Champion Horse (8 page)

We did two more exercises, one with a curving line – a vertical curving five strides to an in-and-out, which made us really sit up and ask the horse to shorten his stride and make it bouncy. The other was a five-fence grid of steep crossbars, which Pie in the Sky greeted like an old friend. For these two exercises, Peter Finneran didn’t say much, though once in a while he pretended to be appalled at Margie. Then we were given a course that added all of these exercises together except for the crossbar grid. At the third fence, Pie in the Sky began to stiffen, but I lifted the rein on the stiff side and bent him a little, and he smoothed out and jumped nicely. He was no trouble over the others. Margie’s horse was getting tired – he knocked down some poles. Eileen’s horse went nicely, and Dinah’s horse was, as Peter Finneran said, ‘workmanlike’.

Sophia and Onyx fell apart. I had never seen them make so many mistakes – wrong lead approaching the first jump, and then Sophia panicked about that and tried to change it, so he changed in the front and not in the back. For the curving line, his curve was flat, so he got into the jump wrong and chipped, then he broke to the trot in front of the in-and-out, though he got through it okay. Sophia even said ‘Dammit!’ at one point. When she was finished with all the jumps, she jumped off Onyx the way she always did, leg over the neck, and stomped out of the arena, pulling him behind her.

Peter Finneran said, ‘One down, four to go.’

Pie in the Sky and I were standing next to him, and I said, ‘You need to mind your manners.’

Well, it just came out. I wasn’t even thinking it. That was a phrase Dad used all the time about any child who was getting out of hand, even if the child was not actually his. So instead of me saying it, I like to think that Dad was speaking through me. Nevertheless, Peter Finneran looked up and me and said, ‘Who asked you?’

We stared at each other for just a moment, and I thought, I dare you to make
me
cry.

He walked away. After a moment, he looked at his watch and said, ‘Ten more minutes, girls. Let’s try to use them productively.’

In fact, our last exercise, pairs abreast, was fun. Pairs abreast was a hunter thing they did in the East – the exhibitors dressed in their complete show hunter outfits, including flask and whip, and rode a whole course right beside each other. I was put with Margie, whose horse was about the same size as Pie in the Sky, and Eileen and Dinah went together. We didn’t have any turns – we just trotted and then cantered to three jumps in a row, trying to stay straight and together. The horses seemed to like it; at least Pie in the Sky was very relaxed. Margie and I almost did the thing you were supposed to do, which was be exactly at the top of the jump at the same time. Eileen and Dinah looked nervous, but then they found that it was easier than it looked. After they were finished, it was three-thirty, and we had to line up in front of Peter Finneran and hear what he had to say. To me he said, ‘Abby, you have a nice seat and following hands. Your leg position could be more secure, and your hair could be neater. This horse is preferable to that worthless beast you rode yesterday.’ Then he turned away.

I did not say a word other than ‘fine, fine, fine, fine’ to Mom, Dad, Danny, or Jane about the Peter Finneran clinic. In fact, I decided to put it out of my mind and never think about it or about him again. I did say a word or two about it to Blue, though. Every time I petted him or gave him a treat, I said, ‘You are a good boy, and a beauty, and you have the world’s most delicious canter.’ When I got out to the stables on Saturday morning, there was no sign that Peter Finneran had ever been there, and I thought that was good. I gave Ellen and Melinda, whom I hadn’t seen since the show, their lessons, and I was really nice to them. Then Mom took me to that store and bought me the black-and-white dress with the short sleeves, because it had been marked down to thirty dollars and she thought that it looked so good that I could wear it around the house if I had to. She put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Wearing nice dresses takes a little practice, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

She smiled. ‘Well, you have to learn not to wipe your hands on your jeans when they get dirty, because sometimes you aren’t wearing jeans.’ 

They broke us into high school over two days and a night, and every minute of that, I would look around and wonder where the Goldman twins were. They should have been walking down the hall, laughing and talking. They should have been standing with us, looking at the stage in the school theatre and planning a recital or a play. They should have been investigating the potter’s wheels (two of them) in the art room, and they should have been teasing Mrs Goldman during the evening meeting in the library, where the head teacher, Mr Houston (pronounced HOW-ston, not HEW-ston), was telling us the rules: no short skirts, no cigarettes or chewing tobacco anywhere on the grounds, no beer, only seniors can drive cars, every absence must be excused, have to pass the swimming test, no more than three library books checked out at one time, no writing in textbooks, three tardies equals an absence, three absences results in detention, Saturday detention lasts four hours, one sport per year is required of all students otherwise physical education is mandatory, pick up your PE uniform at the concession stand, and Go, Condors! The school mascot was the California condor, and a huge picture of a condor, painted by someone, hung in the hallway. Also in the hallways were giant pictures of every graduating class, with the class of 1933 by the side door, facing the class of 1966 across the hall. The class of 1933 had had 42 students, 20 girls and 22 boys. The class of 1966 had 356 students from all over the western part of the county. Our little eighth grade that I had gone to school with for three years sort of scattered among the others like sand thrown into the ocean. The Goldman twins, somehow, would have made sure that we didn’t disappear.

The surprise was that Sophia was there. I’d thought that she went to private school. When I saw her at the evening meeting, sitting next to a nicely dressed woman who looked just like her, I realised that I had never seen Sophia’s mother. I saw Sophia again in assembly the next day, where we were told about student government (one thing we had to do as a class was elect two representatives to the student council, and some other stuff that I didn’t understand). High school was about following rules, and we even had a handbook that told us what the rules were. It was twenty pages long.

When you are in eighth grade, you think you are pretty grown-up and all you need to do, really, is get your parents to let you do whatever you want. When you get to ninth grade, it is so obvious that you are not grown-up and that if your parents were to let you do whatever you wanted, the school and the police would stop you anyway. The high school had guards in uniforms – only two of them, but they must have been there to make sure that the older kids did what they were told.

The older kids were the show. There were all types of them, and they controlled the hallways and the pathways of the whole school. In one place, there would be a girl with perfectly set blonde hair, standing with her back against the wall and her books in her arms, giggling, with a guy leaning towards her, his hand on the wall behind her head and a pencil in his mouth like a cigarette. Or four guys with hair almost to their shoulders would be lounging under a tree talking about waves and tides. Or a couple would be holding hands in a corner and when you walked past them they would drop hands. Or three guys would be standing in the parking lot by an old car with the hood up, staring at the engine. There were guys with crew cuts and girls with pageboys and girls with hair to their waists and boys with big heads of fluffy curls and girls with big heads of fluffy curls and even boys with moustaches and chin whiskers. There were girls dressed like me, in plain skirts and blouses, and there were girls in dresses that looked like swirls of flower colours, girls in peasant blouses, and even two boys in old suits, but they were barefoot.

When we got into our classes (I was taking English, geometry, ancient history, geology, French and tennis), all the kids in the ninth grade looked a little scared and not as colourful, and it was sort of a relief. I hoped that Dad would never come to the high school – it would be a big shock for him. Mom was the one who came to the evening meeting. She didn’t say much, but she laughed a few times. I thought she enjoyed herself. She said, ‘Well, goodness me. When did Danny start here? Was that four years ago or forty? It’s not the same place at all.’

Sophia was in my ancient history class, Gloria was in my geology class and my geometry class, and Stella was in my English class. Of the other kids, Kyle was in history, geology, and geometry; Larry
Schnuck
was in English, where the male teacher wore big glasses and looked old, so I figured Larry would cause a lot of trouble; and Leslie was in French and tennis. Leslie had been at camp all summer – she hadn’t even been home by the time of Barbie and Alexis’s big party, so no one had laid eyes on her in months. She looked much happier and taller. She had also learned how to do something with her hair. She brushed it straight back, under a tortoiseshell head band. It hung below her shoulders and was very shiny. I saw Kyle Gonzalez bump into her and excuse himself as if he had never seen her before. Then she and I exchanged a glance, and she rolled her eyes. I laughed. My plan for high school was to stay out of the way and do my homework on the way home on the bus. The ride was about ten minutes longer than the old bus ride, so time at home would be short. Most of the high-school kids lived in town, which meant that we were the country bumpkins, and so we had to keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.

Riding Oh My, Blue and Nobby was the best part of the day.

I didn’t get back to real work with Blue until the Friday after school started. I had let him take a break for four days after the clinic, and then we went on the trail a few times. He seemed fine, and as happy to forget Peter Finneran as I was. But Friday was an early day – we got home from school before three – so Dad had set up some jumps in the arena to see what Blue had learned. There were hay bales, two verticals, and a gate Dad had put together out of tree branches, actually a very handsome jump – about two-foot-six, with an X surrounded by a frame, like a regular gate, though the tree branches curved a little and were covered with bark. I thought the stables should have one.

We did all the things I normally did – work him in the round corral, both directions at the trot and the canter, plenty of turns and plenty of stepping over. Then I got on him in the arena and trotted him in figure of eights and small circles and serpentines, backed him, walked him, cantered and did some lead changes. Dad was standing in the middle, and he didn’t tell me what to do – Blue was my horse and my business. But Dad was smiling. After our flat work, I felt good.

Blue had jumped all the jumps in the arena more than once, and over the summer, Dad had even done what he liked especially to do – put strange things on the jumps, books and soft toy animals and dangling spoons, to get Blue used to surprises. Blue had never been as calm about the surprises as Black George had been, but he got so he didn’t mind them. Today, though, there were no surprises – Dad had been doing errands all day with no time to think up tricks.

Nevertheless, Blue was a mess.

As he trotted down to the first vertical, his ears seemed to go further forward than possible, and then he tossed his head and refused. Not only that, but after refusing, he backed up a couple of steps. Dad said, ‘What was that?’ He looked around, then said, ‘His eyes are popping out of his head.’ But there was nothing on the hillside, nothing outside the fence, not even really a breeze. I turned him and tried again. This time I was prepared and made him jump the fence, which he did, but he seemed more nervous about it than he had ever been. Dad put the jump down, and instead of jumping, we trotted over the three poles lying together between the standards. It took us four times of that for him to calm down. Then Dad raised the poles about a foot, and we trotted through those.

The second vertical was only two feet high, and it looked exactly like the first one, but when we
approached
it, he did the same thing as he had done before – acted terrified. Well, we could not let him avoid the jump, so we did what we had done with the first one, and worked him over the poles until he was calmer. But after that, I went to Dad in the centre of the arena and said, ‘That’s enough for me. He’s scared to death. I don’t understand it.’ Inside, I was thinking about what Peter Finneran had said – maybe Blue was a worthless beast after all.

Dad said, ‘Is he seeing ghosts?’ I said nothing – this reminded me of the spring, but I had never told Dad about my ghost fears. ‘Well, tomorrow is another day, and we’ll definitely pray over this. Don’t worry about it, okay?’

I nodded. But how was I not going to worry about it?

When we took Oh My and Lady on the trail, Dad kept pointing out birds (blue jay, hawk, early owl, kingfisher, crows, even a hummingbird), animals (two ground squirrels, a bobcat), and plants (tree moss, olive tree, many oaks with unusual branches, walnut, mustard), and then he had me tell him all about school (I told him about the books we were going to read for class –
The Red Badge of Courage, Le Ballon Rouge, Introduction to Geometry, Mountains and Oceans,
and
The Egyptians
). He was keeping me from worrying about Blue. And I did stop worrying about him and start worrying about geology. Just that very day, our geology teacher, Mr Mallon, had asked us how old we thought the world (‘the Earth’) was, and Kyle had given the correct answer, four and a half billion years old, and he knew all about some meteorite that had landed somewhere in Arizona and was tested for something that showed how old the universe was. This was way older than the Bible said, and I was glad I hadn’t raised my hand. But then, I planned to never raise my hand.

On Monday, in history, Sophia came in, sat down right next to me as if we were perfectly good friends, and said, ‘You should ride Pie in the Sky again.’

‘He was nice.’

‘He’s erratic.’

‘I liked him.’ Then I said, ‘Peter Finneran was kind of mean.’

Then the teacher gave us a look, and we opened our textbooks. I watched Sophia for a moment, and I was sorry I had said anything. She stared at the book and began kicking her foot against the leg of her chair. Miss Cumberland said, ‘Abby Lovitt! Do you have something better to do than read your book?’

I read my book. We had done pharaohs already in seventh grade, but this time we were going to go from Egypt to Ur to Greece to Rome, all before Thanksgiving. I have to say that the textbook about the Egyptians did not say much about the Israelites, but even so, there were pretty interesting things in there – photographs of pyramids and drawings of tiny little men pushing huge stones up ramps on some logs. There were also a lot of Egyptian paintings of kings, where the kings were very large and the regular people only came up to about their knees. By the end of the period, Sophia was her normal self – she marched off to her next class without looking right or left.

A couple of days later, Miss Cumberland gave us paper and coloured pencils – as a project, we were supposed to draw ourselves in the Egyptian way, with the feet and head looking north, say, and the chest looking west. Sophia and I drew each other, and the pictures made us laugh. I gave her a hard hat, big feet, and riding boots, and she gave me a whip in my hand. We gave each other horses that looked sort of Egyptian, too. Miss Cumberland tacked all the drawings to the bulletin board. After that, we talked pretty often, but Sophia never said ‘Hi,’ or ‘Bye,’ or ‘See you later.’ She just started talking or stopped talking, depending on whether she had something to say.

It turned out that she had gone to the private school that ended in eighth grade. Then most of her friends went on to the private high school, but Sophia didn’t want such a long day, and Colonel Hawkins agreed with her – the private school started after nine and didn’t get out until almost five, whereas the public school started just before eight and got out by three. More time to ride. Sophia and her mom had discussed it all summer, and finally, when Sophia had promised to make all As (which she had not done at her previous school), her mom had given in. Her dad didn’t care – he had gone to our high school, the class of 1943 (one day, after class, she showed me his picture in the hall). Her mom was from Chicago. Her parents had met in the army during the Second World War. She was an only child. She had four dogs – a miniature poodle of her own, two King Charles spaniels that her mom took to dog shows, and a Gordon setter that her dad hunted with. The poodle’s best trick was that she could balance a piece of cheese on her nose, then toss it in the air and catch it.

At lunch, I always sat with Gloria and Stella, while Sophia sat with another girl who was her next-door neighbour – they had known each other since they were babies. Gloria and Stella thought that Sophia could do with a makeover. Gloria said that her clothes were fine, ‘good-quality,’ so the best thing in the world would be for her to cut her plaits and wear her hair in a nice shoulder-length flip – fairly conservative, but with some bounce. That would offset the thinness of her face and emphasise her eyes, which were her best feature. Stella said that Sophia should get herself a padded bra, because her shoulders were so big that she looked like a boy. I did not tell Sophia any of these things. Gloria and Stella got two other girls to sit with us, Mary and Luisa, and Leslie sat with us most of the time, too. I have to say that we all, literally, looked up to Leslie now. She was four inches taller than Stella, who was the tallest, and she confided that the camp had been a weight-loss camp – she had lost twenty pounds and she knew exactly how to keep it off, which was swimming or playing basketball every day of the week. She had lots of opinions, which was not the Leslie I had ever known, but one of the things they had done at her camp was spend two whole days and nights alone, with only a knife, a box of matches, some water, and a blanket. They were supposed to fast and think about their goals and rename themselves a secret name that they would never reveal, but that was the name of their future self. I noticed that some of the older boys looked at her, too.