EIGHTEEN EIGHTEENA DISTANT BANG AWAKENED ME, STILL ON THE SAME DAY, I was fairly certain. At first I thought the thunder had returned, but there was no advancing rumble, just a sharp pop immediately followed by another and another. Gunfire. It had to mean the Independence Day celebration was beginning.
I blinked my eyes open, tried to focus them. Staring up at the sloping ceiling, I thought about James and the firehorses, and all the other horses that would be in the parade, and wished I could somehow be there to see them. Out on the street, the hurried clatter of a horse and wagon grew loud and then faded. They were probably on their way to the parade, I thought enviously.
I’d been to the street that ran along the Common—that’s where the parade was passing by—so I could easily imagine how it looked. The expectant crowd would be pushed onto the pavement, necks craning in the same direction. A dog would probably trot across the empty corridor and a child would chase after him, ignoring his mother’s calls. But then a commanding whistle would split the air and invigorating drumbeats sound their rat-a-tat-tat, and everyone would clear the way and even the sun would obediently scatter the clouds.
That’s how I imagined it, and upon the blank slate of my sloping ceiling I made the parade unfold. First would come the grand marshal, a captain in the army, on a handsome bay. Then a commercial entry, perhaps a local coal company driving an enormous pair of black Percherons. In my mind’s eye, the horses’ massive haunches rippled from blue to black as the harness bells shook. After them I placed a team and wagon entered by a bakery and then one by a candy maker. I imagined the driver tossing wrapped samples to the crowd.
They’d be peppermints, of course, and out of the crowd a hand rose high to grab one; it was Mr. Stead, and he turned and smiled straight at me, and I had to push him out of my mind.
Annoyed, I conjured up the firemen. They burst onto the scene with their shining, hissing steam engine, and the onlookers went wild. James strutted among the other red-shirted men, and they encouraged the crowd to greater noise by whooping and waving their hats.
To my surprise, Mr. Benton Lee charged into view, nearly clipping the fire engine’s wheels and—whose parade was this, anyway? I watched in confused horror as the black stallion harnessed to his two-wheeled gig ran backward, squatted, and lifted into a rear. The single seat tipped dangerously, but Mr. Lee—who took the time to give me a sly grin—coolly flicked his beribboned whip and sent the stallion plunging forward and out of the picture.
The parade images evaporated. I became acutely aware of the room’s chill and of the unsettling odor of soot in the air. How dare Mr. Lee shove his way into my amusement? And for that matter, how dare Mr. Stead turn up? They did nothing but plague me with their deceptions and then vanish.
Feeling sorry for myself, I kicked against the bed’s covers. Mother had them tucked in so tightly I was practically pinned to the sheets. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I gasped for air like a bluegill heaved onto a pond’s bank and abandoned. With my chin brushing the fuzzy rolled edge of the coverlet, I fought to calm my heaving chest. Determinedly I focused my attention on the ceiling again, seeking salvation.
For some time all I saw was the spiderweb of cracks running through the chipped plaster and the brown water stains forming a murky band of clouds across the ceiling’s middle. But gradually that murky band became a herd of wild horses thundering across some distant prairie, and recklessly I threw my leg across one, clutched the mane, and galloped. I didn’t notice the sunlight slipping away or the clouds returning, the walls fading from ivory to ash to iron gray. As rain began spattering the roof, blending with the drumming of the horses’ hooves in my mind, I was lulled into another sleep.
When I awoke, the room was again gloomy, bathed in that thin light that masqueraded as both dawn and dusk. I didn’t know what time it was. I did know the laudanum had completely worn off because my arms burned with a relentless fire. And yet there was some air in me. I felt as if I could breathe again, and I sensed the stirrings of something hopeful. The horses had done that. They were better than any tonic.
Out of habit, or maybe unrepentant stubbornness, I gazed toward the spine of my horse care manual. I longed to open its pages and read; but I couldn’t light the lamp, let alone lift the book into my hands. Heaving a sigh of frustration, I turned my thoughts to the Girl. If I could just go see her … But I knew Mother would never let me past the door, especially now that it was raining again. So I lay there, as helpless as a gasping fish, muddling stupidly about ruffles and samplers, and what made something so right when everyone else thought it was wrong, and wondering with a dull ache just how I was going to fill the long days ahead.
When Mother floated up to my room again, she carried an early dinner and something flat wrapped in tissue. “I have another gift for you,” she said in an unusually bright singsong voice. My incapacitation seemed to have breathed new life into her. She set the tray on the bureau to light the lamp, then pulled a rectangular card, about four by six inches, from its tissue sleeve. “It’s just now arrived from the gallery, just this very minute.” Proudly she held out the photograph that we’d posed for on Saturday.
Three pale faces stared from the gray frame, and it struck me at once that we looked as trapped and lifeless as Father’s butterflies. There was Grandmother, grim as ever in her black widow’s weeds, awaiting the world’s end. And Mother, neat as a pin in white, her lips pinched together so tightly they’d vanished. With a newly churning stomach, I leaned closer to study my own face. At first glance it seemed just as pale and flat and ordinary as the other two, except—I squinted—what was that beside my ear? A fragment of straw? It was. I quashed a smile. Now I remembered: I’d been cleaning the carriage shed, preparing it for the burned mare. Quickly I examined my hands in the photograph. They were dutifully clasped in my lap as the photographer had directed, but—hardly anyone would notice—that shadow between my thumb and forefinger was actually dirt, rubbed in by the pitchfork’s handle. I couldn’t hold back my smile then. I was sure I was never going to be the perfect specimen; no camera or glass or bandage was going to contain me.
Mother took my smile as appreciation. “This one is yours. Your father ordered a cabinet card for each of us,” she said. “Wasn’t that generous of him?”
I nodded, wondering with wry humor if he’d ever notice the flaws in the image that he’d paid to have captured.
After she’d propped the card against my horse care manual, she took up her perch on the bed and began spooning chicken and dumpling stew into me. “It seems I have my baby back,” she murmured happily, and I could have choked. When the bowl was scraped clean, she brought out the bottle of laudanum and unscrewed the cap. The skull on its stark label leered.
“Do I have to take more of that?” My burned arms screamed “yes,” but I couldn’t stay drugged the rest of my life. I had work to do.
“The doctor said it will help you sleep, dear.”
“I’ve been sleeping most of the day,” I argued. “Couldn’t I just wait a while and take it later?”
She looked at me with some misgiving. “Well, all right. We’ll wait another hour or so. Can I bring you anything else?” I shook my head and forced my lips to widen into an agreeable smile, and she left.
I could feel those pale faces staring at me. This is your future, they seemed to say. Your present and your future. Why fight it? I already was. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I lifted one bandaged arm and knocked the photograph flat.
That revealed my manual and Mother’s magazine. My dreams and hers. And that did give me another twinge of guilt. One of the Ten Commandments was “Honor thy father and thy mother.” I’d stitched those words onto a sampler when I was just six. But what if your father and your mother were wrong? Just plain wrong. What then?
I did what I’d always done: I galloped.
Mother had loosened my covers enough that now I was able to kick free of them. Keeping my eyes trained on the horse care manual, I gingerly twisted onto my back. Every little movement disturbed the bandages, yanking them across my raw and oozing skin and burning it anew, but I clenched my jaw. Clumsily using my toes for fingers, I wangled the heavy manual toward the edge of the nightstand. Inch by tantalizing inch it came closer. The Godey’s was still on top, so when the book finally tumbled onto the bed, the magazine came with it. A very pretty lady corseted into a suffocating S-shape and balanced upon her furled umbrella beckoned me with a smile. I smiled back and kicked the magazine onto the floor.
I hated having to poke my dirty toes under the leather cover, even more to pry apart the gilt-edged pages. But with my hands in bandages, it was the only way. When the manual finally flopped open, my heart quickened. It was like a crack in that door, a door that hadn’t been latched quite firmly enough to keep me out. Gathering myself again, I managed to get up onto my knees. The pain almost knocked me back. But like a horse stretching to water, I gradually bent over the book. The words and their knowledge rippled in front of me just as precious as water to the thirsty. It didn’t matter that the pages had fallen open to the middle of a chapter, one entitled “A Brief History of the Horse in the Wild.” I began drinking them in.
It’s a fallacy, though one widely held, that a stallion rules the herd. He is there to protect, of course, to chase away the wolf and the grizzly and the catamount with his superior strength and sharp hooves, but it is another individual who truly leads the herd. As a Texas Ranger with many years’ experience studying horses in the wild once informed me, there is always one wily mare who blazes the way for the others. The stallion may trumpet his call to run, but it is this one mare who tells them where to go. She knows the safest path to the watering hole and which pastures offer the best grazing. She considers the abilities of those around her and adjusts her speed or her path to accommodate the young, the aged, or the injured. This Texas Ranger said he’d even watched one of these wise mares on a spring evening guide a sister mare to a protected wash to give birth. All that night she stood guard, he said, nickering advice and not leaving even to feed herself. On another occasion she shouldered a colt aside just before a rattlesnake struck. How did she come by such authority? I asked. Did mares fight for supremacy as I knew stallions did? He shook his head. No, he answered, a lead mare always chooses herself. She just seems to know that others need her.