Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

'Excuse me saying it, ma'am,' he said. 'But you sure as hell don't like taking no for an answer.'

'No,' Annie said simply. 'I suppose I don't.'

Grace lay on her back on the floor of the musty bedroom, doing her exercises and listening to the electronic bells of the Methodist church across the street. They didn't just chime the hour, they played whole tunes. She quite liked the sound, mainly because it was driving her mother crazy. Annie was down in the hall, on the phone to the real estate agent about it.

'Don't they know there are laws about this sort of thing?' she was saying. 'They're polluting the air.'

It was the fifth time she had called him in two days. The poor man had made the mistake of giving her his home number and Annie was ruining his weekend, bombarding him with complaints: the heating wasn't working, the bedrooms were damp, the extra phone line she'd asked for hadn't been installed, the heating still wasn't working. And now the bells.

'It wouldn't be so bad if they played something half decent,' she was saying. 'It's ridiculous, the Methodists have all the good tunes.'

Yesterday when Annie went out to the ranch, Grace had refused to go with her. After Annie left, she went out exploring. There wasn't much to explore. Choteau was basically one long main street with a railroad on one side and a grid of residential streets on the other. There was a dog parlor, a video store, a steak house and a cinema showing a movie Grace had seen over a year ago. The town's only claim to fame was a museum where you could see dinosaur eggs. She went into a couple of stores and the people were friendly but reserved. She was aware of others watching as she walked slowly back down the street with her cane. When she got back to the house she felt so depressed, she burst into tears.

Annie had come back elated and told Grace that Tom Booker had agreed to come and see Pilgrim the following morning. All Grace said was, 'How long have we got to stay in this dump?'

The house was a big, rambling place, faced with peeling pale-blue clapboard and carpeted throughout in a stained, yellow-brown shagpile. The sparse furniture looked as if it had been picked up in a yard sale. Annie was appalled when they first saw the place. Grace was delighted. Its glaring inadequacy was on her side, a perfect vindication.

Secretly, she wasn't as opposed to this mission of her mother's as she made out. It was a relief in fact to get away from school and the tiring business of putting on a brave face all the time. But her feelings for Pilgrim were confused. They frightened her. It was best to block him right out of her head. Her mother however made this impossible. Her every action seemed to force Grace to confront the issue. She'd taken this whole thing on as if Pilgrim was hers and he wasn't hers, he was Grace's. Of course Grace wanted him to get better, it was just that… It struck her then, for the first time, that maybe she didn't want him to get better. Maybe she blamed him for what had happened? No, that was stupid. Maybe she wanted him to be as she was, forever maimed? Why should he recover and not her? It wasn't fair. Stop it, stop it, she told herself. These whirling, crazy thoughts were her mother's fault and Grace wasn't going to let them get a hold in her head.

She redoubled the effort in her exercises, until she felt the sweat trickle down her neck. She lifted her stump high in the air, again and again, making the muscles ache in her right buttock and her thigh. She could look at this leg now and accept at last that it belonged to her. The scar was neat, no longer that angry, itching pink. Her muscles were coming back nicely, so much so that the sleeve of her prosthetic leg was starting to feel a little tight. She heard Annie hang up.

'Grace? Have you finished? He'll be here soon.'

Grace didn't reply, just let the words hang there.

'Grace?'

'Yeah. So what?'

She could feel Annie's reaction, picture the irked look on her face giving way to resignation. She heard her sigh and go back into the drab dining room which, as a first priority of course, Annie had transformed into her office.

All Tom had promised was that he would go and have another look at the horse. After she had come all that way, it was the least he could do. But he'd made it a condition that he would go alone. He didn't want her looking over his shoulder, putting pressure on him. She was pretty good at that, he already knew. She had made him promise to drop by afterward and give her his verdict.

He knew the Petersen place, just outside Choteau, where she had Pilgrim stabled. They were nice enough people, but if the horse was as bad as when Tom last saw him, they wouldn't put up with him for long.

Old man Petersen had the face of an outlaw, three days of grizzled beard and teeth as black as the tobacco he always chewed. He showed them in a mischievous grin when Tom pulled up in the Chevy.

'What's it they say? If you're looking for trouble, you've come to the right place. Damn near killed me getting him unloaded. Been kicking and hollering like a banshee ever since.'

He led Tom down a muddy track, past the rusting hulks of derelict cars, to an old barn, lined either side with stalls. The other horses had been turned out. Tom could hear Pilgrim long before they got there.

'Only fitted that door last summer,' Petersen said. 'He'd have had the old one down by now. Woman says you're gonna sort him out for her.'

'Oh she did?'

'Uh-huh. All I can say is, make sure you go see Bill Larson for a fitting first.' He roared with laughter and slapped Tom on the back. Bill Larson was the local undertaker.

The horse was in even sorrier shape than when Tom last saw him. His front leg was so badly wasted, Tom wondered how he even managed to stand, let alone keep up the kicking.

'Must have been a nice-lookin' horse once,' said Petersen.

'I reckon.' Tom turned away. He'd seen enough.

He drove back into Choteau and looked at the piece of paper on which Annie had written her address. When he pulled up outside the house and walked up to the front door, the church bells were playing a tune he hadn't heard since he was a kid in Sunday school. He rang the doorbell and waited.

The face he saw when the door opened startled him. It wasn't that he'd been expecting the mother, it was the open hostility in the girl's pale, freckled face. He remembered the face from the photograph Annie had sent him, a happy girl and her horse. The contrast was shocking. He smiled.

'You must be Grace.' She didn't smile back, just nodded and stepped aside for him to come in. He took off his hat and waited while she shut the door. He could hear Annie talking in a room off the hallway.

'She's on the phone. You can wait in here.'

She led the way into a bare, L-shaped living room. Tom looked down at her leg and the cane as he followed, making a mental note not to look again. The room was gloomy and smelled of damp. There were a couple of old armchairs, a sagging sofa and a TV playing an old black-and-white movie. Grace sat down and went on watching it.

Tom perched himself on an arm of one of the chairs. The door across the hallway was half open and he could see a fax machine, a computer screen and a tangle of wires. All he could see of Annie was a crossed leg and a boot that bobbed impatiently. She sounded pretty worked up about something.

'What! He said what? I don't believe it. Lucy… Lucy, I don't care. It's got nothing to do with Crawford, I'm the bloody editor and that's the cover we go with.'

Tom saw Grace raise her eyes to the ceiling and wondered if it was for his benefit. In the movie, an actress whose name he could never remember was on her knees, hanging on to James Cagney, begging him not to leave. They always did this and Tom could never understand why they bothered.