeared, stepping in front of him and pushing him back. She turned the ignition and the car purred with life.

“Let him in,” I said.

Mouse turned her smile on me, each tooth a shining bone. Underneath her skin, the death’s head of her skull was momentarily evident, then vanished again. “He’s not part of the journey.” She pressed the gas. In the rearview, Timothy stood with Dave and John Rivers. In front of us was a brick wall.

I grabbed for the steering wheel, but the distance grew longer than my arms could reach. I screamed for her to stop. When we hit the wall, she flew. The wall evaporated, and her thin cotton dress carried her like wings across the surface of the earth, while I lay in a heap, powerless to fly.