Borrowed Horses

Read Borrowed Horses Online

Authors: Sian Griffiths

Borrowed

Horses

Borrowed

Horses

a novel by Siân Griffiths

American Fiction Series

©2013 by Siân Griffiths

First Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012950072

ISBN: 978-0-89823-284-4

eISBN: 978-0-89823-289-9

American Fiction Series

Cover design by Renae Hansen

Author photo by Karyn Johnston

Interior design by Richard D. Natale

The publication of
Borrowed Horses
is made possible by the generous support of the McKnight Foundation and other contributors to New Rivers Press.

For academic permission or copyright clearance please contact Frederick T. Courtright at 570-839-7477 or
[email protected]
.

New Rivers Press is a nonprofit literary press associated with Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Alan Davis, Co-Director and Senior Editor

Suzzanne Kelley, Co-Director and Managing Editor

Wayne Gudmundson, Consultant

Allen Sheets, Art Director

Thom Tammaro, Poetry Editor

Kevin Carollo, MVP Poetry Coordinator

Publishing Interns:

Katie Baker, Hayley Burdett, Katelin Hansen, Richard D. Natale, Emilee Ruhland,

Daniel A. Shudlick

Borrowed Horses
Book Team:

David Binkard, Jenna Galstad, Megan Bartholomay

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Nathanael, Gwendolyn, and Oliver

CONTENTS

I

IN THE CORNER

Broken Down
A Little Death
The Heard

II

LOOKING FOR A FENCE

Shift
An Eddie and an Eddy
A Story to Regret
The Man with No Name
A Silence
The First Showdowns

III

DETERMINING THE LINE

Timothy Like the Grass
Riding the Zephyr
The Next Storm
Bodies in Motion
The Calm
Forge
Phantom Actualized

IV

LIGHTENING THE FOREHAND

More Rivers
Leaving the Comfort of Fire
Wreck

V

FINDING THE DISTANCE

Dream Girl
Showdown
Deep Creek
Truth, Will, Out

VI

THE JUMP

Dark and Bitter
Beggars’ Horses
The Thickness of Blood, the Thickness of Water
Rivals for Possession of the Dead
Acknowledgements
About the Author

I

In the Corner

Deep in the belly of a whale I found her
Down with the deep blue jail around her
Running her hands through the ribs of the dark
Florence and Calamity and Joan of Arc
—Josh Ritter, “To the Dogs or Whoever”
The gaucho acquired an exaggerated notion
of mastery over
His own destiny from the simple act of riding horseback
Way far across the plain
.
—as found by Anne Carson,
The Autobiography of Red

Broken Down

I
t was Eddie, my first real riding coach, who taught me about corners. The corner is where everything happens. “By the time you reach the fence,” he would say, “it’s too late.” I had to learn that the fence itself isn’t the obstacle. The obstacle is your mind.

A stone fence should be no more difficult to jump than a piece of twine strung at the same height. Yet stone looks taller and it’s all too easy to imagine its edges stripping your skin if you fail. These thoughts suck the jumper down, amplifying gravity. The trick of jumping a fence—any fence—is to convince yourself that the fence is an illusion. The jump is just another stride, taken with the same rhythm and tempo as the strides before it and the strides after. If the rider believes it, if she keeps her eyes focused on the horizon and her mind on the cadence of strides, the horse too will forget that the obstacle is solid and looming and will allow himself to clear it cleanly in one magnificent thrust of haunches and—
tempo, tempo
—move on.

Corners make this possible. In the arena’s corner, the rider must both urge and check her horse. A slight pressure from the rider’s legs, a fluid pressure in the hands, a confident, open chest and shoulders ask the horse to condense and collect his power. He will bring his hind feet further underneath him, coiling his body like a tightly wrought spring. Everything comes together—not only the body collects, but also the mind and spirit. Everything pulls in like water, like the tide preparing a wave. His forehand lightens and gravity loses its pull. Here, in the corner, the laws of earthbound physicality are temporarily stowed and the jumping of an enormous and all too solid fence becomes possible.

Eddie always put it more simply: “Bend the bow and let the arrow fly.” He repeated this phrase, like all the stock phrases that composed his lessons, so that now, years later, I still hear his low and baritone voice in my mind.
Bend the bow, bend the bow. Let the arrow fly
.

Two miles north of Moscow on Highway 95, the engine made a guttering sound and the needle climbed from black to orange. Smoke curled from under the Chevy’s wide hood, softly filling with moonlight. I pulled onto the slush at the side of the road, a single woman in the middle of the night on a road I’d never found all that lonely until now.

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