Good-bye to a Horse
My daughter's first love was tall, dark, and handsome. He helped her grow from a girl into a woman. Then the day arrived when she had to say ...
WHEN MY ALARM WENT OFF AT 6:01 A.M., I found a paper plate covered with my daughter Vivian's handwriting outside the bedroom door. "Please don't wake me up in the morning," it said. "It's 3:00 a.m. I can't go to sleep because I'm thinking about Mark. I've just laid in bed for two hours, but nothing works."
Mark was her horse. That morning at ten, a man from Boysville, a residential center for abused or neglected children near San Antonio, was coming to pick him up. We had agreed to donate Mark to the home. Mark was lame, which meant he couldn't be ridden in competitions and no one would buy him. At Boysville he would be looked after and he would not be ridden hard, so he might prove useful. But if not, they would sell him at auction to the highest bidder without questioning what purpose that bidder had in mind. His fate would be uncertain. That was why Vivian was so worried.
She had graduated from high school that spring, then dragged through the summer, working hard at her job but refusing to turn her attention to any of the crucial shopping, packing, and organizing that had to happen before she left for college. In fact, there was a slight shadow of sadness all around. At the first of the summer, her ancient cocker spaniel, who had been with her since she was four, had had to be put to sleep. And now Mark was going too.
I fixed myself a small breakfast, then showered. At eight-thirty I went to Vivian's room, intending to awaken her so she could get ready to go to the stables. She slept so heavily that she often lay for hours with her clock radio blaring next to her ear. To my surprise, her bed was empty. I went back to our bedroom, where Tracy, my wife, was still asleep. I nudged her gently. "Vivian's left already," I said. "We should probably go on out to the stables."
"All right," she said, pushing herself up on one elbow. As she dressed, I sat alone in the front of the house and waited.
TRACY AND I WERE CITY PEOPLE who thought that having both a dog and a cat was the equivalent of running a zoo. But Vivian had been a little girl who, like so many little girls, was instinctively drawn to horses. She began taking riding lessons at various stables around Austin in the second grade. Eventually we found some stables we really liked in the north of town about thirty minutes from our house. Vivian began jumping fences and going to shows. She rode a succession of horses owned by the stables, most notably a stiff and obstreperous one named Sneakers. By this time she was thirteen. She had several friends from school her age or slightly older who were riding too. They already had their own horses and, in one case, a private trainer. They won too, and at a higher level of competition than Vivian rode in. The attention of the stable owners, the better trainers, and the older riders was naturally directed toward those girls. Oblivious at the time, I see now how difficult that was for her. She was jealous, although too proud to admit it. But it was more than simple jealousy. Those girls were living what she saw as her destiny, and it was clear that she could not progress much further without riding a better horse than Sneakers. The only way to get a better horse was to buy one. But even in our little corner of the show-jumping world, such a horse would cost more than $10,000, and that was out of the question. We couldn't afford it. Vivian's riding career stalled.
Meanwhile, the other girls her age began to drift away from riding and sold their horses. The cliché is that girls love their horses until they discover boys. There was some of that, I guess, but the girls who left weren't necessarily boy-crazy, and the ones who kept riding often had boys on their minds as well as horses. The distinction was that the girls who'd left had found other things they would rather do—often other sports, sometimes student politics, sometimes simply studying. They were, in a way, rather sensible, entering the normal world at the normal time and beginning to make a place for themselves in it. The girls who kept riding were idealists, pagan idealists, who still believed that the horse was a god incarnate. They would sacrifice much of the teenage universe—popularity, conformity, school spirit, and yes, their share of dates—so they could continue to live in the world where the god ruled. They were believers.
Certainly Vivian was. Tracy and I waited for her apostasy, but it did not come. Instead, as if in some divine plan, Vivian came into a small inheritance from her great-grandmother. The prudent thing to do was to save it for college. On the other hand, too coincidental to be ignored, it was almost enough to buy a horse. We gave her all the appropriate warnings: You'll have to take care of him; you'll have to ride more often; you'll miss out on a lot the other girls are doing, and so on. She was impatient through it all. She would, she would, she would. Didn't we know her? Didn't we understand her? We told the stable owners to begin looking for a horse.
But by now she wasn't the only one with her mind on horses. About six months earlier, a strange thing happened: I began riding myself. I had gone out to the stables one evening to pick Vivian up, and amid the by-now familiar sights and sounds and smells, I realized that I wished I knew how to ride. I still wasn't sure what I thought about horse shows and all that went with them, but I watched Vivian sitting in control of a horse as it cantered along, and I wanted to know that I could do that too.
My respect for Vivian grew as I began riding. During the first lesson, the instructor said, "It takes at least two years to become a rider, not a passenger." I didn't believe her, but I soon reconsidered. I found I couldn't do something as simple as go from a trot to a walk without losing my stirrups. But by the time we began to look for a horse for Vivian, I had progressed to jumping small fences. Still, the notion that I might ride the horse too became part of the justification for buying one at all. Vivian responded to this idea very cleverly. She never disputed my riding the horse while we were looking. But as soon as we had bought one, she took him over so completely that there was no question of my riding him except on rare occasions.
One spring day Glenn and Phoebe Johnson, the owners of the stables, called for us to come to a horse show in Boerne, northwest of San Antonio, to see a quarter horse they had their eyes on. Boerne has become a major center for all kinds of riding in Central Texas. There is a large pavilion on the edge of town with stables and several show rings. We arrived late on a Friday afternoon, before the competition began. We walked among the bewildering maze of horse stalls before finding Glenn and Phoebe, who were staying in one of the many trailers surrounding the pavilion grounds. They led us through the stalls to a young gelding, who raised his head apprehensively as we approached. Glenn put a halter on him and led him out to a paddock, a change the horse accepted easily enough. Halfway between a roan and a chestnut, with high white socks and a lot of white specks on his ribs and belly, he was tall, with a quarter horse's short back and long tail. Too thin at the moment and a bit restless, he shifted his weight back and forth as Vivian put a saddle and bridle on him and led him toward the largest of the three rings.
Vivian, precarious and nervous atop this unfamiliar horse, entered the ring. Glenn watched silently as she walked the horse along the fence clear around the ring. Then he asked her to trot. Vivian had to stop occasionally as riders who had just come over a jump suddenly loomed in her path. Then, warily, she would continue. Glenn told her to canter. The horse responded willingly, perhaps too willingly. Tracy and I had a few terrifying moments as the horse increased his pace, apparently unconcerned with Vivian's attempts to turn him right or left or slow him down. At the same time, he had beautiful movement, and when Glenn asked her to begin taking the lower fences along the long, straight sides of the ring, the horse went over them with great confidence and eagerness and a quite pretty curve from his neck to his hindquarters. At seven years old, he was an adolescent filled with raw energy and sheer joy in his own physicality. We told Glenn and Phoebe that we wanted to buy the horse.
We drove back to Austin in silence. Vivian was too excited and we were too stunned at what we'd done to talk much. Suddenly, we were horse people. Except for our house, and a disastrous real estate deal ten years earlier that was supposed to make us rich for life, the horse was the biggest investment we had ever made.
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