Read Blind Your Ponies for Free Online

tried to attribute it to first-day jitters.
    She hadn’t been here for the first day of school last year, arriving instead in January to replace a teacher on maternity leave. Diana remembered how she’d found the opening on the Montana Education Association’s newsletter: a general science teacher at the elementary and high school level with experience in health, P.E., and some coaching. She remembered how she finally found Willow Creek on the map—after some serious nose-to-the-table squinting—and how she had a feeling this was the kind of place she had been searching for.
    But then she arrived at Willow Creek and she couldn’t deny the second thoughts that overwhelmed her. The blacktop highway curved into town and led to the first and most impressive building on Main Street: the Blue Willow Inn, a bright, blue two-story wood-frame building with white trim and a boardwalk porch across the front. Though not the geographical center of town, Diana discovered it was undoubtedly the social center, open throughout the day as a gathering place for rumors and gossip as well asfor serving meals in its historic dining room and dispensing beer and hard liquor from the tavern side of the establishment.
    And when she looked for a supermarket, a filling station, or even a convenience store, all she found, besides the Blue Willow Inn, was a quaint little art gallery and a tool store. If she needed a loaf of bread or a tank of gas, forget it. But if she needed a watercolor or a radial-arm saw in a hurry, well she was in the right place. Or if she needed a bull. Willow Creek had a reputation for producing the best Hereford bulls in Montana or, depending on whom you talked to, in the country. Diana realized that in Willow Creek—a town with no drug store, no doctor or dentist, no police, no variety store, no hardware store—the Blue Willow was it, sink or swim.
    But then again, in Willow Creek, if an old brown dog slept in the middle of Main Street, everyone drove carefully around him.
    The Painters’ gray sedan pulled up in front of the school and Diana snapped out of her reverie. A blond-headed boy unfolded himself from the passenger seat like a Swiss army knife, and when he straightened himself up he towered over the car. Diana blinked. From the second-story window it was hard to tell just how tall he was, but he was
tall.
The boy sheepishly made his way toward the front door as the kids stopped their playing and stared. They made way for him as though he were royal blood or Freddie Krueger from
Nightmare on Elm Street.
    Diana bolted for the hallway and ran the stairs two at a time. Sam had to see this.
    S AM WAS THUMBING through a dictionary when Diana burst into his classroom.
    “Sam, there’s a surprise for you downstairs you’ve got to see!”
    He regarded her from behind his wire-rimmed aviator glasses but showed no excitement. Aside from conversing across tables at the Blue Willow when they happened to be eating at the same hour, Sam and Diana hadn’t had much social contact.
    “I think I’ve already seen him.” “You have?” she asked, disappointed. Diana wanted to be the first to show the coach his incarnate dream.
    “Peter Strong, Grandma Chapman’s grandson, right?”
    “Wrong. C’mon, this’ll be fun.” She ran out the door.
    Sam reluctantly pushed away from his desk and followed, finally catching up to her at the stairs.
    “What’s this little surprise got to do with?” he asked.
    “I’d say it’s a coach’s pot of gold.” She laughed.
    When they rounded the landing to the second floor, they saw the Painters’ exchange student talking with Bess, the office secretary. Diana and Sam had stopped two steps above the second floor and the boy was at about the same level they were.
    Diana stepped down and introduced herself. From ground level the boy seemed to be seven feet tall.
    “Hello, I am Olaf Gustafson. From Norway I am coming.”
    Students filed past to their classrooms, gawking.
    “It’s