Chosen by a Horse (6 page)

I
T WAS THE
middle of April. I’d had Lay Me Down and her foal for three weeks. Rib and hip bones were disappearing under a layer of new fat and muscle. Lay Me Down had lost the bony hump at the base of her mane, her eyes were clear, the wheezing was almost gone.

The Marimekko quilt was gone, too, and in its place she sported a blue New Zealand rug with a polar fleece sweater underneath. I loved her in this getup because I imagined it was a novel experience for her to be both warm and dry. Allie would say I was anthropomorphizing, but I thought the mare was grateful. In fact, I thought most rescued animals exhibited signs of gratitude, an awareness of having been saved from suffering or death, and their gratitude was expressed in a particularly open affection.

Lay Me Down expressed affection by sighing. I saw it as an expression of relief, a letting go of all the tension she’d carried in that big body for such a long time, the horse equivalent of “Phew, I made it.”

She sighed a lot. She sighed when I poured the bran mash into her feed bin. She sighed when I put her blankets on at night, and she sighed in the morning when I took them off. She sighed at her hay, she sighed when I brushed her, she sighed when I kissed the end of her nose. She sighed at the vet: great big sighs, big enough to spray me with snot sometimes; loud, wet, affectionate sighs. I loved her sighs. Sometimes I sighed back. I couldn’t help it. I wanted her to know I felt the same way. I was relieved, too. “Phew, we’ve made it,” I sighed. We were both safe.

They say you can’t escape your past, but I don’t believe that. I believe you escape it every day, over and over again, always cognizant of the difference between past and present. Being allowed to live in my own house without being hit, threatened, or ejected would forever remain a novel experience for me. I couldn’t imagine taking peace and security for granted. Every morning when I woke up, I luxuriated in the miracle that there was no one in the house who was going to hurt me. I wouldn’t walk downstairs for breakfast and be locked in the basement because I’d forgotten to take my clothes out of the dryer the previous day. I wouldn’t be told to pack my suitcase and get out. I wouldn’t be hit. I’d felt safe for fifteen years, since ending my marriage and buying and moving into this house. I also
felt safe since breaking ties with the relatives who had raised me. I luxuriated in the silence in my house, in all the voices that were absent.

Lay Me Down and I were safe, but it turned out the foal wasn’t. The case went to court and the owner won.

“You can keep the mare but the foal has to be returned,” said a woman on the phone, calling from the SPCA.

I thought I had heard her wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We did everything we could.”

I asked her for the name of the judge who had made the decision and then we hung up. It made no sense. Dozens of people had spent thousands of dollars to right a terrible wrong and the court said, “Give them back”? A few minutes later I called the SPCA back and when no one answered, I left a message, protesting the decision. Then I called Allie.

“We can steal her,” she said. “We’ll keep her in my barn.”

I called my lawyer, he had horses, too. He understood this side of me. Still, he advised me against stealing. I hung up, wondering if I had the right lawyer.

The moment I decided to steal the foal, the phone rang. This time it was the director of the SPCA. She explained the court decision in full. Technically, the owner was getting the foals back, but he would have to turn them over to his vet as payment toward his vet bill, which dated from years ago, when the owner still bothered with a vet. The director told me that the owner was required to round up all the foals at their various foster locations and deliver them to his vet.

“He’ll be coming
here
?”

“Sometime this afternoon,” she replied.

It was the first incomprehensible thing the SPCA had done in this whole case. Giving out the names and addresses of all the foster homes to the former owner of the horses seemed completely irresponsible to me. What was to prevent him from stealing back the mares, from threatening us, from sending one of his cronies over to beat us up, or from chopping off Georgia’s head and sticking it under my blanket while I slept?

Allie said she’d come and wait with me so he wouldn’t think I lived alone.

“There’s strength in numbers,” she said.

Oh yeah, I thought, two middle-aged women will really scare this guy. I promised myself I wouldn’t open my mouth when he appeared. Not a word. I didn’t want to anger him, give him an excuse for being any more of a monster than he already was. Anyway, it was the way I usually dealt with conflict: be silent, smile to death, look at the floor, flee. I did better expressing my anger at the appliances.

I felt ill every time I thought of separating Lay Me Down from her foal. It was too soon and too sudden; the foal wasn’t even weaned. I knew people weaned foals as early as six weeks, but I thought it was cruel. I hadn’t weaned Sweet Revenge until she was past six months. By then she trusted me, she trusted her environment, and she was completely established on solid food. Also, Georgia had shown signs of being bored with nursing. She walked away
abruptly in the middle of being nursed or twitched her tail “no” if she saw her foal approaching.

With the foal gone, Lay Me Down would be alone in her pasture, and horses shouldn’t be alone. They’re herd animals. The herd provides security, protection, and companionship. I believe it is vital to a horse’s sense of well-being to always be with other horses, even if it is only one. It meant I’d have to introduce Lay Me Down to my three sooner than I had planned. If the two geldings had been alone, introducing Lay Me Down could have been done in an afternoon. But introducing one mare to another in an established herd would take longer.

Mares could be difficult to blend. Georgia was possessive of me, the two geldings, the pasture, and the barn. What she saw was what she owned. Her behavior toward other mares could be embarrassing. Sometimes if we trotted past pastured mares, Georgia would pause at the fence long enough to scream and strike, kicking out with a powerful front leg.

Introducing Lay Me Down to Georgia would take a couple of weeks. It meant confining one mare to a stall while the other was loose, in alternation so that contact was limited to sniffing over the stall door. How each mare behaved during each stage determined how soon we could move to the next level of contact.

I wasn’t sure about Lay Me Down, but I suspected Georgia would need the full two-week sniff phase. The next step would be to let them meet across a fence, then introduce
them face to face on lead lines, then turn them out together in the pasture for short periods of time without the geldings present, and finally, allow all four to be together, loose in the pasture at the same time. The process could easily take a month. Even then I didn’t imagine the relationship between Georgia and Lay Me Down would ever amount to more than an uneasy truce. Mares just don’t like other mares.

After talking to the SPCA, I called around to some of the other people who had fostered horses and found out quite a bit about the man who was coming to reclaim his foal. I was told that he was originally from Queens before he moved upstate, that he knew nothing about horses, had hired migrant labor for minimal care, and had gambled away his track winnings and everything else.

I didn’t like horse racing because I thought it exploited horses, but I understood the thrill of racing, of watching horses thunder around the track. It was impossible not to experience their power vicariously. If you stood close enough to the track, you could feel this power in your chest. As a rider, the power became part of you. One minute you were a smallish human looking at the big tree that had fallen across the path, the next you were half a ton of gorgeous red hair flying over it.

The real problem with horse racing was the money. There was a lot of it and anyone could get lucky. A racehorse owner didn’t have to go to college or work his way up from the mail room or wait six months for a small
raise. All he had to do was make a small down payment on a racehorse. He didn’t even have to know which end went into the starting gate first. Like the man coming to reclaim the foal, he didn’t have to know very much to end up with a lot of valuable breeding stock.

Allie arrived right after lunch, and she’d brought along her husband. Rick was calm, good at diffusing tension; he worked in management for a large corporation. He wasn’t big but he was smart. His presence would insure a sane, left-brain kind of experience; no emotional outbursts.

“I could give him a boarding bill,” I said to Rick. “Tell him he can’t take the foal until he pays it.”

“If he had any money, the foal wouldn’t be here,” Rick reminded me.

“It’s not too late to steal her,” Allie said.

“
Alice
,” Rick sighed.

This was why we needed him.

Around two o’clock, a Ford truck pulling a blue four-horse trailer turned into my driveway. Someone had money. Everything looked new—the big truck with the double cab and the shiny blue trailer with all the extras. I didn’t want to believe that it belonged to the owner, that he’d spent money on a fancy rig but not on food.

“Maybe it’s the vet,” I said.

The truck crept down my driveway until it was across the front lawn from us, parallel to where Allie, Rick, and I sat on the back deck. The driver’s window rolled down, and a man with thick features and dark hair leaned out.

“Where’s da horse?”

Da horse?

“I don’t think it’s the vet,” Allie whispered.

“Straight ahead,” Rick called and pointed to the back pasture.

The man didn’t answer, didn’t even nod. The window rolled up, and the truck moved slowly toward the back pasture. Allie, Rick, and I followed on foot. I was on the edge of crazy, mostly because I thought it was too soon to separate mother and foal, but also because I was afraid of how he’d treat the foal, and I was afraid he’d come back to take Lay Me Down, to hurt me, to hurt my horses, to hurt something. In his mind, horses were all about money, and I was the one who was getting to keep some of what was his.

He pulled the trailer as close to the pasture gate as he could, and then he turned off the engine, and for a second, everything was very quiet. Then two men got out, the driver and another man who looked enough like him to be his brother. They were both tall and fat. They were wearing knit shirts, jeans, and shiny black loafers—city shoes. If it had been 1960 and I had been ten years old, we would have called them greasers. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t even look at us.

One walked around to the back of the trailer and let down the ramp. He came back with a lead line, and I wanted to laugh. Did he think he was going to walk up to the foal, clip the lead to her halter, and walk her into the trailer like a golden retriever?

Allie must have been thinking the same thing. “You won’t need that,” she said. “The only way you’ll get the foal into the trailer is to get the mother in first.”

“I’ll get Lay Me Down,” I said. I didn’t trust either of them to touch her. I didn’t trust that once they had her in the trailer they’d let her out again. While they were busy trying to deal with the foal once she was in the trailer, I’d make sure Lay Me Down got out.

It went quickly. Lay Me Down let me lead her into the trailer, and the foal went right in after her. As soon as the foal was inside, I started backing out Lay Me Down. When she saw her mother leaving, the foal squealed, but both men held her, and we made it down the ramp, while Rick closed the back door of the trailer before the foal could escape.

Lay Me Down gave several rapid-fire nickers, showing moderate distress at being separated from her foal. But, as a broodmare, she’d been through this so many times before. For the foal, it was a different story. Lay Me Down stood next to me with her ears forward, listening with the rest of us to the ruckus coming from inside the trailer. It sounded like a soccer game: two teams and everyone playing hard. I wondered how strong the side walls of the trailer were. I wondered if anyone was bleeding. In a few minutes, the driver emerged from the door at the front of the trailer. I was surprised that he still had his front teeth.

“Man,” he said, shaking his head.

It was the first thing he’d said since “Where’s da horse?” He lit a cigarette and took one deep drag, then flicked the
mostly unsmoked cigarette into the long grass.

Whatever had been holding me together didn’t last. I could almost hear the snap inside my head—a
ping
, like the sound of a toaster oven when the toast was done—and all of a sudden my dead grandmother showed up, an individual who, during her lifetime, was widely known for possessing no diplomatic skills whatsoever.

“LITTERBUG!” she screamed at him. “Pick up that cigarette!”

Lay Me Down pulled away slightly and looked at me, which is more than I got from the litterbug, who left the cigarette smoldering in the grass and headed for the cab of the truck.