The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

went to Atlanta Medical School on scholarship; George, to law school in Illinois, but they both came back—each with a new wife. My mother, Elizabeth, was in her second year at Agnes Scott College and was expected to find a husband in Georgia when she met my father at a semiformal dance. She was twenty years old; he five years older. It was a perfect match.
    George and his new wife, Carrie, settled in Gainesville, a stone’s throw from Emathla. My father could have practiced medicine anywhere, but he wanted to help people, so he went to a place where he was the only doctor for miles and miles. This was how it was always explained to me and Sam, anyway: we could have lived anywhere, but lived here because of my father’s goodness. And at first Mother, accustomed to the bustle of Miami, thought she would be lonely in such a rural place. But the magic of our home was that it destroyed loneliness. You could see other people—and Mother did, once every few weeks, tea with a neighbor, a Camellia Society meeting—but other people and places only made you love your home, your people, more.
    These were my people: Sam, my mother and father; Uncle George and Aunt Carrie and their son, my cousin, Georgie.
    That was our first story, how we had come to be situated in this little piece of heaven carved from the Florida wilderness. Luck, partly, but also love: Mother and Father had become engaged two weeks after meeting. George and Carrie and Georgie were part of this story, of course, not central to it but it is easy now to see how the story would have collapsed without them. We needed them in Gainesville to illuminate our own lives.
    —
    T he bell rang, signaling the end of rest hour, and I woke with a start.
    “Finally!” Gates said. She liked to ride as much as I did. Everyone else was already pulling on their breeches and boots. This was the first time I was going to ride with everyone else, and I was both nervous and excited, a combination I loved. I tugged my boots on with boot hooks, and saw Sissy out of the corner of my eye, watching. She smiled, I smiled back. I was eager to please her.
    I tucked my shirt into my breeches. We wore white breeches here; even the suede at the knees was white. Our clothes were laundered by the maids so it didn’t matter to us how dirty we got, but it seemed silly to dress us exclusively in white.
    When I walked outside the cabin into the smell of pine trees and sunshine, I saw Sissy had waited for me.
    “A letter?”
    “From my mother.” I remembered from my snooping that Eva and Sissy’s fathers had not written to them, only their mothers.
    “My mother writes me,” Sissy said, “three times a week. But her letters are so boring. My sister, hardly ever, only when she’s made to.”
    Other girls flocked around us, all identically dressed. They waved at Sissy, and because I was with her, at me. I smiled back. I’d never smiled at so many people in my life.
    “I hate writing letters,” I said, “it takes so long to write what you could say in half the time.” There were butterflies in my stomach; I was glad Sissy provided a distraction.
    Another girl walked by, so close she grazed my arm. I started to say something, then stopped. She was the girl with the white hair I’d seen bathing in the bathhouse. And, I realized with the small, pleasurable shock of recognition, the girl from the horse photograph, from the Castle. I knew even before Sissy said her name.
    “That’s Leona.”
    We both watched Leona disappear around a bend. We had passed the privies, now we were almost at the stables. Leona was a giant, her strides covered twice the ground of my own. Her white-blond hair was pinned into a tidy bun. Her boots were navy blue, the only girl among us who didn’t have black boots.
    “She’s from Fort Worth,” Sissy said. She said
Fort Worth
as if she were saying some other, more improbable place—Constantinople, Port-au-Prince. She was whispering now, even though Leona had