Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  The meeting between Lay Me Down and Tempo had gone smoothly. The only glitch had been Hotshot’s proprietary behavior toward Lay Me Down, which created minor tension between the geldings for the first time in the thirteen years they’d been together. Hotshot was never farther than a few feet from Lay Me Down and always positioned between her and Tempo. If Tempo got too close, Hotshot flattened his ears and rushed at him, warning him away. Tempo accepted the warning and moved off without objection.

  Lay Me Down seemed irritated by the intensity of Hotshot’s attachment. I know I would have been. He shadowed her everywhere and wouldn’t let her get close to Tempo even when she initiated it. He hovered by her stall door when it was her turn to be confined. Sometimes she flattened her ears and flicked her tail at him but that was as angry as she ever got. It was good to see she could assert herself even though it made no difference. Hotshot didn’t budge from her side.

  I sat in the sunny doorway, within sight of Georgia so she wouldn’t be alone, hoping my presence would help soothe her agitation. It did a little. There were longer stretches of quiet between the pacing and whinnying, when I knew she was either eating hay or resting from the exhaustion of being angry for three days.

  She’d been quiet so long I’d been able to read the whole paper, including the classifieds. I wasn’t selling or buying anything, I didn’t need a job, and even though I was a daring Christopher Columbus rat now, I’d rather have been single forever than answer an ad in the personals.

  Then something stranger than answering a personal ad happened. I went in for lunch and the phone rang.

  “Hello, Susan,” a male voice said, “this is Hank Dolby. We met six years ago at a party at the Gardners’ house.”

  I was instantly confused. I remembered meeting him, but I couldn’t imagine why he was calling except for some horrible reason: mutual friends had been killed in a freak accident, my ex-husband had moved next door and was asking about me in a suspicious way, I had done something awful. My mind was spinning. Nobody just called out of the blue. He and his wife were writers and lived in a small town on the other side of the Hudson River. The wife was tall and opinionated with beautiful skin. Hank was shorter and quieter with thinning red hair and twinkly, observant eyes. Their pretty young daughter had been at the party, too, and when I met them at the Gardners’ that night, I remembered thinking they were a family who had it all: brains, beauty, and books.

  “I remember you,” I said, straining to sound composed.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. “Last time we talked you were on your way to England.”

  Is that why he was calling, to find out how my trip to England had been? Six years later?

  “It was sunny the whole time.” This felt crazy, telling him about six-year-old weather.

  We talked like that for a few more minutes, stuck in the past.

  Then suddenly he said, “Are you with anyone?”

  I thought he was asking if anyone was in the room with me, as though he was going to tell me a secret, and he wanted to make sure I was alone. Then I understood.

  “Not really.”

  He told me he’d been divorced for a year and felt ready to “get out there again,” as he put it. Would I like to have dinner next Saturday?

  “I’d love to,” I said, but what I really meant was, I’d love to be able to. I’d love to be able to throw on a little black dress and head out the door next Saturday night like thousands of women all over America. That he’d asked, that he’d remembered me six years later and called was enough excitement. The miracle had already happened. Getting to know him could ruin it. But I can’t tell him that. I said I’d love to. I could call and cancel later.

  Being asked for a date was big news, big enough to make me want to tell someone, so I called my brother, Lloyd, a lawyer who lived in Vermont with his wife and three children. I could count on getting the sensitive male perspective from my brother.

  “He’s probably going through his Rolodex and it took him a year to get to the Rs,” he said.

  I could also count on getting the insensitive male perspective, the reality check. It was impossible to forget that I was the God-you’re-so-dumb little sister, still getting my nose flicked every time I fell for the What’s this on the front of your shirt? routine. That was my earliest memory of him. I trusted him, and he tripped me every chance he got.

  After our mother died and our father left, for a few brief weeks we crawled into each other’s beds at night and whispered about what was to become of us. On one of those nights he gave me a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, the first thing he had ever given me, and it was as though he had given me the Hope Diamond. Those few weeks huddled together at night, along with the gift of gum, created a connection to him that was so strong in me it survived the next twenty years we were to be separated.

  By our forties, our pattern hadn’t changed much. Sometimes I got tripped, and sometimes I got Juicy Fruit gum, but our connection was deep and unbreakable. We liked to talk about the past.

  When I’d visit him in Vermont we’d sit around the table after dinner and start talking about What Had Happened.

  “What was it like before she died?” I’d ask. I had almost no memories of our mother, no memories of our family doing anything together. My brother was seven when she died, I had been five. He remembered a lot.

  “In the summer we’d go to the beach,” he’d say. “Dad liked to cook out on the beach.”

  “Did we have fun?” I’d ask. “Did Mom and Dad get along?”

  “Sometimes,” he’d say. “She didn’t like his drinking.”

  After a while, my brother’s wife and three teenage children would start to fidget, and one by one, they’d slip away from the table and leave us to our excavating.

  “Did she know she was dying?”

  He’d nod. “She told me to take care of you.”

  And in a way he had. Not then, not when he was seven and sent away to a boarding school in South Carolina that had created a third grade especially for him. And not during the years when I was sent from relative to relative and eventually to a boarding school in Massachusetts in eighth grade. It was after college, when we were both in graduate school in Boston, that we started to get together regularly. Two or three times a week I’d drive to his house in the suburbs, and we’d take a walk or have dinner and catch up on the past.

  I needed to do that. I needed to know what had happened to us and, as much as possible, why. And I couldn’t do it without my brother’s early memories of our family, because I had almost no memories of my own. He never got tired of answering my questions, even when I asked the same ones over and over again.

  “Did I love her?” That was what disturbed me the most—not remembering her love for me, but mine for her.

  “The last time we visited her in the hospital, you climbed into her bed, and it took two nurses to pull you away from her. You screamed all the way to the car.”

  I pictured a little girl who looked like me, clinging to her mother, holding on for dear life. I thought if I could remember that moment, remember loving someone that much, I’d be able to love like that again. “What did I say when she died?”

  “You didn’t understand. You kept asking me when she was coming back.”

  “What would you tell me?”

  “I’d say, never. She’s never coming back.”

  “You understood death?”

  He’d pause. “I knew she wasn’t coming back.”

  There was no laughter when we talked about our mother or what it was like before she died. We found nothing funny about those years. However, we laughed about everything else in our childhoods.

  “Jean beat me with a belt once because I answered the telephone,” I told my brother. Jean was my grandfather’s second wife, and for a time I had lived with them in Baltimore. “She said twelve-year-olds had no business answering the telephone.”

  My brother and I would look at each other wide-eyed and laugh.

  �
�I’d do anything to avoid being punished for wetting the bed,” he’d say, “so I’d sleep sitting up in a chair and then wet the chair.”

  His bed-wetting stories could send us into hysterics. His wife and children would hear the laughter and return to the table.

  “Tell us about the time you buried the suitcase full of dirty sheets,” his daughter, Marguerite, would urge.

  He’d tell us: a nine-year-old boy walks into the woods next to my grandmother’s house carrying a suitcase containing a week’s worth of urine-soaked sheets and buries it. Unbeknownst to him, the boy is followed by a servant. Later the servant digs up the suitcase and presents it to my grandmother while she and the boy are eating lunch. The boy is dragged from the table by his hair and locked in a bedroom no one uses, with just a mattress on the floor. He is left there for a week with someone bringing his meals and letting him out to use the bathroom. At night he wets the mattress.

  Why did we laugh? Why did the endless repetition of this repertoire of our childhood horrors strike us as so funny? We didn’t laugh at the painful memories of others, just our own.

  “We’d go nuts if we didn’t laugh,” my brother said.

  “Hey, remember when they had our dog put to sleep and told us they had given her away?”

  “Yeah, that was really funny.”

  What he said about Hank going through the Rolodex was more like being tripped than being handed a piece of Juicy Fruit, but it lessened some of the pressure I felt about having a date. If I wasn’t someone special Hank had been losing sleep over for six years, I didn’t have to live up to anything. I was just an R in the Rolodex after A through Q hadn’t worked out. Maybe the Rs wouldn’t either and he’d move on to the Ss. It gave me the courage to meet him.

  As I stood in the kitchen, trying to absorb the idea that I had a date for the first time in almost ten years, the phone rang again. This time it was Allie. Before I could tell her about my date, she launched in about the horses. She said three days of letting the mares sniff each other over the stall door was plenty. Any longer and I’d be creating more tension by not allowing them to meet face to face. I should just turn them out in the pasture together. Right away.

  “No lead lines,” she said. “Just get out of the way and let them work it out.”

  “Lay Me Down is so stiff,” I argued. “She won’t be able to run if she needs to.”

  “Give her bute, wait an hour, and then let her out.”

  Bute is a painkiller and anti-inflammatory that comes as a white paste in an oral syringe. I gave Lay Me Down a moderate dose, waited an hour, and then it was time.

  I decided to give Lay Me Down a head start, so I let her out first, hoping she’d wander to the far end of the pasture. She didn’t, but she did go far enough to give her plenty of time to see Georgia coming. The bute had worked, and her gait was smoother, less labored. If she had to run, she could. Hotshot stood right next to her, and I wondered if he’d be a help or a hindrance. I knew he’d try to protect her, but he was old and no match for Georgia. Tempo grazed near the other two and my guess was that he wouldn’t involve himself in whatever happened. He’d stay close and observe.

  When I’d run out of reasons to delay the inevitable, I opened Georgia’s door. If I hadn’t moved to the side, she would have knocked me down. She left her stall at a dead run. I felt sick as I watched her gallop down the cement aisle and out of the barn. I ran after her to watch.

  She went right for Lay Me Down, who had seen her coming and had trotted toward the far fence with Hotshot right behind her. Even with the bute, I could see Lay Me Down had trouble moving fast. Her trot looked stiff-kneed and choppy, the front legs worse than the rear. As a Standardbred, she should have easily been able to outrun a Morgan but there had been so much damage to her joints from racing that she’d lost her advantage. At least her lungs were clear: she’d need all her breath.

  Georgia’s ears were flat back, and her neck was stretched out as far as a short, thick Morgan neck could stretch. At the end of her neck was her head with the lips curled back, exposing big, grass-stained teeth. She was moving so fast that all four feet were in the air at the same time. She looked like a TV trailer for a new reality show: Killer Horses of Olivebridge.

  She reached Hotshot first—bless his poor, protective heart—and sank her teeth into his rump. He kind of kicked back but he was Hotshot; he didn’t know how to be nasty, even in war. His kicks were no more than little bucks, his rear legs never getting farther off the ground than a few inches. Mostly they acted as body blocks and in that sense they sort of worked. He managed to keep Georgia from reaching Lay Me Down and, in the process, got bitten a lot.

  This assault took place at a fairly high speed. All three horses were moving at a trot or a canter—four horses, if you counted Tempo, who circled at the periphery. The fight got closer and closer to the barn, and I wondered if Georgia was too far out of her mind to listen if I blocked the entry and yelled if she tried to get inside. I quickly fetched the buggy whip just in case. The sound of a cracking whip was the one thing that always got her respect.

  Until then.

  They were right up against the barn, everyone covered in foamy sweat, their breathing fast and heavy. Georgia squealed as she kicked and bit, throwing one end of herself or the other at Lay Me Down. I lunged toward her, cracking the whip, shouting, “NO,” and suddenly they were inside, the whip ignored.

  Why hadn’t I shut the door?

  I never shut the two big sliding doors that hung on the overhead track. Not even in winter, when the wind and snow were howling, and it was below zero. For all I knew, after all these years, they’d rusted in that position and couldn’t be shut. But I wished I had tried. I wished I’d thought of it. Lay Me Down and Georgia were inside now, going at each other, standing on the cement center aisle. Hotshot, Tempo, and I were outside, panting and scared.

  The sound of metal horseshoes on cement is only pretty when it’s slow and rhythmic, like when a horse walks in or out of the stall at feed time. This sound was different. This sounded like a car accident. They crashed against closed stall doors and hanging chains used for cross-tying horses when they were being groomed. They grunted and squealed and breathed as loud as humpback whales.

  When I thought I couldn’t stand another second, Lay Me Down fell onto the cement. Georgia came prancing out of the barn as proud as if she had just wiped out cholera. I went right to Lay Me Down, who was sitting dog style: front legs bent and tucked neatly to one side, her rear legs tucked to the same side. Her long neck rose straight up from her chest, her ears were forward and alert, listening for Georgia’s return. I knelt at her side and checked all I could see of her for bites or wounds of any kind. She was wet and breathing hard, but she looked OK.

  I ran my hand over her neck and back, talking to her softly, hoping she’d get up, but she didn’t. It didn’t feel right, her lying there like that. And the longer she lay there, the less right it felt. I went to the tack room to get her halter, and while I was up, I glanced outside to see where the others were. Georgia and Tempo were grazing together at the far end of the pasture, but Hotshot was standing right by the barn door. I noticed a few bare spots on his rump where Georgia had pulled out the hair, but otherwise he seemed to be in good shape.

  I got Lay Me Down’s halter and went back to where she was still lying and put it on. I gave her a few more minutes to compose herself, and then tried to get her up. If I had shut the barn doors, this never would have happened. The longer she lay there, the worse I felt.

  I slipped the halter over her nose and ears and clipped on a lead line. I stood a few feet in front of her, leaving the lead line slack to see if she’d get up on her own. Most horses move forward as soon as they hear the snap of the lead line in place, but Lay Me Down didn’t move.

  “Come on, girl,” I said and gave the line a little tug. When she still didn’t move, I knelt next to her, pulling her head forward with one hand on her halter and pushing against her side with my
shoulder. That worked. She heaved herself to her feet. Even on a good day, Lay Me Down got up with difficulty because of her overall stiffness. So, for a moment, it was hard to tell whether she was injured.

  I led her down the aisle to see how she walked and that’s when I noticed she was badly lame in one of her rear legs. She could hardly put any weight on it while walking, and when she stood, she held it up. I put her in her stall, pulled out the cell phone, and called the vet.

  While I waited for the vet, I went to the house and got one of the sport wraps I kept in the freezer for my bad back and took it to the barn. I was pretty sure the injury was low in her leg, in the pastern, right above her hoof. She let me wrap the cold compress around it, and since I’d already given her bute, I didn’t give her anything more for pain.

  I offered her some hay and dried her down with a towel. She alternated between holding her foot up and letting just the tip of the hoof rest on the stall floor. I would have soaked it in cold water if I’d thought she’d have kept her foot in the bucket, but if she was going to keep pulling it out, the compress was better.

  Dr. Grice arrived within the hour and drove her blue truck right up to the barn entrance. She was a tall young woman with short blonde hair, and the first vet none of my horses fled from. She was smart and gentle, a favorite with horse farms all over the Hudson Valley on both sides of the river.

  I brought out Lay Me Down and cross-tied her in the center aisle on the flat cement floor where Dr. Grice could examine her and set up her portable X-ray machine, a square black box a little smaller than a toaster oven. When Dr. Grice took off the compress to examine the leg, we both saw Lay Me Down’s pastern was already swollen, so icing it had been the right thing to do. I stood by Lay Me Down’s head to keep her company while Dr. Grice put the injured leg through a range of motion series to confirm that the problem was in the pastern and not somewhere else. Whenever Dr. Grice touched near the pastern, Lay Me Down moved her head up and down and flicked her ears sideways, indicating her objection. Ears flat back would have shown more pain.