Centaur Rising

  “I get it. I get it! Now we’re going out to the barn, and I’ll bring you some breakfast in a few minutes. Better to eat it out here and not in the kitchen in front of the reporters. The company will be better in the stall.”

  “A lot better,” he agreed.

  * * *

  When we got to the barn, everything was quiet in the stall. Kai was still asleep, nestled up against Agora’s rump, thumb in his mouth.

  I left Robbie by the door in the stall with his books, The Olive Fairy Book and a biography of General Custer. He’d already opened it and was deep into the introduction. As I turned the corner at the end of the corridor, I heard a tiny snick. Robbie had locked the door behind me. I breathed out, suddenly aware I’d been holding my breath.

  By the time I got back to the house, the coffee meeting was over, a bunch of cards were on the kitchen table with the reporters’ names and phone numbers, and they were leaving in their various cars.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked.

  Mom smiled. “I said we had a desperately ill animal here, but by next Sunday, if it was well enough, they could come see for themselves whether the pictures their Mr. Fern was shopping around were real or not.”

  “So it was Fern,” I said. “And he did get pictures.”

  Mom nodded. “Not great pictures,” she said. “They were pretty gray and fuzzy, but enough to make the reporters very curious.”

  “They seemed okay with your mom’s proposal,” Dr. Herks said. “Especially since I told them I’d been up all night with the horse.”

  Martha snorted. “It was the straw in your hair that cinched it.”

  “Yes, the old hayseed trick,” Mom said.

  I gaped. “How did that get in your hair? You were asleep in the chair when I woke you.”

  He grinned. “Professional secret.”

  Clearly he’d been in to check up on Kai sometime during the night, maybe even slept in the straw, which had to be more comfortable than the chair.

  “Robbie needs breakfast.”

  “Oh, right!” Mom began bustling around the kitchen and put together a hard-boiled egg, some toast with jam, and a large glass of milk. “You find something for yourself, Ari. I’ll take this out to him.”

  “I’m off to the office,” Dr. Herks said. “Don’t want them to forget I’m the Big Dog. But I’ll be back soon.”

  * * *

  I grabbed a bowl of cereal with bananas and wolfed it down, took a glass of milk with me, and finally went back to the stable. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I started eating.

  Mrs. Angotti was already out in the ménage with Joey. She was never this early, which was odd. Joey was up on Bor, who was still much too big for him to handle, so his mother, in her jodhpurs, was leading them around the ring.

  Mom was standing by the fence watching, a letter in her hand. When she noticed me, she handed me the letter. “Mrs. A came super early to give me this. What do you think?”

  Dear Mrs. Martins,

  I meant no harm, really. And I told Zoe it was a secret. She didn’t actally believe me anyway. So it wasn’t really my fault her teacher sent it to the contest. But I’ll take the blame. I’m really and truely sorry for any inconvenience I caused.

  Angela

  “So?”

  “She misspelled two words,” I said.

  “I mean what do you think of what she says?”

  “She’s afraid of being told off, she’s afraid of being banned from the farm, and she’s never had to take the blame for anything in her life.” I reread the letter quickly. “Also she doesn’t know how to spell, which, for a junior in high school, is pretty bad.” I took a deep breath. “Or else she just wrote the letter in a hurry because her mother made her, and she didn’t take time to revise it. After all, she did spell inconvenience right!”

  “Just because she’s a lousy speller doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person, honey. Maybe she really does feel sorry. Maybe she wouldn’t hurt Kai for all the world.”

  I shrugged but didn’t argue. It could be true. Stranger things had happened. I mean—we just had a centaur born in our barn.

  Then I realized: Mom had confided in me and asked my opinion about something. I handed the letter back to her and smiled.

  She folded the paper three times and put it in her pocket. “Angela said she’d take the blame.”

  “Then hold her to it.”

  Mom nodded. “I plan to. Nothing more needs to be said. And you have chores to do.”

  I saluted her, and we both laughed. Then I went to the barn to start mucking out the first of the stalls.

  18

  Kai’s Run

  FOR HALF A WEEK, things seemed to get back to normal, or at least to the new normal, which meant having less than half our usual riders and horses. Mom said we’d be all right, and maybe even more than all right once Kai had grown a little more and could hold his own with visitors.

  He was already a huge hit with everyone in on the secret. So much so, we had to ration his visiting time. And the visitors had to be cautioned about feeding him too many apples and sugar cubes, especially the Angottis. He might have looked like a seven-year-old boy on the top, but he was still part foal and occasionally goofy.

  Joey and Angela were allowed to visit Kai only with supervision, but the Proper kids were let in anytime they wanted to read to him.

  Kai had to stay in the stall because we didn’t dare let him out for a run again, and the only thing he liked more than running turned out to be books. Robbie was reading him nonfiction about stars and constellations, about the history of the Morgan horse, and some novels as well. Kai couldn’t seem to get enough of it.

  “Can we bring a TV into the barn?” Robbie asked one night at bedtime. “Please, Mom—I think he’d especially like Mister Ed.”

  She smiled but shook her head. “We don’t have the right kind of outlets to plug it in and no proper aerial out there. Also, we can’t chance a TV man or an electrician in the barn asking questions, poking about. But I’ll talk to Gerry. Maybe he’ll have some ideas.”

  * * *

  Well, we all had ideas and not just about TV, but Dr. Herks had the best one. He came over that evening for dinner and told us.

  “Kai is growing so fast. He needs to be able to run, not just stay cooped up in his stall or in the corridor. Agora’s getting a little crabby, too. She tried to kick me this morning.”

  I gasped. That was not like Agora at all.

  “Not a real kick,” Dr. Herks was quick to say, “but a warning nevertheless.”

  “Why a fence?” Robbie asked. “Why not just let him run in the pasture?”

  “Don’t be a Silly Billy,” Martha said. “Prying eyes. Secrets discovered. Crowds of people. Old man Suss selling tickets on his side of the fence.”

  “Martha’s right. With a fenced-in run, Kai will be able to race to his heart’s content outdoors,” Dr. Herks told Robbie, “and yet be safe from prying eyes, as long as there aren’t any photographers and sightseers in helicopters.”

  “Helicopters?” I checked his face to see if he was kidding.

  * * *

  The next day, Friday, he showed up with a pickup truck full of wooden fencing, a posthole digger, a sledgehammer, and a toolbox.

  “Taking a break from my practice” is how he put it. “For the first time in a year, I’m letting Dr. Small cover the office the entire weekend.” He smiled. “That’s how much I like your family, Ari.”

  I smiled back, afraid to read too much into what he’d said.

  “I told her not to call me, not even if it’s an emergency. And I reminded her she has always been great in emergencies. Since she’s considering retirement, she’s put more and more on my shoulders. I think she was shocked that I needed time off.”

  “Gerry, this”—Mom waved at the full pickup truck—“is hardly time off.”

  “It is to me,” he said.

  Mom smiled tentatively. “Thanks.”

  ??
?Arlene’s been a vet since before I was a teen,” Dr. Herks explained. “I used to work for her cleaning out the pens. She’s the one who encouraged me to go to veterinary school after my Vietnam service, and then let me buy into her practice. But she still needs to hear that she’s a good vet as she worries that at her age she’s lost too much of her speed and skill.”

  “Everyone does,” Mom said. “I’m not as fast up on a horse these days…” She wasn’t grinning, except with her eyes. I hoped Dr. Herks could see that.

  * * *

  We all helped with the fence—Mom and Martha and me, of course, as well as Mrs. Angotti, the Propers, and Dr. Harries, who had come to work their horses and stayed to build the fence, not just the unloading of materials on Friday but the whole weekend long.

  Dr. Harries and Mom and Mr. Proper hauled all the biggest pieces of fence to the places where Dr. Herks had dug forty postholes, twenty on each side, ten feet apart. I got to help Martha and Dr. Harries with the measurements.

  “You women are too fast for me,” Dr. Herks said, and gave me a wink.

  The fence was eight feet high, higher than Kai would be when fully grown. It was attached to the end of the back barn but wound well into the pasture, staying far enough away from the Suss farm’s fence that it couldn’t be overlooked. It looped back on itself and—to make it a bit more interesting—cut off a corner of the pond so Kai would have a place to drink, too.

  “Why not a jump or two?” Mrs. Angotti suggested when we were almost done.

  “Too dangerous,” Mom said.

  Martha added, “You can’t put a boy down if his leg breaks.”

  “Or get him into a wheelchair,” Dr. Harries pointed out.

  “Or have him use crutches,” Mrs. Proper said.

  The thought of all that was both funny and terrifying. The idea of any jumps was quickly dismissed.

  Joey was more trouble than help until we let him sit in Agora’s stall and play Monopoly with Robbie and Kai and the Proper kids. At this point, Kai could beat them all but had somehow figured out how to cheat in order to let Joey win occasionally.

  The only one who stayed far away from the action was Angela. She elected to work in the kitchen making pitchers of lemonade and setting out the cookies for our frequent breaks. I think she was still embarrassed to be around us because of spilling the secret.

  Either way, I was secretly relieved.

  Even with all the help, getting that long fence up was hard work, and it took two days. We didn’t finish until Sunday at dinnertime.

  * * *

  That evening, we let Kai try out his new toy. He could go right from the barn into the fenced-in run without being seen by onlookers. The run was wide enough for him to turn around in, but not much more. It followed the curve of the wire fence, but only on the side where we bordered the National Forest land. We didn’t want people over on the Suss property taking pictures from ladders.

  He stepped into the run in a shy way. Unlike little boys, horses aren’t really explorers. They prefer the known to the unknown. But soon enough, his boy brain took over and then Kai began trotting up and down, arms in the air and shouting, “I’m trotting fast, Ari.” And when he broke into a gallop, he added, “I’m running very fast!”

  As he raced along, tail flaring out behind, he called out, “The Black Stallion would be proud!”

  You could always tell what he and Robbie were reading together!

  “Not just fast, Kai—you’re almost flying!” Then I called out the names of whatever gaits he was doing.

  He already knew walk, trot, gallop, but we added canter, pace, amble, halt, back up, turn and he got them all the first time. The only one that confused him was the fox-trot because it went diagonally. We all laughed ourselves silly as he tried to master it.

  Robbie made up a game song for him, trying to trick him.

  Here comes Kai a-walking, walking,

  Here comes Kai a-trot.

  Here comes Kai ambling—

  A canter, it is not!

  “He’s a pony Einstein,” Mrs. Proper declared, patting his head each time he made the circuit.

  Robbie got pouty at that. “Not a pony, not a scientist.”

  Mrs. Proper smiled. “You’re right, Robbie. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  But Kai wasn’t hurt by what she said. In fact, he wanted to know what an Einstein was, and later we found him two children’s books at the library on the subject.

  Dr. Herks lent him two other books, one called Essentials of Human Anatomy and one about horse anatomy. They were both way over his head, but he loved the pictures.

  “He just gulps it all down,” Dr. Herks said. “Never saw anything like it.”

  “He’ll be a teen before we know it,” Martha said, adding sourly, “Not sure I’m ready for that!”

  * * *

  It had become clear very early on that Kai had to be a vegetarian. He liked the taste of just about anything, but it turned out he had only one stomach after all. Dr. Herks had determined that by a variety of tests. One stomach, and it was in the horse part of his body.

  There’d been a close call midweek, when Joey—feeling generous after having beaten Kai at Monopoly—had shared his chocolate cupcake with Kai, who wolfed it down. There was no way either of them could have known that chocolate can be very dangerous to a young horse’s digestion.

  Martha said, “Thank the stars that Dr. Herks was around and noticed a chocolate smear on Kai’s mouth.”

  Thank the stars indeed! He got Kai to throw up the chocolate and explained what a close call we’d had. It convinced us all that Kai had to remain on a strict horse diet, and he had to learn what was safe for him to eat and why.

  What Kai liked best (besides chocolate, which he now knew he couldn’t have) were carrots and apples. He had a terrible sweet tooth, and would have eaten as many sugar cubes as he could get.

  Dr. Herks told him sternly, “Not too often, Kai, because horses simply can’t tolerate a lot of it.”

  “But Boy Kai likes sugar.”

  “It’s horse Kai’s tummy we have to worry about,” Martha said.

  That left grass and grains, which horses need because of ulcers and other stomach problems. So we had to give Kai oat cereals and breads made with rough oats, alfalfa, barley. From early on, Mom did one large baking on Wednesdays and smaller ones throughout the week. Now Angela helped whenever she was visiting.

  It turned out that if we put enough molasses on barley mash, Kai would eat it like a dessert. For a treat he had oatcakes every Thursday with a dollop of apple butter. He called it Yum-day.

  I got the job each evening to cook down a mixture of grasses, apple slices, unpeeled carrots sweetened with a little sugar water, and crushed vitamin pills Dr. Herks brought us to help strengthen Kai’s bones. After the mixture cooled, I used a beater to turn it into a kind of puree and then poured it through a funnel into glass bottles, which we kept in a small refrigerator in his stall with a line snaking out to an outlet in the hall. It took him only a minute to learn how to open the refrigerator door. He could drink about a half dozen bottles of juice during the day. But all that food and the veggie-fruit drinks meant that his growth-spurt geyser became a constant waterfall. And as a consequence, he weaned himself.

  Now that he was no longer nursing, Agora was put into another stall. Just as well since his boy stuff—a table for his games, a small bookcase, the fridge—was filling up all the spaces. Though often Kai asked for her to come back at night so he could sleep cuddled up next to her.

  Luckily for me, he quickly learned to keep his stall clean. What with my other chores, I needed all the help I could get.

  19

  Questions, Answers

  THE REST OF THE SIXTH WEEK FLEW BY, and Sunday almost all of the reporters, plus two new ones, came back. The only one who didn’t was the guy from the Boston Globe, who sent us a message that he would use whatever the wire services gave him because he was on a bigger story: President Johnson
had recently announced a huge new number of soldiers were being sent to Vietnam, and the Globe reporter was preparing to be sent overseas.

  Mom invited the reporters into the barn office and gave them coffee and zucchini muffins. While they ate, she outlined what would happen next. It had taken us a couple of hours to figure it out, and she’d typed up the schedule. Dr. Herks had one of those new copying machines called a Xerox at his office, a present from a happy horse owner whose prize racehorse he’d saved. With it, he’d made a dozen copies, which he handed out. They were much easier to read than the purple mimeo things we had at school.

  And then the questions came thick and fast.

  “Is he real?” asked the first reporter, a redhead with an even redder mustache that covered the sides of his mouth like parentheses.

  Mom’s smile was tight. “Of course he’s real. As real as you or me.”

  “I mean, a real centaur,” the reporter persisted.

  “Pony boy would be more accurate,” Dr. Herks told him. “This isn’t ancient Greece, after all.”

  A second reporter, slight and balding, with a nose like a leprechaun’s, leaned forward and asked eagerly, “When can we see him?”

  “Shortly,” Mom said. “Kai should have finished his breakfast by now.”

  “Kai?” asked a guy with long stork legs and a nose like a beak.

  Mom nodded at me to answer this one.

  “That’s his name. Short for Chiron, after the good centaur in the Greek myths, the one who taught Jason and other Greek princes.”

  A hand shot up. The man had a short, pointed beard. “Can you spell Chiron?”

  I was surprised that a reporter had to ask such a thing, but I spelled Chiron slowly, the way you do in a spelling bee. They all scribbled in their notebooks.

  Martha added, “And her name is Arianne Martins, daughter of the house and three-time winner of the Swift River Elementary School spelling bee.”

  Surprised, I blushed. I hadn’t known she knew. Or cared.

  More scribblings.

  Mom then took over again. “We have ladders at five different locations along the fence so you can watch Kai run. Please don’t call or shout to him. He’s still very young and can startle easily. And no pictures outside, as he’s already had a fright once. When he’s back in the barn, in more comfortable and controlled surroundings, you will be able to speak to him, and that’s where you can take your pictures.”