mount, and I climbed onto the barn roof, sure the corral would
descend into violence. But when Shawn hoisted himself into the
saddle, the Yearling merely skittered. His front hooves raised a few
inches off the dirt, as if he’d pondered rearing but thought better of it,
then he dropped his head and his paws stilled. In the space of a
moment, he had accepted our claim to ride him, to his being ridden.
He had accepted the world as it was, in which he was an owned thing.
He had never been feral, so he could not hear the maddening call of
that other world, on the mountain, in which he could not be owned,
could not be ridden.
I named him Bud. Every night for a week I watched Shawn and Bud
gallop through the corral in the gray haze of dusk. Then, on a soft
summer evening, I stood next to Bud, grasping the reins while Shawn
held the halter steady, and stepped into the saddle.
—SHAWN SAID HE WANTED out of his old life, and that the first step was to
stay away from his friends. Suddenly he was home every evening,
looking for something to do. He began to drive me to my rehearsals at
Worm Creek. When it was just the two of us floating down the
highway, he was mellow, lighthearted. He joked and teased, and he
sometimes gave me advice, which was mostly “Don’t do what I did.”
But when we arrived at the theater, he would change.
At first he watched the younger boys with wary concentration, then
he began to bait them. It wasn’t obvious aggression, just small
provocations. He might flick off a boy’s hat or knock a soda can from
his hand and laugh as the stain spread over the boy’s jeans. If he was
challenged—and he usually wasn’t—he would play the part of the
ruffian, a hardened “Whatcha gonna do about it?” expression
disguising his face. But after, when it was just the two of us, the mask
lowered, the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was my
brother.
It was his smile I loved best. His upper canines had never grown in,
and the string of holistic dentists my parents had taken him to as a
child had failed to notice until it was too late. By the time he was
twenty-three, and he got himself to an oral surgeon, they had rotated
sideways inside his gums and were ejecting themselves through the
tissue under his nose. The surgeon who removed them told Shawn to