Emma and the Cutting Horse (12 page)

At lunch, Emma could see them in the
cafeteria, but the population of Candi’s table had diminished. The
girls who were still sitting with her were louder than ever, but
some of her friends from last year could be seem scattered out
among the other tables with new friends.

“What happened with Candi’s father?” Emma
asked Katie and Hannah when they joined her.

“My mom said he got out on bail, but his
trial hasn’t started yet. I don’t think he’s living with Candi and
her mom and sister anymore, though,” Katie said. “I really haven’t
heard anything about them lately. He still has the car lot, I
guess. My mom saw him there this summer.”

Katie was suddenly distracted by Joe, who put
his tray down on their table.

“Can I sit here?” he asked Katie.

“Sure,” Katie said, patting the seat beside
her.

He sat down, and smiled at Hannah and Emma.
An awkward silence descended, but it was relieved when one of Joe’s
friends came and sat down across the table from him. They struck up
a conversation about football practice and gradually the tension
dissipated. Emma noticed that Katie could hardly eat, even though
Joe wasn’t talking to her.

* * *

Emma’s father suggested that she and Kyle not
talk too much about Miss Dellfene and the Futurity at school.

“You’ll be embarrassed if you make her sound
like a sure-fire winner and then something goes wrong. The Futurity
is the big time for cutting horses. There will be over a quarter of
a million dollars in prize money awarded. You can bet your bonnet
there will be some tough competitors there.”

Emma saw the sense in her father’s words and
tried to put the whole business out of her mind, at least while she
was at school. She sure wasn’t planning to discuss anything about
horses in a public setting again. She studied hard. Nothing could
interfere with her father’s promise to take her out of school so
she could watch Miss Dellfene compete.

Kyle’s riding lessons continued, but they
were becoming less like formal lessons and more like riding with a
friend. Riding in the arena, she coached Kyle in keeping Rosie’s
trot slow and making sure she loped in the correct lead.

“Push your heels down and sit up straight,”
she reminded him over and over.

One Saturday in early fall, Emma’s father
asked them both to saddle the horses and help him move some cattle
to a different pasture. He drove his truck and opened and closed
the gates, while Emma and Kyle waved their arms from the backs of
their horses and hollered to shoo the cattle through. Emma rode
Ditto, who wasn’t getting as much attention as he thought he
deserved while Emma was training Camaro.

“This is not the NCHA Futurity,” her father
grinned. “Move them slowly and stay back a ways from them so they
don’t split up and start to run.”

The only problems were with the younger
calves; so full of themselves in the chilly sunshine that they
curled their tails up over their backs and dashed around the herd
in circles.

“Let them go!” Emma’s dad called. “Their
mamas will call them back before they get too far away!”

When the last calf galloped through the gate,
Kyle smiled across at Emma.

“That was fun! You’re going to make John
Wayne out of me yet, Pilgrim.”

* * *

The approach of Thanksgiving was an
afterthought with the Futurity just a few weeks away. The marathon
of cooking and cleaning went on as usual, but Emma and her mother
went through the beloved routines with preoccupied minds. Emma
baked an extra pecan pie, her specialty, for Kyle and his family,
and took it out as Kyle was getting into his father’s old truck to
go home.

“Wow, thanks, Jennifer!” he exclaimed. “Did
you bake this all by yourself? I never dreamed you had domestic
tendencies.”

“You bet I do,” Emma said, “and if you can’t
be nice, I hope you break a tooth on a piece of pecan shell.”

“You mean you put the shells in there too?”
Kyle fixed her with a look of mock horror.

Thanksgiving Day arrived in a blur of eating,
dishwashing and relatives. Emma’s grandparents came, along with
Uncle David and his two teenaged daughters, Sarah and Sandra, who
sat in the living room in irritated silence while Emma and her mom
prepared food and set the table.

“Can we go down and look at the horses?”
Sarah asked after dinner was over.

“Sure. Emma will show them to you,” her
father said.

Emma walked with them to the horse pens and
bit her tongue when she felt the urge to tell them about Miss
Dellfene and the coming Futurity. She knew that they weren’t really
interested in horses, anyway, and remembered her father’s comments
about the embarrassment of having to admit that they had not won.
Sarah and Sandra were older than Emma. Their knee high fashion
boots looked out of place tromping through the dead grass around
the pens. Emma hoped neither of them stepped in any horse manure.
They talked to each other, not to her, and the subject of their
conversation was a boy named Jimmy, who was “outta sight”. Emma
felt awkward and leaned on the fence rubbing Ditto’s chin and
looking at her scuffed ropers. Sarah, the oldest, glanced toward
the house and then pulled a small metal bottle from the pocket of
her jacket, unscrewed the cap, and sipped from the contents. She
offered it to her sister, who also took a sip. From their demeanor,
Emma suspected that their parents would not approve of what was in
the bottle. They must have known that Emma would not tell on them,
and they were right. One thing she didn’t need right now was to be
in the middle of a big family squabble. Suddenly her pleasure at
getting away from the stuffy house and polite conversation
evaporated.

“I’m going to fill the water tubs while we’re
down here,” Emma said.

She walked off down the row of pens to turn
on the hose, and busied herself with rinsing out the tubs and
refilling them. Before long, she saw her cousins strolling back
toward the house. They had not spoken a word to her during their
visit to the horse pens, and in their company, she had felt
invisible. She vowed that when she reached their age she would
remember that younger kids had feelings, too.

It was early evening when the last carload of
relatives left and the house was quiet again. Emma’s mom looked
around the room at all the empty glasses and wadded up napkins and
sighed.

“Sometimes it’s hard to be thankful for all
this work, isn’t it?”

Then she caught Emma’s arm and pulled her
close, wrapping her arms around her in an affectionate hug.

“One thing I
am
thankful for is that
I’ve got
you
! That Sarah and Sandra are a real treat, aren’t
they?”

“That’s the truth!” Emma replied, returning
the hug.

Chapter
Eleven

Emma’s father wrote a note to her teachers on
the Monday after Thanksgiving. It briefly informed them that Emma
would miss school for a part of the following week because her
family was going out of town. The note requested that she be given
her assignments early or allowed to make them up when she returned,
so her grades would not suffer. She handed the note to each teacher
as she got to class. Her teachers read it and nodded without
questioning her. The rest of the week she did homework assignments
from supper until bedtime. She knew that Miss Dellfene would only
work one time in the first go-round, which would take three days to
complete. She would have some time on her hands then, but she
didn’t want anything to interfere with watching the horses.

Her father surprised her by asking Kyle if he
wanted to go to the Futurity with them. He offered to pay for an
extra room adjoining theirs if they stayed overnight.

“I figure I owe you something for working
nearly a year without pay,” he told Kyle. “If you want to go, I’ll
go home with you to ask your parents’ permission.”

Kyle was so astonished, he couldn’t think of
a single snappy retort.

“That would be
so cool
,” he finally
managed, “but I’m not sure my parents will let me.”

Emma’s father followed Kyle home that evening
in his truck. When he returned, he took one look at Emma’s
questioning face.

“He can go. I promised his parents that we
would keep him with us every minute while we are in Ft. Worth. His
mom said that he talks about Miss Dellfene and the Futurity
constantly and that going along would be the best present he could
imagine. I think he’s earned the right to go. He sure has picked up
a lot of knowledge about horses in the last year. I made him
promise that he would not go off alone for any reason other than
the bathroom.”

The weekend dragged by and the overcast skies
and freezing temperatures did nothing to dampen Emma’s enthusiasm.
She packed a suitcase with jeans and several new shirts her mom had
bought her and emptied the jar that held her savings, stashing the
money in her suitcase. After nearly a year of waiting, it didn’t
seem possible that the Futurity was about to start. On Monday
morning the National Cutting Horse Association officials would draw
numbers to determine the order in which the horses would work, and
the first go-round would begin.

“We won’t be able to watch Miss Dellfene’s
last workout,” her father said on Saturday morning. “John is taking
her to Brownwood to work in an indoor arena. He wants her to get
used to strange places and the way the noise echoes in a covered
arena. He’ll take her on to Ft. Worth tomorrow so she’ll have time
to settle in and rest before the competition. It may be a good
thing that he’s going to be there by Sunday afternoon. There’s snow
in the forecast for Sunday night.”

“Snow?” Emma said. “It never snows in
Texas.”

“Never say never,” her father replied.

The snow hadn’t listened to the weather
forecast. It started Sunday morning.

A snowstorm was a rarity in central Texas and
this one didn’t last long. The dime-sized fluffy flakes that fell
in the late morning turned to tiny ice pellets by lunchtime. They
formed a thin white dust on the sidewalk like powdered sugar
sprinkled on top of a cake. The temperature rose in the early
afternoon and the ice pellets dissolved into freezing rain. Emma’s
mom put on her big, pink sweater and spent quite a bit of time
gazing out the frosted windows. By four o’clock, ice began to form
on tree branches and power lines.

Emma put on her down jacket and turned up the
collar. Her dad was already down at the horse pens filling the
water tubs in case the pipes froze. Emma ducked her head against
the freezing drizzle and hurried down to help out with the hay and
feed for the horses. They were huddled in the sheds that were built
into the corner of each pen. Gusts of icy wind tossed the branches
of the trees, and their coating of ice made a metallic clicking
sound.

“If you can put feed in their tubs, I’ll take
care of the rest,” Emma’s dad called to her across the pens. “I’ll
have to drain this hose first before it freezes. Give them a little
extra grain since it’s so cold.”

Emma was already sorry she hadn’t put on a
hat. The frigid rain was soaking her hair as she rushed back and
forth between the feed shed and the horse pens. The latches on the
gates were frozen and she had to chip the ice off each one with a
rock to get them open. The horses were desperately hungry and
nearly pushed her aside in their rush to get to the feed. By the
time she put the bucket away and latched the feed shed, icy water
was dripping down the collar of her coat and the frosty ground had
penetrated the soles of her boots numbing her toes.

“Go on,” her dad called. “I’ll finish
up.”

Gratefully, she headed for the house. The mud
was beginning to develop a frozen crust that cracked when she
stepped on it.

“For Heaven’s sake, Emma. Why didn’t you wear
a hat? Your ears are bright red and your hair is soaked.” her mom
said when she came in the kitchen door.

A pot of chili simmered on the stove, and
Emma held her frozen hands over the pot to warm them.

“The ground’s starting to freeze,” she said.
“What will happen if the roads get icy and we can’t get to Ft.
Worth tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” her mom answered. “I just
hope John and the horse get there before this gets too bad. I guess
the Futurity will just go on without us if we can’t get there.”

“No,” Emma moaned. “
We
have
to
be there!”

The ten o’clock news was almost entirely
weather related. Weather advisories ran across the bottom of the
screen warning of ice on bridges and overpasses, and advising
people to stay off the roads except in extreme emergencies. There
had already been several traffic accidents, and announcements of
school closings were starting to come in.

“We might as well try to get some sleep,”
Emma’s father said. “Watching all this gloom and doom develop won’t
change anything.”

Emma had just gotten into bed when she heard
the phone ringing. She got up and went out to the living room just
in time to hear her dad saying, “I’m glad to hear you made it.
We’ve been pretty worried. It doesn’t look like we’ll get there
tomorrow; the roads are already icy here.”

He listened for a minute and then said, “Will
you try to call us when you find out the working order? There’s no
point in our driving to Ft. Worth on slick roads if she’s not going
to work on the first day.”

Disappointment flooded through Emma. She had
waited so long for this, and now a freak ice storm was going to
ruin it. It was so unfair! She got back into bed and lay there
listening to the faint clicking of sleet against her bedroom
window. Sometime later she was startled out of a light sleep by the
sound of her parents’ voices. Her room was dark and cold, but a
faint flickering light came through the crack under the bedroom
door. Shrugging into the hooded sweatshirt she had left on the foot
of her bed, she followed the light to the kitchen, where two thick
candles were burning in the middle of the kitchen table. Her
parents sat huddled over steaming cups.