Telling Topie Good-bye

Cold air slapped my face as I walked to the barn, my boots sloshing in the Michigan mud. The icy gusts spoke of more than just predawn chill. It happened each year, just when the snow gave way to a mud-fresh world and I thought that spring was here to stay. Then, one day, the sky would suddenly darken and mocking snow would cover the ground one last time.

I heaved the barn door open. My horse Topie was in the corner of his stall, his eyes closed. Slipping the halter over his white-tipped muzzle and dainty Arabian ears, I gently spoke to him.

“Hey, old boy.” He opened his eyes slowly. “I know, I know—I’m early.”

Topie wasn’t used to waking up at that hour, but he was going to a new home in the afternoon and I was worried that we wouldn’t have much time together later. My family was moving to California after the school year was out and it cost too much out there to rent a house with a barn. A man had bought Topie for his daughter. He was coming to pick him up after school.

“They’ll take you to the fair this summer,” I said. Topie was wide awake now. He pawed the ground and munched the carrot in my flattened hand.

“Well, I’ll never have to do this again,” I sighed to Topie as I shoveled muck into the rusted red wheelbarrow. “I know, I know,” I went on, quoting my dad. “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”

My friends thought I was crazy for talking to my horse. They also thought I was crazy for spending my baby-sitting money on hoof picks and halters instead of clothes and contact lenses. I knew I was crazy for getting up at five each morning in order to clean out his stall and feed him before seminary. Wrapping my arms around his withers, I buried my face into the white oval marking on his dappled gray neck. How I was going to miss him.

I rode for a half hour as the morning sky changed from black to pink-gray. The wind swirled my hair and I posted up and down, Topie jumping and cantering in graceful rhythm. I loved the way I could leave my klutzy 14-year-old self behind when I was riding. Then it didn’t seem to matter that I had frizzy hair and wore Coke bottle glasses, that I was the last person chosen for the field hockey team, or that I hadn’t made the honor roll once this year.

After cooling Topie down and grooming him, I trudged back into the house. The kitchen scene brought me back into the real world. Syrup and milk splotches adorned the table as my two-year-old sister, Katie, threw a lung-bursting, feet-stomping fit because she couldn’t have gummi bears for breakfast. I searched for my breakfast and could only find a half piece of cold toast.

“Oops, Tracy, I thought you had eaten!” explained my ten-year-old brother, Rob, as he thumbed through a book on amazing facts about outer space.

“I can’t believe your black hole manners!” I said, watching him wolf down Cheerios.

I braced myself for the bathroom battle which my sister Casey and I waged each morning. “I need to curl my hair,” I yelled, my fist banging on the door. The clock ticked away. Sister Montgomery would be there in ten minutes to pick us up for seminary. It was my goal to recover the curling iron and occupy the mirror while there was still time.

“It’s not my fault that you were out with your horse all this time,” Casey fired over the whir of her fiercest weapon—the blow dryer. I kicked the door.

“Hey, Trace, let’s call a truce.” Casey pranced through the door, her long blond hair flowing behind her like victory banners. Her blue eyes blurred into soft eye-lined shadows and her lipstick painted her mouth perfect. “Just think, only three more weeks of seminary. Then, school’s out and life’s a breeze.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I retorted, throwing daggers at her with my eyes. “Topie’s leaving this afternoon and I’ll probably flunk geometry this semester and Mom will make me take it over this summer. It doesn’t even matter that I’m one of the only freshmen in a class full of juniors and seniors.”

“Oh, you’ll probably pass,” Casey added, flicking my stubborn brown hair. “No one in our family has ever flunked anything before.”

Pushing past her, I glimpsed the old “Families Can Be Forever” plaque on the wall. Sure! That is if you don’t starve to death first because the food reaches your little brother before it gets to you. And who would want to live forever in the shadow of a brilliant, gorgeous 17-year-old sister?

The bathroom battle raged on, only this time it was against myself. I tried brushing my hair. It gained electricity and frizzed even more. Next I tried curling my mop with the curling iron, then spraying mousse in it, then gel. It didn’t look frizzy anymore, just plastered. I thought about putting lipstick on, but it would just make me look more like an alien. Resigned to defeat, I trudged down the hall, through the front door, and into Sister Montgomery’s car.

As we pulled out of the driveway, I heard Topie whinny in the air as he shot around the pasture, his tail held high. I fought the lump in my throat. I shook my head, brushing away a tear before anyone saw it.

“Whew! What’s that smell?” exclaimed Ed Montgomery, a gorgeous senior, as we pulled onto the expressway.

“Tracy, you forgot to change your barn boots!” Casey wailed, jabbing me with her elbow. I focused on the mud fringing my boots and gingerly balanced on my toes in order to avoid getting more horse manure onto the car’s spotless, light blue carpet.

Things went from bad to worse. Casey’s best friend, Sherry, rolled all of the windows down. We practically froze, but she said it was better than suffocating. Ed made some wise crack about marketing a perfume called “Just Horse’n Around.” I opened my geometry book and fixed a frozen stare onto the page.

We arrived at seminary ten minutes early. I hurried to the bathroom before anyone noticed the tears starting down my cheeks. It wasn’t just that I had proven once and for all what a klutz I was, or even the fact that right triangle theorems totally confused me. I could handle total embarrassment and complete failure. The thing that kept flashing through my mind was the scent of clover and the feel of Topie’s warm breath at my shoulder as I lay in summer grass. I heard the soft earthen echo of Topie’s hooves when he followed me out of the wildflower-clad pasture. I remembered riding on winter days when the world was white and the sky steel blue.

“Tracy.” The accented voice of Sister Wong, my seminary teacher, scattered my thoughts. “Why are you in here alone and crying?”

“It’s nothing,” I said, gulping in my tears, “just a bad morning.” I hoped she didn’t think it was self-pity. I had a great deal of respect for Sister Wong. She had grown up in Hong Kong. She had overcome leukemia and many other obstacles. She hated self-pity. She called it a destructive parasite sucking energy from the soul. “Learn to live life with energy, wisdom, and joy,” she would say.

“Tracy, Tracy,” she began. “Did you know that your very beautiful inside shines through to the outside more each day? Please tell me what happened to make it such a bad morning.”

First I told her about the problem I had with geometry.

“Tears over something such as this are a waste of time,” she told me. “You are bright. You are capable. Memorize the theorems. Try a tutor or more study time to pull you through. Do not sorrow over something you can change.”

Then I told her about my dirty boots in Sisters Montgomery’s car.

Involuntarily smiling, Sister Wong went on. “Learn to laugh over such things,” she said. “The Montgomery’s car is a much too clean, carbon copy of a hundred other cars. Your addition of life’s debris will give it character and variety. And think of how you rescued the passengers from a barrage of boredom!” She got some paper towels and began helping me clean off my boots.

As we cleaned I told Sister Wong about Topie. I told her about how I had sold him because we couldn’t afford to take him to California. I also told her about how I had earned the money to buy him two years ago when he was just a foal. I explained the voice commands I had taught him before he was old enough to be broken. I told her of the endless hours walking with him when he was sick with colic, and how he trembled when I put salve on his wounds after he tore himself on barbed wire.

I explained how hard it had been to pay my tithing when I was responsible for my horse financially. Yet somehow it had always worked out. The baby-sitting jobs had come, and I was able to keep the promise I had made to Mom and Dad that my horse wouldn’t burden the family financially. Now I had decided to sell my horse. I had decided to sell my beautiful friend rather than beg and cry to my parents and break my promise.

We finished cleaning my boots and Sister Wong looked up. I was surprised to glimpse a tear gleaming for a split second in her eyes.

“Tracy,” she said, draped in her usual dignity, “you speak of change, and growth, and saying good-bye. These things are worthy of your tears.”

We went back to the classroom and seminary was as demanding as usual. Sister Wong left us with an assignment due tomorrow. We were to write a first person account, pretending we were someone in the New Testament. We were to try very hard to imagine how that person might have felt, lived, and reacted to the Savior. We were to become, for a moment, that individual.

The day progressed better than I thought it would. Snow fell throughout the morning, giving way to an afternoon of windy sunshine. I heaved a relieved sigh when my geometry test was postponed a day. I hurried home after school to tell Topie good-bye.

Mom met me at the door. She held a dish towel in her hands. Her cheeks were wet. Why had she been crying?

“Honey,” she said, “I tried to get them to wait until you came home from school, but they left with Topie an hour ago. I know how much you wanted to say good-bye. I’m sorry, Honey. I’m so sorry.”

I felt numb and strange and sort of broken. “I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’m going to go up to my room for a while.”

I sat on my bed for a long time. I stared out the window at the ring I used to ride in and the homemade jumps Dad built for me. I stared at distant hoof prints in the mud and the bit of snow that hadn’t quite melted. There wouldn’t be any snow in California. I stared at the green and yellow wallpaper Mom had found on sale and we had hung together. I stared at everything that I would be leaving behind.

Suddenly the door cracked open and, before I could say anything, Rob was next to me on the bed.

“Why aren’t you at baseball practice?” I asked.

“I thought you might want to do something,” he said. His little boy eyes looked soft.

That’s when it hit. I didn’t just cry. I sobbed. Tears for my beautiful horse, my ugly hair, and all of the changes that jerked me so fast and hard. Rob’s hand on my shoulder moved up and down with my gulps. When I quieted, Rob turned to me.

“I’m thinking of someone,” he said.

He was playing the guessing game, a silly game we played on long car trips. By asking yes and no questions a player had to guess who the other player was thinking about. The person in mind could be rich and famous, alive or dead, or the kid next door. The only rule was that all of the players had to have heard of that person. You got a point for each question you asked and the lowest score won.

We played for a long time, our voices trailing the air. In the back of my mind I realized that my little ten-year-old brother was missing his Little League practice in order to be with me, in order to keep my mind moving and to give my soul something to grip other than loneliness. Rob beat me by one point.

“Hey, this isn’t fair,” I forced a smile. “When you were a little kid I used to let you win whenever we raced. You could at least let me win one today.”

“That’s too much to ask!” Rob laughed. “But I will let you have the mashed potatoes first tonight!” I managed a real smile. We raced down to dinner and tied.

After dinner, Casey plopped down next to me on the sofa. “I looked over your geometry chapter,” she said. “I think I remember it well enough to help you study.” It was amazing what a little one-on-one help did for me that night. I don’t know if it was because my brain was clear and quiet, like an erased slate, after the day of emotion, or just the knack Casey had for making things clear. But whatever it was, I finally understood.

Before going to sleep, I worked on my paper for Sister Wong. I was going to be leaving my home and I thought about how Jesus must have felt before he died and had to leave this world. I carefully read John, chapter 13. I decided to write as if I were one of the disciples there, as Jesus said good-bye and washed his disciple’s feet. The words came to me clear and real:

“Moments passed. The flame flickered on. Then, Jesus spoke the words, the words which would echo across the ages: ‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; … By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another’” (John 13:34–35).

I thought about Sister Wong’s painted fingernails cleaning horse dung off my boots. I thought of Mom’s wet cheeks and Dad’s strong hands. I even thought about the silky baby kisses Katie gave me each night, and about how Rob and Casey made me so very angry and so very glad all in the same day. I thought about Topie. I thought about the Savior. Then I concluded my paper:

“I looked through the dim light at the other disciples as the Master filled a worn basin and washed each of our feet. Tears were in the eyes of each, all so strong and yet so weak at the same time. Was there love enough inside of me to love as he had loved each of us? How could I serve as he had served? Yet, although Jesus was leaving, I knew I could go on, living through the love he left inside of me.”