Stealing Horses
February 28, 2020
I loved my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Borum. She was young, she was beautiful, and I had never had a young or a beautiful teacher before. But at the end of the school year, she married a guy named Steve, and that just seemed wrong. What’s worse she ended up with a stepson, also named Steve, who was a stuck-up jerk.
The summer after they married, I noticed that Steve, Junior was keeping his horses, a palomino about 16 hands high, and a smaller red quarter horse, on Hayney Robertson’s farm next to us. Mind you, I was somewhere on that farm or in that barn every single day and I never saw Steve riding them. And he had all that nice tack too, hanging right there in the barn.
As time went on, I thought, well, if Steve’s not going to ride his horses, I might as well. I didn’t think I needed to ask anyone, since I was sort of lord of those parts. So, from time to time, I’d borrow a bridle, and help myself to one of Steve’s horses.
One afternoon after school, I was riding the palomino way up top of the hill across the pond, and I caught sight of a truck going over the cattle crossing. I stopped. Oh, shit. It was the Steves. Both of them. No. They can’t see me on this horse. No, no, no, no, no.
I jumped down, slid the bridle off, and hightailed it over the barbed wire fence into the Matson’s old cornfield, full of dead stalks and ruts and weeds. I ran truly like the wind, thinking fast, thinking that maybe they wouldn’t notice the missing bridle (for Pete’s sake, they had several anyway), through the dry cornstalks, sloshed through mud across the creek, through the woods to my neighbors’ yard, through the yard of the tenant house, over the wood fence into the pasture bordering the road, and up to a barn window. I peeked in--nobody there!-- hung that bridle back on its nail, and ran home as fast as I could.
When I got back to the house, I noticed that my down there, as my grandmother used to call it, and my upper thighs were itching like crazy so before I went in the back door, I looked down at my legs and saw, with horror, that I was absolutely crawling with chiggers and seed ticks. What to do? I tried to scrape them off but they seemed to be multiplying. I panicked and went inside, heard Mama teaching a piano lesson, and decided to take a shower, which was a very strange thing for me to be doing on an afternoon. I took one shower, thinking I’d gotten them, got out, and saw that I had not so I got in to try again. Mama poked her head in the bathroom and asked if I were okay, and I said I was fine, I was just, you know, taking a shower. At a time when I never took a shower. I’m not sure why I didn’t just say I was running through the cornfield and got chiggers, because the running through the cornfields wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, and frankly I could’ve used a second pair of eyes on the chiggers. But I didn’t want her to know I’d been riding Steve’s horse.
For years after, I was reminded of that day every time I got hot because the backs of my legs got red and mottled, even into high school. Apparently, those chiggers had the chance to dig in and make themselves at home, even after the two showers. It eventually went away.
I had the guts to steal a horse, ride it bareback, and not get caught. What I lacked was the ability to google “how to kill chiggers.” Alcohol and clear nail polish, in case you need to know.
©2021 Joy Cunningham