Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

'Thanks Don, I remember him well. Gates really said to drop it?'

'Yes. He said it was costing too much and it would do you and the magazine more harm than good.'

'That son of a bitch! How dare he do that without talking to me? Jesus!'

'For Godsake don't tell him I told you.'

'Jesus.'

Annie swung around in her chair and her elbow knocked a cup of coffee off the desk.

'Shit!'

'You alright?'

'Yeah. Listen Don, I've got to think about this. I'll call you back, okay?'

'Okay.'

She hung up and for a long moment stared down at the broken cup and the spreading stain of coffee.

'Shit.'

And she went off to the kitchen to get a cloth.

'I thought it was the snowplow, you see. I heard it a long, long way off. We had all the time in the world. If we'd known what it was, we could have taken the horses right off the road, out into the field or somewhere. I should have said something about it to Judith but I just didn't think. Any case, when we were out with the horses, she was always the boss, you know? Like if there was a decision to be made, she'd be the one who got to make it. And it was like that with Gulliver and Pilgrim too. Gully was the boss, the sensible one.'

She bit her lip and looked away to one side so that the light on the back of the barn caught the side of her face. It was getting dark and a cool breeze was coming in off the creek. The three of them had put Pilgrim away for the night and then Joe, with no more than a look from Tom, had made himself scarce, saying he had homework to do. Tom and Grace had strolled over to the back pen where he kept the yearlings. Once she'd caught the foot of her false leg in a rut and stumbled a little and Tom had nearly reached out to stop her from falling, but she'd righted herself and he was glad he hadn't. Now the two of them were leaning on the fence of the pen watching the horses.

She'd taken him step by snowy step through the morning of the accident. How they'd gone up through the woods and how funny Pilgrim had been, playing with the snow and how they'd lost the trail and had to make that steep descent beside the stream. She talked without looking at him, keeping her eyes on the horses, but he knew all she saw was what she'd seen that day, another horse and a friend both now dead. And Tom watched her talk and felt for her with the whole of his heart.

'Then we found the place we'd been looking for. It was like this steep bank leading up to the railroad bridge. We'd been up there before, so we knew where the path was. Anyway, Judith went first and you know, it was weird, it was like Gully knew something was wrong because he didn't want to go and Gully isn't like that.'

She heard her own words and how she'd got the tense wrong and she looked at him briefly and he gave her a smile.

'So up he went and I asked her if it was okay and she said it was but to be careful, so I started up after her.'

'Did you have to make Pilgrim go?'

'No, not at all. It wasn't like with Gully. He was happy to go.'

She looked down and for a moment stayed silent. One of the yearlings nickered softly at the far end of the pen. Tom put a hand on her shoulder.

'You okay?'

She nodded. "Then Gully started to slip.' She looked at him, earnest suddenly. 'You know, they found out later that the ice was only on that one side of the path? If he'd been like, a few inches to the left, it wouldn't have happened. But he must have just put one foot on it and that was it.'

She looked away again and he could tell from the way her shoulders moved that she was fighting to calm her breathing.

'So he started to slide. He was trying so hard, you could see, jabbing his feet to try and make them hold but the more he did it the worse it got, they just wouldn't hold. They were coming right at us and Judith yelled for us to get out of the way. She was like clinging on to Gully's neck and I tried to get Pilgrim to turn and I know I did it too hard, you know, really yanked on him? If only I'd kept my head and done it more gently, he'd have gone. But I guess I scared him even worse than he was already and he wouldn't… he just wouldn't move!'

She stopped for a moment and swallowed.

'Then they hit us. How I stayed on I don't know.' She gave a little laugh. 'Would've been a whole lot smarter not to. Unless I'd got hooked up like Judith. When she came off it was like, you know, somebody was waving a flag or something, like she was all flimsy and made of nothing. She kind of flipped as she fell, anyway her leg got caught in the stirrup and down we all went, together, sliding on down. It seemed like it took forever. And you know? The weirdest thing, as we went down I remember thinking, with all this blue sky above us and the sun shining and the snow on the trees and everything and I'm thinking, my, what a beautiful day it is.' She turned to look at him. 'Isn't that the weirdest thing you ever heard?'

Tom didn't think it was weird at all. There were such moments, he knew, when the world chose thus to reveal itself not, as it might seem, to mock our plight or our irrelevance but simply to affirm, for us and for all life, the very act of being. He smiled at her and nodded.

'I don't know if Judith saw it right away, the truck I mean. She must have hit her head really hard and Gully had totally freaked and was just, you know, thrashing her all over the place. But as soon as I saw it, coming through that place where the bridge used to be I thought, there's no way this guy's going to stop and I thought if I could just get hold of Gully I can get everybody out the way. I was so stupid. God I was stupid!'

She clamped her head in her hands, screwing her eyes shut, but only for a few moments. 'What I should have done was got off. It would have been a lot easier to get hold of him. I mean, he was freaked alright, but he'd hurt his leg and he wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. I could have given Pilgrim a whack on the butt and sent him off and then led Gully off the road. But I didn't.' She sniffed, regathered herself. 'Pilgrim was incredible. I mean, he was pretty freaked too, but he got it back together right away. It was like he knew what I wanted. I mean, he could have stepped on Judith or anything, God, but he didn't. He knew. And if the guy hadn't blown his horn, we'd have done it, we were so close. My fingers were that far away, that far…'

Grace looked at him and her face was all distorted with the pain of knowing what might have been and at last the tears came. Tom put his arms around her and held her and she placed the side of her face against his chest and sobbed.

'I saw her face looking up at me, down by Gully's feet, just before the horn sounded. She looked so little, so scared. I could have saved her. I could have saved us all.'

He didn't speak, for he knew the futility of words to change such things and that even the passing of years might leave her certainty undimmed. For a long time they stood that way, with the night folding around them and he cupped his hand on the back of her head and smelled the fresh young smell of her hair. And when her crying was done and he felt her body slacken, he asked her gently if she wanted to go on. She nodded and sniffed and took a breath.

'Once the horn sounded, that was it. And Pilgrim, he kind of turned to face the truck. It was crazy, but it was like he wasn't going to allow it. He wasn't going to let this great monster come and hurt us all, he was going to fight. Fight a forty-ton truck for heaven's sake! Isn't that something? But he was going to, I could feel it. And when it was right in front of us he reared up at it. And I fell and hit my head. That's all I remember.'

The rest Tom knew, at least in outline. Annie had given him Harry Logan's number and a couple of days ago he'd called and listened to the man's account of what had happened next. Logan told him how it had ended for Judith and Gulliver and how Pilgrim had run off and how they'd found him down in the creek with that great hole in his chest. Tom had asked him a lot of detailed questions, some of which he could tell Logan found baffling. But the man sounded bighearted and patiently catalogued the horse's injuries and what he'd done to treat them. He told Tom of how they'd taken Pilgrim to Cornell, whose fine reputation Tom knew of, and all they'd done for him there.