Horse Sense (12 page)

“I don’t believe this!” Stevie said, stunned. How could one of her best friends be so disloyal? “How could you do something like that without us?”

“Well, you were each so busy doing your thing without
me
—” Lisa began.

“Hold it,” Carole said. Both Stevie and Lisa turned to her. Carole was usually the voice of reason. “I have the feeling that we all learned a lesson this afternoon. We’d all totally forgotten that the real purpose of The Saddle Club is to help each other. I mean, that’s the way we started and that’s the way it’s got to be. There’s no way I could have helped Delilah by myself. I
needed
the two of you. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve all been so busy worrying about our own projects that we haven’t been helping each other at all. So, I guess I’m not really surprised that you passed those rules without us, Lisa, and Stevie shouldn’t be either. She’s been so busy with Nickel and the gymkhana that, well, like I said, I think we all learned a lesson.”

“Thanks for understanding, Carole,” Lisa said.

“Wait a second, there,” Stevie interrupted. “I can understand that too, but there’s still a small problem remaining and her name is Estelle Duval.”

“What’s the problem?” Lisa said defensively. “Isn’t she good enough for you?”

“The problem is that the girl has got no horse sense. She doesn’t know the front end from the back or the first thing about riding.”

“But she’s been riding since she was very little!”

“If that’s the case, she hasn’t learned much in all those years,” Stevie said.

“She has her own horse. She told me he’s a white horse named Napoleon.”

“Like I said: She hasn’t learned much,” Stevie repeated.

“What do you mean?” Lisa demanded.

“There’s no such thing as a white horse, Lisa,” Carole explained. Lisa stared at her, confused. “See, all white horses are actually gray. Most of them start out dark-colored and just turn white with age. It’s actually a sign of a real beginner when they call horses white.”

“But she’s not a beginner. For goodness sake, she even told me something that happened when she was about six!”

“What happened?” Stevie asked.

“Well, she was standing up in the saddle, trying to get her balance and tugging at her horse’s mane. The mare got angry and kicked at her.”

“Lisa,” Carole began, “horses don’t have any feeling in their manes. There are no nerves there at all. There’s no way that would make a horse ‘angry.’ Besides that, horses just plain don’t try to kick their riders when they’re on their backs. A lot of times they’ll buck, sometimes they’ll try to nip a rider with their teeth, every once in a while they’ll rear, or just plain run away, but they only kick at something or someone on the ground.”

“You mean it couldn’t happen that way?” Lisa asked.

“That’s what I mean.”

“Well, maybe she forgot. After all, she was pretty little, but she wasn’t so young when she was taking care of Napoleon when he was sick and he threw up on her. That just happened last year!”

Stevie’s heart went out to Lisa. It was hard to believe anybody could have been taken in by these stories, and because Lisa was such a trusting person it seemed especially cruel of Estelle. “She’s told you another tall tale,” Stevie began.

“How do you know?” Lisa asked.

“Because horses don’t throw up. I mean, they can’t. Physically, they don’t work that way. It’s one of the reasons a colicky horse is such a problem. They’d be better off sometimes if they could just get rid of what’s causing the stomachache, but they can’t.”

“Why would Estelle say something that wasn’t true? She doesn’t have any reason to lie to me. After all, she’s the one with the glamorous life, the fancy schools and friends, the country estate.… ”

“Oh, you think so?” Stevie asked.

“I don’t think we’ve been fair to Lisa,” Carole said to Stevie. “Both you and I knew right away that she was a phony—at least when it came to horses—because she couldn’t ride very well. We assumed that Lisa would recognize that, too.”

“Isn’t all the trouble she’s had riding just because of adjusting to American horses?” Lisa asked, defending herself.

“We joke about it, but Max is really right that horses don’t speak English, you know,” Carole said. “There’s no difference among good riders throughout the world.”

“How could I know that?” Lisa asked.

“Of course you couldn’t,” Carole consoled her. “You’re such a good natural rider that we sometimes forget what you
don’t
know. That’s kind of our fault. What you have, though, is really much more important than a lot of facts—you have a real feeling for horses and for riding. Stevie said it a few minutes ago. It’s horse sense. You’ve got it. Estelle doesn’t.”

“Thanks,” Lisa said. “I appreciate your vote of confidence, but the fact remains that as of Friday night, Estelle Duval is a member of The Saddle Club.”

“Not for long,” Stevie said. “Or else I’m not.”

They were just words that Stevie had spoken, but they felt like a bomb to Lisa. As sure as she’d ever known anything, she knew that Stevie meant them. She looked to Carole for consolation, but there wasn’t any there.

“Lisa, I think it’s up to you,” Carole said. Lisa didn’t know what to say then. She only knew how she felt and it was bad. She was going to have to choose between her friends and her mistake. What good was horse sense if you could still get into messes like that?

Carole started to speak. Lisa thought maybe she had a suggestion, but before she really got going, Stevie’s parents and all three of her brothers bounded into the tack room.

“Can I see the baby?” asked her younger brother, Michael. “Please?”

Stevie was actually happy to see them all. She knew that what she’d said about The Saddle Club was upsetting both her friends, so a change of subject right then was a good idea. But just because she didn’t want to talk about her announcement anymore didn’t mean she wasn’t serious about it. She didn’t want any part of Estelle Duval. Ever.

“Come on, guys, let’s introduce my family to Samson.” She linked arms with Carole and Lisa and led everybody on tiptoe to see the newborn.

When the girls had left Samson only a half hour before, he’d been sleeping soundly. Now, just a short time later, he was back up on his feet, walking around on his spindly legs and checking out his surroundings.

Michael climbed up on the slats of the stall’s wall to see better. Samson glanced up at him, his soft brown eyes decidedly curious.

“Wow!” said Michael.

Stevie couldn’t have said it better.

L
ISA KNEW SHE
ought to feel really excited, sharing in the fun of Samson’s birth, but when the sun woke her up the next morning, all she actually felt was dread. Stevie and Carole had made their positions clear. It was Estelle or them.

At first, she thought maybe she could bring her friends around, but when she’d tried to raise the subject once again on the trip home it became clear that Carole and Stevie were totally together. Lisa had made a mistake, a bad one, and she was going to have to correct it.

Correcting mistakes was sometimes impossible and never any fun. Lisa pulled the pillow over her head to shut out the sunlight. Maybe morning would go away.

“Lisa! Breakfast is on the table, dear,” her mother called up. “I made you some oatmeal.…”

And now she had
that
to contend with, too!

By the time she arrived at the stable, she found that she didn’t feel any better at all. She didn’t much want to see Carole and Stevie and she certainly didn’t want to see Estelle. In fact, she didn’t much want to be there at all. Lisa knew that some people would have pretended to be sick, but if she’d done that her mother would have known something was wrong and then she’d have had to answer dozens of questions from
her
.

Lisa was relieved to find that the locker area and the tack room were completely empty. Not surprisingly, everybody was hanging around by the foaling stall, looking at the new baby. Lisa would have joined them, but for three things: Stevie, Carole, and Estelle.

She stowed her lunch in the little refrigerator and lingered in the tack room.

“Aren’t you going to see the foal this morning?” Mrs. Reg asked.

“I guess so, in a minute. The whole wide world is there now, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are,” Mrs. Reg said, laughing. “Say, while you’re waiting, will you give me a hand with something?”

“Sure,” Lisa agreed, wondering quickly if maybe, just maybe, Mrs. Reg’s chore might take all day.

“I seem to have a whole lot of little pieces of tack and other stable hardware that need to be sorted and
stored. Can you do that while I work on the schedule for the three-day event?”

“Oh, I’d be glad to,” Lisa told her. She found herself looking at a jumble of metal rings, loops, hooks, bits, and stirrups. She began sorting them into piles of like items. “This is neat stuff,” Lisa said, gazing at all the hardware in front of her.

“It’s a mishmash of things—harness hooks, rings, double-end snaps, S-hooks, cross-tie chains. All of those are used in the stable, but none of them can be used if we don’t know what we’ve got.”

“How do you know what all these things are and what they do?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, you learn, Lisa. After all, you’ve just started riding. You can’t expect yourself to know everything right away.”

“That’s what
you
think,” Lisa said. Just when she wanted to think about it the least, Mrs. Reg had reminded her how little she actually knew about horses.

“You know, there was a boy here once, a new rider …”

“Who was that?” Lisa asked, making a chain of S-hooks. Mrs. Reg was famous for her riding stories. This could be fun.

“He was a youngster. He came into the stable knowing almost nothing about horses or riding or anything, but he was very eager to learn. It was okay when he first began. He knew he didn’t know anything, so he asked questions all the time and tried to learn as much
as he could. After he’d been riding here a few months, though, he got into some trouble.”

“How’s that?” Lisa asked.

“Well, he started thinking he knew a lot more than he did and he stopped asking questions. One day, he wanted to ride a particular horse, nice little bay gelding we had named Hickory. My husband was watching Hickory, though. He thought he showed signs of lameness. This young rider thought he knew more than my husband and took the horse out anyway—without even asking why he’d been put in a different stall. Within fifteen minutes, the horse was so lame that the rider had to get off him. Took him hours to walk him back to the stable. Vet’s bill was something awful, I’ll tell you. He had a bowed tendon, and even after he’d healed, he was never as good as he had been.”

“But how did that happen? Did the young rider hurt the horse?”

“In a way,” Mrs. Reg said. “It turned out that all that had been wrong in the first place was that he had a stone in his shoe. My husband needed a better light to find it and that’s why he’d moved him to another stall, intending to check the hoof when he had time. Then, when this young rider took poor old Hickory out on the trail, the horse favored his sore foot. He stumbled, and gave his own leg a good kick, tearing his own tendon.”

“You must have been furious,” Lisa said.

“Oh, we were,” Mrs. Reg said. “It’s awful when things go wrong with a horse.”

“I bet you never let that rider back here, did you?”

“We couldn’t do that,” Mrs. Reg said.

“Why not?”

“It was our own son, Max, who did it!”

“Max? My teacher?”

“The very one,” Mrs. Reg said. “Of course, he’s learned a lot since then—and he’s never stopped asking questions, either. Once he got an idea of how much he
didn’t
know, and understood that it was all right not to know, things went much smoother for him.”

“I think you’re trying to tell me something, Mrs. Reg,” Lisa said.

“You almost finished with the sorting?” Mrs. Reg asked.

“Just about.”

“Max used to like to play with this stable hardware when he was a boy. He’d make chains just like the one you made with the S-hooks, and he’d put a dozen rings on a crop and ride around trying to keep them all on.”

“He was a little devil, wasn’t he?” Lisa asked.

Mrs. Reg chuckled. “It’s almost class time now, Lisa. You’ll have to saddle up. Thanks for your help.”

Lisa put the sorted hardware into buckets and then stood up to leave. She looked slyly at Mrs. Reg, who was so busy jotting notes on the paper in front of her that she appeared to be unaware of Lisa at all. Lisa
doubted that. In fact, Lisa strongly suspected that Mrs. Reg never missed anything at all. Not a thing.

A few minutes later, Lisa was in Pepper’s stall, lifting his saddle on. She heard Estelle next to her, working with Patch. Max had let her switch from Nero to another horse. Estelle was having a terrible time with the bridle. She spoke rapidly to the horse in French, but it wasn’t doing any good. Estelle was clearly getting angrier and angrier.

As soon as Lisa finished smoothing a wrinkle in the saddle pad and tightening Pepper’s girth, she went to Estelle’s aid—Patch’s, really. Patch was happily walking backward in circles while Estelle chased him with the bridle in her hands. She’d never get the tack on that way.