Another Kind of Cowboy Read online

  Another Kind of Cowboy

  Susan Juby

  FOR MY MOTHER, who sacrificed to make riding possible when I was a kid, and for my husband, James, who graciously tolerates the obsession I continue to nurture.

  The greatest difficulty in equitation is to keep the horse straight.

  —The Manual of Horsemanship

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Phase I

  1

  Alex Ford

  2

  Cleo O’Shea

  3

  Cleo

  4

  Alex

  5

  Alex

  6

  Alex

  7

  Alex

  8

  Cleo

  9

  Alex

  10

  Cleo

  Phase II

  11

  Alex

  12

  Cleo

  13

  Alex

  14

  Alex

  15

  Cleo

  16

  Cleo

  17

  Alex

  18

  Alex

  19

  Alex

  20

  Alex

  Phase III

  21

  Alex

  22

  Cleo

  23

  Cleo

  24

  Alex

  25

  Cleo

  26

  Alex

  27

  Cleo

  28

  Cleo

  29

  Alex

  30

  Cleo

  31

  Alex

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Susan Juby

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  In the beginning…

  THERE WAS DEL Magnifico le Noir. If you didn’t know better, you might have mistaken him for a darkblue Norco bike, but to six-year-old Alex Ford, Magnifico was a three-year-old Thoroughbred, reminiscent of the Black Stallion. Like the Black Stallion, Magnifico was given to bursts of thrilling speed, which is why Alex kept a red dog leash tied to his handlebars.

  Alex rode Magnifico around his rural neighborhood, whispering “whoa” at stop signs and using an assortment of what he imagined were horsey noises, such as clucks and peculiar trills, to urge the bike through puddles and over small obstacles. Using a Pony Club–approved slip knot, he tied Magnifico outside the school each day and each night brought the bike into the garage for a brisk rubdown, and covered it with an old blanket, fastened with a leatherlike belt he’d taken from one of his mother’s old pantsuits. Alex kept a dog dish filled with water in front of the bike and hung an aluminum fishnet full of dried grass clippings just over Magnifico’s handlebars.

  Once, when Alex’s teenage cousins were visiting, they stole Magnifico and rode him to the store to purchase cheese-flavored snacks. Upon their return, they left the bike on the lawn. When Alex found Magnifico lying in the rain, his deflated front tire spinning helplessly, his red leash muddy and sodden, Alex burst into tears. This was just like the time when the drunken stableman ruined Black Beauty’s knees by galloping him with a rock in his shoe.

  Slowly, Alex pushed Magnifico into the garage where he inflated his tire and then walked him in circles for over an hour. When he was sure Magnifico was going to live, he made him a hot bran mash, wrapped him in extra blankets, and vowed fervently that he’d never let anything like that happen to him again. To their credit, Alex’s cousins felt alarmed and guilty at Alex’s dramatic reaction. They even brought the bike an apple to make up for what they’d done.

  Sometimes Alex felt as if he was set apart from other people. It wasn’t just that he was secretly a naturally gifted horseman with a bike called Del Magnifico le Noir. He suspected he was different in other ways, too, though he couldn’t have said how. Thinking about it made him uncomfortable, so he didn’t. Instead, he tended to Magnifico and immersed himself in horse novels and reference books. He diligently committed to memory The Complete Encyclopedia of Horses and Horse Husbandry: A Compendium. He took the two giant reference volumes out from the library over and over again until the librarian, who had noticed Magnifico wasn’t actually a horse, told him he had to “give them a break because someone else in the neighborhood might want to know something about looking after their bikes.” Alex just blinked owlishly.

  Fortunately, soon after the librarian cut him off from the reference books, Alex discovered horses on television. He was awed by the dashing horse-and-rider teams who careened around the courses and flew over looming jumps. In no time he’d learned the names of all the top show jumpers on ESPN. Alex wasn’t simply watching the horses onscreen—he was the horses onscreen. His head jerked up and down as the horses cleared jumps and obstacles, and when one of them hit a pole or stumbled, he would develop a sympathy limp that could last as long as an hour.

  Then one day Alex found a new horse sport on TV. The announcer called it “corsage.” Alex was instantly mesmerized by the riders who wore top hats and tails and rode their massive horses in intricate patterns around a low-sided white ring. The horses didn’t jump; instead they walked, pranced, and cantered, forward and sideways, in circles and across the diagonals. At times they trotted in place, and at other times they flung out their legs so far they seemed almost to fly. All the while their riders sat perfectly still and elegant.

  This corsage riding was astonishing to Alex—it was like dancing with your horse!

  At the first commercial break Alex nearly levitated off the couch. With his back straight, his hands held elegantly in front of him, he pranced across the room. He cantered a few steps forward, then sideways. Imaginary music swirled in his head. When the commercials ended, he rushed back to the couch to continue watching.

  Alex was in love with the horses. He was in love with the riders. But most of all, he was profoundly in love with corsage. He watched the rest of the competition in a state of barely suppressed exultation. The names of the movements called out by the announcer—piaffe, passage, pirouette—were all so…so…French! Even the word corsage appealed to him. When the program ended, Alex was on his feet again, passaging boldly around the living room. He rolled his shoulders, lifting his knees as high as they’d go, until his father came to the doorway and broke the spell by calling out, “Jesus, Darlene, how much sugar has he had today?”

  Alex ignored his father and swept past him to the garage, where he put on Magnifico’s best seat cover and rode up and down the driveway as elegantly as he could. Alex knew exactly what he’d do when he finally got his own horse. He was going to wear a top hat and tails and ride in a low-sided white ring, a massive crowd cheering in the stands and beautiful music all around him. He was going to become a corsage rider and he was going to dance with horses.

  His aunt Grace happened to be visiting that day and after she watched him ride Magnifico in a perfectly symmetrical figure eight she asked him what he was doing.

  “Corsage,” said Alex, stopping Magnifico by pulling on the handlebar leash and putting down his feet.

  “Corsage?” said Grace.

  “You know, that kind of riding people do in the white rings with the letters.”

  Grace kept her face very still. “I think you might mean dressage,” she said. “Corsage is a kind of flower arrangement.”

  “Oh,” said Alex. He stared down at Magnifico for a moment, then looked up at his aunt. “Really?”

  “Absolutely. Let’s see more dressage. I think you’re doing some excellent work out here.”

  �
�Okay,” said Alex, his face lighting up like someone had flipped a switch.

  Unfortunately, Alex’s parents didn’t share his aunt’s enthusiasm for his new passion. His parents had no sympathy for his horse-riding ambitions. In fact, his mother actively thwarted them. Whenever the subject was raised, she would wail that a horse would be the end of them—the absolute end.

  “Dirty, filthy things,” she’d say, her lipsticked mouth curling over shiny, bleached teeth. “We have nowhere to keep one. Do I look like a farm wife to you, Brian?” she demanded of her husband. “Well? Do I?”

  Alex’s father would shrug his big shoulders and sigh and send an apologetic glance in his son’s direction.

  Alex wasn’t even allowed to go to horse camp. Every summer the twins, Maggie and May, went to martial arts camp. Instead of horse camp, Alex was sent to a dingy, overgrown Pentecostal Bible camp. The Ford family wasn’t religious, but Bible camp was cheap and it was close. The low cost was achieved by feeding the campers a diet of pure reconstituted starch. Every summer Alex, a slight boy, nearly doubled in size. He came home looking nearly as pale as the other campers, as well as puffy and convinced he was going to burn in hell.

  The summer he turned eleven, Alex was surprised when his father was the one who came to get him from camp.

  Brian Ford was mostly noticeable around the house for his absence and his silence. His wife treated him like an annoying, barely functional household appliance. As a result, Brian Ford spent as much time each day as possible at Turnaround RV, the used RV sales center he owned, and his nights at the Wheat Sheaf Pub. He left his wife to reign over the house, a task she accomplished through elaborate personal grooming and questionable redecorating schemes. She mostly encouraged her three children to stay out of the way.

  On the drive home from camp, Alex appreciated his father’s attempts to make conversation but was uncertain how to respond. When his father asked, “Hey, Bud, how they hanging?” Alex offered him a wary glance and a tortured smile.

  His father’s questions about the vehicles Alex had seen around Bible camp fell similarly flat, at least until Alex remembered that Reverend Bill had a new vehicle, purchased, presumably, with money saved on vegetables and fruit.

  “Reverend Bill’s got a new car,” he said.

  “Yeah? What’d he get?”

  Alex thought for a long moment. “A blue one?”

  “Blue?”

  Alex added desperately, “Yeah. I think it might have been one of those V-8s.” He was under the mistaken impression that V-8 was one of the Big Three automakers.

  “Well,” said Mr. Ford, and he didn’t ask another question for the rest of the ride home.

  By the time the big black truck pulled into the driveway Mr. Ford had perked up again.

  “I think you’ll be real glad to be home,” he said.

  Alex agreed. While inadequate in many ways, his home and family were a definite improvement over Bible camp.

  When they got out of the truck, Alex’s father reached into the bed of the pickup for Alex’s duffel bag.

  “Notice anything new around here, Bud?”

  The house remained boxlike and vinyl-sided. The lawn was a chemically induced bright green. There was no garden.

  “Uh, no?” Alex was beginning to suspect a trick.

  “Sure?”

  Alex jerked his head around again. Suddenly he noticed white tape fencing peeking out from behind the house.

  “You put up a fence,” he said.

  “Why don’t you go have a look.”

  Alex walked along the side of the house to the back. White fencing, suspended on thin metal posts, now enclosed the entire back of the property. As Alex cleared the edge of the back deck and walked past the trampoline, his heart contracted as though gripped by a giant hand. Standing among the stumps in the clear-cut pasture was a white horse with several large red patches and a long, shaggy mane.

  Alex stood with his mouth hanging open, his gaze fixed hungrily upon the animal. The horse continued snatching at grass as though it hadn’t eaten in a month.

  “That’s right, Bud. Got you a horse. His name’s Colonel Turnipseed but that sounds kind of girly, so I think it’s best if you just call him Turnip.”

  For a terrible moment Alex thought he was going to throw up. He’d hit excitement, passed through joy, and wound up nauseous. As he struggled to control himself he gradually became aware that his sisters and mother stood on the deck behind him. Maggie and May wore matching grins. The look on his mother’s face was less enthusiastic.

  “See, Brian? He doesn’t even know what to do with the thing. I’m going to end up having to walk it and feed it,” said Mrs. Ford.

  “He knows,” replied Mr. Ford. “Go ahead, Bud. The guy I got him from said he’s real quiet.”

  “Dad won him from an old cowboy in a poker tournament,” said Maggie.

  “An ackaholic cowboy,” added May, touchingly.

  Mrs. Ford rolled her eyes.

  Alex turned back to the horse and it lifted its head and looked right at him. Everything else faded away. Finally, Alex found his voice.

  “Is there any tack?”

  Mr. Ford looked confused.

  “A halter and bridle and things?” explained Alex.

  “Oh, yeah. The guy put all his stuff in the shed when he dropped him off yesterday. Nobody’s touched him since.”

  Alex strode over to the green plastic garden shed and after rooting around for a moment in a tangle of equipment, extracted a threadbare nylon halter and a frayed rope, both of which were nearly white with age. He found the opening in the flimsy tape fence and slowly walked to the horse’s shoulder.

  Everyone fell silent.

  Up close Alex could see that although the horse’s belly was round, his ribs and hips were visible and his coat was covered in welts and bite marks.

  “Hey, boy,” said Alex.

  The red-and-white horse turned its head and then sniffed at the hand Alex held out. Only fumbling a bit, Alex slipped the halter over the horse’s head and carefully arranged the rope so it wasn’t wrapped around his hand. The horse stood quietly at his side. Finally Alex looked back toward the house, a huge smile illuminating his normally solemn face. His father and sisters beamed back at him. His mother was nowhere to be seen.

  PHASE I

  Riding the horse with a natural carriage on straight lines in the ordinary paces in free forward movement with the rein in contact and on a long rein. This is known as riding straight forward. This kind of riding may be practiced for itself alone.

  —Alois Podhajsky, The Complete Training of Horse and Rider in the Principles of Classical Horsemanship

  SEPTEMBER 7

  1

  Alex Ford

  MR. FORD LOVED having a cowboy for a son. Sometimes Alex thought his riding was the only thing his dad had left to live for. Alex realized almost as soon as he got Turnip that he would not be taking dressage lessons. The horse came with a Western saddle and bridle as well as some erratic notions about steering. Apparently the alcoholic cowboy who’d trained him had done a lot of drinking and riding.

  After the first few spills, one of which left Alex unable to remember his own name for most of an afternoon, his father hired a local girl to give Alex Western riding lessons. Meredith, a young woman who trained quarter horses and paints, was almost supernaturally even-tempered and unflappable. She wore a uniform of braids and jeans and boots and looked seventeen, even though she was almost thirty.

  Meredith taught Alex to ride and helped him retrain Turnip. “Getting his steering working,” she called it. Turnip was not a handsome horse, but he was a remarkably willing and honest one. Meredith liked to say he had more try in him than any horse she’d ever known. In that way he was a good match for his owner, who’d changed from an imaginative child into a serious, hardworking, perpetually stressed young man who was only able to relax when he rode.

  Other than their shared love of hard work, Alex and his horse were a
n odd match. Turnip was short, big eared, and roman nosed. He paddled when he trotted and his tail was as sparse as his mane was abundant. Alex, on the other hand, was tallish and well-proportioned. Most people who noticed him also noted that he was graceful, though perhaps not everyone knew to call it that. He was thrilled when people asked if he was from out of town and he treasured the memory of the time a visitor to Meredith’s barn asked, “Who’s the rich kid?” because of the careful way he carried himself.

  The unlikeliness of their pairing must have appealed to Meredith’s sense of humor, because soon after she started teaching Alex, she began bringing him and Turnip to horse shows. That was five years ago. At first Alex and his horse received pitying glances, as though there was something a bit pathetic about the slightly shabby old paint groomed within an inch of his life and his poised young rider. When Alex overheard one woman joke that Turnip’s blanket probably had cost more than the horse, Alex bit back a tart retort about her atrocious haircut. The smart green blanket had cost more than the poker hand that won his horse.

  Meredith had Alex enter performance-based competitions only, like trail and Western riding and horsemanship, because she knew Turnip couldn’t try his way out of ugliness and odd conformation. Under her tutelage, the odd couple, as Alex and his horse came to be known, became the pair to beat on Vancouver Island.

  After nearly five years of winning, Alex suspected that if he asked Turnip to fly, the horse would probably give it his best shot. Alex loved competing and took great pride in his horse’s accomplishments, but he still thought longingly about dressage. He was held back by the worry that asking Turnip to do dressage would be a bit like asking the old horse to fly. He also felt it would have been disloyal to leave Meredith to begin dressage training. Meredith was a first-rate horsewoman and the closest thing Alex had to a real friend.