The Changeling (7 page)

Martha realized that no horse but Dolly could have tamed the terror she had felt when she was first thrown carelessly into a saddle by Mr. Smith, who owned the stables. Ivy had other reasons for her love. Ivy claimed that Dolly was enchanted. She was probably not actually a horse at all.

No one worried if children went into Dolly’s stall to play. Any kid who knew Dolly, knew that his own mother would sooner bite him or step on him than Dolly would. The way Dolly looked at you, even the way she moved when kids were around, made it plain that she thought of children as colt things, and herself as a kind of foster mother.

Martha and Ivy spent hours in Dolly’s stall. They curried her and polished her hooves and braided her mane and tail. They hid bits of apple in their pockets, down their necks, in the tops of their socks and even in their hair, and giggled madly while Dolly frisked them gently with a twitchy velvet nose. They kept her stall dazzlingly clean, and sometimes they sat in the sweet straw and talked for hours, leaning against Dolly’s legs. As long as they kept the flies shooed away, she never so much as stomped a foot.

The day that Kevin Smith, the grandson of the owner of the stables, came to the stall door and stood watching them, they had been daydreaming there, as usual, under Dolly’s placid gaze. They had been imagining the horses they would someday own, when they were old enough to have anything they wanted.

“I’ll have an arab mare,” Martha had said. “Sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail like Dolly, only she’ll be younger and maybe just a little prancier.”

Ivy’s eyes were dreamy. “I’ll have a coal black stallion,” she said, “with a bright gold mane and tail.”

Martha thought back over all the horse books she had known. “I don’t think you can,” she said. “I don’t think there are any that color—black with gold manes and tails.”

“How do you know?” Ivy asked.

“I just never heard of any,” Martha said.

Ivy shrugged. “So?” she said. “That’s no reason why I can’t have one. Why can’t I have something I never heard of?”

Martha was about to change her mare to gold with a black mane and tail, when Kevin’s head appeared over the stall door. Martha poked Ivy to warn her, and they were quiet, watching Kevin warily.

“What you doing with that old mare?” Kevin asked.

“Nothing,” Ivy said.

Kevin stared with an unfriendly grin for a minute, but as he turned away he said, “If she gets any thinner, my granddad’s going to sell her to the dog food factory.”

When he was gone, Martha and Ivy turned in unison to stare at Dolly, but she didn’t seem to have heard. At least, she only went on eating, nuzzling out the best parts of the hay and shaking it gently before beginning to chew. Without a word, Ivy led the way out of the stall and together she and Martha went on a silent horror-stricken search for Mr. Smith.

When they found him, he would not deny that it was true. “It may not be for quite a while yet,” he said. “But when a horse gets past a certain age, sometimes it gets to be impossible to keep any meat on their bones. No matter how much they eat, they just keep on getting thinner and thinner. You girls can understand that I can’t have skinny old nags here at Onowora Stables. I can’t have people saying that I don’t take care of my horses—and that’s what they would think.”

Martha could only stare at Mr. Smith in silent misery while waves of hot tears ran down her face, but Ivy’s dark eyes were dry and hooded like an angry cat’s.

“Well, I think—I think you’re a murderer!” she said, and grabbing Martha she jerked her away, and they ran. They went on running until they were halfway back to Bent Oaks on the ridge trail. Then they dropped flat on their backs in the grass beside the trail. While Martha sobbed, Ivy plotted; and by the time Martha had run out of tears, Ivy had a plan.

“We’ll steal her,” she said. Martha gasped and smiled, delighted and, of course, terrified.

“We’ll steal her at night,” Ivy said, “and take her to Bent Oaks Grove.”

“But they’ll find her there,” Martha said. “Someone will see her there and tell.”

“We’ll only leave her there until morning. We can get her as far as Bent Oaks Grove in the dark, and we’ll tie her there and go home. Then early in the morning—it will have to be Saturday—we’ll take her over the Ridge Trail and the High Trail into the Coast Range and let her go. There’s lots of grass there, and she can live with the deer, and we’ll go to see her now and then and take her oats and carrots.”

It seemed like a lovely plan to Martha until she realized exactly what was going to be asked of her. She, Martha Abbott, who had always had to have all the lights on before she would go down the hall to the bathroom, was going to have to crawl out her window in the dark after everyone else was in bed and go up the hill to Bent Oaks all by herself.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be scared.”

“Being scared won’t hurt you,” Ivy said. “Why don’t you bring Lion with you?”

“I don’t know,” Martha said. She hadn’t needed Lion much lately, and she wasn’t sure she could get him to come back. Besides she’d never taken Lion with her much further than down the hall—at least not in the dark. “I don’t know if I can.” Then she grinned faintly. “I think Lion will be scared, too.”

Ivy laughed. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll do it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Martha said weakly, wondering if she really meant it; and right up until Friday night at ten o’clock she wasn’t sure. But when ten o’clock came she really did climb out her window into the pitch dark, with only Tom’s flashlight, which she didn’t even dare use until she was past the Peters’ house and onto the open hillside. The flashlight made it easier to walk, but it didn’t help the fear, since every kind of horror seem to crowd the dim edge of its narrow beam. By the time Martha reached Bent Oaks where Ivy was waiting, she was sick with fright and besides that she seemed to have been stricken dumb. Ivy had to shake her and pound her on the back for quite a while before her voice began to come back.

“Stop. Stop it. You’re hurting me,” she finally forced out in a kind of sizzle between her clenched teeth. She went on sizzling because she knew she didn’t dare open her mouth any wider. She felt absolutely certain that once it got open, it would stay open, and all her fear would come out in a terrible, disgraceful howl, and probably her dinner along with it. “Come on,” she hissed. “Let’s do it quick because I think I’m going to be sick.”

All the way down the trail to the stables they had to stop from time to time while Martha clutched her stomach with one hand and her mouth with the other and moaned. Whenever she did, Ivy would whisper, “Go ahead and get it over with. You’ll feel better. Get it over with before we get to the stables.” But Martha couldn’t quite.

When they reached the stables, they skirted the yard to the rear and climbed the fence behind the buildings. Inside the stable everything was silent, except for the snuffle and bump of the horses; and dark, except for one dim bulb outside the front entrance. The girls made their way noiselessly down the sawdust-covered walkway between the stalls, to Dolly’s door. As Ivy stood on tiptoe to reach the latch, Dolly softly nickered her surprise to see them there at such a strange hour. As soon as they were inside the stall, she nuzzled their faces happily in greeting, and suddenly overcome with the thought of what was going to happen to all of them if they were caught, Martha began to cry. She leaned on Dolly’s manger, clutching her mouth while tears burned down across her hands.

Ivy, who was usually very patient with Martha’s weeping, almost lost her temper. “Stop it, this minute,” she said. “Here, you hold the flashlight while I get the rope around her neck.”

Martha managed to pull herself together, and the three of them made their way carefully through the stable, past the hitching racks, past the dark shadow of the Smiths’ house, across the yard to the front gate—where suddenly the horrible truth dawned on them. The front gate was closed and locked. The girls had never seen it even closed before, and it had never occurred to them that it would be locked at night. Of course, they could easily climb the fence, but there was no way in the world to get Dolly to the other side. They were still staring at the lock in unbelieving terror when the floodlights went on in the stable yard, and there was Mr. Smith standing close behind them carrying a gun.

Startled by the lights and the sudden appearance of Mr. Smith, Dolly sidestepped quickly, and her hoof came down on Ivy’s toes. Ivy screamed in pain, and that was the last straw. Martha’s stomach did what it had been threatening to do all evening. The next time Martha looked at Mr. Smith, the gun had disappeared. He’d probably realized that he had enough of an advantage without it.

Within a very few minutes, Dolly was back in her stall and Ivy and Martha were sitting in the kitchen of the Smiths’ house. Ivy, still angry, beautifully silent, had her shoe off and was soaking her rapidly swelling foot in a pan of water. Martha sat beside her, pale green and saturated with tears.

Mrs. Smith, whom the girls had rarely seen before, and who never seemed to take much part in the horsey doings of the rest of the Smiths, was bustling around in a bright-colored robe, and across the room Mr. Smith sat at the kitchen table saying nothing at all. Once he got up and came over to look at Ivy’s foot and agree with Mrs. Smith that it was not broken, only bruised. Then he went back to his chair.

Martha finally stopped crying, and her cheeks were just beginning to dry when she remembered something she’d heard about horse thieves. It hadn’t occurred to her before that that's what they were—horse thieves! A new tidal wave of tears flooded her face, almost drowning her in their hot flow.

“Now, now,” Mrs. Smith said. “You’ve got to stop that. It’s not so bad as all that.”

Martha mopped at her sopping face and gasped, “Do—do—they hang you if you’re only eight years old?”

“Oh, you poor little thing,” Mrs. Smith said, hugging Martha’s bowed head up against her. Then she turned to her husband and said, “Dan, what on earth is behind all this?”

Ivy spoke then for the first time since they’d been brought into the house. “You mean you don’t know what he’s going to do to Dolly?” she said. “That he’s going to send her away to be killed?”

“Dan?” Mrs. Smith said in a small, questioning voice.

“Could you come in the other room a minute, Lil,” Mr. Smith said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

The Smiths both went out, and Ivy turned to Martha. “Do you want to run for it?” she asked. “I can’t, but you could go right out the back door and run home.”

“No, no,” Martha whispered. “They know where I live, and besides I’m afraid to go over the trail alone.”

When the Smiths came back into the room, they were both smiling, and everything was suddenly all right. They had decided to drive the girls most of the way home—and not insist on telling their parents—if the girls would in turn promise to give up horse stealing. And about Dolly, Mr. Smith said, “We’ve decided to just turn her out on the winter pasture for the rest of her life. I do sell a horse to the factories now and then, but Dolly’s given more years of service than most. I guess she’s earned a retirement.”

Then, when it was over and Martha was jumping up and down with joy and relief, Ivy cried. Not buckets like Martha, but just two big tears that glittered in her eyes and turned her heavy eyelashes to thick shreds of wet satin. Ivy didn’t say thank you with words the way Martha was doing. But as she was sitting on the floor putting her shoe back on over her swollen foot, she looked up at the Smiths and smiled; and Martha noticed that the Smiths stood perfectly still looking down at her for a long time, as if they had seen something very strange or beautiful.

O
NE OF THE GOOD THINGS
that came from saving Dolly was getting to know Mrs. Smith. Martha and Ivy had scarcely seen her before the night of the kidnapping. They had caught glimpses of her once or twice in the stable, and once they had passed her walking on the trail carrying a metal tool chest and an easel. She was a small slender woman; and, although they knew she was a grandmother, she seemed to be of no particular age at all. She was a painter.

After the kidnapping incident, Mrs. Smith began talking to Martha and Ivy whenever they visited the stables, and very soon they were good friends. After a while they found out why Mrs. Smith took no part in the stable business. She told them she didn’t really approve of renting horses as a way of earning a living. Mrs. Smith had strange feelings about horses, at least strange for an adult. One day when Martha asked her if she liked horses she said, “I love some of them. Some of them I can’t stand.”

“Why?” was all that Martha could think to say, but Ivy went further.

“Which ones do you think are bad?”

“Well, the big gray, Matador, for instance,” she said. “Matador is cruel. He’d be a killer except that he is also a coward.”

By then Martha had thought of other questions, but Ivy was nodding her head as if she understood perfectly and agreed. So Martha only asked, “What about Dolly? What do you think about her?”

“Dolly is beautiful,” Mrs. Smith said. Beautiful was a word that Mrs. Smith used a great deal, about a great many things. Once she told Martha and Ivy that if they had to time to pose for her someday, she would like to paint their pictures. When Martha asked why, she smiled and said, “Because you two are very beautiful.”

Martha was amazed. She knew that Mrs. Smith used the word beautiful a lot, but still it was a surprise to hear it used to describe Ivy and herself. Ivy often seemed beautiful to Martha, but she’d heard grown-ups refer to Ivy as “unkempt” or “pitiful looking”; and as for herself, Martha had always known she was the unbeautiful Abbott.

But the picture did turn out to be very beautiful.

They posed for it in the pasture, near the edge of the lake. Martha stood beside the trunk of a small tree, looking up and with both hands stretched upward on the trunk. Ivy was stretched out on a limb just over her head. Mrs. Smith had them pose for several minutes while she sketched in the picture, and then she let them go away while she painted for a long time. Finally they came back while she put in their faces and hands, which turned out to be just about all of them that showed.