Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“I was thinking,” Nicholas said, “that I wish you could show me what Taylor Street is like.”

My mother had seven geldings, and with the exception of Donegal, they were named for men she had turned down. “I don’t date,” she had told me. “Very few men think that the perfect end to an evening of seduction is a ten o’clock check through the stable.” Eddy and Andy were chestnuts, Thoroughbreds. Tony was a mixed-breed pony she had saved from starvation. Burt was a quarter horse that was older than dirt, and Jean-Claude and Elmo were three-year-olds that had come from the racetrack and were in the process of being broken.

While she took Jean-Claude or Elmo down to the ring to work on a lunge line, Josh and I mucked the stalls and spread sweet bedding and scrubbed the water buckets. It was hard work, which knotted my back and my calf muscles, but I found that I could rake through an entire stable sometimes without thinking about Nicholas or Max. In fact, almost anything I did in association with the horses took my mind off the family I had left behind, and I began to see what held my mother’s fascination.

I was filling the black beveled buckets in Aurora’s stall, and as usual she was trying to bite my back every time I turned away. She was the eighth horse my mother owned, the white fairy-tale mare. She had said that she bought her on impulse, because she’d been hoping Prince Charming would come with the deal, but she’d regretted the purchase ever since. Aurora was bitchy and foul-tempered and stubborn to train. “I’ve done Aurora’s water,” I called to Josh, who was mucking farther down in the same barn. I liked him-he was a little weird, but he made me smile. He did not eat meat because “somewhere, cows are sacred.” He had let me know the second day I was here that he was already halfway down the eightfold path to nirvana.

I picked up the wheelbarrow Josh had filled with manure and went to the dump pile that composted under the hot Carolina sun. I lifted my face and felt the grime collecting on the back of my neck although it was only eight-thirty.

“Paige!” Josh yelled, “Get here quick! And bring a halter!”

I threw the wheelbarrow aside and raced back, grabbing the halter hanging beside Andy’s stall. From the far end of the barn I heard Josh’s soothing words. “Come closer,” he whispered to me, “and walk slow.”

When I peeked out the far door, he had Aurora by the mane. “It’s customary to lock the stall when you finish,” he said, grinning.

“I did!” I insisted, and I worked the little clip, just to prove it. But one of the chain-link spokes had broken, and I realized I had probably fastened the clip over that one, and the door had sprung free. “Sorry,” I said, and I took Aurora by the halter. “Maybe you should have just let her go,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Josh said. “I don’t owe Lily any favors this month.”

We took a break and went to watch my mother lunging Jean-Claude. She stood in the center of the ring, letting the horse buck and gallop in circles around her. This time, he had a saddle on his back, simply to get used to the feeling. “Look at his conformation,” she’d said. “He’s a born jumper-nice sloping shoulders, short back.”

“And,” Josh had said, “an ass like a truck.”

My mother had patted him on the cheek with the same tenderness she showed her horses. “Just as long as you don’t say that about me,” she said.

We watched the muscles in my mother’s arms cord and bunch as she tugged on the line that Jean-Claude was valiantly trying to shake free. “How long has she been doing this?” I asked.

“Jean-Claude?” Josh said. “He’s only been here a month. But Jesus, Donegal’s her first horse, and he’s a champion, and he’s only seven.” Josh bent down and pulled a stalk of grass from the ground and settled it between his front teeth. He began to tell me the story of my mother and Fly By Night Farm.

She had been working as a personal secretary to Harlan Cozackis, a Kentucky millionaire who had made his fortune in corrugated cardboard. He was very involved in the racing circuit and bought a couple of horses who placed well in the Derby and the Preakness. When he got pancreatic cancer, his wife left him for his business partner. He had told Lily she ought to go too; who gave a damn if his company was in order, since the co-owner was banging his own wife? But Lily hadn’t left. She stopped keeping the books and started to feed Harlan barley soup in bed; she recorded the times he’d taken his painkillers. He tried chemotherapy for a while, and Lily stayed with him the nights after the treatments, holding damp washcloths to his wrinkled chest and mopping up his vomit.

When he started to die, Lily sat for hours at his side, reading him the odds for local horse races and placing bets over the phone. She told him stories of her days as Calamity Jane in the rodeo, and that was probably what had given him the idea. When he died, he did not leave her any money but instead gave her the colt that had been born just a month before, sired by a stallion with bloodlines to Seattle Slew.

Josh said my mother had laughed long and hard over this one: she had a nearly priceless horse and not a red cent to her name. She drove to Carolina, all the way to Farleyville, until she found a stable she wanted to lease. She brought Donegal out here and for a long time he was the only one in the barn, but she paid her rent just the same. Little by little, by giving lessons to people on their own horses and farms, she saved enough money to buy Eddy, and also Tony, and then Aurora and Andy. She bought a horse named Joseph right from the track, like Aurora, and trained him for a year and then sold him for $45,000-three times her buying price. That was when she started to show Donegal, and his prize money began to pay for his blue-blood care: hundred-fifty-dollar plastic shoes, shots every three months, expensive hay with more clover than timothy. “But we still lost ten thousand dollars last year,” Josh said.

“You lost ten thousand dollars,” I whispered. “You don’t even turn a profit? Why does she keep doing this?”

Josh smiled. In the distance, my mother spoke softly to Jean-Claude and then lifted herself into the saddle bound over his back. She held her reins steady until the horse stopped whinnying and tossing from side to side. She lifted her face to the sky and laughed into the wind. “It’s her karma,” Josh said. “Why else?”

It got easier every day. I would ride for an hour in the morning after we’d turned out the other horses and mucked the stalls. I rode Tony, the gentlest horse my mother owned. Under her careful direction, I improved. My legs stopped feeling like tightly stretched bands. I could second-guess the horse, who had a habit of ducking out to the right of a jump. Even the canter, which at first had seemed so quick and uncontrollable, had settled. Now Tony would take off so neatly I could close my eyes and pretend that I was running on the voice of the wind.

“What do you want to do now?” my mother called from the center of the ring.

I had slowed Tony to a walk. “Let’s jump,” I said. “I want to try a vertical.” I knew now that the fences were called gymnastics; that a straight-across bar was a vertical and an “X” was called a cross-rail. Because Tony was only about fourteen hands, he couldn’t jump very high, but he could easily take a two-foot vertical if he was in the mood.

I loved the feeling of a jump. I loved the easy lead up to it, the squeeze of my thighs and calves pressuring the horse’s hind end, the remarkable power with which he pushed off the ground. As Tony started to come up, I’d lift myself into the half-seat position, suspended in midair until the horse’s back rose up to meet me. “Don’t look down-look across the jump,” my mother had told me over and over, and I would, seeing the rich berry-twisted brush that edged the stream. It never failed to surprise me that within seconds, we actually touched down on everyday earth.