Borrowed Horses
Authors: Sian Griffiths
Borrowed
Horses
Borrowed
Horses
a novel by Siân Griffiths
American Fiction Series
©2013 by Siân Griffiths
First Edition
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012950072
ISBN: 978-0-89823-284-4
eISBN: 978-0-89823-289-9
American Fiction Series
Cover design by Renae Hansen
Author photo by Karyn Johnston
Interior design by Richard D. Natale
The publication of
Borrowed Horses
is made possible by the generous support of the McKnight Foundation and other contributors to New Rivers Press.
For academic permission or copyright clearance please contact Frederick T. Courtright at 570-839-7477 or
[email protected]
.
New Rivers Press is a nonprofit literary press associated with Minnesota State University Moorhead.
Alan Davis, Co-Director and Senior Editor
Suzzanne Kelley, Co-Director and Managing Editor
Wayne Gudmundson, Consultant
Allen Sheets, Art Director
Thom Tammaro, Poetry Editor
Kevin Carollo, MVP Poetry Coordinator
Publishing Interns:
Katie Baker, Hayley Burdett, Katelin Hansen, Richard D. Natale, Emilee Ruhland,
Daniel A. Shudlick
Borrowed Horses
Book Team:
David Binkard, Jenna Galstad, Megan Bartholomay
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Nathanael, Gwendolyn, and Oliver
CONTENTS
Broken Down
A Little Death
The Heard
Shift
An Eddie and an Eddy
A Story to Regret
The Man with No Name
A Silence
The First Showdowns
Timothy Like the Grass
Riding the Zephyr
The Next Storm
Bodies in Motion
The Calm
Forge
Phantom Actualized
More Rivers
Leaving the Comfort of Fire
Wreck
Dream Girl
Showdown
Deep Creek
Truth, Will, Out
Dark and Bitter
Beggars’ Horses
The Thickness of Blood, the Thickness of Water
Rivals for Possession of the Dead
Acknowledgements
About the Author
I
In the Corner
Deep in the belly of a whale I found her
Down with the deep blue jail around her
Running her hands through the ribs of the dark
Florence and Calamity and Joan of Arc
—Josh Ritter, “To the Dogs or Whoever”
The gaucho acquired an exaggerated notion
of mastery over
His own destiny from the simple act of riding horseback
Way far across the plain
.
—as found by Anne Carson,
The Autobiography of Red
Broken Down
I
t was Eddie, my first real riding coach, who taught me about corners. The corner is where everything happens. “By the time you reach the fence,” he would say, “it’s too late.” I had to learn that the fence itself isn’t the obstacle. The obstacle is your mind.
A stone fence should be no more difficult to jump than a piece of twine strung at the same height. Yet stone looks taller and it’s all too easy to imagine its edges stripping your skin if you fail. These thoughts suck the jumper down, amplifying gravity. The trick of jumping a fence—any fence—is to convince yourself that the fence is an illusion. The jump is just another stride, taken with the same rhythm and tempo as the strides before it and the strides after. If the rider believes it, if she keeps her eyes focused on the horizon and her mind on the cadence of strides, the horse too will forget that the obstacle is solid and looming and will allow himself to clear it cleanly in one magnificent thrust of haunches and—
tempo, tempo
—move on.
Corners make this possible. In the arena’s corner, the rider must both urge and check her horse. A slight pressure from the rider’s legs, a fluid pressure in the hands, a confident, open chest and shoulders ask the horse to condense and collect his power. He will bring his hind feet further underneath him, coiling his body like a tightly wrought spring. Everything comes together—not only the body collects, but also the mind and spirit. Everything pulls in like water, like the tide preparing a wave. His forehand lightens and gravity loses its pull. Here, in the corner, the laws of earthbound physicality are temporarily stowed and the jumping of an enormous and all too solid fence becomes possible.
Eddie always put it more simply: “Bend the bow and let the arrow fly.” He repeated this phrase, like all the stock phrases that composed his lessons, so that now, years later, I still hear his low and baritone voice in my mind.
Bend the bow, bend the bow. Let the arrow fly
.
Two miles north of Moscow on Highway 95, the engine made a guttering sound and the needle climbed from black to orange. Smoke curled from under the Chevy’s wide hood, softly filling with moonlight. I pulled onto the slush at the side of the road, a single woman in the middle of the night on a road I’d never found all that lonely until now.