Horse Heaven (32 page)

“Well,” said Florence. “That was the strangest thing I ever saw.”

“Me, too,” said Audrey.

“I wish your father were here to see that!”

“Me, too,” said Audrey.

They sighed.

But, oddly, Audrey felt a little better. Something interesting had happened. By contrast, in the last two weeks, everything had been new but at the same time darkly tedious.

“Would you like something to eat, sweetheart?” said Florence.

Audrey nodded. Florence took her hand. After a few steps, Audrey said, “Dad
could
be with us, couldn’t he? He doesn’t seem to be, but he
could
be.”

Florence looked at her, then said, “Yes. Yes, he could be. Lots of people in the world would say that he is. But, you know, it’s not something that I’d made up my mind about.”

“Let’s say that he is and see what happens.”

“Yes,” said Florence, “let’s do just exactly that.”

A
S SOON AS
D
EIRDRE
turned down Cold Spring Road and was driving between the white board fences that defined the contours of the land on either side of the gravel, her heart started to pound, and it kept pounding, faster and faster, as she drove into the parking lot beside the barn, pulled into a spot, turned off the ignition, and looked through the windshield. She had expected a reaction of some sort, for she had not been to her old barn in six years, since finally selling it off to Ellen. She had not consciously stayed away, she thought. Every type of horse business, she thought, was life-consuming. There were people at the track who never went anywhere else at all. That she sometimes took in a concert, she thought, or a good meal made her a degree less single-minded than many. But still.

Of course there were changes—Ellen had put up an indoor arena, which Deirdre had wished to do but been unable to afford. The barn had been repainted. Accent trim formerly green against the white walls was now black. The pastures had been divided, so that more horses could be turned out in less space. Deirdre found reassuring these little shoots of disapproval already cropping up around her chest-thumping anxiety. Disapproval of the way others ran their businesses and treated their horses was the meat and drink of the hunter-jumper business and still pleasantly nourishing after all these years. She opened her door and got out. The number of cars in the parking lot told her that plenty was going on, but it wasn’t until she rounded the end of the long center-aisle barn that she witnessed it.

At least ten people were riding, six in the main arena and four in the jumping arena. Two others were cooling out their horses on the grass. Three instructors, of which Ellen was one, were standing, staring at their charges in attitudes of dismay, real or mock. As Deirdre came onto the scene, she heard
Ellen exclaim, “Lorelei! You are riding a horse, not a motorcycle! If you lean into the turn and don’t balance him up, he will stumble!”

Lorelei, on a little bay, nodded. Deirdre went up to the rail of the arena and leaned on it. Without glancing at her, Ellen called out, “May I help you?”

“Well, then, I don’t know, Miss. Have you a harse I might ride, then?” Deirdre put on the real Irish.

“Deirdre! You came! I’d lost hope!”

“A bit late, but better that than early.”

“Do you really want to ride?”

“That was just a bit of a joke.”

Well, she was very affectionate, coming over to the fence and giving Deirdre an uninvited hug and a kiss on both cheeks, not so bad, in its way, for it calmed her inner turmoil. She managed a grunt, just to reflect Ellen’s grin, and said, “When you called, I thought I’d better come over and see whether you’ve broken down that lovely filly I sent you in the winter.”

“Hot as a pistol! Can’t break her down if we can’t ride her!”

“You know the statistic about sixteen percent of any and every group of humans being jerks? Well, sixteen percent of all horses are useless as bent nails, and that filly is one of them, but you would have her!”

“I would have her, and you would sell her! How’s George?”

“The curtain goes up on George’s play every single day and he does himself a star turn. It’s getting a bit boring the way they all light up when they see that boy. You’re lighting up yourself, and you know better.”

“No one knows better with George.”

“He’s just an Irish boy, no different from all the rest of ’em.”

“Ha. Well, he’s a lost cause, I know that, so we’d better go look at the horses.”

They came into the dark, wide aisle. Dust rose on every golden sunbeam that fell from the clerestory windows. At the sound of Ellen’s voice, a horse head popped over every stall guard, eyes alert and ears pricked. Right there at the front would be the Jackal, Ellen’s Grand Prix horse; Deirdre recognized the white diamond inside his left nostril. Deirdre had broken him as a two-year-old some twelve years before, when Ellen was just starting out with jumping and Deirdre would ride anything over anything at any speed in any type of class. She stepped up to the Jackal and cupped her hand under his chin. Smooth and whisker-free. She said, “Now, how do you expect the poor beast to find the grass if you shave him clean like this?”

Ellen laughed. “I’ve never seen him have a speck of trouble with that.”

“Then how do you expect him to sense the fairies and the ghosts all around?”

“Look at this one, Deirdre. I got him from Mike Huber in Texas. He had him up to Intermediate, but his rider couldn’t hold him cross-country even in a double-twisted wire snaffle, but he’s a great jumper. I’ve just got him in a full-cheek and he goes fine. He’s jumped six feet. I want to make him a Puissance horse.”

“Listen to you now, dearie. Who’s that girl who used to cry out, ‘Oh, Deirdre! Don’t put ’em up! Are they three feet? Don’t put ’em up!’ ” She was smiling again.

“Here’s the filly.”

Clean as a whistle and fat, the filly Deirdre had sold Ellen in the winter came out of the stall as out of a silk glove, on her toes, her ears pricked and her nostrils wide. She swept around them in the wide aisle, her tail flowing. Ellen said, “I put her out in the indoor and she goes over and looks in the mirror. This way, that way, posing. She’ll spend forty-five minutes at it, sometimes. I just love watching her.”

“You’re not riding her?”

“She needs a little more time to calm down from life at the track.”

“Ah, what a princess she was! Dainty about her food and dainty about her footing and dainty about her company. Tsk! What a useless beast! Best shoot her. And don’t be tempted to breed her.”

“You said that.”

“She’s not got the temperament nor the pedigree.”

“I know, but she’s—”

“Darlin’, you’re a lover of horses. You have no standards. You love the lame, the halt, the bad-tempered, and the blind most of all. But if you’re going to breed them, they have to have some generally accepted usefulness. We’ve discussed this before.”

“I know, but—”

“Promise me you won’t breed this filly, at least until she shows she can take up a life work and do well at it.”

“I promise.”

“All right, then.”

“She’s so pretty—”

“Marilyn Monroe was pretty, too, darlin’, but she was not intended to be anyone’s mother.”

“Okay.”

They went out and watched the lessons again, and finally Ellen got to the point. She used that voice of concern that Deirdre found so maddening. “George told Martin about the wreck. Martin told Hope, and Hope told me.”

“Ah, well.” When they used that voice of concern with you, your own voice had to be especially cool and ironic.

“Have you talked to anyone about it?”

“In what sense?”

“In any sense.”

“I told the owners the horse would be euthanized.”

“That’s it?”

“What’s there to say? The jockey broke a rib and was out a week is all.”

“You need to talk to someone.”

“Perhaps you mean therapeutically?”

“Perhaps I do. Perhaps I mean as a friend.”

“What is there to say?”

“How did you feel?”

“You want me to get down to the nubbin right now?”

Ellen looked at her soberly, and said, “Yes, I do.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Ah, well, you can’t lead me there that way, either.”

“You don’t look good.”

“I never look good, darlin’. I always look cross and misanthropic, because I always am, and the sun has turned my once fair complexion to leather, and my back hurts so that I am the despair of my chiropractor.”

“But normally you just look angry and determined. Now you look—”

“Well, do tell, dearie.”

“You look hopeless.”

“Perhaps, were I to cover the gray, then—”

“Tell me what it was like.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I want to know.”

“I don’t want to tell.”

“I want you to tell.”

Deirdre sighed. She was being worn down.

Ellen said, “I’m going to make us a cup of tea.”

“I think I’ll be going.”

“No, you’re not. You’re going to have a cup of tea with me.”

And so they did, in the lovely tackroom with the border around the baseboard of hunters and hounds galloping over some Irish landscape of the mind, and oak cabinets full of trophies and ribbons. Ellen scattered the corgis and Deirdre sat down. Ellen handed her a cup of tea. Deirdre said, resolutely, “It will not do me good to tell.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to give it life or power.”

“I can tell by looking at you that it has life and power. And Martin said—”

“Ha!”

“—you told five of your owners to move their horses.”

“Cheap horses.”

“A trainer does not live by stakes horses alone.”

“Cheap horses are more likely to break down.”

“How are you going to support yourself?”

“I hear this every day. Clearly, I am not going to support myself, or that’s what my bookkeeper says.”

Ellen looked at her cup, then said, “How do you feel about that?”

“That’s why you called me! You’ve talked to George, and now the future of my livelihood is the topic of general conversation!” She was beginning to feel irritated.

“Not just that, not primarily that!”

“Does George think I need some therapeutic conversation?”

“He thinks you need to go to church, frankly, and talk to the priest.” Then she said, “How angry are you? I can’t tell.”

Deirdre set down her cup a bit emphatically, but said, “I don’t know.”

“Deirdre, I was the one who went with you to the hospital when you broke your back, and sat outside the recovery room and waited for them to tell me whether you would walk again.”

“Yes, you were, and I did thank you for it.”

“Not graciously.”

“I will be gracious in my next life.”

“I don’t care if you are gracious or not. I love you even though I hardly ever see you. You gave me a life, this life, and I give thanks every day for it.”

Deirdre thought that was the most amazing thing of all. She said, “To whom?”

“To whoever is listening when I say the words. Anyway, I don’t just love you out of gratitude. I love you, who you are. I miss you.”

Deirdre looked at the other woman. What did it mean, that Ellen would say she loved her? George loved her, but he had to, being employed by her and of her breed. She and George loved each other the way the right hand loves the left hand. So it took her by surprise that Ellen would say these words that no one else in the world ever ever said to her. Just say them. In the course of conversation. To cover her surprise, she said, “I will tell you the one thing I wonder about.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the horses were bunched. It was a big field, and there were several stragglers, but eight of them were bunched right together, and the lead horse was the one who went down, flat out, across the track. He dropped the next three like bowling pins, but the next four got around him, and were fine. You know, when they have one of those multicar pile-ups on I-95, fifty or a hundred cars smash up before you know it. I wake up thinking about it.”

“How do you mean?”

“What did it look like to them? How did they see it?”

“Or what did it feel like to them?”

“What?”

“Well, maybe they saw something. We don’t know how they see, really. But maybe they also felt something, some disturbance in the field.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, like a magnetic field, or an energy field, or a gravitational field. A rock in a stream.”

“And the horses were water that flowed around it.”

“Fish that swam around it. They aren’t like us. They don’t have to know that they know, they just have to know it.”

After a moment, Deirdre said, “Remember that jumper I had for a while, Tinker?”

“Big paint horse?”

“Well, he was the most irritable thing. Bucked on every turn, reared up in the in-gate. Ah, he was a nerve-racking ride, that one. But I did take him to the Penn National that year, and I’ll never forget there was a triple combination three strides out of a corner right after a big square oxer. Horse had to stretch, then turn, then huddle himself up. Well, I heard his toe hit the oxer, just a little tick, and it distracted me into the turn, and I cocked my head, and then there was the triple combination. For a second there, I’d forgotten all about it. Well, that Tinker exploded through that combination all on his own. Boom, no stride, boom, one stride, boom, and out. He just did it.”

“They do it all time. All the time they just let us buy on credit. That’s how I know they like it.”

“Like what?”

“Like what they do. What they do that we ask of them.”

“Do they? That’s what I really wake up wondering. Am I flogging these poor beasts to their early destruction, sinner that I am? They weren’t built to run so far, so fast. They weren’t built to live in a barn, without touching one another. They certainly weren’t built to jump over fences, be weaned at six months, be ridden, eat grain and hay, wear blankets. Och!”

“No, they weren’t built for that, but the building accommodates it, and
the soul inside the building likes it. Deirdre, they like to have something to think about. They like to have problems to solve. If we don’t give them some, they’ll find some. I had that Appy gelding, remember him, that little guy, almost a pony. He used to let himself out of his stall, then let all the mares out and herd them down the aisle and around the barn in a parade, as if to show all the other geldings that he was the boss.”