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Show £" UNHEARD MELODIES 215 the faint sour smell of manure. Beauty, neglected, got as uppity as she got shaggy. And so every spring was a renewal for me, sending me out to curry her and woo her again. More and more she got to be my horse because Henry was getting so long legged that riding her was wearing out his shoes, but there were times when I preferred our other riding horse, a blue gelding we called Sam. He was useful, he thrilled me with his greater speed and power, and, when I was ten and eleven and rode over to see my friend on the next farm, I knew that in his eyes I had much more status on a man-sized horse. But none of those things ultimately satisfied me any more than they do now, and thus Sam was only a horse to me while Beauty was and has remained over all diese years something more. More neurotic for one thing. I remember a summer day when a cousin was visiting me and I took him out to the corral to see her. A town boy and full of my dire warnings, he was frightened of Beauty and assumed a blase air toward her, pretending his real interest was in the calf in the corral with her, a big-eyed pretty little heifer. But when he walked toward it, Beauty came charging after him, ears back and looking mean as hell. My cousin shot up the straw stack like a goat, hardly blase now, and I smiled in a modesdy superior way and swaggered toward her to show him how it was done. She promptly laid her ears back and sent me up the stack to join him. I thought she had gone crazy jealous over that pretty little calf but it turned out to be nothing so base: she had adopted it and was protecting it. A mother complex! I got all excited and told Dad, but he didn't seem properly impressed. Still, the next spring, when a young mare's glands turn her thoughts to love, he located a Shetland stallion on a farm near Cedaredge. It was a long trip in those days, forty miles over those roads in those cars, ours a '30 Dodge sedan. Beauty would practically have fit in the back seat but since we had a two-wheeled trailer, Dad rustled up some old lumber and knocked together side-boards and ends for it and we loaded her in there. Out of Delta on a straight stretch we had really started kicking up the dust, the Dodge swaying from the sway of the trailer, when there was a sudden lurch and I practically broke my neck looking back: no trailer following us, just on back down the road a big cloud of dust. Already Dad was skidding to a stop and shifting and we were careening back toward the dust with that whine of gears reversed and me feeling sick. When the car lurched to a stop I jumped out and the first thing through the dust I saw was that trailer turned crossways and wheels up with lumber scattered all over the road like it had hit a land mine. The next thing I saw was Beauty, standing there looking at us with, I swear, indignation on her face. And not a mark on her except a small skinned spot on her left hock. I took it as a sign, confident that Beauty was charmed to survive forever. We tipped the trailer upright, wired it mostly back together, wired up |
