A Good Horse (17 page)

While I was reading this letter, Mom was finishing cooking dinner—macaroni and cheese. She didn’t make me set the table; she just let me read the letter. When I was through, I put the pages together and laid them on the sideboard. I thought it
was sad, thinking of those mares being driven all around the countryside, and maybe not fed, and then just being let go, one by one, far away from each other so they didn’t even have friends. I had read a book once in which a girl wants a horse, so she tames a white mare who happens to be running around the neighborhood of her family farm. I must have been ten when I read that book. When I was ten, I thought the part that was hard to believe was that if she wanted a horse and she lived on a farm, why didn’t she just go to a horse auction and buy one? But now that I was thirteen, I knew that not everyone can have a horse, even if they live on a farm. Now I thought the part that was hard to believe was that the horse would be by herself, that she would not want to make friends and be taken into the barn and given some hay and a brushing.

Thinking about that book made me think about Brown Jewel, and thinking about Brown Jewel made me think about that book—that lonely horse running around, not really knowing what to do.

When we sat down at the table, I asked Daddy what the Cheyenne and Arapaho country was like. He said, “Well, it’s plains. Arid and dry. Good farming country in places, though. Good wheat country.”

“But if Brown Jewel was lost there—”

“Well, maybe she wasn’t lost for very long.”

“If they stole her on October fifteenth, and the first mare was found before October thirtieth, then they could have been abandoned for two or three weeks.”

“They could have,” said Daddy. “But by the time I saw her, she didn’t look as thin as that. I don’t know that she got the
kind of feed we would give her, but she must have gotten something.”

“Yes,” said Mom. “I don’t think you should think of her as wandering around lost. Besides, we don’t know that the mare we had was the mare that was lost. Mr. Brandt says that a couple of times. Our mare could have been just a mare that a rancher had and needed to get rid of, like all the others we find. Like Black George and Happy. The world is full of people who realize all of a sudden that they have too many horses.”

I almost said, But what about the cowlick? I didn’t say that. It seemed like Mom and Daddy were interested in the mare, but that they really, really were not sure that Pearl was this Alabama Lady, while I was really, really sure that Pearl was Alabama Lady and Jack was the son of Jaipur. I didn’t want to be sure of that, but I was.

But I also didn’t want to persuade them that what I thought was true, and after this, I shut up, and we talked about taking Black George out to the stable for a training session in a week, when we had a day off school for teacher training.

I knew about Oklahoma—or I knew about the part of Oklahoma where my grandparents lived, which was more to the east, and pretty green, with lots of cricks and rivers, and much more rain than we had in California, at least in good times. Even though my father and his brothers grew up ranching, riding, and roping cattle, not everyone they knew had ranches—some had farms and grew crops, and what you did depended a little on what sort of land you had and a little on what you liked to grow. My grandparents Lovitt sometimes talked about the Dust Bowl, when it seemed like all their
neighbors left Oklahoma for somewhere else, and they would say, “Well, it was bad, but we survived it, and thank the Lord for that.” My uncle Luke liked to tease Daddy by saying that the only reason he moved to California was that he had missed the train the first time around because he was only a baby when it left before, and he was too little to climb the step. Mom’s family was from farther east, really green country with woods, almost to the Ozark Mountains, and the way Daddy teased her was to say that her grandfather never did realize that he’d got out of Missouri all the way to Oklahoma—he died thinking he was still twenty miles from Springfield. All of these things were completely familiar to me.

After supper, I did my usual things—I studied
le subjonctif
—
“J’aimerais que vous m’appeliez demain,”
which was, “I would like for you to do something or other tomorrow.” I read about the Ohio River Valley and Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. I looked at pictures of the circulatory system. And I solved eighteen math problems, such as “John is two years older than three times Joe’s age. If Joe is
x
years old, how would you calculate John’s age?” I didn’t have to read
Julius Caesar
because we were going to finish that Saturday at the Goldmans’ house, and actually, I was looking forward to that.

It was a cool night, so I put on my jacket and went out to say goodnight to Jack, Black George, Happy, and Sprinkles. Lester was gone—he had left that day. The gelding pasture looked a little empty without his bright buckskin beauty. By the time I got to bed, I thought I had forgotten completely about that letter—I didn’t feel bad and I went right to sleep, but in the middle of the night, I dreamt about Pearl.

She was on the hillside above the ranch, not far from where the cows had broken through the fence. Even though I knew that she was there, I also saw that the hillside was much bigger than usual—it was a real mountain, like in the sierras or something. Pearl was crossing it, not going up or down, but making her way along it, stopping from time to time to taste the grass. The grass was brown and thin, almost just dirt. She was above the gelding pasture, in a way, but instead of our geldings in it, there was just the stubble of some harvested crop. In the dream, I knew it was “peat,” but I had no idea what “peat” was—something not very edible, since Pearl didn’t even try to get to it. She stopped under a tree, but the tree got smaller, so she walked on. I knew in the dream that there wasn’t any water anywhere, and that she was thirsty—she hadn’t had water in three weeks. A voice that sounded like mine in the dream said that that was impossible, that she couldn’t be walking if she hadn’t had water in three weeks, and then Mom’s voice said, “Well, you’d be surprised.”

She walked, and then she stumbled and went to her knees, and then she got up and walked again, but she wasn’t getting anywhere—the hill just seemed to go on and on. In the dream, I thought she should come down the hill and get some water at our place, but there was no way to tell Pearl this. As I watched her in the dream, I didn’t see anything else—no cows, no other horses, no people, and no dogs or coyotes—no one. And then she fell again, but this time she rolled down the hill, she rolled and rolled over and over (though I don’t know how a horse could do that—it was as if she were a stuffed animal), and I was shocked and upset. At the bottom of the hill, she stopped
rolling, and she lay there, and as she lay there, she looked exactly the way she had when we found her the day she died, stretched out on the ground, the hair rubbed off her forehead, her tongue hanging out of her mouth just a little bit, and her eyes half closed. Jack wasn’t born, or wasn’t around, or something. She was completely alone.

I woke up from this dream crying. I was heaving deep breaths, and the tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I could hear myself and feel how wet my face was, and it took me a few minutes (I don’t know how many) to realize that it was a dream. I wiped my face with the corner of my sheet.

My clock read four a.m. I was still taking deep breaths. Pearl lying there was so in my head that I felt like I had to get up and look out the window, try and look across the gelding pasture and just see for myself whether she was really not there. But actually getting up and checking seemed bad, like giving in to temptation, so I lay there with my arms outside the covers, holding myself in the bed, and I told myself that my dream of Pearl had nothing to do with what had happened to her, really. There was no way of knowing what had happened to her, or rather, what had happened to her was that Daddy bought her, and she came to us, and for almost two months, she had plenty to eat and other horses to be with and us, Daddy, Mom, and me, who treated her kindly and were just waiting for things with the other horses to slow down before riding her. But then I remembered that what really happened to her was that she gave birth and a month later colicked and died, and we had been unable to save her or even to help her, and then I felt like no time had really passed since that day, and then I was crying again.

So now I did get up, and I went to the window and looked out. There was no moon, and I couldn’t see the horses except as dark shapes not very distinguishable from other dark shapes, so I opened the window, and in rolled the fragrance of the ranch—of the wind off the hillside, of the paddocks and the horses, of some additional freshness that I couldn’t identify. It was cool—or cold—and it woke me up. I felt Pearl go out of my head, and I knew that rolling down the hill hadn’t happened. A horse whinnied, and then another one whinnied back, then another one snorted and another one groaned the way horses do when they are getting up from lying down. Sure enough, I could just make out one of the horses in the gelding pasture pulling himself to his feet and then shaking himself off and blowing air out of his nostrils. He must have been asleep. Just looking at the geldings in the pasture, all of them doing this and that, no big deal, made me feel calmer. It was now almost four-thirty. I yawned and went back to bed.

B
UT IT’S FUNNY HOW A FEELING STICKS IN YOUR MIND
. E
VERYTHING
is the same, but it looks a little different just because of that feeling. For me, for the next couple of days, things just looked a little sadder than usual. Here was Rusty, who got to lie on the porch now and be petted by Mom, and called by her new name, which she seemed to understand, and instead of thinking of her as a dog who had found a home, I thought of her as a dog who had looked for a home for a long time. Or here was Stella in a new outfit (a green and black plaid skirt with a round-collared pink blouse, which actually looked pretty nice with the plaid), and I didn’t think of her as a girl with a new outfit but as a girl who was never satisfied, no matter how many outfits her mom bought her. Here was Kyle
Gonzalez, who always got As, which was how I usually thought of him, but now it seemed to me that As would never be good enough for him. Or there was Leslie. Leslie always sat near people but never right with them. She could have opened her mouth and said something, or she could have sat in a corner and read a book, but she did the one thing that was guaranteed to make her feel left out.

Only Alexis and Barbara could not be made to be unhappy. You could see it in the way they walked down the hall—they were always talking to one another about their plans. Yakety-yak, yakety-yak—they would stride down the hall and just slide around whoever was in their way without even noticing. “Excuse me; oh, sorry; hi; thanks”—there was a way that they were perfectly polite, because they knew all the words and said them automatically, but they didn’t look around themselves. I realized that they were so full of projects that maybe it never crossed their minds to wonder what the other kids thought of them, or who liked them and who didn’t. They had each other.