Horse Shy (10 page)

And when Carole needed help, her friends gave it to her—even if she didn’t think she wanted it!

C
AROLE FELT VERY
awkward when she arrived at Pine Hollow on Saturday. For one thing, she was wearing overalls and a loose shirt and sneakers. She usually wore riding clothes. But she’d always been there before to ride. This time she was only coming to sort out tack. She didn’t need to wear riding breeches and boots to sort out tack. In fact, she didn’t need to wear breeches and boots ever again. She wasn’t going to ride anymore.

She’d waited until the last of her classmates had left after Saturday’s lesson. Max was busy with the adults who took a jumping class after the girls’ class. Mrs. Reg was, as usual, in her office off the tack room. Carole would go to her—in a few minutes.

She let herself in the side door of the stable. It had been almost two weeks since Cobalt’s death—but Carole felt as though she’d been away for months. As soon as she stepped inside, memories came flooding back to her. The smell of hay and horses was sharp and welcoming— but not to her, she told herself. She breathed deeply and waited for her eyes to adjust to the muted light.

Patch stuck his head out over the top of his stall door. Carole automatically reached for his soft nose, rubbing it gently. He nuzzled her neck, but she hadn’t brought any tidbits for him. She patted him once again. Next door, Pepper’s head popped out of his stall.
It was just like Pepper to want to get in on the patting, Carole laughed to herself. She scratched his forehead and patted his big strong neck.

Pepper was a big horse, almost as big as Cobalt, but he didn’t have Cobalt’s brilliant, shiny black coat and he didn’t have the smooth trot and the wonderful rolling canter that Cobalt had had. He didn’t have—Carole stopped these thoughts. They wouldn’t bring Cobalt back. Nothing would bring him back. Cobalt’s stall was the one just beyond Pepper’s. Carole didn’t want to see it. Quickly, Carole turned and retreated to the tack room.

“Hi, Mrs. Reg,” she said. “I just remembered I promised you I’d straighten out the stuff we took on the MTO. Here I am.”

“Oh, hi, Carole. That bag’s in the corner. I haven’t even opened it. Thanks for coming by.”

Carole got the sack and dumped out its contents. She had to laugh at what she saw. Every time somebody had asked her about extra stirrup leathers, she’d put two in the bag. There were dozens there! And they hadn’t needed any of them. She began sorting them out, as well as the stirrups, bits, and other miscellaneous items that had been stuffed in—none of which they’d needed. She knew, though, that if she hadn’t brought them, stirrup leathers would have been snapping left and right.

“Be careful where you toss it over there,” Mrs. Reg said after a moment.

“Why’s that?” Carole asked.

“Eclipse just had a litter of kittens last week and they’re bedded down in the box in the corner,” Mrs. Reg explained.

“Can I look?” Carole asked.

“Sure, just be careful. They’re starting to scramble and trying to get out of the box. Every time we have a litter I’m so afraid that the little ones will get hurt, you know?”

“I’ll be careful,” Carole promised. Quietly, cautiously, she peeked into the box. There, sleeping contentedly, were six little furry kittens. They were so tangled up with one another as they slept that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other one ended. Eclipse, their mother, was awake, watching them proudly. “Oh, Mrs. Reg, they’re the cutest ever! Aren’t they wonderful?”

“As long as they’re good mousers, they’re wonderful,” Mrs. Reg said, always practical.

Pine Hollow, like all stables, had occasional problems with mice who liked oats almost as much as the horses did. For centuries, horse people had known that the best exterminator in a barn was a hungry cat. Pine Hollow usually had four or five cats, and every once in a while, that meant four or five kittens as well. This time, there were six! “What have you named them?” Carole asked.

At Pine Hollow, the tradition was to name the cats after the most distinguished horses in history. Eclipse,
for example, was named after a famous Thoroughbred racehorse from the eighteenth century. The main drawback of this system of naming cats was that the most famous horses were stallions. With a name like Copperbottom, who was a famous Quarter Horse, it didn’t matter. But the last litter of kittens had been born to Sir Archie!

“Oh, I haven’t decided,” Mrs. Reg said. “I think it’s about time to use some of the Standardbreds. How about Messenger, Hambletonian, Dutchman, Yankee, Dan Patch?”

“Yes,” Carole agreed. “Those are good names. The little black-and-white one has to be Dan Patch—or are those really two kittens all tangled up?” Carole was trying to figure that out when the question was answered for her. Half of the “black-and-white one” woke up. He was completely black and his eyes were barely open. He was so small, he could have sat on the palm of her hand. The kitten stretched and began walking across his brothers and sisters, heading for the side of the box. He stood on his hind feet, his forelegs straddling the rim. He tried to push himself up and over, struggling mightily. He scratched at the side of the box with his hind legs, trying to get a grasp on it to push himself up—and out.

“This black one’s trying to get out,” Carole said, gently lowering him back toward his sleeping littermates.

“That one’s been trying to get out practically since the day he was born. He’s smarter than the rest,
tougher, stronger. He always feeds first, and he was the first to walk. That one’s a handful of trouble, but he’s a winner. You want to name him?” Mrs. Reg asked.

Carole watched the kitten a moment. His blue, blue eyes gleamed with curiosity about the world. Then the sun caught his black coat and it shone brightly, almost a blue-black. Carole had seen a coat like that before. She’d known an animal with a heart like that before. She knew what name that little kitten had earned. But she couldn’t say it.

“Maybe,” she told Mrs. Reg. “I’ll think about it.”

Carole turned to the mixed-up pile of leathers and bits she had to sort.

“You know, I was thinking the other day about a horse I once rode,” Mrs. Reg said.

Mrs. Reg had ridden horses all her life until her arthritis made it impossible. She’d known horses and horse people. She had wonderful stories to tell and Carole always enjoyed listening to them. It made her work with the tack pass quickly. Carole tugged at the long leather straps, trying to untangle them, and listened with pleasure.

“She was a fine horse, that one. Her name was Lady Day. She was a Saddlebred with wonderful showy gaits, lifting her legs up high with every step, moving smooth as glass. She belonged to the real estate man in town. He used to love to take people to see property in a buggy, pulled by Lady Day. He sold a lot of houses that way, I’ll tell you. But when he didn’t have customers, she just
stayed with us. Max would let her out in the paddock for exercise, but that wasn’t enough for her. That one liked to perform. She needed an audience, riding her or watching her.

“So, I took to riding her—with Mr. Marsh’s permission, of course. She was as much fun to ride as any horse I’ve known. She would prance across the fields, pretty and proud as could be. I always sat tall on her back, feeling as proud as she did. And, as you can imagine, when spring rolled around and Mr. Marsh’s business got busier and he was using her every day, well, I missed her a lot. She was a winter horse for me, see, because he wouldn’t take his customers out in the cold. We were sort of foul-weather friends.”

Mrs. Reg stopped talking and Carole waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, Carole urged her. “What happened to her?”

“Oh, Mr. Marsh sold her one day—said she’d stumbled pulling his buggy and he couldn’t have an animal that wasn’t surefooted taking his customers around.”

“Was that true?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think his business wasn’t going so well then and he needed the money.”

“But didn’t you feel awful when Lady Day was gone?” Carole asked.

“Me? No, not really. But what a horse she was!”

“I never heard you talk about her before. Was she your favorite horse ever?” Carole asked.

“Favorite?” Mrs. Reg said, as if she were considering what the word meant. “I don’t think so, though
she made me want to own a Saddlebred myself. I nagged Max until he bought one. That one was named Jefferson. Sweetest horse, I’ll tell you. Now, he used to wait for me every morning. Old Max would tell you I was crazy, but I swear that horse smiled when he saw me. When I curried him, he never budged. He even stood still for the blacksmith. You gave him a signal to do something, he did it right away. I don’t think I ever touched the creature with a riding crop.”

“Oh, he must have been a
dream
to ride,” Carole said breathlessly.

“Not really,” Mrs. Reg told her. “He spent so much time being nice that he had almost no spirit of his own. But that was nothing like old Foxfire.”

“Who was Foxfire?” Carole asked.

“Foxfire was a mare we had. She was a fine horse, good to ride, gentle with the youngsters, nice jumper, too. And then we bred her. We wanted to see if we could have that nice temperament carry over another generation.”

“Did it?”

“Hard to tell,” Mrs. Reg said. “See, as soon as her foal was born—it was a pretty bay colt with a white star on his forehead—Foxfire completely changed personalities. She became so protective of her colt that she wouldn’t let anybody near him, or her, for that matter.”

“What did you do?” Carole asked.

“We sold them. We sold them both together. Some man from downstate said he was sure he could retrain
the mare. Took them away in a van one day and we never heard another word from him.”

Carole laughed to herself. Mrs. Reg’s stories were never what she expected. People who told horse stories usually told about the unlikely undersized weakling foal who grew up to take blue ribbons at the National Horse Show. Real life, Carole knew, wasn’t like that. Mrs. Reg was good at telling real-life stories about horses and riders. Her horses always had good points and bad ones the way most real-life horses did—except Cobalt. And their owners were real people, too, with good and bad mixed together.

“Come on, Mrs. Reg,” Carole urged her. “Tell me. You must have had a favorite horse over all the others, didn’t you?”

“Oh, let’s see, now,” Mrs. Reg mused. “Of course, I loved to ride Lady Day, but then I could watch a beauty like Jesse’s Pride forever. What a lovely horse he was. And then, there was the jumper; Roo was what we called him, short for Kangaroo. There was a whole bunch of grays, one after the other, that Max kept for this funny old woman in town. Said she wanted horses with whiter hair than her own. And then—”

“You mean there never was a favorite?” Carole asked as she hung the final stirrup leather on the rack and tossed the bits into the bit tray.

Mrs. Reg shook her head. “Nope, never was,” she said, and Carole knew she was telling the truth. Mrs. Reg loved all her horses, in one way or another.

Just then, the little black kitten succeeded in getting over the top edge of the box.

“You better catch that one!” Mrs. Reg said.

The kitten began stumbling across the tack room floor in search of adventure. He found a piece of straw and started batting it fiercely.

Carole and Mrs. Reg laughed, watching the little creature fight the straw so valiantly.

“He’s something,” Carole said.

“He sure is,” Mrs. Reg agreed. “Let me know when you decide on a name for him, okay?”

Carole had completed putting away the sack of extra leathers, bits, and stirrups. She was done now, finished with Pine Hollow. She didn’t really want to remind Mrs. Reg that she wasn’t coming back.

“Okay,” she said. “ ’Bye.” Mrs. Reg told her goodnight and Carole left slowly, saying good-bye to Pine Hollow, for the night, for the week, for—ever?

“Y
OU KNOW
, I really miss Carole,” Stevie told Lisa a week later.

“Me, too,” Lisa agreed. “Even seeing her at school isn’t the same thing as riding with her. She waves to me in the hall and sometimes we sit together at lunch. But she won’t talk about horses! Can you imagine? We spent the entire lunch period on Tuesday talking about
history
. Maybe you should call her. She’s got to change her mind and start riding again, doesn’t she?”

“I sure hope so,” Stevie told Lisa. “But I do call her and it’s the same thing. I talked to her three times this week and she wouldn’t even use the word ‘horse.’ I’m still pretty sure she’ll get over this. I just wish she’d do it right away!”

“Me, too—then she could help us on our research project about Max!”

“I don’t think I can stand another afternoon looking at the town register,” Stevie groaned. “We haven’t even found the man’s name, and that register has
every
thing in it: land sales, building permits, birth, death, marriage records. Let’s face it, the man was invisible.”

“Maybe he never existed,” Lisa said. “Should we consider that possibility?”

“No way—not until we’ve exhausted everything else. Besides, if our Max is Max the Third, there
had
to be a Max the First. Right?”