Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  I was thirty-three before I had the nerve to skip a grooming. It was a soul-searching decision and I tortured myself all day with what it meant and where it might lead and what would happen to my ungroomed horse and what if a friend, driving by, noticed the muddy leg from the road? When nothing too horrible happened, I tried it again, and then again. One thing led to another and, after a while, when I skipped one day, it felt so good, sometimes I skipped a whole week.

  When my (ungroomed) horses were done with their grain and were outside, eating hay, I headed over to the other pasture, stopping by the house to pick up the bran mash. Lay Me Down stood under the overhang of her turnout while her foal grazed nearby. I was twenty or thirty feet away when I noticed that Lay Me Down was shivering. Either she was much sicker or it was much colder. I poured the bran mash into her feed bin, put grain in the foal’s creep, and ran back to the barn for a thermometer. While I was there I glanced at the horse blankets hanging in the tack room. None of them would fit Lay Me Down. She was a giant compared to my three, who were at the other end of the horse spectrum. Lay Me Down was taller, longer, wider (even though emaciated), and much broader across the chest. She was shivering, however, so she had to have something.

  Right away I knew the only thing that would fit her. I ran to the house and got the king-size quilt off my bed, a one-of-a-kind patchwork quilt of orange-and-yellow-patterned squares, a Marimekko fabric. It had been on my bed for twenty years. As I lugged it across the back lawn to Lay Me Down’s pasture, I thought about how I could poke holes in it with a screwdriver and use baling twine to tie it across her chest and secure it under her belly. Not forever, just until I could buy her a coat that fit.

  She was still shivering when I returned with the quilt so I let her sniff it for a second before I threw it across her back. She continued eating her bran mash without flinching as the weight of the quilt settled along her spine and the ends fluttered down her sides. It covered her nicely, from her neck to the base of her tail, with plenty of fabric to spread across her chest. I could lace her up like a sneaker. She stood quietly under the quilt, eating, while I punched holes in the front of it with a screwdriver and pulled the twine through. I punched more holes near her belly and threaded the twine underneath her like a girth and hoped that it wouldn’t be too itchy.

  I didn’t know if she’d ever worn a blanket or had anything across her back but a harness, but she seemed unconcerned about the heavy quilt wrapped around her like a hotdog bun. I stood back to look. It wouldn’t have been the right moment for some of my fancier horse friends to visit. I started to giggle, then felt terrible to be laughing at this sick, sweet animal who had just let me dress her up like a float in the Rose Bowl Parade.

  Her head hung down slightly at the end of her long neck, her ears were up and forward, her runny eyes wide open at me. She had finished her bran mash, and she stood watching me watch her. I wasn’t used to a horse who stood so still, who maintained such long stretches of eye contact. Sometimes she sighed one of her wheezy sighs and blinked, but she didn’t move away, and she didn’t knock me down looking for carrots.

  I asked myself the question I asked a lot, as a psychotherapist and as someone who lived with animals, but mostly as someone who grew up in a family with lots of mixed messages. What did her body language say? Sometimes it was easy to read body language, and sometimes I felt like I was doing nothing more than hazarding a wild guess. The rule was, I could make a list of all the things I thought the person (or dog or cat or horse) was saying, but in the end, I had to reduce it to one thing. Just one phrase that conveyed the dominant message.

  What was Lay Me Down saying? From the lowered head, the quiet tail, the weight evenly distributed on all four legs, the slow, rhythmic movement of her rib cage as she breathed, I heard, “I’m tired” or “I don’t feel well.” When I combined the description of her body with her face—eyes looking at me, ears forward, lower lip hanging open slightly—what I heard changed to “I’m curious.” If I considered that she stood absolutely still while I carried a large, flapping, bright-colored object toward her across the pasture (all three of mine would have fled at the sight), and then let me tie her up in it, I heard “I trust you.” So what was the dominant message? If I added it all up, what I heard was “I like you.”

  At that exact moment, I got this horse. I understood her nature. It came to me as an image—a cat all dressed up in doll clothes, lying on its back in some little girl’s ruffle-trimmed baby carriage, being wheeled around the house. That’s who Lay Me Down was. That cat. She was the pet who let you do anything to her, the pet who little boys roughed up and little girls dressed up, and it never bit or scratched or ran away or got mad or did anything but bask in the attention and be a wonderful, affectionate, totally available pet. It was rare in a cat or dog. Such tractability was almost unknown in a horse.

  I had never had a docile, loving pet. When I was little and riding in horse shows for children, every once in a while they’d hold something called a gymkhana—a show that combined riding skills with games. The show ring would be set up with little jumps and other obstacles—places you’d have to back out of, a line of poles the rider would weave her pony through, spoon races where competitors carried an egg, potato-sack races where the rider would dismount and get in a sack, pulling her pony behind, and so on.

  In the best gymkhana events, horse and rider wore costumes. Not everyone could enter these because it meant you had to have a pony who (like the cat in that baby carriage) had a high tolerance for strange things strapped to its head and costumes that fluttered around its legs. Contestants took these costumes to heart, so they were often elaborate, and at least once in every show, some poor child would end up clinging to a runaway pony whose patience for a petticoat had just expired.

  My Shetland pony, Bunty, was a moody creature who tolerated very little. On a bad day she would reject the bridle, the saddle, and the rider. Imagine her reaction to wearing a hat! The single event in which we did well was the potato-sack race, when I stayed on the ground leading her. I hopped as fast as I could, not to win but to stay well ahead of Bunty’s teeth.

  Lay Me Down would have breezed through a costume event. I was standing in front of the turnout, soaking up her niceness, when I noticed her foal jitterbugging behind me on those flying hooves. I turned and faced the flattened ears, the snaky head, the restless legs, the twitchy tail. Her body language was easy to read. It said, “Go away.”

  I hated being told to go away. It was a rude, unloving, insensitive thing to say, and I’d heard it all my life, beginning with the people who had raised me and, as an adult, in my marriage. It was the loudest half of the mixed message “I love you, go away.” For years, since the end of my marriage, I had made certain I’d never have to hear “Go away” again. My resolve meant changing the kind of people I allowed into my life. No more angry, rejecting, Shetland-pony types.

  Yet I could understood why the foal would reject me. It was easy to imagine the kind of treatment she had received or witnessed at the hands of human beings. She had come to a logical conclusion about what to expect from the likes of me. Foals in the wild showed less hostility toward humans than this one exhibited toward me. She’d obviously been hurt. She might have been hit or frightened by rough handling when the halter was fitted. This can frighten foals even when done gently. She would also have witnessed whatever abuse her mother and the rest of the herd had suffered.

  For a moment I allowed myself to imagine the origins of the mixed message in my own human family. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this, but somehow, right then, in front of the angry foal, the parallels were easier to see and easier to forgive. In my family, one unwanted, unloved generation acted out their unwantedness and unlovability with the next. When my mother died of leukemia, it was as though someone had shattered a glass, sending the shards flying in every direction. Some of the biggest shards disappeared for twenty years. My father vanished into an alcoholic stupor somewhere in another city, a
nd my brother was banished many states away to board at a new school. At age five, I became the ward of a stern grandmother. After I had lived with her for two years, she decided she was too old to raise me herself, so she sent me to live with strangers, albeit relatives. They remained strangers until the routine of threats and beatings became as familiar as getting tucked into bed at night had once been. Alcoholism was endemic on both sides of the family, fueling the rage that was vented onto the children. Those children, initially victims, later became the next generation of victimizers. This daisy chain of pain didn’t end until some in my generation noticed the pattern and decided to put a stop to it, but even then, it required a herculean effort. Watching Lay Me Down and her hostile foal, it was impossible not to connect my own plight with theirs: orphaned, abandoned, mistreated.

  I didn’t know I was angry until I was about thirty-three. I thought I was just born uncongenial until a therapist suggested I might be reacting to the loss of my parents and being left in the “care” of my grandmother. After that, for years I was nothing but angry. I’d get angry if the phone rang. I’d get angry when the clothes dryer buzzed. I’d get angry when the toaster oven went Ping! I got so angry at the refrigerator hum I called a repairman. When he arrived and heard the normal sound of a refrigerator, he stood in the kitchen with the tool kit in his hand and, avoiding my glare, advised me simply to unplug it.

  Standing near the turnout, thinking about all this, I more or less came to terms with the foal’s animosity toward me. What remained troublesome was the physical threat she posed, which meant I had to remain aware of her position whenever I was in her pasture. This time, after glaring at me for a moment, she found her mother’s teat under the bulky quilt and began nursing. She had already finished all the grain in her creep. It was a good time to take Lay Me Down’s temperature, while she was distracted by the foal. I lifted her tail and inserted a lubricated thermometer.

  When I pulled it out three minutes later, I was surprised. No temperature? I slid my hand under the quilt, letting it rest on Lay Me Down’s bony flank. I didn’t feel any shivering. I slid my hand further up, pausing over her ribs, her withers, and finally under her mane, high up on her neck. No shivering anywhere. She wasn’t cold any longer; the quilt was working. And the antibiotics must have kicked in so her temperature had fallen.

  I put fresh hay down for both of them and got the wheelbarrow and muck rake to start cleaning up the manure. Right away, the foal spooked at the wheelbarrow and pranced in tight little circles around her mother, snorting at it every time she looked at it. But her stride got longer and slower, and it was obvious she wanted to meet the bright blue creature with the three short legs and no head.

  Her circles took her closer and closer to the wheelbarrow and finally she approached it directly, three steps forward, one step back, until she was close enough to stretch her neck out and smell the rim. When it didn’t bite or hit or kick, she became braver and stepped close enough to smell all around the rim and then to sniff each wooden handle and then the little tire in front. When she had smelled the whole thing, she tested the rim with her teeth giving it little practice nips all around the edge. When it still didn’t nip back, she picked it up with her teeth and flung it as far as she could. It didn’t go far, three or four feet but the foal seemed pleased with this. It was the first time I’d seen her ears pricked straight up and her slender legs so still, as she paused to admire her accomplishment. And who could blame her for gloating? She had just killed her first wheelbarrow.

  [ 5 ]

  IT 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.