The Heartbreak of Horses

a memory

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Forty-three years later, I still think that I could’ve kissed her. I’ll call her Bethany.

Our Future Farmers of America parliamentary procedure debate team was lost in the Kansas City suburbs. We were running late for the national finals. Our rental van was parked outside a grocery store. Our advisor was on the nearby payphone asking for directions from some official person. I was sitting in the van’s passenger seat. Bethany was standing at the open window. She sighed, shook her head, stepped up on the running board, and leaned through the window. Bethany leaned close to me. She leaned right up to that border between modest flirtation and outright ardor. At least, that was my theory about her intentions. That’s what I felt.

It was the last few weeks of her senior year in high school. She was eighteen and would soon be heading to the University of Idaho. I was fifteen and would be a high school sophomore that autumn. You can minimize my affections and say that I was just a boy who had a crush on an older girl. But she and I had always talked about real stuff—about magic and loss, about loneliness and joy, about our families. Maybe you think our close friendship was age-inappropriate but there was zero chance that we would’ve had sex. She was a conservative and chaste Christian who lived her faith without hypocrisy. If we had kissed, there’s a good chance that I would’ve been her first kiss. Maybe second. She would’ve been my third kiss.

Bethany was a black-haired white girl. I was a black-haired Indian boy. Juliet and Romeo in the wheat fields without the lovemaking and suicide.

When she leaned through that window close to me, I inhaled the scent of minty lip balm and bubblegum. She usually wore contacts but was wearing her glasses that day. Her vision was terrible. Her glasses were thick and unstylish. She was beautiful.

She leaned close to me and we shared eye contact that lasted for a moment too long—a moment filled with possibility. But our schoolmates were gathered in and around the van. Our advisor was ten feet away. That kiss would’ve been public. So there would be no kiss.

Bethany leaned back and stepped off the running board. I don’t recall what she did after that. I had no idea that I’d still vividly remember that moment over four decades later. Who can predict such things?

Later that day, after we’d found our way to the competition venue, one of my other Future Farmers teammates said, “She wanted to kiss you.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I was imagining things.”

“I saw it,” he said. “It was fire.”

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Eight years later, my high school sweetheart and I had become college sweethearts. I’ll call her Rose. We were students at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, which was only ten miles across the state border from Moscow, Idaho, home of the University of Idaho. I knew Bethany had graduated from the U of I but I hadn’t seen or talked to her since that day of the near-kiss.

Rose had been lifelong friends with Bethany’s little sister. I’ll call her Maggie. She’d followed her sister’s path to the University of Idaho and had invited Rose and I to watch Bethany compete in a barrel riding competition in the college’s rodeo arena. Or maybe the arena was not on campus. It might’ve been somewhere else. Maybe on the outskirts of Moscow, which is pronounced Moss-coe and not Moss-cow. Maybe the rodeo grounds were in a nearby town. Maybe in Troy, Idaho. My memory of the arena location is unclear.

As Maggie, Rose, and I sat in the bleachers, I realized that my romantic feelings for Bethany had become as small and flickering as a solo star in the night sky. And when she and her horse sped into the arena and ran a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels set one hundred feet apart, I cheered for her with a joyful nostalgia. It’s strange how your overwhelming passion for somebody can dissipate over the years.

I don’t remember if Bethany was a good barrel racer. I don’t remember the results of that race. But Maggie, Rose, and I waited in the bleachers until everybody else in the audience had gone.

“Okay,” Maggie said. “Let’s go find Bethany.”

We exited the arena and found Bethany and her horse in a staging area. There were perhaps ten or fifteen female barrel racers and male bronc busters talking and laughing. Bethany looked to be very popular. All of those cowboys and cowgirls were white. Maggie was white. Rose was white. I was an Indian boy with shaggy hair, a lisp, and a sing-song reservation accent.

“Hey, Bethany,” Maggie said. “Look. It’s Rose and Sherman.”

Bethany was still on her horse. She sat a few feet above us. She was distracted by after-competition details but she smiled warmly and waved. I kept my distance from the horse. I’m afraid of them. Yeah, you can laugh. I’m an Indian who’s afraid of horses. People tell me they’re loyal and affectionate. Empathetic. But they’re too big. Their voices are too loud. I know they sense my worries and doubts. They know I’m afraid of them and that makes them afraid of me.

“I’ll be right back,” Bethany said to us and rode her horse to some other location. And I realized that I’d been fooling myself. I was still a little bit in love with her. I hoped that Rose hadn’t noticed but she probably did.

Then my internal alarm bells started to ring.

Some people have a difficult time believing it, but we brown and black people can detect racism, no matter how loud or silent it might be. I’d grown up in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho, among the most right-wing places in the country, but I’d encountered active racism probably less than ten times during my early years. Those encounters have scarred me. But I can also promise you this: I grew up surrounded by my political opposites and, no matter what my fellow leftists and liberals might believe about conservatives, they’re not automatically racist.

But as I stood among that rodeo crowd, I saw and felt their racism. The whispers and stern glances. The lightning eyes. The dark distance and silence, the dark distance and silence, the distance, the silence.

Rose and I were an interracial couple so she’d learned to spot the disapproving racism, too. She’d developed her own alarm system. On those rodeo grounds, we shared a different kind of intense eye contact. It wasn’t about our romantic love. It was our shared exhaustion, anger, and touch of fear. In those moments, throughout our relationship, Rose was as white as Princess Diana and I was as Indian as Geronimo.

Rose’s father had always been impressed by my athletic and academic achievements but he didn’t want his daughter to date me.

“Honey,” he’d once said to her. “I don’t want you making charcoal babies with Sherman.”

That was a disgusting insult.

Rose’s mother had always been kind but she forbade Rose from visiting me on the reservation because Indians are “too angry.”

She wasn’t exactly wrong about that anger.

“I’m going to go find Bethany,” said Maggie and walked away from us to find her big sister.

I was in fight, flight, or freeze mode. I was a prey animal. I picked out the biggest white guy and knew I’d punch him first if things went haywire. I’d get my ass kicked but their alpha boy would bleed.

You might doubt what Rose and I felt that day. You might doubt that those rodeo assholes were racists. But their hostility was as obvious as a stampede.

Then Rose took my hand in a show of interracial strength. I can smile now and wish that we’d tongue-kissed as we slid to the dust. It would’ve been great fun to get booed by racists. But none of that happened. Rose and I didn’t wait for Bethany and Maggie to return. We drove back to my apartment in Pullman. I don’t remember if Rose and I conversed about our rodeo adventure as we traveled home. I don’t think we ever talked about it.

During those college years, I always knew it was possible that Rose and I would spend a lifetime with each other. But I also knew, with far more certainty, that I’d only date Indian women if Rose and I ever broke up. And that’s what happened. Rose graduated from college in 1991. I was a poet, three credits short of an American Studies degree, but I didn’t want to stay in Pullman without Rose. We broke up for good ten months later and then, ten months after that, I met Diane, the Hidatsa Indian woman who has been my wife for over thirty years. I like to think of our marriage as Native American orthodox.

I haven’t seen Bethany since she and her horse ran that cloverleaf pattern through the barrels. I still remember her with affection. I absolutely know that she wasn’t a racist but she lived, worked, and played among a few who are definitely racist. I know that she’s lived in a small Idaho town for many years. 64% of Idaho voters went for Trump in 2020. I’m friends and family with people who are in that 64% percent. I’m not on Facebook so I don’t know if Bethany voted for Trump. Maybe she’s part of the 36% who voted against him. You can dispute this fact all you want but Idaho is among the most racist states in the USA. I don’t know how Bethany feels about the traitorous insurrection of January 6th. I don’t know if she’d be angry with me for calling it a traitorous insurrection. But I know that we’ll warmly greet each other if we ever cross paths again. I’m sure that she still rides horses but, like me, I’m just as sure that she’s aged out of intense athletic competition.

I still think that I could’ve kissed Bethany forty-three years ago. I think there was fire between us. We placed seventh in those Future Farmers of America parliamentary procedure national finals. We were robbed.

Like everybody else, I’m lonesome for my childhood. But I also shudder when I think of the small, medium, and epic terrors that I faced. I won many of those battles. I lost many of them, too.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a horse cry. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a horse panic. But there’s a horse weeping and screaming in my heart as I write this. Damn, damn, damn. I want you to know that I’m afraid of some people whom I dearly love.