Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [60]
Gladys arrived in a rented horse car, and was backed out of it easily enough. “Come on, you old sweetie pie,” Billie said. “There! Isn’t she gorgeous?” Gladys turned around obediently and let herself be viewed. She had a round thick body, with legs that were too short for her bulk. She was part Welsh pit pony, part Arab, said Billie. That accounted for her odd shape. It also meant she would want to eat a lot. Welsh ponies were like that. Billie had made the trip in the horse car with her; she’d bought her a new bridle.
Nell was expected to pay for this bridle, and also for the horse-car rental: Gladys was now hers, it appeared. Surely that had not been the original understanding, but Billie thought it had been. She seemed to feel she was doing Nell a favour – had given her a priceless gift. She didn’t charge for the original hundred dollars, nor for her own time. She’d taken a week off work to set Gladys up with Nell. She made a point of mentioning that.
Gladys regarded Nell through her long, frowsy forelock. She had the weary, blank, but calculating look of a carnival con artist: she was sizing Nell up, figuring her out, estimating how to get round her. Then she ducked her head and snatched at a tuft of grass.
“None of that, you naughty girl,” said Billie, jerking Gladys’s head up by the bridle. “You can’t let them get away with anything,” she told Nell. She led Gladys to the end of the drive shed, where there was a fenced-in space originally intended for goats – Nell had fought off the goat idea – and tied her up to one of the posts. “We’ll put her in here for now,” she said.
Billie volunteered to stay at the farm until Gladys was settled in, so Nell made up the recently acquired pullout couch in the former back parlour. The previous summer, Nell and Tig had tried to incubate some eggs in there, turning them and sprinkling them with water as per the instructions in the booklet that came with the incubator, but something went wrong and the chicks emerged with goggling eyes and swollen, blue-veined, unfinished stomachs, and had to be hit with a shovel and buried in the back field. Howl dug them up again, several times, after which the cats got into them, with unpleasant results. Nell kept finding tiny claws in unexpected places, as if the chicks were growing up through the barnyard dirt like disagreeable weeds.
Nell had taken to keeping tomato plants under a grow light in the back parlour, but she’d moved them to the upstairs landing in preparation for Billie’s week-long stay.
Much had to be done for Gladys. Equipment was needed. Billie contributed some of her old horse things – a brush, a curry comb, a hoof pick – but the saddle had to be bought. It was second-hand, but still – thought Nell – breathtakingly expensive.
“You need the English, not the Western,” Billie had said. “That way you’ll learn to be a real rider.” What she meant, it turned out, was that with the English saddle you had to grip with your knees or else you would fall off. Nell would rather have had the Western saddle – she had no interest in plummeting off a horse – but at least with Gladys it wasn’t very far down to the ground, because of her stumpy little legs.
Saddle soap had to be applied to the saddle and worked in, metal items on the tackle had to be polished. A horse blanket was needed too, and a crop, and some old towels, for rubbing Gladys down. Gladys would have to be rubbed down like a boxer after every session of exercise, said Billie, because horses were delicate creatures, and the number of diseases or conditions they could get was staggering.
After the tackle had been brought up to scratch, Gladys herself had to be gone over, inch by inch. Nell did the work – because she had to learn how, didn’t she? – with supervision by Billie. Dust and old hair came off Gladys in clouds, long white horsehairs from her mane and tail detached themselves and floated onto Nell. Gladys bore all this patiently, and might even have enjoyed it. Billie said she was enjoying it