White Horse Running

My grandpa turns eighty-six this year. His mustache curls yellow at the edges, like pages of a book spilled on and then sun-dried; his shoulders stoop and he leads with a small potbelly that nestles just above his old brown belt. Only his eyes remain the flinty not-quite-blue they’ve always been. I know these things from a picture that he sent me this past Christmas, a picture that his friend Charlie the sheriff took. He’s standing by a tree with skinny limbs and lots of spaces, a stray bulb here and there. I guess he figured I might forget the way he looks. More likely the tree would grow new branches. I haven’t seen him in almost a year.  

He’s standing on the porch as we drive up, moving at a snail’s pace toward an empty chair. He’s always stood straight as a pine and been real skinny, despite all the failed desserts my mother plunked before him. Now his shoulders sag like in the picture and, even from a distance, I can make out the small potbelly where he’s always been flat as a board. 

I’m twelve years old and coming home from England with my mother. It seems unnatural, old people everywhere.  

“Of course, there are old people, it’s an institution,” my mother says as we drive up. “Where else would he be, a man of eighty-five, for heaven’s sake?” 

At home, I think, but I don’t answer. She’s never liked the farm. She’s never flat out said this in so many words, but I figured it out before I was potty-trained. She left the farm with me in tow the year my father died, headed for St. Paul, a hundred miles away. I was five years old and didn’t let up screaming for two days straight, if you believe her story. To shut me up, she promised I could go back every summer. She kept her word until the summer when the white horse died.  

I look like my dad (black hair, blue eyes, and freckles), at least that’s what folks say, but I hardly knew him. I never got the chance. He was a soldier in Afghanistan. He joined the National Guard to find some peace, my grandpa said, then a few years later his unit was called up. They sent him home in a silver casket. “Soldiers die,” my mother told me, “that’s what they do.” My grandpa gave her a look that would have turned a normal person cross-eyed. Young as I was, I can still hear the hoarse way that he cried. My mother didn’t seem to notice, didn’t blink an eye.  

“He should have died at home,” my grandpa said, sometimes to my mother, sometimes to me as I tagged after him. “He should have died on friendly soil, some place familiar, that’s the least a man can ask.” He blew his nose over and over in the big red handkerchief he always carried, big enough to wrap a dolly in. It all went pretty much past me at the time, despite his terrible grief. Death was a stranger to me. I didn’t look Death in the face until the white horse died.  

King was a mighty animal, a magnificent white horse. He came to my grandpa’s farm to retire last summer, the worst year of my life. To help out a friend, Grandpa took him in. King had been a military horse, my grandpa said, a soldier like my dad, and I believed him. He had a stride like no horse I’d ever seen, and my grandpa always had good horses on the place.  

This horse was different from the others. He reached out with his great hooves as if to grab the air and haul it under him. He had a regal sense of presence — misplaced, it seemed to me, in a small retirement pasture, with nothing but one seedy bay to trundle after him. He was, my grandpa liked to say, an aristocrat. Right from the start, he wanted nothing to do with the two of us — undeniable proof, my grandpa said, of his superior breeding. With a shake of his white head, he refused all my attempts to win him over. There wasn’t a carrot big enough to lure him to my outstretched hand. An apple received a shudder of his nostrils, the pawing of an aristocratic hoof. A gnawed-on carrot, a lump of sugar I left lying on the ground he picked up later. I’d hide behind a bush and watch him slither over, stretch out his long white neck and coax a bit of apple to him with his black-whiskered lips. It wasn’t that I put one over on him, he knew that I was there. He’d shake his head and shudder, ready to wheel and sprint at my slightest indiscretion.  

Right from the start he was different from the others, but the thing that really set him off was the timer in his head — memory, my grandpa called it, of a horse with a superior sense of duty, memory that seemed to strike from out of nowhere. Blowing on the pond, sucking up the water, he’d yank up his head like a horse who smells a cougar, like a horse who hears someone holler “GO!” and in that split second lunge, legs grabbing at the air, eating up great gulps of earth as he spun around the pasture.  

When he heard the call, there was no stopping him. 

It made me want to cry to see it. It was as if he was misplaced somehow, as though the army had gone on without him, left him behind before he was ready to give up, with the fight still in him. I’d watch him, my heart pounding in my chest. I tried my best that summer to befriend him. He’d roll his eyes and wave his head at the grain Grandpa grudgingly provided for a horse no longer working that did not belong to him. Still, Grandpa stood beside me as I rattled the oats in the pan. When Grandpa had enough of waiting, he’d reach for the pan and set it on the ground. At once King would approach, white head snaking along the path. If I moved in his direction, he’d spin around, nothing left where he’d been standing but flying grain and mangled pasture grass. Behind me I’d hear Grandpa chuckle as he headed for the house. Red-faced and disgusted, I’d hang around until in his own good time the white horse sashayed back.  

I became obsessed with the urge to hear his great heart beating, to fling a leg across his back; but more than anything else, I longed to touch him, to slide my hand beneath his muzzle, to feel the ripple of his skin beneath my hand. I lost interest in my small horse Sadie. I cared for her, I rode her daily, but the white horse was filling up my mind. I schemed and planned and fretted. Then one day the bay mare brushed against the fence where I was sitting; as if my plan had hatched without my knowing, I slid as though propelled onto the bay mare’s back. She turned her head and waved in friendly fashion a wisp of grass clutched between her teeth. I laughed aloud at how easy it had been. I wondered that I hadn’t thought of it before. He’d soon be used to me, and when he was, from the bay mare’s back I would reach out and touch him, and before he knew what hit him, I’d feel his whiskered lips moving in my hand.  

This thought had barely taken hold when the white horse sauntered up. He stopped and pawed the earth as if to weigh the situation. Like a tiny bird, hope fluttered in my chest. Then with a wild snort, he threw up his head, rolled his eyes, and took off across the pasture. Without the slightest hesitation and at a furious clip, the bay mare bolted after. We whipped around the bushes at a dizzy pace, careened back and forth among the black-trunked trees. When he performed a sudden pirouette, the bay mare, in a clumsy attempt to follow, spun around and landed on her knees, pitching me into a patch of prickly currant bushes. Then as suddenly as he had started, the white horse stopped clean in his tracks and stood as if stapled to the ground, a magnificent white statue, the small voice in his head at last grown still. With a gentle shudder he turned his face to me.  

I couldn’t look at him. I limped in mortification from the pasture.  

Grandpa checked me over and stuck a band-aid here and there. “That’s one hell of a horse.” He grinned and slapped his leg.  

That night I couldn’t sleep. To pass the time I reviewed all the things Grandpa had taught me: how to milk a cow and clean a gutter, how to ride and how to drive a truck, how to feed a calf who lost its mother, how to set a hook and reel ’em in, how to brew a pot of coffee strong enough to blow your hat off, how to fry potatoes till they crackled in the pan. All these things and many others I had learned from Grandpa, but he had no answer for the mystery of the horse.  

Outside the moon was playing in the trees. I climbed out of bed and headed for the pasture to watch the white horse race beneath the moon, for he never gave up his relentless pace. Day or night, it didn’t matter. When he heard the call, he threw up his head and ran.  

In the dark he was an easy horse to spot, but tonight I couldn’t find him. I circled the pasture; I searched for him among the trees. When I finally caught sight of him, he was stretched out in the moonlight. I stumbled over my own feet. I gasped, I couldn’t breathe. He was a horse always on the ready, a horse with a mysterious signal in his head, and here he was sprawled out on the grass. I felt like I was staring at a ghost. I caught my breath and cautiously crept toward him. His legs were moving where he lay; those great pistons arced in perfect rhythm, going nowhere as they slid across the grass. Without a sound, I moved a few steps closer. He rolled his eyes at me, the whites startling in the moonlight. When I could find my voice, I whispered, “It’ll be okay,” and stumbled backward. The white horse kept on running, rubbing his legs back and forth across the grass.  

Grandpa heard me yelling before I hit the porch. He came out pulling up his pants, sticking his arms through his suspenders, a flashlight in his hand. I followed him, bawling all the way back to the pasture. He slowed his pace when he saw King lying in the moonlight, then without a word he turned and headed back.  

“Aren’t you going to do something? Where’re you going?” I wailed, running at his side, pulling on his sleeve.  

“Of course I’m gonna do something. First light, I’m gonna call the owner,” he said, prying loose my fingers. “You know darn well he’s not my horse.”  

We drank coffee at the kitchen table and waited for the sun to rise. Before Grandpa got the owner on the phone, it was hauling its orange belly over the trees above the barn. After explaining the situation, Grandpa slammed down the receiver. “Stand for stud, indeed,” he snorted. “The man’s an idiot!” Then he turned to me and muttered, “Anyway, he says he’s coming out, wants to see for himself what’s going on.”  

But he didn’t come that day or the next day either. Grandpa tried to give the white horse water; I watched it form a puddle under his whiskered lips.  

I had never seen death up close before, and it took the white horse three days to die. They were the worst days of my life. He wore circles in the pasture with his hooves, dragging his mighty legs slowly back and forth. I never saw him still. It was as if the signal had malfunctioned, as if it was stuck somehow, for he didn’t stop to rest anymore. I wanted to reach out and touch him, to console him, to finally feel the whiteness of his coat, but I couldn’t take such advantage. His eyes rolled wildly each time I approached. We both knew what that meant: He was still the king, and I was still in awe of him.  

“He said he’d be right out,” my grandpa muttered the third morning. “It’s his damn horse. He should be put down, where the hell’s he staying? Damn fool people.” 

These words sent me fleeing from the house.  

When I got back, cried out and exhausted, my grandpa’s rifle stood against the wall.  

“Stay away from him,” he said, “and dry your tears. Nothing lives forever, girl. He died at home, a man can’t ask for more than that.”  

He made no distinction between horse and man, as if they were the same.  

It was just a few weeks later, near the middle of July, when my mother pulled into the yard and announced that we were on our way to England. She explained, while munching on a doughnut, that she had met an Englishman on a river cruise earlier that summer and was of a mind to marry him. I told her I didn’t want to go. I begged, I sulked, I pleaded. She didn’t hear a word I had to say. She just kept talking about the fun the three of us would have, while licking grains of sugar from her fingers. All my grandpa had to say as he wiped away my tears was “Make the most of it.” 

When we arrived in England, I spent a month with the two of them at his fancy estate just outside of London, then they stuck me in a boarding school with a lot of snooty kids. I was miserable and homesick. Days I spent thinking hateful thoughts about my mother; nights when I couldn’t sleep I thought of Grandpa and the horse. I thought of King only at his best. I kept my mind from seeing him lying in the moonlight. Instead I saw him streak across the pasture, powerful white legs reaching out, grabbing at the earth. 

I struggled through the school year and made a few new friends, with one eye on the summer coming up. In March my mother sidled in, a bombshell in her pocket. Fiddling with fingernails, polished red and chewed close to the quick, she announced that we would not be going home that summer. This news she set adrift among a lot of stuff about her new life style, the Englishman, and something about money. No words would dissuade her. It was as if I was talking and no sound was coming out, as if I had stumbled into a silent movie and she was in a talkie. “It’s for your own good,” she kept repeating. “There’s nothing for you back on that old farm.”  

But this time my mother didn’t have her way.  

Before the month was over, Charlie, the sheriff who had snapped the Christmas picture, wrote and said that Grandpa needed help and that she should hightail it on home, said it flat out that way. My mother’s answer to this cry for help was to contact social services and line up an institution. I prayed that he’d refuse to leave the farm, but he went without a fight. His only condition was that she bring me home that summer. My mother found this perplexing and a little sad. “He insists I bring you all the way from England. Why would he ask a thing like that?” Her voice was high and pitiful as she stroked my head, where I sat barely breathing on the bottom of the bed.  

We headed for home the day that school let out. She left the Englishman with a little smile and a backward wave of her hand. I wasn’t sure how they were doing, but it didn’t look too good.  

When we pull up to the institution two days later, Grandpa is standing on the porch.  

I walk into his arms as thin as rails. I breathe in the familiar smells I’ve loved since I was little. I feel his small potbelly warm against my stomach, his flannel shirt soft against my face.  

“You’re looking fine,” I say.  

“You get that lying from your ma’s side of the family.” His voice is no more than a raspy whisper, like he hasn’t used it much in the past year. “I’m eighty-five years old, darling, nothing lives forever, girl.”  

I cry, my face against his chest.  

I am of an age that my mother refers to as irrational. Each time I tried to talk to her in England, she brushed aside my pain like a band of pesky flies. Her only response, that the Englishman had found me trying and that she hadn’t liked my attitude one single bit.  

Yet my grandpa calls me darling. I wipe my nose against his shirt and crawl into his chest.  

My mother sighs and walks ahead of us. We tour the institution before dinner. Although my mother is a stranger to this place, she assumes the role of tour guide, pointing out each highlight she can find along the way. I trail after her and Grandpa. The place is neat and tidy with an antiseptic smell. Grandpa’s room is nothing special, but long narrow windows reach from the ceiling to the floor. He can watch the sunrise, see the moonlight. It makes me feel a little better. Grandpa shows no interest; he doesn’t have a single word to say.  

In a room with lots of windows, we have what my mother calls an institutional dinner — a slab of skinless chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, a pickle, and a piece of cake. None of us eats much. There are paper napkins and plastic flowers on the table. The room is full of silent people bent over their plates. My grandpa nods at everything my mother says, but doesn’t once look up. At seven o’clock a young man approaches, a big grin on his face, and tells us visiting hours are over. Grandpa pays him no attention, drops three lumps of sugar into his coffee with a “plop.”  

“Remember the white horse?” He suddenly looks up.  

“Of course I do.” I sit up straighter, surprised that he asks this question with my mother sitting there.  

“He was a long time dying.”  

“What?” my mother says. It isn’t a question wanting an answer; it’s her way of telling us to both shut up. She’s always hated references to animals at mealtime, to death and dying, and not enough money in the bank. Early on I learned to skirt these issues, but Grandpa has never paid much attention to anything she says.  

Just then a skinny blonde with a lot of hair walks up. “It’s time.” She nods and smiles. The cup jiggles as Grandpa hurries it to his lips. She takes it from his hand and sets it in the saucer. “Rules are rules.” She winks at me as if we’re in cahoots and leads him like a child from the table; he doesn’t once look back. As we leave for the Budget Six Motel I watch to see if he may be standing at the window, but there’s not a soul anywhere in sight. 

The moon is full tonight. I watch it slip around like Jell-O in a pan — sliding back and forth through clouds like pale, transparent fingers. Do you remember the white horse? thrums a mantra in my head. Once more I see King stretched out in the pasture, white legs churning in the grass.  

When I can’t stand it any longer, I wipe the sheet beneath my nose and slip out of my bed. Across the room my mother mumbles in her sleep and pulls the covers tightly to her chest.  

I learned to drive from the man who taught me everything worth knowing. I learned to steer sitting in his lap. By the age of ten, I was driving his old blue pickup in the meadow, up one rutted road and down another. I move the seat up as far as it will go, stick the key in the ignition and, one eye on the rearview mirror, barrel down the road. I park the car in back, close to the room I know is Grandpa’s, then run around and ring the bell. The young man we met at dinner gives me a grin and opens up the door. I tell the woman at the desk that my mother left her purse in Grandpa’s room and sent me in to fetch it. She nods and keeps on talking on the phone. “You just wouldn’t believe …” I hear as I walk by, and then a giggle. “I mean, really, and with the likes of him. …”  

My grandpa stirs when I approach his bed. He opens one eye and his mustache twitches, and without a word he sits straight up in bed. I hand him his teeth and search the bathroom for his toothbrush and stick it in my pocket for the few teeth he has left. He pulls on his trousers; I struggle with his shoes and lace them up. Together we unlatch a screen and wrestle it inside. A wrought iron railing like a small veranda encircles every room — I help Grandpa through the window and haul him over this. He sputters, but he doesn’t say a word; instead he grabs my arm and points up to the sky. A small bank of wispy clouds is moving toward the moon. I smile at him. He chuckles in a voice barely a whisper, then under the small cloud cover, we creep across the lawn. 

We’re barely in the car when Grandpa urges me “to put the pedal to the metal” and, leaning over, switches on the radio. At once the car is filled with the gravelly voice of Johnny Cash. “I fell into a burning ring of fire. I went down, down, down and the flames grew higher.” “Universal gut-wrenching, ache-jabbing,” Grandpa calls it. As we roar down the highway, I feel we have something in common, Johnny Cash and I. I feel I am spinning in a vortex of my own. I’m not sure just what the two of us are doing cruising down the road together. I’m hoping that I’m moving by instinct or intuition or whatever it is that women claim moves them along, gives them their best shot at things. I’m not sure what Grandpa is hooked up to, but when I look over he’s grinning and one foot’s tapping on the floor.  

By the time we get to the farm four hours later, Grandpa is asleep and snoring; his mouth hangs open like a tiny cavern, the edges of his moustache swoop and flutter with each snort. I pull up to the house, kill the engine, and just stare. The place looks worn around the edges in the moonlight. Still it looks pretty much the same. The barn is standing where it always stood. Dark trunks of trees jump out of the shadows, branches thin as pitchforks stabbing at the sky; bushes like fat dancing girls scatter everywhere. I swallow with relief. I can almost hear the rhythm of King circling the pasture; I can almost see his white coat flash beneath the trees.  

Once inside I turn the oven on and open up the door. Grandpa shuffles to the living room and his favorite chair — an old gray lounger near a window that overlooks the pasture. 

“Fetch that purple Afghan,” he says, his voice less raspy now, “just right to take the chill off. It’s wool, you know. Your grandma always worked with wool … a sensible woman … pretty too …” His voice trails off, dragging the words behind him, as if he doesn’t quite believe himself.  

I almost fall off the chair where I’m digging through the afghans. It’s not like him, talking about Grandma, calling her sensible and pretty, a woman who left him before I was even born, and for nothing better than a fast-talking peddler who came banging on the door. He’s never talked about her or my father either, flat out refused to talk about the past, no matter how much I pestered him.  

“She’s dead now,” he adds, as if I didn’t know.  

Of course, he’s not the one who told me — it’s my mother who fills me in on this kind of stuff. I suppose she learned it from my dad when they got married; somebody had to explain why Grandma wasn’t there.  

My grandma was his second wife, my mother said; the first one, name of Emmy Lou, died after twenty years of marriage and never had a child. Ten years later Grandpa met my grandma at a church bazaar and proposed right on the spot. He was forty-eight and she was thirty. It was the spring my dad turned eight she ran off with the peddler. They hightailed it out of town with Grandpa chasing after, skidded on a slick of ice, and drowned in the Mississippi. Folks came for miles around to watch the peddler’s pots and pans crash in the icy water. After that I guess my grandpa had enough of marriage; he hunkered in to work the farm and raise my dad alone.  

I get the purple afghan and turn the oven off. I cover Grandpa up, tuck the edges underneath his legs, bundle him up as if he’s going on a sleigh ride. We sit together all night long, talking about everything except why we are there, sipping coffee, strong and black — Grandpa taking his the way he likes it, with a shot of Jack Daniels he managed to stash away somewhere.  

“You got the best of him,” one time he mutters. “God finally making up for taking Sam.” 

I nod but don’t reply to what he said. Grandpa has his own way of thinking about things, religion being no exception. He feels God’s got to answer for His mistakes, make things right like anybody else, omnipotent or not. My mother calls it blasphemous, says he’s going straight to hell. On principle, I never agree with anything my mother says, but I don’t know how to respond to this stuff about God and the stranger he calls my dad.  

“You’re just like him.” He nods. “Makes moving on a little easier.”  

The hair on the back of my neck is rubbing on my collar. “I want to be like you.” It comes out a whimper. My nose is stuffing up, tears are sliding down my face; it’s like someone is pumping a well inside me, sending water seeping beneath my eyelids at a terrible pace. 

“I don’t want you to go anywhere, Grandpa. Don’t go anywhere,” I plead, afraid now of what we’ve done, afraid of the words he’s saying. 

“Blow your nose.” He hands me an old red handkerchief, all crinkled up.  

I blow my nose and stick it in my pocket. 

“You had a powerful memory even as a little kid.”  

Do you remember the white horse? clangs in my ears.  

“You tricked me, Grandpa,” I whisper.  

“I doubt that.” He laughs and slaps his leg. “It’s a shame you never knew your dad. He was a fine man — and such a boy. ‘An Idea a Minute’ I used to call him.” 

“That’s not a nickname, Grandpa.”  

“Well, it suited him just fine.” 

“You tricked me, Grandpa.”  

“If you say so,” he says. He strokes his beard and chuckles and begins to tell the stories I’ve longed for all my life. Before my eyes he shapes a picture of my father from the time he was a very little boy. My mouth hangs open, I hang on tightly to his chair. Sometimes a tear rolls down his cheek but he keeps on talking. His voice, first rough and scratchy, grows deeper and deeper until it seems a soft sweet humming fills the house. 

Somewhere in the rumble of his voice I fall asleep. When I wake up the sun is coming through the window. It lights up his beard and gathers on his face. I know that he is gone, but I am all through crying. I kiss his hands and fold them underneath the afghan. I close his eyes but I do not cover up his face. With Grandpa’s stories running through my head, I sit down on the floor at his side and wait.  

It isn’t long before the sheriff’s car pulls into the yard. Right behind him is my mother in another rental car.  

I don’t have any answers to her questions — what can I tell her? I have no words to make her understand. All I say is that we went for one last ride together.  

Grandpa’s old friend Charlie runs the back of his hand across his eyes and says, “I’ll take care of things,” picks up the whiskey bottle, and takes a hefty swig.  

My mother frowns and shrugs her shoulders. “We’ll be at the Budget Six Motel,” is all she says.  

I stare at the pasture as we drive away.  

I watched the white horse move his powerful legs, marking futile circles in the earth, but I never touched him. I gave him his respect. I loved him rightly to the end. 

“A man can’t ask for more than that,” I whisper.