Childhood 3: Riding Dark Horses Bareback and Barefoot
The boy wants a horse. The dad gets him a horse— a bronco he was told which use to be a thoroughbred, a black wind of a creature who barely tolerates the old, cracked saddle from the dad’s jockey days.
It takes two track hands to hold the reins, to keep the stallion still when the dad addresses him .
In the dad’s right hand is a milking stool, in the left, the wriggling boy in his remorse.
The stallion whinnies and snorts, releasing fury into the cold air. Ice daggers settle and prick the hands’ back palms. Hocks and tendons twitch cyclones. Hooves paw the crying turf.
The dad waits. The equine storm settles into its eye. The dad rests the milking stool into the bleeding earth. He lifts the boy onto it, urging him to swing his leg up over the saddle and gently to the other side.
The child titters a little, enough to settle himself, but not enough to show the fear inside.
The dad hands the child the reins. The boy knows how to pull the horse left and right, to steady him. He imagined it in play a thousand times.
But he wasn’t ready for the wild, breaking rhythms of the real thing, a thing that wants nothing more than to buck him off, trample him from face to toe, bloody him so that this pretend little man would never want to mount or ride him ever again.
And so, the stallion kicks. In a wild-eye fury he rears. Not many could ride him for the eight seconds of glory. Certainly not this little man.
And so, the child falls off in less than two. Only his father saves him from avenging hooves.
Bathed in mud, the child sees bloody knuckles, feels shame. In his muddy child, bloody son the father feels hurt and pride, yet an opportunity to teach the boy the value of second chances, and the victories that come with persistence, persistence, persistence.
So, the father settles the stool once more into the bruised turf just starting to scar over. The hands corral the stallion from the far corners of the track and bring the creature to him for the boys second try. The father remembers that six was the number it took for him to finally track a line.
The hands find an old brown saddle towel drying on a stable post and bring it over. The father gently wipes the mud off the boy’s face, shirt, pants and boots.
He lifts the boy one more time and places his feet gently on the stool. The boy’s feet heavy and bruised cannot support his weight and he falls into his father’s arms.
The father lifts him up, and with the help of the hands, guide the boy’s legs over the saddle, and position him into a proper mount.
The stallion rears but the horse is panting from all the galloping. He is thirsty and drinks greedily from the sopping sponge the hands place loosely on a riding crop. He turns his head and notices the stables with other horses, the fragrant sweet and inviting scent of hay coming from the stalls.
He knows the small irritant on his back is still there. He flicks his tail at it and misses. He decides to let it be, exist on him for the short trot to food.
The kicks are manageable for the boy now. The reins do not slack and remain easily in his control.
He pulls right, towards the stables, towards home just a few miles beyond. The stallion obeys.
The hands step away. The father removes the stool and steps away.
The boy and the stallion track the line to the stables. It’s a slow, steady and comfortable journey.
And the dismount is an easy one. No need for a stool to step down onto or for a father to help him down lest he fall. Even his tired heavy feet gladly held him up.
The boy removes his boots and his socks too.
The father noticed his son’s bruised feet. The father puts the stool down in front of the boy. He places the boy’s feet on it. He massages his son’s toes until the pain has gone and the heaviness has evaporated into the cold.
The bruises would take longer to heal and finally go away.
For now, they were comfortable with each other. For now, they would be fine in the tomorrows yet to be.
“He did it in two,“ the father notes inside to himself. He musses the boy’s hair in jealousy and a semi-pride.
“You’ll make a fine jockey, someday,” he amusingly says.
Or even a Cowboy or a Bronco Buster,” the son replies back.
“We will see. We will see,” father’s last words to his boy that sweet hurting day.
The father turns his back to his son. The boy gladly mounts him, barebacked and barefooted, for the short quarter-mile trot to the ninety five horsepower machine he would eventually be taught to drive.
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