learn later, Cliff never did read Wuthering Heights.
At the time—a time of unapologetic social-class labeling and bias—the good people of Albemarle County were divided into three groups: “town,” “gown,” and “county.” We were “county,” while Cliff was definitely “town.”
Our neighbors, Meryl and Frank—actually, they lived across the road from us—did a number of things, including running the diaper service in town and boarding horses. They also had a lot of apple trees on their property. One time, when they let some of the horses out into a field where apples were lying rotting and fermenting on the ground, the horses ate them and got drunk. It was kind of funny to watch them staggering around and falling down, but it was pretty awful, too. Like the whole world had all of a sudden gotten unsteady. Meryl and Frank had several children, all of them girls.
Emily Brontë was also a poet:
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear . . .**
** Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 182.
At that cocktail party celebrating Sally’s birthday, I learned that the gray horse Cliff had ridden in the race was hers. I should have guessed that. I also found out that he and Sally were sleeping together. I should have guessed that, too. Apparently, Cliff came in fourth in the race—not that I cared. But I did.
I care a lot about horses and about horsemanship. The way someone rides, I think, tells a lot about that person. For instance, Charlie is a good rider. He rides primarily from strength. I don’t object to that as long as he does not abuse his strength. Charlie rides with his thighs while I ride with my ass. I ride from empathy. I try to second-guess what my horse will do and anticipate it. I don’t wear spurs or use a whip. I’ve ridden almost all my life—at least since I was five years old. I feel good on a horse and the horse usually knows that.
The first horse I rode was a pony called Freddy. Like a lot of ponies, Freddy was mean. Because of a Napoleonic complex, or what? Freddy did his best to buck me off, or he would reach around and try to bite me while I was mounting him; a couple of times he would get down on his knees and start to roll, but I always managed to get off him in time. Funnily enough, none of that meanness bothered or deterred me. After Freddy, came Delia, a palomino mare who was gentle and kind and on whom I learned to jump. I had Delia for seven years—grooming and feeding her and mucking out her stall every day. I loved her dearly. Then one day while we were out riding, she shied a few times for no discernible reason; later, when I let her out in the field, she ran smack into the fence. She had contracted what is commonly referred to as moon blindness and officially known as equine recurrent uveitis, for which, unfortunately, there is no known cause or cure. I was heartbroken. My next horse was a tricky black colt named Balthazar—Balt for short. I had to train him—lunge him, get him used to the saddle, me on top of the saddle, the whole nine yards. I learned a lot.
“Too good-looking for his own good,” the same person who said Cliff was having an affair with Sally told me. “He’s reckless and he’s an operator, he’s cheating on his wife and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, he’d probably rob his own grandmother if he could, he’s nothing but trouble, mark my words . . .”
“Heathcliff’s enduring appeal is approximately that of Edmund, Iago, Richard III, the intermittent Macbeth: the villain who impresses by way of his energy, his cleverness, his peculiar sort of courage; and by his asides, inviting, as they do, the audience’s or reader’s collaboration in wickedness.”***
*** Joyce Carol Oates, “The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 2 (Dec. 1982): 435–49.
Meryl and Frank’s oldest daughter, Carol, came over and babysat from time to time. She was fourteen, wore glasses, and always brought a book along with her—last time she came over she was reading A Tale of Two Cities. Not only did I approve, I thought she seemed reliable.
But she was shy and hard to talk to.
“Do you kids ride over at your place?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“No? Why not? Your dad has a bunch of nice horses there.”
Shrugging, she held her book up to her chest as if in defense. “I’m afraid of horses,” she said.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said.
“The last time I rode, I fell off and broke my arm,” Carol said.
“Did you get back on again?”
Carol shook her head. She looked as if she was about to cry.
“I fell off once and broke my collarbone—I was about your age, maybe a little older—and my dad made me get right back on the horse, although it hurt like crazy. I thought I was going to pass out,” I told her.
Carol said nothing.
“How do you like A Tale of Two Cities?” I asked, to change the subject.
Lela, Bella, and Nelly—all bitches—were the names of our three dogs. Lela and Bella, the English springer spaniels, belonged to Charlie and he hunted birds with them—quail, pheasant, ducks, and doves. Nelly, a Norwich terrier, belonged to me. Nelly was eight years old and going a little deaf, and, like all terriers, she was stubborn and disobedient, and I adored her.
Keeper, Emily Brontë’s dog, was fierce and unruly and obeyed only her. When Emily died at the age of thirty, “her devoted Keeper, whom she had treated with the sort of feeling usually reserved for human beings, walked in the short cortège of Charlotte, Anne, the servants and Mr. Brontë, behind the wooden coffin through the graveyard in the biting wind. He was taken into the church and the Brontës’ own pew, where he sat quietly while the burial service was read. And for the next week he lay outside Emily’s bedroom and howled.”****
**** Rebecca Fraser, The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family (New York: Crown, 1988), pp. 318–19.
When we were first married, Charlie taught me how to shoot. He taught me how to shoot a pistol—his .44 Magnum with an ivory grip that he had bought from a dealer in Texas—and a shotgun. The shotgun was a double-barreled twelve-gauge, and the recoil hurt until I eventually got used to it and stopped anticipating it. Eventually, too, I got to be a pretty good shot and enjoyed going clay pigeon shooting with Charlie. I also surprised myself by how competitive I turned out to be and how determined I was to get a higher score than Charlie’s. (In a standard clay pigeon round—or skeet shoot, as the sport is also known—each person gets to shoot at 25 “pigeons,” and each “pigeon” is 3 points for a first barrel kill, 2 points for a second barrel kill, and, of course, 0 for a miss. The maximum per round is 75 points, and I usually scored in the mid- to high 60s.)
Charlie had taken a four-hour course with Lucky McDaniel, who taught “instinct shooting,” and, for a while, Charlie could not stop talking about him. The premise was that you didn’t aim, you just pointed at the target—the way, for instance, you point your finger or throw a baseball.
“He’s
