Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

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.

  “Um,” Rick said, separating himself from me. “Need any help backing out?”

  “I hope she kicked the shit out of you!” the reincarnation of Granny called out. But my granny would never have said “shit.” It’s possible she didn’t know the word existed.

  “Just keep it real straight through that narrow opening in the stone wall and you should be OK,” Rick said as the man swung into the seat and slammed the door in Rick’s face. The truck started and began slowly backing down the dirt drive, trailer first.

  Allie came over and put her arm around me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “she definitely kicked the shit out of him.”

  I felt awful—awful for the foal, awful because I had turned into my grandmother, and awful because Lay Me Down was going to be alone in her pasture that night.

  The truck made it to the end of the driveway without hitting anything and backed slowly into the road. Rick and Allie and I stood around Lay Me Down, watching the blue trailer until it disappeared over the crest of a small rise.

  We were left with a huge stillness, like an empty school yard after the children have gone home. The air was sweet with pink apple blossoms, blooming in the old orchard behind Lay Me Do
wn’s turnout. The pasture grasses had turned a tender green. A pair of killdeer exchanged high-pitched cries as they scuttled around the pasture on long ternlike legs. They would lay their mottled eggs in the middle of the field, perfectly camouflaged on a lichen-covered rock. By mid-July the fledglings would teeter on the fence not too far from the young swallows, all of them taking shaky practice flights across the field. The day the babies flew away for good would feel a lot like this day. Empty. Quiet. Lonely.

  “Come for dinner later,” Allie called as she and Rick pulled out of my driveway.

  After they left, I decided to brush Lay Me Down to help distract her from the foal’s absence. She followed me across the pasture into the turnout and waited patiently while I fetched the grooming kit, a long wooden box with a wooden dowel grip filled with combs and brushes. I put it on the ground next to me and pulled out a shed blade: a two-handled flexible aluminum blade with small dull teeth on one side, used to pull out the hair of a horse’s thick winter coat.

  I started right behind her ears, scraping the blade along her neck in the same direction the hair grew, pulling out the short, dull undercoat as I went. The hair fell to the ground in perfect crescent-shaped clumps. Later, I’d gather up the hair and sprinkle it in the bushes around the pasture for birds to use as nesting material. I had a collection of bird nests in the house, blown down in windstorms, all made with hair from my horses. The nests were incredible works of engineering, some made entirely of horse hair, others mixed with twigs and long grasses.

  Lay Me Down pushed her neck against the blade, savoring the feel of a good scratch. Shedding is an itchy business, and most horses enjoy the help of a shedding blade. I had put down some hay to keep her busy while I brushed, but she didn’t seem interested in it. Maybe the newly green pasture had spoiled her taste for hay or maybe she just liked being brushed. She looked sleepy. Her head hung low at the end of her long neck, and her eyes gave a slow, droopy blink.

  I’d never known a horse this obliging, this relaxed. I was used to being bossed around by Georgia, always on my guard lest I offend her in some way. It didn’t seem horsey, this calm, endless good nature. It didn’t even seem human. She had so many good reasons to be skittish or mean or difficult, but she never was. Except for when I led her into the trailer, I didn’t even keep a halter on her. There was no reason to, she came as soon as she saw me.

  Unlike me, Lay Me Down seemed to feel no rancor. In spite of everything, she was open and trusting of people, qualities I decidedly lacked. It was her capacity to engage that drew me to her, that made me aware of what was possible for me if I had her capacity to … to what? Forgive? Forget? Live in the moment? What exactly was it that enabled an abused animal, for lack of a better word, to love again?

  I switched to the other side of her neck and worked backward toward her newly fleshed-out shoulder. She was a pure bay without a single white marking. It made her seem bigger to me, an ocean of deep brown as far as the eye could see.

  “You’re beautiful,” I told her, letting the blade drop and running my hands over the newly sleeked neck. “My Lay Me Downie Brownie,” I said.

  She took a deep breath and let a fine mist flubber out of her nostrils and slightly parted lips. I felt it on the back of my neck, her big, wet sigh. I felt it on my heart.

  [ 6 ]

  ALLIE AND I referred to our young womanhood as colorful. We had been colorful in a lot of the same ways but not together because we hadn’t known each other then. We didn’t meet until our midthirties, and by then we were in our spiritual phase, grateful we had survived our previous phase. It was the mideighties when we met and lying in the backseat of either one of our cars might have been books like The Road Less Traveled, Men Who Hate Women, or the AA Big Book.

  For some of us, it was news to find out the whole world didn’t wake up most mornings hungover, with a man they’d met the night before asleep on the pillow next to them. But that more or less described my twenties if you threw in two packs of Marlboros a day. Somehow I’d managed to get through graduate school and to become a high-school English teacher in Boston.

  What I remembered about teaching was the clock, the big round clock at the back of the class, and how long it took the hands to get to noon, when I could leave and eat aspirin for lunch. Afternoon classes were better. The aspirin would start to kick in, and before I knew it, I’d be heading with a group of teachers to Happy Hour at a sports bar in Beacon Circle.

  Nobody was happier at Happy Hour than I. By my third glass of white wine the hangover was gone, the shyness was gone, and I was brilliant.

  I was pretty and guys liked me. It didn’t hurt that I was as hard to pick up as a beer nut. I drank and laughed, gave expert advice on subjects I knew nothing about, danced in my underwear, and hoped everyone noticed how smart I was.

  What I really wanted was to buy a horse and get a lot of new riding clothes and be Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. First I needed to find a husband, and when I was twenty-nine years old I did. Instead of a baron, my husband was an angry Vietnam vet who looked good in a T-shirt splitting wood. He had once been a world-ranked tennis player and later became the tennis pro at a nearby country club. When he wasn’t being surly, he was charming, so we got married and bought a hundredacre farm in the Africa of America—Vermont.

  During the day Jerry taught tennis, and I bought expensive appliances with money I had inherited from my mother. At night we drank and hurled slurred accusations at each other while gourmet dinners burned on the new Viking range.

  A month after we were married, he hit me. From that moment on I hated him, even though a psychiatrist tried to persuade me I didn’t.

  “Why don’t you look at Jerry and tell him how you really feel,” the doctor would prompt, as though the worst thing the man in the chair next to me had ever done was to leave the toilet seat up. So I’d turn and look deep into Jerry’s eyes and say, “I hate you.”

  This went on for months while I worked up the courage to leave. I would have left the day he hit me except I was embarrassed that my marriage had lasted only a month. Then Jerry had a heart attack. He was only thirty-six years old and, as it turned out, we made it to the emergency room in the nick of time. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about that.

  On the spot, Jerry swore off red meat, butter, and Camembert. “What about Scotch?” I asked.

  So he swore off Scotch, too, and a few weeks later he was home and sober, cooking Pritikin on the Viking, and I felt trapped. How could I leave someone who faced quadruple bypass surgery within the year?

  One night at dinner as I started on the second bottle of wine all by myself, he turned to me and said, “I think you have a drinking problem, too.”

  Then I really hated him. To get out of the house more, I went shopping for a horse. Someone had actually loaned me a horse, two horses if you counted the companion pony that came with the pretty bay mare. They had come from a young woman who had left the area to go to college and didn’t know when she’d be back. The mare was a quarter horse and her name was April. Our farm bordered state land on all sides with miles of wide dirt logging roads, and I’d go on daylong trail rides with April, letting the pony follow us loose.

  But I wanted my own horse, not for showing but for riding trails, jumping fallen trees or stone walls or small streams. I wanted an all-terrain vehicle of a horse, a horse with strength and stamina and beauty. I wanted a Morgan.

  I’d never bought my own horse, and I decided to take my time looking for one. Horses can live thirty or forty years, and since I planned on keeping him or her forever, it was important to make the right choice. If only I’d put the same care and thoughtfulness into choosing a husband.

  I spent almost a year taking short trips all over New England and New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, looking at every Morgan for sale and also seeing a lot of other horses besides. At the same time, I knew I’d leave my marriage eventually, so while I was shopping for a horse, I was also looking for an area that could become home
.

  In late fall about a year after Jerry’s heart attack, I found myself in upstate New York. It was cold and windy, and all the leaves were gone as I drove up a long dirt driveway on the way to visit a big Morgan horse breeder who had several horses for sale. On either side of the drive were pastures full of Morgans, five or ten to a field, stretching away as far as the eye could see. Everywhere fences were in need of repair, barns needed roofing, and the main house looked like it hadn’t seen a new coat of paint in my lifetime. In the past year I’d seen all kinds of horse farms, from climate-controlled stables with airportlike security systems to simple backyard barns where horses and cows shared a muddy paddock. This farm looked big and broke. But whatever money the owner still had, she must have put it into the horses because they looked healthy. I drove slowly and checked: trimmed feet, shiny coats, clear eyes, good muscle tone. They looked terrific, every single one.

  I had spoken to the owner on the phone. Sarah Nicholson’s voice had been farmer tired and unpretentious. She told me exactly what I needed to know about her horses and not a word more. I already knew from the Morgan Horse Breeder’s Guide that she owned the top-ranked Morgan stallion in the country.

  I stopped the car at one of the enormous falling-down barns at the end of the drive. It must have been a dairy barn once; there were a few cow stanchions still visible at one end. I got out of the car and looked around for a human being. The barnyard was full of odd bits of farm equipment, chickens scratching around in the dirt, barn cats sunning in the doorway, and a couple of scraggly-looking black dogs who came over and peed on my tires. But no people.

  I could see the color of the air that day, clear and sharp, the way the light is in late fall, the sun low in the west, bouncing off all those shiny rumps in fields that were still green. In the distance I could hear cars on the New York State Thruway, a steady hum floating on the wind across the wide-open fields. The barnyard smelled of manure, diesel fuel, and hay.

  And then, in the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, turning into the same dirt drive I had just driven down, I saw my horse. There’s a line I read in a book once: I knew it was her by the feel of my heart in my chest. That’s how it was for me.