Chosen by a Horse (22 page)

For once Allie didn’t accuse me of anthropomorphizing. “Could be the anesthesia,” she said. “Sometimes it takes months for the effects to wear off.”

Lay Me Down had greeted our unexpected night visit in her new, more casual way: a glance, a faint sigh, and then she went right back to eating hay. I missed the way she used to be, her engaging stare, the big wet sighs misting some lucky recipient, usually me. Everything I wore was covered in horse snot or sticky from peppermints. Even my car was never without the wide gray lick marks swirled across the windows. And recently, Lay Me Down’s teeth had left a jagged white trail across the smooth red hood. I couldn’t feel angry even though I tried. A horse shouldn’t be allowed to eat your car. I’d said no and pushed her away, but there was no threat in my voice, nothing that would frighten her.

It would have been different with Georgia. With Georgia I would have rushed at her in a fury of waving arms and loud nos, and she would have flicked her tail at me and trotted, stiff-legged, to a safe distance to wait until I had returned to my senses. No matter what she had done, it was never Georgia’s fault.
I
was the crazy one who periodically exploded for no good reason. Morgans are without contrition, the
Who, me?
of horse breeds.

Lay Me Down had enough contrition for both of them. Maybe too much, like people who apologized when someone else stepped on them.

“Maybe she knows she’s dying,” I said. I felt funny saying this out loud in front of Lay Me Down. You never know.

Allie shook her head. “She’s not dying.”

For a second I felt elated. Dr. Rebhun was wrong. My smart friend was about to tell me what we could do to get rid of this tumor. “She’s not?”

“Not for a while.”

My elation vanished. My smart friend was being literal. Lay Me Down was eating hay, not dying. What would dying look like?

“Think she can make it to April?” I asked.

Allie looked at her bad eye. “I don’t know,” she said.

No one I asked could tell me when to euthanize Lay Me Down. I called Dr. Grice back and made arrangements for her to come twice a month. Dr. Grice would measure the growth of the tumor, check Lay Me Down’s vital signs, and give me medicated drops to help keep the eye moist and
clean. Then I hung up and called Clayton Barringer. He had a backhoe and dug graves for the town cemetery. He also dug horse graves. I wanted to bury Lay Me Down on my property but didn’t know if a hole could be dug when the ground was frozen. Should he dig it now, before the frost line got deeper?

“Frozen ground’s no problem,” he said, air whistling between missing teeth. “Call me the day before. That way it’ll be ready and the vet can do it right by the hole. Is the horse strong enough to walk to where you want the hole dug?”

Something I’d never thought of, how to get Lay Me Down from where she died to where she was going to be buried. This was part of not facing death, having no plan for the obvious. I’d never thought about this, but it made sense. Bring the horse to the hole and euthanize her there. Creepy but practical. It was better than whatever the alternative was. Dragging? Part of knowing when to euthanize her meant not letting her get so weak she couldn’t walk. But what if it happened suddenly? What if she was normal one day and the next day couldn’t get up?

“I don’t know,” I said. I resisted the urge to apologize, to cry, to ask him to come over and shoot her between the eyes right then and take her away so all signs of her were gone by evening chores. I resisted the urge to explain why I didn’t know if she’d be able to walk to her own grave or not. It didn’t matter.

I heard him light a cigarette and blow out the smoke.
“Don’t you worry,” he said after a long pause, “I’ll arrange him in the hole real pretty.”

I resisted the urge to say
her
.

Facing death meant getting up every cold dark morning and walking to the barn and doing exactly what I always did. It meant going to work and coming home and going back to the barn to do evening chores. It meant sticking to the routine. Was I the only one who didn’t know that facing death meant facing life? They were exactly the same. Even Georgia seemed to know this. It must have been obvious to her that Lay Me Down was sick, but it made no difference. She still hated her. She still chased her away whenever she got the chance.

Hotshot stuck to his routine, too. The ugly pink growth, now the size of a tennis ball, didn’t change his ardor. When she came back from Cornell he was the only one I allowed out to greet her, the only one of the three who would give her the wholehearted welcome I wanted her to have. And he did. He sniffed and nickered the length of her until she grew annoyed and flicked him away with her tail. Already I was sad, thinking how he would miss her. I got a taste of it when she was at Cornell, watching him look for her up and down the fence line several times a day. He’d stand at the gate and whinny in the direction of the pasture where he’d first seen her. There was something almost unbearably sweet in his thinking she might be there, just across the pond where he couldn’t see her. What must he think of me? That I would separate him from her for no reason?

At the beginning of February I got around to making some New Year’s resolutions. It was a short list, only one item: end the relationship with Hank. My resolution was connected to Lay Me Down. Life is short, do what matters. My horse was dying and sadness made me bold, woke me up, gave everything an edge, a now-or-never quality. Lay Me Down was my muse, my inspiration to find meaning in loss, to make peace with it, to find the beauty in it. If nothing else, to see the truth of it.

A few weeks earlier Hank had given me an ultimatum. Either we lived together or he’d end our relationship. He wanted me to move there, into the house he had shared with his wife, with his Hudson River School paintings, his brown linoleum kitchen floor, and his blue Mexican water glasses with the air bubbles. I felt as if he was asking me to slip into someone else’s old dress. I never seriously entertained the idea, but I had put off telling him because that was what I did. I avoided endings. Besides, I didn’t take his threat seriously. This was a man who had waited six years to call me. It was important to take my time, chose the right moment. This was someone’s heart. Then something right out of a movie happened.

“Sorry about you and Hank,” a woman we both knew said to me in the grocery store. “I didn’t think he was the kind of man to go for someone that young.”

It was as though she’d punched me. I gripped my cart, hoping she didn’t realize it was holding me up. “What?”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “You didn’t know?”

I was filled with such loathing for this woman I could have struck her, reached over and slapped that shocked look right off her pretty face. For a second, hating her took my mind completely off what she had said. I didn’t trust myself to speak. If I opened my mouth flames would engulf her. I’d incinerate the whole store.

When my knees stopped shaking, I turned and walked out, leaving the cart half full of groceries and the woman standing there with her hand still covering her mouth. I drove toward Allie’s house in a bubble of numb rage. I kept seeing the face of the woman in the grocery store—the wide eyes, the open mouth hidden behind the slender hand. No suffering I could imagine was enough to punish her for what she had done. For a few minutes hating and blaming her worked to keep my mind off what she had told me, but halfway to Allie’s I forgot about her and switched to hating Hank. By the time I was there, I hated all men, and before I was out of the car, I hated all men and all women. I was in no shape to talk. I felt possessed, as though I could have spun my head three hundred and sixty degrees and vomited frogs. Before Allie saw my car, I turned around and left.

It was four o’clock and already getting dark. When I reached home I walked from room to room, flipping on lights. I couldn’t stop moving. No matter where I went, I saw her face, the look of astonishment, her beautiful hand—slender with smooth white skin. She hardly knew me and she had brought me this news of Hank’s betrayal.
I was obsessed with her, frozen in the moment of what she must have intended as a condolence, as words of solidarity.

I changed into barn clothes: long underwear full of holes, sweatpants, turtleneck, sweatshirt. Everything smelled of horses. Downstairs, I took the insulated snow pants off the hook on the stairwell wall. They smelled like the barn, too. Sometimes I worried that my whole house smelled like the barn.

I grabbed a bag of carrots out of the refrigerator and slipped my boots on by the dining-room door. The snow squeaked as I crossed the lawn and ducked under the fence into the pasture. The horses were there waiting, all four of them, right by the fence. They jostled each other, pressed around me, blowing columns of frozen breath. This was when Georgia could be her most possessive, her most obnoxious. Still, I loved this moment, seeing them again after a day apart, smelling them. I said their names, teased them by crinkling the bag of carrots. I gave them each one, then hurried them along to the barn before Georgia could spoil this moment with her jealousy.

Georgia followed me into the barn, bumping up against me when I stopped to turn on the lights. She amazed me. If she was a person I’d hate her. She was the woman behind you in line at the grocery store who bumps you with her cart, who slaps her checkbook onto the little transaction platform while you’re still waiting for change, who casually mentions that your boyfriend is cheating on you.

Georgia flattened her ears and stood in the entry, keeping
everyone else out. Charming. Tempo ignored her and shoved her aside. He was the only one who could get away with this, who even dared try. Hotshot and Lay Me Down paced around outside. I could hear the crunch of snow as they circled. I didn’t trust Georgia to behave herself waiting for dinner. I got her to follow me to her stall by crinkling the bag of carrots. Once there, I gave her one, then left, shutting her in.

Right away Hotshot and Lay Me Down knew it was safe to come inside. Lay Me Down hurried to her stall with quick, stiff steps and heaved a big sigh as soon as she was there. She stretched her neck toward the ceiling and curled back her upper lip until it was almost touching her nostrils, and gave herself a deep whiff of her stall. It was a gesture of utter contentment. I understood. It was the way I felt about home, too.

Hotshot stood just outside her stall in the aisle, her guardian, her devotee. I couldn’t look at him without an ache in my chest. I kept seeing him trot up and down the fence when she was at Cornell, the innocence of his distress, how distressed he would be again.

Tempo went into his own stall and pawed at the wall with his front foot. BAM! BAM! BAM! It was so unlike his general attitude, this display of adolescent impatience, this boldness. But it was his unfailing routine, every morning and every night. Like Lay Me Down sniffing her stall, I thought kicking the wall was Tempo’s way of expressing joy at being home. Or maybe it was the way a predominantly
anxious personality could say to the world,
You might think I’m a scaredy-cat but I’m really a big, tough guy
. BAM! BAM! BAM!

I scooped different amounts of grain into four buckets, added medication, vitamins, and supplements and broke up the carrots and added those. I brought Tempo’s out first to get him to stop kicking the wall and because he took the longest to eat. Then Lay Me Down’s, because she got so excited when she saw Tempo’s bucket that she’d pace around her stall, and I couldn’t stand to make her wait. Then Hotshot’s, for no reason except to get him out of the aisle, and finally Georgia’s, whose head arched and bobbed over the stall door, indignant at being last. I apologized, told her she was gorgeous, she was wonderful, the best horse in the whole world. Her ears flattened, and she shoved hard at my shoulder with her nose, almost spilling the contents of the bucket as I hooked it to the ring in the wall. Fat chance she’d fall for flattery. I’d made her wait!

I climbed the steep spiral stairs to the hayloft where there were six hundred bales, give or take, stacked all the way to the roof. There was a narrow path winding through the bales so I could drop hay through holes in the floor to the stalls below. Georgia was the only one who’d move out of the way when I dropped the hay. I’d warn her and she’d move. The others didn’t get it. They’d look up at me through the hole and get hay dropped on their heads. I tried to do it while they were still eating grain so I wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes brushing hay out of forelocks and
manes. I didn’t know why Georgia understood and the others didn’t. You’d think she would have explained it to them.

After I dropped the hay, I opened the wide hayloft doors that overlooked the pasture, my neighbor’s hay fields, and, twenty miles away, the ridge line of the Shawangunk Mountains. I sat in the doorway, dangling my legs over the edge. It was clear and cold and, in a few hours, the sky would be filled with stars. Right now it was a blue-black with a silver glow still visible to the west. To the left, on the other side of the pasture fence, yellow light spilled out of the tall back windows of my house, across the deck and onto the snow. I could see almost the entire downstairs: my grandmother’s red tapestry, the red couch, red dining-room chairs, a red colander hanging from a beam in the kitchen.

Hank liked blue
.

It was so quiet I could hear ice crystals blowing across the surface of the snow. I listened for a long time, smelling the hay around me, watching the stars emerge one by one in the blackening sky. I cried because it was a terrible way to end a relationship. I cried because I was afraid it was too late for me to find love. I cried because I was losing Lay Me Down.

But I didn’t cry for Hank.