Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  “Agh,” Belker responded, waving his hand dismissively and turning back to his chores. “What does he know? He’s a veterinarian. I’m a trainer.”

  “Julian,” I said, “I can’t do this anymore. He’s got to come home.”

  There was a silence, followed by, “Do what you have to do, Girl.”

  No harsh words were exchanged. It was even kind of amicable. Yes, Belker had played me. Yes, he was a huckster. But he was more two-bit bumbler than huckster, giving all his horses bad hay, including a couple that he owned and raced at the track. This wasn’t something personal about Baby or me. Perhaps he always fed horses cheap hay. Maybe that was the way it was done in the ’60s and ’70s.

  In addition, this hadn’t gone on as long as my relationship with Coburn. I had paid that man for thirteen months straight. With Belker, most of our association took place between March and August—just five months.

  When the trailer with Baby drove up to the house, all the horses started whinnying in relief. They began running around—“He’s home again!” They were so excited that they started bumping into each other, jostling for position to get the first glimpse of him.

  Baby, for his part, had begun whinnying from the trailer as soon as it began coming down our road. And with energy he hadn’t managed in a while, he pulled to get down to the barn as soon as he was let out. I put him in his stall and then let Scarlett come into her stall right next to his. They immediately started grooming each other, and the other horses wanted to greet him, too, so I put everyone in their stalls where they could see him, all settle down and be happy.

  Immediately, I started giving Baby better hay. I also let him out in the pasture to graze, but gradually. Horses don’t do well with changes in diet. It upsets their delicate digestive systems, causing diarrhea and gas. And summer grass is rich food for a horse—a huge contrast from the bad hay and straw he had been consuming, so I had to be really careful, turning Baby out for only an hour a day at first and working up from there.

  I called my farm vet, Allen Balay, right away, too. He would look at Baby very differently from the way a track vet would. Horses at the track are not pets. They’re there to earn money for everybody involved, including the veterinarians who examine them. That is, they’re vehicles for cash, like a deck of cards or a pair of dice at a casino, so the aim of the track vet is to keep them racing. A farm vet, on the other hand, is like the vet who treats a dog or cat. He understands that the animal is a companion, a member of the family.

  Dr. Balay was immediately very angry. “Oh my God, what did they do to this horse?” he demanded.

  “Well, he’s sound,” I said. “No torn ligaments or broken bones or joint problems. I kept saying he’s a big, stocky horse, but my trainer insisted that he was racing lean.”

  “Well, he’s more than racing lean,” Dr. Balay responded, disgusted. “I’m getting some blood on this horse.” And with that he went to his truck to pull out syringes and other supplies.

  “How many pounds does he need to gain?” I asked, as he drew blood from Baby’s jugular—a safe, easy vein to retrieve blood from a horse. “The track vet said one hundred.”

  “He needs to gain at least two hundred,” he said. “Was he racing?” Dr. Balay asked, agitated.

  “Yes, he raced just a couple of days ago,” I told him.

  “How was he doing?”

  “He was coming in last a lot.”

  “Well, that’s not surprising,” came the curt reply.

  “They tried him at six furlongs, and they tried him at a mile,” I offered.

  “They asked this horse to run a mile?” he questioned incredulously.

  “Yes,” I told him. “They said it was easier because the horse doesn’t have to expend all his energy in one major spurt, like a sprinter.”

  Dr. Balay didn’t reply. He just kept slamming things around.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “You’ve got a decision to make,” he said sternly. “His muscles have been damaged.” Baby was so thin he had been breaking down muscle for energy, for fuel. “And he may be anemic. I want to make sure he’s not. Either way, a horse in this condition, if you want to allow him to fully recover his body, it’s going to take six months. The other option is that he could also gain back the weight and appear to be fine in sixty days. We could give him some additives.”

  But I knew before he reached the end of his sentence that I would not be sending Baby back to finish out the season. He couldn’t just look right. He had to be truly healthy again, at the top of his game.

  Dr. Balay called not long after to say that Baby was, in fact, anemic and needed an iron shot followed by supplements. He would also need as many flakes of hay as he would eat. The plan was to keep giving him more at night until there was some left the next morning. He would also be gradually going out more and grazing with his mother, Scarlett, Beauty, and Pumpkin.

  Again, I was guilt-ridden, as I should have been. I chose this trainer. I let things go on for too long. Along with feeding Baby bad hay, Belker probably also bought cheap feed mixed up near his house rather than a name brand, like Purina.

  I wondered if I should just retire Baby, let him stay home. I still had Scarlett to try out next year. But the option to retire Baby gnawed at me. I knew he was a runner. I had had too many people tell me that.

  There’s a TV in the track kitchen on which they run tapes of the previous day’s races. One day, when the trainers started filing into the kitchen after morning training, one of them called out to me, “Your race from yesterday is coming up. Look. Your horse can run. Watch what he does.” I looked up at the screen, and the horses were coming into the homestretch turn. Baby got caught up in traffic; a lot of horses became bunched up. His jockey had to pull him up, slow his stride, swing him out to the far right, then ask him to come forward again at high speed. And he did.

  “Horses don’t do that,” the trainer said to me. “You pull them off stride, you ask them to come again, they don’t. That’s a runner.”

  Thinking of that only made me feel worse. I felt like I hadn’t been fair to Baby on a level apart from compromising his health. He had been out there doing what I asked him to do. He was trying to show me, I am the horse you think I am, I am everything people are telling you I am, you are going to be proud of me. But I wasn’t letting him do his best because I kept picking the wrong people to bring the best out of him.

  I petted him and lay my head on his neck, apologizing. “I’m so sorry I didn’t take you home the minute I noticed you were losing weight, Baby. Why didn’t I pick a better trainer for you?” Baby, in response, turned his head and nuzzled me, rubbed his face against me. He was probably just enjoying the tenderness and looking for treats, but I anthropomorphized his actions, believing that perhaps he was apologizing for disappointing me.

  “Oh, no, Baby, it wasn’t you,” I said back in this one-sided conversation. “It was me.” Deep down, I knew I would bring him back. I needed to fix my own bad judgment.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As guilty as I felt that I let Baby become so pitifully underweight before I realized how bad things had gotten, and as angry as I felt not only at myself but also at Belker, I loved being able to nourish Baby. He was sound—there were no orthopedic problems—so there was no worrying about whether he was in pain or might not get over an injury. All I had to do was give him as much food as he could handle. And what mother doesn’t like to feed her hungry child?

  “Look what Mommy’s got for you!” I would say as I came into the barn. I gave him his grain ration that I had sweetened with apples and carrots. The grain, very high-quality, pelleted feed by Purina, was easily digested, so there was no waste. It was totally absorbed in Baby’s gastrointestinal tract, along with the iron supplements I was giving him so he could get past his anemia.

  Between meals, I made sure Baby had the best hay. “There’s a really nice snack here,” I’d tell him in a rising voice, pointing it out. “Look at all t
his alfalfa!” When he finished, I’d say, “You ate it all up. You good boy, you! That’s Momma’s boy. I’ll go get some more.”

  I’d groom him carefully, too, and for a long time. Baby was so relaxed, not having to go to train in the mornings. He grazed to his heart’s content in the pasture. These were easy days for him, and I was so glad.

  At first, it was difficult to see the weight gain. When you’re looking at a 1,000- or 1,200-pound animal, you can’t tell that twenty pounds have come on in a week. You can’t rush the weight gain, either. When a horse is full, he’ll stop eating his hay and stop grazing in the pasture (although he’ll eat himself to death on grain, which is why it has to be rationed, even if the horse is underweight). But gradually, after about four to six weeks, I was able to see that Baby was filling in. No longer were there hollows at the withers, at the dock of his tail.

  He perked up, too, becoming more interested in playing with Scarlett again. By October, he was even ready to go for rides. I didn’t want to ride him before that—why make him carry an extra 130 pounds when he was more than that many pounds underweight? But now, he felt like getting out a little.

  Michigan autumns are just beautiful—the best times for riding. The tremendous palette of fall colors—crimsons next to bursting yellow-golds—arch against the backdrop of a sky whose blues couldn’t be more brilliant. The daytime temperature reaches sixty-five, seventy degrees, and there are no bugs. The first nighttime frost has already killed the flies, the gnats, the mosquitoes. You can ride to the woods, in the shade. You can ride in the sun.

  Going along a wooded trail, all I could hear was the scrunch, scrunch, scrunch of Baby’s feet. A leaf or two would drift slowly to the ground, swaying a bit before landing. I could feel how relaxed Baby was, how placid. His look let me know that he was aware this was down time. I wondered again, fleetingly, whether I should send him back to the track. But he did seem to like training. “I can run,” I felt he was telling me. “Just find me the right trainer, and I’ll show you. Don’t let someone starve me. Don’t let someone play games with me. Find the person who will bring out the best in me. Yes, it’s great to come home. But when I’m at the track, I know why. And I want to prove it to you.”

  Once more, I was likening him to my daughters. Sure, they loved to come home and watch TV and do what kids do. But when Rebecca was competing, she’d wrap the blisters on her toes to be able to go out and dance en pointe. Jessica would be on the ice the morning after she tumbled during a jump and had to get stitches, attempting the very same move that caused her to fall the day before. I resolved to find a new trainer.

  * * *

  That fall, the elections for the Michigan chapter of the Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association were going to be held. That meant that not only did I have to keep going to the track to find someone to train Baby, I also needed to continue to have a presence there so I would get elected. Both owners and trainers voted, and while I had enhanced my standing among owners with my election to the Michigan TOBA board, I now needed to keep my face in front of the trainers whose trust and friendship I had spent so much time cultivating.

  In the meantime, I wondered, how was I going to secure a serious trainer who had a good track record but who would be kind to my horse, understand that he was a pet; would not be so big that he had dozens of horses to train and not pay close enough attention to Baby, yet at the same time not be a Coburn or Belker, with just a few horses; and, at least as important, would not mind that I was going to be there every single day, talking to the vet, coming to the stall, feeling Baby’s legs for heat or swelling, watching at the rail? For Baby’s safety, I also found it more imperative than ever to find a trainer who would be able to keep him at the front of the pack.

  One day, while I was idling at the rail watching morning training, a big van, like one you’d see at a furniture dealer’s, drove onto the backstretch. I had not remembered seeing a vehicle like that at the track before. When I asked someone about it, I was told the truck was sent by a company called Darling International.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, they’re going to pick up horses,” the guy standing next to me said.

  “Pick up horses?” I replied. “But that’s not a horse van.”

  “No,” I was told. They’re going to the back of the track to pick up horses that have broken down—broken a leg or torn a ligament or fractured a bone—suffered an injury so bad that they needed to be put down.

  I had heard the term “breakdown,” but I always thought it meant a horse had overdone it and needed to rest. I didn’t know it meant that there had been a catastrophic event, and that if it didn’t cause death, it caused the need to euthanize a horse to put it out of unfixable pain.

  I had not seen breakdowns, or at least I did not remember seeing them. It was one of those tricks the mind plays. John worked for Michigan Bell, but before he joined the company, I never saw a Michigan Bell truck. After, every tenth vehicle in my field of vision was a Michigan Bell truck. Now, breakdowns were going to go from some place outside the periphery of my vision to the center.

  “Where on the back of the track are they taken?” I wanted to know.

  “On those tons of acres back there. When they get enough dead horses, they call Darling International to pick them up and send them to a renderer.”

  I knew from the way the guy was talking that this was not about picking up two or three horses, certainly not with that giant rig.

  No way was Baby going to end up on those acres of death, I said to myself, all the more determined to find a trainer who could keep him at the front of the pack. I knew Baby was going to remain sound because I took such special care of him, but I started getting scared that someone else’s horse was going to break down in front of mine and that Baby would trip over it and go tumbling.

  When a Thoroughbred gallops, he is going as fast as thirty-five miles an hour, sometimes thirty-eight. His heart is pumping at its limit. His tendons and ligaments are strained to their utmost. Bones might break. If he stops right in the middle of a race, it can create an impact as significant as that of a car wreck on a main road.

  Learning about breakdowns wasn’t the only unsettling education I received that season. One day in the track kitchen, someone casually asked, “Did you hear what happened at the track yesterday?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Word got up to the stewards that one of the jockeys had a buzzer.”

  “What’s a buzzer?” I questioned.

  “The jockey keeps it in his hand, and when they come out of the gate, he gives the horse an electric shock with it to goad it on. He also might use it in the middle of the race.”

  “They can use those?” I wondered aloud, surprised.

  “No, of course not,” I was told. “They’re completely illegal. A jockey can be suspended for using one. But to try to stop it without punishment or embarrassment, the stewards told the gate crew to say to all the jockeys that they knew one of them had it, and that if it was left in the dirt inside the gate, before the race started, no action would be taken.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “The bell went off, the horses left the gate, and the gate crew went looking in all eight gate sections for a dropped buzzer. They found one in each loading section.”

  I was astonished, but as with so much else, I let it go. I was too far in. And I felt my Baby was in a bubble, as would be Scarlett. I would keep looking after them; I would choose a trainer who wouldn’t physically abuse them. Others, too, knew nothing was going to happen to any horse of Jo Anne’s. She was too much on top of things, they’d say.

  To choose a trainer judiciously rather than just by a feeling or by circumstance, I decided to do a survey of everybody I could talk to on the backstretch except trainers, who had a vested interest and often said to me that they’d like to train Baby. I would speak to jockeys, jockey’s agents, the veterinarians, exercise riders, and maybe some grooms. Whatever name
came up most often would be the person I’d interview.

  I said the same thing to everyone I pulled aside. “I need some help. I want your opinion, and it’s going to stay between you and me.” Insuring privacy was important so no one would worry that they were hurting their relationship with a particular trainer if they named another trainer.

  “You know I have a Reel On Reel horse,” I continued with each person I interviewed. “And you know that I can’t pick a trainer for shit. I need your advice,” and then I’d list the attributes of the trainer I sought, throwing in that I also had a granddaughter of Secretariat who would be coming to the track the next year.

  The name that came up most often was that of a trainer with whom I was not familiar, close community as the track was. It was a woman, Pam Thibodeau, who, it turned out, kept to herself. She wasn’t one of the ones who hung out in the kitchen. She didn’t become involved in track gossip. She didn’t chitchat at the rail.

  She had about ten horses in training, not too many, not too few. I went over to the shedrow in which she kept them, and it was immaculate—stall doors painted with a checkerboard pattern, all the floors raked well.

  Pam had actually been an exercise rider in the past, which I saw as a huge advantage over a trainer who had never galloped a horse around the track. She knew firsthand what it meant to feel how much horse a Thoroughbred had left in him after a run. She could watch an exercise rider and know whether he was following her instructions properly. Having ridden, she also had more knowledge than other trainers of the different types of bits, of subtleties in the way the reins were held—all of which meant that she knew about communication between the rider and the horse that went beyond voice commands.

  I went over and introduced myself. Pam was blonde, petite, maybe eight years younger than I was, in her late thirties. Like me, she dressed very neatly, had her nails done and makeup on. I told her our situation—that we had a Reel On Reel gelding who had raced eleven times but never won and would be turning four next year—and that she had been recommended. When I said the part about Baby’s never having won a race, she kind of tilted her head, waiting for an explanation. “Well,” I explained, “he’s still a maiden”—the term for a horse who has yet to win his first race—“because I didn’t know how to pick a trainer. The first didn’t have enough experience, and the second was Julian Belker.”