A Good Horse (15 page)

Daddy still hadn’t seen this—he had the cows in the pasture and was getting off Lester to try and fix the fence. He shouted, “Abby! Abby!” I cantered Happy up the hill.

He said, “All you have to do is w—”

I said, “Look down the hill.” Even from this high up, you could see the cow and the calf and the dog perfectly well.

I could tell that the last thing Daddy wanted to do was look down the hill—he sniffed, but then, there they were, cow mooing and calf bawling, both of them running up the hill with the dog at their heels. Daddy whooped and then laughed, standing there, holding Lester by the bridle.

The dog was good—he didn’t just drive them straight. If he had, he would have run them into the fence. But he knew that they had to get where Daddy and Lester were, and so he went out to the right and got the cow to cross the hill. Daddy saw them coming and took Lester out of the way to the left of the gap, and that’s where I stood, too. It took a few minutes, and my heart was beating, but it was like the dog never had any doubt about what was going to happen. He got the cow and the calf to where they were in front of the gap, and then the cow saw the other cows (and, of course, everyone was making an incredible racket), and then they ran through the gap and joined the others.

By this time, Mom had reached me where I was sitting on Happy, and she was laughing. “Did you see that?” she said, and the dog, who had stopped and was staring at the group of cows, looked over at her. That was what made me laugh. I was the one who was supposed to guard the gap on Happy while Daddy fixed the fence, but I didn’t have to. That dog sat down maybe ten feet below the gap, right in the middle, just sat there with his tongue out of his mouth a bit but a confident look on his face, and believe me, those cows weren’t going anywhere. When they moved more than he liked, he barked.

I got off Happy and gave the reins to Mom, and helped Daddy just a little bit. The posts weren’t broken, but some of
the wire was, so we strung four new strands and rolled up the old strands and Daddy stuck those in his saddlebag. When he mounted again and we walked down the hill, the dog didn’t move for a long time—he just sat there, guarding the cows. It wasn’t until we were almost to the gelding pen that I looked back up the hill and saw he was gone.

The horses were a little wild from all the activity and not having gotten their hay, but by the time we had fed them and put Lincoln, Happy, and Lester away, everything was calm and back to normal, except, of course, that it was nearly eleven o’clock and I was dead on my feet.

The next day, Mom let me sleep. And I did sleep—I looked at the clock when I woke up, and it read twenty after six. I thought I would look at the clock again, just to be sure, and it read half past ten, and the room was light, and I didn’t have any sense of time having passed. When I sat up, I remembered Black George and the jumping and Jane Slater, and when I was in the bathroom, I remembered driving the cows up the hill in the moonlight, and then I remembered the dog. It wasn’t until I was looking in my closet that I remembered that it was Monday and I had missed the school bus.

Mom came in from outside when I was getting the cereal down from the pantry, and she had a big smile on her face. She said, “Oh, you woke up! You must have been exhausted. I went in your room at seven, and you were so dead to the world, I just couldn’t wake you.”

I said, “What did Daddy say?”

“Not a word.” She pointed to the ribbons and the trophy,
which one of them had set up on the sideboard. “He knows you did a good job. Yesterday
and
last night.”

But she was still smiling. Then I happened to look out the kitchen door. There was a dog on the porch. There was
the
dog on the porch. I said, “Mom! Who is that?”

And she said, “Oh, you mean Rusty?”

“Rusty!”

She laughed.

The dog pricked his ears.

“How do you know his name is Rusty?”

“I think the real question is, how does
she
know her name is Rusty.”

“How does she know?”

Mom shrugged. Then we went out on the porch.

Rusty was sitting over to the side, by one of the posts, looking out toward the barn. She did not rush to us when we opened the door but brushed her tail from side to side, and then, when Mom said, “Hey, Rusty,” she stood up and walked over to us and sat down in front of us. Then she looked up at Mom and lifted her left paw. Mom took it.

I said, “She knows tricks?”

“She seems like a well-trained dog.”

“She always looked so wild out there, like a wolf or something. I thought she was a he.”

“Well, I’m thinking she’s half German shepherd and maybe half Australian shepherd. She does have a wolfy look.”

I said, “That’s what I thought last night, when he—I mean she—started running after the cow and the calf. I thought she was going to attack them.”

“Oh, I never once thought Rusty would do that.”

Now I turned and stared at Mom. I said, “Have you known Rusty for a while, Mom?”

She gave me a big grin. “About four months now.”

“That’s since July.”

“Yeah, that’s about when she appeared.”

“I thought we saw her the first time down at the crick a month or so ago.”

“Well, she was following us.”

“What does Daddy think?”

“After last night, your father said Rusty could live in the barn and be an outside dog.”

“Your outside dog.”

“Our outside dog.”

“How long has Daddy known about her?”

“Oh, twelve hours, maybe.”

Rusty was looking at me. She had a very steady gaze and dark golden eyes. Now she lifted her paw. I took it, and then petted her on the head and down her neck. I said, “She is awfully clean for a stray. And pretty fat, too.”

“She’s sleek, not fat. And I brush her, of course. I use one of the old body brushes. It gets through her coat nicely.”

“But she is a little wolfy-looking.”

“That’s just the German shepherd in her.” She petted her and stared at her with a happy look on her face, and I saw right then that Rusty was Mom’s dog, and it didn’t really matter what Daddy thought—Rusty had made up her mind. I said, “What are you feeding her?”

“Oh, vegetables. Leftovers if they aren’t too rich. Rice
when we have it. She likes everything. I think she was scavenging before, and I think she was doing a pretty good job. Weren’t you, Rusty?”

Rusty gave Mom her paw again.

The thing is, your mom is someone that you think you know. But Daddy always said about Mom, “Well, there’s more there than meets the eye,” and of course, he was right.

A
FTER THE WEEKEND, THE WEEK AT SCHOOL WAS A REAL VACATION
. On Tuesday, Gloria, Stella, Leslie, Linda A., and Maria and I all took the same school bus—number 6 rather than number 9 for me—to Alexis and Barbara Goldman’s house to read
Julius Caesar
aloud. Barbara was going to “direct,” and Alexis was going to read the biggest part, which turned out to be a character named Brutus. The villain, whose name was Cassius, was assigned to Gloria. Alexis and Barbara said that they didn’t invite any boys because when Shakespeare was writing, only boys and men were in the plays (boys played the female parts), so it was only fair that our “production” (which was what Barbara kept calling it) was all girls.

Alexis and Barbara lived just up the road from the school
bus stop, in a big house with lots of windows and a garden entirely made of large rocks, what looked like white gravel, and cactuses, instead of a front yard. As soon as we walked in, we saw that giant glass doors opened onto a deck that looked out over a valley to the back. If you went out onto the deck, you were standing on a cliff.

Alexis and Barbara shared two rooms right above this living room—they slept in bunk beds in one of the rooms and had the other for projects. This whole room was filled with shelves and cubbies, and they had two work areas—one was a table with art supplies on it, and the other was for music. Alexis’s piano was there, and a music stand and a chair. Next to the chair was a table where Barbara kept her violin and her flute. I guess they thought that one violin plus one flute was equal to one piano.

There were chairs set up in the living room. A tray of cupcakes and a pitcher of lemonade sat on the coffee table. Mrs. Goldman said, “Oh, girls! Just relax and have a cupcake, and let Barbie take over, because she will, anyway!” And then Alexis, Barbara, and their mother laughed. There were also three cats—the two black ones in the house got up and scurried out as soon as they saw us, but the one on the deck stared in through the glass doors. It was an orange cat the size of a pillow. The others were much smaller.

We did let Barbara take over—it was easy. There were a lot more parts in the play than there were of us, so at the beginning of each scene, Barbara would assign each of us a role. Only Alexis and Gloria stayed the same. In the first scene, I played the Second Commoner, and I had to make a joke about
shoes that I didn’t understand until Barbara explained it to me. The second scene was where Julius came in—Linda A. played him. Maria played his wife, Calpurnia. I got to be the Soothsayer, who is the person who tells fortunes, and to say, “Beware the Ides of March!” Barbara had me say it in a deep, growly voice, and then Linda A. had to act afraid and repeat my sentence. It was at this point that we started to have fun.

Julius Caesar
was not at all like
Great Expectations
. Even when I read the lines ahead of time and couldn’t really figure them out, once we said them aloud, we did mostly understand them, and anyway, what was going to happen was pretty clear—Julius was going to get killed, and Cassius and Brutus were going to do the killing. Cassius wanted to and Brutus didn’t really want to. There was one scene where Maria played someone named Casca and Linda A. played someone named Cicero. Cicero says hello to Casca, but Casca is very upset. For one thing, there has been an earthquake, and for another, Casca has seen some very scary things—a guy with fire coming out of his hand but his hand is not burning, a lion in the middle of town, and an owl screaming during daylight. Maria made it sound like a Frankenstein movie, and we were all staring at her—Linda A. was staring at her, too, just like she was scared to death. It was really fun.

Barbara and Alexis had been through the play already maybe three times, and they understood it perfectly as far as I could tell, so whenever one of us seemed confused, Barbara would stop things and very patiently explain what was going on. This meant that we did not get through the play on that first day. We only got to the scene where they actually kill
Julius, and we did that scene twice, once sitting in our chairs and once pushing the chairs back and acting it out. When we did it this way, Gloria got to fall down and say “Et tu, Brute!” which means, “You, too, Brutus!” Julius was surprised and upset because he thought Brutus was his friend. After that, Brutus and Cassius talk, and then I got to be a character called Antony, who is on the stage at the end with his servant, and he is the only one who is sorry to see Julius get stabbed. Since I was Antony, I had to pretend to go out early in the scene because one of Brutus and Cassius’s friends lured me away so that they could get Julius.