The Smell of Cedar

The Smell of Cedar
Steve Sheppard
Sometimes a memory disappears inside a pile of tragedy and gets buried under six feet of slag. My first kiss was from a cowgirl in Oregon, and the only way I can remember is if I close my eyes, bury my head deep in cedar shavings, and breathe.
“Where the hell are we supposed to be?” Dad says.
“Barn Six,” Perry, my brother, says.
“Six?” Dad says out the window, and a man in a golf cart points and his mouth moves. I try to hear, but Charlie Daniels and a hundred other ambient sounds – hooves, loud speakers, vehicles, people – drown him out. Dad has a rapport with strangers that I still don’t understand. I don’t listen is why. I keep to the barns, help the help, work for Wayne, our horse trainer. We are up twenty-hour days at shows, Perry and I. Sometimes you get numb and concussed, like you were run over by a speeding golf cart.
“Where?” Perry says.
“Down there. There’s Wayne’s trailer. There’s Barn Six.”
Barn Six. Right by the arena. That’s where the show happens, and Dad’s on the planning committee. I think his title is Chief Planner and that allows him to strategically place people in barns. It’s a grown-up way of getting the best seat in the classroom. “Saul, disconnect. Perry, unload,” Chief Planner says, and I slide down the seat out of our Chevy Silverado and the Oregon air hits my face and bare shoulders like a hot breath. I had made all my t-shirts into muscle-shirts, which is where you rip the sleeves off and show your muscles, which I hadn’t any. But that was okay, because my rocker friend, Jimmy, says the muscle-shirt coolness carries limpy arms like Spandex carries any sized ass—plus, I have my rad scar, with the stitches still in, we’ll just call it a summer of accidents, but I have my rad scar and it looks like a scorpion with no claws, and I hope the girls notice.
Dad waits for me to pull the hitch release and grinds away, crunching and spitting gravel down the long road to somewhere else, but the brake lights light up and there’s a man who looks important. Hands jut out, how ‘ya doin’, good to see ya, place looks great, rapport, rapport. I figure that guy’s somehow like gold to Dad the way he stops and tosses him into a pan and swishes him around.
Perry crawls in and eases Monarch, our prized stallion, back down the ramp of our Miley four-horse. His hooves stomp the floor like short sledge hammers. He’s a brute and has the strength to lift a stall door off it’s hinges, which has done. Perry leads him into Barn Six, and we see Sandy, the oldest Galloway sister, and her horse, Blackjack. Both stallions tense up and plant feet, a sign that they’re ready to fight. Perry jerks the line, setting Monarch straight. Such is not necessary with Blackjack as Sandy heaves her stall door shut, separating the horses.
Sandy Galloway is a short and sturdy blonde who uses two hands for everything, even holding a brush, or shaking hands. It’s a childlike habit, though she’s sixteen, and she looks out over my small, Chief Nobody head. I pat Blackjack and he’s hard, like polished granite. Sandy pulls his sheet off and his coat is slick and dappled like redwood burl under Shellac, like they towel him daily with Show Sheen. “He has better color than Monarch,” I tender, because you should always say this to one with fewer trophies.
“Thanks. Are you showing Monarch?”
“We have lots of horses here. Where Camille?”
“Registration.”
“I’ll come by later.”
Perry and I bed stalls, which should have been done for us, but this is a new show and many things are out of order. Down our aisle is a bright pink swathe of cedar shavings and tightly wrapped bags of it are left for us. The smell is bitter and potent at first, and we try to recall ever using it. Perry takes a razor and pops the bags open while I hold them up, and the cedar spills onto the ground, and what a waste, I think, knowing what the horses will do to it.
A click-click-click comes out over the loud speaker, then a trumpet—bump bump badda bump, bump bump badda bump— like Golden Gate Raceway, and bright tones swirl around as the announcer says words like Yearling, Futurity, Stallion, Park Saddle, Registration, Equitation, Welcome to PNW, yada yada, thank you and see you tomorrow, click-click-click and no one listens anyway.
We sleep in the barn and inhale cedar until we grow coniferous needles out of our skin. I wake up Friday to the sounds of grumbling horses and Monarch kicking his door and my watch says 4:36, but Perry sleeps soundly on the bale of hay beside me—he didn’t have the rough night I had, getting up to put rubber bells on Monarchs precious hooves to protect our hours of work shining them. Perry’s a social bug, like Dad, and wakes up saying, “you feed, and I’ll bring back breakfast,” and he’s gone, and I don’t see again, and that’s every day.
Now, feeding is your basic wheelbarrow down the aisle with the hay and grain type thing, half an hour. The bitch is cleaning stalls, and Wayne teaches us this crappy, drawn-out method of building a mound on the wall with the rake and letting turds roll down, which seems like turd-worship to me. Why don’t we just scoop the shit and haul it out? Plus, you never really know when you’re done because Wayne’s never satisfied. And with twenty stalls to clean—and at shows we clean twice a day, in case rich people show up—you do the math. Rich people aren’t aloud to see crap, or horses crapping, or mistakes, or any kind of youth in a muscle shirt, or a horse fight. That’s why the turd hits the fan the first day, after the first morning class, when I hear a scuffle, horses screeching, and screams from the arena gate. I go down and see Camille’s mom, Linda Galloway. She tell’s me there was a horse fight right after the last class.
“Idiots!” she says, “they’re using the same gate as an entrance and an exit!” She doesn’t look down but reports, as if life was seen through her own spyglass. “They come face to face. They should wait their turn. Never let two horses come face to face, Saul. Who’s running this show anyway?” Which I knew the answer, but didn’t say. Linda Galloway was a concerned woman with nice curves for somebody’s mom. She worked and spent a lot of money getting Sandy and Camille to a few shows—and Perry and I benefited—and she always had her opinion and might have made Chief Planner. Maybe she could marry my dad and they’d be Mr. and Mrs. Chief Planner, but that wasn’t in her spyglass.
“Are you showing this weekend, Saully?”
“I help.”
The truth is, I never even think about showing horses. There is enough to do, though it seems everyone, even the son of the man driving the golf cart, is in a class. Showing is of least interest to me. Why show when you can meet girls, go to dances and concerts, party at hotels and drive golf carts, which we did at Plymouth. Showing is not the point and I don’t see the fuss, yet it is the only point, and even Perry shows, Western Saddle.
Linda stands up, tousles my hair and walks away. She’s wearing dressage breeches, the best garment ever created for a woman, and I wonder when I’ll see the One Galloway I was looking for. Rounding the corner, I head back to Barn Six to resume the chores meant for Perry. I look down and see the destroyed raking pattern we accomplished the night before, the worthless extra work demanded by Wayne, where we dress the entire aisle in a pseudo-thatch “which sets us apart,” he says.
Then a voice smacks me like a golf cart on fire.
“Saul”
“Camille,” I say, and she hugs me Grandma-tight and I smell her, and she smells like girl and makeup and cedar. I course her body, bottom to top, landing at her face, at the Obvious Thing, the tragedy, concealed under a lock of hair, and she speaks quickly, interrupting the reaction in my eyes.
“I show Blackjack this weekend, thirteen-and-under,” she says. I’m enthralled, numbering all the ways in which thirteen had been better to her than me.
“Can you ride a stallion thirteen-and-under?”
“Sure. He’s docile. Gentle.”
“I know.”
So it goes, always with this first meeting, which has to be hard for her, because she likes me and wonders when I’m going to abandon her because of the Obvious Thing. But I don’t, and we become better friends every show, and I follow every ritual, traverse every thatched pattern of eggshells she lays. She is beautiful otherwise, simple but shapely in her Wranglers. Her brown hair is thick and wavy and her olive skin shines in the dim barn lights. She grins, hiding her braces, and the Obvious Thing, the third degree burn, like a giant tongue, dabs over her thin, Asian eye, a sparrow’s eye. I can tell the scar has grown, and she knows I can tell, but we look at it together like the headstone of her face.
“If Blackjack keeps winning, we’ll stud him out,” Camille says.
“Cool.”
“We’ll charge a thousand bucks a pop,” and she giggles with that, because ‘pop’ has double-meaning, and with that, the moment is over, and we move on.
“Should we hang out tonight?”
“Yea.”
That night, Perry leaves early, and I go to the public showers to clean up and see a couple of guys walking around naked, which I ignore. “Nothing but cold water,” they say, which is the case, but I rough it, get dressed, and find Camille and we set out together. The whole fairgrounds is desolate. Everyone has plans, secret plans they whispered to each other because neither Camille nor I heard of anything to do, but everyone’s out doing it. We walk through certain barns hoping to glean some sort of activity.
“Hey, come in here,” says Brook, a cowboy who works for Chuck Walker Stables. He’s in a stall in Barn One. We go in, and it’s a tack room full of expensive, silver appointed saddles stacked five-high and show bridles hanging, glistening like jewelry, over the walls. On the ground are two large ice chests and a big-chested woman, sitting with Brook. He kicks the lid off one of the ice chests and it’s full of champagne bottles. “You can have all you want. Just need you to watch the barn for a bit.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Be back in an hour,” Brook says, laughing, and he leaves, with the woman. Camille and I stare at the bottles.
“You ever try champagne before?” I say.
“Of course I have,” she says. I take a bottle and grip the cork like I’d seen done many times, and after one turn, it pushes itself off, making a small ‘pop.’ A fine mist curls out, like smoke, and Camille has two plastic cups, so I pour.
“It’s all—bubbly,” she says, coughing as she sips. “What kind is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Read the label.”
The bottle is dark green with a gold label in the shape of a shield.
“It says ‘Champagne Cuvee Dom Perignon, Vintage 1980.’”
“Mmmm. That’s what I thought,” she says.
The champagne tastes like sweet, cold air, and the room begins to sway around us.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, and the room stops and her stare lands on me like a bright light. “Why do you dress like a cowgirl but ride English?”
“Because we only have one saddle, dummy.”
“All your butts fit in it?”
She laughs. “Yea, all our butts fit in it!”
There’s an awkward teenage silence.
“Why do you wear 501’s, not Wranglers, like your brother?” She says.
“Because I’m not a cowboy, nor do I want to be a cowboy, nor do I want to hang out with my brother, or any of his cowboy friends.”
“Sor-ry.”
An hour goes by and Brook returns with Perry, but no woman, and they see Camille and me holding hands and twirling in circles together. They laugh as we twirl away, back towards Barn Six, towards the arena, the arena gate, and the tiny amount of champagne we had makes holding hands a necessity. “You know what’s cool about you, Saully?” Camille says, and she turns and grabs my other hand, so we’re standing face to face like two people at the altar.
“My muscle shirts?”
“No, those are actually pretty stupid.”
“What, then?”
“You treat me normal, and that makes other people treat me normal.”
“You are normal.”
“What about this.” she says, and lifts her hair, and now, for the first time, I have to say something about the Obvious Thing. She permitted me to ask about it, or say whatever I wanted but I never wanted to say something, because she was a girl, with boobs and everything, and I was a boy, and dang if I was going to let a scar get in the way of that—besides, now I’m drunk and who knows what I’ll say.
“How did it happen?”
“Sandy spilled boiling water on me. We were kids.”
“Did she get burned?”
“No.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Don’t remember.”
“Well. It’s hardly noticeable. Do you like my scar?” I say, and without warning, Camille’s lips collide with mine. They are soft and squishy, and her spit doesn’t taste bad at all, and she kisses right into my soul. Everything about her is soft and smooth, even the Obvious Thing, which my cheek touches briefly.
“What was that for?”
“I don’t know,” she says, laughing, and she runs into the dimly lit arena doing handsprings, dancing like a dove in the air. I watch, giddily, and her kiss might have planted a fizzing thing into my chest because now I shiver, even on a hot August night. We go to our tack stall and close our eyes and kiss more, like people in movies. It’s just pressing our mouths together, but I never want it to end, and the mirthy smell of cedar circles our heads like a drug and my shivering reaches a crescendo. By midnight, we both have to pee so badly that we say goodnight, and it’s all over.

The next day it rains and another fight breaks out by the arena gate. This time, a man gets kicked in the ribs and a mob of people rush by, besieging him. I think for sure they’ll cancel the show, but the trumpet sounds, and it the show goes on. Western Saddle means a break for me, so I sit with Camille, holding hands, since we’re now boyfriend and girlfriend, and we watch Perry get third place. Lizzy Welsh sits down. She’s eighteen and smokes in front of her parents, wears gothy clothes, and is a duck in all the waters I only dreamed of testing.
“You two are adorable!” she says, kissing me on the cheek, and I kiss her back, because I’m a kisser now. “Are you coming to the Hyatt tonight?”
“You know my dad won’t let us near the Hyatt.”
“Screw him! Come anyways, it’ll be fun!” she says. Lizzy’s family has a hundred million dollars and a hotel chain, and she has the strange piercings to prove it. Her face is pleasured, yet worn, like a rock star, and her hair twirls in a serpentine flame above her head, making her impossible to refuse.
“I may need to watch Chuck Walker’s barn,” I say, glancing at Camille.
“I need you. I need you!” Lizzy says, lacing her stringy arms around my neck, and oh, if it were true, I think, but Dad goes to these parties and makes deals and impresses people; and our presence would be like a wrecking ball because rich horse traders don’t like muscle shirts. The history book of Dad’s life is thick with deals, arrangements, trades, silent partners, and people I’d never heard of, and I’m just a seed planted in hay, shavings and dung, dispatched to the needs of others, until some invisible painter paints strokes in my favor.
Later that night, I rake the aisle. “Did you have a shower?” Perry shouts from the back seat of a bright blue King Cab Silverado. There are three other guys in the truck dressed like Country Music stars.
“The water’s still cold…” I say.
“Get in, let’s go,” Perry says, and I do, and we creep out of the fairgrounds.
By the Galloway’s camper I see Camille, wearing a skirt and a tube top, looking non-cowgirl, and I notice her hair is pulled up and her face is exposed. She waits, looking toward Barn Six, never once thinking I would be in a truck driving away.
The Hyatt is slick and sturdy with pillars, polished checkered-marble floors, high ceilings and large furniture. The Welsh party is high brow, and rich people teem in a ribbon of suits and dresses from the lobby to the ballroom. Perry and I see two tables of food with mountains of chops, raw fish, cheese, crackers, and bread. We build tall sandwiches and squish them together like xylophones and take big bites, giving no care to how we were going to chew.
From a vacant part of the room, Lizzy Welsh materializes. She’s the biggest fish this town has ever seen. Her black suit, tanned, scarless face and bright diamonds part the crowd as she strolls in, shaking hands and kissing the cheeks of gentility. She stops right front of Perry and me. “Welcome to PNW, boys!” she says, smelling of alcohol and perfume. I feel like the lizard who crept into the king’s chamber, or like that poor friend rich people keep on the side. She likes me, or something about me, maybe raw youth, or that I don’t know or care what’s going on. Lizzy mingles, laughs, smiles, then when she’s about to ask me to dance, I revive those shivers in an instant. But a hand of stone takes my shoulder and I see a terror in Perry’s eyes.
“Hey, Dad,” he says.
“Put the sandwiches down,” Dad says, quietly, wearing a perfectly sinless white tuxedo. His face shines like smooth, bearded concrete. “Why are you here?” I turn toward Lizzy, but she disappears like fly spray, and is off dancing with some rich horse trader. We put down our masterpiece sandwiches and go to the lobby, where Dad speaks to the front desk man for a while. Then we get on the elevator to the tenth floor and to room 1016. “Don’t go out this door. I’ll see you in the morning.” SLAM, he’s gone.
“This is better than sleeping on hay,” I say. Perry ignores me and turns on the television.
“Don’t you have anything but muscle shirts?” he says, and I don’t know what this means, but maybe with nicer clothes, we wouldn’t have been seen, two kids, thirteen and fifteen, at the front table, eating like starved dogs.
A half hour later, Chuck Walker and Brook show up, Perry’s cowboy friends who drove us. Chuck pulls out his Copenhagen, forms a dip on his thumb and furls it, quickly, into his lip. “What’s that?” I say, knowing full well. Chuck tosses the can and I open it. The warm, moist “worm dirt” is like a hot pickling barrel and I wince, but then partake and toss it back. Now we’re buddies, out in the desert, wrangling wild mustangs. But the chew burns my lip and I get wheezy. The room spins. By the time the guys leave, I puke whatever sandwich I ate and swish cold water until not a grain of tobacco remains in my mouth. Now, any fun I had at the Hyatt is flushed down the Willamette River.
We watch Saturday Night Live and James Belushi break dances and that’s funny enough back then to be it’s own skit. “Thanks for bringing me anyways,” I say. Perry is silent. He, too, is a grown-up trapped in a kid’s body, and I realize these failed attempts to reach out of our station have a quality of themselves. They mean we aren’t as low as we appear, and cleaning stalls, picking hooves, and working twenty-hour days was merely a function of age.
The next morning we take long, hot showers, and Wayne picks us up and we go out for breakfast. He and Perry talk about horses and showing, like nothing happened. That afternoon is Camille’s class, so I watch from the stands with Linda Galloway. “What happened last night?” she says, not inquiring, but accusing. I think she half expected me to ditch Camille, as all men will do to all women.
“We got in big trouble.”
“Here she comes,” Linda says, uninterested, and I look up and see Camille. She looks elegant riding Blackjack, himself a beauty with his long, full tail dragging behind, and at that moment, and only then, do I ever understand showing. I see her and I want to show. I want to ride Monarch, or one of our mares, into the ring and have people shout for me. But that glory is reserved for people who work hard all year, and I never seem to know where to start, and never end up in a class.
I look around and see something odd by the gate. A man waits with a golden eagle perched on his arm, and it’s claws are the size of human hands. It wears a leather hood over it’s eyes, and I wonder just how stupid eagles have to be to think nothing’s wrong just because they cannot see. I remembered why the man was there. He was supposed to fly the eagle as Monarch came into his park saddle class and it would be a cool visual gimmick for the rich people to coo and flap about. It’s the sort of thing people do at horse shows.
Screams. Loud, like I never would expect from Linda Galloway. I turn and see Camille won her class. First place out of only four, but it’s still first. I realize I must matter even less to Camille now that she’s a champion. I notice Dad with Wayne, our trainer, and Lizzy’s mother, Carolyn Welsh. He motions for me to stay, and now I realize that Monarch’s class is next, but I go with the crowd down to the gate to meet Camille.
Lizzy Welsh waits on Monarch, in full show attire, for the next class. Her derby is pulled down tight and her face is set like flint and her lipstick bright red. She’s all about business and ignores my wave, but I think what perfection of beauty this pale, waify doll is on our dappled, black stallion.
Camille lingers in the empty arena while the photographer snaps flashy big photos, and as she rides out, Lizzy starts in, full trot. One gate. Two horses. Lizzy was told to make a grand entrance and the eagle will fly high, and rich people will coo and flap. For a foolish second, nothing happens. Everyone’s genteel. But it doesn’t last. The eagle’s hood comes off and it spreads it’s wings and flies up, dipping, then soaring into the center of the arena, as planned. Blackjack rears at the sight of this and Monarch pins his ears down and whips around. He throws Lizzy off like a doll and squats low, backing up to Blackjack. From there, he springs up high, ramming two hooves into the other horse’s chest. His shoes rip clean streaks of hide off Blackjack’s shoulders so fast it looks like flesh colored paint strokes.
Blackjack flails, making sparks in the concrete below with his show shoes, then crumbles to the ground, Camille beneath him. There’s a stunned silence. Sandy Galloway appears instantly and grasps the 1,000 pound horse by the neck with both arms. She twists and clenches every muscle to leverage him off her sister. Camille escapes and darts to the edge of the crowd. Monarch kicks into mid-air with deep, hollow, screetches, sounds only the old horse people know, having seen it before, and every story I’d ever heard comes to mind—every buggy fork lodged through a horse’s chest, every broken trough gashing a leg, every broken neck from running into a fence—and the fine demarcation between man and animal is the gun, in every case, stayed by money in a rare few, but not for the Galloways, who barely make it to a few shows on a single mom’s income.
Voices scream, “Stop him!” as Monarch strives, but his kicks are a function of nature, and no one intervenes until nature takes it’s course. There’s a loud “POP” near Blackjack, and some of us look around for a gun. As he rises from, he paws at the ground, but his hoof is broke off and separated from the shin exposing smooth, shiny white bone. Dark blood sprinkles and the confused horse holds his leg up, his hoof dangling by a small tendon.
Monarch trots away from the wreckage, his reigns dragging and his saddle halfway down his side. Lizzy springs up, unhurt, and leads him away, and how strangely rare are human casualties in this business, I think. Bruises, for sure, and scars, like my scorpion, but broken bones and deaths are not common. The horse gets the short end. Blackjack. The one bleeding and trembling, his tongue hanging like a wet, foamy eel, gets the short end.
An arrangement of spectators hobble him away, gently, like movers carrying priceless china. “We’ll take a thirty minute break. Thirty minutes,” says the announcer, trying to restore order. “Up next – the CHAMPIONSHIPS!” Click-click-click and Charlie Daniels comes out softly. I run to Barn Six and a crowd hovers around the Galloways’ stalls. There’s a blue Miley two-horse, backed in next to the Dr. Whitney’s truck, which they load with bales and horse blankets.
“Why the bales?” I say to Camille, who I find sitting, shaking.
“We’re transporting him to U.C. Davis. It’s eight hours away.”
She was civil and distant, lumping me into the crowd. I feel like we never kissed or twirled or drank bubbly or held hands.
“He’ll be okay,” I say.
“We’re not sure,” she says through a crack in the sturdy wall that has formed between us. Her hair is proudly pinned back displaying the Obvious Thing, while this new, bigger wound takes the stage.
The Galloway’s pull away that night and there’s a hush at the fairgrounds. Perry hears the news and tells me they “put Blackjack down” which is a nice way of saying “they injected sodium pentobarbital into him.” I know from my ride-alongs with Dr. Schaeffer back home. Blackjack was probably chewing on a carrot when he felt a prick in his massive neck and slumped, dead, as fast as one heartbeat.
The gun is just a figure of speech.
Camille’s sorrow haunts me. I want to run out to the manure pile and take deep breaths so I don’t pollute the other memory. But it’s too late, and the entire weekend smells of cedar, forever, beginning to end, good and bad. I’m the son of the owner of the horse that killed her horse, and, in a thirteen year-old way, that’s enough to sever the small tendon holding Camille and me together. A tiny, one night tendon. One kiss. One twirl. One scar.

Dad backs the Silverado up to our four-horse Miley and, click-click-clump, the fifth-wheel hitch slams home, and the truck and trailer are one again. Monarch’s loaded. He kicks the floor and picks at his hay. It’s just another annoying ride.
I crank up the drop jack, hook up the chains, connect the lights, we check ‘em.
“Brakes?”
“Yea.”
“Left?”
“Yea.”
“Right?”
“Yea.”
“Don’t worry about running lights. We’ll be home before dark. Let’s go.”



Copyright © 2005 Steve Sheppard

Age before beauty...

Aimzers: "You look good for your age."
Customer: "How old do you think I am."
Aimzers: "Thirty-nine?"
Customer: "I'm thirty-five."