It is hard to imagine these days how much horses meant to me when I was a child. There was seldom a day that passed that I was not somehow involved with horses in some way. To my ultimate dismay this seldom ever involved actually being near a horse. I had to fulfill my bottomless horse desire with drawing, daydreaming, watching Big Valley and other horse themed shows or talking about them. My sister was also very horse driven which allowed us to commiserate together about the lack of horse in our lives and to conspire together to try and increase our horse opportunities.
Luckily for us our aunt who lived next door to us had a friend who had horses. Billie was a very sturdily built woman who lived on several acres with her two kids and a half dozen horses. I think there was a Mr. Billie but I never remember seeing him. Billie was unlike my mother and unlike my aunt in many ways. Number one on the list was her attire. I don't believe I ever saw her wearing anything but jeans and cowboy boots along with some worse for wear tee shirt. Now, my mother and my aunt wore jeans, but theirs were a variety that was not likely to be used for labor. Billie's jeans were stained, torn and smelled of horse.
Billie also had short hair which was worn in a style called a 'shag'. Basically it was many layers of stiff dark hair that didn't seem to get combed very often. My mother's hair was always 'done' in some way that kept it stylish and caused her to avoid things that would 'undo' it. The most different thing about Billie from female relatives was her personality. She was loud. She was outspoken. She would use words that my sister and I were not allowed to speak and were not even supposed to hear. We loved Billie.
Of course had she just been this loud swearing woman who dressed like a ranch hand I am sure I would have loved her still, but what really made us love her was that she had horsed - and she invited us over to ride them.
I clearly remember our first such outing and it was memorable for several reasons. First was that for some reason my mother trusted Billie enough to leave my sister, my cousins and I with her. Perhaps my mother had something really urgent she needed to do, or perhaps my aunt was using some sort of hypnotic persuasion technique on my mother, but she left us in the care of this scruffy, loud, un-motherly, swearing woman. And she left us there for hours at a time. Truly a memorable moment.
So my mother and my aunt drop my sister and three cousins and me off and drive away. Billie waves and calls out encouraging things to them as they drive off and then just sets about getting all of us kids, including her own two into readying the horses for riding. Since there were more of us than horses that could be ridden and probably because she didn't want too many of us on horseback at once she divided us into groups of two and set us about tasks. We had to water the horses and saddle the horses and comb the horses and several other chores. We who would balk at even the slightest home chore went after all tasks with wild, happy abandon. Horses have a way of doing that to kids.
I was one of the first two riders. Billie chose for me to ride Roper, a bay colored horse and her daughter who was a couple of years younger than me was set up to ride a pony. As she boosted me into the saddle, Billie just instructed me to ride to the end of the field, which was about two acre lengths and then turn around and come back. I took hold of the reins and held them the way she instructed and then clucked for the horse to walk. Billie's daughter started off beside me and as we started crossing the field she said to me, "Don't let him roll on you." I wanted to ask her what she meant, but the pony chose to trot forward and then Roper began to trot which caused me to bounce up and down in the saddle like a sack of grain. We jounced our way to the end of the field and I set about pulling on the reins to get Roper to turn.
He decided he did not want to turn. Instead, Roper abruptly stopped and began to kneel down, then slowly began to roll over onto his side. This was something unprecedented in my limited horse riding experience. I had just enough presence of mind to get off the saddle as Roper began to try to roll onto his back. From across the field I could hear Billie shouting, "Don't you let that @#&* horse roll!!"
Often as a child I was given what seemed like incomplete information. Things such as how in fact one was supposed to stop an animal that weighed hundreds of more pounds than you from doing what it pleased was entirely lacking. I tried to improvise by putting my little hands on his neck and pushing, saying "Roper, don't roll." This was not effective. Roper proceeded to roll over onto his back.
Now Billie had not just shouted at me, she had begun to run my way and this was a sight as well. She was a big woman and you might have thought her to be somewhat slow, but that would be a mistake. Once she got going the momentum of her bulk had her traveling at quite a clip. She reached us just as Roper had rolled over once and proceeded to let out the most loud and invective filled string of syllables I had ever heard. This was not lost on Roper and he jumped to his feet immediately. She took hold of his reins and told me to "Come on!" while she practically drug Roper back to the stable yard.
I was feeling pretty low at that point and thought my chance to ride had been forfeited when she commanded me to get back in his saddle. "You're the one he pulled that crap with so you're the one who has to ride him." She snapped a lead rope to Ropers bridle and once I was back on top of him she said "Now don't touch the reins. Just hold on to the saddle horn." I did just that. No way was I doing to disobey this cantankerous woman. She picked up a riding crop, stood in the center of a dirt ring and slapped the crop against her leg, telling Roper to get going. He began to walk around a circle the length the lead rope allowed.
At first I was quite scared, but after several circles, things didn't seem to be so bad. Billie grunted. and brought us to a stop. "What way were you turning when he rolled?" she asked. "Uhhh..." I responded trying to desperately think of which was my left and right hand. Sensing that Billie was not about to put up with my personal failings I just blurted out, "Right." Somehow this turned out to be the actual answer and was not the current direction we were circling. "Okay," she said, "Then he is not going to like this next part, so you better hang on tight."
There was no time for me to even fully comprehend what she said before she had us turned and circling right. Roper did not in fact like going in this direction and began to buck just a little bit. She smacked him on the rump and he began to go even faster, slightly humping his back occasionally as he did. I was clenching the saddle horn for all I was worth and each time Roper bucked I felt myself lifting from the saddle only to gratefully slam back down. As he began to travel faster, still arching his back from time to time I began to list a little bit in the saddle when I came down and I was worried that if he bucked one more time I was going to fall off and then Billie would kill me. Luckily she slowed him down and let me get off.
"Alright," she said, "That ought to do it." Then she commanded me to walk the horse, take off his saddle, comb him down and feed him. I did each thing she said without a moments hesitation. One false move and I was afraid she was going to make me ride him again. It began to dawn on me that Billie had a lot more expectation of me than my mother ever did. In Billie's world you did not talk back, you did as you were told. If you fell off the horse nobody was going to coddle you or even ask if you were okay. If you were told to do something you did it, even if you weren't actually capable of doing it. Thus I fell off the horse and didn't get hurt. I rode a bucking horse and didn't fall off. I took off a saddle that weighed almost more than I did.
Billie didn't just have this kind of control over us kids, but it seemed to extend to our mother's as well. When my mother and aunt finally came to get us, Billie recounted our adventures, saying of my mishap. "Yeah, that Roper tried to roll on her, but she is okay." Somehow she said it in such a way that it took every bit of menace out of it so that my own overly protective mother did not even bat an eye. My aunt's curiosity was piqued though and she said "Why would a horse try to roll?"
"Well," Billie drawled with one boot up on the lowest fence rail, "The guy that owned him prior to me taught him tricks. So when the horse gets tired or doesn't want to work he will pull one of them. But we got it all settled out didn't we?" She slapped me on the back with the last sentence. I just nodded. Oh yeah, we got it all settled.
That ended our first adventure with Billie and we went on to have many more. Some were the best horse encounters I ever had and some were less than stellar. None however were as memorable as that first one with Roper, the horse that rolled.
