The Horses of Follyfoot Read online

  ‘I’m sorry,’ her father said. ‘I don’t know that we can afford that kind of thing this year.’

  ‘I thought you were doing pretty well,’ Vince said offensively. ‘Putting up houses at the same cost, and raising the price of them to the customer.’

  ‘Business isn’t what it was.’ Blank, who detested rows, didn’t rise to the insult. ‘People haven’t the money to buy and it’s harder to get bank loans.’

  ‘You bought Mom the big Buick at Christmas,’ Jody said.

  ‘Now listen here.’ Her father suddenly got angry, an unusual sight, if not very terrifying. ‘If I want to buy my wife a car, who’s going to stop me?’

  ‘Not me.’ Jody shrugged her shoulders. ‘I merely said, why shouldn’t you buy your daughter one too?’

  Dora sat in the middle of the row uncomfortably, her head going back and forth as if she were at a tennis match. If she had talked like this to her father at home, he’d have thrown her into the street.

  ‘And if we’re so poor,’ Jody persisted, ‘then how come you’re spending all that money on those racehorses? And how come you’re pushing this crazy idea of buying a farm and filling it with old crocks, just so people will say, “Look at that noble Earl Blankenheimer”?’

  ‘Jody, please, honey—’ her mother said nervously. ‘The horses are his pleasure.’

  ‘If he’d spend a bit more on his family and a bit less on his horses … Chuckie is ripping you off right and left, Dad. She’s always charged you too much. But even she thinks you should sell Robin.’

  ‘Perhaps you should.’ Mrs Blank was also nervous of Chuckie, who had once nearly ridden her down on a great black horse, crying, ‘Get out of the way!’ ‘It is an unnecessary extravagance now that Jody—’

  ‘You could get two thousand for Robin easy,’ Jody said. ‘Then I could have the Jag.’

  ‘I’ll never sell that horse,’ Blank said. ‘He means a lot to me.’ He looked at Jody. ‘He means to me the time when you were a happy kid and loved the outdoors. No bitterness. Where does this bitterness come from?’

  He sounded so sad, but Jody only said childishly, ‘It comes from not having a Jaguar.’

  Meaning well, Mrs Blank bumbled in with, ‘The Nelsons would buy him, maybe. They like his looks. Dora told me. The boy, Michael, said he was a good type.’

  Attacked by both his wife and daughter, Blank looked trapped. His eyes darted back and forth, seeking escape, and fastened on Dora.

  ‘Rather than sell him,’ he said, ‘to the Nelsons or anyone, I’d give him away.’

  ‘Jeez.’ Vince closed his heavy-lidded eyes, and leaned back to meditate.

  Dora stood up to clear plates off the table. She couldn’t bear it any longer.

  ‘People might be suspicious if you give a horse—’ Mrs Blank began.

  ‘Dora wouldn’t be,’ Blank said suddenly.

  Dora tripped on the edge of the long skirt and dropped knives and forks on the stone terrace.

  ‘I’ll give him to Dora.’

  ‘But what? – I mean, how? – I mean, I couldn’t—’

  ‘I’ll fly him over to England for you. Pay his keep. I was going to make the Colonel a donation anyway.’

  ‘Oh now, Earl—’

  ‘But listen, Dad—’

  Before Dora could answer, Blank’s wife and daughter were at him. Vince woke up and said, ‘Hey, lookit—’

  ‘Yes.’ Blank nodded, more confident than Dora had ever seen him. ‘That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll see about getting a place in a cargo plane. I’ll send Robin to England for you, Door.’

  Dora carried the plates out to the kitchen. Usually she helped Mrs Blank load them into the dishwasher. This evening, she could only leave them in the sink and go up to her room, her face on fire, her heart thudding.

  She had used her last air letter. She found a postcard – a postcard, to convey earth-shaking news – and wrote to Steve:

  Back on the 15th as planned. Remember that horse I wrote to you about? Blank gave him to me. He’s sending him over by air.

  Just like that, laconic, businesslike, as if she belonged to a world where horses flew the Atlantic every week.

  Love to everyone, wearing fur, hair, skin, feathers, scales (Callie’s neglected fish). Dora & Robin.

  Chapter 14

  IN HIS BEDROOM over the tack room at Follyfoot, Steve was writing to Dora, on a postcard which Callie’s class had sold at school last year in aid of endangered insects.

  On most postcards, the picture is the best side to look at. The other side says, Wish you were here. Los Fritos has fantastic food. Your dad has been a bit queer ever since we came. Don’t forget to water the budgie.

  But some postcards carry world-shaking news.

  Dottie had a foal, Steve wrote. Foal? Colt? Filly? What did you call it when it was a donkey? He crossed out foal and wrote, Dottie had a baby. It’s name is Polka Dot. Polly for short. Love, Steve.

  Impossible to convey on a postcard the surprise of what had happened.

  Dottie, the little chocolate donkey Mr Blank had bought at the market, had always been quite plump. Nobody had guessed why. Two days ago, she had begun to behave strangely. She would lie down, get up, move away from Don to another part of the field, kick out at him if he came after her, lie down again, get up, move off.

  ‘You know what?’ the Colonel said, when Steve called him out to look at Dottie. ‘I think she’s going into labour.’

  ‘Shall I bring her in?’

  ‘No, leave her out. It’s warm. Leave her alone. It’s best that way.’

  Steve put her in a field by herself. Early the next morning, he got up and went out through the misty freshness of the new day to see how she was. At first he couldn’t find her. He walked among the bushes at the bottom of the field, and then he found her by the hedge, a tiny chocolate foal in the grass, Dottie standing over it, sheltering it with her head.

  In a corner of the orchard, there was a small enclosure which they had fenced in when Miss America’s back was still raw, and she couldn’t be turned out with another horse. Steve and Slugger got some old planks and knocked up a shed with an open doorway, so that Dottie and Polly could go in and out as they liked.

  Folly, who was in the orchard with Specs, spent most of the time with his head through the fence, trying to make contact with the new phenomenon. Folly and Specs were alone in the orchard, not because the old horses bothered Folly, but because Folly was so bold and teasing that he bothered the old horses.

  Polly was everybody’s new mania. Callie was out there half the day playing with her, cuddling her, holding her in her lap on the grass, taking her and Dottie into the house to lie on the rug in the Colonel’s study so that Anna could make a sketch of them.

  Don was an outdoors donkey, but Dottie had been coming into the house ever since Blank brought her here. She had appeared at the open side door one day, questing with her white nose and violet eyes. When invited in, she lay down in front of the fire like a dog. Donkeys are naturally clean. If you keep one indoors for more than an hour or two, you can call it house trained.

  Dottie was such a calm mother, she didn’t mind how many people handled her baby. Everyone was sad that Dora wasn’t there to see Polly brand new like this.

  ‘Poor old Dora.’ Steve wasn’t jealous of her trip to America any more. ‘It’s bad luck on her, missing all the fun.’

  One day the postman came when everybody but Steve was out. He saw the red van stop in the lane, and went to get the letters. A handful of bills, advertisements for veterinary remedies and agricultural tools, a postcard with a picture of the Queen Elizabeth in Boston harbour.

  He turned it over. Dora had addressed it to him, although a postcard was public property.

  … Remember that horse I wrote to you about? Blank gave him to me. He’s sending him over by air.

  Steve walked slowly back into the yard and sat down on the edge of the water trough to read the postcard again. It was going to take tim
e to adjust to this before he told everybody. Dora with a horse of her own? The Dora he knew was always scrounging a ride, arguing with Callie over her right to the Cobbler, trying to get him to let her ride Miss America, waiting for Hero to be sound, making do with Willy the mule. Dora with a quarter horse-thoroughbred of her own – that would take some getting used to.

  Chapter 15

  THE DAY THAT Dora got Steve’s postcard with the news of the birth of the donkey foal, the younger of the two children in hospital with encephalitis died. The other one was not expected to live.

  In the western part of the state, a sixteen-year-old boy was taken to hospital with a disease of the central nervous system, suspected to be due to eastern equine encephalitis. Doctors issued statements to say this was not true, but everyone was nervous. Newspaper, radio and television stories fanned the anxiety into a widespread encephalitis scare in New England.

  Two or three horses had developed the disease and died in a few days. Horses that had been exposed to infected mosquitoes might have to be put down.

  This was not in the area where Robin was, but every horse along the eastern Atlantic seaboard must have two immunisation shots.

  ‘Has Robin had his?’ Dora worried.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Blank said. ‘Chuckie always sees to things like worming and shots. She knows it all.’

  He and Dora went to the airport outside Boston to arrange for space in a cargo plane for Robin. There might not be a place available for some time. If a vacancy came up, they would notify Blank at once.

  The countryside where the Blanks lived was gradually being swallowed by building developments and creeping suburbs. Dora and Blank had looked at some possible land for a Home of Rest, but properties with grazing space cost the earth, and people whom Blank approached for contributions had regarded him with sympathy or amused tolerance but no direct offers of help.

  Blank didn’t mention it to Chuckie any more. He went to see the vet. ‘How many horses have been put down this month?’

  ‘Around thirty or forty, I think. It’s getting really bad.’

  ‘I don’t mean because of the encephalitis scare. I mean because they were too old or unsound to work.’

  ‘I could get you the figures. Dozens a month, I should say.’

  ‘What would you think of a farm where they could be well taken care of, so they could stay alive?’ Blank asked.

  ‘Look, Mr Blankenheimer.’ The vet was a sharp-featured young man with thick spectacles and a businesslike manner, more like a banker than a vet. ‘This country is overrun with people and animals. If you ever see a paper bag in the road, in the spring, drive around it. It’s likely to be full of puppies or kittens no one wants. Food supplies are getting scarcer. Pretty soon, half the population will be starving. Does it make sense to you to keep alive animals that have come to the end of their lives?’

  ‘They’ve only come to the end of their lives because their owners say they have,’ Dora argued. ‘At Follyfoot, where we keep the old horses—’

  ‘It may be all right in Britain,’ the vet said rather patronisingly, ‘but I don’t see it going over here.’

  Because Mr Nelson had told Dora that he might be able to help, Blank approached him about the sale of a sixty-acre farm that the Nelson family owned on the side of a hill. Mr Nelson was genial about it, but still vague. The land was valuable, but he might make a fair price, as his contribution to the cause. Give him a bit of time. He’d have to talk to agents. Blank would hear from him.

  ‘You know what I hear, Earl?’ Mrs Blank read all the papers and listened to all the local radio stations. ‘I hear that there’s a housing developer after that land, and his offer is out of sight.’

  ‘The Nelsons wouldn’t do that,’ Blank said. ‘They’re trying to preserve this countryside, not destroy it.’

  ‘Money talks,’ Mrs Blank said sagely.

  ‘They’d never sell to anyone like that. Not without telling me.’

  ‘Why not? They don’t care, people who have it all. Why should they?’

  Mrs Blank’s depressing attitudes had been undermining her husband’s spirit for years. He responded much better to Dora’s attitude, which was that life was good and full of hope, and he could still have as much fun as he did when he was a boy in Indiana.

  ‘Want to climb a tree?’ she asked. ‘I was in the wood yesterday, and there’s this tall pine with branches like a ladder. From the top you can see all over the neighbourhood. You can see the Ellsmiths’ swimming pool. Their kids are washing the dogs in it.’

  ‘Climb a tree?’ Mrs Blankenheimer said. ‘At your age, Earl?’

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Dora. ‘Let’s go!’

  From the top of the tree, you could see not only the Ellsmiths’ pool, which was being ruined for swimming by the addition of a great quantity of detergent and shaggy dogs, but the flat roof of the bicycle factory where the secretaries were sunbathing in their lunch hour, and Chuckie Fiske’s riding ring, where Chuckie herself was out in denims, erecting large solid fences in preparation for the jumping lesson she was going to give Dora when the sun went down.

  Robin had been well schooled as a jumper, starting slow and low and working up to heights. The trouble was that Dora had missed the starting slow bit, and was expected to be at the three foot six point where Robin was. She would prefer to wait till she got him home and start with him slow and easy over the pottery Follyfoot jumps, but Chuckie said she had her reputation to consider, and if the horse was going to England, Dora had got to be in shape to show him off properly.

  In the Ellsmiths’ pool, the children splashed and screamed and wrestled with the dogs. They had just been joined by a couple of ducks and the grandmother in a frilled black suit and floppy hat.

  ‘Want to go for a swim?’ she asked Blank, who was hanging grimly onto a branch below her.

  The beach was about fifteen miles away. If they dawdled there, she might get back too late for her jumping lesson.

  Mrs Blank had gone to a meeting of the Garden Club, where they taught plants and flowers to mind their place and be under control of the people who fed them with expensive fertilisers. Dora and Blank made sandwiches. Dora always felt rather guilty doing things in this spotless kitchen, which was a sacred place to Mrs Blank. She cleaned the stove after every meal, and never left dirty plates piled up. Dora had politely invited her to stay when she next came to England. She hoped that the state of the kitchen at Follyfoot, with its constant succession of meals and snacks, wouldn’t spoil her visit.

  Blank and Door found an uncrowded space at the end of the beach.

  ‘Let’s have lunch first and then swim.’ Dora was starving.

  ‘No, you have to swim before you eat.’ Blank’s mother had evidently given him the same orders as Dora’s had. They had taken root in him, but not with her.

  In her new red swimsuit, she ran across the soft fine sand and plunged ecstatically into the incoming waves. This side of the Atlantic was warmer than it ever was in England. The waves were just big enough to plunge into or dive over, or to ride on the swell with your arms out and your face to the burning sun.

  She looked back to see that Blank had stayed near the edge of the sea, paddling about in the shallow water like a neat and careful dog. You almost expected to see the tip of a tail following after.

  After lunch, Blank spread his beach towel out as neatly as if he were making a hospital bed, and laid himself down to sleep. He woke with a start as a large labrador jumped over his head, spattering sand in his face.

  ‘What the—’

  ‘Sorry!’ The tall, big-jointed boy running by the water’s edge looked back. ‘Oh – gee, I am sorry.’ He recognised Dora. It was Michael Nelson, with his sister who had ridden the grey Welsh pony at the show.

  They parked their towels and snorkelling gear a little way along the beach. Dora lay down again, but she became increasingly bothered by a desire to get up and run down to the water in her new red swimsuit. And she genuinely would lik
e another swim.

  ‘Let’s go in again.’ Blank was still rubbing sand out of his eyes. ‘Wash yourself off with sea water.’

  ‘Just a quick one then. We’ll have to be getting back if you’re to be on time for your jumping lesson.’

  The tide had gone out quite a bit. After Dora had swum some way, her feet touched bottom and she came out on a sandbank. The water was only up to her knees. She looked back and waved at Blank, splashing about between her and the shore.

  ‘Come on!’ she called, prancing about on the sandbank. ‘It’s quite shallow here.’ She moved down the other side of the sandbank, and out into the deeper water.

  Looking round, she saw Blank paddling towards her. She stopped swimming and lay on her back to wait for him. She was floating blissfully, watching the deepening blue of the sky as the sun dropped, and listening to the desperate cries of seagulls. She became aware that there was a smaller cry under the clamour of the gulls. She let down her legs and looked back. Without knowing it, she had floated away from the sandbank. Blank, trying to reach her, had stepped off the bank into the deeper water. He was floundering, out of his depth, coughing and spitting and waving his arms.

  At school, Dora had passed her Life-Saving certificate in the public baths. Ever since, she had hoped to meet someone who was drowning, so that she could hook her arms round their shoulders and tow them safely to shore amid the cheers of the onlookers.

  She yelled at Blank, ‘Hang on, I’m coming!’ and swam as fast as she could towards him. It took all her energy to reach him. The current that had floated her out was very strong. When she finally reached him, he was still afloat, but gasping and panicking.

  He clutched at her hair, and she went under. She came up, striking out to keep him from doing it again. He clutched at her neck. ‘Stop it, Blank!’ She beat at his hands, but he was petrified and could not understand.

  ‘Come on, Blank, it’s Door. I’ll save you. We’ll do it … the two of us … Blank! No handle!’ She shouted in his ear, and he relaxed a little.

  She turned him on his back and swam, towing him, kicking mightily to reach the sandbank. Blank had gone limp. Small waves washed over his face. From time to time, Dora glanced round and saw in agony that she was making no headway against the current. Her muscles were so tired that all she could do was just go on kicking automatically, without conscious effort. Blank was very still and heavy. He must have passed out.