Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  I looked out of the trailer and once again saw all those people, but it was impossible to recognize anyone. It was like one of those dreams where what doesn’t make sense makes sense and vice versa.

  At some point—I don’t know if Pam took my arm or one of the two vets came over—someone said, “He’s in pain. He’s in shock. Can you see him trembling? We have to put him down.”

  Until that point my thoughts seemed very logical to me. I had my charge cards in my purse. I could make the very sane, very practical decision to transport my horse to the hospital and save him. I just had to find a way to sneak away with him. Now, I felt numb, as if somebody had tied me up and gagged me. I needed to move, to get Baby onto another trailer and take him away, save him, but couldn’t budge from the spot, couldn’t scream. I had lost control, didn’t exist anymore, was going with them. Someone was directing me, moving me, I don’t know who, although I remember Larry saying, “Let me take care of it. You don’t have to go,” and I answered back, “I’m going, I’m going, I have to be there.”

  I turned to Pam, and she said something to Larry, and there was commotion as to who was going in what vehicle and who would be on the golf cart. To this day I don’t know if I went in Pam’s cart or someone’s car. Maybe it was a car, but I don’t know whose, and we were traveling, but I didn’t know where, we could have been in my pasture driving a car, passing a lot of people. Nobody was talking, and I don’t know if John and the girls were with me at that point.

  Then we stopped, and we were way behind the track on the acres and acres of fields, beyond which stretched some woods. We stepped out of the car, and on the far side of a field was a bit of a hill that we had to walk up. It was then that I saw the ambulance trailer, which snapped me to attention a little—Oh, I have to go to Baby.

  He was already standing there, still covered in sweat and foam. Larry was there, too, and by that point John and my daughters were with me, right next to him. Some friends and family, I don’t remember who, drove up with us but stayed at a respectful distance, maybe twenty feet behind.

  It wasn’t quite sinking in yet why I was there. Baby still looked so strong. When you think about it, for him to have shattered his tibia into an uncountable number of pieces and not to have gone down on the track, to take that bumpy ride back to the shedrow, out to the back acres, and still be standing—it took amazing heart, and strength, strength that possibly saved not just his own jockey’s life but also the lives of the other jockeys and horses who were behind him and, had he gone down, could have tripped over him at blazing speeds and broken their own necks. His response to his pain was, literally, heroic. I understood that day in a way I never had before what was meant by the phrase, “the heart of a Thoroughbred.”

  “We have to do this now,” Larry said, which pushed me out of my daze. The girls were patting Baby and crying, John was crying, and then Baby and I were alone together. “I’m sorry, Baby. I did this to you,” I said, pressing my face to his wet neck and cupping his muzzle with my hand, kissing him over and over. “I failed you. This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.” Then I breathed my scent into his nostril, whispering good-bye, wishing, crazily, that the gesture could breathe life into him, as it did five years earlier.

  The hardest thing to do was to step away. I wanted to be able to stay with him and keep my hand on him, be touching him while it happened. But Larry said I had to step back because you never know how the horse is going to go down—it could rear or stumble toward you—and they don’t want anybody caught underneath.

  I watched Baby’s face as the syringe went in, shuddering as I wept, looking for some sign of forgiveness. But by then Baby had gone somewhere else himself. As soon as the drug entered his bloodstream, he sank to his knees, then rolled over on his side, in the position in which he loved to nap. I was grateful that it seemed relatively peaceful, Baby taking a last couple of deep breaths, his eyes still open.

  I knelt down and kissed him again, after which Larry touched his eyeball to make sure there was no response.

  I recall thinking that I wasn’t going to be able to walk away from him. But I don’t really remember how things went after that. When I had Baby to focus on, I could act, but now I was back in that trancelike state, as if I’d been hypnotized, functioning, but at other people’s direction. I don’t think there would have been any other way I could have left Baby lying there in the dirt.

  I can’t remember walking away, getting back in a vehicle, driving off the back acres, returning to the shedrow, saying good-bye to anyone, getting into our own car.

  The only thing I remember is being with John in the parking lot outside the security gates. We were about to get on the highway, but John suddenly threw the car in park. We grabbed onto each other, and he was sobbing, and that brought me out of my trance to the point that I began wailing myself, rocking back and forth as we held each other.

  “No, no, nooo!” I kept saying, and my wails turned into hysterical crying. I don’t know how long we sat there. I don’t know how we made it home, in fact. At some point John would have had to compose himself enough to drive, but my mind draws a blank about being on the highway. I didn’t know where the girls were or how they got back to the house. It was a very selfish moment.

  To pull into the driveway and see the “It’s a filly sign” in pink for our ten-day-old newborn, and then the barn, stung like a hard, deliberate slap. The barn had always been my source of comfort, a place of solace. I could go there, sit on the hay, and cry if I needed to. My horses loved me no matter what, and I drew fortitude from them. They exuded strength, a phenomenal power, with their unconditional love. It gave me peace, cure, comfort.

  But driving up now felt like someone was hitting me, shaking me. It was physical, the knowledge that the barn would never again be the same.

  I knew I had to go and check on everyone, Pat and the new foal in particular, but for the first time since we had horses, I almost couldn’t bear to bring myself in there. Beauty and Pumpkin actually would have been okay because I left their stalls unlocked—they could have walked out into the pasture whenever they wanted and grazed, and the outdoor trough always had plenty of water in it.

  But Pat, since she was nursing and confined to her stall with the newborn when I wasn’t home, would need more hay, as well as water. A lactating mare needs a greater amount of food than usual, and she definitely would have drunk all the water in the two pails I had left her that morning.

  I also had to clean the large foaling stall that Pat and the baby shared. Every time Pat gave birth, I heavily bedded her stall so both she and the baby would be as comfortable as possible. And I couldn’t stand the thought of a newborn foal lying in urine-soaked straw or anywhere near manure, so I always made sure the stall was picked up, freshened, and cleaned. You could even go in there and sit on the floor with the sleeping foal’s head on you, or lie down right next to the little horse and cradle it. I felt it was especially important to keep the stall spotless because a tiny foal is in there almost all the time. You can’t let it wander into the pasture when you’re not home because it’s not safe. What if a coyote came through the fence, or one of its little legs became caught in something?

  I became racked with sobs all over again, thinking of how I had tended to Baby as a newborn just five years earlier.

  All the horses were inside, even though Beauty and Pumpkin could have turned themselves out. A herd likes to stay together. Walking over to Beauty, the first horse I ever owned and the dominant one in our herd, I lay my head on her shoulder, still crying. A horse knows your emotions, just like a dog does, if not more. She tensed at first because my mood was not what she anticipated, and then turned so that her face was right next to mine. “What’s wrong?”

  Her muzzle became wet with my tears. “It’s so bad, it’s so bad,” I told her. “We’re not going to see him anymore.”

  The air from her lungs was pumping out through her nostrils right next to mine, warm and alive, signaling her affe
ction. “I’m here, I’m here,” she was telling me, but her scent, so familiar—each horse has her own scent, like people have—wasn’t bringing me the comfort it usually did. Not even the beautiful feel of her velvety muzzle as I rubbed my nose and lips against it could console me, not her ears up and pricked forward in her sweet, anticipatory way. Pumpkin tried to help, too, but Beauty told her not to come near, laying her ears down flat to warn her, and all she could do was slink back to her stall.

  Then I had to enter the foaling stall, which I dreaded. How was I going to be able to face Baby’s mother and his ten-day-old sister—and not just a half sister like Scarlett but a full sister with the same sire and dam? I couldn’t even bear to call her by the barn name we had given her, because “Sissy” referred to the fact that she was Baby’s sister, and now she was full sister to no one.

  To be able to be in such close proximity to a newborn foal, with her rounded head and coat as soft as that of a newborn kitten, and the way a baby horse tickles you with her curly whiskers when she walks up to smell you inquisitively, her long lashes fanning out—normally, that would have been such a privilege, such pure delight. A horse will never be that way again after its first couple of weeks. Yet there was no joy for me, no comfort, even though the same blood coursed through her veins as through Baby’s. In fact, it made it harder that she looked so much like him.

  When I opened the gate to her stall, she at first just stood there and then came over to me on her long, spindly legs, her little tail only six inches long. Ordinarily, I would have immediately been on my knees hugging her, smelling her breath and enjoying the precious scent of milk on her mouth. But in my grief, it was all I could do not to avoid her. It wasn’t fair of me. I just couldn’t help it.

  Pat was pacing, which was easy to do in that big stall. She was tense because of my odd behavior. I went right to her head and cried some more and ran my face down her nose to her muzzle and buried my own nose there.

  Her breathing out increased, not in the almost rhythmic way Beauty’s had in order to comfort me, but more erratically, and with more effort, or intensity. She was considerably more nervous. As a Thoroughbred, she was naturally edgier than Beauty, a Quarter Horse. I told her we had lost Baby and began crying much harder. After all, we were both mothers to him.

  And then I looked up, and there was Baby’s stall right across from Pat’s, next to Scarlett’s, with the photo there of me standing by him the day Scarlett was born, when he felt forlorn that she was getting all the attention and I went over to give him a kiss, telling him he’d always be our baby. “I’m here, Baby,” I had told him. He was just a year old then.

  As perfunctorily as I could I went through the chores—dumped the old water, filled the pails up again, brought over more hay, mucked out the soiled straw, picked up the manure—and then walked out as quickly as possible. Seeing the reminders of Baby made me feel literally nauseated. I had to leave his house, their house.

  I didn’t know how I was going to keep doing this four, five, six times a day, every single day, the way I had now for so many years. How I was going to work on imprinting with Sissy—getting her used to being touched by people, working my hands all around her body while talking sweetly and quietly to her; getting her accustomed to strange objects so she wouldn’t spook? How I was going to come down to the barn to turn her and Pat into the pasture, so important so the foal can run around and build strong bones and muscles, and just as important for the new mother to get back into shape? How was I then going to come back down a while later to bring them back into the barn so the flies wouldn’t drive them crazy?

  Once I was back in the house, everywhere I looked, there were pictures of Baby. There were more pictures of my horses, in fact, than of my daughters. The girls understood that. I had waited longer for the horses.

  As I walked about, I was looking at pictures of Baby in the pasture, Baby as a baby, on the refrigerator, on the hallway wall, in the great room. There was Baby’s win picture hanging prominently.

  At some point, the girls arrived home, but what happened after that remains shrouded. I do know I had a fierce headache, feeling like my head was going to burst. I went upstairs and curled into a fetal position on the bed, hiding under the covers even though it was already late May and still light out. I wanted to disappear, to not exist, to not have to think, to recall, to feel. I couldn’t take what had happened, what I had done.

  I slept on and off, waking periodically to wonder to myself whether what had occurred actually did happen, then regaining more consciousness until the “Oh” set in again within seconds and the pit in my stomach grew and my head continued to hurt and I didn’t know what time it was even though I kept looking at the clock.

  Toward early morning, as the first hints of light seeped through the curtains and in some faraway place I was wondering whether you could make something unhappen, it hit me. “Oh my God, how did I leave him there, in the dirt, in the dark, on those acres of death? The truck was going to come and pick him up—it was too warm to have too many horses back there at once—and what if it came right away? They would take him and grind him up.

  I still had a pounding headache and had not wanted to get out from under the covers, but rousing myself from an inability to do anything or think coherently, I darted from my half-conscious state. John had not come up to bed. We were each in our own world, so I went running down the stairs to him in the great room. He, too, was awake. “We can’t leave him there,” I started shouting. “They’ll take him to the rendering plant. We’ve got to get him out of there. I’ll call a transporter.”

  Because it was a holiday weekend, it was going to be hard to find somebody, but I needed that task. I needed to keep taking care of Baby, and to make sure the track did not get to decide what to do with him. I had already made the most awful decision for him in listening to Jay Fortney instead of James Jackson. I had allowed my head, my desire to win, to obscure something in my gut. But the track had also made the most awful decision for Baby in not spending whatever money it would have taken to keep the racecourse safe. It wasn’t going to get to make this choice, too.

  It was too early in the morning to be making phone calls, and besides, I knew I had to get down to the barn. Again, I performed my chores there robotically, just wanting to check things off in my head as I went through the motions and get out of there as soon as possible.

  When I came back to the house, I got on the phone, early as it still was, and started making calls until I found a transporter that could reach the track that morning and take Baby out of there. I also called Michigan State University, which takes in equine emergencies twenty-four hours a day. They have a pathology department and perform necropsies there, the equine version of autopsies. My legal background as a court reporter had already kicked in, and I wanted to be able to prove that track conditions killed Baby and not some kind of conformational problem that had never been detected. After that, I’d give him the end he deserved—cremation, rather than being ground up at some rendering facility.

  John was going to have to direct the transporter on the back acres. It’s kind of a maze at the track, and it was necessary for him to meet the trailer in the parking lot, sign the driver in, then lead him to Baby.

  He left right away, and as soon as he did, I began to wonder whether Michigan State was the best place in the country to look at Baby’s leg. I didn’t want anybody second-guessing what had happened to him.

  Making a couple more phone calls, I decided the best person was a vet named Susan Stover at the University of California, Davis, largely because California was the only state in the country that required every horse who broke down on the track to have a necropsy, and the horses were often sent to her. Moreover, she had published the most research papers on catastrophic racetrack injuries. But I would have to ship the leg. So I called Michigan State back and told them I still wanted a necropsy but that I wanted the leg sent to U.C. Davis.

  While I was waiting for John to return
home, I was extremely touched to receive a number of phone calls from people at the track, some of whom I didn’t even think had my home phone number and, more importantly, would have seen something like a horse breaking down as all part of the business. I’m quite certain, in fact, that I was made fun of behind my back for all the love and attention I lavished on Baby. But they understood my attachment to him, and that gave their calls all the more meaning.

  One came from James Jackson, who had somewhere between forty and sixty horses that he trained and had little time to offer me condolences. But he went out of his way to find my phone number, probably from someone else on the HPBA board, and told me how sorry he was. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I am with you if you ever need me. I know the condition of that racetrack, and I know what caused your horse to break down.” It was particularly meaningful because he could have said “I told you so,” as he was the board member who kept sounding the alarm that horses were breaking down with increasing alacrity.

  Others phoned, too, but I can’t remember who they were, I was so distraught. Each call would start me crying all over again.

  At one point, I heard a car, and I was sure it was John coming home from the track. But it was Pam and Jerry. Pam was crying. Jerry looked stricken. You could see the compassion in his face, and we all hugged.

  “In all my years of training,” Pam said through her tears, “I have never had a horse of mine break down on the track. Never. I can’t believe that of all those horses, of all those owners, the horse that it would end up happening to would be yours. It’s so hard to understand.”

  As we were crying and talking, John pulled up. This poor man had had to go to the track himself—I couldn’t bear to go back—and see Baby lying there.

  John is a man’s man. He had been a sports jock when we were young, and he was always the person you could lean on. He had held it all in at the track that morning. But, he told me later on, when he and the trailer holding Baby branched off in different directions once they were on the highway, he lost it.