Horse-Famous: Stories Read online

  It’s the first time he has troubled to meet my eyes. He suddenly gives me a searching look, and then his eyebrows snap together over his ice-blue eyes and I know what’s coming next.

  “You’re Inspector Healy’s daughter!” the inspector exclaims, surprised out of his bot-speak. “I’ve seen your photo before!”

  Of course he has. Many, many times. I’m horse-famous.

  Yes, that was me waving from the cover of the first six printings of the English Equestrian Council Inspection Manual. That was me smiling next to my gray Welsh pony, Handsome Will, on the “History” page of the English Equestrian Council’s website. That was me posing beside my hunter Mockingbird, on the huge glossy “Meeting Here!” posters plastered at livery stables the length and breadth of England, my crash helmet properly positioned but not so low that it could disguise my father’s high forehead, my father’s arched eyebrows, my father’s grave green eyes, my father’s sharp nose, my father’s firm chin. Thank goodness my father was a pretty man, because I was and am his spitting image, minus the whiskers he grew in later life. So far.

  Although I grow weary of seeing his face in all my mirrors.

  “Blakely – I didn’t recognize the name,” the inspector is continuing in a star-struck voice. “Or expect to find you in the United States.”

  “Moved here in college,” I say wearily. “Married in college too, and divorced in college. A lot of big changes in college, really,” I add with a piss-poor attempt at humor. By some whim of the international courts, I was left Holly Blakely here, and Holly Healy in Britain. Neither are enviable names, by pronunciation or association, so I have decided to leave well enough alone until I figure out a good serviceable surname which I feel like I can live with for the long haul, something without the associations of university folly or childhood memories, things best forgotten. Not to mention the awe of the equestrian world, which is not something I have ever sought or deserved.

  I look away from the inspector’s worshipful gaze and see that fool Brigid peeping around the corner, her watery blue eyes wide. As working students go she’s one of the best I’ll ever have, hard-working and madly in love with horses. But she has absolutely no social skills and, except for her extraordinary instincts when working with the horses, she has no common sense at all. She’d never leave the feed room door open, but habitually leaves the kitchen door open as if she is running away from a fire. As a result, my house, a sad spectacle of mud, straw, and horsehair to begin with, is perpetually populated by hordes of big fat barn flies, who seem to regard it as some sort of fly-Florida, where they can breed and terrorize humans throughout the winter, traditionally the only time in the farmer’s year that is not an orgy of buzzing, biting insects.

  When she sees I’ve caught her spying, Brigid’s eyes somehow go wider, so that she resembles a ginger cartoon cat who has spotted a growling pit bull, and she scuttles around the corner and disappears, somewhere safe and out of sight, although where she’ll find anyplace out of sight in a English Manual Inspection is beyond me. The tour of the stable will cover every inch from stalls to paddocks to riding ring and will culminate, of course, at the muckheap, as all things in life do.

  But what Brigid couldn’t see is that the inspector is now eyeing me with something akin to adoration, and I’m blushing under all the attention, thinking the local climate was quite preferable when I was a worm to be crushed, rather than a hero to be venerated. I will never be famous; despite many futile and abortive attempts as a precocious and exhausted teenager; I will never join the Olympic team for any country, not even a small obscure one somewhere in South America or Oceania which would like to field a Three-Day-Event rider; I will probably never again ride in international competition as I did at eighteen, still under my father’s watchful eye and forceful tutelage; I will always be average. But to the English Equestrian Council I am, if I allow myself to be, a star.

  Of course I won’t allow it.

  Of course.

  “Right,” I say to the inspector, ready to put an end to the Beatlemania crap he seems to be on the verge of descending into. “Shall we go to the next? Tack room, is it?” As if I hadn’t long-ago memorized the Manual – there, I admit it. Chapter Two is "The Tack Room: Saddlery and Horse Furnishings, Their Maintenance and Proper Storage." And my tack room is a damn magazine photo. My tack room is worthy of old Queenie herself. I’m ready and eager for a perfect score on that, at least. One I earn on my own merits, not on the fact of my parentage.

  “Yes, of course,” the inspector mumbles. He glances down at his clipboard, furrows his brow. “Tack room, then, lead on.” He clears his throat and looks a bit more normal, but the look of bland disapproval has left his expression and unless I do something truly mad and reckless and un-EEC, like lead a horse out of its stall without a headcollar and swing onto its bare back for a gallop around the muddy front pasture (or, indeed, just pull a horse out without first picking debris out of its hooves first, to avoid sullying the clean padded rubber cobbles of the aisle way) I don’t think I’ll be seeing that look again.

  And indeed, as we stand in the center of my big, beautiful tack room, paneled in warm stained oak, the bridles neatly wrapped with their own throatlatches in a figure-8 loop around them, draped over curved brass hangers, the saddles neatly enshrouded in their canvas covers on felt-covered wooden racks, the stray leg wraps and curry combs and horsehair brushes entrapped within monogrammed tack trunks, I can see that I won’t be able to derive any pleasure at all from this inspection and its eventual, inevitable, pass-with-flying-colors result.

  Everything is perfect, sure, and it’s taken me months to put this farm right, but I am now the boss’s daughter. “Revered” would not be too strong a word for how the English Equestrian Council feels about my late father. There’s no possibility of failure now, which sort of takes all the effort of the past half-year and renders it meaningless. It also validates my childhood, in a way, and I don’t want that, not at all.

  The inspector gives a single checkmark to his clipboard, signing off effortlessly and wordlessly on the gleaming Shangri-La I’ve constructed for Saddlery and Horse Furnishings, and then between the two of us offers a few effusive compliments, well-salted with words like “magnificent” and “shining example.” I am hardly listening. He would have said the same if the floor was a slick ice-rink of spilled neatsfoot oil and a cat was in the process of being sick on a two thousand dollar Barnsby jumping saddle. I follow my admirer dispiritedly to the barn aisle for Chapter Three: "Loose Boxes and the General Housing of Horses."

  There cannot be a perfect score for Chapter Three. It is too subjective. The inspector does not stick a ruler into the bedding of each stall to determine if the horse is reposing upon the required 30 to 45 centimeters of pine wood shavings or clean oat straw. The water buckets may have been filled ten minutes before the inspector walks in the door, but at least one horse will have sucked a bucket dry, turned a bucket over, or dropped a load of manure in their pristine drinking water. Their rugs will not all be straight, their tails will not all be clean of bedding, their hay-nets will not be all perfect round balls and at least one will have been pulled down to knee-height, where a horse will regard it curiously, trying to decide if he should stick a hoof in and break his leg just for the hell of it. Horses are destructive and eternally in motion, kicking stamping walking rolling bucking pooping biting tearing at their buckets and hay-nets, napping flat on their sides, twitching and swinging their legs in horse dreams, slamming against wooden walls as they awkwardly arise. All an inspector can do is make a guess.

  I have read advice before that you should always put your messiest horse in the middle of the barn, so that he is not the first thing a client sees when they walk in the front door, but Leo frets when he cannot put his head out over his door and crane it around the big main door of the barn, where he can view the goings-on of the farm with his ears pricked and his eyes wide. And so he is the first horse that we see, and I am sure he will not put
on a good performance. Not that it matters, but I am wincing a little despite myself, not eager to show off this horrible green- and brown-stained beast in his utterly trashed stall. I can only hope he hasn’t pooped in his water bucket already –

  We stand before his stall and gaze at horse heaven.

  Leo is in perfect condition. He should have a brass plaque on the front of his stall which reads “The finest example of horsekeeping in modern history was found in this location on February 1, 2011, when a gray Thoroughbred named Leo Divine was found to be in good health, perfectly white with absolutely no manure marks or blemishes anywhere on his well-muscled body, and a mane and tail like a Show Sheen commercial, eating from a perfectly round ball of hay, drinking from two shimmering water buckets with depths like that of a untouched Alpine spring on some uncharted mountainside, and standing in a perfectly level stall of wood shavings banked to a depth of 36 centimeters.”

  It is that astonishing.

  Leo was my score-killer. Leo was the one I worried about. The messiest, filthiest, foulest creature in the barn (although a joy to ride, once you found him under all the mud and stains.) I had told Brigid, “If we can just keep Leo and his stall clean, this thing is in the bag.” Brigid – ah, she must have gotten him cleaned up while I was hiding in the bathroom. What a good girl.

  The inspector is regarding the gray horse with astonishment. He turns to me at last. “That’s how your father would have kept a horse, ma’am,” he says respectfully, as if I am suddenly his superior.

  Don’t I know it, I think.

  I nod.

  He walks the rest of the barn, full of contented horses who, although neat and tidy, do not shine with the platinum perfection of Leo. I take him outside to investigate Chapter 4, "The Turn-Outs," and Chapter Five, "Riding Premises and the Ménage," and we are quiet and awkward with one another, the deference I would have normally shown to him now reversed. At the end, I invite him to the house, as is customary, for a cup of tea and a discussion, generally one-sided, on the evaluation and the results.

  “Ms Blakely,” he says formally, when we have hung our coats and hats amidst the jumble of oilskins and Wellingtons that crowd the narrow front hallway and spill riotously onto the stairs and newel post, “You truly run a stable precisely as your father would have done.”

  “Well,” I start and then stop dubiously, seating him at the kitchen table and looking with trepidation at the mountain of cups in the sink, as if I didn’t know ahead of time that I’d have company and someone would see this appalling mess that is my kitchen – okay, my house. But he is well-used to horse people, and I imagine a clean kitchen would have come as a complete shock.

  He is already plowing on, with the air of someone who has determined to speak his mind after much deliberation. “I really wonder if I might ask where you have been for all these years. After your father passed away, there would have been no end of places for you if you had wished. The Blairs, in particular, were looking for a stable rider and asked the Council for your information. No one had it.”

  I am running water from the kitchen tap, waiting for the color to subside to something normal and edible. Country wells can be so disgusting.

  “Ms Blakely?” he asks gently.

  “I told you, I came to America to go to college,” I say lightly. “I needed a change. I got one.”

  “A horsewoman with all your advantages of upbringing – that farm you grew up on, that amazing yard and all those horses your father bred – you were able to just leave all that? Mark Harsham has it now, you know. He’ll be on the next Olympic team.”

  I fill the kettle and blink back tears. There is a silence in the kitchen. Outside, the hound barks uselessly at a rolling horse in the neighbor’s paddock.

  “I saw you at the last competition,” he says at last. “Fifteen years ago. I had just left school myself and was beginning with the Council.” He pauses. “You could have been anything. You could have run the Council. You could have ridden for Britain. Instead you disappeared and have popped up again on a twenty-acre farm in South Carolina. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Have you got the right to ask me all this?” I ask, my face still hidden. I’m straightening the stacks of dishes in the sink, making one mess into another. “Is this something to do with the inspection?”

  “Of course it has. And I think you know that.”

  It takes a second for the insult to sink in, but then I am conjuring up the appendix i:"Selection of Staff":

  “Selection of staff is of principle importance when running a livery or making decisions on where to engage in riding lessons or board your horse. A person of sound mind, with no criminal past, is crucial.”

  “So which do you suspect me of?” I snap. “Unsound mind, or criminal history?”

  “It’s reasonable to question how you came to be here,” the inspector says implacably, all traces of hero worship long gone, left behind in the stables. “I’ll require some sort of explanation before I can put the Council’s approval on your business. I think that if you consider my position, you’ll see I’m right.”

  One of Brigid’s big black flies is buzzing frantically against the kitchen window, the noise filling the room. It seems to add to the layers of dirt and clutter that I’ve allowed to fill up the house. I’ve exhausted myself, turning a neglected little hobby farm into a beautiful equestrian facility. I’ve let this miserable little farmhouse sink deeper into rot and sadness. I only come inside to eat and to sleep. I don’t sit still. I don’t think of anything but the stables. I don’t think of my past. But still, all the work I’ve done, with no one but half-crazy Brigid for help, will amount to nothing if I don’t tell the inspector the truth.

  So I sit down across from him, my back to the window that looks out on the gray sky and the muddy paddocks and the trim barn, ignore the useless hound and the desperate fly, and I tell him the truth.

  “I wrote the manual,” I say without preamble. “I kept the yard up. I rode the horses. From the time I was a girl.”

  The inspector has the grace to look startled. “Your father wrote the manual,” he asserts.

  “Oh, no. My father – commissioned – the manual, for lack of a better word. I ran the yard from the time I was 12 years old. I was up at four thirty every morning feeding and training horses before school started. I was in the stables at eight o’clock every night topping off water buckets and straightening rugs.”

  The inspector would have known my father, if he came on board at the council before I’d quit riding and disappeared to the States. My father founded the council. My father was council. All the old traditions were being lost, he’d said. There was no race on earth like the English for the art of horsemanship, and he’d be damned if he’d let the Americans overtake us. Or the French – that didn’t even bear thinking about.

  “You couldn’t run a big yard and a book and run a national society which did everything from sit in conference with MPs to organize horse shows and hunter trials," I went on. "Think about that. Most people, it's all they can do to run a yard and get their horses to shows. My father was most people. He was no different. And everyone thought he was a superman. Who did they think did all the work in the yard? Who did they think cared for all those horses? Who did they think rode them all? The council thought he had an army of grooms. He didn’t. He didn’t need an army of grooms. He had me. And since I thought of nothing but horses, at first I thought it was a great privilege to spend all of my time on them. Until my friends at school were having parties and going to movies and I was going home to muck out stalls and ride the hunters.”

  The inspector nods gravely. It was a common story. The day the pony-mad girl discovers boys. Some get over it, some don’t. Some stick with horses, some don’t. Most are at least given the choice.

  I’ve gotten a good start now. I tell him everything. Everything. I tell him the worst of it.

  My father ran the council until the day he died, heart attack, dropping on the cobbl
es of the clean-swept yard. I was riding Count Me In. I galloped Count in a wide circle around the ménage, brought him down to a trot, popped him over a broad oxer filled with brush, just to get his attention and put his muscles in gear, and when I passed the gate to the yard, I saw him there, sprawled out, unfastened raincoat tangled around his arms and his neck, and I didn’t know what to do, because there was no one else there, no one to take Count and hold his reins, or cool him out, or unsaddle him and put his rug on – there was just me and my father, as there had always been, and horses came first.

  I remembered the mist on the hillside above the ménage, I remembered the goosebumps rising on my bare arms. It had been warm earlier, but the weather had changed while I was on Count.

  Once I had fallen from my pony, from little gray Handsome Will, whose picture had adorned the first Manual, and I refused to get back up on him. I held my knees to my chest and sat in the grass and wept. My father had leaned down from his own hunter, swept up Will’s reins, and led him back to the stable to untack him and dry his legs. I had given up looking for sympathy eventually and came walking back to find my muddy tack awaiting a wipe-down with sponge and oil. This was my childhood. This was the upbringing that made me sit on Count in an agony of indecision, while my father lay sprawled on the cobbles.

  Eventually I dismounted and led the horse across the yard, holding the reins while I leaned down and sought my father’s pulse, cold fingers on his cold neck. Then I walked on, taking Count back to his box to take off his tack and put his rug back on.

  I tell it all to the English inspector, who is leaning back in his chair, his hands loose on the table, his jaw slack with surprise. “But –” he says when I get up to take the whistling kettle off of the stove. “But you – you ran the stables and wrote the Manual? I don’t understand.”

  “Some call it slave labor,” I snap, dropping the tea cups onto the table from a height that is higher than necessary, listening to them slam onto the wood with satisfaction. “And I didn’t write the Manual, to be honest, so much as perform every single task in it to the highest order, so that my father could report and write about the perfect stable.