Chosen by a Horse (17 page)

“They’ve ruined it,” she sobbed to no one in particular, “
ruined it.”
And she refused to go one step further.

She was rather elderly at the time and so distraught
about the condition and decor of her former home that she had to be helped from the building and escorted to her car. A uniformed chauffeur whisked her away. It was easy to imagine her shock. Perhaps we should have done more to prepare her for the changes she would see. When she left, for a moment I, too, felt her enormous loss. It was the way I had felt as I stood in my grandmother’s stable in South Carolina, surrounded by the decayed finery of her old carriages, missing a world I’d never even known.

Christmas at the Manor House was so depressing for the patients in treatment that working there left me no time to ruminate about the trials of my own past Christmases. For most of those in treatment, holidays and their accompanying stresses represented a time of increased drug or alcohol use; for many, this was their first experience coping with a holiday sober. I listened to their stories of previous Christmases spent in soup kitchens, in crack houses, and in jails for violence, theft, or prostitution. The hardships of my own past seemed paltry in comparison. Working on Christmas Day proved as therapeutic for me as it was intended to be for them.

But this Christmas season something felt different. I would be there for the residents of the Manor House, of course, helping them to find the strength to make it through the holidays. But I also needed to do something more to help Lay Me Down, something more than wait and watch. Dr. Grice and I had talked all fall about the possibility of sending her to the veterinary hospital at Cornell. When to
do it had never been clear. When she couldn’t shut the eye? If she seemed uncomfortable? When I asked, Dr. Grice had said I’d know when the time was right. If that was the only criterion, then the time had come.

A
WEEK BEFORE
Christmas, I finished morning barn chores and went back to the house and called Dr. Grice to ask for a referral to Cornell. An hour later, someone from Cornell called me back to tell me they could admit Lay Me Down the next day, which was a Sunday. I said we’d be there. I began calling around to find someone with a trailer willing to drive us. Allie couldn’t because she’d sold her old trailer and hadn’t gotten a new one yet. I called her anyway, and she gave me several names to try.

It was hard finding someone to transport a horse six hours one way a week before Christmas, especially to Ithaca, New York, where there was a lot of snow and it was bitter cold. Everyone I called expressed sympathy for my situation, but it was the middle of the afternoon before I found someone willing to do it. His name was Stan, and he
lived five minutes away. He told me he was retired from hauling horses but because I was a neighbor and my horse was so ill, he’d be willing to do it. His fee was two hundred dollars, half of anyone else’s. His kindness overwhelmed me as well as his compassion for a horse he didn’t even know. We’d leave for Ithaca at seven in the morning and he’d bring along his wife, Carol. I’d follow in my own car because I’d be spending the night in Ithaca, after Stan and Carol returned home.

When I hung up, I realized I didn’t want to do this alone. Now that I’d committed to going to Cornell, I was filled with anxieties about what would happen to Lay Me Down once she was there. I knew Allie couldn’t come with me but I was too upset to think clearly about who could, so I got out my address book and started going through it. As soon as I came to Dorothy’s name I reached for the phone. She was the right friend for this trip. She didn’t know anything about horses, but she was kind and loving and strong. She was the only friend I had who was from the Midwest, and it showed. She was as sensible as a wool hat.

“Sure,” she said without hesitating. “I’ll make corn bread.”

When we hung up, I couldn’t get over the fact that I had a friend who would drop everything for me a week before Christmas to drive someplace as horrible as Ithaca in winter. And who would bring home-baked corn bread, too. Since there was nothing I had to do to get Lay Me Down
ready for the trip, I decided to get thank-you gifts for Stan, his wife, and Dorothy.

For Stan and Carol I filled a wicker basket with food from a gourmet shop in Woodstock called Maria’s: olive oil, stone ground mustard, chocolate truffles, sun-dried tomato paste, and a dozen of Maria’s assorted sugar cookies. Then I bought two thermoses from the hardware store across the street and went back to Maria’s to have them filled with ginger carrot soup.

I got a couple of chicken salad sandwiches for Dorothy and me and some rice cakes. For a present, I’d take her to eat at the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca and buy her a copy of their latest cookbook.

Later, I packed an overnight bag. We’d be arriving on a Sunday, but Lay Me Down wouldn’t see the vet, Dr. Rebhun, until Monday. Even then, they wouldn’t be able to tell me whether she was a candidate for surgery or chemo or radiation (or none of them) until they’d completed their tests and analyzed them. But I wanted to stay until Monday on the chance that I might meet Dr. Rebhun. I’d already been warned that this was unlikely, but I felt it was worth a try. In the back of mind there was another reason for staying, one I was much less willing to admit to myself: I didn’t know if I would ever see Lay Me Down again. If Dr. Rebhun determined she was sick enough, he might recommend euthanizing her right there at Cornell. I had no idea what to expect.

I made arrangements for Hannah to do barn chores
while I was gone and to take care of my cat and dog. By nine that night I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I put on my parka and went out to the barn.

It was a clear cold night with bright stars and just a sliver of a moon. My footsteps sounded hollow on the snowless, frozen ground, and the arms of my parka swished against my sides as I walked across the pasture. Gray puffs of breath disappeared ahead of me into the darkness. In the distance a cone of white fell from the halogen light over the hayloft doors of my neighbor’s barn.

I stopped for a minute to listen for the horses, to see if I could tell where they were—outside foraging or inside eating hay? At this hour, they wouldn’t expect to see me. I didn’t hear them. I started calling their names as I got closer to the barn so the sound of my footsteps in the pasture wouldn’t startle them.

At the barn, I wasn’t surprised to see Georgia standing halfway out, studying the night with wild eyes, the only one brave enough to investigate the dark shape moving across the pasture. Her fear touched me, made me want to run my hands along her high round neck to erase the tension and reassure her. I said her name, using my most playful voice, trying to tease her out of her fright.

I could hear Tempo, standing behind her in the aisle, nickering low in his throat the way he did when he was alarmed. I said his name, too, then Hotshot’s and Lay Me Down’s. I lingered in the entryway, chest to chest with Georgia, her head and neck arched above me while she
snorted gray plumes over my shoulder into the frigid air. My arms hugged her sides, my giant horsechild. She had a low tolerance for the cloying demonstrations of affection of which I was occasionally guilty. She preferred a less saturated kind of love: grooming, treats, a good belly or neck scratch. She let me hold her for a few seconds and then shoved me aside to return to the business of eating hay.

Inside the doorway, I felt around on the wall for the raised wooden box built around the light switch to prevent the horses from rubbing against it and turning on the lights or breaking off the switch. I flipped it on, and the barn was filled with a soft yellow illumination, bright enough to make the horses blink sleepy eyes at the sudden glare.

Hotshot and Lay Me Down stood facing each other across the top of Lay Me Down’s stall door, their necks crossed like swords, the position horses stood in when they scratched each other’s backs with their teeth. But they couldn’t exchange back scratches now because Lay Me Down was completely covered by her New Zealand blanket. She also wore a separate neck warmer and an insulated hood with holes for her ears and eyes. She looked like a medieval horse dressed in padded armor ready for jousting.

Even with the lights on, after the others had resumed eating hay, Tempo continued to stare at me with unabated fear. It wasn’t enough that he recognized me, he was waiting to see why I was there. It was one of those times I wished horses understood English.
It’s OK, Tempo
, I could have told him,
it’s just a visit
. I said it anyway, hoping my tone of voice
conveyed the lightheartedness of the situation. To assuage Tempo’s nervousness I had to think the way Tempo thought, which wasn’t always typical of horse thinking in general. For instance, if I were to approach Tempo while he was afraid, he’d run away from me. He’d assume I was singling him out for something nasty, such as a dose of medication or a visit from the vet. Other horses were soothed by the combination of touch and verbal reassurances, but Tempo wasn’t, not right away. The best way to help Tempo calm down was to ignore him and give him time to observe me petting and talking to the others. I would let him come to his own conclusions about why I was there at such an odd hour. As I stood nearby, fussing over Lay Me Down and Hotshot, I could almost see Tempo thinking something like,
Oh, she’s here for that
.

In a few minutes, I disappeared into the tack room and deliberately made a lot of noise, opening the bucket where the treats were kept. It was a sound they knew well, along with the crinkle of the peppermint candy wrappers. When I came out of the tack room, all three were clumped together in front of the door, straining their heads forward into my clenched hand. The fear in Tempo’s eyes was gone, and Hotshot had abandoned Lay Me Down’s door. Oh, for the power of a peppermint. Lay Me Down leaned over her stall door and stared at us from the eye holes of her hood. As if I could have forgotten her, the reason for this visit.

I unwrapped the peppermints quickly and handed them out before anyone—anyone named Georgia—had a chance
to turn this into a competition. When I was done, I held out my empty hands, palms up, and let everyone have a sniff, applying the same principle with treats that I did with Tempo’s fear. Show them empty hands and let them draw their own conclusions. It worked pretty well, even with Georgia, who pushed at my hands once, as if to be sure nothing was hidden under my ring, and then turned away.

On my way to Lay Me Down’s stall, I gave Tempo a hug, ruffled his mane, and when I was sure he was really his old self, kissed his nose. He only let me do this when he felt secure. Otherwise, it was impossible to get my face that close to his. He’d never completely recovered from being head shy, which was the result of being mishandled during his early years at a public riding stable.

When I pulled the bolt on Lay Me Down’s door, she stepped back to give me room to come in. This small courtesy was very different from Georgia’s behavior. Georgia didn’t seem to realize I was three-dimensional and never allowed me more than a credit card’s width of space to maneuver in as I entered her stall.

If Georgia was a bull in a china shop, then Lay Me Down was a geisha at a tea ceremony. Where Lay Me Down was deferential and patient, Georgia was bossy and demanding. Lay Me Down didn’t bump me or step on me or push at my pockets even when I knew she smelled a treat. Georgia did all that and worse. Like the time we came home after a long hot ride, and she walked right into the pond with the saddle, bridle, and me still on her, and lay down and rolled. It
was so unexpected and so fast that I only just managed to jump off. Saving the saddle was out of the question. I knew other people with Morgans, and they had similar stories. If you looked up Morgans in a breeder’s guide, they were described with words like endurance, stamina, and independence. Each one was true. But you could have substituted one word to cover all three qualities: obstinacy. Not that I would have. My Morgan was a Peechums-weechums.

Lay Me Down sighed me into her stall and stared at my hand. I gave her the peppermint and listened to her grind it into powder with her back teeth. I slipped my hand under her blanket to check for shivering and held it against her withers for a few seconds, then slid it down her back until I was resting it on her rump. She turned her head to watch me, exhaling big pepperminty sighs. She was warm and sleek under her blanket, without the thick undercoat the other three horses grew that made man-made coats unnecessary for them.

I walked back toward her head, feeling under the neck warmer as I went and then under her hood, feeling around her ears. She stood still as I checked her, licking her teeth and finding the last bits of peppermint wherever they might have lodged in her mouth. It was impossible to visit her and not come face to face with the pink gelatinous mass quivering along the bottom lid of her eye. I couldn’t look at it without feeling queasy, and I wished I had more control over this reaction. But she was beginning to look like a special-effects horse in a horror film.