A Horse Like Barney

Barney, Book Two

Jessie Haas

1

Waiting

“August is almost fall,” Sarah said, “and you said we’d buy a horse in the fall. So shouldn’t we at least start looking?”

It was breakfast time, and the kitchen was already too warm. The hottest summer in forty years, according to the weather forecasters. Just drinking his coffee made him sweat, Dad said. He sat at arm’s length from it and then sneaked up on it and took a hasty sip. He was thinking ahead to his writing now, Sarah knew, and he gave no sign that he had heard her.

But Mom closed her book with a sigh and looked up. “August is still very much summer,” she said. “Especially this August! And my class is taking a lot more time than I imagined. So bear with me, okay? When the class is over, we’ll go out and find you a horse.” Mom was normally a social studies teacher, but this summer she’d gotten a job tutoring some fifth graders in math.

Sarah stirred her blueberry yogurt into a purple whirlpool. “Then school will start, and you still won’t have any time!”

“We’ll go on the weekends.”

“We could go on the weekends now,” Sarah muttered. She was on the edge of turning this into a fight, and she couldn’t seem to help it.

“Sarah,” Mom said, “choosing you a horse is going to take more mental energy than I can muster right now. It’s very important that we make the right decision, and I don’t want to rush it. Okay?”

It isn’t going to be your horse! This time Sarah managed to keep her thought silent.

“I’m sorry it’s being such a dull summer,” Mom said after a minute. “But you do have your lessons, and you have Herky to ride. Remember?”

Sarah didn’t answer. Back in the spring, when Albert asked her to help condition Herky for the Hundred Mile Trail Ride, it had seemed like a wonderful idea. She’d known she was facing a horseless summer, but here was a chance to ride every day. What she hadn’t known was how boring it could be, getting ready for the horse equivalent of the Boston Marathon. It was just like jogging, and Sarah hated jogging.

Mom pushed back from the table and put her bowl in the sink. “Ask Jill to come over.”

“I told you—she has to baby-sit every day!”

“I could drop you off over there.”

Sarah slumped deeper in the chair. She didn’t want to go to Jill’s house, and Jill didn’t want her there. Pete and Fred were twice as annoying when Sarah came over, because they could get Jill so much angrier. When Pete and Fred were quiet, the two little ones needed something.

“Well, I can’t help you, Sarah, unless you’ll help yourself a little!” Mom said, running out of patience. But she gave Sarah’s braids a friendly tug in passing. “I’m sorry. Maybe we can go to a nice air-conditioned movie tonight.” She gathered up her book bag and lunch and went out the door. Dad had already disappeared into his study.

Slowly Sarah got up from the table and washed the breakfast dishes. She swept the floor, and she fluffed Star’s cedar dog bed. She had wanted to have a job this summer, to earn some money for her horse. But Mom got a job first. She couldn’t drive Sarah back and forth, and there was nowhere to work that was close enough to bike to.

So Sarah was supposed to be keeping house this summer, and her allowance was set aside for horse money. Only with Dad in his study all day and Mom gone, the house never got dirty at all. Fifteen minutes every morning put things in shape for the day, and then there was nothing to do again.

When the kitchen was clean, Sarah went out to the barn. She filled Goldy’s water bucket and gave the fat young goat an armful of hay.

Then she went up to her room. It felt warm and muggy, with no air stirring. She sat on the bed and looked at the photo on her wall: a round, shaggy bay horse, gazing back at the camera with a mischievous expression. Barney.

Through the last school year Barney had been Sarah’s horse. Missy, his owner, was away at college, and Missy’s mother was having an operation and couldn’t take care of him. Sarah answered the ad: “Wanted—someone to board one horse through May. Hay and expenses provided, free use.” She met Barney, and she fell in love. Foolish, because Missy would never give him up, but inevitable. And it was just as inevitable that come spring, Missy would take him home again.

Sarah still saw Barney every week; in fact, she was going to see him today. Missy was giving her riding lessons. But it wasn’t the same, just as riding Herky wasn’t the same. What Sarah really longed for was to set off on a trail ride in the cool woods, to stay out as long as she wanted, and go wherever she pleased. She wanted a stall to clean and a saddle to soap, and a friendly nicker when she walked into the barn.…

Quickly Sarah turned from the picture. She packed The Black Stallion and two tattered horse magazines into her book bag, put in her radio, and, after a stop at the refrigerator for some iced tea, headed out to the hammock, where she’d spent most of the summer. Star wanted to follow, but Sarah shut her in the kitchen. She couldn’t stand looking at Star’s thick collie fur or listening to her pant. It just made the day seem that much hotter.

Missy arrived right after lunch, in her beat-up car, Old Paint. Old Paint was mostly blue, with a green fender, an orange door, and an all-over dappling of brown rust retardant.

“God,” she said, switching off the radio as Sarah got in. “It’s so hot! I had the air conditioners on in all the rooms, and I almost wanted to stay there!” Missy cleaned bathrooms and changed beds at the economy motel down the road.

Sarah settled cautiously into the seat. Old Paint’s upholstery had been chewed by a dog, and pieces of vinyl could stick into your back. “How was work?”

Missy groaned.

“Is it horrible?” Sarah asked.

“No,” Missy said. “It’s just boring, and you have to get up every morning and do it. My parents brought me up wrong! When they should have been slave-driving and making me have a paper route, they let me just ride. How’m I ever going to work for my living, with a childhood like that?”

“I wish I had a job.”

“You do?” Missy had stopped at the end of the dirt road, and she looked at Sarah in astonishment. “How come?”

Sarah looked away. “Um, because all my friends are too busy and I don’t have anything to do.” She succeeded in controlling her voice. It came out light and bouncy, with never a quaver.

“Yeah, and you don’t have a horse either,” Missy said.

“Lots of people don’t have horses.” Sarah had listened to a lot of radio this summer. She knew what people didn’t have. You could start from the very bottom—enough food to keep you alive—and climb up the scale for a long, long time before you reached her level of need.

“Lots of people don’t want horses.” Missy looked both ways and then swung out onto the main road.

She was quiet for a few minutes, driving carefully. Owning a car was new for Missy, and behind the wheel she seemed younger, wide-eyed.

After a little while she said, “So, when are you guys going to start looking?”

Sarah opened her mouth to say something bright and meaningless, like “Soon!” But she knew her voice would sound exactly like Mom’s, and suddenly it was just too much.

“Maybe in September, we can spend two hours every weekend on it! I hate being a kid! If I were a grown-up, I’d just go out and do it!”

“I know,” said Missy. “When you have your own car—” She stopped. Sarah glanced over at her.

Missy wore a surprised, considering expression. “Sarah,” she said after a moment, and her voice made Sarah sit up straighter. Something was about to happen.…

“Sarah, I have a car!”

“Yes.” Sarah waited, but Missy just sat there, still wearing that awakened look. “And?”

“I could drive you!” Missy said. “If you want to see some horses.”

Sarah stared. If you want to see some horses …

“Of course, we couldn’t buy a horse,” Missy said. “We’d just be looking, but you could get some ideas.” She glanced away from the road. “What d’you think?”

Sarah felt too stunned to speak. But Missy was starting to look uncertain and maybe a little hurt. At last Sarah blurted out, “You’d want to? I mean, don’t you have other stuff you’d rather be doing?”

Missy gave a sharp little laugh. “Well, yes, I could always can string beans or call up high school friends and hear about their love lives. That’s taking a lot of my time right now, but I could squeeze you in!”

Sarah barely heard her. She was arriving at a stable with Missy, horse after horse was being brought out for them, but Sarah, led by an instinct she didn’t understand, was drawn toward a lonely corner stall. The horse inside was considered dangerous, he was neglected, but as soon as Sarah saw him, she knew …

“But will your mother go for it?” Missy asked. “I mean, do you think she’d trust me not to let you fall in love with the wrong horse?”

Sarah stared at her blankly for several seconds. Then her brain seemed to click on. “What a nice idea!” she could hear Mom saying. “Go ahead!”

But she could also hear Mom say, “I’d rather you wait, Sarah, till I can take you. Such an important decision—I don’t want to rush it.” An important decision—no, Mom might not trust Missy to keep things under control.

And if she says no, Sarah thought, I won’t be able to stand it! When she just thought about it, something seemed to tighten around her unbearably.

“I don’t know,” she said. “So maybe we’d better not tell her.”

Missy frowned for a moment, doubtfully. Then her face cleared. “After all, we’re just looking. Where’s the harm in looking?”

2

Plots

Neither of them even considered the riding lesson. Missy gathered up some horse newsletters and sales sheets and refreshments, and they headed down to the barn, where it was cool, to plan.

The path to the barn was narrow and so steep that it was nearly a set of stairs. “Has your mother been down here since her hip got better?” Sarah asked. Mrs. O’Brien, sitting in the living-room chair in front of her fan, didn’t seem any more mobile than she had been last fall.

“I don’t think so,” Missy said. “She’d probably better start, so she can get in shape for winter.”

The barn was small and old, with a big sliding door on each end. Both doors were open now, and that seemed to pull a breeze through the wide passageway, a breeze that Sarah hadn’t felt anywhere else.

“I’ll let Barney out,” Missy said, opening his stall door. “Hi, guy! Want to come be with us? It’s cooler out here.”

There was a pause, then the thud of a horse’s hooves on bare wood, and Barney appeared around the end of the stall door. Pert and cheerful despite the heat, he pointed his ears toward Sarah briefly, then walked straight to the extra stall that was Missy’s tack room. It was also the place where she stored grain. He leaned over the half door as far as his neck would reach.

“Friendly, isn’t he?” Missy said, sitting beside Sarah on the floor. But Sarah didn’t mind. For the first time all summer she had seen Barney without a pang.

Missy handed her a bottle of iced tea and a paper and pencil.

“First things first. What kind of horse do you want?”

Sarah looked across the aisle at Barney. He stood nuzzling the latch of the tack-room door, his eyes wide and thoughtful.

“I want one just like Barney.”

“No, you don’t,” said Missy calmly, opening one of the newsletters and running her finger down a column of ads.

Sarah’s mouth fell open. The hot jealousy she always used to feel toward Missy surged up again.

“You’re already as tall as I am,” Missy went on, “and you’re not even in eighth grade yet. You’ll want something bigger, for a start.”

“Okay, bigger. But I want a Morgan.”

“Think so?”

“Yes,” said Sarah, crisply. She had always been in awe of Missy, as a college student, as a superior rider, as the owner of Barney. But if Missy was going to bully her and tell her what she did or did not want, she might as well stick with Mom.

“I’m not trying to tell you what you want,” Missy said, looking a little worried. At the echo of her own thoughts, Sarah had to smile. Missy grinned back at her.

“You’re like a girl at a football game,” she said. “You’ve got a whole fieldful of potentially gorgeous hunks in front of you, but they’re all hidden underneath helmets and shoulder pads. You shouldn’t even restrict yourself to one team yet, let alone decide you’re in love with number eleven.”

“Oh, God, I’d never fall in love with a football player!”

“It’s too early to say that, too,” said Missy, with a mischievous look. “Anyway, why don’t you make a list of what you want in a horse, and I’ll go through this bunch of ads, and we’ll see if we come up with anything that matches?”

“Okay.” It was the kind of thing Sarah had been doing all summer anyway. She must have two dozen lists, tucked into the pages of her favorite books.

“And try to put them in order of importance. Like—you might want a black horse, but if it’s exactly the right size, that’s obviously more important.”

I don’t want a black horse, Sarah thought. “Bay,” she wrote firmly at the top of her paper.

Now, how big? Barney was thirteen-three hands—just the right size, Sarah thought. But Missy didn’t think so. “Fifteen hands?” Sarah wrote.

Morgan. Barney was half Morgan, and Morgans were the best, Sarah thought. They were beautiful and cheerful and friendly, and a Morgan could do anything—drive, trail ride, jump, and even pull a plow. “Morgan.” She underlined it.

“Smart.”

“Trained English.”

The list grew quickly. “Sound. Sensible. Trailers easily.” And the personality: “Loves people. Loves to go places. Loves goats.”

By now the horse was living in Sarah’s mind, in a way he hadn’t all summer. (He? Yes. “Gelding,” Sarah wrote on her list.) He was beautiful, with large, calm eyes. When she entered his stall, he turned his head with a gentle, inquiring expression. He was fast—she wrote that down—and smooth-gaited, and he stopped instantly at the word Whoa, no matter what. “Emergency brake,” Sarah wrote.

The list was long now, and when Sarah looked it over, she couldn’t make one thing seem more important than another. He was bay. She could see that—

“What kind of price range?” Missy asked, breaking into Sarah’s dream. “Do you have any idea what your parents want to pay?”

“Well … we aren’t rich,” Sarah said. Mom was teaching math, after all, and she wouldn’t do that unless she had to. “I guess it should be as low as possible.”

“You’re in luck,” Missy said. “The horse market was really booming a while ago, but now it’s gone bust. There are a lot of cheap horses out there! Okay, I’ll rule out—”

A sudden metallic clatter, like the lid of a garbage can falling off, came from the tack room. The door was open, and all they could see of Barney was his rump.

“You brat!” Missy said, scrambling to her feet. “How did you get in there without making any noise?” She disappeared into the tack room. Sarah heard her scolding, and then she heard Barney take one last enormous mouthful, a shoveling, crunching sound. When Missy backed him out, he was still chewing and dribbling oats onto the floor.

“Pig!” Missy said. “You’re staying here with us.” She sat beside Sarah again, holding on to the rope. Barney stood over them and dropped oats into their hair.

“Let me see your list,” Missy said, “and you look at these ads.”

The only horse ads Sarah had seen all summer had been in the newspaper, and from May through August there had been a total of nine. Now she had three whole pages of Horse for Sale ads in front of her, and that was from only one newsletter. She wanted to read them all, but Missy was already skimming the list. Sarah skipped down to the first circled ad: “Morgan gelding. Fourteen hands, twelve years old. Rides and drives, good with children. Price negotiable, good home a must.”

“He sounds great!”

Missy looked over her shoulder. “Of course, we don’t know what negotiable means. Could be hundreds, could be thousands. But there’s no harm in looking.”

“No.” Sarah was already skipping down the page. Young broodmares, an Arab stock horse, a two-year-old Morgan/Standardbred cross—

“A two-year-old?”

“Huh? No, I circled that for the other horse, the Morgan mare. You don’t want a two-year-old.”

Sarah’s imagination had already covered years of sensitive training and unexpected early triumphs. She was entering the Olympics, herself a sophomore in college, the horse a mature and spectacular eight—

“Why not?”

“Bad combination. One of you should know something.”

“Oh.” A little hurt—and after all, a winter of caring for Missy’s precious Barney had been worth years of experience—Sarah read on. “Six-year-old Morgan mare, old-type, bred in the purple. Seen it all, done it all. Reasonably priced.”

“Sounds good, I guess.”

Missy shrugged. “Well, who knows? I don’t think the truth in advertising laws apply, but it’s worth taking a look. Now, there’s one thing missing from your list. What do you want to do with your horse?”

Sarah stared at her. “Well, ride.”

Missy smiled. “I know, but what kind? Trail riding? Showing? Jumping?”

“Yes.”

“All of those?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Sarah said. She’d taken riding lessons, she’d pounded out a lot of miles conditioning Herky, and she’d played around on Barney. Other than that she hadn’t done much. She didn’t even know what was possible. “That’s why I want a Morgan. Morgans can do everything.”

“If you get the right Morgan,” Missy said. “So how do we do this? Should I do the calling, so your mother doesn’t start to wonder?”

“That makes sense.” Sarah hated calling strangers.

“And what will you tell her? She’s bound to notice that you’ve found something to do with yourself.”

Sarah considered. “I’ll say we’re going swimming.”

“Oh, good! We will go swimming! I know some really good spots. Meanwhile,” Missy said, “tomorrow’s my day off, and there’s a big Morgan show I was going to go to. Want to come?”

“Will they have horses for sale?”

“None you can afford,” said Missy, “but we can scope ’em out.”

On the way home Sarah had Missy stop at Albert’s. She hadn’t ridden Herky today. On riding lesson days Herky had the afternoon off.

Albert and his father were milking. The big barn smelled wonderful: fresh pine sawdust, fresh hay, fresh milk, and sweet fresh cows.

Albert stood up from beside a cow as Sarah approached. He was so deeply tanned that his teeth and the whites of his eyes flashed. And he was thin and weary-looking.

At the end of school Albert had been fat, but a summer in the saddle and out broiling in a hayfield had melted him away. Now the waist of his jeans looked as if it would go around him twice, and he hauled in the slack with an old leather belt.

“Hi, Alb. I can’t ride Herky tomorrow.”

Albert frowned. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I’m going to a horse show with Missy.”

“Oh.” Albert considered. “I guess he could use another afternoon off. Sure, go ahead.”

“I wasn’t asking your permission, Albert!”

“You weren’t?” Albert looked puzzled.

“No! You aren’t my boss.”

“Oh. No. I never said I was.”

“You didn’t have to,” Sarah muttered, turning away. But, she realized, Albert really needed her. At the end of the month he was going to ride Herky one hundred miles in three days—forty miles on each of the first two days and twenty the last morning. They had to complete the miles within a certain time, and Herky had to come in sound. His pulse, temperature, and breathing rate would be checked at points along the way, and he’d be judged on how quickly he returned to normal.

That meant a lot of miles now, to get him in shape, and Albert simply didn’t have time to do them all. Some of it was up to Sarah.

So I guess Albert is my boss, she thought. She’d have to remember that and be responsible.

There was no reason not to tell Mom about the show, but Sarah tried to keep her excitement hidden. She wanted to bring it up in her own way and not whenever Mom happened to notice.

Supper tonight was cottage cheese with pesto and a marinated tomato salad, which Mom put proudly in the center of the table.

“Finally, enough tomatoes to make something with! The green peppers are ready, too. Pretty good for someone who hasn’t had a garden in fifteen years, hmm?”

“And who used to hate gardening,” Dad said, shoveling tomatoes onto his plate. “Your father had a lot to say about you and that garden last time he was here.”

“He never let me do the fun stuff!” Mom said. “Anybody would rather go riding than weed.” Mom didn’t let Sarah even touch a weed; not that she was dying to, but it would have been something to do.

“Speaking of gardens.” Now Mom turned to Sarah. “Goldy was testing the barnyard fence this afternoon. I hope you’ll spend some time going over it tomorrow.”

Sarah groaned inwardly. Why now? Goldy had had all summer to think this up. “I can’t,” she said. “I was going to tell you—Missy said she’d take me to the big Morgan show tomorrow.”

Mom gave her a direct, thoughtful look, the kind of look Sarah had been hoping to avoid.

“I can lock Goldy in the stall,” Sarah said quickly, “and I’ll fix the fence the day after.”

“Where is this show?”

“Northampton. It’s huge, Missy says. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see some horses for sale!”

At that Mom looked a little guilty, as Sarah had hoped she might. Nothing had been said this evening about a nice air-conditioned movie. “All right,” Mom said. “As long as you realize, Sarah, you won’t find a horse exactly like Barney. Not anywhere, but especially not at a big show like that.”

I was right! Sarah thought. Mom was cautioning her about just going to a horse show. Imagine what she’d say if she knew their other plan!

3

The Morgan Show