Smiley Mystery Horse

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ISBN: 978-0-571-27937-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

When Abby Lovitt gets to work at her family's ranch, she can hardly believe her luck. True Blue is a beauty, a dapple grey, and he needs a new home - his owner was tragically killed in a car crash, and no one has claimed him. Her father is wary, as always. But Abby is smitten. True Blue is a sweetheart, and whenever Abby calls out, 'Blue, Blue, how are you?' he whinnies back. But sometimes True Blue seems, well . . . spooked. He paces, and always seems to be looking for something. Or someone. Abby starts to wonder about True Blue's owner. What was she like? What did she look like? And what are the strange whispers Abby sometimes hears when she's with him?

Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles and grew up in St Louis, Missouri. In 1992 she won the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres, for which she also won the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her other novels include Moo (1995), Horse Heaven (2000), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Good Faith (2003) and Ten Days in the Hills (2007). Her most recent novel is Private Life (2010). In 2006 Jane Smiley was awarded the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smiley, Jane

Leseproben

Chapter 1

I had gone into the house to change my jeans, and I was only about halfway out of my boots – which were very muddy – when the phone started ringing. And it kept ringing, all the time I was pulling off my boots and hanging up my hat and pushing my hair out of my face. I was really wet – I’d been riding Happy in the arena when the rain fell out of the sky like water out of a bucket, and we were drenched so fast we just started laughing. Dad was in the barn, and Mom jumped off of Jefferson and ran in there with him – she was right by the gate, so she didn’t get as wet as I did. I could barely see my way across the ring, the water was coming down so hard. But Happy didn’t care. All of our horses lived outside anyway. Rain was just a bath to them.

And then it all stopped. There we were, standing in the aisle of the barn, looking out at the clouds blowing off and the sun shining through the misty air. Mom said, ‘Oh, I love California. The weather just comes and goes. And there are no tornadoes. I love that the best.’ Back in Oklahoma, where Mom and Dad had grown up, there were tornadoes every day, or at least that’s how they made it sound when they talked about it.

But I had to change my jeans at least – my jacket had kept my shirt a little dry.

The phone rang and rang, and I knew because of that it would be Jane Slater, and it was. Jane was a trainer at the big stable on the coast; she had helped us sell a horse there in the autumn. She said, ‘Oh, Abby! How are you? I do so miss talking to you. What’s it been?’

I said, ‘We saw you at New Year’s. How—’

But she was excited about something, so she interrupted me. She said, ‘Then I didn’t tell you that Melinda is back, did I?’

‘No, when . . .’

‘She hasn’t grown an inch, and Ellen Leinsdorf thinks she’s her worst enemy! Their lessons are back to back, and they’re both riding Gallant Man, because, you know, there’s been a big brouhaha about Melinda’s parents’ divorce, and they have to half-lease him to the Leinsdorfs to afford the board, which is fine, but, goodness! What am I talking about?’

Ellen and Melinda were two students she taught; I’d helped her with them from time to time. Melinda was older – about ten – but Ellen was tougher. I laughed to think about them and said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, Abby, I miss you. I feel surrounded by little little girls!’

I said, ‘I miss you, too.’

‘Well, why don’t you come over here and look at this horse, and I can see you.’

‘What horse?’

‘Such a sad story. But he’s a nice horse. His name is True Blue. Very pretty dappled grey, black mane and tail, black points. Is your dad around?’

Just then, Dad came in. I handed him the phone and ran upstairs. That was the first I heard of Blue. While I was looking for a clean pair of jeans, the rain came again, and by the time it was over, the arena was too soaked to ride any more that day, because even if there was no more rain for the rest of the weekend, it would take twenty-four hours (‘Only a day!’ Dad always said) for the arena to drain. This meant that our work in the winter could be a little intermittent, but at least there were no blizzards. Back in Oklahoma, whenever there weren’t tornadoes, there were blizzards, and Dad and Mom had to walk through them for hours on end to get home from school, without mittens or buttons on their coats (at least, that was what my brother, Danny, always said when they started talking about how lucky we were to be living in California). ‘And uphill both ways!’ When he said that, I always laughed. Of course, I went to Oklahoma myself from time to time, and the weather was fine.

So instead of waiting around and maybe going over to the coast ‘at some point’ (it was a half-hour trip each way, and more than that if we were pulling the horse trailer), we decided that we had nothing better to do than go look at True Blue and then shop for groceries. We left Rusty, our dog, sitting inside the gate with that look on her face that she always had – ‘Don’t bother to call. I’ve got everything under control here.’

The rain might have skipped the coastal part of the peninsula, because even though there wasn’t a horse show, the stables were busy with lessons in all the rings, and grooms, riders, and horses were walking here and there. I looked around for my old horse Black George and that girl, Sophia Rosebury, who had bought him, but I didn’t see them in any of the rings. I made myself stop looking. I had had tremendous fun on Black George for a whole year. I thought about him often, but I hadn’t seen him since they’d driven away with him in the Roseburys’ trailer before Thanksgiving. In fact, I was a little afraid to see him, not because I thought there would be anything wrong with him, but because I thought that seeing him would make me miss him more.

Jane ran over to meet us when she saw us parking the truck in the little lot. Dad said, ‘You didn’t get all the rain?’

Mom laughed. ‘We got buckets. It drove us out.’

‘No rain,’ said Jane. ‘Just fog fog fog. Did I say fog?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Our golfers don’t allow that sort of weather disturbance around here.’

We all smiled. It was fun to see Jane.

The horse, True Blue, was in the nicest part of the barn, and he was standing in his stall, looking out over the door toward the rings with his ears pricked. He saw Jane right away and tossed his head. She said, ‘He’s such a sweetheart. Listen to this.’

We must have been about fifty feet from the stall still; she called out, ‘Blue! Blue! How are you?’ and he let out a tremendous whinny. She said, ‘He always answers.’

‘He’s a poet and don’t know it,’ said Mom.

‘Absolutely,’ said Jane.

By this time, we were at his stall, and I let him sniff my hand, which he did, then I started petting him down the neck. He liked it. But he wasn’t spoiled, because he didn’t all at once start looking for treats the way some horses do.

‘How old is he?’ said Dad.

‘We think he’s about seven. No tattoo, even though he looks like a thoroughbred.’

Since our adventure with our yearling, Jack, in the autumn, I had learned more about thoroughbreds, and one thing I’d learned was that they get tattoos when they are about to go in their first race, on the inside of the upper lip, so that you have to lift that up and read the letter and the numbers, which isn’t always easy. But the tattoo lasts the horse’s whole life, so every horse that races can be identified forever after. The letter comes first and tells what year the horse was born.

Dad continued, ‘Doesn’t the owner . . . didn’t the owner . . .’

Jane shook her head.

I could see that there were things Dad and Jane had talked about while I was changing my clothes. I said, ‘Did something happen to the owner?’

Mom and Dad and Jane all glanced at one another the way grown-ups do when they think you are too young for something. Since Mom was now shorter than I was, if only by half an inch, I thought this was silly, but instead of rolling my eyes or scowling, the way Stella and Gloria did, I just kept petting True Blue, and right then, he looked me in the eye. Horses do that, and when they do, it makes you feel like they are seeing something that you didn’t realise was there. Finally, Jane said, ‘Well, yes, Abby. It was very sad. Not long after she got here with Blue, maybe five weeks? She got into a car crash and was killed. No one else was, thank goodness. It was a one-car accident.’

‘Very tricky road for newcomers,’ said Mom. ‘Down the coast.’

‘They say she was swerving to avoid a deer. I don’t know . . .’ They shook their heads, and I could tell that was all I was going to hear about it. ‘Anyway,’ said Jane. ‘Her name was Mary Carson, and she was from Cleveland, Ohio, and she had made no friends here that I can tell, at least none who’ve come forward to claim the horse and pay the board. The Colonel has called all his Cleveland horse friends and no one there knows her, or knows where she was stabling him. My guess is that she could have been recently divorced and changed her name. Anyway, she wasn’t terribly ambitious – she would get him out and take him on the trail every day or so. He seemed okay doing that, and he’s lovely. Here, let me get him out.’

She took the halter off the hook and slipped it over his head. He came out like a prince, his ears pricked, his neck arched, his feet stepping lightly, and his tail lifted, but not excited or nervous, or even full of himself. Like a prince was how he was. Mom and Dad and I stared at him, then Dad stepped forward and ran his hands along True Blue’s spine and over his flanks, then down each of his legs. He was careful about this, feeling for swellings and warm spots. One of the things he always said was, ‘There’s no such thing as a gift horse.’ And then he looked the gift horse in the mouth. Horses’ teeth grow their whole lives, and they keep wearing them down by eating. Dad said that if they had the right pasture, and they ate it all year, they would go from eating lovely sweet moist grass in the spring through tougher grass in the summer, right into gnawing old dead shoots in the autumn, and their teeth would wear down in just the right way all their lives. Hay isn’t as good for that.

At any rate, True Blue had a full mouth, which meant that all of his baby teeth were gone and all of his adult teeth were grown in, so he was at least a five-year-old. He also had canine teeth, which are little sharp teeth that stick down...