The Horse Whisperer (12 page)

Something caught her eye and she saw through the glass panel by the door that Anthony, her assistant, was mouthing and pointing at his watch. It was nearly noon and she was supposed to be meeting Robert and Grace at the orthopedic clinic.

“What do you think Annie?” Lucy said.

“Sorry Luce, what was that?”

“Lime-green. With pink cover lines.”

“Sounds great.” The art director muttered something that Annie chose to ignore. She sat forward and laid her hands flat on the desk. “Listen, can we wind this up now? I have to be somewhere.”

There was a car waiting for her and she gave the driver the address and sat in the back, hunched inside her coat, as they wove across to the East Side and headed uptown. The streets and those who walked them looked gray and dreary. It was that season of gloom, when the new year had been in long enough for all to see it was just as bad as the old one. Waiting at the lights, Annie watched two derelicts huddled in a doorway, one sleeping while the other declaimed grandly to the sky. Her hands felt cold and she shoved them deeper into her coat pockets.

They passed Lester’s, the coffee shop on Eighty-fourth where Robert used to take Grace for breakfast sometimes before school. They hadn’t talked about school yet but soon she would have to go back and face the stares of the other girls. It wasn’t going to be easy but the longer they left it, the tougher it would be. If the new leg fit alright, the one they were going to try today at the clinic, Grace would soon be walking. When she’d got the hang of it, she should go back to school.

Annie got there twenty minutes late and Robert and Grace were already in with Wendy Auerbach, the prosthetist. Annie declined the receptionist’s offer to take her coat and was led down a narrow white corridor to the fitting room. She could hear their voices.

The door was open and none of them saw her come in. Grace was sitting in her panties on a bed. She was looking down at her legs but Annie couldn’t see them because the prosthetist was kneeling there, adjusting something. Robert stood to one side, watching.

“How’s that?” said the prosthetist. “Is that better?” Grace nodded. “Alrighty. Now see how it feels standing.”

She stood clear and Annie watched Grace frown in concentration and ease herself slowly off the bed, wincing as the false leg took her weight. Then she looked up and saw Annie.

“Hi,” she said and did her best to smile. Robert and the prosthetist turned.

“Hi,” Annie said. “How’s it going?”

Grace shrugged. How pale she looked, thought Annie. How frail.

“The kid’s a natural,” said Wendy Auerbach. “Sorry, we had to start without you, Mom.”

Annie put up a hand to show she didn’t mind. The woman’s relentless jollity irritated her. “Alrighty” was bad enough. Calling her “Mom” was dicing with death. She was finding it difficult to take her eyes off the leg and was aware that Grace was studying her reaction. The leg was flesh-colored and, apart from the hinge and valve hole at the knee, a reasonable match for her left leg. Annie thought it looked hideous, outrageous. She didn’t know what to say. Robert came to the rescue.

“The new socket fits a treat.”

After the first fitting, they had taken another plaster mold of Grace’s stump and fashioned this new and better socket. Robert’s fascination with the technology had made the whole process easier. He had taken Grace into the workshop and asked so many questions he probably now knew enough to be a prosthetist himself. Annie knew the purpose was to distract not just Grace but also himself from the horror of it all. But it worked and Annie was grateful.

Someone brought in a walking-frame and Robert and Annie watched Wendy Auerbach show Grace how to
use it. This would only be needed for a day or two, she said, until Grace got the feel of the leg. Then she could just use a cane and pretty soon she’d find she didn’t even need that. Grace sat down again and the prosthetist bounced through a list of maintenance and hygiene tips. She talked mainly to Grace, but tried to involve the parents too. Soon, this narrowed down to Robert, for it was he who asked the questions and anyway she seemed to sense Annie’s dislike.

“Alrighty,” she said eventually, clapping her hands. “I think we’re done.”

She escorted them to the door. Grace kept the leg on but walked with crutches. Robert carried the walking-frame and a bag of things Wendy Auerbach had given them to look after the leg. He thanked her and they all waited as she opened the door and offered Grace one last piece of advice.

“Remember. There’s hardly a thing you did before that you can’t do now. So, young lady, you just get up on that darn horse of yours as soon as you can.”

Grace lowered her eyes. Robert put his hand on her shoulder. Annie shepherded them before her out of the door.

“She doesn’t want to,” she said through her teeth as she went past. “And neither does the darn horse. Alrighty?”

   Pilgrim was wasting away. The broken bones and the scars on his body and legs had healed, but the damage done to the nerves in his shoulder had rendered him lame. Only a combination of confinement and physical therapy could help him. But such was the violence with which he exploded at anyone’s approach that the latter was impossible without risk of serious injury. Confinement
alone was thus his lot. In the dark stench of his stall, behind the barn where he had known days far happier, Pilgrim grew thin.

Harry Logan had neither the courage nor the skill of Dorothy Chen in administering shots. And so Mrs. Dyer’s boys devised a sly technique to help him. They cut a small, sliding hatch in the bottom section of the door through which they pushed in Pilgrim’s food and water. When a shot was due they would starve him. With Logan standing ready with his syringe, they would put down pails of feed and water outside then open the hatch. The boys would often get a fit of giggles as they hid to one side and waited for Pilgrim’s hunger and thirst to get the better of his fear. When he reached tentatively out to sniff the pails, the boys would ram down the hatch and trap his head long enough for Logan to get the shot into his neck. Logan hated it. He especially hated the way the boys laughed.

In early February he called Liz Hammond and they arranged to meet at the stables. They took a look at Pilgrim through the stall door and then went to sit in Liz’s car. They sat in silence for a while watching Tim and Eric hosing down the yard, fooling around.

“I’ve had enough Liz,” Logan said. “It’s all yours now.”

“Have you spoken with Annie?”

“I called her ten times. I told her a month ago the horse ought to be put down. She won’t listen. But I tell you, I can’t handle this anymore. Those two fucking kids drive me nuts. I’m a vet, Lizzie. I’m supposed to stop animals’ suffering, not make them suffer. I’ve had it.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment, just sat there, gravely assessing the boys. Eric was trying to light a cigarette but Tim kept aiming the hose at him.

“She was asking me if there were horse psychiatrists,” said Liz. Logan laughed.

“That horse doesn’t need a shrink, he needs a lobotomy.” He thought for a while. “There’s this horse chiropractor guy over in Pittsfield but he doesn’t do cases like this. Can’t think of anybody who does. Can you?”

Liz shook her head.

There was no one. Logan sighed. The whole thing, he concluded, had been one goddamn miserable fuckup from the start. And there was no sign he could see of it getting any better.

I
T WAS IN
A
MERICA THAT HORSES FIRST ROAMED
. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.

Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he’d struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.

Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.

They could see into the creature’s soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.

For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, these men were known as Whisperers.

They were mainly, men it seemed and this puzzled Annie as she read by hooded lamplight in the cavernous reading room of the public library. She had assumed that women would know more about such things than men. She sat for many hours at one of the long, gleaming mahogany tables, privately corralled by the books she had found, and she stayed until the place closed,

She read about an Irishman called Sullivan who lived two hundred years ago and whose taming of furious horses had been witnessed by many. He would lead the animals away into a darkened barn and no one knew for sure what happened when he closed the door. He claimed that all he used were the words of an Indian charm, bought for the price of a meal from a hungry traveler. No one ever knew if this was true, for his secret died with him. All the witnesses knew was that when Sullivan led the horses out again, all fury had vanished. Some said they looked hypnotized by fear.

There was a man from Groveport, Ohio called John Solomon Rarey, who tamed his first horse at the age of
twelve. Word of his gift spread and in 1858 he was summoned to Windsor Castle in England to calm a horse of Queen Victoria’s. The queen and her entourage watched astonished as Rarey put his hands on the animal and laid it down on the ground before them. Then he lay down beside it and rested his head on its hooves. The queen chuckled with delight and gave Rarey a hundred dollars. He was a modest, quiet man, but now he was famous and the press wanted more. The call went out to find the most ferocious horse in all England.

It was duly found.

He was a stallion by the name of Cruiser, once the fastest racehorse in the land. Now though, according to the account Annie read, he was a “fiend incarnate” and wore an eight-pound iron muzzle to stop him killing too many stableboys. His owners only kept him alive because they wanted to breed from him and to make him safe enough to do this, they planned to blind him. Against all advice, Rarey let himself into the stable where no one else dared venture and shut the door. He emerged three hours later leading Cruiser, without his muzzle and gentle as a lamb. The owners were so impressed they gave him the horse. Rarey brought him back to Ohio, where Cruiser died on July 6, 1875, outliving his new master by a full nine years.

Annie came out of the library and down between the massive lions that guarded the steps to the street. Traffic blared by and the wind funneled icily up the canyon of buildings. She still had three or four hours of work to do back at the office, but she didn’t take a cab. She wanted to walk. The cold air might make sense of the stories swirling in her head. Whatever their names, no matter where or when they lived, the horses she had read about all had but one face. Pilgrim’s. It was into
Pilgrim’s ears that the Irishman intoned and they were Pilgrim’s eyes behind the iron muzzle.

Something was happening to Annie which she couldn’t yet define. Something visceral. Over the past month she had watched her daughter walking the floors of the apartment, first with the frame, then with the cane. She had helped Grace, they all had, with the brutal, boring, daily slog of physical therapy, hour upon hour of it, till their limbs ached as much as hers. Physically, there was a steady accumulation of tiny triumphs. But Annie could see that, in almost equal measure, something inside the girl was dying.

Grace tried to mask it from them—her parents, Elsa, her friends, even the army of counselors and therapists who were paid well to see such things—with a kind of dogged cheerfulness. But Annie saw through it, saw the way Grace’s face went when she thought no one was looking and saw silence, like a patient monster, enfold her daughter in its arms.

Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter’s decline, Annie had no idea. There was no logic to it. She respected Grace’s decision not to ride again, indeed Annie didn’t like the idea of her even trying. And when Harry Logan and Liz told her again and again that it would be kinder to destroy Pilgrim and that his prolonged existence was a misery to all concerned, she knew they were talking sense. Why then did she keep saying no? Why, when the magazine’s circulation figures had started to level out, had she just taken two whole afternoons off to read about weirdos who whispered into animals’ ears? Because she was a fool, she told herself.

Everyone was going home when she got back to the office. She settled at her desk and Anthony gave her a
list of messages and reminded her about a breakfast meeting she had been trying to avoid. Then he said good-night and left her on her own. Annie made a couple of calls that he’d said couldn’t wait, then called home.

Robert told her that Grace was doing her exercises. She was fine, he said. It was what he always said. Annie told him she would be late and to go ahead and eat without her.

“You sound tired,” he said. “Heavy day?”