Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes

an open-necked golf shirt, talked of his grandfather’s old team, Peaches and Creamy, gone these many years, of my Great-Aunt Regina and her one-horse sleigh, and the chestnut mare named Mae racing over the endless snow-leveled fields of Dakota when the roads drifted closed and the plows were busy elsewhere.

      “Dad, did you ever have a horse?”

      “No, honey, we lived in town. But I always liked horses.” I was rigid with excitement, afraid he would change his mind.

      The farmer had her corralled in a rough paddock. She watched me climb the fence and perch quietly on the top rail. I don’t remember the discussion between my dad and the farmer, just the big, coarse, dappled gray mare watching me, head up, trying to catch my scent. I must have ridden her; I don’t remember. Just her, standing in the center of the paddock, flared nostrils testing the air between us. I loved her at first sight.

      Dad made arrangements to have Belle delivered to a private stable a few miles out of town where he’d secured a ten-dollar-a-month box stall in a barn that included three or four other boarders, girls of about my age.

      Twice a day, rain or shine, we fed and tended to our horses.

      At home, in bed, I lay awake, dreaming of Belle, galloping to me as I called her name. Belle, executing difficult Lipizzaner “airs above ground” movements. In reality, I was dealing with a will and personality as stubborn and unconventional as my own. She was impossible to catch in large enclosures and a terror to trim or load in a horse trailer for local trail rides or horse shows. So I compromised, riding the fields and barrow pits from the farm, wearing trails in the dirt where none had been. Fearful of passing vehicles, she would shy, unseat me, and bolt for home, broken reins dangling. And I would walk, knowing I had to get back on. But I began to notice how my wholeheartedness affected her behavior. Eventually I was able to offer support when she was afraid, with my legs, my hands, my voice. We began to experience unity. And trust. I had the feeling, if I asked her, I could walk her up a water tower.

      Lying on her bare, broad back as she grazed, the back of my head as comfortable on her rounded rump as a child’s head in a mother’s lap, I dreamed and watched the clouds, thinking about the current social crisis at school, or math tests, or slumber parties I wasn’t invited to. Or nothing at all.

      Together with the other horse-crazy boarders, I dedicated myself to horses. Bareback, we played among the cottonwoods, throwing mullein spears and baling-twine lassoes.

      In late spring, high flimsy clouds called “mare’s tails” shifted wraithlike across the prairie, dissolving in the heat to reveal a pure blue sky. A daydream blue, an all-American, state-fair, skipping-stones blue. Nothing quite compared to a prairie sky on a spring day.

      On one such a day, when I was fourteen, I pedaled my way to the white gambrel-roofed barn. Before the kickstand was down, Belle, hearing the crunch of my bicycle tires in the gravel driveway, nickered from within, chesty and low. I looked for her when I wrenched open the sliding door on the rusty rail. Knew she’d be standing with her head hanging over the stall door, impatient and alert.

      Delicately, she extended her lips, accepting the carrots I’d conveyed in the bicycle basket of my three-speed. As I curried Belle’s shining coat with the soft bristle brush, she shifted from hoof to hoof, ears flicking forward to the distant sound of farm machinery, then back to me.

      I’d been given permission to ride the fallow fields, behind the barn and beyond. Unfenced, a colorful network of fields stretched between county roads in orderly, rectangular blocks, from bare black soil before the sugar beets were planted, to fields of green-sprigged winter wheat and barley, to corn and sunflower stubble. Fields running north to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, east to Minnesota, south into South Dakota, and west until you ran up against the Badlands.

      I bridled her, keeping hold of one rein and looping the other over her neck, and asked her to circle me at a trot. She threw her head, arching her body away from me. It was when she bent or yielded in my direction that I knew she was ready. From the ground I grabbed a section of mane and leaped to straddle her bareback. From the barn lot, we pranced lightly into the field, sinking hock-deep in the black loam, and I was careful to hold my heels away from her sides.

      “Easy, girl.”

      Leaning forward to stroke her neck, my touch sent a tremor through her body and out through the arched tail, rippling silver behind us. Beginning with a left lead we loped in a large circle for a minute, crossing over to the right lead, forming oversized figure eights in the dirt, the reins taut as she pulled against them. When I felt her let down, we faced the open fields.

      Without my asking she extended from a canter into a hard gallop, her mane blowing back to intertwine with my hair, brown with steel gray. I carried my hands low, and in answer she lowered her head, settling into a four-beat syncopation. Left hind, right hind, left fore, right fore, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, the echoing beats of my heart. And for a moment, when all four hooves were in the air, there was hardly any sense of motion, and it felt as though we were leaving the earth, but the wind that swept the high prairie flattening our ears prevented us, though I longed to break free. Beyond this field was the next, and beyond that field, the whole country.

      She carried me like an egg, an infant, a package of explosives, neither veering nor turning but running in a straight line, and I was a red Corvette, shifting into fifth gear on a mad, pulse-pounding, tear-blinding, grin-splitting freedom ride to nowhere.

      When I felt her tire and change leads, I reluctantly withdrew my heels from her flanks, and we slowed, turning to face the wide stride-marks of our departure. “Whoa, girl.” She pranced, asking for her head, but I denied her, and we began the long walk home. Off to the south the clouds piled up against one another as if marshaling a charge.

      A swift volley of hail hit before we reached the safety of the barn, the air suddenly icy and smelling like gunpowder. I curried her coat, and while she chomped her oats, I stood in the open barn door. Waiting.

      Into this class-conscious, congenial, and predominantly Scandinavian society of my Midwest upbringing, I tried to fit. Tried to “say nice things or nothing at all” and not “make scenes.” I submitted to the ballet, tap, and hula lessons without developing any noticeable skill, grace, or interest, aware it would soon be my Edwardian duty to marry well, clean, cook, and entertain. My brothers and I knew we were not the center of my parents’ busy lives and accepted they would seldom, if ever, attend the dog and horse shows or the sporting or scholastic events of our youth, and we would be chauffeured to and from these events by someone else. Along with this acquiescence, and vague sense of abandonment, was the irrepressible urge to bolt through the open and unattended gate.

      I was a naive and restless young woman. Had little orientation about sex, barnyard or otherwise. Mr. Gransberg (who owned the barn where I kept Belle) purchased a stallion and for a short time kept him in a pen between our barn and another. The stallion jumped the fence and bred my friend Laurie’s mare while Laurie was riding her. Laurie’s dad, who happened to be present, became hysterical. Laurie and I had no clue what was happening, but no one got hurt, and eleven months later the mare had a foal. And when my best friend Rio learned about sex through a class in the Calvary Lutheran Church, she refused to discuss the details. It seemed like everyone knew something about sex except me. Then overnight I got breasts. Suddenly the boys wanted me, resulting in a clumsy form of inclusion and a skewed sense of vanity.

      Betrayed by the changing demands of my body, my popularity-obsessed peers, and just about everyone else, I attempted to bridle what my mother saw as my “willy-nilly” and “helter-skelter” predilections. Like the other girls, I tried to show restraint.

       What We Don’t Say

       “Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”

      —PAUL TOURNIER

      North Dakota. Never mind the high humidity, mosquitoes, eighty-mile-an-hour straight-line winds, polar fronts, or blizzards. Statistically we were the most churched and least visited state in the country, where the strong and courageous women in my parents’