FICTION | Keli Flynn Davidson Puissance

FICTION

Puissance

By Keli Flynn Davidson

“The only reason God put horses and children in our lives was to break our hearts.” Katie’s Irish grandmother had said this often, although sometimes she had bemoaned horses and dogs, or dogs and children. But she had understood this simple truth: Horses break your heart. Katie already knew this, like she knew that horses also break bones and bank accounts and sometimes families. Her father was a watery-eyed failure of a horse trainer, and he stayed with the horses after her mother left and took Katie and her sister with her, and it broke him, or the horses did. Katie wasn’t sure, or maybe it didn’t matter anymore. But despite this, horses still mattered to her, because it was horses that first taught her that love doesn’t know logic, and no amount of knowing could ever stop love anyway. What the Irish mean when they shrug and talk of fate is just that: No knowledge could ever stave off a broken heart, just like no knowledge could ever keep a drunk from his drink. It’s not the knowing that deals the hand of fate, but it’s the knowing that breaks your heart, because the wanting will trump the knowing, every single time.

Katie was twelve when she first understood her father’s love of horses, and it seeped into and became her very bones.

“Shush Katie, they’re not done yet.”

“Oh Papa, he has no more, you know that, right? Don’t let him fall.” Katie pleaded and tugged at her father’s weathered coat, not taking her eyes off the spent little horse and the young rider astride him. She didn’t comprehend, on that cold night, years ago, when they were among thousands of spectators at the Washington International Horse Show who were all equally swept up in the hopeless scene, that her father had no hand in the fates playing before them.

“Katie, this trial is called Puissance. It’s from an old word that means strength, and the strength to do this test must come from the heart, not the hoof,” Frank Sullivan said, and he pounded his leathered fist to his chest when he got to the word heart. “The biggest heart will always win, Katie, and we’ve no way of knowing if that means the biggest horse.” He knelt down to speak to her when he told her this.

“He’s so little, he can’t jump as high as those big horses, it’s not fair! He has no more, look at him.”

She needn’t have asked him to look, as all eyes in the vast stadium were upon the small, compact horse, who stood splaylegged, head down, and blowing hard. His chestnut, coppery coat was so dripped in sweat that he now appeared to be the dark shadow of a horse. For jumping, he was put together all wrong. He was indeed too small, cow-hocked, and his head was a bit mulish, with a lopsided white star in the center, which radiated like a headlight as he approached the jumps. He would have been far less conspicuous at a rodeo, but here, at the final evening of one of the world’s most esteemed horse shows, he was the most unexpected of finalists in the Puissance.

Puissance, the Grand Prix of jumping, wherein the jumps are raised and then brutally raised again, until, perhaps, one horse and rider defy the odds and clear the last, highest obstacle cleanly. The event exploits the very best of horses who gamely tackle what is not natural to them, but rather what is asked of them. It also displays some of the worst of men, the voyeurism of watching what might very well maim those giving their all.

The little horse had been outclassed all evening by the other, much larger, more eloquent jumpers who had qualified for the Puissance finale. The leggy warmbloods and thoroughbreds graced the audience with their exquisite presence. Their pristine riders in shiny black boots were perched in a seat so firm as to be one with their mount. These pairs possessed a beauty that espoused class, the sort of class that makes people who have never touched, ridden, or smelled a horse — much less been one with one — buy paintings of them. Yet, despite these horses’ captivating, rhythmic presence, the audience had grown bored with them, and were spellbound instead by the unlikely little horse with an unfortunate head and a cowgirl rider.

“Little,” as the crowd began to call him, seemed unaware of their attention, as was his rider. Throughout the day, as Katie and her father walked through the barns, they overheard the crowd querying one another:

“Are you going to stay and watch that little horse go again?”

“I heard that old fool Sullivan hauled him all the way up here from Georgia.”

“That horse must be allergic to wood from the way he gets his legs up over those fences.”

“There are wagers at the bar that he will clear six-and-a-half, run by there before you leave if you can’t stay for the show.” But no one left, and the stadium was overfull as Frank pulled Katie

up onto the bleacher rails so as not to miss what would surely be the last round.

“Papa, do you…”

“Shush Katie, they’re coming now.”

They had been glued to the previous rounds. The statuesque jumpers were given the respectful silence of the audience, followed by its polite applause. The audience clapped, even for those who broke the musical rhythm of hoof beats, punctuated by silence as the horse leapt into the air with the sudden clanging of a fence down, or the collective gasp by the audience of a rider down. Some animals flat out refused to jump and veered off at the last moment as the audience emitted a collective “Oooh” in response.

“Damn.” That’s what Frank said when they watched Little come on, because from their vantage point, you could not see the horse at all, except for the tips of his ears, as his body was blocked by the insurmountable wall. His ears bobbed in and out of view as he galloped toward them and the jump. When the horse’s ears disappeared as he crouched to spring for the jump, the rider yelled out “GIT!” Then the horse would git, and git right over that wall, quite out of the character, rhythm, and protocol of the Washington International. Watching them, the audience became one person, all breaths inhaled and exhaled together, and their voyeurism transformed into a collective power to will the doubtful pair up and over. The crowd shared rapturous joy when they made it, again and again. The portrait horses, one by one, were eliminated to the sounds of polite applause.

Expensively-dressed women cheered each other’s glasses, spilling their champagne, as they shared this implausible scene. Men well-invested in horse flesh remained perplexed, but

everyone felt like they were in the middle of something rare, but very fine.

“Damn.” Frank said, shaking his head. He turned to Katie, whose eyes filled with tears. There was only the Little left to jump the impossible wall that had just felled the only other horse left, a presumed American Team qualifier. But the little horse was spent, everyone could see it. His chest heaved and his head gave occasional birdlike jerks to clear the sweat that ran down his face and into his eyes. Each round he had given his absolute all, and now, one more wall was erected — a stadium record, the gleeful announcer informed the crowd.

Frank had taught Katie what he loved about horses. He told her how horses so often do things for their rider that defy their very nature, and that most people miss the horse’s sacrifice. “Katie, think of all the ways that horses are used out there — jumping, in lots of forms, cutting, dressage, really everything that we see these horses doing, with perhaps the exception of racing, which you know I think is their least interesting use. These all betray horses’ nature because, without first being taught to by us, they wouldn’t do it. Forget scenes like that one in National Velvet, when the untrained horse sailed over a fourfoot stone wall.” He shook his head. “No. It’d never happen like that. We’ve taken the horse and molded him to our will. We taught horses to jump, Katie, we asked them, again and again, to ignore their instincts and trust us to do what we demand of them. The horse has but one defense, and that’s flight. When we get on a horse, we take this away, and he must fight his own nature in order to oblige us.”

Frank held the bridle while the rider mounted. She swung her leg wide, without grace. “We’ll be on the other side,” he said. The girl leaned down, stroked the horse’s neck, and started

to say something, but Frank stopped her

“Trust him, he’ll know what to do” he said and pulled his flat cap low and raised his jacket collar against the cold. He put one hand deep into his pocket and took Katie’s hand with the other. They walked back up into the stands to watch the ride.

As they waited, a man Katie did not recognize broke from the crowd and grabbed Frank’s shoulder. “For God’s sake, Sullivan, pull that poor animal before you kill the both of them.”

Frank removed the man’s hand from his shoulder and turned back to face the arena, but Katie felt her father’s hands tremble when he braced her up on the rail.

Just outside the arena, the rider petted and reassured the horse, and she leaned into his ear from her saddle to say something to him. His ear turned back to listen, as if they were conspiring. It was like a quaint scene from a child’s pony show, but here, having downed the best, the pair’s harmonious relationship was mesmerizing. There was white smoke from the horse’s breath, so cold was the night, as the rider gathered her reins. Then, as one, they leapt forward. Frank’s grip tightened on Katie, and together they watched the horse’s ears coming up and down, just tipping over the top of the record-breaking wall. It was like that cowgirl was just willing that horse over the jumps, and the audience was still, and it was as if the entire world was still, waiting.

“GIT!”

The silent, transcendent flight of that pair suspended all noise in the vast stadium for what seemed a very long time, and no one exhaled. Then, the audience lost their magic ties — the magic of their collective will that had held the little horse aloft. As the pair fell back to earth, the only sound was the soft thud of his hoofs hitting the dirt on the other side of the wall, having

cleared it cleanly. The audience broke apart into wild screaming. The shared experience of this flying, reckless hope would never be repeated. That crazy rider had been oblivious to the highdollar world she and her diminutive horse just flown over, the world that Katie’s father had never quite mastered before that night, and never would again. Katie later learned that the rider was just what she appeared to be, a kid, not too much older than herself, who had been jumping her un-papered horse in a backyard. But Frank had believed that they could make it, perhaps because he needed them to, and that faith had infected the girl, who then believed that the little horse could make it, so much so that she trusted him to do it. The horse, in turn trusted her, and their giant leap of faith had won the whole damn thing.

The stadium would be still there cheering, no doubt, and the girl with the Little would be still there looking bewildered, most likely, but Frank saw how the horse stammered to regain his balance amidst the cheers. He knew girls too and turned to Katie. “Meet me in the wash racks. The girl’s in shock, and the horse is hurting.”

Frank had to cut the girl down from the horse with his pocketknife. She had woven her hands into the braided mane and blood seeped from her fingers when they were freed. She staggered and fell back onto the hard ground. She could fly, but she couldn’t walk. Frank sat her atop a hay bale next to Katie, then washed the horse in a liniment bath and dried him before he wrapped the legs, feeling them up and down for heat. He threw woolen horse blankets over Katie and the rider, both shivering, and not just from the cold. Katie never saw the girl again, or the horse. She drifted to sleep on a hay bale, wrapped in the heavy blankets, while listening to the other trainers, riders and owners talk to her father. A fire in a barrel outside gave off

smoke that intermingled with the smell of horses, hay, leather, and whiskey, to flavor the air that was peppered with the small, late-night talk of horsemen.

Katie remembered this as the last time she was with her father. Her mother married an accountant and they moved out west, taking Katie and her sister far from their father and his horses. The accountant gave away their dog, and adored the son he had with her mother. Later, Maggie would bring up other times that the girls had seen their father after they moved out west. Katie would always fail to bring those memories into focus, but instead would recapture this bit of him, and recall the smells and soft talking as the heavy horse blanket closed in on her.

“He was at Grams’ funeral and wake,” Maggie would offer.

“Was he?”

That weathered man in a suit, uncomfortable and so out of place and time, giving a formal handshake to her stepfather. No, in Katie’s mind, she had drifted to sleep, deep in the aura of witnessing something so grand as to have been part of it, and when she woke, her father was gone. He went with his love, but not before sharing that love with her. This little piece of her father, and of life, became a dog-eared paperback in Katie’s mind, a page to fall back into whenever she found herself failing in strength or in love. As the years stretched out, many things that Katie loved joined the lost ranks of her father and dog, but this bit of time could never be lost or given away. Another person might hold and cherish their parent’s sterling watch, but Katie held close her stories of her father and his horses, and turned them over and over, like a river does stone, until the edges smoothed out and found a comfortable place to rest in her heart.