Chosen by a Horse (5 page)

There was no snow on the ground in March, no snowballs to distract her from my pockets, so we jostled along together until we reached the barn. She stopped just outside
the entrance to make sure the boys couldn’t get in, while I disappeared inside to prepare feed buckets. Afterward, I broke up a bale of hay and threw it out the hayloft door onto the ground below for the three to share when they were done with their grain.

I decided to forgo grooming because I was anxious to check on Lay Me Down and her foal. As a five-year-old, neglecting to brush daily would have been unthinkable to me, the result of being raised in an atmosphere just this side of a cult. It wasn’t a deity we blindly venerated, it was
The Horse
. There were certain rituals and practices that, if not performed daily, had consequences too catastrophic for a child even to imagine. For instance, if you didn’t groom your horse twice a day, you were asking for it.

“Mats!”
the German riding master who taught at the local stable would scream at some tiny child, flicking the mane of her pony where a small tangle appeared. “
Vut are you tinking
?”

An ungroomed horse was a disgrace, an embarrassment, a sign the owner was bad. It was a clear indication that she was as unprepared for life as she was for riding. She was lazy. She was someone who would never amount to anything and would never fit in. If she didn’t brush her horse until her arm ached, its skin might rot, its circulation might stop, it might keel over right there in the stall, too filthy to live. And, worst of all, not brushing her horse would reflect badly on the instructor.

At the very least, not grooming your horse meant you
didn’t deserve to own one, and it might be snatched away, given to some more deserving, nameless child who thought nothing of getting up on a December morning to walk to the stable in pitch-black cold to feed and groom before school, and then returning after school to repeat the routine. Failing to do this cheerfully, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, meant something was wrong with you. It meant you didn’t have any friends, and your family was mad at you, and there was nowhere on this earth to hide from your shame and wrongness until you went away to college and discovered not everyone in the world was horse obsessed.

I was thirty-three before I had the nerve to skip a grooming. It was a soul-searching decision and I tortured myself all day with what it meant and where it might lead and what would happen to my ungroomed horse and
what if a friend, driving by, noticed the muddy leg from the road?
When nothing too horrible happened, I tried it again, and then again. One thing led to another and, after a while, when I skipped one day, it felt so good, sometimes I skipped a whole week.

When my (ungroomed) horses were done with their grain and were outside, eating hay, I headed over to the other pasture, stopping by the house to pick up the bran mash. Lay Me Down stood under the overhang of her turnout while her foal grazed nearby. I was twenty or thirty feet away when I noticed that Lay Me Down was shivering. Either she was much sicker or it was much colder. I poured the bran mash into her feed bin, put grain in the foal’s creep, and ran back to the barn for a thermometer.
While I was there I glanced at the horse blankets hanging in the tack room. None of them would fit Lay Me Down. She was a giant compared to my three, who were at the other end of the horse spectrum. Lay Me Down was taller, longer, wider (even though emaciated), and much broader across the chest. She was shivering, however, so she had to have something.

Right away I knew the only thing that would fit her. I ran to the house and got the king-size quilt off my bed, a one-of-a-kind patchwork quilt of orange-and-yellow-patterned squares, a Marimekko fabric. It had been on my bed for twenty years. As I lugged it across the back lawn to Lay Me Down’s pasture, I thought about how I could poke holes in it with a screwdriver and use baling twine to tie it across her chest and secure it under her belly. Not forever, just until I could buy her a coat that fit.

She was still shivering when I returned with the quilt so I let her sniff it for a second before I threw it across her back. She continued eating her bran mash without flinching as the weight of the quilt settled along her spine and the ends fluttered down her sides. It covered her nicely, from her neck to the base of her tail, with plenty of fabric to spread across her chest. I could lace her up like a sneaker. She stood quietly under the quilt, eating, while I punched holes in the front of it with a screwdriver and pulled the twine through. I punched more holes near her belly and threaded the twine underneath her like a girth and hoped that it wouldn’t be too itchy.

I didn’t know if she’d ever worn a blanket or had anything across her back but a harness, but she seemed unconcerned about the heavy quilt wrapped around her like a hotdog bun. I stood back to look. It wouldn’t have been the right moment for some of my fancier horse friends to visit. I started to giggle, then felt terrible to be laughing at this sick, sweet animal who had just let me dress her up like a float in the Rose Bowl Parade.

Her head hung down slightly at the end of her long neck, her ears were up and forward, her runny eyes wide open at me. She had finished her bran mash, and she stood watching me watch her. I wasn’t used to a horse who stood so still, who maintained such long stretches of eye contact. Sometimes she sighed one of her wheezy sighs and blinked, but she didn’t move away, and she didn’t knock me down looking for carrots.

I asked myself the question I asked a lot, as a psychotherapist and as someone who lived with animals, but mostly as someone who grew up in a family with lots of mixed messages. What did her body language say? Sometimes it was easy to read body language, and sometimes I felt like I was doing nothing more than hazarding a wild guess. The rule was, I could make a list of all the things I thought the person (or dog or cat or horse) was saying, but in the end, I had to reduce it to one thing. Just one phrase that conveyed the dominant message.

What was Lay Me Down saying? From the lowered head, the quiet tail, the weight evenly distributed on all four
legs, the slow, rhythmic movement of her rib cage as she breathed, I heard, “I’m tired” or “I don’t feel well.” When I combined the description of her body with her face—eyes looking at me, ears forward, lower lip hanging open slightly—what I heard changed to “I’m curious.” If I considered that she stood absolutely still while I carried a large, flapping, bright-colored object toward her across the pasture (all three of mine would have fled at the sight), and then let me tie her up in it, I heard “I trust you.” So what was the dominant message? If I added it all up, what I heard was “I like you.”

At that exact moment, I got this horse. I understood her nature. It came to me as an image—a cat all dressed up in doll clothes, lying on its back in some little girl’s ruffle-trimmed baby carriage, being wheeled around the house. That’s who Lay Me Down was. That cat. She was the pet who let you do anything to her, the pet who little boys roughed up and little girls dressed up, and it never bit or scratched or ran away or got mad or did anything but bask in the attention and be a wonderful, affectionate, totally available pet. It was rare in a cat or dog. Such tractability was almost unknown in a horse.

I had never had a docile, loving pet. When I was little and riding in horse shows for children, every once in a while they’d hold something called a gymkhana—a show that combined riding skills with games. The show ring would be set up with little jumps and other obstacles—places you’d have to back out of, a line of poles the rider would weave
her pony through, spoon races where competitors carried an egg, potato-sack races where the rider would dismount and get in a sack, pulling her pony behind, and so on.

In the best gymkhana events, horse and rider wore costumes. Not everyone could enter these because it meant you had to have a pony who (like the cat in that baby carriage) had a high tolerance for strange things strapped to its head and costumes that fluttered around its legs. Contestants took these costumes to heart, so they were often elaborate, and at least once in every show, some poor child would end up clinging to a runaway pony whose patience for a petticoat had just expired.

My Shetland pony, Bunty, was a moody creature who tolerated very little. On a bad day she would reject the bridle, the saddle, and the rider. Imagine her reaction to wearing a hat! The single event in which we did well was the potato-sack race, when I stayed on the ground leading her. I hopped as fast as I could, not to win but to stay well ahead of Bunty’s teeth.

Lay Me Down would have breezed through a costume event. I was standing in front of the turnout, soaking up her niceness, when I noticed her foal jitterbugging behind me on those flying hooves. I turned and faced the flattened ears, the snaky head, the restless legs, the twitchy tail. Her body language was easy to read. It said, “Go away.”

I hated being told to go away. It was a rude, unloving, insensitive thing to say, and I’d heard it all my life, beginning with the people who had raised me and, as an adult, in my
marriage. It was the loudest half of the mixed message “I love you, go away.” For years, since the end of my marriage, I had made certain I’d never have to hear “Go away” again. My resolve meant changing the kind of people I allowed into my life. No more angry, rejecting, Shetland-pony types.

Yet I could understood why the foal would reject me. It was easy to imagine the kind of treatment she had received or witnessed at the hands of human beings. She had come to a logical conclusion about what to expect from the likes of me. Foals in the wild showed less hostility toward humans than this one exhibited toward me. She’d obviously been hurt. She might have been hit or frightened by rough handling when the halter was fitted. This can frighten foals even when done gently. She would also have witnessed whatever abuse her mother and the rest of the herd had suffered.

For a moment I allowed myself to imagine the origins of the mixed message in my own human family. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this, but somehow, right then, in front of the angry foal, the parallels were easier to see and easier to forgive. In my family, one unwanted, unloved generation acted out their unwantedness and unlovability with the next. When my mother died of leukemia, it was as though someone had shattered a glass, sending the shards flying in every direction. Some of the biggest shards disappeared for twenty years. My father vanished into an alcoholic stupor somewhere in another city, and my brother was banished many states away to board at a new school. At age five, I became the ward of a stern grandmother. After
I had lived with her for two years, she decided she was too old to raise me herself, so she sent me to live with strangers, albeit relatives. They remained strangers until the routine of threats and beatings became as familiar as getting tucked into bed at night had once been. Alcoholism was endemic on both sides of the family, fueling the rage that was vented onto the children. Those children, initially victims, later became the next generation of victimizers. This daisy chain of pain didn’t end until some in my generation noticed the pattern and decided to put a stop to it, but even then, it required a herculean effort. Watching Lay Me Down and her hostile foal, it was impossible not to connect my own plight with theirs: orphaned, abandoned, mistreated.

I didn’t know I was angry until I was about thirty-three. I thought I was just born uncongenial until a therapist suggested I might be reacting to the loss of my parents and being left in the “care” of my grandmother. After that, for years I was nothing
but
angry. I’d get angry if the phone rang. I’d get angry when the clothes dryer buzzed. I’d get angry when the toaster oven went
Ping!
I got so angry at the refrigerator hum I called a repairman. When he arrived and heard the normal sound of a refrigerator, he stood in the kitchen with the tool kit in his hand and, avoiding my glare, advised me simply to unplug it.

Standing near the turnout, thinking about all this, I more or less came to terms with the foal’s animosity toward me. What remained troublesome was the physical threat she
posed, which meant I had to remain aware of her position whenever I was in her pasture. This time, after glaring at me for a moment, she found her mother’s teat under the bulky quilt and began nursing. She had already finished all the grain in her creep. It was a good time to take Lay Me Down’s temperature, while she was distracted by the foal. I lifted her tail and inserted a lubricated thermometer.

When I pulled it out three minutes later, I was surprised. No temperature? I slid my hand under the quilt, letting it rest on Lay Me Down’s bony flank. I didn’t feel any shivering. I slid my hand further up, pausing over her ribs, her withers, and finally under her mane, high up on her neck. No shivering anywhere. She wasn’t cold any longer; the quilt was working. And the antibiotics must have kicked in so her temperature had fallen.

I put fresh hay down for both of them and got the wheelbarrow and muck rake to start cleaning up the manure. Right away, the foal spooked at the wheelbarrow and pranced in tight little circles around her mother, snorting at it every time she looked at it. But her stride got longer and slower, and it was obvious she wanted to meet the bright blue creature with the three short legs and no head.

Her circles took her closer and closer to the wheelbarrow and finally she approached it directly, three steps forward, one step back, until she was close enough to stretch her neck out and smell the rim. When it didn’t bite or hit or kick, she became braver and stepped close enough to smell all around the rim and then to sniff each wooden
handle and then the little tire in front. When she had smelled the whole thing, she tested the rim with her teeth giving it little practice nips all around the edge. When it still didn’t nip back, she picked it up with her teeth and flung it as far as she could. It didn’t go far, three or four feet but the foal seemed pleased with this. It was the first time I’d seen her ears pricked straight up and her slender legs so still, as she paused to admire her accomplishment. And who could blame her for gloating? She had just killed her first wheelbarrow.