A Kingdom in a Horse (13 page)

“No, Dad,” David said, “I really wouldn’t. Gypsy has always been my horse, in a way, and pretty soon we’ll have all those others. If I had a horse of my own then, it wouldn’t seem fair. I want to love the old ones, and I don’t care if I ever even ride, which sounds crazy even to me.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth, Dad, I think I would have made a lousy bronco rider.”

That Christmas no one received more presents than Gypsy. She was the center of attention even during Christmas dinner, looking splendid in a new winter blanket and a stone-studded halter.

Sarah didn’t know how she caught the cold. The worst of the winter weather was behind them. The snows were thawing and the winds of March were coming from the south. She began to cough, and coughed often, and sometimes it seemed to her that the coughing fit would never end.

Everything she did now took longer. She felt dizzy when she rode Gypsy, and her sore throat made it painful for her to talk to her horse. Cleaning the stable seemed to be a never-ending chore because she would have to stop often to rest. The things she carried became strangely heavy. Sometimes she would have to stop whatever she was doing just to catch the breath that seemed increasingly irregular.

She worried in earnest about the cold not getting better, and for the first time in her life, began to take care of herself, spending the time not with Gypsy but in bed, resting and taking aspirin. She would pretend in front of David that it wasn’t a cold at all but spring hay fever. But it was a cold and it did not go away. It became a part of her, with her body weakened by a pain in the chest from the coughing fits.

She had been planning to enter the horse show, but when Lee came over to see how Gypsy was behaving while being ridden, she knew that she would be too weak to enter it. Still she hoped that Gypsy might go and that David might show her instead.

“I can’t believe it,” Lee said under his breath as he jumped off Gypsy; and then more loudly, looking at Sarah and then at David, he asked, “How could you two, in such a short time, ruin such a perfectly trained animal?”

“Ruin it?” Sarah asked, her eyes wide with fear. David didn’t say anything; he knew what his father meant.

“I mean, spoil it!” Lee sounded disgusted. “Why did you let her get away with everything? I don’t blame you, but David ought to know better. If I hadn’t been shoeing her I would never believe her to be the same mare you bought only a year ago.”

David looked guiltily at the ground, and Gypsy lowered her head also, while Sarah smiled at them.

“I couldn’t do a thing with her,” Lee continued angrily. “She wouldn’t walk for me when I wanted her to walk and she breaks into a lope from a jog. This horse was the best broke critter, and look at her now! You can thank yourself and David and forget all about that horse show unless both of you want to make fools of yourselves.”

“I can shape her up,” David said suddenly.

“You’d need more than a week,” his father said disgustedly, leading Gypsy out of the pasture.

“I can do it in a week,” David said quickly. “I can do it in less than that.”

“Go ahead. Try it,” his father said, “but you’d better work on Mrs. Tierney as much as on Gypsy. As far as I am concerned I have nothing to say about you two, that horse, or the show.”

He strode off toward the truck, leaving David to spend the weekend in Sarah’s house.

“Your father is very mad—more at me, I think, than at you.”

“No, he’s mad at me mostly,” David said. “He wouldn’t have any right to be mad at you. After all, it’s your horse and you had a perfect right to spoil her if you wanted to. But I should have been firmer with her. Well, we’d better get to work. I’ll just walk her and nothing else, but we’ll get her ready for that show yet. I want you to win your first ribbon.”

“Would you ride her?” Sarah asked eagerly. “I mean ride her in the show instead of me?”

“No, I wouldn’t. Legally it’s your horse and you’re going to show her.”

“But you know how badly I ride and I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“I’ll teach you all about it,” he said, jumping on the saddle. “By the time I’m through with both of you, you’ll be sick of me and sick of each other.”

That day Sarah watched David for more than three hours. She was amazed at his great patience. Gypsy had no intention of walking; she wanted to run. Fighting the reins, she tossed her neck up and down, raised her feet high, and pranced sideways. Yet David never lost his temper, never stopped talking to her in a gentle, soothing voice. By the time darkness fell Gypsy had quietly walked several times around the pasture. And Sarah had learned by that evening what it means to train a horse. She felt guilty that she had made Gypsy forget what she must have been taught with equal patience once before.

The next day, and throughout the week that followed, David spent all his time preparing Sarah and Gypsy for the show. They worked hard at it, but feeling the horse handle with new ease and intelligence filled Sarah with pride.

While she watched Gypsy and David working she realized that she was often shivering with cold. When she was near David she would hide her flushed cheeks, but it was harder to cover up the cough which now seemed to come from the very depths of her aching body. David was too busy to notice these things, but Gypsy would fold her ears back at the sound of the racking cough that Sarah could no longer muffle with a handkerchief.

She had trouble sleeping at night while the fever rose, and she could tell midnight by its hot peak. She knew that she should spend more time in bed or see a doctor, but she wanted more than anything else to be able to show Gypsy herself.

The morning of the horse show she was too weak to get out of bed. When she heard Lee and David arrive with the trailer, she threw a coat over her nightgown and used all her will power to reach the stable. Her head was burning, and her legs felt as if they were filled with cotton.

“I overslept,” she told them. “You’d better start without me. I will catch up.”

“You don’t look well at all,” Lee said.

“I think you have a fever,” David said, “you’d better take your temperature.”

“I’m all right,” she said. “It’s just that I slept too long and I’m not used to it.”

When Gypsy was in the trailer, Sarah walked in and put her arms around the horse’s neck. “It will be David, not I, who’ll ride you,” she whispered. “You’ll have a better chance of winning that ribbon. Be good to him, and miss me, just a bit. And remember that you are going into the world well-loved.”

“I don’t think we should go,” David said when she came out of the trailer. “You ought to go to bed and we should stick around.”

“Oh, but you must go, David,” Sarah said, and hugged him. “Gypsy is counting so much on bringing back a ribbon. I’ve promised it to her and we mustn’t break that promise. But if I don’t get there before the first event, you must ride her. Will you do that, David?”

“Sure, but …”

She pushed him gently toward the truck. She had to lean against the stable as she waved good-bye to them. She watched them until they disappeared around the last bend in the road, and then she walked slowly into the stable. Shivering, she stood for a while looking at Gypsy’s empty stall. Then she sat down in the rocking chair, wrapping her coat more tightly around herself.

If only she had had a chance to see a horse show. She had no idea what Gypsy would have to do or how hard she would have to compete with other horses. Of course the judges would have to be fair, but, she thought, how could they ever be quite fair to the other horses, once they saw Gypsy?

She closed her eyes and tried to see Gypsy as the people at the horse show would see her. She would not be the tallest of the horses, and certainly not the smallest. Would it be her eyes that would attract them? Or that warm russet glow of her coat? Would they recognize that special softness about her?

Gypsy was standing far away, at the edge of the forest. The copper of her body against the green pines was like a burning fire, her face a patch of white mist. Sarah felt like running toward her horse, but there seemed to be no need to hurry. The distance between them was diminishing fast as she walked across the sunlit meadow, in the deep grass. Her hand was in her husband’s hand, and they were walking together toward the horse that stood waiting for them at the edge of the forest.

Author of 19 published books, Maia Wojciechowska won the Newberry Award in 1965 for her young adult novel,
Shadow of a Bull
.

Born in Poland on August 7, 1927, she traveled through war torn Europe as a child and later immigrated to the United States with her family. Her first book,
Market Day for ‘Ti André
, was published in 1952, and she didn’t attempt another for over ten years. Instead, she tried her hand at being a wife, a mother, a masseuse, an undercover detective, an Avon saleswoman, a ski bum, and a bullfighter. Her unconventional life, which afforded her opportunities to test her own physical and moral courage, inspired her to write novels inhabited by characters who struggle to make brave and inspired choices for themselves.

Before she died in 2002, she raised another child as a single mother, became a grandmother, was an elected councilwoman, was made an honorary member of the Ramapough Indian tribe, and donated her body to medical science.