A different kind of Angel. (Short story)
I found this story in my Chicken Soup book. It really touched me, and I get tears in my eyes everytime I read it. I hope you enjoy it too, I typed it up from the book.
A different kind of Angel
Foaling season is a time for dreams. We'd just begun breeding Appaloosas on our Arizona ranch, and I was dreaming of blue ribbons and eager buyers. That first year the blazing coats of nine tiny Appaloosas had already transformed our pastures into a landscape of color. Their faces were bright with stars and blazes, their rumps glittering with patches and spots splashed over them like suds.
As we awaited the birth of our tenth foal, I was sure it would be the most colorful of all. Its father was a white stud with chestnut spots over half his body and a multicolored tail that touched the ground. The mother was covered with thousands of penny-sized dots. I already had a name for their unborn offspring: Starburst.
:With horses, what you want and what you get are often two different things," my husband, Bill warned me.
The night of her foaling, I was monitoring the mother on a closed-circuit television Bill had installed in our bedroom. I could see the mare glistening with sweat, her white rimmed eyes full of anxiety. She was within hours of delivering when I dozed off.
I awoke with a jolt. Three hours had passed! A glance at the monitor revealed the mare was flat-out on her side. The birth was over. But where was the baby?
"Bill! Wake up!" I shook his hard. "Something stole the baby!" Wild dogs, coyotes and other predators invaded my imagination. Moments later we ere in the dimly lit corral. "Where's your baby, Mama?" I cried as I got on my knees to stoke the mare's neck.
Suddenly a face popped out of the shadows-thin, dark, and ugly. As the creature stuggled to stand, I realized why I hadn't seen it on my TV: no colorful spots, no blazing coat. Our foal was brown as dirt.
"I don't believe it!" I said as we crouched for a closer look. "There's not a single white hair on this filly!" We saw more unwanted traits: a bulging forehead, a hideous sloping nose, ears that hung like a hack rabbit's and a nearly hairless bobtail.
"She's a throwback," Bill said. I knew we were both thinking the same thing. <i>This filly will never sell. Who wants an Appaloosa without color?</i>
The next morning when our older son Scott arrived for work and saw our newest addition, he minced no words.
"What are we going to do with that ugly thing?" he asked/
By now, the foal's ears stood straight up. "She looks like a mule," Scott said. "Who's gonna want her?"
Our youngers girls, Becky and Jaymee, ages fifteen and twelve, had questions too. "How will anyone know she's an Appaloosa?" Becky asked. "Are there spots under the fur?"
"No," I told her, "but she's still and Appy inside."
"That means she's got spots on her heart," said Jaymee.
<i>Who knows</i>, I wondered. <i>Maybe she does.</i>
From the beginning, the homely filly seemed to sense she was different. Visitors rarly looked at her, and if they did, we said, "Oh, we're just boarding the mother." We didn't want anyone to know our beautiful stallion had sired that foal.
Before long, I started noticing that she relished human company. She and her mother were the first at the gate at feeding time, and when I scratched her neck, her eyelids closed in contentment. Soon she was nuzzling my jacket, running her lips over my shirt, and chewing my buttons off and even opening the gate to follow me so she could rub her head on my hip. This wasn't normal behavior for a filly.
Unfortunately, her appetite was huge. And the bigger she got, the uglier she got. <i>Where will we ever find a home for her?</i> I wondered.
One day a man bought one of our best Appaloosas for a circus. Suddenly he spired the brown, bobtailed filly.
"That's not an Appaloosa, is it?" he asked. "Looks like a donkey." Since he was after circus horses, I snatched at the opportunity. "You'd be suprised," I said. "That filly knows more tricks that a short-order cool. She can take a handkerchief out of my pocket and roll under the fences. She can climb into water troughs. Even turn on spigots!"
"Reg'lar little devil, huh?"
"No," I said quickly, then added on the spur of the moment, "as a matter of fact, I named her Angel!"
He chuckled. "Well. it's eye-catchin' color we need," he told me. "Folks like spotted horses best."
As time passed, Angel-as we now called her-invented new tricks. Her favorite was opening gates to get to food on the opposite side.
"She's a regular Houdini," Bill marveled.
"She's a regular pain," said scott, who always had to go catch her.
"You've got to give her more attention," I told him. "You spend all your time grooming and training the other yearlings. You never touch Angel except to yell at her."
"Who has time to work with a jughead? Besides, Dad said we're taking her to auction."
"What! Sell her?"
I corralled Bill. "Please give her a chance. Let her grow up on the ranch," I begged. "Then Scott can saddle-break her when she's two. With her sweet nature, she'll be worth something to someone by then."
"I guess one more horse won't hurt for the time being," he said. "We'll put her down on the east pasture. There's not much gtazing there, but..." Angel was safe for now.
Two weeks later, she was at the front door eating the dry food from our watchdog's bowl. She'd slipped the chain off the pasture gate and let herself out-plus ten other horses as well. By the time Scott and Bill had rounded them up, I could see that Bill's patience was wearing thin.
Over time, her assortment of tricks grew. When Bill or Scott drove to the field, she'd eat the rubber off the windshield wipers. If they left a window open, she'd snatch a rag, glove or notebook off the front seat, then run like the wind.
Suprisingly, Bill began forgiving Angel's pranks. When an Appaloosa buyer would arrive, she'd come running at a gallop, slide to a stop thirty feet away, and back up to have her rump scratched. "We have our own circus right here," BIll told buyers. By now, a small smile was even showing through Scott's thick mustache.
The seasons rolled by. Blazing sun turned to rain-and brought flies by the millions. One day, when Angel was two-and-a-half, I saw Scott leading her to the barn. "She gets no protection at all from that stupid tail," he told me. "I'm gonna make her a new one." That's when I realized Scott's feelings for the horse were starting to change.
The next morning I couldn't help smiling as Scott cut and twisted two dozen stands of bright-yellow baling twine into a long string mop and fastened it with tape around Angel's bandaged tail. "There," he said. "She looks almost like a normal horse."
Scott decided to try to "break" Angel for riding. Bill and I sat on the corral fence as he put the saddle on. Angel humped her back. "We're gonna have a rodeo here!" I whispered. But as Scott tightened the cinch around Angel's plump middle, she didn't buck, as many other young horses would. She simply waited.
When Scott climbed aboard and applied gental pressure with his knees, the willing heart of the Appaloosa showed. He ordered her forward, and she responded as though she'd been ridden for years. I reached up and scratched the bulging forehead. "Someday she's going to make a terrific trail-riding horse," I said.
"With a temperament like this," Scott relied, "someone could play polo off her. Or she could be a great kid's horse." Even Scott was having a few dreams for our plain brown Appaloosa with the funny-colored tail.
At foaling time, Angel whinnied to the new borns as though each one were her own. "We ought to breed her," I said to Bill. "She's four. With her capacity to love, imagine what a good mother she'd make."
Bill thought this was a good idea. So did Scott. "People often buy bred mares," he said. "Maybe we'd find a home for her." Suddenly I saw an expression on Scott's face I hadn't seen before. <i>Could he really care?</i> I wondered.
During the winter months of her pregnacy, Angel seemed to forget about escaping from her corral. Then in early April, as she drew closer to her due date, a heavy rain came and our fields burst to life. We worried Angel would once more start slipping through the gates in her quest for greener pastures.
One morning, I was starting breakfast when Scott came through the kitchen door. His hazel eyes loomed dark beneath his broad-brimmed Stetson. "It's Angel," he said softly. "You better come. She got out of the corral last night."
Trying to hold back my fears, I followed Scott to his pickup. "She's had her foal somewhere," he said," but Dad and I couldn't find it. She's...dying." I heard the catch in his voice. "Looks like she was trying to make it home."
When we got to Angel, Bill was crouched beside her. "There's nothing we can do," he said, pointing to the blue wildflowers in the lush green fields, in easy reach for a hungry horse through the barbed wire. "Loco weed. Some horses love it, but it can be a killer."
I pulled Angel's big head onto my lap and stroked behind her ears. Tears welled in Scott's eyes. "Best mare we ever had," he murmured.
"Angel!" I pleaded. "Please don't go!" Choking back my grief, I ran my hand down her neck and listened to her labored breathing. She shuddered once, and I looked into eyes that could no longer see. Angel was gone.
In a cloud of numbness, I heard Scott call out only a few yards away. "Mom! Dad! Come look at this foal!"
Deep in the sweet-smelling grasses lay a tiny colt. A single spot brightened his face, and stars spangled his back and hips. A pure, radiant Appaloosa, our horse of many colors. "Starburst," I whispered.
But somehow, all that color didn't matter anymore. As his mother had taught us so many times, it's not what's on the outside that counts, but what lies deep inside the heart.
- Penny Porter
