the home stretch, Hettienne warmed up Questa Volta. The Ormond ladies groused in a knot. In Simon’s hand, the silver of the stopwatch gleamed.
At Simon’s nod, Cousin Hal dismounted and cupped his hand around the bell’s breast-like orb, then pulled the lanyard to test its muted clapper, brrrrrrippp! Simon nodded. Hooking two fingers at his lips, he let tear a hunter’s whistle. Then he waved his hat to Hettienne and circled it around his head. Hettienne pranced to them on Questa Volta.
“David. Hal,” Simon said as Questa Volta approached the taut rope, which now became a starting line across the dirt track. The colt was so muscled that watching his hide move was like staring at the transformations in the raw charcoal of beams razed by fire.
When the black colt steadied behind the rope, Simon raised the silver stopwatch. With a click of his thumb, he brought the watch down in a silver flash. Hal pulled the bell. Simon and David dropped the rope. At the rip of the bell, Questa Volta lunged. In no time, the colt and Hettienne were full out, shooting toward the first turn, then shrinking to a distant dust boil along the back side of the dirt oval, hand riding, the horse taking all the ground it wanted.
Straightening in the homestretch, she coaxed, and Questa Volta switched leads without any hauling. David’s and Hal’s faces both went blank; the Ormond girls all sullenly tucked their chins to their collarbones. Simon straightened his shoulders and in that moment seemed to shed decades.
In her hand, the riding crop flashed. She showed it to the colt, popped it once hard to Questa Volta’s black rump. Then suddenly, as she brought the crop forward and back to snap the leather with all the volume but none of the sting, a slip. A scramble. And the crop tumbled to the ground. All gasped but Johanna. And she braced up her posture and smugly waited for the worst to unfold.
Yet Hettienne crouched and urged with the horse, rocking, elbows sometimes up around its ears, the reins flourished as if she might cast them like ribbons of lightning. The horse, crop or not, found its second gear, blowing: pluh, ppluh, pppluh, ears forward.
Simon raised the watch high. The colt’s stretched nose, neck, and then Hettienne crossed the finish line. Clasped to the colt’s back, she rowed her arms onward again. The colt seemed not to touch the dirt but floated. Though they all knew the vision impossible from the pounding of hooves, there it floated: A black streak, a white rider flashing by.
Simon consulted the watch while Hal and David eyed him in wonder. Simon scowled at them, then coldly scanned the Ormond girls fanning themselves at the rail. “Now, that,” Simon said to all, “is a Sheehy.” Standing to her full height in the stirrups, Hettienne rode Questa Volta to them, jouncing sideways as if the all-out run on the farm’s only thoroughbred had been no effort at all.
Though everyone scoured the dirt track for the bobbled riding crop, the heat forced their surrender and withdrawal, and its loss was but a minor disappointment.
Riding back to the stable alongside his Sheehy niece, Simon told her and the Ormonds “The Tale of the Sickbed of Chuchulain” and how Sheehy ancestors at combat tournaments sang ballads of all the foes they had slaughtered and claimed proof of each victory by cutting off the tip of a bested opponent’s tongue. From a leather pouch strung around the neck of a Sheehy warrior, these bits of gristle were brandished at high points during a triumphant song, the legends of the vanquished clearly the property of the victor.
As Simon went on, Hettienne slowed Questa Volta to ride beside glum Johanna. She leaned to Johanna with a wink. “How’s that for a tale of yore, Cuz?”
Never yet bested, Johanna stuck out her tongue. Then, from behind her back, she brought Hettienne’s dusty riding crop. She wobbled it. “Drop something? Cuz?”
After hot walking and washing the colt with Hettienne, Simon ordered his dearest niece to minister the white analgesic liniment, Roy Boy. This she did with the care and drama of an acolyte at an altar despite the nervous eyes of the Hungarian groom and the riveted focus of Simon. The two men monitored the girl’s long arms and graceful fingers dipping into the crock of Roy Boy and salving the thoroughbred’s legs white. The colt gave only a shiver and a stamp.
Johanna, smoldering, turned away to walk her horse to the stables alone.
- 3 -
In the dead of night, Aunt Agnes found Hettienne in a chemise and boxers standing before the open icebox, arms dripping wet, mouth agape, and eyes like saucers. Puddles of water trembled around the child’s bare feet. Agnes called the girl’s full name, Hettienne Ellery Sheehy. No reaction. A still, white streak in the musty dark of the kitchen ell. Agnes spat upon the floorboards at her niece’s bare feet, then made the sign of the cross. The instant she finished with the Holy Spirit, she clutched her dressing gown up at her hips and rushed to fetch James, her heart as frantic as a sparrow in a fist. James had studied sleepwalking and had, in fact, brought Simon to safety many times.
“Oh, Hell,” said James in a whisper on seeing his niece. Agnes released his hand, then smacked his knuckles. “Remember,” James whispered, “the pain of growing that fast?”
Agnes’s lips puckered. “I remember the switch. My back’ll soon remember the mop and bucket!”
“Tell no one,” James said, then held his finger to his lips for a long while to be clear. “Last thing we want’s for her mother to fly into a rage and take her forever from us.”
“Bitch!” spit Agnes.
“Yes, but the girl’s mother as well.”
Hettienne did not come down to family breakfast—a breach unless gravely ill. Young Ormond cousins whispered and wondered. Johanna smarted most from this unprecedented privilege and became so wound up that David at last asked, “How do you know she isn’t ill, heifer?” The Ormond children landed at the table in a foul mood. Agnes was in a muddle, dropping plates, leaving milk to scald at the back of the stove. Simon kept an eye on them all, tense and silent. “A memorable breakfast,” Helen Sheehy remarked once the spinsters were shut in the kitchen. “For unknown reasons.”
With the meal cleared, the three spinster sisters were nibbling and gossiping in the kitchen amid the leftovers and dirty dishes when Hettienne entered from the back ell, dressed for riding, her hat in her hand and her hair woven in a bun, of which all three spinsters instantly approved.
“I’ll be direct,” snapped Margaret Sheehy. Helen and Agnes moved in echelon behind her. In their long brown dresses, they appeared to Hettienne as human approximations of the round-bodied, drab female wigeons bustling on Lake Michigan. “Just what is the meaning of all this, young lady?”
Hettienne bowed her head but could not stop the emotion flooding her. “I love you all so very much,” she whispered, her voice quaking. For all her summers, all the blazing months away from Chicago in the paradise of the Sheehy farm among family, she had been their infallible favorite, the one Sheehy child. She knew her episodes made for a confusing, alarming disappointment.
“I’m so sorry to have caused all this trouble.” She covered her face with her hands.
The kitchen smelled of live yeast, flour, bacon, peppery sausage gravy, and cantaloupe. Hettienne cupped all those soothing smells to her.
Like a flock, the three sisters nestled forward, and their long arms swooped around her shoulders and waist.
She let them lower her hands, and Margaret then lifted Hettienne’s chin. “Oh, dear child. We sisters agree. This staring, this rhyming, the gaps. It is just manifestations of the change.” Her voice dropped to a low whisper. “From girl to woman. Sheehys change hard.”
The spinsters all nodded.
“Agnes, I swear, sent the moon awry,” said Aunt Helen.
Not at all ready for the circle into which she had just been admitted, Hettienne shuddered. “I’m hungry,” she managed. Lightning fast, fried potatoes, sausage, milky coffee, and the remains of a pyramid of melon balls—orange, green, and red—flashed before her. The sisters hovered while she ate.