Firehorse (9781442403352) (21 page)

It's a fallacy, though one widely held, that a stallion rules the herd. He is there to protect, of course, to chase away the wolf and the grizzly and the catamount with his superior strength and sharp hooves, but it is another individual who truly leads the herd. As a Texas Ranger with many years' experience studying horses in the wild once informed me, there is always one wily mare who blazes the way for the others. The
stallion may trumpet his call to run, but it is this one mare who tells them where to go. She knows the safest path to the watering hole and which pastures offer the best grazing. She considers the abilities of those around her and adjusts her speed or her path to accommodate the young, the aged, or the injured. This Texas Ranger said he'd even watched one of these wise mares on a spring evening guide a sister mare to a protected wash to give birth. All that night she stood guard, he said, nickering advice and not leaving even to feed herself. On another occasion she shouldered a colt aside just before a rattlesnake struck. How did she come by such authority? I asked. Did mares fight for supremacy as I knew stallions did? He shook his head. No, he answered, a lead mare always chooses herself. She just seems to know that others need her.

NINETEEN

A
CLEANSING WIND FILLED MY LUNGS.
R
EADING THOSE
words was like opening a gate to go at a gallop. I drank them in, gulp after gulp, late into the night. Mother came up to my room twice to insist on more laudanum, but I shook my head. The third time she spooned the awful stuff into me by threat—“I'll take that book away, I promise you”—before turning down the lamp and even pushing my manual out of reach. I lay in the darkness, my heart thudding. Mice skittered behind the walls. I was galloping beyond them.

Over the next several days I read every moment that I could—whenever Mother allowed me a good dose of light and a light dose of laudanum. The pain came and went unpredictably: Some mornings I awoke to terrible, feverish spasms that pinned me to my bed, writhing, for hours. Other days I could block out the waves of nausea by staring at the ceiling and reciting as many as twenty-seven different bones on an imaginary horse skeleton that I saw there.

In one rain-filled week I made more progress through that manual than in the entire six months that I'd owned it. But the more I read, the more I realized that words and drawings were weak replacements for velvet skin and liquid eyes. I needed to be with the Girl. Only I, like her, was a prisoner. Bandaged from fingers to elbows, I couldn't button a dress or lace a shoe or turn a doorknob. All I could do, if my door was left ajar, was hobble down to the upstairs hall and gaze through the dripping pane and across the muddy yard to where I longed to be.

I suppose we all felt confined during the rain, because the first morning that broke to sunshine instead of thunder Mother and Grandmother hurried out of the house. I was determined to do the same. As gingerly as I could, I slipped my bandaged arms into a loose-sleeved robe and negotiated the stairs in my bare feet. Pausing to peek out the window—I could see her!—my heart beat faster. I scrambled down the next set of stairs, ignoring the painful throbbing that brought to my arms. I was almost there. Around the newel post and through the kitchen and right up to the back door and its slippery smooth knob, and I was stuck.

Confound it! What was I going to do now? I tried turning it with my hip. I clasped it between my elbows. Each time the knob began a teasing circuit before slipping back into place. I had no choice, not if I wanted to see the Girl. Clenching my jaw, I plunged into the fire by gripping the knob with both bandaged hands, turning it until I heard that blessed
click
, then opening the door. I sprinted across the yard.

The Girl's nicker helped salve the stinging pain. She seemed genuinely happy to see me. When she stretched her neck out, making little whiffling sounds with her nostrils, her peeling muzzle just kissed my cheek. I noticed the wet stains shadowing her eyes. They couldn't be tears, I told myself; horses didn't cry. They were probably just some aftereffects of her injuries. But the fleeting possibility dampened my own eyes.

Dizzy from my sudden escape, I plopped onto the upturned crate and steadied myself by inhaling the longed-for aromas: warm horse, sweet oats, sun-dried straw. I saw that same spider wave from the pimpled rust of the hoe. And that same brown-capped sparrow, or one of his friends, alight in the window frame and chirp happily. I watched him drop onto the floor and hop over to inspect a crumpled paper sack that hadn't been there a week ago. Curious as well, I went over for a closer look. One nudge from my toe spilled a fragrance of peppermint into the air, and I knew with a sharp pang who had dropped it. Even so, I inhaled deeply and let the aroma stir its own memories.

That healing visit had to hold me for a while, because when Mother returned to find me in the carriage shed she scolded me all the way up to my room. The doctor was coming at any minute to change my bandages, she said, and was I ever a sight!

If I hadn't had that restorative time with the Girl, I don't know how I could have gotten through the next hour. The doctor said he'd proceed slowly and that it wouldn't hurt, but his promises proved meaningless. Having the bandages ripped from my
arms was as searingly painful as having the fire consume them in the first place. I couldn't help crying, I simply couldn't, and afterward, when Mother spooned the dreaded laudanum into me, I actually welcomed sleep. That lost me another day with the Girl.

Since the evening of my accident, Grandmother had been making the effort—and it
was
an effort with her bad knees—to climb the attic stairs on a daily basis in order to brush my hair and provide some company. The very next day she happened to carry a greeting from Mr. Stead, along with a newly published pamphlet he'd sent entitled “Vices in Horses: Taming the Stubborn and the Intractable.” I recognized it as a sly prod toward my confrontation with Father, but glaring at my bandaged arms, I knew that would have to wait for now. Still, I was pleased with his gift and immeasurably glad that he hadn't forsaken me.

Since finding me in the carriage shed, Mother had forbidden me to return to it. She said that was rightfully James's work. She warned that it was simply too dangerous. She even threatened—“And I mean it, Rachel”—to have the Girl removed to another stable if I didn't obey.

“No!” I begged. “You can't.”

“All right, then. See that you stay in your room until you're healed.”

I managed two more days. But when Sunday came along and everyone left to attend church, sinner that I was, I scurried right down the stairs and out to the Girl. I figured I had a good three hours or so.

The doctor had left the tips of my fingers free the last time he'd changed my bandages—my palms had taken the brunt of the fire—so the back door posed somewhat less of a problem. I was even able to carry a blank journal clamped to my side. I'd decided I was going to be more methodical about the Girl's treatment. I was going to record all my observations and keep diligent track of the facts of her recovery. Cold facts were Father's currency, I knew. So if I had any hope at all of getting his permission to study with Mr. Stead, I was going to need them.

Settling on the crate again, I gripped a pencil between my thumb and fourth finger and clumsily wrote “The Girl's Progress” on the opening page. That alone filled me with hope. Someday I'd show the journal to Mr. Stead and he'd be impressed too. He'd see me as something more than just a girl feeding doughnuts to a horse and following him around like a stray puppy.

From my horse care manual I'd learned that my first task was to record the Girl's heart rate. And for that I'd borrowed Grandfather's old pocket watch from Grandmother's bedside drawer. Luckily for me, she kept it wound. Cradling the silver disc in my bandaged palm, I stepped in beside the big mare. She nickered. Pressing my ear against her side, right behind her elbow, I found the steady beat of her heart and began counting. Curious, she swung her head around to lightly rest her muzzle on my back. I wondered with a smile if she was taking her own measurement. The manual said that thirty beats per minute, give or take a few, was normal for a horse. For that first entry on July 211 scrawled “thirty-two.”

Next I made a visual examination, nose to tail. A little over three weeks had passed since she'd been burned, yet a gelatinous landscape of red and yellow oozing sores, flecked with black cinders, still covered her neck and back. Behind her withers I could actually peer into a netting of tiny blood vessels and watch them work. While the manual's illustrations had prepared me for such a sight, they had done nothing for the sickly odor. I made some notes and moved on.

A pale, grainy substance clotted some of the wound pockets, along with straw fragments and bits of dirt. Flies waded through the sticky pools. I swished them away, wincing at the pain that caused, but they resettled instantly. James, I knew, had been dredging the sores in flour, and I set down my journal to clumsily scoop a handful from the open bag near the door. As tenderly as I could, I tamped it into her flesh. She tolerated only three handfuls before pinning her ears and shaking her head at me. I stopped at once, recognizing all too well the pain in her black eyes.

The Girl's face wasn't as swollen as it had been. It was still hairless, with a nightmarish mottling of pink and gray that deepened to purple around her muzzle. What little patchy skin remained had curled upon itself like paper ash. I recorded it all.

But registering facts wasn't enough. I had to know more about horse care, and especially burn care, than was in my manual. So on subsequent afternoons, when Mother allowed me down to the parlor, I searched through the newspapers lying around and even tiptoed into Father's study to scan his
leather-bound titles. There I found a medical book from the last century that suggested slathering a burn with frothed eggs and salad oil, while another one recommended mixing chalk and hog's lard. How was I supposed to know which one was right? Her care was too important to rely on a guess.

As July's rain was exchanged for August's sweltering heat, I managed to sneak more visits to the Girl. I recorded dozens more facts in my journal and I tore out newspaper advertisements for such cures as B.J. Kendall's Renovating Powders and Royal Equine Cordials—“Used on Her Majesty's own horses”—and pressed them between its pages for future study.

Hungry for knowledge, I even pumped the doctor for facts. The next time he was changing my bandages, I set my jaw against the pain and asked, “How do you treat a burn when bandages won't hold?”

He was at that moment examining a deep, oozing crack in my left wrist, one that threatened to upend my own stomach. “Your bandages are holding just fine,” he answered absently, poking at the inflamed edge.

“But would you recommend dredging them in flour?”

“Dredging them—? Certainly not!” he exclaimed, pulling back and blinking as if I'd insulted him.

“Rachel,” Mother cautioned.

He turned to her. “Laudanum can sometimes bring on a state of confusion, Mrs. Selby, a light-headedness. Don't worry, it will pass.”

But I wasn't at all light-headed. I was as clear and as
lucid as anyone—and determined. “If, for some reason, my burns could
not
be bandaged, how would you treat them?”

That flustered him a moment. But like any good doctor, he came up with an answer. “Well, I suppose applying bicarbonate of soda might bring some relief. But the point is to keep out air, so bandages are best.”

Bicarbonate of soda. Another fact for my journal and, since we always had some in the kitchen, another possible healing tool for the Girl. Mother gave me a warning glare, but when she left the house that afternoon on an errand, well… I rushed out to the shed and kicked aside the bag of flour. Instead I sprinkled bicarbonate of soda onto the Girl's wounds. I thought she looked more relieved and made just such a note.

A flame was burning inside me that I'd defy anyone to put out. Like that Texas Ranger's wily mare, I'd chosen myself. Mother could faint and God could rumble and Father could puff on his pipe until his lips burned, but no one was going to stop me from learning to heal horses, even if I had to teach myself.

That was akin to shaking my fist at fate, I suppose, because in the following weeks my world wobbled away from order. A terrible storm crashed through the city, spinning carriages off the streets and yanking trees from the ground, and I heard God's rumbling in the thunder. But Grandmother was the one who fainted. She took a spill coming down the stairs one morning and banged her head so badly that she had to be helped back to her bed. Trailing James and Mother up the stairs, I heard her solemnly predict her end and ours. God was close
to “seeking his vengeance,” she mumbled, and wouldn't you know it, a thunderclap sounded at that very instant and I nearly jumped out of my skin. He was coming, she moaned, “with fire and with fury.” My knees twitched an exclamation point to her prophecy.