Chosen by a Horse (4 page)

I don’t know what the foal was thinking, what could have possessed her to decide, at that moment, that the best place to be, in the whole three acres of her world, was in the corner with Hotshot. By then, Georgia was so out of her mind she didn’t seem to realize that part of the time she was kicking and biting her own foal. The foal screamed, Hotshot screamed, Georgia screamed, I screamed. I thought it would never end. Probably no more than a minute or two had elapsed since the attack began, but it felt
much longer. I ran to that corner, too, and was looking for a way to get close enough to grab someone’s halter. Anyone’s. Ideally Georgia’s. We had a strong relationship. She was my girl, my Georgia peach, my peachums-weechums, my Georgie-Porgie-pooh-bear, my fuzzy-wuzzy-wuzzums. That’s how it is when you love a horse. Silly language and sometimes silly beliefs, like hoping my relationship with fuzzy-wuzzy-wuzzums would supersede her instinct to protect her young from the “death threat” cowering in the corner.

When the electrified fence wire pulled loose from the middle rail and wrapped around the foal’s neck, I finally sprang into action. I couldn’t untangle the foal while Georgia was still in a rage because I’d just get kicked, too, so I grabbed the nearest stick, which was actually a large tree limb, and made a lunge for Hotshot’s halter.

“Move!”
I screamed, pulling him in the direction of the gate, hitting him with the branch to get him to follow me. Hotshot, sweet and dumb, had never been slapped, let alone clubbed. Finally, he moved. My plan was to get him to the gate, open it, let him out, then go back and untangle the foal. And that’s more or less what happened.

Within minutes, all four were grazing within a few feet of each other as though nothing had just happened, albeit with Hotshot now on one side of the fence, while the other three were clumped together in the pasture. I could only guess that the reason Georgia perceived Hotshot to be a threat and not Tempo, was because during the get-acquainted
phase, when noses were touching across the electric fence, Hotshot showed far more interest in the foal than Tempo had. The foal seemed to return his interest, and the two of them often grazed as near to each other as the fence would permit. My theory was that Georgia was jealous.

Allie and I were still standing in the turnout talking when Judy appeared, the friend who had called to tell me about the SPCA’s televised plea for help. Like me, Judy was a social worker and someone who loved horses, though she didn’t own any. She had come to see whom I’d brought home and to offer help.

“Well,” I said, glancing at Allie, “we could use some help putting a new halter on the foal.”

We were three small women in our forties. Allie needed all her fingers to make a living. I had a herniated disc. Judy was just plain out of shape. It was raining. The foal was wild.

“Sure,” Judy said.

After disinfecting my hands and boots in a bucket of Clorox and water, I went to the tack room in the barn and found the little leather halter Sweet Revenge had worn when she was a foal. It hung on a wall cluttered with halters and lead lines, bridles and saddles, including the first saddle I’d ever had as a child, a small all-purpose Steuben, as good now, thirty-five years later, as the day it was bought. It flooded me with memories, and I felt old and sad surrounded by the smell of leather and mildew.

The gloom lifted when I heard my three horses trotting
across the field toward the barn. They had seen me and had come to find out what was in it for them. I fished around in the treat bucket and pulled out three alfalfa cubes as steel shoes clattered down the cement center aisle of the barn and stopped outside the tack room. A nose snorted into the space under the door, someone squealed, more clattering as they jostled for position. I opened the door, and Georgia was so close it touched her chest. Her neck arched over me and she gave me one of those utterly surprised looks, eyes big and wide, ears cranked forward. The same look I’d get when I’d find her grazing on the lawn after she had used her rump to knock down a section of fence:
I was minding my own business and suddenly there was this noise behind me and I found myself standing on this really green grass
. I handed out the treats, gave everyone a quick pat, and left while they were still chewing so they wouldn’t come after me for more.

Back in the turnout with the new halter, we planned our strategy. We would surround the foal right there, inside the turnout, until one of us could grab her halter while one held her around the rump, and the other, around the chest. Allie was the strongest so she was assigned rump control. I’d go for the chest and Judy, the halter.

Before we budged, the foal sensed something was afoot. She jerked her head up from the hay and flattened her ears. Lay Me Down gave the foal a tired glance and went back to her nap. I handed the new halter to Judy, and the three of us started to walk around the back end of Lay Me
Down toward the foal, who had already positioned herself in the corner.

I sensed our mission was doomed.

As I got closer to the irate foal, I remembered I’d never lost a tooth or broken a bone. I’d never had stitches. My various body parts suddenly seemed precious. I really
like
my knees, I thought. My hands looked good hanging at the end of my arms like that. So what if her halter was a little snug?

I didn’t used to be such a chicken. It had gotten worse with age, since my back problems began a few years earlier. I felt so fragile sometimes, so vulnerable. I think it started the first time my back gave out. That day I spent six hours on the kitchen floor, since I couldn’t reach the phone for help. My dog came over and lay beside me and, eventually, so did my Siamese cat. My back seized up in the morning, right after I’d come in from barn chores, and I lay on the floor in my smelly clothes until three o’clock in the afternoon when two friends showed up unexpectedly. It could have been worse. Sometimes no one stopped by, and I might be alone in the house for days. I don’t think you’re ever the same after you’ve experienced that kind of helplessness, never as confident in your independence. After that, I bought a cell phone and carried it everywhere—I, who hated telephones.

“She doesn’t look very friendly,” Judy said as the foal bucked herself straight into the air.

“She’s just scared, poor thing,” Allie cooed, taking a few steps closer. The foal bared her teeth and squealed. Lay Me
Down watched under heavy, bored eyelids. Either she knew her foal could hold her own against the likes of us (this was a no-brainer), or she was tired of mothering this nasty little baby and hoped we were the people from the circus.

Allie continued making reassuring sounds, and we crept closer until we were just out of kicking range. “Now!” At her order, we charged forward: Allie at the rump, Judy at the head, and me at the chest. We had her, all two hundred—plus, squirming, squealing pounds.

Every time the foal bucked, Allie was lifted into the air, but she didn’t let go. The foal spun and twirled, and we spun and twirled with her. Judy wasn’t holding onto the foal’s halter, which was good because we didn’t want to injure the foal’s neck as she yanked away from us. Judy’s job was to stay close enough to the thrashing head to unbuckle the old halter, slip it off, and get the new one on and buckled. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t been able to get that close. I had one arm across the foal’s chest and the other flung over her back. Her mane was fleecy soft against my face, reminding me that even though she was strong, she was still a baby.

The baby dragged us out of the turnout into the rain. It was as if she knew we didn’t have a prayer in our rubber boots once we were on the wet grass that provided perfect traction for her little hooves. They dug into the soft ground and she pulled us around like water skiers. We lost Judy somewhere along the way so I wasn’t sure why Allie and I continued to hold on. Perhaps it was because letting go was
as tricky as catching her had been. Once we released her, we’d have to get out of the way fast.

We were bounced around and dragged around for a few more minutes, and then I knew I’d had enough.

“I’m going to let go,” I yelled to Allie.

“On the count of three,” she yelled back.

When she got to three, we both let go. It was like being flung out of a moving car. We landed flat on our backs almost on top of each other. The foal sprang away from us as if she were charging out of the starting gate at Churchill Downs. Her victory lap around the field was breathtaking, full of grace and fury. She ran effortlessly, carrying her head high as though flaunting her victory. We lay where she had ditched us, a little out of breath. Judy appeared and knelt beside us in the wet grass. The drizzle had changed to rain, and it was colder.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

Water trickled inside my collar and down the back of my neck. Bigger drips fell off the ends of hair flattened against my forehead and rolled down my face. They felt like tears, tears about being forty-three and too old to handle horses, tears because everything hurt: my back, my arms, my feelings. I didn’t like being dumped, not by a horse, not by anyone. Tears because I was wet and tired and scared. If Lay Me Down died, how would I ever manage to take care of this crazy foal?

The foal bounced to a stop in front of the turnout, tossed a final nicker at us, and disappeared inside. It felt like a slap
in the face. At that point I wasn’t so much wet as oozing self-pity.

“What an
asshole
,” I said.

Allie wiped at the raindrops running into her eyes. “Stop anthropomorphizing,” she said, squeezing water out of the end of her braid, “she’s not your ex-husband.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I was up early and stood at the living-room window barefoot, searching Lay Me Down’s pasture. I was relieved to see mother and foal grazing together near the turnout and rushed into jeans, a turtleneck, and an old parka to clean stalls and distribute feed. I made a bran mash for Lay Me Down before I went out and left it cooling by the deck door. I took care of my own three horses first because they’d been waiting for me at the gate ever since they’d seen the light go on in the upstairs bathroom. They knew that once they saw that light it would be about fifteen minutes until I appeared in the pasture with carrots. Much longer than that, and I was asking for a broken fence.

Except for the rare vacation, and once when I had the flu, I hadn’t missed a morning feed in fifteen years. I almost
couldn’t imagine what a leisurely morning would feel like. I allowed myself one hour to do chores and another hour to get ready for work. With Lay Me Down and her foal to care for, I’d need another forty-five minutes.

I didn’t mind. Taking care of horses was the best way I could think of to begin a day. Most of the time I felt lucky, as though I was living a way of life that had ended with gas lighting and parasols—the way my grandmother had lived. I was the keeper of a precious legacy, an ancient rite. Until my back episode, I had never considered riding or horse care as physically demanding or even as particularly risky. After that, for the first time I questioned my assumption that I’d have horses forever. That I’d be like my aunt, still riding into her eighties. For the first time, I saw that love alone might not be enough to enable me to keep horses into my dotage.

I reminded myself of all the women I knew who were older than I and who still had horses. Then I checked my pocket for the cell phone and headed for the barn. As soon as I slipped through the fence into the pasture, Georgia flattened her ears and flicked her tail at the geldings to keep them away so she could frisk me for carrots all by herself. She jabbed her nose into my armpits, my neck, my ribs. This was rude horse behavior, and I felt like a bad horse owner for allowing it. Nobody I knew let their horse shove them around the way Georgia shoved me around every morning on my walk to the barn.

She was smart and gregarious and in some ways, more like a dog than a horse. She followed me around (whether or not I had carrots), came when she was called, and changed gaits on voice command (walk, trot, canter, and stop).

She had other endearing qualities. If I was at work and she broke out of the pasture, she’d graze on the lawn for a while, then stand at the end of the driveway and wait for my car. As far as I knew, she’d left the property only once, and that was on a brief visit to my next-door neighbor’s bird feeder. She had always had a mind of her own, and before my back gave out, when we were riding miles and miles from home, I’d let her decide the best way to navigate streams or go up and down steep trails.

I didn’t like saying no to a horse; humans have restricted equine lives in so many ways. Still, I made a halfhearted attempt to discipline her. I pushed her away and said no a few times—none of which worked very well. What worked best (if there was snow on the ground) was making a snowball and lobbing it at her rump. This signaled the beginning of her favorite game. She’d buck away from me across the pasture, anticipating the next snowball. Snowballs didn’t have the same effect on the boys, but the mare’s playfulness did, and soon all three would be galloping around me in circles, dodging snowballs.