Free Edie by Jean Stein Page B

and a real feeling for her horse. The animals loved her very much. When we would go riding, the dogs would come tumbling after. Lord, there were the dogs. My parents had two Airedales named Gog and Mig. There was Queechy, an English bull terrier who was very fierce . . . a fiend . . . my father’s dog. When Edie was little, they had a St. Bernard named Pougachev for the leader of the people’s rebellion in the time of Catherine the Great. They had Great Danes—a dog named Woof who was half Great Dane and half greyhound.

    The Sedgwick family outside the tack room, Corral de Quati, 1946
(left to right):
Kate, Francis, Bobby, Alice, Jonathan, Edie, Minty, Pamela, Suky, and Saucie
     
    HARRY SEDGWICK  I remember that dog Woof. It was so fast and powerful, it would go for whatever was in its way—pigs, deer. Once, we were riding off in the West Mesa and suddenly this horrible scream came from a clump of bushes. My uncle fuzzy jumped off his horse and went in there and pulled out the dog attached to a deer! The dog had the deer by the hindquarters, and the animal was really screaming . . . it was almost human. Fuzzy kept clubbing the dog with his quirt, or whatever they call a horsewhip out in the West, until he finally let go, and we all bounced back into the ranch. Well, this old cowboy who worked on the place heard about it, and he said he was going to get the authorities after Fuzzy and his dog. I happened to mention that to Fuzzy, foolishly, and I’ll tell you, he just hit the ceiling. He thought of it as a threat to himself! The dog, the horse, the house, the mistress–;they were all
his
. Expressions of himself. They couldn’t be tampered with. With the kids . . . well, the dogs and the horses made out a lot better. Somehow the kids were a threat to him.
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  My parents owned the land from horizon to horizon in every direction. Imagine a situation like that where nobody entered who wasn’t invited or hired! In this landscape my mother and father rooted out any influence that they could not dominate. You weren’t even told where you were going to ride that day. “Wait and see,” they’d say. “Can we go to Santa Barbara tomorrow?” “Wait and see.” As far as I know, the three little girls never went off the ranch except to go to Santa Barbara to the doctor.
    Edie had so little to work with. How small the furniture of her life was! She grew up with a total lack of boundaries, a total lack of a sense of scale about herself. She was stuck in there. When I was small and growing up, I had a very distinct feeling of background and tradition—what lay back of my parents’ way of life—which was a very strong sense of being connected to my grandmother and to Uncle Ellery and my grandfather Babbo and all those older people with linen suits and silk dresses and Bostonian voices. The impression when you’re little is powerful, and it made it possible for me to reach beyond my parents to a feeling of being connected. That possibility had vanished by the time Edie came along. For her there was no sense of anything except the ranch: the world had shrunk to that.
    WENDY WILDER  The Sedgwicks lived in their own world. We went over sometimes, but they were hard to know. They even had their own schoolhouse. I don’t think Edie had a good friend—horses maybe.
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  The schoolroom was very small—just a shack in the corner of the ranch where one of the cowboys had lived until my parents decided to make it into a school. My parents had kept track of a couple named Bryant they knew from New York—he had been a music student at Juilliard and she had earned money by modeling, for my father among other people. My father sent them a telegram—they were living in Oregon—proposing that they come down and run the school. In those days you could send a telegram up to ten words for a fixed amount. The Bryants sent back a telegram which read, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES!  They