My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Page B

would follow the horse trailer when we loaded up Buck, so we’d load him up, too, and off we’d go, me and Buck, Robbie and Gunsmoke. It was fun learning to ride in formation and doing square dances and quadrilles on horseback. Before long, Robbie and I were competing in rodeos.
    One of my favorite events was barrel racing, where you ride your horse at top speed, circling around an obstacle course of three upright barrels in a cloverleaf formation. It was a perfect event for Buck, who had only two speeds: on and flat out. Buck was a roping horse; he was trained to stop when you get off. He didn’t understand “whoa.” So I’d have to throw off one leg to get him to stop, which was challenging to say the least.
    Robbie and I competed as a team in the Rescue Race. He would ride Gunsmoke as fast as he could to the end of the ring, circling around me as he threw his arm out to pick me up. It was supposed to go like this: I would grab his arm, jump on the back of the horse, and then race to the finish line triumphantly. The only problem was that I couldn’t seem to figure out how to throw my leg all the way over Gunsmoke’s rump after Robbie reached down to pull me up. One time I never even got mounted, and Robbie just held on to my arm as we galloped to the finish line. Mother was watching the race and told me I looked like a little flag, napping in the wind.
    At first we boarded Buck and Gunsmoke with our aunt and uncle Sam and Maurine, who had some pasture around their house on the outskirts of Quitman. Later we rented the fenced field across the highway from our house to keep the horses. As soon as I’d get home from school, I’d run over there with my saddle, and off we’d go. One day after a particularly long ride, I thought I’d bring Buck back to the house and put him in the backyard for a while. I thought it would be nice to let him graze on the cool, thick grass. I couldn’t tie him to the cherry laurel tree because it was poisonous for horses. So I took his saddle off and tied him on a long rope to the clothesline out back, which was two T-poles sunk in cement, with three wires strung between them. I figured Buck could move up and down the line like a dog, and eat grass wherever he wanted. Another bad idea. As soon as I had him situated, he got all tangled up in the long rope, which is something I quickly learned horses don’t handle very well. Before I knew it, he’d taken off running, pulled down the clothesline, and stretched the wires so tightly, the sound they made when they snapped behind him was like ricocheting rifle shots. Buck tore through the side yard and across Edna Lipscomb’s beautiful front lawn, tearing up her Saint Augustine, and headed for the highway.
    I was running after him when I saw a huge tractor trailer bearing down on my horse. I closed my eyes and all I could hear was the driver leaning on his horn. When I opened my eyes again, the truck was gone and Buck was standing across the street in a neighbor’s yard, shaking like a sweetgum leaf. I don’t know who was trembling more, me or Buck. There were skid marks in the asphalt from his metal horseshoes. I still don’t know how he survived.
    One thing I was good at was fishing. My dad and I would spend hours together out on the lakes around Quitman, although once I did hear him mention to my mother that my chattering scared away most of the fish. My crowning achievement was when I was six and the whole family spent the summer in Colorado, where Daddy was taking some post-graduate courses. We drove out to a big river to fish for trout. He and the boys had fly rods, but nobody thought I would catch anything, so all I had was a pole with a string and a hook. I didn’t even have a worm on my hook, but something that looked like a worm that had fallen from a flowering tree.
    I was standing upstream from my brothers holding my pole when all of a sudden I saw a huge fish splashing on the far side of the water. I was so transfixed, I