The Georges and the Jewels (22 page)

I believed him.

Our ride wasn’t that big of a deal. We walked, trotted, cantered, halted, backed, made some large, medium-sized, and small circles in both directions, trotted from the halt, halted from the trot, stood quietly for a while while I rested my hand on his haunches. He sighed. No big deal.

That was why it was a big deal.

I walked him out. When I got back to the barn, Daddy was finishing up the evening work. He had filled all the water buckets and put out all the hay, hung up all the tack, and put away the bridles. Without saying anything, he helped me untack Ornery George and brush him off, then put him away. The very fact that he wasn’t saying anything let me know that while he appreciated my efforts, there were things
to talk about—things that required a family meeting and praying to the Lord for guidance, things that were much too serious to talk about as we were making our way from the barn to the house. The horses had sort of lulled me, hadn’t they? But now my stomach started to hurt.

I
T DIDN’T OFTEN HAPPEN IN OUR HOUSE THAT
M
OM AND
D
ADDY
had a quiet conversation over supper. Usually Daddy was excited about something and Mom went along with it, whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes, supper was lively and funny, with lots of jokes and a song or two. Other times, supper was loud and not funny at all, because Daddy was righteously angry or resolute in his determination or dedicated to rectifying evil. All the Lovitts were big talkers. But our supper that night was much more like a supper at Gloria’s house, where Gloria’s mom kept up a steady, soothing patter and Gloria’s dad ate first the vegetable, then the meat, then the starch, never letting any one of those touch any of the others. Gloria’s house was very neat—even the fringes of the rugs looked like
they were combed out straight. We had spaghetti. Thinking again about Gloria, I didn’t eat much.

I noticed that our house was very neat, too. That’s what Daddy and Mom had been doing while I was out with the horses—turning over a new leaf. In our house, a new leaf always started with the vacuum cleaner and ended up with me going to bed at nine on the dot.

After supper, Daddy went to his desk in the living room, opened his Bible at random, and read a verse. The verse was, “And a certain man found him, and, behold, he was wandering in the field: and the man asked him, saying, What seekest thou?” I saw Mom purse her lips a little and sigh. There was a long pause, and I knew they were trying to figure out what to make of this verse. I said, “I guess they were seeking Joan’s necklace for about four or five days.” I tried to sound helpful.

Daddy said, “Tell me about this necklace.”

I said, “It’s an add-a-pearl. Every year on her birthday, her grandmother gives her a pearl, and they string it on with the rest of them.”

“So there are twelve pearls?”

“Thirteen. I guess there was one to grow on.”

“How valuable would a necklace like that be?”

I shrugged.

Mom said, “At least a hundred dollars. Maybe more depending on the chain and the pearls.”

I said, “I didn’t take the necklace.”

“We don’t think you did, honey,” said Mom.

I looked at Daddy. He said, “But when the evidence is against you, it’s hard to prove a negative. It looks to me like if
they suspended you, they feel they’ve got a pretty good circumstantial case. How could the necklace have gotten into your locker?”

“I don’t know, unless somebody knows the combination to my lock. But I haven’t told it even to Gloria. They would have to be watching me open it.”

“That could be anyone,” said Daddy.

We listened to the clock tick for a while, then Daddy said, “I see we are at the mercy of the Lord. May his mercy be upon us.”

Mom said, “Amen.”

Daddy said, “Now, Abby, you have kept from us this mission-building project, and I wonder if I have been remiss in explaining to you certain facts about the Roman Catholic Church.”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“The thing is, the Roman Catholic Church is a great and powerful enemy.
Our
great and powerful enemy. It has done many things over the centuries to our people and to its own people that are not easy to speak about.”

“It was a school assignment. Danny had to do it, too.”

“Reminding me that your brother may have been sneaking around behind my back does not make me happier that you have been doing the same thing.”

I bit my lips and tried to think of something. I looked at Mom, but it was clear she wasn’t going to help me. I knew I was right on the edge between asking a question and sassing back. Daddy didn’t seem mad so far, but he could get there in no time. I kept my mouth shut, and he did what he always did, which was to expand on his previous statement. This could be dangerous, too. He said, “Who helped you with this project?”

“Kyle Gonzalez. We made it out of clay, but we didn’t fire it. We just let it dry and then painted it.”

“Did this boy who has a Mexican name and therefore is probably Roman Catholic witness to you while you were working together?”

“He told me who the missions were named for. Saints. Things like that.”

“Which was your mission?”

“San Juan Bautista.”

“John the Baptist.”

“Yeah.”

“At least he’s in the Bible,” said Mom. “He himself wasn’t Roman Catholic like Francis of Assisi or Agnes. You could have ended up with someone else, a real Roman Catholic. Abby, you—”

I said, “Danny did San Miguel. That’s the archangel Michael.”

They looked at me a moment, letting this remark pass, then Daddy continued, “You need to ask us how to walk this narrow path.”

They had been talking for sure. They were a united front. I said, “What should I ask you?” hoping this didn’t sound sassy.

Daddy said, “I think I have to go to the school. I think I have to go personally to the school and look over the curriculum and discuss what Abby will be allowed to study and what she won’t be allowed to study.”

Mom nodded.

My heart sank. I loved my family. Both Daddy and Mom made the other parents I knew look stiff and sad. Everything
they did, they did all out. There was never a moment when Daddy didn’t mean what he said and say what he meant—most of the time he said what he meant until you couldn’t stand to hear it anymore. Mom was prettier and more fun than any other mother—she was prettier and more fun than I was, in fact. But the idea of Daddy and Mom and Mr. Canning and my other teachers never seeing eye to eye was terrifying, because Daddy would keep after them and after them. He didn’t know how to stop because he didn’t think it was right to stop. He would certainly bring his Bible to school and lay it on Mr. Canning’s desk and quote from it every chance he got. I wondered if it might be better, after all, just to get expelled. I could do that if I confessed to stealing the necklace.

Daddy said, “Why don’t you bring your books down, Abby, and let me have a look at them. I’ve been remiss, I see.” He sighed.

I got up and went to my room. After putting the books on his desk, I went out to check the horses. Everyone was fine. Blue Jewel was lying down near the fence, sleeping. I looked at her in the moonlight for a while and thought of her licking me, then I went back in the house. Daddy and Mom were still up. Mom said, “It’s almost nine, Abby.”

I put my hand on the banister and my foot on the step, and then I just said it. I said, “I want to name the horses. I want to name Blue Jewel ‘Sapphire’ and Ornery George something nice, like ‘Rally.’ Black George can stay Black George because it’s sort of like a pirate and makes me laugh. I’ll think of the others by morning.”

I went up the stairs. They didn’t say anything, and so I had no idea whether this qualified as sassiness or not. But it did seem as though I had nothing to lose.

The next day was only Tuesday. Imagine that! And then I remembered that we were coming up on spring break, anyway, so I was going to be out of school for a long time. Long enough, I thought, for the school to forget about me completely. Tuesday wasn’t bad. Over breakfast, I wrote out the names I had come up with—Jack, Rally, Sapphire, Black George, “Sprinkles” for Roan Jewel, “Sunshine” for Star Jewel, “Webster” for Socks George (I had been stuck for a name, and then my school dictionary was the first thing I laid eyes on when I got up in the morning). I read the names aloud to Mom, and she didn’t say that now I was going to get attached to them, she said, “Maybe when we name them, we’re really seeing something in them that will help us train them the best way we can.”

Maybe. I did like the names. I could see each one in my mind’s eye very clearly now. I said, “I think I’m going to get a notebook and write each name on one of the pages, and then I can keep track of things I need to remember about them.”

Mom treated me not like she was mad at me, but like she had been mad at me, which was a different thing completely, because Mom always hated getting mad at anyone and felt remorse afterward, so she would make it up in little ways, like giving me a cut-up banana with my Cheerios or opening the apricot jam even though we weren’t finished with the strawberry jam. After breakfast, since Daddy was gone into town, she helped me get the horses ready and she let me do Jack first,
even though our usual motto was work before pleasure. She stood and watched us, and when he paid attention to me the whole time, keeping his eyes on me and his ears in “learning position”—that is, sort of flopped to either side—she said, “He’s learning. You’re doing a good job with him.” After fifteen minutes of training and some rubbing with the chamois, I put him out with Black George, Rally, and Webster. I watched them for a bit and then went around to each one and patted him and said his name, then gave each of them a piece of carrot. I did the same for the mares, Sapphire, Sprinkles, and Sunshine.

No mention that Daddy had returned from town. In the afternoon, I started with Ornery George—Rally. I went through everything that Jem told me to do—stepping over, stepping back, being sure he was soft through the shoulder, making sure he would turn his head to either side and soften. When he didn’t seem quite ready, I got him to run around the pen on his own a bit. Then I walked him to the arena, where I mounted from the fence. I looked at his eye before I got on. He was looking at me, and his eye said, “Who, me?”

Daddy drove in while we were working and came over to the fence. I rode Rally for half an hour, and we did everything Daddy asked us to do, no problem. It was time-consuming, all the steps to getting Rally to do his work without a fuss, but he did it. And I had all the time in the world, didn’t I? Afterword, Daddy said, “Abby, you did a very good job on that horse. I’m impressed.”

I said, “Rally likes some playtime before his work time.”

“Some do,” said Daddy.

“But,” I said, “you’d better ride him yourself, because if
you’re going to tell Mr. Tacker that a grown man can ride him, you’d better be sure.”

Daddy frowned as if I were sassing him but then smiled in spite of himself, and I have to say that I laughed as I went into the barn to put away the bridle.

We had a baked chicken for supper, and then I read some of
Julius Caesar
, a play we were reading for English. It wasn’t bad. I even stopped looking at the page numbers. Just before I went to bed, Mom came into my room and gave me my new notebook. It was smaller than a school notebook and nicer, too, with heavy green covers. She also gave me a Paper Mate pen—green and silver. She kissed me on the forehead. After she went out, I set them on my desk, and then I put myself to sleep thinking about what I would write in the notebook about each of the horses. The notebook had eighty-eight pages. That was eighty-eight horses. It was fun to think of what I would be writing on the last page.

On Thursday, the only horse we worked in the morning was Rally. I hadn’t seen Daddy ride much for several weeks, just because either I was at school or he was making me ride the horses. Now that I had spent so much time with Jem and thinking about Jem, I saw that Daddy was more like Uncle Luke than I had realized, and almost as soon as he began working with Rally, they began arguing. I kept my mouth shut while he was tacking Rally up, even though I thought his brush strokes were too quick and his movements around the horse too brusque. It wasn’t that he was doing anything mean, but compared to Jem, he seemed not to think that the horse had any feelings. At first, Rally was his new self, the self I had come
to know in the last week or so, paying attention and acting interested. But by the time Daddy was leading Rally to the arena, I saw that Rally’s eye was ornery again, and I realized that he was insulted. And maybe that had been the problem all along.

When we got to the arena, Daddy tightened the girth with a jerk, and Rally’s ears went back. I said, “I wouldn’t get on him just yet if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“I would check to see if he’s loosened up any or if his back is tight.”

“I don’t have time. …”

“Well, look at his face. He looks a little mad.”

“He always looks a little mad.”