Flying Horse (9 page)

T
HEY CLUSTERED AROUND
her. Stevie was holding her upper thigh, grimacing, and blinking back tears. Without a word, Denise gently pried Stevie’s hands away from her leg. She pushed Stevie’s long khaki shorts up a few inches. Blood oozed from a few scratches surrounding a reddened, hoof-shaped welt.

“I’ll be okay,” Stevie gasped. “It hurts less already.”

“Are you sure?” Carole asked anxiously. She had sprained her ankle once and had tried to pretend it wasn’t hurt. She didn’t want Stevie doing the same thing.

“I’m sure,” Stevie said. “Her hoof must have been
pretty rough to scrape my skin like that, but at least she wasn’t wearing shoes.” They all nodded. They knew that a horse wearing steel shoes could do a lot more damage with its hooves than one that wasn’t. “So I’ll get a little bruise,” said Stevie, trying to laugh. “It won’t be the first time.”

Denise shook her head. “Stevie, I am so sorry. This was all my fault. And me an A-rated Pony Clubber! I should have known better than to bring you so close to the wild ponies. I knew they were wild—I wasn’t mistaking them for house pets. I’m really sorry.”

Stevie shook her head. “You shouldn’t be,” she said. “I should have known better, too. I knew they were wild just as much as you did.” She looked around at her friends. “Besides,” she admitted, “I think we all wanted to touch a wild pony. I think I would have tried to ride one if I thought I could get away with it.”

Her friends nodded. “It was really stupid of us,” Lisa said. “I’m just glad you weren’t seriously hurt.”

Denise smiled ruefully. “That’s what comes from being horse crazy, I guess. I’m just as bad as the three of you, even if I am older. Sometimes horse crazy turns out to be just plain crazy.”

“Do you think you can walk back to the car?” Lisa asked. “Otherwise, we can go ask the park rangers for help.”

“I can definitely walk,” Stevie assured her. “And
please, don’t anybody tell Mrs. Reg or Dorothy or Nigel about this. I don’t want them to know how stupid I was.”

Limping back along the woodland trail, Stevie reflected that she had indeed been pretty stupid. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the accident had been entirely her own fault—after all, the pony hadn’t kicked Denise. Stevie remembered how Denise had backed off whenever she did anything to make the pony uneasy, whereas Stevie had simply barged ahead and tried to force the pony do what she wanted.

She knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way she had asked the pony to pick up its foot. And there was nothing wrong with the way she had hung on to its foot, either—nothing wrong, that is, if the pony had been trained to understand what Stevie was doing. As it was, the pony hadn’t understood, and it had reacted with fear. Kicking, Stevie knew, was one of the pony’s ways of defending itself.

The worst part, thought Stevie, was that she had
known
that the wild pony didn’t understand what she was doing, but she hadn’t changed her own behavior to help the pony understand. “I should have known better,” she muttered.

Lisa turned. “What? Is your leg hurting?”

Stevie managed a small smile. “No. It’s my brain that hurts—you see, I’m thinking, for a change.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
it rained, a steady, cold, soaking rain. Sailboats bobbed in the bay with their sails furled, and the tourist traffic on the island was noticeably thinner. All morning The Saddle Club repainted the parlor a delicate shade of shell pink. Lisa and Carole worked with rollers on the walls, and Stevie painted the trim with a small brush. First, however, Stevie outlined a life-size pink horse on one of the bare walls.

“Stevie!” Lisa said, turning just as Stevie was painting in a wind-tossed mane.

“You’re going to paint this wall with the same paint anyway,” Stevie said quickly. “I don’t think the horse will show.”

“But I didn’t know you could paint horses!” Lisa said.

Carole burst out laughing. “Sure you did, Lisa. Don’t you remember when we painted the barn?”

Lisa and Stevie started laughing, too. One of Pine Hollow’s horses had gotten loose and run underneath their ladder, and a bucket of paint had spilled on him. He hadn’t been hurt, but he had looked unusually colorful for a few weeks.

“Still,” Lisa said, “you ought to be taking painting
classes this summer, not me. I’m going to tell my mom.”

Stevie shook her head. “I only do horses,” she said quickly. She stepped back to admire her work. “This is great, to have a whole wall to work on. Usually I’ve only got the margins of my math papers. Do you think it looks like Belle?”

Carole studied the painted horse’s happy expression. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think you could draw a horse that didn’t look like Belle. You know her best, after all.”

A
FEW HOURS
later, when Mrs. DeSoto came in, Carole and Lisa were finishing their second-to-last wall, and Stevie had done almost all the trim. Mrs. DeSoto appeared at the door. “Flying change?” she read in a puzzled voice.

Lisa and Carole turned to her in equal puzzlement. Stevie looked slightly embarrassed. “There.” Mrs. DeSoto pointed to the last wall—the one with Stevie’s horse on it. Sometime after they had all started working, Stevie had gone back to her painting of Belle and added an arrow pointing to Belle’s legs along with the words “flying change!”

“Oh that,” Stevie said vaguely. “It’s a thing a horse does—or doesn’t, depending on the horse.”

“Yes, I know,” Mrs. DeSoto said. “I just wondered why you painted it on the wall.”

“We saved that wall for last,” Lisa chimed in quickly, sensing Stevie’s discomfort, “because we really loved Stevie’s picture. Isn’t it a beautiful horse?”

“It is,” Mrs. DeSoto agreed. “I’d even like to leave it there—but I think plain walls might go better with the curtains and furniture I’ve ordered. I came to tell you that I’ve made some hot soup for lunch, since it’s such a cold day—homemade New England clam chowder, a specialty of the DeSoto Inn.”

They laughed. All week long Mrs. DeSoto had been experimenting with new recipes, calling each one “a specialty of the inn.”

“Lunch will be ready soon,” she concluded. “As soon as you’re finished painting, come eat!”

A
FTER LUNCH THE
girls sat in the bright kitchen and looked out the windows. The rain showed no signs of stopping. “I don’t think today is a good day for Assateague,” Denise said.

“I agree,” Stevie said. “The marshlands are wet enough in dry weather. Today we’d sink in up to our knees!” Stevie’s thigh felt stiff and sore, and she was glad to have an excuse not to walk much.

“There’s always the beach,” Denise said, but even she sounded doubtful.

“No thanks,” said Lisa. “Can you imagine how cold the ocean would feel today?
Brr!
”

Carole fingered the tablecloth reluctantly. “I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about this,” she said. “I read that, somewhere in town here, they have Misty—I mean the real Misty, the pony—in a museum. We could go there.” She looked up at her friends. “I’m just not sure that I want to.”

Stevie frowned. “I know Misty was a real pony,” she said. “But Carole—that book was written fifty years ago! Misty’s dead!”

“Is that true?” Lisa asked.

Mrs. DeSoto nodded. “I have to know all about the island if I’m going to be a good innkeeper,” she said. “Both Carole and Stevie are right. Misty had a good life; she lived to be more than thirty years old. When she died they stuffed her, like—I don’t know, like a wildlife exhibit—and they have her in a little museum in town. I haven’t been there, but I can tell you girls where it is.”

“Eew,” said Stevie. “I mean—I’m glad Misty was real, and I’m glad she had a good life, but I don’t know if that means I want to see her skin.”

“I’m with you, Stevie,” Nigel said, toasting her with his cup of tea.

“I don’t know,” said Dorothy. “I’ve talked to some of the people in town, and one woman told me that it
seems to mean a lot to some children to be able to touch and pet Misty. It makes her more real to them.

“Paul Beebe was killed in a car accident when he was a young man,” she continued. “Maureen is married and still lives nearby, but she’s not the young girl she was in the book. A group of people are trying to raise money to buy Grandpa Beebe’s house and set it up as a memorial, but his Pony Farm is already gone. Misty’s the only thing that’s still the same.”

“That’s not quite right,” Denise argued. “The wild ponies are still the same, too. I mean, I read the book
Misty
when I was in the fourth grade and I really liked it. I guess I still do, but I think the live ponies on Assateague are the best memorial to Misty.”

“You can touch them,” Stevie muttered, rubbing the leg of her blue jeans, “and know they’re real.” Her friends gave her cautious looks. “I don’t mean really,” she added hastily.

“I guess, after all, I’d rather remember Misty the way she is in Marguerite Henry’s book,” said Carole. “I really don’t want to see her.” No one could argue with that.

“We could take a walk,” Lisa suggested after a pause. “We haven’t seen too much of the actual town yet.”

“In this rain?” protested Stevie. “We’d freeze to death! No thank you.”

Lisa remembered Stevie’s bruised leg. She nodded understandingly.

“Well,” Mrs. DeSoto said briskly. “I don’t think we need to fill the house with any more paint fumes, not on a day when we can’t possibly open the windows. I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a great DeSoto Inn chocolate chip cookie recipe that needs testing. If you girls wouldn’t mind—”

Stevie leaped up from the table so fast her leg started to throb. “Lead me to the chips!” she proclaimed.

Lisa and Carole grinned. This seemed like the Stevie they knew best and hadn’t seen since the trouble with Belle began. Maybe Chincoteague was indeed just what Stevie needed.

N
IGEL
, D
OROTHY
, M
RS.
DeSoto, Mrs. Reg, and Denise all sat around the big kitchen table while The Saddle Club whipped up a super batch of cookies. Nigel made another pot of tea; Mrs. Reg made coffee, and they ate cookies and talked.

“I remember the first time you stopped me after one of Dorothy’s riding lessons,” Mrs. DeSoto said to Mrs. Reg, “and told me that you thought Dorothy really showed some riding talent. I thought, ‘Oh, horrors! I’ve got a talented child!’ ” The adults burst out laughing.

“I don’t understand,” Carole said, frowning. “Why would that be horrible?” Stevie and Lisa grinned. They were both good riders, but they knew that Carole wanted someday to be far better than good.

“Oh, the work!” explained Mrs. DeSoto. “Think about it—I had to put up with Dorothy going down to that stable every day. I had to endure muddy boots on my carpet and muddy breeches in the wash. I knew that soon I’d be spending my Saturdays at horse shows, and eventually I’d probably have to buy her a horse!”

She laughed again, and this time Carole laughed with her. She hadn’t ever thought about her riding from her father’s point of view. “I bet you were just as understanding of Dorothy’s riding as my dad is of mine,” she said.

“Well, yes,” admitted Mrs. DeSoto. “But those first few minutes were terrifying.”

Stevie turned away from the table and looked out the window again. Raindrops made tracks down the glass, and the sky was dark gray. She wondered if it was raining at Pine Hollow. Ever since she’d gotten up that morning, she’d worried about Belle. Red had promised to turn Belle out when they were gone, and first Stevie had worried that he hadn’t done it, that Belle was pining and restless in her stall. Now she worried that Red had left Belle out in the cold rain, and Belle was wet and unhappy.

Stevie sighed and leaned her head against the window. Belle had been miserable the last day they spent together—the last ride they had had, when Stevie had tried to force her to do a flying change. No, Stevie corrected herself, I tried to
teach
her a flying change.

No, she corrected herself again, more honestly, I tried to
force
her to do a flying change. She sighed again. She loved her horse so much. She didn’t know what to do! No matter how much fun she had on Chincoteague, Stevie couldn’t stop thinking about Belle. If only Belle would do a flying change!

Lisa saw the anguished look on her friend’s face. She touched Carole’s arm and pointed to Stevie, and Carole nodded sadly. No matter how much they tried to get Stevie’s mind off Belle, clearly it wasn’t working. Stevie was miserable.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
, Nigel and Mrs. DeSoto went to the mainland to shop at a wholesale club for kitchen and bathroom supplies for the inn. Dorothy planned to go shopping for bed and bath linens to match the inn’s guest rooms. Denise volunteered to go with her. Only The Saddle Club and Mrs. Reg were left on Chincoteague.

“Well,” said Mrs. Reg, laying down her copy of the island’s weekly newspaper, “it gives the name of a store here that rents bicycles. Wouldn’t that be a nice way for us to get to Assateague?”

The Saddle Club quickly agreed. Half an hour later,
mounted on bicycles, the four rode across the bridge to the outer island.