Show Barn Blues Read online

  “But the dressage is important, you said,” she argued, hanging up bridles she’d carted in from the horse trailer. “You said that’s their edge.”

  “It’s the horses’ edge,” I corrected her. “I’m not sure it’s doing much for their riders. They like to get on and jump. The dressage is just bumming them out, and I’m the one who teaches it to them, anyway. You should have been here after the last show — everyone was threatening to mutiny. It was like the Bounty in here. I’m not aiming to be Captain Cook, and I don’t want everyone jumping ship to get away from me. If they don’t like dressage and only want to jump, well then, I’ll just keep on doing the dressage on their horses and they can jump them. That way everyone’s happy.”

  “But they’re not improving as riders.”

  I glared at her. “Are you going to argue with me about every single decision I make? Kennedy. For the tenth time. They are here to show their horses and bring home ribbons. They are not here to become the next great horse trainers.”

  Kennedy frowned and picked up the loops of lunge line and side reins that had gotten tangled up on the wheelbarrow ride back to the barn. “I just don’t get how you can deny them the opportunity to progress and say that’s what they want.”

  “Look.” I sat down on a tack trunk and prepared to make her understand the business once and for all. She wanted to make a living as a riding instructor and show trainer? Fine, she needed to get this. “Take this in. There is a difference, in this business, between people who just want to show, and people who want to train and maybe show too. And people who just want to show do not need to learn how to train. No one in this barn needs to know how to start a young horse under saddle or over fences — no one but you, and me, and Anna. Because we are the only ones who want to, and that information is not required in order to show. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess, but—”

  “No, no buts. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Colleen does not need to know how to train a horse to do lead changes. She needs to know how to tell her horse to do lead changes. These folks have limited time to ride. I help them make the most of it and reach their goals. And if someone wants to learn to train a baby — then we’d teach them very differently. But it hasn’t come up yet. So we’re okay?”

  Kennedy sighed. “Okay.”

  “The kids are the same,” I said warningly. “Until they’re older. Don’t get technical with a ten-year-old. Teach them to post. Teach them to do a crest release. Got it?”

  “I got it, I got it!” Kennedy laughed. “God, you’re so serious!”

  “It’s my business,” I said simply. “You want to know how to make a living at this without killing yourself, I’m telling you. Keep it simple, that’s all you have to do.”

  “And what about the older kids who want to know how it works and why it works?”

  “Oh, them.” Who knew? Teens were different. They could grow up to be like me, or Kennedy, or Anna. Or they could be another Missy, riding like hell until college and boys and careers took them out of the barn for decades. “Sprinkle the technical stuff in and go with your gut,” I decided. “But remember that parents are paying the bills, so keep them moving towards the show-ring. Ribbons make repeat customers.”

  Kennedy nodded. “Ribbons make repeat customers. That’s pretty good. You should put it on a cross-stitch pattern and sell it.”

  “Trade secrets,” I sighed, slipping from the tack trunk. “I’m going to bed. Have a nice day off tomorrow.”

  Kennedy looked up from the reins she had been untangling. “I’m going to ride the ponies tomorrow.”

  “No you’re not. Tomorrow’s Monday. On the eighth day, the horse trainer looked and saw that it was good. Yea and she rested. The Horseman’s Gospel.”

  “But they had the whole weekend off!”

  “They’ve had three years off,” I said wearily. “Tomorrow won’t kill them. It might kill me.”

  I headed for the house, trusting Kennedy would turn out the lights, ready for thirty-six hours without seeing a single horse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Except, I broke my own rule.

  I didn’t spend all of Monday on non-equestrian things, as I was supposed to do. I didn’t even make it to sunrise. By the time the first mockingbirds were lazily wheezing from the branches of the live oaks that sheltered the bungalow, I was wide awake, the covers flung away and squashed down at the foot of the bed, staring at the darkness above me and thinking about that feeling.

  That feeling — the one I’d been having on Ivor before the show, when we’d been together out there in the scrub, galloping on a ramrod-straight path, the sound of his hooves rolling across the firm white sand, the hoof-prints left behind us perfect black horseshoes waiting to lead us home again at the end of our frolicking. The sight of the endless reaches of Florida wilderness between his pricked ears, the lift of his head as he sought out the horizon, the fluidity of his muscles and ligaments and bones and tendons as he moved like one perfect, incomparable machine. It haunted me, it woke me in the night, it woke me before the dawn, with the lazy Florida sun still somewhere far east and not even the mourning doves awake to coo from the treetops.

  I curled up my toes in the rucked-up covers and resolved to go back to sleep.

  I closed my eyes and then I scrunched them up to keep them closed, like a toddler pretending to take a nap. But my mind was racing, and so was my heart.

  “Stupid horse,” I said aloud, and I meant it. Because I was tired, and today was my day off, and I wanted to sleep until eight o’clock and then drink a pot of coffee and make pancakes and read a romance novel in my pajamas. The way normal people did on weekends, the people who didn’t have horses and hadn’t devoted their lives to animals who required constant care and surveillance seven days a week. I liked to pretend to be one of those people every week — just once, just enough to keep my sanity. Now, it looked like I had finally cracked. Waking up in the night to daydream about riding a horse in the woods — that was the sort of thing teenagers did, and teenagers were the sort of people who pushed themselves until they burned out completely a few years later.

  Exhibit A: Kennedy. Look how crazy horses had made her. She’d given up horses and gotten an office job she hated, and now here she was back at square one, teaching beginners and breaking ponies for someone else, when once she’d had her own farm and her own show team and her own name out there.

  Was I going to let myself go right over the edge and risk the same fate? I shook my head on my feather pillow. After I’d worked my whole life to reach this point? Hell no. I was going to go back to sleep like the sane, intelligent, professional woman I was.

  After a few moments of weakening resolve I got up anyway. What was the point of laying in bed wide awake, after all? I was awake, I should get out of bed. I wouldn’t go to the barn. No sir! I was going to make coffee, sit on my pretty front porch that got so little use, and watch the sun rise.

  Fifteen minutes later I settled onto my creaking old rocking chair, which wobbled alarmingly atop my creaking old porch floor, and gazed through the swirling fog at precisely nothing. The barn wasn’t visible from the porch; it was hidden by a grove of oak trees, draped with picturesque Spanish moss like a scene on a drug-store postcard, and now those oak trees were shrouded with a silvery mist, curving and snaking through the boughs in sinuous shapes. I sipped at my coffee and waited for the sky to grow gray and pink, for the birds to start carrying on as they did every morning. Out on the highway, a semi went rattling by, its sound amplified by the damp air, and I frowned at its intrusion. I remembered when the only trucks on this road had been farmer’s trucks, pulling flatbeds of watermelon in summer, citrus in winter. The watermelon beds were gone now, and the last remnants of citrus groves were ghostly ruins, an acre here or an acre there left behind of gray, skeletal trees, their few remaining oranges gleaming bravely in late winter before someone — the old owners? Kids from the subdivisions? Migrant workers? — plucked t
he fruit from the withering branches and left the trees bare for another year.

  Maybe that was where my silly fixation on galloping through the scrub was coming from. Maybe I was so tired of watching the countryside I had known get paved over, my exhaustion with all things man-made was extending to the show-ring. Maybe I was on the verge of a mental breakdown entirely different from the one I had been staving off with all my rules about barn hours and days off. Maybe I was fixing to head out west to some forgotten corner of mountainside or meadow where I could live in a shack, haul water from a spring, and commune only with my horses and the wild creatures that would come visit me, like Snow White’s animal friends. Maybe I was one step away from hermit-hood.

  I took another long, restorative gulp of black coffee. Fair-trade, Sumatran beans. I would have to take quite a few bags of this blend, I reflected, if I was going to make it somewhere that actually had a winter. I hadn’t seen snow in ten years, and only then on a vacation I had regretted (because of said snow). I could live like a hermit, sure, but I was going to need good coffee and a good percolator. Probably I should find somewhere tropical. Maybe Costa Rica? They grew their own coffee there.

  I heard the rattle of the front gate as it hummed to life and swung open for the first groom to arrive. That made the time six thirty. The horses would hear the gate too, even though the barn was a quarter mile away. I had been down in my office before their breakfast-time before, seen the way their heads lifted and their eyes brightened a few minutes before the first car pulled into the parking lot. They were like dogs — they could tell the sounds of different motors apart from hundreds of feet away, and knew which car belonged to a groom (which meant food) and which car belonged to a boarder (which meant a confused person walking up and down the aisles wondering what time everything got started around here).

  Sure enough, the sound of the motor had barely reached the house when the nickers and whinnies began to filter out of the barn, their melodies rippling through the sea of fog. Happy horses, ready for their breakfasts.

  New sounds amplified by the fog followed: the gate wobbling its way shut on hinges in need of good greasing, the car making its way to the parking lot, the engine shutting off, the slam of the door. A few kicks on wooden walls — Ivor’s calling card — and a cacophony of high-pitched neighs as whoever-it-was entered the barn. Who was on breakfast duty this morning? Was it Tom? I couldn’t remember who did what any more.

  I did remember the Monday morning routine, though, and I knew by ten o’clock, the barn would be empty of people, the horses on day turn-out would be in their paddocks, the horses who stayed in all day would be munching extra hay, listening to the barn radio (set to classical music from the local NPR station), all tranquil and completely isolated until four o’clock.

  A window of six hours, during which I must fend off this insane urge to go riding.

  I could get up right now, get dressed, get into my car, and drive into town. (It wasn’t very far). I could have a nice breakfast. I could go shopping. I could go to Ikea and buy flat-pack furniture and re-do my shabby little living room for under five hundred dollars. I could go to the tack shop on the other side of town and indulge in the little things I wanted, like six new pairs of boot socks, or a quilted white saddle pad with argyle trim. I could go to a used bookstore and look for old English riding manuals, pages dusty and yellow with age, and breathe in their musty scent as I flipped through glossy insets of grainy photos, images of model riders jumping six foot rustic poles without ground lines or hard hats or saddle pads or martingales or flash nosebands or gag bits or any clue that in sixty years all of those things would be de rigueur for every show-rider from Pony Club to the Olympics.

  I could see a movie. Play tennis. Go fishing. Take a knitting class. I could do a million things that wouldn’t involve breaking my own rules and going down to the barn on a Monday, on a Monday after a show no less, and falling pell mell down a rabbit hole which would lead to an eventual disillusionment with my entire life, right when I was on the verge of shaking it up from its doldrums.

  I went in for more coffee, my imaginary Jack Russell at my side, heels clicking on the scarred old hardwood.

  I could go get a real dog, and that idea actually had some merit. The thought gained some traction in my brain. Dog-shopping! I picked up my tablet from the kitchen table and took it back outside with me. The birds were carrying on now in truth, tweeting and singing and, in the case of one deranged mockingbird who had obviously spent too much time in a nearby subdivision, caterwauling like a car alarm. The silver fog was thinning, and the sky above was gray and pink, shot with blue. The day was getting underway. A second car went by — the death-rattle of Margaret’s old Subaru, telling me Anna was the lucky duck who had a full day off today. She was probably still asleep, her white noise machine on to drown out the happy horse sounds in the stable below. Anna was still young enough to sleep the day away. Lucky duck, indeed.

  I sipped at black coffee, cooling now and with an oily rainbow pattern swirling atop its depths, and flicked my finger idly across my tablet, scanning through the local dog rescue’s available listings. Pit bull cross, rottweiler cross, Staffordshire Terrier (come on now, I wasn’t stupid), chihuahua cross. The former dogs would frighten the boarders, the latter was hardly what I had in mind for a barn dog. I put the tablet down on the floor next to my rocking chair. So no new dog today. It had been an idle thought anyway, easily forgotten, easily pushed to one side. I was happy enough with my imaginary dog right now. He didn’t eat any pillows, and no one had peed in my closet in more than six years, which had to be something like a world record in horse trainer terms.

  The only thought that wouldn’t leave my head was of Ivor’s pricked ears, of his forelock blown back by a breeze of his own creation, of the wild rhythm of his shoulders working between my knees.

  I’d wait, then, I thought. I’d wait until everyone had left, and then I’d give in to temptation. Who knew, maybe it wouldn’t lead to my eventual nervous breakdown. Maybe it would be just what it looked like on the outside: a merry gallop on a favorite horse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Anna came downstairs just as I came creeping back into the barn, a sweaty Ivor stepping up eagerly beside me. I heard her door close and my head snapped up to see her, leaning curiously over the railing of her little landing. “What on earth are you doing?” she asked, seeming rather delighted to have caught me sneaking around my own barn.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, like a guilty child. “I mean — I took Ivor out for an extra ride. He’s had a lot of excess energy lately.”

  Ivor pawed at the concrete aisle, leaving a white streak behind from his steel shoe. “See what I mean? He’s still asking for more.”

  “More galloping on the trails, you mean.” Anna laughed. “I can’t believe you’re going to this extreme to hide that you’ve been riding out there! And I’m really shocked to see you out here on a Monday,” she added. “I thought your Mondays were sacred.”

  “They are,” I admitted. “But for some reason I just couldn’t help myself. I wanted to get out there. It’s such a pretty day.”

  It had been a perfect day out in the scrub. The temperature no higher than sixty-five degrees, the sun bright in a sky of unrelenting blue, not a single fluffy white cloud to be seen. It was as dry as a desert and as green as a jungle out there today, and Ivor and I had enjoyed every moment of our ride. He pawed again, as if to punctuate my thoughts.

  “You know,” Anna said rather darkly, coming down the steps. “Ivor worked very hard at the show yesterday.”

  “I know.” My fingers slipped up to his noseband, began to undo the fastenings. I was suddenly as guilty as a child who had snuck out on her pony. “I shouldn’t have taken him out.”

  Anna stopped on the bottom stair and I saw she was barefoot. I’d never seen her feet before — she always wore boots — and I was mildly surprised to see her toenails were painted yellow, bright as the center of a daisy.
“I’m sure he would have much preferred to stay in his stall all day, staring at the walls,” she agreed, and smiled mockingly at me. “You were so cruel to take him out to have a fun gallop. And he looks just utterly depressed.”

  Ivor fluttered his nostrils at her, stretching his neck out to see if she had any treats. I tossed her a peppermint under his neck and she caught it neatly. Holding it out, she crackled the plastic temptingly and Ivor nearly took her fingers off before she could get it unwrapped. “Yup, he’s abused all right,” she sighed, watching him crunch the peppermint. “Someone should call the authorities on you.”

  I shook my head at her and pulled the saddle off in a heap of leather and metal and sweaty cotton pad, leaning it against the wall to wait until I had Ivor showered and put away. “I know, it’s silly. But it was bad. I have these rules in place for a reason. I shouldn’t be breaking them, anymore than any of the boarders should be. I would come down hard on anybody who rode when and where they shouldn’t be, after all. So I have to respect those rules, too.”

  “You make owning a farm sound so appealing,” Anna said dryly. “I can’t wait to spend my life working up to this point, where I have sunk my entire savings and career into running a barn with rules that I don’t like, but that I have to follow for my own good. Come on, Grace, if that’s the future I might as well just board my horse and give someone else the headache of paying for all this and keeping it running.”

  “I don’t have rules like this for fun,” I argued, but Anna cut me off in a very un-Anna-like fashion.

  “You don’t do anything for fun! Or if you do, you beat yourself up about it afterwards. I was proud of you when I saw you riding out there this morning. Of course I saw you, do you think I sleep all day? I was sitting at the kitchen table and I heard hoofbeats. So I looked out — what if someone had gotten loose? I’d be the only one here to do anything about it. And what do I see, but my boss heading out on her big bad stallion, the one that’s too valuable to waste on trails. Except that’s all the horses, they’re all too valuable to waste on trails. The trails that they like, and that their riders like, of course. I know what you told me before, about the horses having one job and all that, but I don’t think you believe it anymore. So why not admit it and start having some fun? And maybe let everyone else join in?”