His grandfather was a great dancer. Tom could remember him gliding with his grandmother under the strings of colored lights at the Fourth of July dance. Their feet seemed to be on air. It was the same when he rode a horse.
'Dancing and riding, it's the same damn thing,' he would say. 'It's about trust and consent. You've gotten hold of one another. The man's leading but he's not dragging her, he's offering a feel and she feels it and goes with him. You're in harmony and moving to each other's rhythm, just following the feel.'
These things Tom knew already, though knew not how he came to know them. He understood the language of horses in the same way he understood the difference between colors or smells. At any moment he could tell what was going on in their heads and he knew it was mutual. He started his first colt (he never used the word break) when he was just seven.
Tom's grandparents died the same winter, one swiftly following the other, when Tom was twelve. John left the ranch in its entirety to Tom's father. Ned flew up from Los Angeles to hear the will read out. He had been back rarely and Tom only remembered him for his fancy two-tone shoes and the hunted look he had in his eyes. He always called him 'bud' and brought some useless gift, a piece of frippery that was the current craze of city kids. This time he left without saying a word. Instead, they heard from his lawyers.
The litigation dragged on for three years. Tom would hear his mother crying in the night and the kitchen always seemed full of lawyers and real estate people and neighbors who smelled money. Tom turned away from all this and lost himself in the horses. He would cut school to be with them and his parents were too preoccupied either to notice or to care.
The only time he remembered his father happy during this time was in the spring when for three days they drove the cattle up to the summer pastures. His mother, Frank and Rosie came too and the five of them would ride all day and sleep out under the stars.
'If only you could make now last forever,' Frank said on one of those nights while they lay on their backs watching a huge half-moon roar up out of the dark shoulders of the mountain. Frank was eleven and not by nature a philosopher. They had all lain still, thinking about this for a while. Somewhere, a long way off, a coyote called.
'I guess that's all forever is,' his father replied. 'Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.'
It seemed to Tom as good a recipe for life as he'd yet heard.
Three years of lawsuits left his father a broken man. The ranch ended up sold to an oil company and the money that remained, after the lawyers and the taxman had taken their cut, was split in half. Ned was never seen or heard of again. Daniel and Ellen took Tom, Rosie and Frank and moved away west. They bought seven thousand acres and an old sprawl of a ranch house on the Rocky Mountain Front. It was where the high plains ran smack into a hundred-million-year-old wall of limestone, a place of harsh, towering beauty, which later Tom would come to love. But he wasn't ready for it. His real home had been sold from under him and he wanted to be off on his own. Once he had helped his parents get the new ranch going, he upped and left.
He went down to Wyoming and worked as a hired hand. There he saw things he would never have believed. Cowboys who whipped and spurred their horses till they bled. At a ranch near Sheridan he saw for himself why they called it 'breaking' a horse. He watched a man tie a yearling tight by its neck to a fence, hobble a hind leg then beat it into submission with a length of zinc piping. Tom would never forget the fear in the animal's eyes nor the stupid triumph in the man's when, many hours later, it sought to save its life and submitted to the saddle. Tom told the man he was a fool, got into a fight and was fired on the spot.
He moved to Nevada and worked some of the big ranches there. Wherever he worked, he made a point of seeking out the most troubled horses and offering to ride them. Many of the men he rode with had been doing the job since long before he was born and, to begin with, they would snigger behind their hands at the sight of him mounting some crazy beast that had thrown the best of them a dozen times. They soon stopped though when they saw the way the boy handled himself and how the horse changed. Tom lost count of the horses he met who had been seriously screwed up by the stupidity or cruelty of humans, but he never met one he couldn't help.
For five years this was his life. He came home when he could and always tried to be there for the times his father most needed help. For Ellen, these visits were like a series of snapshots plotting her son's progression into manhood. He had grown lean and tall and of her three children by far the best looking. He wore his sunbleached hair longer than before and she chided him for it but secretly liked it. Even in winter his face was tanned and it made the clear, pale blue of his eyes all the more vivid.
The life he described seemed to his mother a lonely one. There were friends he mentioned, but none who were close. There were girls he dated, but none he was serious about. By his own account, most of the time that he wasn't working with horses, he spent reading and studying for a correspondence course he'd signed up for. Ellen noticed he'd grown quieter, how he spoke now only when he had something to say. Unlike his father however, there was nothing sad about this quietness. It was more a kind of focused stillness.
As time went by, people got to hear about the Booker boy and calls would come to wherever he happened to be working, asking if he would take a look at some horse or other they were having trouble with.
'How much you charge 'em for doing this?' his brother Frank asked him over supper one April when Tom had come home to help with the branding. Rosie was away at college and Frank, nineteen now, was working full time on the ranch. He had a keen commercial nose and in fact virtually ran the place as their father retreated ever deeper into the gloom created by the lawsuits.
'Oh, I don't charge them,' Tom said. Frank put his fork down and gave him a look.
'You don't charge them at all? Ever?'
'Nope.' He took another mouthful.
'Why the hell not? These people have money, don't they?'
Tom thought for a moment. His parents were looking at him too. It seemed this was a matter of some interest to all of them.
'Well. You see, I don't do it for the people. I do it for the horse.'
There was a silence. Frank smiled and shook his head. It was clear Tom's father thought him a little crazy too. Ellen stood up and started stacking plates defensively.
'Well, I think it's nice,' she said.
It got Tom thinking. But it took another couple of years for the idea of doing clinics to take shape. Meanwhile, he surprised them all by announcing he was going off to the University of Chicago.
It was a mixed humanities and social sciences course and he stuck it out for eighteen months. He only lasted that long because he fell in love with a beautiful girl from New Jersey who played the cello in a student string quartet. Tom went to five concerts before they even spoke. She had a mane of thick, glossy black hair which she swept back over her shoulders and she wore silver hoops in her ears like a folk singer. Tom watched the way she moved as she played, the music seeming to swim through her body. It was the sexiest thing he had ever seen.
At the sixth concert she looked at him all the way through and he waited for her afterward outside. She came up and took his arm without saying a word. Her name was Rachel Feinerman and later that night in her room, Tom thought he had died and gone to heaven. He watched her light candles and then turn to stare at him as she stepped out of her dress. He thought it strange how she kept her earrings on but was glad she had because the candlelight flashed in them as they made love. She never once closed her eyes and she arched herself into him, watching him watch his hands travel her body in wonder. Her nipples were large and the color of chocolate and the luxuriant triangle of hair on her belly glistened like the wing of a raven.