“This is unbearable,” I said to the dying leg on the transparent sheet.
“It is unbearable,” Alexander said. “But horses die.”
He put his head down on the desk, temple to the wood, and we sat in silence, separate. I should have turned to him to comfort him. I should have put my hand on his shoulder, I should have kissed his neck, I should have told him I loved him. But I looked away from him, across the room, to where a mirror hung in a gilt frame, elegantly surrounded by trophies and win photos from the horses we had sent to the races, as if it were the drawing room of a landed aristocrat. I watched my reflection, my three a.m. reflection, my 23-hours-of-wakefulness-face so wary and tired and sad. I was tired of being tired. I was tired of being sad. I was tired of horses and all their heartbreaks. I turned away from Alexander, then, and I got up and left the room, and sat in the golf cart, swatting at mosquitoes in the chill, until he came and sat down next to me, and we wordlessly drove back to the house.
CHAPTER SIX
Closed Curtains
If Alexander noticed that I had stopped talking, he didn’t bring it up. He was too busy maintaining a silent funk of his own. We did the things we had always done, but we ignored one another. We stepped around one another in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the barns. We were polite, and we were icy. It was grief, and disappointment, and exhaustion, I told myself. We had both had a long winter, and the sooner we could get through the selected two-year-old sale, unloading a dozen or so horses from our personal breeding program that we didn’t plan on running ourselves, and accepted the new boarders (which were sometimes the same horses that we shipped to Miami to be sold), the better off we would be. Alexander wasn’t above slipping away mid-breeding season for a weekend in the Keys; we had to keep our phones on our persons at all times, in case there was a calamity with a mare or foal or one of the trainees, but it was better than the alternative that most horsepeople were faced with: spending the breeding season, January to June, locked down on the farm.
“Horsemen have miserable love lives,” he’d told me once. “Sometimes you have to get away right at the peak of things, to remind you of who is most important in your life.”
I waited for some mention of a bed and breakfast booked, of picking out some new music or a book to listen to on the long journey south, but nothing happened, and we went wheeling through February, with the breeding sheds open, three dozen horses in training, and the death lingering between us. The sales horses shipped out, the empty stalls were raked back and left to air, snowed white with lime. Two foals were born on the coldest night of the year, the pastures sparkling with frost, and I shivered under three sweaters while I tied up the placentas with hay-twine and a plastic bag of sand, to help speed its expulsion from the mares, while they licked their wet foals and grumbled contentedly. Another was born on a sunny afternoon in a gray patch of sand in the middle of the paddock; the other mares held their distance while the veteran mama laid down, pushed out her foal in a matter of minutes, and hopped up to graze while the baby scrabbled in the sand. I pulled the foal into the cleaner grass so that its nostrils wouldn’t get clogged with wet dirt and went about the usual business, dousing the navel stump with iodine, tying up the placenta, and then sat in the grass to soak up a little warmth from the sun while the foal got to work at controlling his four stilt legs.
Alexander watched from the kitchen window.
I could see him. I looked away, back at the foal. I was not interested in its efforts to stand, or find its mother’s udder. I knew it had to, because that was my job, to make sure the foal had a good start, survived, grew up strong. But I didn’t have any real feelings for it anymore. And clearly Alexander did not either, or he’d have come out to check on its progress.
The curtains twitched closed. I saw them without trying, I saw them because I had to look. We never closed those curtains. I closed my eyes for a minute, to blot out the sun and the grass and the foal and the house where Alexander had hidden himself.
Everything was going wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Erin's Princess
Some rituals did not change. Only the new silence defined them. In the mid-afternoon, we came inside to drink another pot of coffee and watch a few races, fending off the afternoon’s drowsiness. It was the most challenging part of the day, worse than getting out of bed at four thirty in the morning to get to the training barn, worse than heading back out to the broodmare barns and the yearling barns to check the conditions after we had changed out of training clothes and the day was heating up, worse than business calls in the office at five thirty in the evening, a time calculated to provide the maximum number of voicemail calls and a minimum of actual time-consuming person-to-person communications (businessmen were out of the office for the night; horsemen were at the races or presiding over night feeding). The afternoon doldrums and the prospect of still more work before nightfall were enough to put anyone off the equestrian lifestyle.
I had started to just give in and slip off to sleep, sideways on the couch, while the race calls echoed in my dreams. There had been a foal the night before, another long birth from a maiden mare who didn’t understand what was happening to her. She thought she was going to die, probably, and when the first contractions struck her in mid-afternoon she flung herself around the huge foaling stall like a maniac fighting off a strait-jacket. In the end the foal had been large and poorly presented, and it had taken Dr. Eddie at two a.m. to reach in, grab the leg that was caught behind her pelvis, and pull the big colt free. He was coming back this evening to stitch her up; the colt’s big shoulders had torn her on the way out. It was enough to make you swear off children forever, all this blood and groaning and raw flesh. I thought about going up to the bedroom and slipping between the sheets, getting away from the bronze horses dancing atop the bookshelves and the race callers droning on and on with necks and lengths and under the whip and bids for the lead, away from horses for just a little while. . .
“Whoa!” Alexander shouted, startling me out of the coma I’d been slipping into. “Who is that?”
In-between races, when they could find absolutely nothing else to fill the airwaves with, the racing channel very occasionally showed interviews and little vignettes of racetrack life with various trainers. Dancing down a training track, black and lithe as a panther, a young colt filled the screen and then galloped out of the camera angle, which panned back to the trainer, a leathery man that I recognized as a mid-level claimer type from the New York tracks. He was very talented at picking up cheap horses on the climb, fixing them up, patching their problems (they all had problems) and turning them into expensive claimers that were, in turn, claimed by higher-echelon trainers who ran the horses in stakes races and got a great deal of money and credit for it all. The man had a curse for a talent. But at least he was earning a decent living, and he got respect from his fellow trainers, if not from the moneyed elite who purchased the high-end horses.
“. . .Picked up a few two-year-olds privately from a closing breeding farm and they’re turning out good…” he was saying, rather expansive and tell-all for a racehorse trainer. The interviewer asked him about the colt now pulled up behind him, flashing polished hooves in the dark gray of Aqueduct’s frost-proof inner track, steaming from his fluttering nostrils. “Oh, he’s a Tiger Tiger. . . Not the most fashionable sire, but out of a good Northern Dancer mare—you remember Erin’s Princess, don’t you, very big in the stallion stakes a few years ago.”
The interviewer, a New Yorker with a long memory, began to expound in detail upon Erin’s Princess, who evidently had several thrilling wins in the New York-breds restricted division as a three and four-year-old, more than a decade ago, and the colt disappeared back towards the barns. Without warning, the view cut suddenly to the post parade at Gulfstream Park, a Florida track which sparkled amidst high-rise condos in Hallandale Beach, and the cold, wind-whipped horses and trainers of Queens were replaced with palm trees, Spanish archit
ecture, and tinkling fountains. The horses here were sweating even beneath close-clipped coats, and the railbirds wore baseball caps and sandals. Despite the pageantry, it was an unimpressive race; the horses were cheap and one favorite easily out-classed them all.
I thought about the name of the broodmare. Erin’s Princess. . . there was something. . . oh.
“Alexander!” I exclaimed urgently. “Erin’s Princess, for god’s sake!”
Alexander turned to look at me, and his eyes were bright with sudden excitement. “You’re right! That’s him!”
We’d looked in vain for the last Erin’s Princess colt last year, when Red Erin died of laminitis. Her two-year-old chestnut colt had been our darling, and and when he’d fractured a bone in his foreleg we’d gone to great lengths to surgically repair it, only to have him die during his confinement after surgery. It had been horrific, to come down to the barn one morning, waiting for him to poke his head over the webbing, and instead hear a terrible groaning, like a man who’d been beaten and left for dead, and rush down to find him lying in the straw with wide eyes and vein-popping sweat, in agonies from his inflamed hooves.
I’d watched when the vet slipped the needle in, two days later. I’d watched him take his last breaths, and run my hand beneath his mane, along his hot, wet neck. I’d brushed my hands over his eyelids, taken a piece of straw out of his forelock, laid the tarp over him before the front of the stall was winched off and the tractor chains were brought out to haul him out to the cow pasture. The common wisdom is that you never euthanize a horse in his stall, but Alexander would rather dismantle the barn than put his horse through more pain.
After Red Erin had died, I thought the only thing that would please me was his little brother, whom we had seen by her side at the farm in Williston, a town a few miles east. But he’d been sold privately, without the paper trail of a public auction, and we hadn’t been able to locate him.
That was his glorious self on our TV screen, for just a few seconds.
“I may need you to go to New York,” he announced.
I was wide awake for the first time in days, maybe weeks. “When?”
“Tomorrow? I’m not sure. But you go ahead and pack an overnight bag and ask Sandy to look up a good flight for you to JFK. Let me get a hold of this fellow and get an appointment. Dick Figaro. What a name. I’m sure Nickie knows him—"
And just like that, Alexander was off, all the misery of the past weeks completely shaken away. Into the office, to call Nickie over at Sun Meadows Training Center, the horseman who knew all horsemen, big and small.
I went upstairs and pulled out a leather carry-on, with the farm’s logo embossed on the side, and started sorting through the closet, looking for sweaters and hats and gloves. It was cold in New York. I’d have to find some things that looked decent; doubtless Alexander would set me up with dinner with some of his friends, and we’d be somewhere in Manhattan, where they could show off to the country bumpkin from Down South. I didn’t want to look the part of homeless jockey, even if that was the role I tended to affect in Ocala. (That’s an exaggeration, and I admit it. After all, I try to look decent. I always put on clean jeans when I go somewhere in town. Besides the feed store.)
Riffling through my closet, I tried to feel some sort of excitement, that we had found the colt at last, but it just wasn’t there. I didn’t want to go to New York. I mean, I wanted to go, but I didn’t. I wanted the Erin’s Princess colt. Not quite as desperately as I had last year, of course. We were over the initial grief, which had been a raw and strange thing. Horses die. We knew that. We lost a yearling or a foal every year; once in a while, we lost a broodmare or a young horse in training. Horses did stupid things, horses went out of their way to hurt themselves, horses were delicate in their birth and in their pregnancies. It was part of the business. We’d loved Red Erin—there had just been something about it him, something from the moment we saw him as a naughty red yearling—and he’d been our special pet. Of course we would have wanted to buy his brother, keep a little piece of him close to us.
It might have been different if I thought Red Erin’s brother would have had the power to fix us—give me back my passion, give Alexander back his spark—and we could have gone on as we had before. But that didn’t seem likely. I kicked a pair of boots aside in my closet to reveal—more boots. That was all I had. Boots, breeches, jeans. I had nothing. Red Erin and Saltpeter, they were nothing but reminders that horses die, and they are rude and dirty and stop you from doing anything else in life but worrying over them, and I was tired of them, bone-tired soul-tired tired of them.
I didn’t want to go to New York, because I didn’t want to come home again.
I hadn’t been to New York alone since the summer before I came to Ocala. It was like another version of me, someone I’d almost forgotten, someone I felt nostalgic for now. I’d gone and walked the streets, refusing to use a guidebook in case someone mistook me for a tourist, when clearly I was a woman walking the streets of her soul’s birth. I strolled Central Park in the moonlight and basked in the glow of Midtown, I rode the subway where it came bursting out of the ground somewhere high in upper Manhattan to go rattling across bridges and above the streets, I ventured across the Brooklyn Bridge and felt wonderfully dangerous to be walking the mean streets of Brooklyn alone—until I came to a Banana Republic and a Children’s Place across the street from one another.
I thought, I’m going to live here. This is where writers live, and I will be a writer, and this is where I will live, and I will meet people and make friends and we will sit around and write together, in coffee shops, and then when we are done writing we will go to bars and drink and listen to music and everything will be glamorous all the time. I was going to be a writer in New York City. That was the plan. Of course, it had been a silly plan. There would be no horses in my life there. It was a fun dream while it lasted, but I quickly wrote it off once I was back in Florida, surrounded by fields of horses. Naturally I couldn’t live without horses!
Now, sitting on the edge of my bed, surveying the sad truth of my wardrobe of jeans and breeches and argyle boot socks, I wondered if it had all been so much drama. Oh, I can’t live without horses! Such an exclamation! Was that really true? Could anyone simply not live without horses? That seemed terribly dramatic and grade school. Maybe I just didn’t want to grow up, out-grow my pony stickers and my fairy tales.
This life I led was my dream. It was supposed to be perfect. I was living the life I’d dreamed of since elementary school. Should priorities change, somewhere between elementary school and adulthood?
In the past few years, Alexander had taken me to New York several times, on jaunts to visit trainer friends. We’d gone to Belmont Park and sat in the echoing stands, built for fifty thousand and occupied by fifty on a sunny June day, the white clouds scudding above the great expanse of turf and dirt of the mile and half oval, with jets swooping low on approach to JFK. Beyond the backstretch, the silver cars of the Long Island Rail Road rattled by. It was a graceful oasis in the drama of New York City, just outside the border of Queens, and it was largely ignored, like most of North America’s racetracks, by the surrounding populace.
We’d gone to Central Park (in the daylight, how conventional) and I’d admired the bomb-proof ponies of Claremont Riding Academy, jogging along the Bridle Path and weaving in and out of human joggers and dog walkers, who were in turn offended by the presence of the horses as if they weren’t sure what the word “Bridle” actually meant. Perhaps they thought it meant a wedding path. Perhaps they’d thought it was a typo.
We’d shoved and tussled our way through Times Square and I had been amazed by the bored police mounts, dozing with one leg cocked and ears at half-mast, in the center of the most frenzied pedestrian and automobile jam-ups one could imagine outside of Southeast Asia.
Perhaps, I thought, digging through the dresser drawers for the thickest socks I could find, I didn’t really know New York. My knowledge was based on that
one solo trip and a few cursory tourist explorations with Alexander. And the horses who lived there. But wasn’t that just typical? Wasn’t that just like me? What else was there, but horses? What else was there to me? Horses, and horses, and more horses. Run away from home, run away from school, run to the horses. And here I was, on a farm in Ocala, where for all I knew I might live out my days (although Alexander would have to leave me the farm for that to happen, for if I wasn’t killed galloping some fool yearling, I’d certainly out-live him). I was twenty-five.
I sat down hard on the bed and thought about that.
Twenty-five, no college degree, on the farm where I’d live forever, living the life I’d live forever. Up at four thirty, forever. Galloping babies in the morning, forever (or at least as long as I was limber). Holding mares for the vet in the afternoon, calling clients, leaving voicemails, dreading call-backs. Forever. Just the smell of veterinary lube and manure mixed together on a long plastic glove was enough to put me off the thought of another day of breeding season, let alone a lifetime of springs like this one.
I pushed my hair back from my face, groping for the rubber band I kept on my wrist, to pull it all away into a pony tail. The band caught on the dry ridges of my fingers. I rubbed at them, disgusted by the dirt that had ground into them. My fingers were practically black with dirt. I hadn’t noticed before.
My eyes rose and trailed over the sad, dull array of clothes hanging in my closet, nothing suitable for a night out in New York, and I thought suddenly of music and nice clothes and the respect of those around me, not just horse people but real, live, living people, to whom life was more than getting up at four thirty and galloping a bunch of putzy, head-tossing, snot-nosed horses and then helping a veterinarian stick his arm up a broodmare’s arse to make sure she was pregnant and making more putzy, head-tossing, snot-nosed horses, whom I would have to stay up all night waiting for and probably roll around in the straw trying to tug out of the mare, covered with amniotic fluid and blood and manure—and I wondered what the hell I was doing.
The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1) Page 4
