Nine White Horses (5 page)

“Very.”

I stuck out a hand, a little late, and introduced myself.
Her hand was thin and knobby, but she had a respectable grip. “You’re Mrs.
Tiffney, of course.”

She laughed, which was surprising. She sounded impossibly
young. “Of course! I’m the only antique human on the farm.” She kept on smiling
at me. “My yard is full of Lipizzans, and you notice my two ponies?”

“Big ponies,” I said. “If they’re that. Morgans?”

“No,” she said. She didn’t tell me what they were.

I didn’t, at that point, ask. Someone was standing behind
me. Janna, I knew later. She wanted to know what to do about someone named
Ragweed, who was in heat, and Florence had categorically refused to move her
Warmblood for any silly circus horse, and the show manager wanted to know if he
could use the shavings in the new barn, but she wasn’t sure what to charge him
for them, if she let him have them at all, since no one had told her if there
was going to be a delivery this week.

It went on like that. I found myself dumping feed in nervous
boarders’ bins and helping Janna pitch hay to the horses that had been put out
to pasture for the night. There were people around—this was a big barn, and the
guests had plenty of grooms of their own—but one way and another I seemed to
have been adopted. Or to have adopted the place.

o0o

“Do you always take in strangers?” I asked Janna. It was
late by then. We were up in the office, drinking coffee from the urn and
feeling fairly comfortable. Feeding horses together can do that to people. She’d
sent the kids home, and the grooms were gone to their hotel or bedded down in
the barn. Even Mrs. Tiffney had gone to the house that stood on the hill behind
the barns.

Janna yawned till her jaw cracked. She didn’t apologize. She
was comfortable people, about my age and about my size, with the no-nonsense
air that stable managers either learn early or give up and become bitchy
instead. “We take in strays,” she said. “Plenty of cats. Too damn many dogs.
Horses, as often as not. People, not that often. People are a bad lot.”

“Maybe I am, too,” I said.

“Mrs. Tiffney likes you,” said Janna.

“Just like that?”

Janna shrugged. “She’s good at judging animals.”

“People-type animals, too?”

Janna didn’t answer. She poured more coffee instead, first
for me, then for herself. “Do you ride?” she asked.

“Not since the winter. I had a mare up at Meadow Farm; Arab.
Did dressage with her. She got twisted intestine. Had to put her down.” It
still hurt to say that.

Janna was horse people. She understood. “Looking for
another?”

“Starting to.”

“None for sale here right now,” she said. “But some of the
boarders take leases. There’s always someone wanting a horse ridden. If you
want to try one of them, take a lesson…”

o0o

I tried one, and then another. I took a lesson. I took
two. Pretty soon I was a regular, though I didn’t settle on any particular
horse. The ones that came up weren’t quite what I was looking for, and the ones
I might have been interested in weren’t for sale or lease, but I had plenty of
chances to ride them.

What I was mostly interested in was just being there.
Someone had put up a sampler in the tack room: “Peaceable Kingdom.” Tacky and
sentimental, but it fit. There were always dogs around and cats underfoot.
Janna gave most of the lessons, but she had a couple of older kids to help with
the beginners. I didn’t do any teaching. I did enough of that every day, down
in the trenches.

There were thirty horses in the two barns, minus the
one-night stand of Lipizzans. The farm owned a few ponies and a couple of
school horses, and Mrs. Tiffney’s pair of stallions, who had a corner of the
old barn to themselves.

They weren’t kept for stud, weren’t anything registered that
anyone knew of. They were just Mrs. Tiffney’s horses, the red and the grey—Zan
and Bali. She drove them as a team, pulling a surrey in the summer and a sleigh
in the winter.

Janna rode them every day if she could. Bali was a pretty
decent jumper. Zan was happier as a dressage horse, though he’d jump if Janna
asked; and I’d seen what he could do in the way of caprioles.

Bali was the quiet one, though that wasn’t saying he was
gentle—he had plenty of spirit. Zan was the one you had to watch. He’d snake
his head out if you walked by his stall, and get titchy if he thought you owed
him a carrot or a bit of apple. Bali was more likely to charm it out of you.
Zan expected it, or else.

I got friendly with most of the horses, even Florence’s
precious Warmblood, but those two had brought me in first, and I always had a
soft spot for them. They seemed to know who I was, too, and Bali started to
nicker when I came, though I thought that was more for his daily apple than for
me. If Mrs. Tiffney was there, I’d help her and Janna harness them up for her
to take her drive around the pastures and down the road, or sit with her while
she watched Janna ride one or the other of them.

The day she asked me if I’d like to ride Bali—Janna was
saddling Zan then—I should have been prepared, and in a way I was, but I was
surprised. I had my saddle, I was wearing my boots; I’d been riding Sam for his
owner, who was jetsetting in Atlantic City. But people didn’t just ride Mrs.
Tiffney’s horses.

I said so. She laughed at me. “No, they don’t. Unless I tell
them to. Go and saddle Bali. He’ll be much happier to be with his brother.”

He was that. I felt as if I was all over his back—first-ride
nerves; I always get them in front of the owner. But he had lovely gaits, and
he seemed determined to show me all of them.

Fourteen. I’d counted once at Meadow Farm, when I watched
the riding master. Walk: collected, working, medium, extended. Trot: ditto.
Canter: ditto. And then, because Mrs. Tiffney told me to do it, and because
Janna was there to set my legs where they belonged and to guide my hands, the
two gaits almost no one ever gets to ride: passage, the graceful, elevated,
slow-motion trot; and piaffe, “Spanish trot” that in Vienna they do between the
pillars, not an inch forward, but all that power and impulsion concentrated in
one place, in perfect control, to the touch of the leg and the support of the
hand and the will of the rider that by then is perfectly melded with that of
the horse.

I dropped down and hugged Bali till he snorted. I was
grinning like an idiot. Janna was grinning, too. I could have sworn even Zan
was, flirting his tail at his brother as he went by.

Mrs. Tiffney smiled. She looked quite as satisfied as Bali
did when I pulled back to look at him, though I thought he might be laughing,
too. And told myself to stop anthropomorphizing, but how often does anyone get
to ride a high-school horse?

Not long after that, Mrs. Tiffney taught me to drive. I’d
never learned that, had always been out riding when chances came up. It was
easier than riding in some ways. Harder in others, with two horses to think of,
and turning axes, and all those bits and pieces of harness.

We didn’t talk much through all of this. The horses were
enough. Sometimes I mentioned something that had happened at school, or said I’d
have to leave early to have dinner with a friend, or mentioned that I was
thinking of going back to grad school.

“In what?” she asked me.

“Classics, probably,” I said. “I’ve got the Masters in it,
but all I teach is Latin. I’d like to get my Greek back before I lose it. And
teach in college. High school’s a war zone, most of the time. You can’t really
teach. Mostly you just play policeman and hope most of your classes can read.”

“Surely,” she said, “if they can take Latin, they can read
English?”

She sounded properly shocked. I laughed sourly. “You’d think
so, wouldn’t you? But we’re egalitarian at Jonathan Small. Anyone who wants anything
can take it. Can’t be elitist, now, can we? Though I finally got them to give
me a remedial Latin class—remedial reading, for kids who can’t read English. It
does work. And it keeps them from going nuts in a regular class.”

“Democracy,” said Mrs. Tiffney, “was never intended for
everyone.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. I couldn’t stop. When I
finally did manage to suck in a breath, she was watching me patiently. She didn’t
look offended. She didn’t say anything further, either, except to ask me to turn
around and put the team into a trot.

When we’d cooled the horses and cleaned the harness—she
insisted on doing it herself, no matter what anyone said—she invited me to the
house. I almost refused. I’m shy about things like that, and I had classes in
the morning. But maybe I had amends to make. I shouldn’t have laughed at her.

o0o

From the outside it was nothing in particular. A big white
frame house with pillars in front: New England Neoclassical. Janna had the
upstairs rear, which I’d seen already, steep twisty staircases and rooms with
interesting ceilings, dipping and swooping at the roof’s whim, and a fireplace
that worked.

Downstairs was much the same, but the ceilings were halfway
to the sky, rimmed with ornate moldings, and there seemed to be a fireplace in
every room, even the kitchen. There were books everywhere, on shelves to the
ceiling, on revolving shelves beside the big comfortable chairs, between
bookends on tables and mantelpieces. And in through the books there were
wonderful things: a bust
of a Roman senator, a medieval triptych of angels and saints around a Madonna and Child, an African mask, a Greek krater, a bronze horse
that must have been Greek, too, and hanging from the ceiling, so surprising
that I laughed, a papier-maché pterodactyl
with carefully painted-in silvery-grey
fur.

Mrs. Tiffney wasn’t going to let me help her with the cups and cookies, but she didn’t try too hard to stop
me. She did insist that
I get comfortable in the living room while she waited for the water to boil.

I wandered where she pointed, past the den and the library I’d
already seen, to the front room with its wide windows and its Oriental carpet.
It was full of books as all the other rooms were, and its fireplace was marble,
cream-pale in the light from the tall windows. There was a painting over it, an
odd one, perfectly round, with what must have been hundreds of figures in
concentric circles.

When I came closer I saw that it wasn’t a painting,
precisely. More of a bas-relief, with a rim that must have been gold leaf, and
inside it a rim of beautiful blue shading to green and grey and white,
sea-colors, and in the center a field of stars—I picked out the gold dots of
constellations, Orion and the Dipper, and the moon in silver phases—and between
were more people than I could begin to count, doing more things than a glance
could take in. They had a classical look, neoclassical more probably, not quite
elaborate enough to be baroque, not quite off-center enough to be medieval.

I found my finger creeping up to touch, to see if it was
really real. I shoved my hand in the pocket of my jacket.

A kettle shrieked in the kitchen. I almost bolted toward it.
Hating to leave that wonderful thing, but glad to escape the temptation to
touch it.

“Did you know,” I said to Mrs. Tiffney as she filled the
teapot, “that you have the shield of Achilles in your living room?”

She didn’t look at me oddly. Just smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I
thought you’d recognize it.”

I picked up the tray before she could do it, and carried it
back through the rooms. The shield—yes, it was a shield, or meant to be one,
clearly and, now that I noticed, rather markedly convex—glowed at me while Mrs.
Tiffney poured tea and I ate cookies.

I don’t remember what the cookies tasted like. They were good, I suppose.
I was counting circles. There was the city at peace, yes. And the city at war.
The wedding and the battle. The trial, the ambush. The field and the vineyard.
The cattle and the lions. The sheep and the shepherds. The dancing floor and
the dancers.

“Someone,” I said, “made himself a masterpiece.”

Mrs. Tiffney nodded. She was still smiling, sipping tea,
looking sometimes at me and sometimes at the marvel over her mantle.

“People argue,” I said. “Over how it really was supposed to
be. Your artist went for the simplest way out—the circles.”

“Sometimes simplest is best,” Mrs. Tiffney said.

I nodded. The cattle were gold, I noticed, with a patina
that made them look like real animals, and their horns looked like tin, or
something else greyish-silvery. Base metal, probably, gilded or foiled over.

Whoever this artist was, whenever he worked—I was almost ready to say seventeenth century, or very good twentieth with a very large budget—he knew his Homer. Loved him, to do every detail, wrinkles of snarls on the lions’ muzzles, curls of hair on the bulls’ foreheads, bright red flashes of blood where the
lions had struck.

“This should be
in a museum,” I said.

Mrs. Tiffney didn’t
frown, but her smile was
gone. “I suppose it should. But I’m selfish. I think it’s happier here,
where people live, and can
touch it if they want to, and it can know the air and the light.”

Pure heresy, of course. A wonder like this should have the
best protection money could buy, controlled climate, controlled access,
everything and anything to preserve it for the ages.

But it was beautiful up there in this living room, with late
daylight on it and a bit of breeze blowing through. I got up without thinking
and went over to it, and touched it. The figures were cool, raised so that I
could have seen them without eyes, and they wove and flowed around one another,
a long undulating line that came back to where it began.

I wasn’t breathing. I drew a breath in slowly. “I’ve never,”
I said, “seen a thing like this. Or anything that came close to it.”

“There’s only one like it in the world,” Mrs. Tiffney said.
She bent forward to fill my cup again. I sat back down, took another cookie.