The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  “Has his diet changed?” Dr. Fascal asked Rose. “Don’t know, I mean, no. No,” Rose said, stumbling in a way that was all wrong for her, eyes cast down. The vet left, with instructions. For the next twenty-four hours Rose massaged Splash’s sides, sang him songs, slept in the straw so she could walk him on the hour. Had she answered Dr. Fascal smoothly, had she not slept in the straw, had she sailed instead of stumbled, we could have simply hated her.

  Rose. Nothing simple. Sweetly pretty. She slept in the straw. She loved Mr. K. Every evening she bathed her horses; hose on, loofah sponge; she massaged each animal, humming as she worked, her feet bare in the sudsy runoff. She was a woman lovely to look at then, pale and vivid both.

  It didn’t take me long to map out Flat Rock Farm. Within days I knew how to find the pond, the pastures, the far field. Within the first week I’d seen the whip work and adjusted to my mandates. The goal, Rose told us over and over during the group lessons that dominated the day (we were taught all together despite differences in our abilities, and I was the least experienced rider at the camp), the goal for every rider was to practice balance by finding the body’s core. One must not grip the mane or reins: balance was ultimately a matter of mind.

  And also, I discovered, a matter of physical work, so different from the cerebral pursuits of school. Each dawn at Flat Rock Farm Alice fed us warm biscuits, then sent us to the stable for scheduled chores just as the day became blue. We took up pitchforks, wheelbarrows, brooms. Balance could also be found in labor, in the repetition of small tasks that occupied the body as they freed the mind. We learned to wash the tack. We climbed ladders, crawled into the cupola with a rag and a tin bucket. Once inside that cupola, I found an intact but dead dragonfly. Its body glinted green, like the ones I’d seen in the woods. The wings were netted and reminded me of the nylons my mother wore. How odd, something similar between two species that shared next to nothing. And yet, maybe the spaces between them were not so great. Weeks went by. I learned to balance on the broad back of a horse. As I did I found I could do more than just hold on. I found I could talk to the horse with my legs, my hands, my weight, and that the horse, in turn, could talk to me.

  Reassuring, yes. Apparently nature had these built-in bridges, and who knew how far they could go? If a thousand-pound, hard-hoofed beast could understand you, and vice versa, well then, who or what could not? Horses proved that there was no such thing as an impossible conversation.

  I think we came to Flat Rock Farm for this impossibly possible talk. We were all girls between eleven and sixteen, but the gaps in age were irrelevant here. All the ordinary dividing lines dissolved: old/young/fat/thin/pretty/ugly/well-dressed/slob/rich/poor. Here all girls were equaled by shoveling shit and putting in bits. When everyone stinks, no one does.

  While Freudians posit that girls are drawn to horses as a form of heterosexual practice (in both its private and public manifestations), maybe the opposite is the case. Perhaps girls are drawn to horses because these grand animals provide girls a rare opportunity to be together, as females, unsaddled by cultural conventions. At Flat Rock Farm, Jenny, the fat girl, was friends with Theresa, the prom queen. I remember one rest hour going to the barn, all twelve of us girls, and finding there in the back tack room an old trunk.

  “Open it up,” Emily whispered.

  Outside it was high noon, glaring and hot, but inside the tack room the air was dark and quiet, the saddles on their mounts looking haunted, their shape suggesting a rider we couldn’t see.

  We opened the trunk. It was from another century, lined with crumbling floral paper. In there we found a black-and-white photograph of a stern, slim woman sitting high on her high horse. With one hand she held the reins, in the other a bouquet of roses. Beneath her a judge was pinning a ribbon and rose to her horse’s bridle.

  We found flouncy skirts held up by hoops; jodhpurs padded with threadbare suede; boots that laced up the front with tiny tarnished fishhooks; a postcard showing a massive ship, its prow raised above the wild waters of what must have been the Atlantic, on the backside someone’s spidery script, impossible to read except the end: Love to you all, to the farm, to Lady–Moi.

  “‘Moi’?” whispered Amy.

  “‘Me’ in French,” whispered Jenny, holding the card, turning it over and over.

  “Why are we whispering?” shouted Theresa.

  All twelve of us girls jumped as though we’d been stuck with a cattle prod.

  “Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!” said Jane. “Jesus!”

  “Look at this,” said Elizabeth, and she pulled from the trunk a straw hat banded by a cucumber-colored ribbon; she put it on.

  That was the beginning. Someone else pulled on the old black boots, another girl the once-white skirts. That trunk had no end; from its interior came more and more clothes, came pearls and brooches, hard hats and sun hats, multiple corsets with ribbon and eyehooks, crumpled kid gloves. Despite the heat, we shucked our standard uniform and dressed ourselves right out of this world, and when we were done, we walked around, bowing to one another, admiring.

  Not long ago, Amy Brisbee, a girl who’d been at Flat Rock Farm during the same summers I was, e-mailed me a picture of us dressed up in the mystery clothes from the old trunk. “Remember this?” Amy wrote. “I found it in my dresser drawer.” The picture, scanned in, was grainy but unmistakable; there we were in various stages of Victorian regalia, behind us the saddles and the sunbeams through the shuttered windows, our real clothes visible in piles on the floor. “Who could forget?” I e-mailed back. But there is one part I did forget, or maybe never knew: Who had taken that picture? Not Amy, because I found her. I found everyone, following form after form with my finger. All twelve of us accounted for. “Who gave you the photo?” I asked Amy, and she wrote back, “Don’t know.” Was someone looking in on us from outside, perhaps peering between the shutters; someone spying. Hank? Rose? Someone seeing.

  That picture is remarkable for the way it captures a group of girls at play, in whim, but it is more remarkable if you realize we were so absorbed we never knew we were being watched. Or if we knew, we didn’t care, and thus forgot. We were twelve girls learning to do the work of womanhood—the shit-smeared feeding, cleaning, muscle-aching labor of loving an animal dependent upon you and not losing yourself in the animal. In fact finding yourself in the animal and all the associated tasks of care, shaping as you were shaped.

  Practicing. Twelve in all. Girls, learning our mothers’ lives were not our future’s only form, and that, unlike those older women, we need not be diminished by the need to nurture. Twelve girls. Washing the tack on Sundays, cleaning the cupola on Mondays. We grew so strong those summers. Twelve girls freed in our faux corsets. Standing sure, we were. Learning. “My, you look lovely, madame.”

  That I was the worst rider at camp seemed more a matter of character than skill, a fact that I accepted with an odd equanimity. My heels flew up; my reins tangled. I kicked when I should have squeezed, squeezed when I should have kicked. When the other girls cantered, I had to move my mount to the center and stand idle. Sometimes my mounts, probably bored beyond reason, would lift their heads and let loose a plaintive whinny, or a deep soft nicker, as though chuckling to themselves over me, the clumsy one who belonged in a Schul, not a saddle.

  The fact is, my bloodline was entirely irrelevant. Religion did not hold me back; philosophy did. I rode like I lived, and vice versa: in a state of foreboding. What so scared me up there? Was it that I could feel, though the thick wedge of saddle, the orchestration of many muscles moving me, so I was moved, a passive person, a rider only in name? Or was it simply the gap between me and the ground, that descent decorated night after night with tales of horse lore as we lay in our beds; someone knew someone who had died going down, her neck snapped when the horse bucked her off, or worse, had we heard, or still worse, there had been … In the dark girls swapped stories, the purpose of which seemed to be to tether us to horses through terror, like a frightening film one can’t wa
it to see. I’d cover my eyes one second, peek out the next.

  What is the purpose of loving what haunts you, of returning, time and again, to terror, or its kinder cousin, fear? What is the story here? Well, for starters, there appears to be no single story when it comes to girls and equines. Terror on the one hand, reassurance on the other, and then we run out of hands, but not contradictions. What is wild and domestic both? How can you find the ground by learning to leap? How can you hate what you love? Some researchers posit that the female brain has a thicker corpus callosum than does the male brain. What might this mean? In the female brain there could be more fibers connecting the separate hemispheres, so left and right swap stories, blend concepts, come closer. Male brains, in a vastly generalized sense, are better at keeping their twin bins on separate sides of the shelf, verbal here, spatial there, image to the right, logic the left, tears east, talk west. Male brains in general don’t court inconsistencies, while the female brain seems to be built for these. Obviously there are abundant exceptions, but let’s look for a moment at the mass. Horses, their mass, one thousand pounds on average. Horses, piebald or chestnut, stubborn or sweet, stallion or mare—either way all this bulk and its associated contradictions may fit with more ease inside the circle of female skull.

  Maybe this is why—short on talent, constantly criticized—I still went back (we still went back), lesson after lesson. Possessing a brain built to perceive paradox, females, or some subset, may find a resonant focus in the horse. In my own particular case, add in the sole certainty of uncertainty that is part and parcel of every equine encounter, along with an entrenched tendency to see a universe ringed by risk, and what better way to practice my perseverance, to entertain my compulsions?

  But what I was mostly chasing up there, I think, was what I’d found that first day on the Bedouin pony—a total concentration, both a focus and a frame for my fear. And when that happened—focus and frame—I got just what I wanted. The click came. I cantered and forgot to call it cantering. There were two beings but one beat. I started streaming.

  And when the ride stopped, the horse stopped, the rhythm stopped, when I slid off the animal and slipped back into the singular, then for a little while objects appeared brighter, sounds suggestive of worlds beyond themselves, a simple sip of water—like drinking diamond. It is hard to hold such joy. Its brimming feels nearly painful, but not quite. No one else knows. The day is as ordinary as country cotton. The milk is as it always is, tinged bluish in the bottle. And yet you look here and there you see new angles in the day, every person a prism. The grass a thick impasto. Horses look different too when you are saturated with such joy, already leaving now, its life span shorter than a fruit fly’s but still enough so you can see the animal anew.

  “Doesn’t it seem weird,” I said to Aggy as we stood by the pasture fence, the lesson over, the click clicked, “doesn’t it seem really weird that horses could kill us in a second if they wanted to?”

  “Yeah,” said Aggy, her hard hat still on. She took it off, dangled it by its strap.

  “Every single time we tack up, and ride a horse, they could trample us, or buck us off; they could kill us in a second,” I repeated. I paused. The wind made the sweat on my scalp tingle in a wonderful way. “But they don’t,” I said. “I mean, even though they have the strength to really harm us, they hardly ever do. We put on their saddles, put in their bits, tighten the girths, sit on their backs, even a two-hundred-pound man could plunk down on their backs, and in just a second any of these horses … they could decide to just throw us off and stomp us to pieces. It would be so easy for them. But for some reason, they, every time, they don’t do that…. Instead of killing us,” I said, trying again, “horses choose to …” I couldn’t find the word.

  “Move us,” Aggy said.

  “Yes,” I said. Precisely.

  There were two babies—Jack and Jill—who, said Rose, were ready for “breaking.” I had scant knowledge of what “breaking” meant, how, for years men had believed the best way to tame a horse was to sap its spirit. In pursuit of this, men used—and many still do—methods that make one wince, the pictures preserved in books. Here is a mare with her lips sewn shut, here a stallion, hung upside down, his eyes full of terror, his hoofs pawing at air.

  Humans have used great cruelty in trying to tame the horse, this despite the great gifts the animal has given. For the thousands of years since horse and human first struck up a relationship, we have been blessed with a beast that, while of nature, has enabled culture to proceed in ways that would have otherwise have been impossible. Horses have aided people in thousands of ways that include ameliorating autism to enriching the soil from which our nation’s crops grow, year after year after year. A single horse daily sustains its massive bulk on a mere eight hundred calories of stringy vegetation otherwise known as weeds and then, from its internal factory, spins out, daily, reliably, pounds of manure so rich in organic matter it can practically turn friable asbestos into a rich and rot-black loam. And anyone who has ever tilled manure into a failing field, and seen it yield a crop of pungent lacy herbs and scarlet vegetables knows, they know, what a horse is worth in this world.

  Surely Rose knew, because her family survived in part by farming; Flat Rock Farm’s pastures were ringed by harrowed fields from which Hank grew and sold broccoli, squash, corn whose husks you could peel back before the time was right and see the pale kernel pattern slowly going saffron, ripening in late July. We’d tasted this corn, husked it when the cobs were much too tiny, eating these starchy embryos with only the frailest tang of what would soon be its sweetness.

  On July 15, 1974, Rose pulled on fringed batwing chaps and a showy platter of an oversized cowboy hat—an outfit entirely out of character as in general she was a hunt seat rider—and, along with Hank in steel-toed boots (how odd, his sudden switch)—they went in search of the colt Jack, whose turn it was for “training.” “Rope ’im in, Dad,” Rose screamed that day as Jack fought the knot that brought him to his knees. Together Hank and Rose tied Jack up in what Hank called a Scotch Hobble, bringing the hind leg up and tying the rope to a post so Jack couldn’t move or change positions: pinned, he was, in place. And so the horse stood there, trembling on three legs while Rose and Hank left him like that and we girls whispered, watching from the tree line: let him go, how, no why when, and too soon the heat claimed the day completely so by noon the colt was drenched in sweat and they came back. Hank untied Jack, distracting him with his escape-about-to-be while Rose sidled up and jammed the bit into his soft maw. Jack’s eyes rolled up, his slab of tongue clamped completely down under this bit made especially for breaking, studded with small tacks. For four days Jack, a breaking-to-bridle horse, wore this bit so when it came out his tongue was toughened and his mouth was ready for snaffles, kurbs, cumberwics, hackamores, or any of the other hundreds of possible bit types without which control would not be possible. For four days we heard Jack’s cries, watched as he was roped and reeled, hour after hour, Rose’s face blank, her eyes oddly empty as she cracked the crop so hard Jack’s hide opened up and red ran down his withers.

  On July 15, Jack got broken. On August 15, one month away, Jill would follow. We dreaded this date, but maybe because we were children, or maybe because we were immersed in our chosen passion, we trotted on, centaurs, slipping between forms and foci.

  As for time, it turned over. Our faces tanned; our muscles thickened. I was still the weakest rider, even as I got stronger. I learned to trot, and then at last to canter, more or less. Three days after Jack, Rose scrawled a star on the stable’s whiteboard, which held our schedule: July 21st. No explanation written beneath. What? we wanted to know. “That’s the day,” Rose said to us, “when you all will learn the secret and essential equestrian skill.”

  What secret skill? Why essential? And were we really all going to learn it, or only the advanced riders?

  “Every one of you,” Rose said. “The secret skill does not depend upon experience. It creates
experience.” Beyond that, Rose wouldn’t drop a clue.

  July 21 came, breakfast as usual, barn as usual, tacking up, riding into the ring, all as usual, but then, once we’d assembled, Rose walked to the far end of the ring, unlatched the back end gate, the one we never used, kicking hard so it swung open on screechy hinges, rasping the unmowed meadow beyond. We never entered that meadow, unkempt, clotted with vines, lined with cherry trees and their droplets of red fruit. But now, without saying a word, Rose walked into this thick field as she beckoned over her shoulder for us on our horses to follow. Bees fussed with flowers. Rose kept beckoning. The grasses were hip high, and when we rode through the whole world was filled with silken sounds.

  And then, at last, our teacher stopped, and when she spoke her voice seemed thin in the hugeness of the space. “Form a circle around me, girls.” We did, maneuvering our horses into position. “Now,” Rose said, standing in the center so we could hear her better, “you can’t really learn to fly unless you learn to fall.” She paused for a moment, as though to let this statement sink in, her hands clasped dramatically beneath her chin, and that’s when I noticed she was wearing her hard hat, uncommon only because she wasn’t riding, so why would she have it on?

  “Know what I mean?” asked Rose.

  “I’ve fallen plenty of times,” said Aggy.

  “I’m sure you have,” said Rose. “But have those falls been orchestrated? Or have they been just …” and here Rose paused, searching for the words, “just chaotic attempts to cope?” Again Rose paused, appeared to be thinking and then added one word: “Retrospective.”