She stood in the shade. Voices drifted back to her and laughter. The smell of camp fire.
The cars were all parked alongside the road: Grandpa’s and Uncle Bob’s and the sea-green Buick station wagon they all called Nelliebelle. She liked the color of Nelliebelle.
She looked up toward the sky but could only see the branches of the pine trees. It was dizzying: the trees were so much taller than the people and the people were so much taller than she was. She was certain her father was the tallest of all of them: tall, thin, with hair as black as the coal that came down the coal chute in the winter when they lived in town. They didn’t live in town in the warm summer, but lived in one of two white houses with green shutters up in the woods.
The houses had names: Pole Crick and Mahoney. She liked Mahoney best because there was a big white barn at the end of a long, wide gravel drive and there were always horses in the corrals. There were horses at Pole Crick, too, but no long driveway where she could play and make mud pies.
It would be years before she learned to spell and more years before she learned that Pole Crick was spelled Pole Creek.
In the sunny clearing where white smoke curled up from the campfire, her tow-headed girl cousins were giggling with her big brother. He was making funny faces, something he was very good at.
Her mother was busy with the new baby, Denise. Aunt Phyllis had a new baby, too. The babies were not very exciting: they cried and stayed wrapped in blankets.
The dogs were running around, sniffing the ground and begging. She didn’t like her mother’s dog, the little Chihuahua mutt they called “Squeaky”. Squeaky nipped. She was afraid of Squeaky’s nips, even though they didn’t really hurt.
She wanted to be special. The other children were special. They huddled together and laughed, but she stood on the edge looking in. She didn’t know how to play the games they played and that made her feel afraid.
All around her, the woods were dark and light, shadow and sun, green and brown and sagebrush. Wild animals lurked out there: porcupines, big red-and-white cows, floppy-eared mule deers, the chattering camp robber and the invisible rattlesnakes.
She looked down at her feet: the earth was a soft brown duff, littered with thin pine needles. This spikes of green grass poked upward. At Mahoney, there were flowers she could pick to put into her mudpies: yarrow, dandelions, Queen Anne’s Lace. She hoped to see some bright red Indian Paintbrush, but there was none to be seen.
There was something odd staring up at her. Half buried in the duff, a worn little soldier stared through the tiny cast-iron ears of his Cavalry mount. A horse! There was a horse on the ground by her feet. A horse that no one else had seen. A horse left there by some child many years before she came to this place.
She picked him up and toddled to her grandfather and father, the soldier and his horse held tightly in her hands. So excited by her find, she lost all sense of shyness and held it out for all to see.
Who told her that it was special? She could tell by the interest the grown-ups took in it and the careful way her grandfather cleaned it off.
“That is very old,” someone said.
The other children crowded to see, but when the soldier was released from adult hands, it was back into her hands. “No, he belongs to Jackie. She found him. He is hers to keep.”
The other kids lost interest because the horse only had three legs. That was all right with her: a three-legged horse was probably why it was such a special find. And part of her was sad for the little boy who lost it long ago. She would never know if it had all four legs when it was lost or not.
**The only parts of this story that are true are: we were on a picnic. My grandparents were there. Some cousins were there, but I don’t remember which ones. It was out of Jarbidge, NV. We spent our summers at one or the other Ranger Station: Mahoney and Pole Creek. And the wild animals that were loose in the woods. And our Buick, Nelliebelle, but we may have purchased the car after I found the soldier. I was two and a half or three and a half, so it was 1959-1960. Could have been 1961, but no later than that. My memories get clearer after 1961.
***The soldier looks very much now as he did when I rescued him. He has always been very happy to live with me and I have taken good care of him.
I don’t know why I have never named the horse or the soldier. I guess I thought that if they wanted me to know their names, they would have told me and they never did.
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Jaci Dawn 