Horsekeeping (4 page)

“You wouldn't want to come back as a brood mare, that's for sure,” Tammy said.

I quizzed them about the darker aspects of racing life, about the doping of horses and unscrupulous trainers who knowingly run them unsound, the controversy of running two- and three-year-old horses before their bones and ligaments are fully stable, the betting fixes and the sad afterlife of too many washed-up, but still young Thoroughbreds. Losing racers are shifted to ever lesser tracks as their winning prospects dim. Some get rescued and patiently rehabilitated as pleasure horses, but many remain unaccustomed to life off the track and make troublesome companions. Few horses in any discipline enjoy lifelong security but the racing industry pushes the envelope. I had gleaned these ideas from newspaper accounts that appear around the big three races—the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes—and also from Jane Smiley's account of her adventures in this great sport of speed and bravery, but my friends' experience had been a good one overall, and I imagine that the Billingslys' operation is humane and well-run. Many others aren't so. It is akin to factory farming—once remote, large scale specialization “improves” productivity, cruelty and nonsensical practices can creep in. If we witnessed the brutish life of cows, pigs and chickens, we'd force change for our own physical and mental health. But we don't see these feedlot animals—the barbaric conditions and slaughter. In the case of expensive horses bred for the track, the mare's plight of live cover while confined in a stall is not even alleviated by artificial insemination, a good practice banned for no reason other than tradition.

Back in Manhattan two days later, I ran into a morose Tammy. Her horse, one that she had nursed back to health after an infection two months before, relapsed and was put down.
Oh, boy
. I can already hear the sobs of my children prostrate over the stiffening body of some
ill-fated pony; not to mention my own agony. I mourn every chipmunk I roll over, and brake for frogs. More pets mean more love, but I have also opened my family's hearts to more pain. Many mourning owners opt for a pet-less future, eschewing any more grief. I need animals in my life and make that compact, but I know Scott would prefer to avoid them and their dramas altogether.

Two weeks after our visit to El-Arabia we awaited the inspector's full report. Braced for the worst, I half-hoped a bad verdict would rescue us from our folly. How could it be good? But Pat called with surprising news: a sound main building, but some boards would have to be replaced and improved doors and a new roof put on. The inspector deemed the electrical wiring safe, but advised better light fixtures. The beams and interior woodwork, if ragged, stood stable. Most of the work tended toward cosmetic. Suspicious but willing to suspend disbelief, and despite our poor qualifications, we were green-flagged to buy fencing by the mile, have our kids' fingers mistaken for carrots, and probably go broke in the horse business. Optimistic businessman Scott considered himself that one in a thousand who could make it work.

Our imaginations about the possibilities for our “farm” ran wild. My kids thrilled at the idea of baby animals—from horses to piglets. Jane would finally get the cats her father forbade in the house, and I pictured black-and-white downy chickens and speckled brown-and-blue eggs. Clucks, oinks, neighs, baas and cock-a-doodle-doos orchestrated in my head. Elliot would learn about sex surreptitiously through animal husbandry. Goats and cheese sounded fun. And I've always liked the sage look of highland cattle—those orange shaggy coats and long horns. We'd find safe, grateful horses that Scott and I would ride around our property like Ron and Nancy Reagan, and as a family we'd gallop off into the sunset. We could play as gentleman farmers, and maybe,
just maybe
, not get our hands too dirty and our hearts too broken.

CHAPTER THREE

Keep Manhattan, Just Give Me that Countryside?

E
L-ARABIA BORDERED OUR PROPERTY TO THE NORTHEAST, and we had been walking and biking past it for six years, since 1998, the year my husband Scott and I traded up our second home. Our rural village of Salisbury was founded in 1742 with the quintessential Congregational Church established on the green. About five thousand souls are spread over sixty square miles, a community remotely wedged into the northwestern corner of Connecticut where the Litchfield Hills graduate into the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

New Yorkers during the week, we have been spending blissful weekends and chunks of the summer here for sixteen years. Our friends introduced us through a house they rented on Lake Waramaug a little further south. We visited Bob and Laurie four times, saw our city-circumscribed shih-tzu joyously leap and roll through a tender, greener-than-green spring hayfield, and fell hard for New England—the soft mountains, the distinct seasons, the Puritan remnants, the privacy. Though still renters in the city, when we saved enough money we decided to spend it on such a retreat. During our reconnaissance trip, we drove down curvy Route 41 from Sheffield, Massachusetts, into Salisbury, almost killing ourselves gawking at the undulating spread of forested hills and lake dotted pastures fully in May's fertile burst. We agreed that the beach, a more conventional choice among NYC thirty-somethings, couldn't hold a candle to it: this was the most beautiful place we had ever seen.

Our first house purchase, made when we were childless, did not later suit our then-toddler son so we moved from our (now we can admit it) three-story, box-ugly, out-of-place A-frame contemporary into a “real” New England country house, a two-hundred-year-old colonial. Previously nestled up a long dirt road along with five neighbors against a reforested mountain, we would now dwell in the pastoral, flat, long-inhabited, pasture patch-worked, misty river valley. This house holds family histories we can only surmise, long predating paved roads, strip malls and gas stations. It is a needy house, still standing but requiring lavish attention.

Unenlightened urbanites think they want a quaint antique house until they crack their noggins against the low ceiling beams, locate that “country” kitchen unsocially hidden away at the wrong end of the house, and, most irreconcilably, see that the house sits smack up against the edge of the road. Convenient in the snowplow-less days of horse and buggy, roadside agility is not a modern-day asset given that country roads are no longer the sleepy, meandering lanes we romanticize. Country folk speed just like time-pressured urbanites, flying over hill and across dale with chainsaws, leaf-blowers and tools of every variety banging around the beds of their pick-ups. Lacking bypassing highways, the two-lane country roads also support a steady nighttime parade of tractor trailers and, combined with the absence of sidewalks; this means you risk your life by venturing a stroll. Be ready to pitch yourself into the rough at each rumble of an oncoming vehicle.

Though our house was extensively renovated and enlarged by former owners, an old house is an old house: quirky and expensive problems continually manifest themselves no matter how much money we prophylactically sacrifice to plumbers, painters, tree experts, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, pest controllers, roofers, and various other “experts.” Pipes seize up in winter in spite of the thousands of gallons of
fuel oil that the forty-year-old furnace sucks down. Ice dams along the roof gutters and slowly melts, working a puddle through the ceiling of the living room requiring re-plastering and a new roof. The workhorse gutters marginally prevent the cascading H
₂
O from turning the foundation into a soupy muck and flooding the basement into a moist mold that rots the gapped pine floorboards of the uninsulated library. It is the kind of damp we are over-blessed with in merry old New England for three-quarters of the year, and we have to power wash off the external clapboards every few years before each paint job.

Since our house is so aged, with hand-laid stone walls and a dirt floor as the foundation, water in the basement shouldn't be a problem—except for sinkage: ship-like, a soggy footprint can list a house this way or that, mis-aligning the timber structure, cracking walls, bending floors and otherwise wreaking havoc from roof to attic. Not to mention the dead people I've heard were sometimes buried in basements back in the day, residents of our distinguished homestead I would not care to upset. A wished for ghost in theory beats one in practice. Despite the heroic gutters, some water and much else still manages to intrude because an old house is porous, perforated like lace. This has its advantages, I persuade myself, in terms of healthier indoor air. When the price of fuel oil soared in the seventies, people built shelters so tight that they poisoned themselves with the gasses emitted by mundane items like carpet, upholstery, Windex and hairspray, not to mention natural toxins like radon.

But impenetrability is not our problem. Water, mud, cold air in winter, hot air in summer, mice, shrews, bats, chipmunks, snakes, squirrels, frogs, mega-spiders and insects of every variety—creeping and airborne, a large noisy toad or two, and only Noah knows what else, regularly invade our space through attic, uninsulated walls, one-hundred-year old windows in two-hundred-year-old casements and of course, the crocheted stone walls of the basement. My supposedly sturdy, two-hundred-year-old, time-tested dwelling all of a sudden seems a rickety house of cards with a life of its own as regards weather and creatures. I don't begrudge the
animal kingdom its bit of shelter, and mainly I let it be. I try to accept the bats as my friends: one tiny Chiropteran can devour six hundred bugs an evening while flying above my yard, so even when they graze the split ends on the top of my head when diving single file out of the eaves like machine gun pellets shot from a WWII Spitfire, I simply duck. I know better than to get my hopes up for a bug-free picnic the next day, but I imagine five mosquito bites instead of ten on each leg of my two children.

Other visitors get to me when I am cold and huddled in my high-off-the-floor creepy-crawler fortified bed (I'm in denial that anything would dare crawl up the four bedposts, despite their carved footholds). Outside, the coyotes howl it up while tearing the flesh from the bones of the neighbor's sheep, chasing away sweet dreams. The nocturnal flying squirrels perform their housekeeping at 2:00 a.m. in the attic recesses overhead. At 3:00 a.m. I lie awake imagining the elaborate condo complex they construct. As I wait for their rustling to quiet and envy my husband's soft snoring, my blood pressures as I plot vigilante tactics that rival Bill Murray's against the gopher. Furry, cute and innocent my ass: not in the wee hours they're not. I see red-rat eyes and sharp, salivating teeth. Poison? Metal traps? Death cages? Rifle? I picture myself grease-painted, my hips hoisting a sagging belt studded with Raid cans:
bring it on fur ball—I've got camo and ammo
.

But to complain is churlish. This old house is lovely with wainscoted and plastered walls and wide-board floors cut from pine trees that were already ancient when our house was long ago hand-hewn with axes, square nails and muscle. Burnished for years by mops and socks, these floors appear marbleized in places. Built for a Mr. Averill around 1801, the house boasts two-stories and higher ceilings than most and was periodically added onto and tastefully modernized since. At one low point, perhaps a century ago, it served as the police barracks. We know one of the “boys,” now my age, whose parents lived in our house for forty-five years, until the early nineties. Each time I run into John in the village
coffee shop or pharmacy I am treated to another anecdote of his siblings' high jinx. I learned how the kids tiptoed around the squeaky floorboard outside his parent's bedroom door on their midnight escapades. Now I smile when I slip in to give my sleeping son yet another good-night kiss, making these boards speak.

I heard about the barn the boys burned down, explaining the mysterious bits of concrete foundation I pondered at the base of the huge willow. We respect the tomb of the family Newfoundland interred beneath the stand of tall hemlocks outside the pine-paneled library bay window, and have a visual of the old dormitory-style layout of the children's bedrooms, now a spacious master bedroom suite. The pantry bell panel still carries the Borden family designations—“John's room,” “parlor,” “library” etc.—evidently still in use through the fifties. Some still function, not that anyone remains to do the servanting. My husband tried ringing for breakfast once, but remained hungry, feeding only upon my “yeah,
right
.” Several years ago John and his family returned to scatter his mother's ashes on the property of the house she treasured.