In Training

In Training

Her ears were suddenly filled with a deadly silence. Just a minute ago, her father had charged through the adjoining woods on his yellow horse, who snorted and dodged between the pine trees in the thicket. The stubborn bull, one of a trio of Herefords, had made a break for the unfenced tree line along the gravel road, and her dad had followed on his temperamental old mustang, Goldie.

He left his daughter to wait, legs splayed across the bare back of her old white nag. She was not allowed a saddle.

It was as if horse and rider had slipped through the tight brush and disappeared into another dimension.

Bluebell lowered her head and began to graze, along with the other two unconcerned bulls. The girl felt a prickle of panic. She was an inexperienced cowgirl, the closest thing to a cowhand her father could muster, having three daughters. What if another bull would make a run for it?

Could Bluebell dive through those trees if she was kicked hard enough? Or would she refuse stubbornly, as she often did when the sisters tried to persuade her to barrel race, and stop short so the girl would sail off the horse’s shoulder onto the spiny branches of the downed trees on the forest floor?

But the bulls and Bluebell were only too glad to stop, munch, and swat flies with their tails. They had no inclination to bolt and seemed pleased with the distraction that allowed them to rest.

The girl sat and waited for what seemed like a long time. The woods thrummed with the chirps of summer insects, but nothing else.

She began to think about being a barrel racer. She knew she needed a much better horse.

She wanted to be a ballerina because she had a book about ballerinas, but she knew she was much too big and tall already.

She was an artist; that’s what her parents often told her. Maybe she would go to art school.

The girl didn’t know about dreams then. Nobody told her you had to work, how time and favor, talent, and circumstance all had to be juxtaposed correctly for a dream to happen. Not her mother, who was taken out of school after eighth grade. Not her father, who went through the Depression hungry.

So the girl sat on her broad-backed horse and dreamed.

She was a dancer, full of grace. She was a jockey, perched atop a winning thoroughbred, feet in tiny stirrups. She was an acclaimed artist; she was a poet. She was a fashion designer, working from home on her old black sewing machine.

There was no limit or ceiling in her world. Reality, and the truth of that magic juxtaposition, would take many more years.

She sat quietly, patting Bluebell’s neck. As quickly as they had left, her father and Goldie popped back into her dimension, pushing along a wayward bull, and the quiet dreaming was broken.

Her father looked at her, relieved, and hawed and git-alonged the bulls to get them to the corral, or summer pasture, or wherever it was that they didn’t want to go.

Maybe she would be a writer. She had stories and dreams to tell.