Champion Horse (6 page)

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘California girls! Hair everywhere, shirts not tucked in, leathers out of their keepers, dirty horses.’ He walked over to one of the chestnuts and flicked something off the horse’s shoulder. ‘I can tell you girls have never served in the US Army.’ Two of the girls looked at each other sort of nervously, as though they were wondering if they’d missed an assignment – the assignment of serving in the US Army. Then he said, ‘You know, young ladies, just because you haven’t been told to do something, that doesn’t mean you just sit there slouching in your saddles, letting your horses do whatever they please.’ He looked straight at that same chestnut, who was tossing his head like he had a fly on his nose. ‘Stand up now! Form a line along here, right in front of me. It should be in order of size, but my guess is that’s beyond you.’

We lined up the way you do after a hack class in a show. I put Blue between Parisienne and one of the chestnuts. Onyx was at the far end. Sophia did not have her hair everywhere, because she wore plaits, and, thanks to Rodney, no leathers were out of their keepers. Peter Finneran walked down the line, stopping at each horse and asking for the rider’s name, the horse’s name, and where they were from. Then he would say the names and ask a question or two. He started with Sophia, but I couldn’t hear him very well until he got to Parisienne.

‘Name?’

‘Nancy Howard.’

‘Nancy.’ He made her name sound like a bit of a joke. ‘Horse?’

‘Parisienne.’

‘Parisienne. You are from?’

‘Here.’

He laughed. ‘Show experience?’

‘Parisienne was a first-year green hunter last year, champion at four shows. Then I got her. This year, she’s gone second-year green and got some ribbons at two shows—’

‘Going into decline, then?’

Nancy looked a little shocked at this, and began to say, ‘Well, I—’

‘Does your opinion matter? I’m giving the clinic. It’s my opinion that matters. We will figure it out. What is she, an old racehorse?’

‘She was bred for the track, but I don’t think she ran.’

‘Well, that’s good and that’s bad. It’s good, because she’s probably pretty sound, but it’s bad, because they had some reason to reject her.’

In the midst of Nancy’s shrug of ignorance, Peter Finneran turned suddenly to me and said, ‘Name?’

‘Abby Lovitt.’

‘Abby. Horse?’

‘True Blue.’

‘True Blue. How sentimental. I recognise him. Pretty worthless in the show, wasn’t he?’

I didn’t speak or move.

‘Ah. Struck dumb. Where are you from?’

I had to clear my throat. ‘We have a ranch in the valley.’

‘Experience?’

‘I usually ride western. We just got Blue in the spring. That was his first show.’

‘I could tell.’ He was already looking at the chestnut, though, and then he went on. Nancy and I exchanged a glance that said, Well, that’s over anyway.

Once he had come to the end of the line and recited our names in a list, he sent us to the rail and watched us for a long time, it seemed, and it felt like a test. You went around and went around, and the longer you walked and then trotted, the more self-conscious you got. Who was he looking at? Thank goodness, not me.

And yet the ninety minutes passed pretty quickly. With fourteen horses in the ring, he didn’t have much to say to any one person. His comments were not about heels down or look ahead or chin up, like a riding lesson. They were about ‘I need to see some energy in that mare, Margie. Sit deeper and push her on with your legs,’ or ‘Square corners, Eileen. Your horse is able to bend, even if you don’t realise it.’ Blue’s flat work was good, and I made sure to ask him to lift his inside shoulder the way Jem Jarrow taught. I even sort of lost track of where I was during the canter, because Blue’s canter was so dreamy and light. I got a compliment when we had to do the voltes, which were small circles. Blue and I started ours just where we were told to, and made just the right size circle, perfectly round. Peter Finneran boomed out, ‘See that, girls? Very precise. If she can do it, you can do it.’

The important thing, I came to realise, was following instructions exactly. When he said, ‘Canter at the light pole,’ your horse had to go into the canter as your leg was passing the light pole. When he said, ‘Rein back four steps,’ you had to know how to count to four, not five. It was surprising how hard this exercise was. When he asked for a figure of eight, first at the trot and then at the canter, you had to make circles and change direction right in the middle. Thanks to Danny, Blue could do this, with a flying change of lead in both directions. I did not get a compliment, but I didn’t get what Nancy got, either. Parisienne changed only her front legs, not her back legs, for the flying change, and went on like that for four strides without Nancy realising it. Peter Finneran exclaimed, ‘Nancy! Is there a brain in that blonde head? Oh, these California girls!’

Yes, I was lulled. After exactly fifty minutes, we lined up at one end of the arena, and Rodney and another groom set up some cavalletti – four in a row. One by one, we trotted down over these. Onyx went first, which was probably bad for the rest of us, because he sparkled through, springing his body and lifting his legs. I could see that he was thinking, At last the jumps! Everyone after him looked a little clumsier and not as attentive. Blue knocked the first one with his hoof, but then got the others right. Peter Finneran exclaimed, ‘You girls know how they did this at Fort Riley? Nose to tail! If you did that, these horses would fall over. Pick it up, ladies!’ We tried again. After four times, everyone was fine. Peter Finneran was staring at Onyx and Sophia. I was sure he thought they were the best.

Now Rodney and the other groom came out and removed the cavalletti, then set up two small jumps in the centre of the arena, end to end, sort of the way they would be in the warm-up at a show. Both were simple verticals. Then they put poles in front of each of them – for one, there were two poles on the barn side, and for the other, there were two poles on the woods side. We were to trot down over the poles and jump the first fence, then turn and canter the poles and jump the second fence. The fences were about two-foot-nine. Without me trying to remember, I thought of those pictures in the cavalry manual, of the horse who looked just like Blue cantering down to the fence, jumping it, and cantering away. I made myself get straight like the soldier in the picture – lifting my hands a little bit, pushing my heels down, tucking my chin. When it came to my turn, I picked up the trot and headed for the first jump. After three strides, I was the soldier in the picture.

Unfortunately, Blue was not the horse in the picture. He trotted the poles, but stared at the vertical, then hesitated for just a moment and finally popped over. I went on, but I was really embarrassed – I could feel that my face was red. When we made the loop, Blue tossed his head and picked up the wrong lead. I had to stop him and start again, which made me feel even more awkward. Then he half stumbled over the canter poles, and hesitated again before the jump. He did jump it, though. I glanced at Peter Finneran. He was shaking his head.

But there were other horses, and we had to finish the class. For the next twenty minutes, each of the horses did the same exercise. We all did it three times altogether. I can’t say that Blue was perfect or even good, but he did get better each time. At exactly 10.30, Peter Finneran lined us up and dismissed us. We would get our group assignments after lunch.

The afternoon class, which only lasted forty-five minutes, was pretty much fun. There were four of us in it – not Sophia and not Nancy, just me and three other girls on young horses (a four-year-old and a couple of five-year-olds). One of them was something called a ‘cob’, from England, which was wide and woolly like a pony, but a normal horse size. The girl who was riding him, Lucy, had an English accent. She was down from Woodside and was training the horse, Donegal, for the hunt field. Peter Finneran seemed to like him. He said he was ‘old-fashioned and unpretentious’.

Our exercises were much simpler, all over poles on the ground. Rodney and the other groom set up the poles to look like jumping courses, but they were only poles, so we trotted and cantered and galloped over them, made our turns, and practised our lead changes and trot diagonals without being nervous about the jumps. The biggest jump we had was two poles next to one another. I have to say that Blue noticed the two poles, and made a little bigger jump than he did with one pole. I wanted Peter Finneran to see this and to say something nice about how observant Blue was, but he just nodded and turned to the next horse. However, I enjoyed myself (mostly because we got to canter a lot) and by the end of the day, I felt pretty good. Not everybody did. One girl in our class, who was riding a tidy little chestnut, the four-year-old, started crying as we walked back to the barns, and I heard Lucy say to her, ‘Now, don’t be at that, Monica. He can hear you, and it just makes him worse.’

Monica said, ‘Who does he think he is?’

Lucy said, ‘He thinks he’s an Olympic horseman, and he is.’

‘She’s four years old.’

‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have brought her, then, if she’s not ready.’

Monica sniffled a few more times but didn’t say anything. At the barns, they were stabled pretty far away from me, so we didn’t talk. I untacked Blue and brushed him down, then gave him a couple of carrots and his hay and water and put his sheet on him. Rodney was supposed to look in on him at the evening feeding time. When Mom picked me up and asked me about the clinic, I said it was fine.
Fine
is a good word, because you are not actually lying and saying that it was fun or good or enjoyable. You might just be saying that you could stand it. Mom didn’t press me. Since Dad was coming to watch the next day, I guess she thought she would find out then.

When we got home, it was only three-thirty, so I changed into jeans and cowboy boots and took Oh My for a walk down to the creek. It was totally relaxing, and I was reminded how nice it is to ride a horse out for a walk. Rusty came along with us, and I’m sure Rusty had business of some sort, since she kept racing away and then circling back, and looking up into the trees and off towards the horizon. Rusty always felt she had two jobs, one of which was to protect the ranch and the other of which was to keep her eye on Mom in case Mom wanted to pet her. Oh My was a little like Rusty in the sense that she enjoyed getting out and having a look at things. She was one of the few horses I’ve known who wanted to investigate. For example, let’s say you were passing a stump among the trees. Oh My would look at the stump, then she would go over to the stump and stand there sniffing the stump for a while. Every time you passed the stump after that, she would glance at it to see, I suppose, if it was the same as it had been the time before. Dad said that this was a sign of intelligence, and it was no surprise that Oh My had made herself the boss of the mare band in the space of about five minutes when we turned her out in the pasture.

After I came back with Oh My, I put Jack in the pen and worked him for twenty minutes. He could do all sorts of things, now – walk, trot, canter in both directions for however long you wanted, come, pivot both directions, back up, touch his nose to his side. I had also taught him a trick that I’d taught Blue – to see a treat, but then to turn his head away in
order
to get it. I’d taught Blue a second trick, which I called ‘Where’s the carrot?’ I would do what grown-ups used to do when we were kids, show him the bit of carrot in one hand, then pass it back and forth and put my hands behind my back. Then I would say, ‘Where’s the carrot?’ and Blue would nudge my right arm and I would give him the carrot. That was because the carrot was always in my right hand, but I played it up by pretending he had picked the proper arm. I hadn’t taught Jack that trick yet. Dad said not to teach them tricks like bowing or rearing, because you could be trotting along out there, give a mistaken command, and suddenly he’d bow.

I put Jack in with the others and got the wheelbarrow and the hay. Of course, I still had to clean my boots and iron my other shirt. By bedtime, I was actually looking forward to the next day. I’d decided that maybe Peter Finneran hadn’t been that bad. The horses, including Blue, had improved, and the exercises had been fun.

Since we were the lowest-level group, we were to be on our horses and lined up by nine, but then we would be out of there by ten-thirty, so Mom was planning to take me clothes shopping for the school year – high school would be starting one week after the clinic. I had spent the entire summer not thinking about high school, even though that was all that Gloria and Stella talked about. Gloria had already bought all of her new clothes, and had shown them to me the last time I spent the night at her house. Gloria had grown, too, and now she was about a quarter-inch taller than I was, and ‘developed’, as her mom said. She had worn the same shoe size for a year, so she was ‘done’ and her mom decided to splurge on some ‘classics’ for Gloria. I thought they seemed a little fancy for high school, but I had no idea, really. She had also had her hair cut in what she called a ‘five-point’ style. It was short and thick, and it came down over the forehead and in front of her ears, and then in a point at the middle of her neck in back. She had to get up and style it every morning, but that was like her hobby, and she didn’t mind. Stella I hadn’t seen except at the Goldmans’ party. Gloria said that Stella was planning on wearing her French twist every day. I didn’t really have a hair plan for high school, which made me a little nervous. Anyway, because Mom was taking me to the department store, she decided to stay and watch the clinic.

We lined our horses up at the end of the arena, because four jumps had been built in the middle in an X. Two arms of the X were verticals – the east arm and the north arm; the west arm was an oxer, and the south arm was a brush.

There were poles in front of the verticals, but not in front of the oxer or the brush. Blue did very nice flat work – precise and energetic – so Peter Finneran actually said, ‘Abby, you or someone has done a good job with this horse.’ I didn’t answer, but I smiled the way you are supposed to when you get a compliment. The same could not be said for Monica. At one point in the flat work, her mare grabbed the bit, tossed her head, and started bucking. Peter Finneran began shouting, ‘Kick her on, Monica! Make her go forward! Doesn’t she know the most basic things? Don’t you?’ Penny and her five-year-old brown gelding always got the same response: ‘Okay. That will do.’ He continued to like Donegal – at least he would smile when Donegal was slow in his responses, and say, ‘Well, he’s a bit thick, but he’s doing his best.’ Lucy scowled, which indicated to me that ‘a bit thick’ wasn’t a compliment. However, when the jumping started, Donegal went first and he just galloped down over the fences, not looking right or left. I guess that was why Peter Finneran liked him.