A Kingdom in a Horse by Maia Wojciechowska

just ask the boys to put the lettuce in separate boxes. How’s that?”
    “Oh, that’s very kind of you, John,” Sarah said gratefully.
    At the dry-goods store Tom Straka, the owner, said to her when she was hardly inside the door:
    “Ordered you some cowboy boots. They ought to be here about the middle of next week.”
    “How did you know? ”
    “Word gets around.”
    “I suppose”—she smiled at him—”that you also knew I needed some blue jeans.”
    “There’s a couple of pairs for you to try on in the back room.”
    In the grocery store where she went for the apples and carrots, Jean, the young clerk, had a big box of apples waiting for her.
    “These here apples aren’t rotten or anything,” she said, “but they’re sort of spotted, so you can have the whole box for ten cents.”
    Sarah laughed.
    “You didn’t know I also wanted some carrots, did you?”
    “Sure,” she said, “there’s a bag of them here. I asked Sam to give you a special wholesale rate on them.”
    On the street she thought that everyone smiled at her more kindly than usually, and she was happy that no one laughed at her or questioned her about her horse.
    It was after two in the afternoon when she finally got Gypsy saddled. She had no trouble putting the bridle on, but she had to retie the saddle knot twice before she got it right. She was nervous and scared as she got Gypsy out of the stable and mounted her.
    “Now,” she said, “you’ve had one carrot and one apple. You’ll have two of each if you walk nicely.” She kept repeating the order to walk, and her horse obeyed. But she didn’t know whether the obedience was due to her command or to the path they took. It was narrow and followed a winding creek. The patches of moist grass and the stones made for careful stepping. “This is what we’ll always do first,” Sarah said, patting the horse’s neck. “We’ll walk right here. It’s beautiful and you wouldn’t want to run here. But I do hope that your feet don’t hurt because of the stones. I must ask Lee about that.”
    It was truly a beautiful walk. The path was shady, with the sun visible only in rays of light, cool with the moisture of the water and green with the new foliage. They were walking up to the top of a hill, and Sarah had to dodge the branches by putting her face next to the horse’s neck. The feeling of fear did not vanish, but during the walk it subsided. And talking to the horse, she realized, was the fastest way of pushing the fear away.
    The hill had a flat plateau, and it was here that Sarah tried to make Gypsy do her turns. She remembered how Lee leaned slightly toward the side he was turning to and how he placed the reins on the horse’s neck.
    “Now, barrel horse, do your stuff,” Sarah whispered in Gypsy’s ear. Amazingly enough the horse obeyed the neck reining quite well. At first, however, it did the turns at barely a trot and Sarah bounced up and down in the saddle, not liking it a bit. She loosened the reins and said, “All right,” and Gypsy broke into a canter. After a pat on the neck and high praise, Sarah let the horse do what it wanted. And it wanted to run. They cantered out of the shade cast by the maple trees and into the sunlit fields and down a grassy road. Gypsy broke into a gallop, and Sarah loved the speed and the feeling of freedom that came with it. Her eyes filled with tears from the wind.
    They reached another hill and they stood motionless for a while, the horse and the woman both looking down into the valley below them. They could see the house and the barn but not the stable, and beyond the winding dirt road, the highway. And on the four sides of them there lay the land that Sarah owned, fields coming alive with the new green of grass, and to the north, the green roof of the maple grove.
    “It is a beautiful place, isn’t it?” Sarah said to Gypsy. “Look out there. Do you see that smoke? Besides the smoke, all you can see of Cornwall is the spire of