The Red Pony

Front cover of a 1937 first edition of The Red Pony.

The Red Pony is a book by the Nobel Prize-winning American author John Steinbeck. It is an anthology of four short stories, all of which had previously been published in magazines, that together form an episodic narrative. The first edition, which contains the stories "The Gift", "The Great Mountains" and "The Promise", was published in 1937. The story "The Leader of the People" was added to the 1945 edition.

The main character in the four stories is a 10 year-old boy named Jody. He lives on a small and somewhat isolated ranch in California with his parents, Carl and Ruth Tiflin, and the ranch hand Billy Buck. Jody appears to have a much closer and friendlier relationship with Billy Buck than with his father and to consider Billy Buck to be more of a role model. Major themes of the book are disappointment and the disillusionment that comes when children realize that adults are fallible. Jody has to accept that Billy Buck, whom he had formerly idolized, is capable of making mistakes and is not always able to keep his promises exactly as either he or Jody would have liked. Billy Buck himself is painfully aware of losing some of Jody's admiration for him and being unable to ever fully regain it.

The Red Pony has twice been adapted for the screen, as a 1949 American film and as a 1973 American TV movie.

Summary

The Gift

The 10 year-old boy Jody Tiflin lives on a ranch in the Salinas Valley with his father Carl and his mother Ruth. Only one ranch hand is employed there, a man named Billy Buck who is an acknowledged expert in horses and who Jody believes to be capable of doing anything.

One evening in late August, Jody is sent to bed early. From his bedroom, Jody can hear his parents talking. His father has bought something that he assures his mother was not very expensive. The following morning, Jody discovers that what his father had bought was a young red pony that is a gift for him. Carl tells his son that he will be solely responsible for taking care of the pony if he wants to keep him, a condition to which Jody readily agrees. Jody names the pony Gabilan after the nearby Gabilan Mountains. Although Carl bought Gabilan from a show that had gone bankrupt, the pony is completely untrained. Jody will be responsible for training him also, with assistance from Billy Buck. Carl tells hs son that he should be able to start riding the pony by Thanksgiving.

As Thanksgiving draws closer, Billy Buck suggests that as part of Gabilan's training, he should be left in the corral all day while Jody is at school. Jody is worried that it might rain and cause his pony to catch cold. Billy Buck assures him that it will not rain and Jody takes his word for that. It rains heavily and the pony catches a cold. Billy Buck treats the animal but has to acknowledge that Gabilan's condition is only getting worse. Jody spends the night in the barn next to his pony. He wakes up in the night to find that the barn door has blown open and Gabilan has left. He goes out to find the pony and bring him back.

When Billy Buck next examines Gabilan, he decides that he will have to cut a hole in his windpipe so that he can breathe. Jody again spends the night in the barn to care for his pony. Jody, however, knows that Gabilan is dying. Jody eventually falls asleep and dreams about powerful winds.

In the morning, Jody finds that the barn door has once again blown open and Gabilan has left again. The boy follows the Gabilan's tracks and finds some buzzards pecking at the pony's corpse. Jody is able to grab hold of one buzzard that is eating Gabilan's eye. He wrestles with the bird and manages to beat it to death. At that moment, Carl and Billy Buck arrive. Carl tells his son that the buzzard did not kill the pony. Billy Buck points out that Jody already knows that.

The Great Mountains

While playing outside, Billy's attention is drawn to the great mountains. He has never been to them, nor have his father or Billy Buck. They both tell him that there is no point visiting them because there is nothing to be found there.

An old Hispanic man arrives. He says that his name is Gitano, that he was born on the land that is now occupied by the Tiflins' ranch and that he has returned to spend the rest of his life there. When told that there is no work on the ranch for him, he replies that he is now too old to work. Carl says that he cannot afford to keep on someone who is unable to work. He allows Gitano to stay for one night and tells him that he must leave in the morning. Jody shows Gitano around the ranch. He points out a very old horse named Easter, the first horse that his father ever owned. Carl comes along and says that he should kill Easter because the horse is now useless now that he is too old to work.

That evening, Jody goes into Gitano's room. He finds the old man polishing a sword, which he then tries to hide. In answer to Jody's questions, Gitano says that the sword was given to him by his father and that he does not know where his father got it. Jody asks Gitano if he has ever been to the great mountains. The old man replies that his father took him there once but he can no longer remember anything he saw that day. It is obvious that he does not want to talk any more and wants Jody to leave.

By the time everyone else wakes up the following morning, Gitano has already left. He has apparently left all his belongings behind, although Jody notices the sword is not there. Easter has also gone. A neighbor tells Carl that he saw Easter heading towards the great mountains being ridden by an old man. The old man was holding something in his hand that the neighbor took for a gun. Carl jokes that Gitano has saved him the trouble of burying Easter. He checks his guns and finds that none of them are missing. Jody knows it was the sword that Gitano was holding.

The Promise

Having heard from Billy Buck that Jody took good care of the pony Gabilan, Carl decides to let his son have another horse. The boy is to take their mare Nellie to be bred and care for her throughout her pregnancy with the assistance of Billy Buck. He will then be given her foal, which he will be responsible for training. Since the death of Gabilan, Jody has lost some of his former confidence in Billy Buck. Billy Buck is sadly aware of this. He promises Jody, however, that he will have hs foal.

Jody cares for Nellie throughout her long pregnancy. Billy Buck tries to answer all of Jody's questions honestly. He admits that horses' pregnancies can be unpredictable and that things can go wrong. He tells Jody that sometimes births go wrong and it is necessary to cut the foal to pieces in order to save the mare's life.

When Nellie goes into labor at night, Billy Buck gets Jody out of bed to witness the birth. It soon becomes clear to Billy Buck that there are serious complications. He orders Jody to turn his head, which the boy stubbornly ignores. Billy Buck kills Nellie by hitting her in the head with a hammer before cutting her open to extract the live foal. He leaves the foal at Jody's feet and tells him that he will have to raise the newborn animal like a mother. Billy Buck has kept his promise to Jody although neither he nor Jody are happy.

The Leader of the People

Ruth Tiflin receives a letter from her father to let her know he is coming to visit. Carl is not happy to hear about his father-in-law's upcoming to visit because the old man constantly tells the same stories about how he came West on a wagon train. Ruth excuses her father by saying that he was the leader of the wagon train, that it was the only really important thing he ever did in his life and that once the wagon train reached the Pacific Ocean there was nothing left for him to do. Jody, however, is delighted that his grandfather is coming to visit. He loves listening to the old man's stories and does not mind that he has heard them all before.

At dinner on the night of his arrival, Jody's grandfather tells some of the stories about his journey West that he has told word-for-word the same many times before. Apart from Jody, nobody pays any attention to him. The old man's tone of voice suggests that even he is no longer interested in his tales. At breakfast the next morning, before Jody's grandfather has let his bedroom, Carl complains about having to hear the same stories of the old man's long ago adventures again and again. At that point, Jody's grandfather enters the room. He says that his adventures are not really the point of the stories that he tells. What he has been trying and failing to convey was the sense of community among the people of which he was the leader.

Jody invites his grandfather to go outside and help him kill mice that had been hiding under a haystack. The old man follows hs grandson outside but says he just wants to sit in the sun. Jody asks his grandfather to tell him a story about his journey West. The old man laments that only little boys want to hear his stories even though they are about things that only adults could do. Jody tries to comfort his grandfather by saying that he would like to be a leader too. He then offers the old man a glass of lemonade. He asks his mother for a lemon to make the drink for hs grandfather. Ruth assumes that her son really wants two lemons to make lemonade for his grandfather and himself. The boy says that he does not want any. Ruth realizes that her son is acting out of genuine compassion.

Adaptations

1946 photograph of Robert Mitchum.

The Red Pony was adapted as a 1949 American Technicolor film of the same name directed by Lewis Milestone. The Red Pony stars child actor Peter Miles as the boy (whose name is changed from Jody to Tom for the film), Shepperd Strudwick and Myrna Loy as his parents (whose names are changed from Carl and Ruth to Fred and Alice), Louis Calhern as the boy's grandfather and Robert Mitchum as Billy Buck. The screenplay, written by John Steinbeck himself, is mostly based on the two stories "The Gift" and "The Promise". The film has a happy ending, in which Billy Buck finds he does not have to kill a pregnant mare to deliver a foal by caesarian section with both the mother and the newborn colt surviving.

The book was adapted for the screen again as the 1973 American TV movie The Red Pony, directed by Robert Totten, that first aired on NBC on March 18, 1973. The TV movie stars Henry Fonda as Carl Tiflin, Maureen O'Hara as Ruth Tiflin, Clint Howard as Jody and Jack Elam as Jody's grandfather. The Red Pony one two Emmy Awards, one for its sound editi and one for its original music by composer Jerry Goldsmith.

External links

• John Steinbeck's The Red Pony on Faded Page.com. The website is hosted in Canada where the book is now in the public domain. It is still under copyright in the United states and many other countries.