Doubters and Dreamers

Unbroken

26 Unbroken I’m not sure where Dad dredged up the money to buy my older sister her first horse, a mottled Morab, a three-year-old filly named Gray Lady. My parents learned about the horse from Wren’s riding teacher at Grizzly Stables. “She’s near Martinez,” he told us, “in Pacheco Canyon.” One Sunday afternoon we headed out that way, along Alhambra Boulevard. In the muddy paddock Lady stood, tossing her head and snorting. The canyon oaks had shed some of their leaves—crenelated forms that littered the ground. In the dampness, I could detect the scent of molasses and hay, horehound and thistle. Above the canyon, ragged clouds drifted in a cold, blue sky. Barely saddle-broken, Lady was a lovely handful; her owner rode her using a faded blue surcingle and a hackamore. She responded to the man’s weight, his touch, his particular smell of sweat, faded denim, and worn leather boots. That day, my younger sister, Laurel, and I crowded near my mom, who tentatively held pieces of apple to the horse on the flat of her hand. Wren, fifteen in September, sat astride the young mare and, brighteyed , smiling, watched Dad write a check to complete the transaction. For the next years, Wren trained herself and Lady, remounting after each accident—a hoof-shaped bruise to her belly, a ripped upper lip, cracked ribs. I remember her first felt hat, the color of melted chocolate, her first belt buckle, showing a painted Appaloosa in relief, and her handsome first saddle with its rawhide seat and tooled leather, custommade by a guy in East Oakland. 27 Then she discovered her first cowboy, Dennis, who, because of a brain fever in childhood, had never learned to read, though he played a mean game of chess. He was slim and long-waisted, wore Wranglers and a tattered red mackinaw with a fake sheepskin lining. He pitched hay and manure, tending the horses for $1.25 an hour at the barn where Lady was stabled. Dennis could have been part Indian, like us, with his black hair and deep brown eyes. He could ride that green horse better than anyone. Mama fell in love with him too, said he reminded her of her favorite brother, and invited the stray young man to live with us in our rambling Berkeley home. One spring—this was much later—he pushed Laurel down in the corner of a stall at the racetrack, where he and the girls had been hotwalking thoroughbreds, and when she wouldn’t stop screaming, Wren came running with a shovel. Struggling with the cowboy’s lunging drunkenness, she whacked him on the back until he stumbled away. That was the end of that particular romance with the wild and unruly. The accusations my mom threw at Wren—“cheap” and “chippy”— subsided, and my older sister changed her life. Dad sent Dennis packing, and after that, no more pearl-buttoned shirts to iron. No horses, either—for awhile. My parents shipped Lady up to a farm in Oregon, where she was still high-strung, but finally, over time, grew sedate and wise, though she always had a mind of her own. ...