The Red Pony
As near as I can remember, it started with
the red pony. It was August: hot. I was sitting on a dark green bench in the
282 schoolyard, half-watching my brother and some other guys playing half-court
pick-up basketball. I was there most
mornings in summer; I was too little to cross the street by myself – that’s
what my mother said anyway – so the only way I was getting off the block was to
go with my brother to the schoolyard in the mornings. We had to go early because that was the only
way to get one of the three half courts.
If you got there too late, you’d have to stand around and wait for
someone to drop out and for a team to pick you up. Anyway, it wasn’t bad there in the
mornings. We went before it got really
hot, before the blacktop started to get soft. I usually watched and waited for
some other little kids to arrive, and then we’d play freeze tag or regular tag
or old mother witch.
This morning was different than most; I
had a book that Tony, an old Dominican guy on my block that sold piraguas, had given me three or four
days before. Tony was nice to the kids
on the block; the piraguas were a
quarter but he’d let you slide if you were short. One day, when I was buying my icy – coconut
was my favorite – I noticed an old tan book on the milk crate where Tony
usually sat. The book was pretty big,
about 7x9, and it had a picture of a red horse on the cover. “You reading that book, Tony?” Tony said he’d
tried to read it but his Ingles wasn’t
good enough even though the book was kind of a kids’ book. “You wannit, kid?” I wanted it.
So that morning, I was reading about
Buck and the red pony. Buck was about my
age but he lived on a ranch in Montana.
He worked on the ranch even though he was a kid; he was a cowboy and
what he wanted more than anything was his own horse. Well, he’d gotten one, a red pony that he
loved more than anything. He took good
care of him; he bathed him and fed him regular, but the pony got sick
anyway. The doctor cut a hole in his
throat so he could breathe but the pony didn’t get better. One day when Buck went to the barn, the pony
was gone. He’d gone off (to die?!!?)
Buck caught up with him a couple miles cross-country and was walking him back
in when he noticed the vultures circling.
That’s where I’d stopped the night
before. So, this morning, fingers
crossed, I opened the book. An hour
later, it was time to go home. My
brother came over to the bench where I sat crying. “Somebody mess with you?” I told him what
happened to the pony and what Buck did after driven to violence by grief. “Buck?” I started to tell Brother the whole
story. “Wait a minute. You crying over a story in a book?”
I was.
When I think of the story today, I can
still feel it: tightening chest and throat --shallow breath --watery eyes. I still feel it; 35 years later --as I write
this sentence – I feel the grief, the rage, and the loss of a 10-year-old boy
who was the figment of someone’s imagination. It’s magical, no? That feeling persists, after heartbreak,
deaths in the family, addiction and divorce.
I still feel it.
I think that day I understood, albeit in a
very rudimentary way, the power inherent in the written word. Through the story
of Buck and his red pony, I was able to really experience – emotionally --
something impossible in my world. We
didn’t get ponies on St. Johns Place; you were lucky if you got a cat. In that moment, when I was reading, the story
was real -- Buck and the red pony were real – what happened in the story really
happened. Maybe not word for word; but
something like that; something that made a kid feel angry, sad and powerless;
something totally unjust. So, I figured, that story was actually a lot of
stories; stories that had different people and places, different events;
different injustices but exactly the same feelings.
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