Show Barn Blues Read online

  “I should think so.” Margaret’s old boss had been a competitive trail rider of some repute. Of course, that had been twenty years ago, and I would have thought trail-blazing might have progressed beyond swinging swords from the saddle, but this was the horse biz, after all. Change came slowly out here. “So the trail out to the sandy road is open again?”

  “Guess so,” Margaret shrugged. She didn’t care.

  “Everyone’s been taking about trail riding,” Tom said. He still cared a little. “The new girl has been talking it up. Says horses need the down-time.”

  “She talks it up while I’m out in the ring and can’t hear,” I guessed, and Tom nodded, brushing back his white-blonde locks.

  “She’s going to get someone hurt,” I said testily. “These ladies aren’t used to trail-riding, to say nothing of their horses. Let me know when some of them are planning on sneaking out there, will ya? And try to discourage it. Discreetly. Mention the shows coming up, that sort of thing. They won’t want to throw away all their hard work if you remind them of how important their training is to a successful season.” After all, that’s why they were here, every single one of them, paying top dollar — to win on the A-circuit. Not to goof around in the woods with a priceless show horse.

  There was a trio of nods, from weary and uncaring (Margaret) to brisk and can-do (Anna), with Tom somewhere in between. I released them for lunch with a nod of my own, and walked back to my office, climbing the stairs slowly, aware of every step as my kneecaps protested the hard labor, reminding me of all the years I’d been training, all the successful and not-so-successful seasons I had had.

  These ladies with their Mercedes and their BMWs and their imported horses had it easy, but they still rode hard and aimed high. I wasn’t about to let them fritter it all away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The new worries about the trail riding joined the older worries about the development next door, plus some old favorites that came up when the electric bill arrived in the mail, and they were all eating away at me. I tried to put in a training session on Gayle’s silly mare, but I couldn’t concentrate on walk-canter transitions anymore than Maxine could. I gave it up, handed the sweaty mare over to Anna, and tacked up Ivor.

  Riding my big gray stallion often seemed like the answer to all life’s problems. I could forget about everything — bickering boarders, mystery lamenesses, overdue balances, unpleasant bank statements — and just sink into his spirit, moving with him as easily as an eagle soaring on the thermals. We had been together long enough to know each other on the sort of deep level that made self-help-equestrian mash-up books such a success. Everyone wanted what Ivor and I had. I happened to know that it was rare. I’d ridden a lot of horses in my time, and only had this kind of connection twice.

  Whatever we had — one person’s psychic-bond scenario was another person’s practical explanation that we had just been riding together for a very long time, and I tended towards the practical side of things at all times — it was enough to knock my old boarder’s defection and my new boarder’s dismal lack of ambition and the presence of that damn sign next door quite out of my head. I was granted forty-five minutes of happiness and peace, worrying only over finding the right stride and cadence in Ivor’s big ebullient canter.

  Once we had bounced through a jumping school, me relishing the way he bunny-hopped through gymnastics, he swapping his leads for fun as we circled after each course of fences, I handed him off to Anna to cool out and got down to the business of teaching. I was thankful for the further distraction, especially as it would last right through the evening. Friday evening was a busy time for riding lessons, especially with the clients who worked all week in air-conditioned offices, and sweated through their evening rides every night before hurrying home to heat up dinner for their families. They showed up in breeches and boots despite the late-afternoon heat and grew red-faced as they labored through figure-eights, lead changes, and triple combinations. Huffing and puffing, one by one, my students toddled out of the arena leading their sweating, blowing horses, and I felt I could pat myself on the back for another job well done. Miserable work in summer would be a delight in winter, and they’d ride like champions in the show ring.

  Most days, we had just a little small talk before lessons — how were the kids, how was work, of course I’d be delighted to ride your horse on Tuesday, so sorry you can’t make it — but today, everyone I hadn’t seen all week only wanted to talk about The Sign, and what it would mean for the barn.

  “Do you think the construction will be noisy?”

  “It’s going to be so weird to lose those trees. It’s going to change the whole character of the farm.”

  “Sad to see another piece of woodland get mowed down.”

  “I guess this place will be next.”

  I heard this last one from every single student, and I marveled that they could all think I’d just up and sell. “Why would you think that?” I asked my last student, mystified. Did they have so little faith in my commitment to Seabreeze, and to them? Did they not understand this was my life’s work, and I was doing everything that I could to preserve it? Sometimes I wondered why I bothered, if this was all the respect my struggles had gained me.

  “No one would blame you,” Melanie said matter-of-factly, rubbing Rowan’s forehead. She had him in his flat bridle, the one that Anna hadn’t seen the day she used Fallon’s new bridle and stretched out the throat-latch. Rowan did have a huge head, I noticed. Stacy had been right about that, anyway. The flat hunting bridle really complemented his massive noggin. “Everyone else has sold. Even two years ago there were at least four more barns on this road. Now there’s just you.”

  “Well, don’t forget — this is my home. I couldn’t possibly sell it.” If anyone thought for a second I’d sell the property, they’d all be barn-shopping and I’d have an empty barn and a bankrupt business in no time.

  “Even when you’re the last one here?”

  “Especially then. I’ll have a lock on the market!” I grinned. “Now let’s get rolling. We have a dressage show coming up soon.”

  Melanie groaned and led Rowan up to the mounting block. I smiled. You wanted to do the Winter Equestrian Festival, you did the little dressage show, that was the deal. And you brought home a good score, if not a ribbon. “Walk him on a loose rein for a few minutes, then pick him up, put him together, and give us a few nice walk-trot transitions!” I bellowed, in full teacher-mode, and managed to forget about the construction company next door for another half an hour.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Saturday arrived hot and dry, a September sizzler without a cloud in the sky. The logical person would have savored a free hour in the schedule and spent it lolling in the air conditioning. However, I was not logical, I was a horsewoman.

  I decided to fill in the extra hour in my day that Stacy had gifted me with a bonus afternoon ride on Ivor. After six years with Ivor, I was about as close to him as I could get to a horse, but every day Ivor pushed me a little further into respecting him in a very human way. He was aloof and prickly with most people, respectful and patient with me, and athletic enough to jump a barn.

  Despite his natural talent for jumping, however, Ivor was the horse who had convinced me that every show jumper needed dressage, and plenty of it. His difficult youthful years were legendary amongst the handful of boarders who had been with me as long as I’d had him. They used to drop whatever they were doing when they saw me tacking him up, just so that they could rush out to the arena and form a little peanut gallery, gasping and oohing and aaahing over Ivor’s spectacular leaps, crashes, dead stops, and back-breaking bucks.

  “Look at you now, Ivor,” I told him, and his ears flicked back to listen. We were turning around a corner of the covered arena at a beautiful working trot, his neck arched and his mouth soft on the bit, his back bending around the curve from poll to tail. “You were a pill, you know that? And now you’re a pleasure.”

  He was still diff
icult from time to time — he had occasional aversions to the requests that I made, which manifested themselves in tail-wringing, rearing, even squealing like a toddler throwing a tantrum. But he was a stallion, I reasoned. You’d have that. I had high hopes that after this show season, I’d be justified in my decision to keep Ivor intact. Balls weren’t usually my thing on a show horse, too much trouble with the ladies in the boarding stable and on the trailer and at the show-grounds, too, for that matter. Ivor was different, though — his brain was so quick and his attitude was so interesting to work with, I couldn’t bear the thought of changing him. If he won a few Grand Prix classes this winter, I was going to go into the stud-horse business with him.

  I mulled over Stacy and Kennedy while we trotted through the arena. A lot of the work I’d done to fix Ivor’s brain had been out on the trails, working alone, where he was the only horse, without the distractions of hormones and pheromones and studdish rivalries that had kept him from concentrating in the arena.

  I hadn’t liked doing it that way — it was risky, riding alone out there, and no one knew that better than I did. I liked my fences, I liked my closed gates, I liked a barn full of people or at least a groom or two nearby in case something went wrong and a horse got loose. But I couldn’t deny the plain facts in this case. Isolation and the quiet woods had worked wonders for jittery, angry Ivor, as the smooth-moving horse beneath me was demonstrating with every lovely stride. Kennedy was right when she told the other boarders trail-riding could fix horses — I just disagreed with the premise that my boarders had any of the problems that necessitated trail work. Anyway, there was no reason for any of them to take the kind of risk riding out on the trails with their show horses entailed — or to mar their own show-perfect positions with more defensive poses.

  I sat down and closed my fingers, stilling my motion, and Ivor settled easily into a walk. I glanced at my watch, and then out of the covered arena, wondering when the new pair of trail riders were headed out on their adventure. It was easy to keep an eye out for them — the covered arena was adjacent to the barn, separated by a little swath of green grass and palm trees, and this gap between buildings afforded a clear view of the parking lot, with the hay and machine sheds just beyond. Next to the shed, the trail-head beckoned, a slim gap in the trees and palmettos that lined the farm.

  The trail wandered through a chunk of my own land before it met up with the old road through the scrub. The Timucuan Trail was white-sand, fairly straight, and virtually forgotten. I supposed it was a national treasure, or at least a state one, but no one outside of the local equestrians and ranchers had ever seemed to know about it, and I was the only one left.

  What would they think, if they saw the riches out there? Would they see the beauty I saw, in the dark, still pools glimmering darkly beneath the cypress trees; in the rattling green fronds of the palmettos, lizards darting across the white sand and into their shadows; in the stark skinny longleaf pines that cast hardly any shade and roared like an ocean when a storm threatened?

  It wasn’t the Florida folks from up north expected.

  All around my farm, the other ranches that had once dotted the countryside had disappeared, the pastures covered with concrete of every sort: concrete driveways, concrete hotels, concrete houses, concrete-bottomed drainage canals, concrete pools — artificial versions of the swimming holes and sparkling creeks which had once snaked through this land. People didn’t come to central Florida to see what it actually looked like — they came to Florida for a fake version of some paradise in their own head, one which didn’t include mud-bottomed lakes or tannin-stained lazy rivers, shimmering as the ripples from slow-moving alligators caught the sunlight.

  It was certainly true of my clients — few of them had grown up in Florida, fewer of them had any sort of knowledge of local flora and fauna, or any interest in such things, besides what flowers looked nicest in their gardens and what those long-legged white birds were.

  “Which ones?” I’d ask dryly when this question came up with the latest boarder to arrive from up north. “Could it have been the ibis, the great egret, the snowy egret, the wood stork?”

  This usually invited a blank stare.

  The new Floridians had never heard a great horned owl break the silence of a still night, and they’d never backed away from a diamondback rattlesnake. They couldn’t tell a blackjack oak from a live oak, and they didn’t know that Spanish moss was as murderous to trees as it was beautiful. To them, none of that matter — the great outdoors wasn’t part of their lives. They came from Up North and they lived in stucco Spanish-revival houses, they had a landscaping crew come once a week to mow and edge the lawns, and they kept their horses at my farm, with its covered arena, so they didn’t have to ride in the hot sun.

  People like this certainly had no business riding out in the Florida wilderness. Maybe on experienced horses, maybe on a guided trail ride, I would have let them go without worrying about them. But I ran a barn that catered to a group of wealthy women whose wild equestrian stories were all from their teenage years, or even before that. Twenty or thirty years of college, career, and kids finally loosened their grip enough for them to snatch a few hours of personal time a week, and now they were back in the saddle — which was great, but they weren’t kids anymore, and they didn’t bounce when they hit the ground anymore.

  Heaven knew their horses were no better, used to groomed footing and guiding rails. They should have learned by now that show horses were show horses. I had learned that lesson young — how had they all missed it?

  I lifted my hands and my calves and my pelvis and Ivor picked up a springing canter from the walk, the upwards motion and momentum flowing through my spine, and went bounding down the center line of the arena. It nearly took my mind off the situation back in the barn. There was no feeling like a good walk-canter transition. It was a controlled rocket launch, and I was the one controlling it. I adjusted my body and asked Ivor to change directions at the end of the arena.

  Ivor skipped through his flying lead change with tremendous gravity and I gave him a quick pat on the neck for getting through such an exciting maneuver without throwing a crow-hop or a buck. He cantered obediently in a twenty-meter circle, then, just as I made to change reins and ask for him to swap leads again, he spooked hard to the left, away from the arena’s railing, and broke into a rough gallop, his head high.

  I wrestled him back down without too much fuss and swung him back around to the top of the arena, my gaze following his pricked ears, and saw Stacy and Kennedy heading out on their trail ride, which I hadn’t been able to talk her out of after all, 17.2 hand high stallion, tapping whip, and custom breeches notwithstanding. Kennedy was sitting comfortably on Sailor the Wonder Horse, who was a rotund little apple-butt of a Quarter Horse and delightful in his way, but Stacy wasn’t having such an easy time. Fallon, a tall, dark bay Hanoverian I’d had imported from Germany two years ago, was looking around the unfamiliar surroundings of the parking lot with alarm, his head high and his eyes wide. He spooked at the machine shed and went skittering into Sailor, a tangle of legs and mane and tail, and he might have turned back for the barn, but Kennedy reached out and snagged his reins, pulling his head close to Sailor’s neck.

  I let Ivor halt at the arena fence and we both watched the unlikely quartet of humans and horses as they disappeared into the woods, hoof by faltering hoof. Ivor was utterly astonished, his head as high as his neck could get it (which was pretty high) at the sight of seeing two horses foot-loose and fancy-free, beyond the familiar boundaries of the barn and the arena and the paddocks, in a realm usually known to only hold useful articles like the Gator, which always arrived at the barn full of delicious hay. I could imagine his thoughts: He wasn’t allowed out there anymore, so why were they? He was the stallion, after all. Wasn’t this his farm?

  “Settle down,” I told him, not unkindly, and gave the curb rein a little jiggle, just to remind him I was still there and still on top and still in charge. �
��They’ll be back soon enough. Maybe not all together, but still.”

  Indeed, for a moment it looked like they’d be back sooner rather than later. Fallon, who was a solid show jumper, was less than reliable anywhere less secure than a nice fenced arena. He’d once run out from a jump and then just plain ran away at a show with a grassy, unfenced jumping field. But those sorts of courses were really few and far between in the show jumping circuit, and so it didn’t matter if he had security issues outside of the nice safe railings of an arena. He was a show horse, not a trail horse. He was good at his job. I thought it was unfair of Kennedy and Stacy to expect anything more of him.

  Sure, he had his sticky spots — every horse did. If now and then he got behind the bit and wasn’t moving forward as well as we knew he could, that was something we could work on right here in the arena, where he was comfortable and happy. I didn’t think blowing his mind out on the trail was the right thing to do at all, and as Stacy’s trainer I should have had the last word in the argument, but she had insisted it was something she wanted to try. Now — well, look at them. They’d come to a halt halfway into the trail-head, and Fallon was throwing his head up while Kennedy was holding on as tightly as she could, and Stacy was kicking him so hard she was pulling her legs away from his sides like a kid on a tough pony. I had my doubts, but eventually the group effort worked and they dragged/shoved poor Fallon, all but kicking and screaming, into the forest.

  “Sorry bud,” I said, and Ivor twitched a muscle along his shoulder blade, as if he was nervous the same fate awaited him. Or perhaps jealous — maybe he wanted to go out there and goof around in the woods instead of preparing for his biggest show season yet. Well, we all had to work, and Ivor demonstrated constantly that he enjoyed his job, so there was no reason to mess with a good thing. “Nope, nothing for you but a few more lead changes and then a nice bath.”