At the Horse Show
“My beloved is mine and I am his. He feedeth among the lilies.” –Song of Songs
When Mom and Evvie and I were in town shopping at the Grand Union, we saw a poster that said the County 4-H Club was putting on a horse show that weekend. Evvie and I really wanted to go, especially now we were horse owners ourselves. We wanted to see other kids’ horses even though we knew our noble steed was better than anybody else’s—Sam was strong, smart, true, and willing—and handsome, too.
It had only taken two weeks for us to realize how beautiful Sam was. How could we have been so blind before? Sometimes we’d sit eating pb&js for lunch on the porch rockers, just admiring Sam’s handsome conformation as he grazed among the cows. At certain angles I could see a curvaceous crest on his neck. In certain lights his mane looked silky. His broad chest and round white legs and big feet were evidence of his strength and power.
Saturday morning, Mom was going off shopping with Beatrice, and Beatrice was going to pick her up. She and Mom talked on the phone every day and they called each other Joanie and Bea. Mom would whoop and laugh at the things the farmer’s wife said. Bea never kept her opinions to herself and she was kind of sarcastic, which Dad said he couldn’t stand in a woman. But Mom loved Bea.
Dad, however, was going to go fishing on the Otterkill, and his road lay in the direction of the 4-H fairgrounds, so he said yes he would drop us at the horse show and pick us up when he had caught his limit. We piled in with him after kissing Sam goodbye in the barn.
Dad, wearing his old hat with the home-tied flies on it, and his old tackle vest that smelled sweetly of the fish of yesteryear, kept silence. I could tell Dad was happy just thinking about trout; how to find, catch, and cook trout.
We kept silence too, about certain things. For instance we never told our parents how far from home we had gone on Sam and how we held onto his tail going up hills. Nor did we mention how Sam loved us and took care of us. Dad especially didn’t need to know.
“All animals care about is food,” he liked to say. “All that nonsense about dogs or horses loving you is a sentimental delusion.”
Evvie and I knew better. We had no delusions whatsoever about our noble, beautiful, wonderful horse Sam.
The fair grounds were crowded with trucks and horse trailers; the hot-dog stands were selling pinky-red steamed wienies and thick-cut French fries with the skins still on. We drank in that intoxicating fair-ground smell of fried dough and cotton candy mingled with manure and hay and horse. We heard the call for Western Pleasure Class, so we sauntered over to the ring fence and leaned on it with the cocked heads and narrowed eyes of sophisticated Horse People, sizing up the local horse flesh.
There was already a golden haze of dust in the ring, and around and around flew the pretty, ponies—paints, appaloosas, chestnuts, buckskins, palominos with flashy blazes and socks. There were chocolate Morgans with rippling silver manes and tails, there were blue roans with black points.
Every one of them had slim legs, tea-cup sized feet, velvety little muzzles, soft kind brown eyes. For about ten minutes we said nothing, as we hung on the rail, as those fine shiny ponies flashed by.
Evvie said it.
“They’re so—so—little.”
They certainly were. We had clean forgotten what a girl’s pleasure pony was supposed to look like. We had clean forgotten what our dream pony used to look like. Now here they all were, in front of us, a joy to behold, a dream to own, lining up and posing prettily for the judge.
I felt a terrible pang somewhere near my heart and wondered if a hot dog with ketchup and mustard and relish would make it go away. My sister and I retreated to the hotdog stand and plunked down our money. We kept some more silence as we munched our way through those weenies, weenies that tasted like ashes and dust.
We wandered back among the trailers, watching the kids in Western dress and concha belts; the kids in hunting kit, a few snooty looking young ladies in saddle-seat habits. They and their 4-H club leaders and parents were cleaning tack, shaving bot-fly eggs off ponies’ legs with razor blades, braiding manes, stripping appaloosa tails down to a fashionable wisp. Those lucky kids, with their lovely horses. We didn’t squint at them with cocked heads now or point out their conformation faults; we just stared.
After three hours Dad came and picked us up and held up his creel full of little speckled trouts for us to admire. He asked how was the horse show. OK, we guessed.
“Did you see any horses as nice as Sam?”
“Nah.” We sat silent during the ride home, trying to digest those hotdogs, and a few other things.
As soon as we got home, my sister and I found a pair of scissors and went right out to the barn. Sam was dozing in the run-in stall. We trimmed off his beard. We braided his mane. We blunt-cut his tail and hacked the feathering off his fetlocks. Sam fell back asleep, snoring away beneath his cherubs’ busy little hands. His lower lip wiggled and dangled in a particularly disgusting way, he was snoring loudly and one hip was cocked. He looked like a flatbed truck with one wheel in a ditch.
I noticed all the bot-fly eggs on the inside of his forelegs. I noticed the booming noise his feet made when he stamped the flies off. There was a sand crack in the outer quarter of his near hind hoof. It was getting bigger. His pink penis hung down between his hocks like a steamed hot dog.
We worked away in grim silence for a long time. Finally we had whittled as much off Sam as could be whittled; he was still too big and too common and too hairy, and the flies were biting and we were hot and sweaty and tired. I went to get the saddle and bridle, but Evvie shook her head.
“I don’t feel much like riding.”
“Me neither, I guess,” I said.
We hung up the tack, and trudged up to our special sitting rock in the middle of the pasture. It looked west over our fields to Connor’s hill pastures, so we called it Sunset Rock. We flung ourselves down and watched the tree shadows lengthen over the haylot and slide across the road into the cornfield.
The western sky turned pink and peach color fading to light blue further up. When it got cool, Sam came out of the barn and grazed his way up to the rock. He stood right over us. He yawned, showing us his yellow teeth and the ripply roof of his mouth. He cleared his nostrils, shook his head, lowered it so it almost touched each of our shoulders, and went back to sleep.
Venus shone over our house. Birds had stopped singing, except for a barred owl in the orchard, laughing like a fool, “who cooks, who cooks, who cooks for you-all?” The deer slipped out of the brush and came dancing onto the hay meadow on their delicate legs. The sky turned deeper blue. Still we sat there.
Finally Evvie stood up. Sam turned his head to her, pressing his nose against her chest. Evvie reached up and began to undo the braids in his mane. I stood up too and helped her. We patted Sam’s big strong neck with shy pats.
When Sam went off again to graze, we went down to the house to eat supper. Venus was sliding down the sky toward the horizon and the night wind was rustling with a dark velvety sound on the mountain. The white road of the milky way wound across the sky. You could almost ride along it.