Stable Manners (9 page)

T
HERE WAS MORE
unfinished business and all three girls knew it. Although it was time to leave the stable, go home, do homework, bone up more on the Know-Down material, and sort out what really happened to Lisa, none of the three of them was ready to proceed. There was something else they had to do first.

When their own horses were completely tended to, they gathered at the paddock where Samson, the stable’s colt, had been playing. Stevie had her grooming bucket. Although Samson didn’t seem particularly in need of a grooming, the girls were particularly in need of something to do while they talked. Carole clipped a lead onto Samson’s halter and they began grooming
the coal-black colt. He liked the attention. They were glad for the opportunity to talk while they combed and brushed.

“It was awful,” Lisa said. “I just completely missed the point.”

Her friends didn’t say anything. They agreed, they understood. They knew it could have been them.

“The point wasn’t to be sure May knew all that stuff. The point was for both of us to learn—to learn together. May won’t always be there when I want to hitch up a pony to a wagon. And Stevie won’t always be there to make me look good. I can pretend to Max, maybe even to you two.…” She looked at her friends. “All right, not to you two, but anyway, I can pretend to other people. Who I can’t pretend to is the horse. I mean Nickel isn’t exactly able to tell me how to do it, is he?”

“No,” Carole answered. “And that’s the core of it, isn’t it?”

Both Stevie and Lisa knew that Carole wasn’t just talking about Lisa then. She was talking about the three of them. She was talking about the Know-Down. “You’re not the only one who learned something this afternoon, Lisa,” Carole continued.

“We’re going to have to tell about the study sheets, aren’t we?” Stevie asked.

Carole nodded. So did Lisa.

“I kept trying to figure it out so we wouldn’t have to do it. I kept thinking how much fun it would be to score perfectly while Phil was there. I almost had myself convinced.”

“What made you see it the other way?” Lisa asked.

“It was thinking about the horses—really what you just said. Nickel couldn’t tell you what to do. We can learn everything Max puts on the Know-Down, but what do we do when something comes up that wasn’t on the Know-Down question sheets?

“The horses have to come first,” Carole said, summing up all of their arguments.

Lisa pulled a comb through Samson’s tangled mane and spoke thoughtfully. “You know, I used to think that learning just meant studying. That was hard enough work. Today I’m finding that learning can be a lot harder than just studying.”

Stevie and Carole knew exactly what she meant. They also knew that the hardest part probably wasn’t over yet. They still had to face Max and Carole still had to face her father.

The decision was made. Samson was perfectly groomed. There could be no more delays. The three of them packed up Stevie’s grooming gear and went to face the music in Max’s office.

Max was there and so were the parent volunteers. The girls didn’t like the idea of having a public audience, but the parents would all know soon enough. The hardest was the fact that Colonel Hanson was there. He smiled brightly at Carole. She hated to think how much she was about to hurt him.

“Max, there’s something we have to tell you,” Lisa began. While Lisa didn’t know very much about hitching a pony to a cart, she knew a lot about explaining things clearly. She first described what had happened to each of their sets of study sheets and how the three of them found themselves at Carole’s house without anything to study from. Then Carole took over. She spoke to Max, but her words were for her father.

“We didn’t mean to be snooping or anything. It was just that we needed the study sheets and I knew Dad had put them on his desk. It never occurred to any of us that what the parent volunteers got from you was any different from what the pony clubbers had gotten.”

“We just didn’t know,” Stevie said, taking over. “We made copies and we got to work. We’ve been working very hard, too. You can test us if you want. But we’ve been working on the wrong thing—or
maybe it was the right thing, but anyway, we figured out that it was the wrong thing to do.”

Lisa finished for them. “We’re sorry, Max. We really are. We didn’t mean to do this. For a little while after we discovered it, it seemed like a great thing, but in the end we know it’s just not right. We need to learn everything there is to know about horses—not just what we’re going to be tested on.”

Colonel Hanson stood by the door of Max’s office. His face didn’t reveal anything. Max sat down and blew a chestful of air out through his pursed lips. Nobody said anything for a few minutes.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Max asked.

“Disqualified? Are we out?” Carole asked. She didn’t want to miss the Know-Down, but even more than that, she didn’t want to have to tell Cam about it all.

“No, I don’t think so,” Max said. “I suspect you three have been working very hard. In fact, judging by what else I’ve seen today, I suspect you’ve been working on the Know-Down material only.” He glanced at Lisa. She looked at the floor. “No, what it means is that I’m going to have to make up new questions.”

“It’s going to be a lot more work and we’re really sorry,” said Stevie.

“I don’t mind the work,” Max said. “What I mind is that I thought I had made the meanest, sneakiest, and toughest questions possible out of that material on the study sheets. Now I have to be meaner, sneakier, and tougher—all because of you.”

“You’re very good at it,” Stevie said. Then she realized that that might not sound like much of a compliment. She tried to soften it. “I mean, it takes one to know one,” she told him.

He smiled weakly. Then he stood up. “Back to the drawing board,” he said. “Now get out of here. I’ve got a lot of work to do. And so do you.”

The girls shared a feeling that was hard to describe when they left Max’s office. They felt awful because they knew they’d let Max down—and Colonel Hanson, too. They felt worried because they knew there were just a few days until the Know-Down and there was a lot to learn from the study sheets that they hadn’t learned from the question-and-answer pages and they all wanted to do very well. And there was another feeling, too. They all felt relieved because they knew that, hard as it was, and as much trouble as they were causing, they felt better being honest about what had happened.

Carole and her father walked behind Lisa and Stevie. Nobody was talking. There was too much
thinking going on. It took Carole only a minute to pick up her backpack from the locker area and she met her father in the car. She pulled the door closed and prepared for a long drive home.

Colonel Hanson started up the engine and the journey began.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Carole said. “I didn’t mean to do it. I just didn’t think—”

“I know you didn’t think.” The irritation was clear in his voice.

“I really
am
sorry,” she repeated.

“I know you are, honey,” he said more softly. “I know you didn’t mean to do it. I always knew you didn’t mean to. Almost, anyway. At first, I wasn’t sure.”

Always?

“You knew?”

“Sure, I did,” he said. “From the moment I saw that the papers had been moved on my desk.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“What was I going to say? It was up to you to say something, not me. I knew you would, too.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did. You’re my daughter. You know right from wrong. Sometimes it might take you a
while to figure out which is which, but I knew you’d come through.”

Carole was simply stunned. Then another thought occurred to her.

“Did you think we were cheating?” she asked.

“I knew what you were up to,” he said. “You broke the rules the moment you decided to take papers off my desk. The fact that you didn’t know how much you were cheating is just a question of degree. What I was always sure of was that you’d come clean—only I didn’t know when.”

Carole didn’t know what to say. Her father seemed to have an infinite capacity to surprise her. It made her love him all the more.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said.

“For what?”

“For trusting me when I didn’t deserve it.”

He took her hand and squeezed it. “That’s what dads are for,” he said.

They rode the rest of the way home without talking. Carole mulled over all the events of the day. She’d learned a lot. Mostly, like Lisa, she’d learned that learning itself could involve a lot more than just studying hard. Some lessons were tougher than others. Today had been full of those.

“W
HAT ARE THE
five major internal parasites?” Carole asked Stevie. The three girls were sitting on bales of hay in the feed room, trying, once again, to make up for lost time.

Stevie grimaced. “Why do you always ask me that question? It’s so disgusting to even think about those things.”

“It’s even more disgusting if you’re a horse infested with them,” Carole said. “Then you’d really want your owner to know.”

“All right. Here goes: botflies, bloodworms, pinworms, intestinal worms, and stomach worms. But
don’t ask me how you know when your horse has them. It’s more than I can handle.”

“I won’t,” Carole promised. “That’s what I’m going to ask Lisa.”

Lisa was ready. “For botflies, you can spot the eggs on the horse’s coat. For the other ones, major symptoms are weight loss, a potbelly, lethargy, tail rubbing, diarrhea, and coughing. But I agree with Stevie. Those things are just disgusting and the best way to cope with them is not to get them at all.”

“How do you do that?” Carole asked. It wasn’t an idle question. It was the next set of information on the sheet.

“Mainly cleanliness. If there isn’t a lot of manure around, then the parasites can’t breed and you break their life cycle. Also, have horses, especially young ones, eat from a manger that isn’t on the ground where parasites breed. Keep the feed areas dry and the horses clean.”

“Very good,” said Carole. “But don’t forget to have the horses checked and wormed regularly by a vet.”

“Can we move on to something nicer?” Stevie asked.

Carole nodded. “Let’s talk about equitation.” She and Cam had been talking about it last night. She
wanted to be sure to cover the subject with her friends, too.

Stevie sighed with relief as they continued their work.

The Saddle Club had been working very hard over the last few days to be sure they would know as much as possible at the Know-Down tomorrow. Stevie had talked to Phil the night before and it was clear that he’d been studying, too. He’d managed to drop a couple of rather obscure facts on her, like the place where the first three-day event was ever held in England (Badminton). Stevie’s first reaction had been to wonder why anybody cared. Her second reaction was to wonder what other obscure information Phil might have mastered that would be just the thing to put him over the top in the Know-Down. The result of that was that she now knew that the three-day event had taken place in 1949. What she still hadn’t figured out was who cared.

“Name the parts of a hoof visible on the underside of a shod hoof,” Carole said to Lisa.

“The sole, the frog, and I think there’s something else, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“Stevie?”

“The bars.”

“The bars, the bars, the bars. Sole, frog, and bars,”
Lisa said, trying to recite the names so she’d remember them forever—or at least until tomorrow afternoon. She needed a memory trick. Stevie had one for her.

“I’ve got it. Remember that you want to stay out of the bar that serves filet of sole and frog legs,” Stevie suggested. “It’s not a place you want to go to while your horse is getting new shoes.”

“I think that’s longer and more complicated than remembering sole, frog, and bars.”

“Whatever,” Stevie said.

The girls continued working until they each thought facts would be floating out of their ears. Finally when their minds were fully stuffed with everything there was to know about horses, they all went home.

It didn’t stop there, though. Stevie spent the rest of the afternoon and evening trying desperately to memorize every obscure fact Phil might know that she didn’t. Lisa worked on everything she thought Stevie and Carole already knew because they’d been riding so much longer than she had. And Carole tried to master everything she thought was most important for a good rider, trainer, breeder, and vet to know.

That night Carole called Cam. She always enjoyed talking about horses and she always liked talking with Cam. Talking about horses
with
Cam was a great combination.
Together, they went over some of the study sheets. Carole tested Cam and then Cam tested Carole. Carole thought they both did pretty well. It was a nice thought that helped her fall asleep easily.

W
HEN
C
AROLE WOKE
up the next morning, it took a minute for her to remember why she had butterflies in her stomach. Then it came to her. This was The Day. It was the Know-Down, but it was also the day that Cam was coming to Horse Wise. They had talked a lot—including last night—but the last time she had seen him was when they’d competed against one another at a horse show and now they would be competing in the Know-Down. That wasn’t what was on her mind about him, though. What she was really thinking about was what a nice boy he was, how great he was with horses, and how good-looking, too. No wonder she had butterflies in her stomach!