Girl and Five Brave Horses, A by Sonora Carver

and by morning seemed so exhausted that when the maid came to change his linens I told her not to bother him, but he heard me whispering and opened his eyes. “Let her,” he said, and, raising himself, threw one of the blankets around himself and walked a few steps across the room to a chair. When he sat down I looked at his face and knew as I had not known before that he was going to die.
    It hit me so hard that I almost cried out, but I held onto myself and, telling the maid to call me when she was through, hurried to my room. There I stayed and had my cry.
    When I returned I helped him out of the chair and back into bed, and that night he lapsed into a coma. In the morning we took him to the hospital, but he didn’t even know. He had had a long and eventful trip through life, but the end had come at last. Dr. Carver died that afternoon.
    We could not go with him to his final resting place. He died only three days before we were to open in Sacramento, and he had told us, “No matter what happens to me, don’t break any contracts. My word has always been good and I want to keep it that way.” So we sent him off alone to a grave beside his parents in Winslow, Illinois, knowing he would have wanted it that way and that we were doing the thing he would have most respected; we were keeping his word.
    I tried to keep busy after that, getting ready for our appearance. Because of Dr. Carver’s illness I hadn’t had time to buy any new bathing suits. I went out and bought a dozen in different colors and styles and also some spangles to sew on those I’d be wearing at night. This was a wide departure from the outfits I had worn before, but now I was working for Al, and Al’s outlook was different from his father’s. He allowed his performers to dress the way they pleased, so I put away forever the old red suit with its modest neckline and gave over to a new magnificence.
    To top my new finery, Lorena gave me a shawl of green silk with long fringe around the edge and a peacock on the back. She had embroidered the peacock herself with a large punch-work needle, and I was as thrilled when I had it on as a little girl dressed up in her mother’s finery.
    In one last gesture of putting aside the old and taking up the new, I discarded the helmet. For a long time Lorena had not worn one when she was away from her father, adopting in its place a headpiece made of sateen over a regular bathing cap. Surely by this time, I told myself, I had been diving long enough to know how to protect myself from the horses’ hoofs.
    There was one thing I couldn’t bring myself to change. Dr. Carver had been so pleased when I let my hair grow—“Now you look like a lady”—that for a long time I refused to cut it.
    The night we opened in Sacramento it was Al who announced the act. He pulled out all the stops, and the spiel he unwound was a sure guarantee to make everyone listening believe he was about to witness the most breath-taking performance in history.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” Al said, “all eyes cast atop this lof-ty tower,” breaking the word “lofty” in such a way as to make it seem as high as any human could possibly go without benefit of oxygen. “Tonight we present for your entertainment the most exciting act in show business today ...” and so on until every eye was hopelessly and completely glued to the tower.
    Al had picked up his art of announcing in his days with the circus he had run away to join when he was only eleven. Eleven years old and a runaway, a dead match for his father; yet his reason for running had not been the same. He had not been mistreated; he had been ignored. It was during the time his father owned a Wild West show and Al yearned to go touring with the cowboys and Indians, but Dr. Carver forbade it, saying he wanted Al to stay home with his mother and go to school. Al simply up and left home.
    With an eleven-year-old’s impracticality he chose the month of December, which, living in Colorado