A Kingdom in a Horse (12 page)

“Thanks,” he said, and then impulsively he leaned across the seat and kissed her on the cheek.

The feeling of happiness made David hungry, and he went into the kitchen for a sandwich and a glass of milk. His father was seated at the kitchen table holding David’s letter in his hands. He looked up at David, and for a moment his eyes were cloudy. They looked at each other, not saying anything, and both felt the unbearably wonderful mixture of happiness and peace. And then his father got up and went to the icebox.

“What will you have? “ he asked David.

“Gee, Dad, I think I’d like a sandwich made of everything that’s in there.”

“What if—” David asked his father as they approached the woman’s house, “what if Doc Smith says it’s founder? ”

“If it is,” his father replied slowly, “I don’t think Mrs. Tierney will be able to bear to see Gypsy suffer. The first time she hears Gypsy groan, and sees her sweat and refuse to get up—”

“She hasn’t foundered!” David shouted then, not wanting his father to go on.

They were waiting, Gypsy wearing her blanket and the woman a warm coat in which she seemed to shiver.

“Can I ride in the trailer? “ she wanted to know.

“It’s too small,” Lee said.

Into the built-in feeder Sarah put some hay and grains and a few handfuls of lettuce leaves. They had no trouble getting Gypsy into the trailer, but her legs seemed very weak and her walk stiff-kneed. They didn’t talk much on the way to Burlington, but just before turning into Dr. Smith’s driveway Sarah said, “I’ve read about laminitis in the
Horseman’s Encyclopedia
. It didn’t say that it’s incurable, but it did say about the pain. Do they recover? ”

“Sometimes,” Lee said.

“I think,” Sarah said quietly, “that it might be better if she didn’t have to suffer.”

Dr. Smith, a giant of a man, watched as Gypsy backed out of the trailer and walked toward the stable.

“She walks so much better! “ Sarah whispered in awe. And indeed Gypsy’s walk, although not perfect, was remarkably improved.

“That often happens,” Dr. Smith said, his eyes on the horse as it was being led around by Lee. “When they brace themselves in the trailer they’re using muscles that they didn’t even know they had.”

“Then it’s not founder! “ Sarah exclaimed.

“Why does every horse owner,” Dr. Smith asked no one in particular, “always think the animal’s foundered? To me this looks as if she’s pulled a tendon on her right foot and has been favoring the other. Did you bring the bridle with you?”

“No,” David said, “but if you want me to trot her on the pavement, I could do it without one.”

“You know a lot about horses, don’t you?” Dr. Smith said, smiling as David hoisted himself on Gypsy’s back. “That’s the very best way to check on a pulled tendon, by trotting the animal on hard pavement.”

Gypsy didn’t have to trot far for the doctor to confirm his diagnosis.

“You’ll be all right!” Sarah was saying loudly, hugging Gypsy, burying her face in the horse’s neck.

“It could have happened anytime, couldn’t it?” David was asking the doctor.

“Sure. She could even have pulled it getting up in the stall or walking in the pasture. It can happen sometimes when they shift weight while they’re standing still. Of course,” he looked at David and smiled, “if you’ve been riding her over very rough terrain, it could be your fault.”

“But she’ll be all right, won’t she?” Sarah was asking.

“She’ll be all right,” the doctor answered, “only if you take good care of her. I’ll give her a shot of cortisone. Lee will pull off her shoes, and she’ll need plenty of rest, some walking on a lead line and daily soaking of her right foot in Epsom salts. Later on she might need special heeled shoes, but maybe she’ll recover so completely that that won’t be necessary. She shouldn’t be ridden, of course, and by Christmas she should be as good as new.” He pried open Gypsy’s mouth. “She’s sixteen, and by spring she could be in good enough shape to be in foal again.”

The cure began that very same day. Lee devised a plastic stocking which kept the hot compresses warm. David managed to find a battery-powered massager which helped the circulation of the blood in Gypsy’s legs. Now each day after school David would bicycle over to Sarah’s house. Together they would attend to Gypsy. They would baby her as if the very fact that she had not foundered was something that they had to reward with constant care and abounding love. Their common attention to the horse drew them close together, and neither one could any longer imagine life without the other.

“Just a short while ago,” David told Sarah one day, “I didn’t care about the future or anything much. But now I know what it is that I want to do with my life. I’ll study to be a vet. But that’s not the important part. Do you want to guess what the most important thing in my life is going to be?”

“It has something to do with horses, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but you’d never guess!” His eyes were bright on her. “I want to have a sort of nursing home for old horses. You know, a place where the very old ones, the ones that can no longer be ridden, or work, or anything, can come to rest. I want to give them a good time before they die. I will go to auctions and find those that should no longer be used, and I’ll buy them and bring them to this place I’ll have, a farmlike place, with great big pastures, lots of shade and water. They will have the best of care, because I’ll be a vet then, and lots of company and good food, and no one will be riding them or working them. They will just lead lazy lives and be so spoiled that if they were ever abused they will no longer remember. And I’ll even advertise, in all sorts of newspapers and magazines, that I’ll take old horses and keep them for nothing so that even people who are good to their animals but don’t know what to do with them when they grow old can send me theirs. And it won’t be a sad place. It will be big and the horses will feel free, and they will graze over acres of green grass and there will be no one asking them to do anything.”

Even before he stopped talking she knew he need not wait to grow up. She could make his dream a reality.

“Oh, David!” she shouted, hugging him. “This farm, wouldn’t it make a perfect place? The barn is there. It used to house forty cows once. If we make box stalls, we could have twenty horses there, at least, and there are streams running through the fields and plenty of trees for shade. All we’d need do would be to fence the whole thing in. Isn’t it perfect? ”

They were laughing and making their plans when Lee drove in to pick up David. When they told him what they were planning to do he was immediately carried away by the idea.

“It wouldn’t take hardly any work at all,” he said. “We could hire a few of the boys from your school to help us with the fencing—”

“There’re the twins, and Peter Pollock,” David interrupted. “I know they’d help us—”

“And the barn,” Lee went on, “it’s in great shape except it would need a wooden floor and partitions, but I know of a place where I can pick up the lumber, used planks, for next to nothing, and there is also an old house that they wanted to burn down, and I can get the flooring off that.”

“We’ll start in the spring,” Sarah said and laughed. “By the summer, by the beginning of summer we will have our first horse, and Gypsy will have company.”

“She won’t ever be jealous,” David assured her, “because her stable will always be her very own, and the others will realize she’s a queen here.”

That evening when David and his father had gone back to their own house, Sarah sat down to write her will. She left her property and all her money, her husband’s insurance and her own, as well as her small income, to Lee in trust for David, to be used for what she called “a horse kingdom.” And that night she dreamt again, and remembered the dream when she woke up. She had dreamt of horses, old, misused horses, acres of them, feeding on grass, sunbathing, nuzzling each other, moving slowly, some running, others standing still, as if lost in dreams; and among them stood Gypsy with a foal by her side.

Before the first snows fell, Gypsy was over her pulled tendon. For her, life had not changed. She was now cared for as much by David as by Sarah; her daily massages continued; she was ridden by both, the boy and the woman, and both of them spoiled her and let her run whenever she wanted to, but not quite as much as before.

But for the people who loved her, nothing seemed quite the same. Lee was planning to sell his house and use the money from it for all the necessary things which would turn Sarah Tierney’s farm into a shelter for old horses. She had invited him and David to come and live with her as soon as their house was sold.

“It doesn’t make any sense for me to live alone in this big house,” she told them. “And besides you’ll be here all the time getting things ready, and once the horses arrive, we’ll have much to do, so we’ll hire a woman to do the housework and cooking, and the three of us will spend all our time with the horses.”

When the weather turned cold, Sarah asked Lee to come and install a potbellied stove in the stable.

“But horses don’t feel the cold as bad as people,” he told her. “Besides, they grow winter coats.”

“A Vermont winter is too awful even for a horse,” she insisted, and the stove was put in. She banked it at night and the fire never went out. It was an additional chore, carrying the coal and keeping the fire going, but she did it with love, as she did everything that concerned her horse. Besides, she now had David, who did a hundred helpful little things without ever being asked.

In the early afternoons before David would come, she would sit in her rocking chair next to the stove, and she would take her afternoon naps. And now each time she fell asleep she would dream, each dream celebrating something new in her horse. She dreamt of Gypsy as a movie horse, pursuing the bad men under the hot California sun; she dreamt of her as the winner of important horse shows; she dreamt of her always as a fearless and noble animal, a legendary horse, a creature so splendid that her life and exploits extended from biblical times through the most important events in man’s history to the present day. And each time she dreamt, she would remember the dream clearly and tell it to Gypsy and to David.

The first snow, when it fell hesitantly, did not please Gypsy. She walked around, forlornly hunting for her grass; and finding it gone, she began to dig for it with her nose, helping herself with a hoof. Giving her her daily exercise or watching David ride her, Sarah would worry about the horse’s hoofs, which would pack snow until they formed white balls. She would dismount often and pick the hoofs clean, and David would do the same. But when the next snow fell, four inches of light powder followed by a sun-filled day, she rode Gypsy as if through a sea, the white spray coming high from the horse’s running legs. And coming back, she found David waiting for them in the stable to help her rub Gypsy dry. He was always there, each afternoon now, and sometimes he would bring the twins or Peter with him. She would help them with their homework, delighted to discover that eighth-grade arithmetic was not beyond her.

When the weather deteriorated and the cold gripped everything in an unmerciful freeze, Sarah could not bear to have Gypsy stay in a stable that could no longer be made warm even with a red-hot stove. During the coldest nights she would bring Gypsy into the kitchen of the house. With David’s help she folded the large table and made a sort of stall, with newspapers on the floor and a thick covering of straw for Gypsy’s bed.

“You know,” she explained to her horse, “this is as much for me as it is for you. Your house was getting much too cold for my old bones. And besides, it was too cold for our guest, for David. I hated to see his nose get so red.”

She was somewhat ashamed of having moved Gypsy into the house, but when Father Connen and Margaret Evans came to see her on separate visits, they, together with Lee, agreed that there was nothing terribly strange in a horse living in the kitchen.

“If it were any other horse,” Margaret said, “it would look crazy, but Gypsy seems to belong here just as much as you, Sarah.”

One day before Christmas Lee asked David if he’d like a horse as a present.