The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Jill, the filly, was already there, sleepy in her stall. Rose didn’t halter her or cross tie her or anything. Instead she entered the stall, still holding the bridle, closing the door behind her, and turning then to face us, her face and the filly’s side by side. “Long time ago,” Rose said, “people had their ways of doing things and those ways change except when we don’t want them to. My daddy taught me one way to break a horse, but I learned others from those hippie horse girls I never much liked.” Rose laughed. “I can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong in terms of making a trustworthy horse,” she said. “We’ve always done things one way at our farm here, and no horse here has ever hurt or even thrown a girl so …,” Rose trailed off. “That’s significant,” she said and nodded crisply, and the filly nodded crisply too and we laughed.

  “But in the end, the more tricks a trainer has in her grab bag, the better off she’ll be. I learned the sticky-bit trick …” She cast her eyes upward, counted to herself. “… Eight years ago?” Rose said. “Eight years already?” Her brow furrowed. She swiped her eyes, and then inspected her hand for streaks. “I’m forty years old,” Rose said. “That’s right. 1974. So I’ll be nearing seventy when the year 2000 comes. And when you’re forty …,” Rose said, looking at me and Em, the youngest. “When you two girls are forty, I’ll be …” And we could see her counting down the years until a stunned, slapped look came across her face. She stopped speaking.

  And when she started again, here’s what she had to say: “Horses live a long, long time. Some can go forty years. But because they only need four hours of sleep a week, they get a lot of living in. Way more than we do.” Now, Rose tickled Jill beneath her pruny chin. “Right, little girl?” Rose said.

  And Jill, well Jill stepped forward, towards her taming. Rose held Jill’s jaw with one hand and with the other she slipped that sugared bit right between the horse’s lips. We saw the bit move back until it snapped into its spot, and Jill’s eyes went bright with surprise. “Taste buds all over the back of a horse’s tongue,” Rose explained. “Good girl,” Rose said. Then she turned towards us, shrugged.

  “That’s it,” Rose finally said. “No drama now,” she said. “Show’s over.”

  “That’s it?” Jenny said. “Jill’s broken?”

  Rose turned back towards Jill, who was savoring the sweetness. “She doesn’t look broken to me,” Rose said. She smiled. “We’ll leave her for a little while. She’ll get used to the gear. We’ll work with her—over time. We can make it easier,” Rose said. “Sure, we can be kinder. I know I—” And then she stopped.

  I raised my hand.

  “Slater,” Rose said.

  “Why haven’t you been?” I said. And then added, quickly, “Kinder?”

  Rose sighed, rolled her eyes. “You know, Slater,” she said. “Do you gotta push every single goddamn limit you see? It gets tiring.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I didn’t know exactly what she meant.

  “Okay, girls,” Rose said. Her voice took on its familiar, authoritarian, irritable, regal tone. “Slater has one of her typical profound and provocative questions, and as your camp counselor and equestrian trainer, I’m gonna answer it. But listen to me, girls ’cause I’m gonna say this once and only once, and if you forget it, don’t waste my time running to me when you should have listened up from the start instead of daydreaming about boys and bubblegum and god knows what else you think about in those adolescent eggheads of yours. You hear?” Rose said.

  We heard.

  Jill was still tasting her tameness.

  “I said I’m gonna say it to you once, right now, and never again, so don’t ask me to repeat myself, don’t make me waste my breath, ’cause I don’t have much breath left, according to my most recent calculations, so I’m saying this once, not twice, not thrice, just once and only once am I going to say I’m goddamn sorry.”

  We stood there, letting the words linger.

  Rose herself seemed surprised by her last three words, her head cocked, as though, like us, listening to the linger. And then: “Would you all stop with your gawking and get to work!” Rose bellowed, and so we did. We scattered fast.

  I’m sure it was the sugar. I could tell a long story about this, but I shouldn’t now. Now the day is done, and that bugle is playing, like it did every evening at Flat Rock Farm, us twelve girls and the family standing in a ring around their flagpole while “Taps” played on their tape recorder set in the kitchen window. Day is done. Gone the sun. Strange, isn’t it, that every evening the sun just slips away, soft as a slipper falling from a woman’s foot. You can’t ever hear it crash. Because it doesn’t.

  And last night—speed ahead thirty years now, Rose seventysomething and I know not where—last night I was lying in bed next to the daughter that is mine, helping her find her way to sleep. Sleep is not easy for Clara. My son plunges in with glee, the same way some kids plunge into pools. But Clara, well, she is like me, picking her way carefully down a set of stone stairs, slippery, the granite treads emerald with old moss and damp.

  And so I lie next to my daughter, this growing girl, this girl growing away from me; night after night she lets me lie close—for how much longer?—me, hoping to ease that passage, trying to give her what I was not able to get, and we talk. I so treasure this time. Every night. I treasure. The darkness loosens our lips. Lying together, side by side, I think it makes us less afraid of the bit we both know is lodged in all of life. She’s learned that one without me. Tell me, who is totally free? And who is not hurt by what holds them?

  And Clara, who has been studying the solar system in school this autumn, asks, “Why, if the sun is keeping the planets in their orbit because of its gravitational pull, well then, why don’t all the planets just get totally sucked straight into the sun?”

  “Good question,” I say. I stare up, into the darkness. Light spills from beneath her door, from the hall, where it is golden with glow. “Could it be because there are other solar systems beyond ours exerting an equal but opposite gravitational pull? Could it be that the force of our spinning through space counteracts the force of the sun’s suck?” I don’t know the answer. Neither, obviously, does she. We guess and guess and then, when we have nothing left to wager, we just lie there together in the dark, mother and daughter in a blue twin bed, a beautiful bed, French blue, two stars and a moon cut out of its planked headboard.

  And then she finally falls asleep. It happens every night, the same way, the same fear, the same soft landing.

  Rose sugared the bit on Friday, and on Saturday, the day before the Sunday that marked the end of camp, I fell.

  My falling was neither orchestrated nor artful. We were in morning lessons. I was riding, of all horses, Hero, a large white pony with a heavy plodding gait. Rose set the cantilever bars for me at just three inches and instructed me to trot the pony over them. I’d done this before, several times, and it had none of the thrill of a real jump done at high speed and height. I was sleepy, sad. Camp was coming to a close. I felt the way one feels at the end of a long frightening movie so wholly absorbing that you lose yourself for hours in the matinee, and then it’s over, and you are tossed back into time, and you emerge from the theatre, blinking, disoriented, your homework undone, your shoes too tight, everywhere the plain plodding plot of your life, and you understand that the real fear is here.

  Something had softened in Rose. She set the cantilevered bars. I turned Hero towards them, pressed him into a desultory trot, my eye not on the jump but on the distance, where Hank was riding his rusted tractor high in the farthest field, going around and around.

  And because of this—my wandering eye, my blank brain, because I failed to lean forward or convey to the horse—an exquisitely sensitive prey animal designed by eons of evolution to pick up even the slightest signal—any sense of urgency, the horse simply stopped just before the jump. I, however, forced to live by the laws of physics, which say that an object in motion remains in motion—well I kept going, flying ove
r the jump and landing with a thud on the other side, in the sand.

  The girls clapped and laughed. I stood up, brushed off. Hero had taken my leave as an opportunity to get in a quick graze, munching at the thin vegetation that struggled up through the fill. I looked at the horse. The horse looked at me, a chomped-off daisy dangling from his mouth. He quickly slurped it up, swallowed. That’s it.

  That’s it? A sudden stop, a tiny toss. Painless. Yes. The real fear is here. When the show is over. When you fall not down but out. I shoved my hands in my jeans and looked at my horse, chewing his greens and florals. I looked at Rose, chewing her lip. She smiled sadly at me. I think she saw what I saw, or maybe she saw that I saw—a million things. A billion years. The single shred called your life. How it’s so impossibly small in this trail ride through time and yet so stuffed with all your significances. How you are forced to grow, to go, crooked or straight, east or west, just go, go, go, leaving versions of yourself behind as sketches you can’t complete. I couldn’t have said it then but I knew, in the bone-way one does, that at the core of any life is the truth of its tiny hugeness, yourself more serial than singular, so who you were then is not who you are now or will be in the future; it was obvious. My horse was bored and digesting daisies. Four years ago I didn’t love horses and four years hence I probably would no longer. Perhaps scarier than falling down is falling out. Of love. I would lose my love. And when I took that tumble, what would be there, beneath me? What hoof would I hold? What would make my world move with such pounding beauty? Who could know? One could only hope for the presence of passion or, alternatively, for the balance one needs to bear its absence.

  High in the hill above me stood Hank, staring at stalks.

  4: Time Passes

  What I have wanted in my life is a form in which to cast my fears. Horses were that form. I now suggest, having wandered back into my past, that on their backs a girl practices paradox, balances paradox, bears paradox, which we must be able to do if we are to live with authenticity, in a world where everything wavers. It is not about sex or even love. It is about, I think, learning to find the ground by giving it up, casting aside the clenched classifications of a culture terrified of thinking beyond the binary. I am giving you, here, my best guesses, each guess grown from the loam of personal memory, and no more. And yet more, because are not horses living proof that, despite what science says, our nervous systems are not, in fact, in fear, locked into fight or flight? Horses remind us that humans can choose to respond to terror in flexible ways, wait and watch primary amongst them. Remember Amy, my daughter’s riding instructor? Remember how, when she whistled, the horses would surge across the field, the pounding we felt beneath our feet and the keen desire to step back from the fence, to flee? “Wait and watch,” Amy would say, and so we did, and we felt our fear turn over. Ungripping, when your patriarchal world has trained you to do the opposite.

  And more. I think that girls see their corporeal contradictions in the tethered mare or stallion—so strong, so strung, pure prey, hard hooves, once wild while drawn, inextricably, to things manmade, those muscles.

  In the end, there is no single summation or simple sketch that can capture the bond between a girl and her horse. There is, for sure, no science to what I’m saying here. I speak from my experience only but, then, also from what I saw, year after year, my sample size just twelve, plus Rose. She’s reading what I’m writing here, smiling over my shoulder, living, now, in a place of motes and stars. She approves of my hypotheses. She’s pleased with me at last. She agrees that when a girl goes to her horses she is not in a craze but, I’d wager—we wager—in a state of grace, able to at last admit what we wish most of all not to know: that we have to find a way of falling before we can claim our little lives.

  I loved horses and rode horses until I turned fourteen, at which point I stopped, not because, as Freud might say, I found my way to men. I didn’t. In some ways, I think I never have. What I found, around that time, was a whole new family I went to live with, my new room in this new place tucked beneath the eaves of a house so old it slanted sideways, the pine floors pitted and amber. It was in that new old room, in this new old home, that I found, stashed in a crawl space, a bent book about a lighthouse and the passing of time, a book that had a canter so airy yet pounding you had to hold on hard lest you lose your way in the sea of this story. The words and their way awoke in me a desire to master the many gaits of language. I wanted to turn it, trot it, tether it to the page, and yet also let it spill, this constant playing with paradox. Eventually, as I grew up, I left horses behind. Words became my mount, sentences my stable, the entire enterprise anchoring me even as, still today, it drives me too fast, too long, too much, eclipsing days, weeks, months, everything around me in a haze.

  Except my children. In their faces I see centaurs, centuries, the comings and goings of many people from here to there to here. Sometimes my children’s eyes go back so far I see, in the tiny point of light at the end of their infinite tunnel, a person dancing there. And sometimes I see, in their eyes or in my reflected face, a place before we were, and then before the before, and then before the before the before, and once I went so far back I came to a place where I was not, and when I returned I knelt down, and, like my mother once had, I kissed the ground called home.

  There is so much to do in this new home, in this new country, just forty miles from the city where we still live on school days. I am certainly under no illusions that out here in the country I’ll beat back time and find the girl I once was, pure in her passion for horses. That girl is gone for good, and when we finally move here full time, when we finally get our horses, when I finally ride again, it will be a different me on my mount, long past that point of intense interest. I hope I like it, at least. That my daughter loves it is enough. We are moving here for her, for horses, but for more than that too. We are moving here so we can know this ancient earth without its cities and its cement, this planet born from a big bang, proof perpetual that something comes from nothing, and also proof, perpetual, that nothing is the state to which it all returns.

  The fact is, every animal eventually goes extinct. The average life cycle of a species is five million years. There is not a single species on this earth that has been here for forever, and as for us, according to the clock, it looks like our time is just about up. We’re five million years old, more or less, and beyond that, scientists believe we’re at the cusp of an ecological disaster. Thus, we are moving to the country—to the horses, the goats and pigs and cows and coyotes and crabapples—because how will our children choose to try to save the earth if they do not even know it?

  If our time is up, I hope the horse’s isn’t. Long ago, during the Pleistocene period, horses survived a mass extinction caused by a radical glaciation, an ice age so severe that when it was over, 95 percent of life on earth had vanished, forever. The equine’s superior adaptability and sparse caloric needs, combined with its enormous speed may have contributed to its survival then and, I hope, again, in our most uncertain future.

  If humans were to die out, or in some other fashion to leave the earth forever, who would hold the histories? Who would speak about the first people who struggled to straddle wild equines thousands of years ago, in the Ukraine steppes, when civilization was barely born? Who would tell about how horses changed our world so entirely that time and space shifted while trade blossomed, bringing with it wars, bullets, blood; the glorious chariots and then the plain old plows, the day’s work, the working days, the hauled loads, the forests falling, the black blinders, the crops cracking, the heavy harrows and the bright red barns and the hay-smelling stalls where, boxed up, boxed in, our horses rested before the next difficult dawn.

  Just yesterday I read a report in a respectable science journal about new research suggesting flowers sing to one another. If indeed this on-it’s-face-absurd claim is true, or even worthy of serious consideration, then perhaps we can allow ourselves to imagine that in some way we are entirely unable
to fathom horses know how to whisper their history down their own long lines. And what would these whispers be? A story, of course, a tale about a once wild life shrugged off for the love of man, and then woman, both of whom seemed mythic from a distance but up close turned out to be silly little hoofless creatures with eyes so small they could not see the sky was falling; hairless creatures with blinders so, so total they would not, could not grasp a basic critical fact: they were not giants but rather on a giant, at its beck and behest.

  And if horses survive the next great extinction some say we’re tunneling towards, might they maybe do more than merely remember us? I’d like to think that long after we’ve left the world, horses will, in the myth I’m making, know how to cross the line and enter wherever we are once our bodies are gone. I like to think they will carry our spirits on their broad backs, across galaxies and through solar systems, so that, at last, we can see the orb where we once lived, for five million years or more. Finally freed from us, the planet will pulse with pure pigment colors, with all manner of life, the seas stocked with fish so wild and fresh they look like lamps beneath the wavy water, the trees splayed sky high, every landscape as if wrought with a watercolor brush, pinks bleeding into blues bleeding into the thalo greens of leaves.

  Who could not hope—without us to muck things up—that the planet will find some beautiful balance again? And who could not hope still harder that even though we’re gone, some sort of partial return will be possible? At least in the myth I’m making. Straddling their backs we ride through space, our forms transparent, our bones—if at all—white wisps.

  Who, in the end, can accept that? Who can pry themselves loose from a living ledge? Who can let themselves fall and then get up with grace, or a giggle? Did you know that once we leave the world we will be light as feathers, as flakes? Do you hear the horses now? Or now? Listen hard, Clara. Feel them with your feet. They are thundering towards us. They travel in packs. They are hard and healthy. Come, while we still have time. Hold out your hand and say, Come now. Say, Amen. Call the names of all the horses you’ve been lucky enough to love. Say, Here, here, White Night, Pride’s Starlight, Evening Mist, Rocked Steady, Oh Gosh! Fly Me to the Moon, Desert King, Hope ’N’ Glory, Glory Be—