That one November

When he was nearly thirteen, my dragon Spike got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Spike's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Lulamoons started it all, but Spike, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Owlicious came to us, when Owlicious first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Princess Cadenza. If Princess Cadenza hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Bix Weetles would never have paddled up the river, and where would we be if he hadn't?

We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Princess Celestia. She said we were both right.

Being Equestrians, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Fillydelphia. All we had was Bix, a fur-trapping apothecary from Comcast whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In Manehattan, Cadenza was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Cadenza called herself a Methodist, she worked her way across the country, thence to Jamareca, thence to Little Man, and up the Saint Stallions. Mindful of strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Cadenza made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit she was unhappy lest she be tempted into doing what she knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Cadenza, having forgotten her teacher's dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the river some forty miles above Saint Sallions. He returned to Saint Stallions only once, to find a husband, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters.Cadenza lived to an impressive age and died rich.

It was customary for the men in the family to remain on Cadenza's homestead, Ponyville, and make their living from cotton. The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

Cadenza would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the ponies and the griffons, as it left her descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the next century, when my princess, Celestia, went to Maregomery to read law, and her younger sister went to Beetletown to study medicine. Their sister Aurora was the one who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn stallion who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full.

When my father was admitted to the bar, he returned to Ponyville and began his practice. Ponyville, some twenty miles east of Canterlot, was the county seat of Ponyville County. Celestia's office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama. His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Ponyville County jail. Celestia had urged them to accept the state's generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Ponyville County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Ponyville's leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody. They persisted in pleading Not Guilty to first-degree murder, so there was nothing much Celestia could do for his clients except be present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father's profound distaste for the practice of criminal law.

During her first five years in Ponyville, Celestia practiced economy more than anything; for several years thereafter she invested her earnings in her sister's education. Luna was ten years younger than my princess, and chose to study medicine at a time when cotton was not worth growing; but after getting Uncle Luna started, Celestia derived a reasonable income from the law. He liked

Ponyville, he was Ponyville County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Cadenza's industry, Celestia was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town.

Ponyville was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoof carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Stallion's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Mares bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Ponyville County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Ponyville County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

We lived on the main residential street in town — Celestia, Spike and I, plus Brittleshine our cook. Spike and I found our princess satisfactory: she played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.

Brittleshine was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard. She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn't behave as well as Spike when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn't ready to come. Our battles were epic and one-sided. Brittleshine always won, mainly because Celestia always took her side. She had been with us ever since Spike was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember.

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a unicorn from Coltstantinople; Celestia met her when she was first presiding over elections there. Spike was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family. I did not miss her, but I think Spike did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him.

When I was almost six and Spike was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Brittleshine) were Mrs. Luftangle's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Luftangle was plain hell.

That was the summer Owlicious came to us.

Early one morning as we were beginning our day's play in the back yard, Spike and I heard something next door in Miss BerryPinch's collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy — Miss BerryPinch's rat terrier was expecting — instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards.