A Kingdom in a Horse Read Free

his father was unaware of David’s disappearance.
    The very next week David bought a second-hand bicycle with some money he had and tried running away again. This time his father caught up with him before night fell. And once again David felt humiliated. He was hungry and cold and pitying himself when his father found him.
    “I don’t want you to try running away again,” his father said on the way back. “I tried to make you understand why it is that I had to quit the rodeo. It would never have worked for us.” He paused and put an arm around David’s shoulders. “That was a dumb promise I made you. One day you’ll forgive me because you’ll understand that sometimes dreams have to end. I had a dream too, us, working together. It ended the second I saw you inside the arena.”
    The explanation didn’t mean anything to David. He grew more bitter after that. He decided to wait until he was sixteen and then leave. Openly, not sneaking away. Whatever would happen to him between now and then wouldn’t matter. At sixteen he would begin to live again.
    But again time seemed to stand still. The day of his thirteenth birthday came, and he tried not to think about the past or what this day was once to mean to him. He was glad his father had forgotten it was his birthday.
    “I’d like you to drive with me to Burlington this evening,” his father said after dinner that day.
    “Do I have to? I’ve got homework to do,” David said, getting up from the table.
    “I thought you’d finished it. I saw you shut the last book, and you sighed.”
    “I was going to study ahead for the test,” David said impatiently.
    “I need you to come with me. Get your coat.”
    Since they moved to Vermont his father had worked at all sorts of odd jobs, but blacksmithing was the thing that he did well, often, and enjoyed most. David would go with him whenever he had difficult horses to shoe or so many that his help was needed.
    They had pulled up in front of the complex of buildings where the monthly horse auction took place. When his father got out of the truck without taking his tools with him, David suddenly realized that his father had not forgotten his birthday, and that they had come here to look for a horse. He felt tricked and angry.
    “I don’t know if I ever told yon,” David said coldly to his father as they walked through the parking lot already beginning to fill up with cars, “but I really hate horses. I wouldn’t have one for a million dollars.”
    He watched his father’s face as he said it, and by the dim light he saw it change. The look of pain came over it, and he turned his eyes away.
    “That couldn’t be true,” his father said calmly. “You’ve always loved horses.”
    “I used to love a lot of things,” David said, and once again he looked up at his father.
    His father’s eyes blinked and then hardened. They walked silently, side by side, each feeling himself a stranger to the other.
    David did not mean to look at the horses, and he stayed back at the entrance of the great barn as his father walked the length of it looking over the animals. What caught David’s attention was a chestnut mare which stood in the passageway between the stalls. She was held by a man with a cane. There was nothing particularly special about her; she did not look well cared for, and her limpid blue eye, “the watch eye,” was not that unusual in a western horse. She has as much quarter horse in her, he thought, as she has thoroughbred. Her conformation was good, her legs strong, yet as thin and long as a race horse’s. Her neck would look better if the mane were either cut shorter or let grow. Whoever had cut the mane had done an equally bad job on the tail. It fell less than half way to the ground. The mare’s hips were outlined, the bones pressing against the dirty coat. He liked the wide white mark running from her eyes and narrowing slightly at the nostrils. And more than that, he liked the way the mare looked at him,