I liked Molly’s parenting far better. It gave a kid a chance. But we are products of others. I could not help myself. I told Lucy stories, and never a better time or place than on one of our rides.
When Lucy met her paternal grandparents for the first time she was six years old. She had known me for about a year, but I wasn’t real important, only her mother’s new husband. Her father, whom she had never even seen in a photograph, was the centre of her world.
So when her grandparents began showing her all kinds of pictures of their son riding all kinds of horses, everything from the childhood pony to the summer of his rodeo, it made a powerful impression. They had sold off their horses after Luke’s death, but the next time Molly and I took Lucy out to their place Grandpa Luke had bought a little pony for Lucy to ride whenever she visited. After that, there was no end to it.
Lucy turned horse-crazy. We fought it as long as we could but ended up getting her lessons at a local stable.
When Lucy turned ten, Molly and I bought her a ten-year-old paint gelding named Ahab. She had been riding seriously for over three years by then and showed no sign of losing interest.
We had shopped for a small animal, but all three of us fell in love with Ahab the moment we saw him.
He was enormous, standing over sixteen hands, black mostly but with white lightning streaks on each flank and a few broad splotches of white running up from his belly. He had a white blaze down his long, handsome Roman nose and three high white socks. And Ahab could run. He had an impressive list of first place victories in barrel racing to prove it, so, despite everything, he became Lucy’s first horse. Four years later, we bought Jezebel, a gorgeous bay quarter horse with good lineage and pure fire for a personality. Jezebel came off a racetrack, where she had finished first whenever she had managed to get out of the gate. For a couple of seasons, Lucy struggled with her new mare.
One weekend everything would be fine. The next she might not even take a saddle. I expect a lot of kids would have given up. Hell, I was ready to give up.
But not Lucy. Lucy had what she wanted. Now it was time to learn how to handle it. Molly and I ended up driving her and Jezebel to one riding clinic after another.
When that failed to turn things around completely we drove up to a professional and boarded Jezebel and Lucy for two months. From dawn until dusk Lucy rode every kind of animal that came through that barn.
By the time Lucy returned home, she was a different girl and all the nonsense with Jezebel was history.
The days were long past when I could give advice to my stepdaughter about anything relating to a horse, but horses still remained our hobby, with Ahab having long ago become my horse.
We took the horses through the pasture at a gallop and waded through the creek five minutes later. From there we raced over a couple wooded hills before coming to the back gate at what used to be an orchard.
Our property extended well beyond this gate, another eighty acres in all, but these fields we rented to a farmer who paid us a share of the crop.
At the gate Lucy moved Jezebel around and opened it while she was still in the saddle. This involved moving Jezebel sideways, having her turn from one side of the gate to the other, and then dance sideways again. Ahab was also trained to do this, but the one time I had tried it I embarrassed him so much that afterwards I either let Lucy open the gates or I dismounted and walked through.
Beyond the pasture, we followed the grassy lane that circled a field of corn. We were still a long way from any road, farther still from other houses. We had a small wood giving us some late afternoon shade. There was just enough breeze to keep us cool. It seemed like the perfect time to talk about marijuana, so I gave a whoop in the direction of the blue sky. Jezebel skittered like a race was about to start. Ahab lugged it along like an old hand. Touch his sides, he could still go. Otherwise, he just let folks make noise if that’s what they wanted.
‘It’s good to be sober!’ I shouted.
The hard clay at our feet seemed suddenly very interesting to Lucy. ‘Is it hard? Quitting?’ She met my gaze at the end of her question, curious, nothing more.
I had been sober two years, just before I started writing Jinx. I had quit for no other reason than I really liked to drink and I wanted to prove to myself I still had control of my choices, and because Jinx, a stand-in for my old man, didn’t drink. Once I was off the stuff a week, I felt ten years younger. So I stayed off. I called it my one-step program, and counted myself lucky I didn’t carry demons on my back like most of the heavy drinkers I knew.
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘The payback comes when I can look at you and your mother and I don’t have to feel I’ve let you down. Then it’s not hard at all.’
‘You’ve never let me down, Dave.’
I could think of a few times when I had sent her out to feed the dogs and horses because I was still in town wrapped up in some important barroom talk, but instead of recounting my own failings, I started in on Walt Beery, our family’s poster child for the evils of drink. ‘Three days,’ I said, ‘and to save his life he couldn’t make it four.’ That was it. That was my talk on addictions great and small. Tubs would have mentioned his friend, poor soul, now locked up in an asylum because of that one joint laced with PCP, but I wasn’t the slimiest parent to have walked the earth, so I kept it simple and let Lucy work out the implications on her own. All things considered, I was fairly satisfied with myself, but Molly said later it was lame.
I expect it was, but I doubt anyone could have turned Lucy from the course she had chosen for herself that fall. She was growing up. She was suddenly something more than cute. She was, without quite comprehending it, a force of nature. Words can do nothing against that.
Two days later my sabbatical came to its inevitable and tragic end, and I was sitting in a faculty meeting, the first I had attended in over fifteen months.
There were new faces and new procedures in place, but it felt like the same-old-same-old to me. A couple of days after that I met a new generation of students ready for the agony I was paid to deliver. The trouble was I wasn’t ready.
I had always liked going back to school in the fall, both as a student and as a prof. This time I had trouble adjusting. It had been too long: two summers and one academic year felt like a lifetime. I had developed new routines. I had gotten used to solitude. I liked staying in the country far away from people, especially academics. I had grown accustomed to silence and working the day through without a single crisis. If I wanted to scream profanities the horses never blushed.
The dogs wouldn’t dream of turning me in for a pat on the butt or a careless remark. Suddenly, all that was gone. Students were there with their expectations.
Colleagues needed a shoulder to cry on. People crowded into my life waiting for me to say something glib or intelligent or politically astute, and I discovered to my dismay I didn’t want it anymore.
My teaching, like my office desk, had a patina of dust covering it, as well. It would eventually get cleaned up and straightened out, the teaching and my desk, but not without effort and time. By the end of the first week, things were still not right, and I found I was ready for a drink. As I had no one to sponsor me, the only cure was a long talk with Walt Beery. Living the single life now, Walt’s biorhythms had begun a subtle transformation. At eleven-thirty he was still suffering from the night before and could not seriously think about a drink for another two or three hours. That was fine. We decided to have an early lunch at the Student Union.
I asked Walt on the way over if he was still off the booze. I could smell the answer coming out of his pores, but I thought things would go better between us if we got the confession out of the way early.
Walt gave a weary sigh, admitting his failure in a neat aphorism: ‘I’m not cut out for sobriety, David.’