Show Barn Blues Read online

  It was enough to make a farm girl sick.

  What could any of us do, though, against all the millions of dollars being thrown at these projects? We couldn’t pay lobbyists to stand up for us, the last two farmers in a countryside converted into vacation-land. We were expected to go where we were wanted — north Florida, presumably. Rodney had seen this coming for a long time, and so had I. It just hurt so damn bad now that the time had finally arrived.

  “I understand,” I managed to croak. I needed to be upbeat, to ease the defeated slump of his shoulders. It wasn’t his fault that the world had changed. “Of course I do. It’s just a shock, is all. Where are you going?”

  “Altoona.” Rodney looked up and smiled, already looking more cheerful at the prospect. “Up in horse country. I bought five acres. There’s a doublewide, and a barn for Misty and Patch. I’m going in the spring. Perfect retirement for an old cowboy like me.”

  “It sounds wonderful.” I smiled more brightly, tamping down the slight panic within. “Misty and Patch will be happy to leave behind all those other horses and get a little peace and quiet. What are you going to do with them?” The one big pasture at Rodney’s place had twelve other horses in it, lesson and trail horses of uncertain breeding and probably uncertain futures. Misty and Patch were two leftovers from Rodney’s old life as a Paint breeder, the last two babies he’d bred out of his favorite mare. They were both in their teens now.

  “Well,” Rodney tipped his head a little coquettishly. “I was hoping you might want a few.”

  I took a big gulp of coffee to hide my uncertain expression. Was there a nice way to say his horses weren’t exactly what my clientele were looking for?

  “And some of my students,” he went on. “Some of the local kids. There are some real budding champs in the group. Winning at the 4-H shows. I bet they could do real good at the bigger shows.”

  “But I don’t teach children. I don’t even know much about the junior divisions.” Or ponies. Or the children themselves. I had built a business around adult amateurs and selling imported horses, and I was happy to be a specialist.

  “Oh, they’re easier than adults,” Rodney said airily. “You just tell them what to do and they do it. No answering back or telling you they can’t. And you can always tell them they have to get off the horse if they sass you. Straightens ‘em right up. But my kids are good. No one’ll give you any trouble.” He watched my face, saw that I was still skeptical, and his tone turned wheedling. “Come on now, Grace. The neighborhood kids will have to go all the way to Skip’s, and that’s nearly an hour away. Some of them will have to stop riding.”

  I doubted that — when Rodney said “neighborhood kids” he talked like they were poor kids riding their bikes to the barn and working off lessons, when in truth they were all from the new subdivisions and country clubs. Their parents could find the time or get the nanny to drive them out to Skip’s or one of the other equestrian centers north of town if they really, really wanted to ride.

  Probably.

  Maybe.

  “I can think about it,” I promised him, but Rodney wasn’t finished.

  “I have a few trail horses.”

  “Mmhmm.” I busied myself getting more coffee from the kitchen.

  “Really quiet, really easy keepers. They wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “And what would I do with them? I don’t think that would be a good fit.”

  “You could do trail rides,” Rodney suggested. “You have all that land out back going to waste, and if you’re not going to sell… They really haven’t been pushing you to sell?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. But I can’t do trail rides.” I shook my head briskly. The idea was out of the question. “Where would I find the time?”

  “Oh, you could hire someone to take them out. You’d just be providing the spot for them. It’s easy money, trail rides. I’ve been doing it here and there, working with the hotels when they have big groups. You put helmets on them, you have them sign a waiver, you take them out and show them a gator. It’s nothing.”

  My phone buzzed on the table and I glanced down. Anna wanting to know if she could have an early riding lesson. As good an excuse as any. “I’ll think about it,” I promised again, typing a quick yes to Anna. “I have a lesson to get ready for now, though. Sorry I can’t visit with you longer.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Rodney said affably, getting up from the table. “I know it’s early and you have the day ahead of you. No hurry on the horses. I was just driving by and saw the sign and thought I’d check in.”

  “What sign?”

  “That’s a big sign, all right.”

  Tom nodded sadly. He hunched a little over the Gator’s steering wheel, as if he wanted to hide from the impending doom, the construction crew’s arrival, the downward spiral of the farm, and, finally, the loss of his job. I hopped out of the Gator and walked over to read the fine print more closely. I wasn’t quite so ready to give up on my farm.

  Hannity & Roth Realty and Investments. It was smaller than the rest of the letters on the sign, a big piece of plywood with a poster plastered over it, set up on two-by-fours in front of the plot of land next to the farm. The big letters said Coming Soon: Tuscan Hills Resort and Country Club. Then the usual suspects, a line-up of meaningless descriptors that vaguely indicated what sort of atrocities would be on offer. Elegant resort-style living. Fine homesites available now. The very best Florida has to offer.

  There was an illustration, too: Italian Revival columns and arches, exposed brick and faux-crumbling plaster, twisting non-native pine trees and sparkling blue lakes between green fairways, a cypress dome humping in the distance like some primitive monument kept whole only out of legislative requirement. “The very best Florida has to offer,” if only Florida was an artistic rendering of Tuscany.

  I sniffed derisively and then, struck by some old-fashioned sense of the evil eye, spat on the ground. I picked my way through the sand-spurs and tiny cactus sprouting along the sandy verge and climbed back into the Gator. “Let’s go back,” I told the despondent Tom, pretending nothing had happened. “Anna probably has her horse warmed up now. I’ll get her lesson taught and then I’ll have her strip those two stalls for you.” Every now and then we gave Anna some of the hard physical work, the Tom-Work, to remind her that the horse business required big muscles and a strong stomach. Stripping the ammonia-soaked underbelly of two recently emptied stalls was just the thing.

  Tom nodded and did a quick u-turn, sending us the few hundred feet down the highway’s shoulder to the entrance to the farm, and we motored through the gateway and the glade of live oaks that sheltered my house before we started passing the paddocks, already occupied with horses for the morning, and came around the back of the barn to the parking lot. He cut the motor by the barn aisle and looked at me with melancholy eyes. I just couldn’t take it.

  “What?”

  “Are you going to sell?” Tom asked.

  “What, are you crazy? This is my home. This was my grandfather’s farm. I’d never give this place up. You know that.” We’d had this conversation a hundred times before. Every time someone else sold, every time someone else closed their barn and moved north to the hill country around Ocala, or south to the tiny ranches on the outskirts of the Everglades. Every time another subdivision, or resort, or strip mall went in where horses and cattle had once grazed — every time, I promised once more that I would keep my stable intact. Tom didn’t know that Grove Pointe, the subdivision across the highway, had once been my grandfather’s orange grove, or he would have had a conniption. That part wasn’t important. The stable, I always emphasized, was safe from the developer’s touch.

  I’d developed this land myself, in the image I had always wanted. From empty pastures had risen an equestrian center. The truth was, I had laid my share of concrete here on my grandfather’s farm, I had paved my bit of Florida. I shook my head a little, trying to rid myself of the thought. At least his house and l
ive oaks were preserved, and to museum-quality, if I said so myself. So I’d built up the pastures, so what? The scrubland out back, I’d never touch.

  “When that over there is all houses, you won’t sell?” He pointed at the tangle of pine and scrub to our right, the southern border of the property, the future Tuscan Hills Resort.

  “I’ll never sell,” I repeated. Firmly, like I meant it. Just as I had every other time he had asked.

  I hopped out of the Gator, leaving Tom to sit and worry over the future of the farm. I had my own worries on that count.

  I walked down the wide south aisle of the barn and stopped in front of the newest empty stalls, eyeing them glumly. They were part of a growing trend.

  Two horses had left over the weekend. Three more might be gone by the end of the month, while their owners waited to finalize home sales and moves. The dreaded eight empty stalls was just a matter of time, and my wait-list was a thing of the past.

  For a long time, development around here had been good for the riding lesson and boarding business — subdivisions meant families, and families meant clients of all ages. For years, I had a full barn. I had a waiting list. I had a full eight-horse rig and several private trailers unloading show horses and ponies at every A-circuit show from Venice to Jacksonville. I’d given up my first love, dressage, and devoted myself to hunter/jumpers, because that was what my clients wanted. I’d shaped my life and my business around teaching and training adult amateurs.

  Then, things changed. Slowly, and then all at once.

  First, it was the hurricanes. People from up north didn’t like hurricanes, and they really didn’t like four in one season. You could tell folks it was a fluke, a hundred-year-season that wouldn’t be repeated in their lifetimes, but losing their roofs once was enough for a lot of them. Then it was the local government — failing schools, not enough money to fix them, taxes voted down time and time again. White-collar families, my bread-and-butter, voted with their moving vans. They rented out their houses when the houses wouldn’t sell, and suddenly the neighboring subdivisions were playing host to a revolving door of international families renting vacation homes.

  After that, things changed very quickly. The developers changed their plans, bought more woodland and farms, and got to work.

  They built the water park. They built the luxury mall. Then the resorts began popping up. Vacation homes, villas, towering hotels, grand and classy and seemingly all echoing some collective unconscious memory of Tuscany, of all places — I shook my head, I still couldn’t figure out how they had landed on Tuscany as the ideal Florida image. Either way, my little corner of central Florida had somehow became a new epicenter of every sort of accommodation and amusement a tourist could want for a week or two of sun and fun.

  Not exactly a source of long-term clients, the students who bought horses and boarded them here and showed with me, the ones who had been the backbone of my business for so long. Hell, all of my business.

  I shoved my bangs from my eyes, pushing them behind my ears, and determined that I would think positive. I would figure this out. I would fill my empty stalls. I would adapt, I would evolve, I would prosper. I might be closer to fifty than forty, but I wasn’t a dinosaur yet.

  A horse next to the newest empty stall nickered to me, pushing his nose through the stall bars and wiggling his upper lip along the steel. “Hey, Poppy,” I told the horse, and gave him my fingers to play with. A big bay warmblood with a white spot on his nose, Rebel was one of my favorites — one of the first horses I’d imported from Europe to sell to a student ready for her own jumper. He was the beginning of an era. The Golden Age of Grace Carter’s Seabreeze Equestrian Center.

  Rebel wiggled his long upper lip against my fingers, trying to pull them into his mouth. I tickled the damp flesh under his lip and he jumped back, eyes widening with surprise, then he was back for more immediately. Rebel would play grab-the-fingers all day long. He’d never bite anyone, either. All he wanted to do was catch things in his lips. Anything — reins, pony-tails, shirt collars. Rebel wasn’t picky about what went into his mouth.

  “You’re the cutest,” I told him, retrieving my fingers. He pricked his ears as I walked away, disappointed that I wasn’t going to stay and play. As I turned the corner into the center aisle, I heard him nicker encouragingly, hoping to convince me to come back. But work always beckoned. I went on a morning tour of inspection, savoring every shadow and angle of my barn.

  I peeked into the wash-stalls in the center of the barn and saw Margaret, my grim senior groom, solemnly brushing the tangles from a school horse’s tail. She looked over the horse’s shining chestnut hindquarters and gave me a stiff nod. I nodded gravely in return and Margaret bent her gray curls over the horse’s tail again, applying a generous measure of detangling spray to the witch’s locks. Skeeter, a stout little Dutch Warmblood, liked to rub his tail against the tree in his paddock, and if the brambles weren’t kept down, he brought a shrub of sticks and thorns back inside with him every morning.

  “He only has two lessons today, Margaret,” I called, and she nodded again without looking up from her task.

  “Lotta work for two rides,” Margaret grumbled. “Oughta put it up in a bag.”

  “You know we can’t do that,” I reminded her. “The clients won’t like that look. Or the noise.” Tail-bags were pretty loud when a horse swished a tail at a fly and thumped their side with a big old nylon bag. And it wasn’t a look I thought my clients, who were mainly fairly well-heeled career women, would relish in their beautiful steeds. They wanted the fantasy — there was a reason so many of the sales horses I brought in were dapple gray or flashy chestnuts with plenty of chrome.

  “Any rides on Skeeter today?”

  I thought, picturing my calendar, open on my desk upstairs in the office. “No,” I said after a moment. “He can go back outside today. Same for Splash.”

  “Slow day,” Margaret observed. She lifted her eyebrows and regarded me over her plastic-rimmed glasses.

  “Guess so,” I said lightly, but I was thinking slow week, slow month, slow year.

  Why weren’t the locals riding anymore? Not everyone had moved, but still, my lesson books weren’t full anymore. Either riding was going out of fashion, or the heat was finally keeping the northern transplants confined to air-conditioned pursuits.

  Or maybe they just plain couldn’t afford me any longer. My monthly board for one horse was higher than some downtown studio apartments. My riding lessons were just as expensive as lessons in tennis, or golf, or a host of other sports more manageable and less dangerous than riding. I wasn’t even price gouging — it was just so expensive to keep horses this close to a metropolitan area, with taxes shooting up year after year, with supplies growing so scarce that I had to pay to have everything from feed to shavings to horse shampoo delivered from a farm supply store way up the turnpike. I couldn’t cut my rates, either — if anything, I was going to have to raise prices in the next year just to make ends meet.

  Things were getting tight. Cleared land and construction next door were going to make it tighter.

  But I wasn’t ready to give up on this yet.

  I turned into the northern barn aisle, past a few more empty stalls, past a few more nickering horses, to the end of the barn. I gazed out across the parking lot. Ahead of me was a decent chunk of the last wilderness in the area — hundreds of acres of scrub and savannah and swamp. I had spent my childhood wandering this land on horseback. Now it sat silently, its trails overgrown or lost, for all I knew.

  I hadn’t ridden out there in years. I hadn’t kept all my promises in life, but I’d kept the one I’d made to myself, to keep out of the woods and stay in the arena where I belonged.

  And, I’d kept the promise to my grandfather to keep this land untouched. So far, so good.

  I lifted my eyes above the dense thicket of palmettos, their fronds rattling in a gentle seabreeze from the distant ocean. Sixty feet up, the stark, sparse branches of the long
leaf pines swayed gently against a clean blue sky, scattered with tiny white cotton balls of clouds. It looked like an impenetrable wilderness, but it wasn’t.

  There was still one little trail that could have led riders through the scrub and deposited them onto a wide white road, a sandy path through the palmettos, that led to rich treasures of old Florida. First, an ancient shell-mound, crowned with oak trees and carpeted with leaves, a shady oasis on a hot day. Further along, a cypress swamp humped up in a dome, its centurion trees protecting a tiny blue spring. As kids, we’d called it that white path the Indian Road. My grandfather had said his father called it the Timucuan Trail.

  I wondered if the road still went all the way to the cypress swamp, or if the scrub had taken back its sandy ruts. Somehow, I doubted that the wilderness would ever really take it back. That old road had been clear for decades, maybe centuries, despite hardly ever getting touched by anything more destructive than horses’ hooves. It was a natural element of the scrub, not a scar on the landscape but a shining jewel, bright white in the sunlight, ghostly gray beneath a full moon. I remembered those nights, my pony glowing in the moonlight, Grandpa sitting up above me on his big chestnut mare, smiling down at me from beneath a wide-brimmed Stetson.