All the King's Horses (9 page)

‘Your grandfather is a
trainer
?’

‘Not any more. He’s … retired. But all real horse people know who he is.’

‘Wow!’ she said, and her face was all lit up. ‘Tell me about him.’

‘Well, his father worked on a race-track in Ireland, and he came over here when Grandpa was a kid. First Grandpa worked racehorses, but he and his father didn’t get along, I guess, and he ran away when he was fourteen. He got a job as an exercise boy for a man who trained showjumpers; after a while, he got so good that people paid him to ride their horses in important shows. He won so often that he got to try out for the Olympic team, even though he was too poor to own that kind of horse himself—’

‘– You can
do
that?’

‘Sure you can. If you’re as good as Grandpa was, people with Olympic horses
want
you to compete on them. So they pay for all the expensive stuff, and you just ride.’

‘Boy,’ she murmured.

‘Well, it’s not as easy as it sounds,’ I said. ‘You don’t just get to ride the Olympic horses. When Grandpa was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, he had to ride ten horses a day, sometimes more – and feed, groom, and muck out stalls as well. He says he never got enough sleep.’

‘Yeah, but he made it to the Olympics, so it was worth it.’

‘Actually, he
didn’t
make it. In the try-outs, he was riding this really wonderful mare named Second Chance, and he and a big-name rider both had perfect rounds, so there was a jump-off for time. The other rider went clear in really good time, so the only way Grandpa could beat him was to do a perfect round extra fast. Second Chance could feel that Grandpa was nervous – that’s what he says, anyway – and she got all excited. As they went around the course, Grandpa was having a harder and harder time holding her, and he was scared about the time, so when they came to the last triple bar, he let her go a little too fast, and she took off wrong, and …’

Tiffany hid her face in her hands. ‘They fell,’ she whispered. ‘Disqualified.’

‘More than that! It was a terrible fall. Second Chance got the last rail caught between her front feet, and she flipped over on top of Grandpa, landing sort of sideways so they banged into the side of the jump. Grandpa’s right arm got crushed, but he didn’t even notice, because he was so torn up about Second Chance.’

‘Oh no! What happened to her?’

‘She broke her back – and it was really awful.
She
kept struggling to get up, in spite of everything Grandpa and the vets could do. Finally, she collapsed, and when Grandpa stroked her, she looked at him as if she were trying to say she was sorry they couldn’t finish the course. He says he broke down and cried in front of everyone. And then …’

Tiffany looked out the window. ‘Don’t tell me what they did. I know.’

The bus pulled into school, and we got off, sort of quietly. As we started up the stairs to our classroom, Tiffany asked, ‘What about your grandfather’s arm?’

‘It was so badly smashed that they had to take it off at the elbow,’ I said. ‘They made him an artificial arm – actually, it’s a hook – and after a couple of months, he could do just about anything. But he couldn’t ride any more.’

‘Criminy,’ she breathed. ‘And he’d been good enough for the Olympics!’

‘Well, he could ride; he just couldn’t do showjumping. At first, he says he thought it was the end of him. But one day, his hook glinted in the sun, and he suddenly thought of Nuadu of the Silver Arm.’

Tiffany frowned. ‘Of whom?’

‘Nuadu. He was king of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Irish gods. He lost an arm in a battle
with
the firbolg, and so had to give up his kingship because a king of the gods had to be perfect. But after seven years, the great healer and smith of all the gods made him a silver arm, and he became king again. When Grandpa remembered that story, he realized he
could
go on, just differently. If he couldn’t go to the Olympics, he could train horses that did. So he—’

The bell rang, and we hurried to our seats. But when Tiffany went up to the front for her math group, she slipped me a note and kind of waited. I opened it quick:
There is a secret place on the playground. We could talk about horses there
. I nodded, and she scooted up to the front.

Tiffany’s secret place was a piece of storm drain set between two of the scraggly trees that lined the fence between the school and the apartment houses that backed on it. Kids were supposed to play on it, but there wasn’t much you could do with it, so nobody went over there. When you sat inside it, it made your voice sound funny, but it was a great place to talk. We talked all through recess; and from the questions she asked about Grandpa and the farm and the horses, I knew she’d studied riding with a really good teacher, and I kept waiting for her to tell me about it. But she didn’t, which was strange – so strange that a little radar inside me told me
whatever
she was keeping secret was connected to the way her parents were, and I should Keep Out. So the next recess, I asked her what horse books she’d read, which turned out to be just the thing, because we’d read different ones and it was library day. We both went home with a stack of new ones, and the next few days we talked about them, and pretty soon I felt so much better about school that I forgot Colin wasn’t feeling better, too – at least, I forgot until the day after Veterans’ Day when we got off the bus after school and I noticed his lip was swollen.

‘Colin! Have you been … ?’

‘’Course not,’ he mumbled, stuffing his hands in his pockets. We walked up the hill without another word, until we got to the side door and he looked at me. ‘Don’t tell Mom.’

‘Of course not!’ Then I remembered how big some of the boys in his class were. ‘How’d it go?’

‘Piece of cake, as Grandpa would say. No official winner – Mr Stegeth broke it up – but it took him a long time to get there, and I’d just about finished the job.’

‘I’ll say it took you a long time to get here,’ said Mom, opening the door. ‘I was beginning to wonder where you were.’

‘You shouldn’t worry,’ said Colin. ‘Sometimes the bus is late, that’s all.’

We went in and made peanut butter sandwiches, and I was just thinking we had gotten pretty good at not telling Mom things that would upset her, when Grandpa wandered into the kitchen and patted Colin on the head.

‘Hi,’ he started – then he saw Colin’s knuckles, and he raised his hand and his hook and punched the air. ‘Watch eyes, think feet,’ he muttered, shuffling the way he had when he’d practised with us in Pennsylvania.

Mom spun around from the refrigerator. ‘Dad,’ she said firmly. ‘Colin does
not
— Colin! what happened to your hand?’

‘Colin win?’ asked Grandpa, smiling and hitting the air again.

Mom walked across the kitchen and yanked Colin’s right hand from behind his back. After one look, she marched him up the back stairs.

Grandpa was still stepping around the kitchen like a boxer, which bugged me, so I pulled a horse magazine I’d been sharing with Tiffany out of my backpack and showed it to him. Pretty soon, he was looking at the pictures and eating my sandwich, so I was free.

Upstairs, Mom and Colin were in the bathroom, and as I tiptoed down the hall, I heard Mom say, ‘It’s absolutely
not necessary
for men to settle differences with their fists when they have brains.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d been there,’ said Colin sulkily.

‘I certainly would have. You’re old enough to walk away when somebody insults you.’

‘I do, Mom – honest! But this time … well, look. One of the guys said this house was so slummy that for the last ten years, every single renter had left it after a week—’

‘– It isn’t slummy! It’s run-down, but it’s beauti—’

‘– Sure, sure – but
listen
, OK? He said the
reason
we had to live in the house was that nobody else in town would rent to us, because my grandfather was just like the warehouses people, only worse, and all the real estate people knew the only way to keep him out of trouble was to chain him up in the back yard! You wouldn’t want me to let somebody get away with saying things like that about Grandpa, would you?’

For a moment, there was no sound at all; then Mom sighed. ‘It was a terrible thing to say, Colin,’ she said, in a voice that shook a little. ‘There’s no denying that. Still, the best way to stop that kind of talk is not to let anybody know that it gets to you.’ The first-aid kit clicked shut. ‘You should have known better than to tell them Grandpa was—’

‘– I never in the world told them!’ said Colin. ‘The guy who said it was Joe Butler. His dad rents a lot of places in town, and I guess our real estate lady told him about Grandpa when Joe was around.’ He sniffed. ‘Joe’s big stuff Downstairs, and he’s mad at me because I quit hanging around with him and the other boys who make trouble.’

‘What’s this about Downstairs?’ asked Mom.

Uh-oh. I backed up a couple of steps, then hurried into the bathroom, making lots of noise. ‘Mom, I have Grandpa settled with a magazine. Didn’t you want to go shopping?’

Mom looked at her watch. ‘I guess I’d better, if we’re going to eat dinner. All right, we’ll talk about this later.’

But we didn’t, because she got caught in rush-hour traffic and didn’t get home until after six, and then Grandpa spilled his plate all over the floor at dinner and started to cry about it, and by the time Mom and I got him calmed down, Colin had done the dishes and gone to bed.

The next day, as I was going back to my seat after reading group, I looked out the window, and I saw three boys who sat at the back of our bus step out of the four-square line and walk to the edge of the playground, where some man
had
stopped to watch the kids. A second later, I saw Colin running after them, waving his hands.

‘Sit down, Sarah,’ said Miss Turner, glaring at me.

I went to my seat, but the longer I sat, the more I thought about Colin’s fight, and the more I wondered what he was up to right then. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any more, and I got up to sharpen my pencil. When I looked out the window, I froze; the man who had been on the edge of the playground was close enough to recognize, now. It was Grandpa – and Colin was tugging on his good hand, trying to pull him away from a bunch of laughing boys.

I sat down quickly and raised my hand. Miss Turner looked up from her group. ‘Yes?’

‘May I go to the bathroom?’

She sighed. ‘All right. But tomorrow, please try to wait until—’

I was out the door and half-way down the stairs before she finished. On the ground floor, I raced around the corner beyond the office – and smashed into somebody, so hard that he staggered backwards against the lockers. As I crashed to the floor, I thought,
oh no, it’s Mr Beeker
! But for once I’d gotten lucky: it was Mr Crewes.

‘Sarah Madison – human cannonball,’ he said, helping me up. ‘Don’t you know you’re not
supposed
to run in the … ?’ Then he took a good look at me. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘It’s my grandfather,’ I said. ‘He’s on the playground, and I’ve got to go get him.’ I tried to run, but he stepped in front of me.

‘Walk, Sarah. It’s nice for your grandfather to pay the school a visit, but it’s hardly a national emergency.’

‘No, no – it
is
an emergency!’ I began to cry, which is a stupid thing to do in an emergency, but I couldn’t make myself stop. ‘He’s not crazy, exactly, but he gets mixed up …’

Mr Crewes’s eyebrows shot up, but not like he doubted me. ‘You mean, he thinks school’s out and he’s come to meet you and your brother?’

‘Uh-uh. He doesn’t even know where the school is. It’s that he esc— I mean, he goes for walks, sometimes, and then he can’t find his way home, and this time he must have just wandered on and on and on.’ I wiped my eyes with my wrist. ‘Mom’s probably looking all over for him, and maybe she’s even called the police – she said she’d do that next time we couldn’t find him, because he doesn’t understand traffic any more – but she’d never think he’d come this far, and now the police won’t know where
she
is, and the boys on the playground are teasing him, and Colin’s all by himself … Please, please let me get out there!’

‘You bet,’ he said. ‘Mr Stegeth is on playground duty; get him to help you and Colin bring your grandfather to the office. I’ll call the police and tell them to look for your mom, then I’ll come out.’ He handed me his handkerchief. ‘What does your mom look like?’

‘She has reddish-brown-blond hair, like me, only she’s pretty – her hair’s short, so it curls, and she doesn’t wear glasses, usually – and she’s probably wearing her blue jacket.’

‘Got that,’ he said. ‘Off you go, now.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, and ran to the playground door. Mr Stegeth was standing in the foyer, talking to Miss Fitzgerald, the teacher in charge of the Detention Room. I jogged his elbow, but he told me (not very nicely) not to interrupt, so I ran outside. And it was a good thing I did; there were lots of boys around Grandpa now. As I raced across the playground, I found myself thinking of the picture in the Smithes’ big entry hall, of a stag surrounded by dogs, only I think you were supposed to be rooting for the dogs when you looked at it, and I was definitely not rooting for these boys.

‘Hey! He’s got a hook!’ shouted one of them as I got to the edge of the group.

‘Captain Hook! Captain Hook!’ yelled a boy on the far side. All the kids laughed and started
making
brilliant remarks like, ‘Where’s the crocodile?’ or ‘Where’s Tinkerbell?’

Then a boy with a big shiner said, ‘He doesn’t need Tinkerbell. Colin’s his little fairy.’

Everybody shut up, waiting to see what Colin would do. I edged to the centre to keep him from doing it, but before I got there, I heard him say, ‘Joe, let me take him to the office, OK? He’s sick.’

‘He sure is!’ said Joe, slicking back his hair. ‘Sick in the head.’

They all laughed again, and just as I got to the middle, Joe walked up to Grandpa and touched his silver arm. ‘Hey, Captain – why don’t you talk to us?’

Grandpa whirled around and glared at him. ‘Stupid boys!’ he said. ‘Go away.’