by Jon Katz
There was an old farmhouse next to the barn, and I saw some rickety wooden corral fences, the kind used to contain horses. I saw three horses standing by the gate. They looked a little thin to me, but not alarmingly so.
A dirt roadway led out to some fields in the back—one cornfield and some hay fields. The farmhouse was raggedy, the white paint peeling off of the front, the shutters broken and cracked, gutters falling off of the roof. The old gardens by the front of the house were overgrown and looked as if they hadn’t been tended in years.
I walked down the road away from the house to see if that gave me a better view of the pen in back where Simon was kept, and it did open up as I walked farther south.
I took out my binoculars, which I was carrying in my camera bag, and looked through a break in the pine trees that blocked the view from the front. I saw the pen right away. It looked like an old hog pen to me; the wire mesh fence was tall and looked sturdy. The wooden pallets—the only shelter Simon had—came up in a steeple about four feet off of the ground.
To get shade or protection from the rain, Simon would have had to lie down and stick his head under the pallets. No wonder his skin had been blackened by rain rot. Outside of the pallet shelter, there was room for him to stand up and turn around, but not much more. There was no grass in the pen, so his only food would have been the hay thrown to him. It was a death sentence, that pen, back out of sight of the farmhouse. The farmer didn’t have to even look at Simon, and might have already thought him to be dead.
Simon could have been in the horse corral. There was obviously some hay around; there was plenty of brush and bark out behind the house, for that matter. Donkeys can eat a lot of things if they are hungry—even if they are not. In much of the world, this would have been their fare.
That pen was no place to put a healthy male donkey. It was a prison, a death trap, the equine equivalent of a concentration camp. And I remembered that this was the first thing I had thought of when I saw Simon—he was a concentration camp donkey.
I walked back to the car and put my camera bag in the back before walking to the house. Bringing it would have been provocative and foolish. The farmer might want to talk to me, but who knows how irate he would become if I took a picture of him.
I stopped to take a few breaths. I didn’t want to be angry. I hadn’t come to confront him, but to understand him.
I walked up to the front door and knocked. I heard some footsteps, and a thin, haggard-looking woman in her late forties opened the door. Only her head and her arm were visible. She looked as if she was not expecting good news or friendly visitors.
“Yes?” she asked without any hint of a smile or introduction.
I told her who I was—that I had the donkey that had been taken off of their farm and that I wondered if her husband might be home. I wasn’t a reporter, I said. I was a book writer. I was just trying to understand what had happened; I wanted to hear it from him.
She was anxious, I could see that, and was not going to say anything without her husband’s approval. He was out back, by the barn, she said. “But he won’t talk to you. Couple of reporters called after the police came, and he wouldn’t talk to them, either.”
I tried to explain that I wasn’t here to judge her or her husband, but did not get that chance. “Out back by the barn,” she said, closing the door.
That told me that she was afraid, which suggested her husband might be a scary man. I’ll confess to having a softer image in my mind. I was trying to set up my theory about mercy by imagining the farmer as a sad and tired soul—cruel not because he was a bad person, but an overwhelmed one. A man in his tattered overalls, just trying to keep up.
When I rounded the back of the house, he saw me and I saw him at the same time. From his face, I guessed he knew who I was. He was surprised but not shocked; wary but not angry. I’m sure he knew where Simon had been taken, and it would have been easy enough for him to find out what I looked like.
He stood up, backed away from the lawn mower engine he had been oiling, and waited for me to come up to him. I offered my hand, but he held up his, which were covered with oil.
He also appeared to be in his late forties. He wore farmer’s clothes, dirty jeans, and a work shirt, but also a pair of incongruously clean pointed leather shoes—definitely not farmer shoes.
He had a full head of jet-black hair, some of which was dangling over his forehead. He kept blowing it out of his eyes. In a different context, I would have tagged him as a lawyer. His hands were dirty and rough like a farmer’s, though. He was hard to read.
I introduced myself and said, “Sorry to come here unannounced, but I didn’t think you’d talk to me if I called. I’m not here to judge you or cause trouble.”
He stood straighter, listened to me, wiped his hands on his jeans. “I’m not going to talk to you,” he said. “My lawyer says not to talk to anybody. I’m not going to talk to you.”
I took note of the fact that he didn’t ask about Simon or seem to want to know anything about him. I volunteered that Simon was doing well, he was okay, it had turned out all right.
I went back to my old reporter’s bag of tricks. “Listen, a lot of people had bad things to say about you. I’m a writer and I’m sure I will write about this one day. I don’t need to add to the bad things. I’m just curious to know what happened, if you can guide me a bit. Then I’ll be out of your way and out of your life.”
He looked weary. His eyes seemed cold to me. If he was feeling any emotion he wasn’t showing it.
I told him I wasn’t going to quote him by name, or reveal his identity or true location. I didn’t even need to quote him directly; I just wanted to know his side, to know what had happened.
Most people in conflict with the law feel aggrieved and mistreated, and want to tell their side of things, want their story to get out. He hadn’t thrown me out yet, which he could have done right away. I had the sense he wanted to tell me something.
There was a lengthy pause, which I respected. The two of us stood in the back of his farmhouse for the longest time saying nothing. I knew then that he was going to tell me something. Like so many others I had interviewed, he had been waiting for someone to ask him.
He didn’t apologize for Simon. He didn’t grovel. He said he had never wanted Simon, but to get the horses from the Vermont farmer, he had to take him as well. The farmer pressured him and so he took him. He had a stallion in the corral; he couldn’t put Simon, who was also a male, in with him. So he put him in the back pen, a former hog pen, for the moment. It was just supposed to be temporary.
But it stretched out, he said. The farm had been failing for several years; he was about to lose it. He couldn’t buy grain on credit, and didn’t have enough pasture for his own hay. Last year, he couldn’t buy real Christmas presents for his wife and son. The phone rang all day with creditors, and he was trying to make some money buying and selling horses. There was a market overseas.
He barely had enough food for the horses, he said, barely enough for his family. He expected the bank would foreclose on the farm soon; the only thing that kept it alive was that the bank didn’t want it any more than he did. He never thought he would be in this position, he said. He never thought he would be so up against it.
I said I would leave, but that I had one last question. “I’m sure you’ve got a rifle,” I said. “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”
“I couldn’t even look at him,” he said. “I fed him as long as I could. I can’t talk about this, really. I’ve said too much.” He asked me to leave. I nodded and said good-bye.
The last thing the man said to me was, “I thought he was dead.”
I did not get what I was looking for that morning. There were no sobs, no declarations of guilt, no pleas for mercy or understanding. I suppose I had hoped he would break down in tears and I would pat him on the shoulder and nod and say, I understand, I understand.
My ideas about compassion were changing, perhaps even crumbling, b
y the minute. Compassion was not one thing but many, and it moved around, one second hovering over the farmer, then his son, then Simon.
As I drove back to my farm, I went over the encounter a dozen times. The farmer was defeated, worn down, humiliated and, now, trapped. He couldn’t take care of his family. He couldn’t keep his farm. He was beyond caring about a hungry donkey. He couldn’t feed another animal he didn’t want and couldn’t sell. He was past caring what people thought, or what I thought.
A part of me wanted to slap the man, to wake him up. Get out of there, I wanted to say. Get your family and get out of there while there is something left of you. Go do something else. Start the work of being a human again.
But this was not for me to do. I remembered his dead eyes. He was beyond reach.
And then I thought about the farmer’s wife and son. All this commotion, all this work to save a donkey and bring him back to life.
What about those two? Who was going to worry about them?
ELEVEN
The Summons
When I came home from the visit to the farmer, I went out to the barn. I felt a strong need to see Simon. The whole experience had been sad, and I didn’t get what I had wanted: a good reason to show mercy and compassion to this man.
Or did I?
I looked up at the hill and saw Lulu and Fanny, up near the gate to the back pasture. They looked uneasy, as if they had spotted something new or strange. Donkeys miss nothing, and if I see them looking hard at something, I know it’s something worth paying attention to.
I couldn’t see Simon, and this puzzled and worried me. Donkeys are always near one another; they don’t go off on their own. I wondered if he was lying down in the pole barn resting. I walked up the soft hill of the pasture, but he wasn’t there.
This was alarming. I ran over to where Lulu and Fanny were standing and looked down the hill. Simon was in the back pasture, by the hay feeder where he was first brought, where he had lain sick for days. I couldn’t imagine why he would be there.
I ran down the hill and approached him.
He was sitting upright, in the very spot where I read Platero and I to him and brought him his medicines and fed him hay, where I talked to him and, it seemed, he listened to me.
Simon watched me as I ran down the hill. He didn’t move as he usually does when he sees me, or bray. He simply sat quietly and looked at me. I was certain something was wrong with him. Donkeys rarely lie down—it makes them vulnerable to predators—and he loved being with Lulu and Fanny.
“Simon, are you okay, boy?” I asked.
I went through the checklist:
His ears were up.
His eyes were wide and clear.
His breathing was steady and strong.
Perhaps he had eaten something that didn’t quite agree with him and had just gone back to the spot where he could rest?
I sat down on the ground next to him. I heard a soft bray coming from his snout, almost a wheeze. I thought about calling Ken Norman, or the vet, but he didn’t look uncomfortable. I knew what that looked like. I told myself to stop, to not jump into drama, into crisis.
There was something very peaceful about Simon, something expectant, as if he had been waiting for me to come home and find him.
I am wary of such projections, but have also learned that it is as easy to underestimate an animal as it is to overestimate him. I have learned to wait, to listen, to trust my instincts. I didn’t feel anything was wrong. It didn’t feel right to rush to the phone or send out an SOS. I might be missing something important.
So I decided to do nothing. To wait. We both looked out at the cows grazing in the distant field. Our watchful rooster, Winston the third, was calling the hens to the roost. We watched the chickens making their journey to the safety of the barn. Lulu and Fanny had edged closer through the gate, not wishing to come near but perhaps curious.
How sweet was this soft late afternoon light, a photographer’s light. The blackflies were beginning their retreat, the gnats were rising up in clouds—there is always some insect in the warm weather to torment a donkey.
Simon was at ease. He seemed to be soaking up the soft breeze. I went into the barn, opened a can, and grabbed one of his apple cookies. He watched me disappear into the barn—this usually brought him in, as he knows where all the cookies are—but still he remained seated.
I went out and sat down again, and offered him a cookie. He took it gently, and crunched it loudly and slowly while I sat and watched him. He was clearly fine.
So what was happening?
I had a feeling that Simon was waiting for me. He had returned to the spot where he had come for healing, where he had listened to my voice for hours, sat with me night after night.
I remembered once walking into the pasture to see Simon choking on some twigs or brush he had pulled out of the ground. I rushed over to him, put my arms around his neck, reached into the side of his mouth, and pulled out the cluster of roots that were caught in his swollen jaw.
We had been through a lot, me and Simon, and when you are on a journey like that with an animal, you are bound for life. Something in them never forgets it.
I told Simon the story of the visit to the farmer, of our brief conversation. I spoke of the man’s coldness, his dead eyes. I told him about the farmer’s wife and shared all my impressions of the place.
“So, Simon,” I said, “it comes down to this. If you are really compassionate, then you are compassionate to all beings, even those with dead eyes and cold hearts and souls. Something in this man died awhile back, Simon. I don’t know if he was born that way, or if life just beat him black and blue, or if struggling on a farm just killed his spirit. I’ve seen it happen to people. But are you only compassionate to good people, to people you like? It’s okay to be compassionate to a raccoon with an infected leg, but not to a human being so lost he would leave you starving to death a few yards away and hope that you were dead?”
I told Simon I didn’t really know how to feel, and the truth was, I didn’t.
The two of us sat in the pasture and watched the sun set. It felt like forever, but I’m sure it was just an hour or so. Maria came out of the house calling for me; she saw my car and wondered where I was. She sat with us.
As it started to get dark, and we heard the first crickets and frogs down in the meadow, Simon got up on his feet, shook himself off, and walked up the hill to be with Lulu and Fanny, who waited for him to come through the gate. The three of them walked up toward the top of the pasture, where they often spent the night standing guard over the sheep.
Maria went back into the house, and I stayed behind in the back pasture alone. I was surprised at how emotional a day it had been for me. Simon was clearly well. I looked up, and he was grazing with the other donkeys.
I believe now that Simon had summoned me—had called me to a meditation. Donkeys are the contemplatives of the animal world, and he had called me to him for some purpose that might not be clear to either one of us.
The sound of the crickets and the frogs down by the creek had deepened and become louder, anchoring the night. The gnats and flies were gone. The mosquitoes had risen up, but were held at bay by the breezes that swept the valley for much of the night.
Mercy was very much on my mind. Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas believed that mercy was the greatest of all of the human virtues. It implies a measure of grandeur and nobility. It is the most selfless of human emotions, in that it calls for the generous relief of the needs and miseries of others, out of our own abundance of spirit or wealth. We help others out of our own store of wealth, knowledge, skill, or strength, and if we are truly compassionate, we do so whenever we see sentient beings in need of aid and assistance.
Aquinas did not believe in being merciful to animals out of generosity or compassion for them. He believed we should be merciful to them because it taught us how to be merciful to other human beings.
In his time, most great thinkers believed animals to
be inferior to human beings, as they had no conscience and always chose pleasure over virtue. In our time, many people believe animals to be superior to human beings, and sometimes, watching the news, I think they make a good case.
Mercy is a simple thing, really, in Aquinas’s time and ours. It is a positive action undertaken for the good of another, to relieve misery. And the worst kind of suffering, Aquinas wrote, is the suffering and misfortune that strikes those who in no way deserve it, the innocent.
This group would include animals, to my mind. Simon was an innocent, a creature of moral value. He had no conception of greed, anger, revenge, or envy. The suffering of animals touches people so deeply, I think, because it is so unprovoked, so impossible to justify.
Animals are dependent on us, they are vulnerable to us; when we mistreat them we are diminishing ourselves, destroying our own humanity.
But it seemed to me, I thought, standing out in my pasture, that the love of animals has made many people less compassionate to humans. The very idea of animal rights in our time is equated with hostility, rage, and self-righteousness.
What was I supposed to feel for the farmer, lost in the story of Simon, and his wife, who was also caught up in it? What is supposed to become of the boy who loved Simon, who tried to feed him, and who set his rescue in motion by making that phone call?
The answer became clear in the pasture. I needed to feel as much compassion for the farmer as I did for Simon, and not because I am morally superior or campaigning for sainthood. I needed to do it for me, for my own soul.
I didn’t understand the farmer, and nothing I learned in our talk helped me to understand how he could have gone about his business while this innocent creature lay dying a few feet away. But that was not a reason to hate him, or even to judge him. He deserved as much compassion as Simon did, although no one will come to help him and guide him back to the light. Perhaps he will figure out how to do it himself.
