A Good Horse

T
HE LETTER ARRIVED ON MY BIRTHDAY
. A
LL THROUGH ELEMENTARY
school, I was kind of mad that my birthday came so early in the year, September 13, because people at school—teachers, students, the ladies in the lunchroom, even the moms—weren’t yet thinking about cupcakes in class or singing “Happy Birthday” at lunch. As the school year progressed, every birthday got to be a bigger and bigger deal, and by March (when the Goldman twins had their birthday), there were party hats and little favors and a big “Happy Birthday” on the blackboard in colored chalk. On September 13, though, school was too new; no one was tired of it yet, so if Mom sent cookies, sometimes the teacher would forget to hand them out until the end of the day, and then the kids grabbed them, and took them on the
school bus, and forgot why they were there. It kind of made me mad and it kind of made me sad.

But in junior high, birthdays at school were a thing of the past for everybody. Even so, Gloria and Stella each brought me something: Stella gave me a small stuffed unicorn, and Gloria brought me a book called
C. W. Anderson’s Complete Book of Horses and Horsemanship
. This was a big, expensive book, and I guessed that Gloria’s mom had picked it out. No cookies. But the whole setup was different in eighth grade—we went to different classrooms, and not everyone was in all the same classes together. I had English, algebra, and biology with Gloria, and Stella was in our algebra class, and Stella and I had French and social studies. We all had phys ed at the same time, at least until it got cold and we either passed our required swimming tests or gave up on them. After that, Stella said she was going to play basketball—she had been practicing her jump shot all summer.

The Big Four had been split up and got mixed around—we didn’t even call them the Big Four anymore. It was almost funny to think how they had run the whole seventh grade, and now, three months later, no one paid much attention to them. And so school was dull. It was all business:
“J’ai une soeur et un frère. Mon frère s’appelle Jean et ma soeur s’appelle Annette”;
“If A is greater than B, and C is greater than D, and D is less than A, then what is the value of B?” “Christopher Columbus was not the first European to discover the western hemisphere. That honor goes to Leif Eriksson, who was a Viking from Iceland, the son of Erik the Red, who discovered Greenland”; and “Even though it looks red, blood consists of red blood cells and
white blood cells. These two types of cells have very different functions.” In eighth grade, it was important to take good notes. I had five different notebooks for my classes. (The fifth was for home economics—“All foods are made up of proteins, fats, and starches.” The boys took shop.)

And so school was about the same every day, which I didn’t mind, because there was a lot going on at home, with Black George and Jack and the horses Daddy had gotten through Uncle Luke over the summer, that I needed a rest at school, not the sort of rest where you lie down and sleep but the sort of rest where you know what is going to happen every minute even if it isn’t much fun.

I saw the letter when I got off the school bus and took the mail out of the mailbox by the road. It was right on top. What caught my eye was not the address: “Mr. Mark Lovitt, Oak Valley Ranch,” et cetera, but the return address: “Brandt and Carson Agency, 3802 Lovers’ Lane Circle, Dallas, Texas.” I thought that was such a funny address. And the envelope was nice, too, not like a bill. But I didn’t think about it again once I got in the house, because right there, at the kitchen table, was Jem Jarrow, drinking a glass of water and smiling, and Mom was sitting across from him, grinning and saying, “Abby! Happy birthday, sweetheart!”

So I threw down my books and the letters and ran upstairs to put on my jeans and boots, and the three of us went out to find Jack. This was my birthday present! A training session with Jem Jarrow! I hadn’t seen him in months, and it was the best birthday present I could have thought of.

Jem was smaller than I remembered, walking in front of
me, in those boots that looked like they had molded themselves around his feet, with his pale straw Stetson pushed back on his head. But no, probably not. It was me who was bigger—I knew I had grown at least two inches since the spring. I was almost as tall as Mom. What Daddy said about this was “Once your feet stop growing, then you top out,” which always made Mom laugh, but it was a good question.

Mom had topped out at five foot three, size-six shoes, but Daddy hadn’t topped out until six feet, size ten, same with my brother Danny. And somewhere back there in Oklahoma, where my grandparents and relatives still lived, was Aunt (or Great-aunt) Alice, who had topped out at five-eleven back when most women didn’t see five-two. “You never know when that might crop up again” was what Daddy said the last time he’d bought me a pair of boots, size seven (but a little too big so they would last through the winter), and even though he was smiling, well, you never did know, did you?

Jem was the sort of horse trainer who didn’t expect to come back and tell you the same things over and over—he expected you to learn from him how horses’ minds worked and then to build on what you’d learned. In the spring, he’d helped me with a very grumpy horse that I was rather afraid of. My birthday surprise was that we went to the barn rather than to the gelding corral. Right there in the barn beside the chocolate cake on a card table was Daddy holding my eight-month-old colt, Jack. Jack had a red ribbon with a blue bow looped around his neck, and some more ribbons braided into his forelock, and when he saw me, he whinnied and pricked his ears. And even though I had fed him before going to school that
morning and I saw him every single day and he always trotted over to the fence as soon as I approached and stretched his head out for a pat, and then followed me to the gate, and was in every way a kind and affectionate horse, there was something about this whinny and the way he tossed his head to say “Hey! You’re home! I missed you! Let’s do something!” that brought tears to my eyes because I was so lucky. So I went up to Daddy and took the lead rope out of his hand and led Jack out of the barn, and he turned in a curve around me and then put his head down so I would pat him along the neck, and then he gave a low nicker, just for me.

Jem Jarrow was smiling. He said, “Let’s see what this fellow has learned.” In addition to helping me with Ornery George (who was now sold), Jem had shown me how to give Jack his first lessons in being a good boy.

I led him toward what had once been his pen. It was now the training corral, dusty and tan-colored, because Daddy had brought in a load of sand and the three of us had raked it into the dirt. He had plans for the winter, some way he was going to work the footing so it would drain perfectly after every rainstorm, but there hadn’t been any rain since April, and there probably wouldn’t be any until December, so it was no rush.