Free Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon Page A

saw such specks, if the fog was off the river and the morning was clear.

 
    T HE FRIZZLY-HEAD GIRL , the young fool’s woman, was barking up his heels again with Pelter. She would walk a horse fast, that girl. She liked to hurry a horse, and him too. Sometime she got so fresh she tipped clean out from under the shedrow, carried Pelter in the dirt road and passed Medicine Ed and the horse he was walking on the right hand side. Not if the young fool was watching she wouldn’t—he’d fuss with her if she tried that. Must be worried he stick out enough round here already, and for good reason. Anyhow he want everything done the old way, according to etiquette. The cleanest hay, timothy and alfalfa. Best quality pine tar foot dressing—Zeno used to mix up his own, out of used motor oil and turpentine. Best grain. Hundred percent Castile shampoo. And the most experienced old-time groom fool enough to take his job.
    Naturally, Pelter go along with the girl just fine—Pelter was a game animal, he was always that, bit of a clown, even before he was born he had jumped round the usual etiquette of the business, for he was a unusual creature on the racetrack even if you been around as long as Medicine Ed, namely, a
field-bred horse
. Or that was the story. Some stud horse, maybe not the one officially certified on the papers, who knew, had sneaked round or over a fence somewhere and went with his mother. Some name like Home Cookin, she wasn’t much of a mare and nobodywasn’t expecting much out of her, and she got this witch-eyed long-backed colt who turn into a legend. Pelter. And which, if he could talk, and Medicine Ed wouldn’t put it past him, why, what couldn’t the two of them say about the type of folks they had fell in with now?
    The girl, the young fool’s woman—she didn’t know nothing and she couldn’t do nothing, but she would work, he’d give her that much. Haul them buckets, sling them bales, just like a man, better’n a man if you look at what they got for men round here anymore. If she didn’t know nothing to do, she’d find something to do and get all in your hair or climb up your heels like now. She’d make it up as she go along. In the hole in her head where experience would have stacked up, if she had any experience, that’s where she must find em, her chucklehead ideas.
    You can’t gallop an old horse every day, am I right? she say.
    Hmmm.
    So he gets walked, correct?
    Medicine Ed just eyeball her.
    Okay, if it keeps Pelter sound to walk, isn’t it reasonable that walking him fast is a little better than walking him slow?
    Don’t you be putting off your eeby jeebies on Pelter there. He ain’t nervous. You nervous. He ain’t in a hurry. You in a hurry.
    I didn’t say he was nervous. I said maybe it’d be good for him to go a little faster.
    Good for you, you mean.
    Good for you too, you old Halloween bones—get your appetite up. And she grinned evilly.
    I had a stick leg since before you was born, young woman. (This wasn’t quite true, but somehow the vintage of an injury seem like it ought to get some respect, like what he used to had for his granddaddy who still limped from the war—whicheverwar that was.) Does I go round calling you Four Eyes?
    You probably call me worse than that behind my back.
    What I call you?
    Ignorant. Green.
    You’s all of that.
    Finally it was nothing else to do but show her, learn her a thing or two, in self-defense. He taught her how to rub down the horse’s leg and put on the cottons and bandage, smooth and not too tight, without poking it through with the pin and putting a hole in the animal. Then she thought she knew something. Then she want to bandage everything in sight. She go around bandaging young and old, lame and sound, on her own say-so, and Medicine Ed come around behind her unbandaging. What can it hurt? she say.
    Young woman, it is a price on everything. Every change make some other change that you can’t see. I know some trainers have