In a Hicktown

Chapter 2: Horsing around

The glass cabinet crashed as the house shook. Sharp splinters cascaded over the kitchen floor as Alyssa moaned in her sleep. The windstorm outside that had meteorologists calling for a severe wind advisory for the Palouse region mirrored the storm that echoed in her mind. It was a party, the party her parents were last seen at, champagne flowing, naked young girls with perfect tanned bodies splashing in the hot tub for the entertainment of the crowd. Formally dressed servers passed gourmet food on silver trays and a four star hotel’s chef had been borrowed and well paid to cook for the gala.





Alyssa was awoken several hours later that evening by her maid shaking her and mumbling gibberish about police at her front door. Alyssa stumbled out of her bed, holding one hand to her aching head. Her confusion was quickly wiped away by the weary and stone faced policemen standing in the pouring rain. Her parents had hydroplaned in the storm, her father had been driving and was mildly under the influence, her mother high on cocaine and fun. Her father had been distracted by her mother’s wickedly knowledgeable tongue and he crashed into a telephone pole at seventy miles an hour, killing them both on impact.





Alyssa was seventeen years old at the time, three months shy of her eighteenth birthday. The family lawyers were appointed her guardian until she reached her majority and after that she was sole inheritor of their entire fortune, her father’s business and all property. Alyssa was a pop princess on par with Paris Hilton. She simply had her fortune made from naked women and dark fantasies. In perspective, she didn’t think they were really too much different.





Alyssa had spent her entire childhood with global issues. At fifteen, she went to Antarctica on a mission to save the polar bear from being over hunted and put a portion of her considerable allowance to research that would help the bears from being exterminated. She caught a plane to the Caribbean and went scuba diving for week then spent the rest of her school year skiing in the Alps, becoming part of a local  search and rescue team and finishing her studies with her private tutor.  The next year, finishing her high school work and graduating early, she celebrated by helping with orangutan rescue groups for three months, helped the UN with their relief efforts in Cambodia for another three months then spent the rest of her hear year with her parents in Los Angeles, figuring out a way to obtain a college education in the least amount of time possible that would allow her the freedom to continue with her philanthropic efforts.





The party the night her parents were killed had been her graduation party. She was the first member in their family to have a bachelor’s degree in anything, and she had picked International Business with a minor in Zoology. Alyssa was nearly hired by the UN as an apprentice to continue the relief work that she loved so well. But it became her destiny to continue on with her parent’s business and support herself.





The stubborn redhead had done so, even expanded the business in fact, to the degree that she made a four hundred percent profit when she sold it to come out west. There was no doubting the acumen that Alyssa possessed, a fact that lead to her lawyer buying her out of the business after she her mugging. The only thing that Alyssa didn’t possess was a certain street smarts that could have clued her into when she was going to be stabbed in the back before it happened.





The wind moaned again, the house shook. Alyssa, caught between her dream and reality, began to thrash in her cot in front of the fireplace. She threw the blanket down, reached up as if to grab hold of a life line then sat straight up quickly. Blankly she looked around, seeing nothing. She slammed back down on her cot, which promptly lost its precarious balance and dumped her neatly on the carpet of her shaggy house.





Laying face down on mildew carpet for several seconds, Alyssa took a moment to equilibrate. She was in the middle of nowhere. She was alone. She was not at the hospital and she was no longer seventeen finding out that she was an orphan by two cold policemen in the middle of the night. It had been ten years since then, she was scarred and disfigured, she had been forced out of her business and she fast became aware that she really needed to pee.





Carefully she sat straight up. Other than a small bruise on her head, she didn’t think she was the worse for wear. Achingly stretching out after her rough night, she turned in a circle. The fireplace with cold ashes was still there, the aged carpet was still there, the lack of coffee at hand was noticeable. She stumbled to the window and cleared a spot in the grime sticking to the glass. The snow that plagued her on her drive was nowhere to be seen. It had melted off during the high winds. Instead bare ground with shades of grass welcomed her weary gaze.





The bathroom was cold and unwelcoming. She used the last tissue from her purse, washed her hands in cold water and wiped her hands on her pants. Sighing at the lack of normality anywhere, she dug out a pen and tablet from her briefcase and started what became a very long list by the end of the day. The first thing she needed was coffee. She unpacked a small travel coffee maker and waited for the life giving juice to brew as she stared at the wall, wondering what the hell she was going to do with herself. She had no coffee mug, so she poured the flavored creamer directly into the little coffee pot and sipped out of that.





She had no music, she had little heat that was efficient. She knew that the whole house would have to be weatherized, the electrical system and plumbing overhauled. Every window in the joint would have to be replaced with double pane storm windows that were slightly tinted to keep the house from overheating in the summer. She needed a new hot water heater that was large enough to keep up with demands from two bathrooms and she needed a trustworthy contractor that would start on her remodeling projects and not desert her until she was done. She figured she had through the end of the summer to make the house livable again and then she would be done with the major remodeling.  By that time perhaps she could figure out what she was going to do with her life now that she had made the decision to live.





She set the coffee-pot/mug into the sink, automatically making mental notes to have a dishwasher and new sinks put in after the counters were newly tiled. She put her boots and coat on then went outside to see what other things she was going to have to do to make her new life habitable.





Outside was not much better than the house. It too had suffered neglect and disaster. There were tree limbs that littered the front and side yards from windstorms. Bushes meant for pruning were shaggy and misshapen, suddenly making her think of Edward Sissorhands, needing to come to her plant’s rescue. Smiling at the strange fantasy, she took the broken sidewalk path to the back of the house, skirting random piles of snow that still had not melted. Habitually walking with her eyes to the ground, she did not comprehend the two hooves in front of her until she looked up into the gentle brown eyes of an older Belgian draft horse. The horse looked quite calm at the intrusion of his meal, staring at the scarred and bedraggled appearance of the woman in front of him.





Horses are clever judges of character. Where people see scars and wounds and ugliness, horses often see potential and magic just waiting to happen. All that is needed is for someone or something to reach down inside and really touch the heart of the person standing so wounded and afraid in front of them. This clever horse reached his strong neck out to the woman, touching her wounded face with his velvety soft muzzle. He blew out, his warm grassy breath mingling with hers, then his enormous head went farther and he snuffled her hair, bringing her scent to his mind, where he could remember her. Her heart was falling to pieces just like the house, he thought to himself, and she looked so fragile that one wrong touch would shatter her. But there was strength there as well, he decided, nibbling on her hair. Then he stepped forward, carefully so he wouldn’t startle her, and came close enough to put his head over her shoulder and cradle her into his massive, muscled body.





Something broke in Alyssa heart, the last piece of paper that was keeping the dyke from overflowing. She held onto this new friend’s neck, not knowing or caring that she had never been around a horse before, let alone one this huge or this confident to invite himself into her personal bubble like he had just done. Alyssa had not been able to cry since she was a small child, but she grieved. She sobbed without crying at the wreck her life had become, shudders that wracked her thin and ravaged body. She held onto this unexpected bastion of solidarity and slowly came to terms with what her life was, instead of searching for some way to magically resurrect the life she had always known.


She stepped away from the horse, but still kept her hands on his thick neck. He kept his face facing the road but his eye squarely on her, wondering what she was going to next, willing to follow her if it suited him. She needed to know who this horse belonged to, but she wasn’t willing to give him up quite yet. Still with her hand on his neck, she told him she was going to the barn, which she was just now noticing and he followed her docilely, noticing everything that went on around him, head held high and proud.





“I didn’t know I had a horse,” she said, talking to the Belgian, not realizing that one of his feet roughly equaled both of hers in size. “I didn’t know I had a barn either. What’s in here that I don’t know about? It seems like everything that I had a handle on is suddenly gone kaput!” She entered the barn with the horse on her heels. It was a simple affair, built within the last five years, and was in much better condition than anything else that was on the property, including the house.





It was a cedar affair, with wrought iron and green trim, something bought from a kit out of a pricey horse magazine and put together. The stalls were roomy for normal sized horses but the big horse at her side found it on the cozy side. Instead of sleeping in the stalls, he had found a happy home in the tack room, a large room that doubled as an office at one corner. A computer desk and bookcase were in one corner, stands for saddles and bridles, halters and leads neatly organized the rest of the room. But the dear horse at her side had made his bed in a pile of forgotten straw and had mostly kept his home clean by going out to potty, but being a horse he still had a few piles around the room, thawing now in the warmer weather. Wrinkling her nose, she ducked under the horses neck and made a tour of the rest of the barn. There was a large stack of hay that the horse had been eating from over the winter, nimbly making his way around the baling twine to the good grass hay. There was no alfalfa for him though, and she recalled reading that horses needed this richer stuff to keep warm in the bitter cold months. Looking at the abandoned horse, she wondered how he had kept alive. Wondering how he had gotten water, she went back outside and found a solid mud path going downhill. Following it she came to a small creek, swollen and rushing with the melting snow, that he had gone to for water through the winter months.





He had taken very good care of himself, but she wondered how he could have managed when the river was frozen over, or when he was so lonely and had no one to talk to. For once, she had something else besides herself to worry about. She marched up the hill and met the horse at the top, took hold of his neck and said clearly, “I don’t know who you belonged to before, but you belong to me know. I’m going to take care of you. I don’t really know much about horses, but I will learn. I’ll take care of you.”





The horse lowered his head and snuffled her hair again. He was not surprised. In the way that only horses can explain, his instincts had told him when he first met her that she was a part of his herd, but she had to come to terms with that herself. And she had, to his enjoyment. He would no longer be alone.








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