The Red Pony Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jody’s grief but Billy Buck’s turning on the unseeing father, a multiple instance of unresolved anger. The title of the third story (the last in the original cycle), “The Promise,” is again ironic. The terms of the second “gift” are such that Jody can take no pleasure in it, having required the death of Nellie, the gentle old mare: “He tried to be glad because of the colt, but the bloody face, and the haunted, tired eyes of Billy Buck hung in the air ahead of him.” Here again it is Billy Buck who is the parental figure, carrying the guilt over his omissions that caused the death of the red pony into the bloody horror of delivering the second colt. Though the death of the mare is inevitable, the position of the colt in her womb being beyond human intervention, Billy turns it into an act of retaliation against Jody: “There’s your colt, the way I promised,” he says implying that the death of the mare wassomehow the boy’s fault, much as the name of the colt (given before it is born), Black Demon, carries with it a kind of foreboding or tragic necessity, linking it to the dark range of mountains much as the red pony was named for the Gabilans.
    Symbols of death and loss loom over these stories, but they do not point toward any cumulative pattern of resolution. The most explicit of the parables in this regard is the second, which, like the fourth and last, exists outside the “pony” sequence. The sight of the old Mexican riding an ancient horse off into “The Great Mountains” never to return is a powerful, even archetypal image, which fills Jody with “a nameless sorrow” but no real understanding of what he has witnessed. Death may be the dominant theme of these stories, but although we can read the signs and signals, Jody cannot, and he serves chiefly as a kind of symbol himself, of boyish innocence against which the cycles of birth and death are played. Again, the cumulative result is not progressive but promotes a kind of stasis, a symbolic map of contraries and correspondences: the two ranges of mountains, the two colts, the two old men, the two “fathers,” an arrangement centered by the “round tub at the brush line” and the sad boy lying next to it “with his crossed arms and… nameless sorrow.”
    Like many innocents in American fiction, Jody is something of a Christ figure, burdened with sorrows occasioned by other men. But in many telling ways, also, he is not a particularly sympathetic little boy—again in contrast to the youths in
Yearling
and
Flicka
. He is given to bullying Doubletree Mutt, the family dog, and pestering the cat in Tom Sawyer fashion—but without Tom’s saving grace of mischievous humor. He revenges himself upon his naggingparents by killing a songbird against their specific proscriptions, and we can hardly be sympathetic toward his cold-blooded plans to kill a community of unsuspecting mice—whose chief crime seems to be their plumpness. Christ does not come to mind but rather Twain’s Young Satan. This is clearly not Wordsworth’s or even Rousseau’s Natural Child but rather a kid by way of Calvin and Hobbes. Again, all of these gestures are integral to the power play that makes up the chief substance of the stories, ending with Jody’s bearing a glass of lemonade to his grandfather, a tart sacrament of rebellion against his father. “He didn’t care about the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion.”
    The Red Pony
is undoubtedly the most unconventional story about the adventures of a boy in rural America that can be found in our national canon, lacking as it does both a developmental sequence and a strong moral overlay of didacticism. I have been told that it has become a particular favorite among younger readers—teenagers, not children—perhaps for the same reasons I was drawn to Steinbeck’s fiction during my own high-school years. Adolescents