Saving Baby (21 page)

Bill Mitchell, my lawyer in the suit against the track.

Bill had not been a complete unknown to me before then. A top criminal trial attorney both sharp and jovial, he was on TV all the time. I liked that he was a trial lawyer interested in high-profile cases and, just as important, I liked that he used to own racehorses himself. He really understood the inner workings of the track and the legal responsibilities of the various parties involved.

Bill and I agreed that I shouldn't start by filing a lawsuit but, rather, that he work to force the necessary repairs to the track to stop the maiming and, in addition, arrange a settlement for the loss of Baby. We assumed a settlement would be easy to reach. The evidence on what happened to Baby was so strong.

To this day I don't know what Bill did to get things moving so fast. If someone smoked in a shedrow, the Racing Commission didn't hesitate to fine the person fifty dollars. But enforcing rules that would cost the track money—that it had not wanted to do.

By 10
A.M.
on the day of the hearing, the room was packed. I didn't expect it to be jammed, but even the press was there. I wore a simple black dress with a black jacket—the same outfit I wear today when giving speeches about racing as a slaughter pipeline.

“I'm going to be busy,” Bill said to me when he found me in the crowded hearing room. “I've got to talk to a lot of different people. But I'm here.”

I couldn't wait to be called to give my testimony after all those months of trying to get the attention of the racing commissioner. I had my written statement and all my other exhibits in order—minutes of board meetings, copies of letters to the commission going all the way back to May, my own horse's veterinary records to show he was sound, and my continually growing list of horses who had died on the track.

But hours passed as I and everyone else sat there, waiting for the hearing to start. Private meetings kept taking place in various small offices—I'd see Bill go in one room with the racing commissioner and some of his deputies, then exit that space and go into another with the owners of the track.

Finally, there was an announcement that there would not be a hearing after all. The track had agreed to begin the repairs recommended by its own expert from Belmont, the one who had said the fixes would cost almost $600,000. Beginning as soon as possible, weather permitting, they would start the first of two phases: completely rebuilding the limestone base—not patching it but rebuilding it. They'd also add the necessary soft cushion. The work would be done from the rail all the way to forty-five feet out, which would be wide enough since we never had eighteen to twenty horses in a race, like the Kentucky Derby does. At most we'd have eight to ten, sometimes twelve.

Phase II, the repair of the track at the two starting gate shoots—short areas on which the horses must run when they break from the gate in order to enter the oval of the racecourse—would take place later in the year.

We won! I couldn't believe it. Just like that, the track was going to be fixed. It was too late for Baby and all the other horses that had died throughout the season, but at least going forward things would be different. I couldn't wait to call John to let him know that my doggedness had paid off. I couldn't wait to come home and tell the horses. For once I'd be going to the barn with good news instead of just misery that Baby wasn't there.

Mostly I wanted to tell Scarlett. She was my direct link to Baby, even more than Sissy. Although, unlike Sissy, she was only his half sister, she had lived at the track with him, raced with him, trained with him, traveled to Florida with him.

I also knew she'd be leaving again soon, right after Christmas, in fact. I had signed her up for eventing, and she'd be boarded and trained at a facility twenty minutes away, in Ann Arbor.

It was not an easy decision. I loved having her near me, just enjoying herself in the pasture, enjoying being a horse. I also loved watching Scarlett and Sissy play together now that Sissy was big enough to be let out into the pasture with a barn mate other than her mother. Scarlett was still a young horse, only four, not even an adult yet, and had lots of young-horse energy, whereas Beauty and Pumpkin were old by then and didn't want to tear across the pasture with a weanling. Pat was not going to play tag, either.

Scarlett and Sissy would roll in the snow, get up and shake, then run together, their heels kicking in the air. It was beautiful to watch, if bittersweet. Here was a still-growing replica of the adult-size Baby cavorting with Scarlett, just as he had. The bonding between them was almost as intimate, as tender. It was a time-warped re-creation of what I remembered so well about Baby and Scarlett, one in which Scarlett had aged but Baby was still only months old.

Does Scarlett know this is Baby's sister, I wondered, in addition to being her own half sister through Pat? Does she recognize something about Sissy's scent? Or was I superimposing all this on the scene because of my missing Baby so much?

But while seeing them enjoy each other's company tugged at my heart, I was not able to quell my competitive drive. Scarlett simply was too perfect not to perform, not to be shown off.

I would watch her floating trot out back—her movements were so fluid that it appeared her feet weren't even touching the ground—and feel torn between needing her close to me and needing to let her reach her potential. Looking back, it was probably a foregone conclusion even before I realized it. Her potential was going to win out. I wasn't capable of nurturing a Secretariat snow globe, as I once thought I was. Even with Baby's death, having had my competitive nature stoked after it had lain dormant for years once my daughters stopped skating and dancing, having laid bare that very spot in my core where love and striving were one and the same, I had no choice but to send her out to shine, to win.

If you looked up “Thoroughbred” in an equine book or even a dictionary, the illustration would have been a likeness of Scarlett. She was so wonderfully proportioned. Everything hit the ground right. There was not an ankle bone that was too long or a leg that toed in. She had not too long or short of a back, not too short a neck to support her head. She also had huge dinner-plate feet, perfect for digging into the ground on a jump in order to get lift, and perfect for landing, for absorbing the shock over the widest area possible.

I had thought hard about the discipline in which to have her trained before settling on eventing, which is sort of like a triathalon for horses. It combines dressage, in which a horse is judged on performing difficult but flowing movements without any apparent communication from her rider, almost like an equine ballet; cross-country jumping in varied terrain; and show jumping, a high, fast kind of jumping in which rails set in shallow cups aren't to be disturbed and at which Scarlett, with her perfect conformation, would excel.

I thought she would particularly love the cross-country jumping. The obstacles are set out, maybe fourteen within three-quarters of a mile in the easier competitions, each two to three feet high. But as the competitions increase in difficulty, covering more than two miles, the patterns become more difficult, with as many as forty obstacles to pass and higher jumps to make. The obstacles themselves get wider, too. Whereas at first the horse might have to jump only over a log, later she'll have to clear things like a car, or a picnic table, flying five to eight feet through the air after taking off. The horse has to go faster in more advanced competitions, too, with penalties not just for lagging but also for refusing to jump. Scarlett would love the outdoor courses where she would be able to open up and run between jumps.

She would also excel at it. When she was only two, she had been out in the big pasture grazing alongside Baby one day when, without her noticing, he walked out of sight. Suddenly, not knowing where he had gone, she grew frantic and started calling to him, deep belly whinnies in which you could have heard the alarm way down the road. But Baby wasn't down the road. He had simply walked back into the barn and didn't answer her, probably figuring, “What's the big deal?”

I could see Scarlett building up a panic and running back and forth behind the pasture's fence. She thinks he got out, I realized, and was wandering who knew where. Finally, desperate, she spun around and went tearing directly toward the fence, five feet high, to get to him. “This is it,” I thought. “She's going to go straight into it and fracture something.” Now my own mind was in a panic. But instead, she took off and sailed over the boards, tucking up her front legs close to her chin and never even coming close to touching the fence top.

Now out of the pasture and in our front yard, having escaped, she began looking for Baby, still bellowing to him. Perhaps sensing that her call was further away than before, he finally honked back. At that, she spun around and came flying to the barn, entering through its front door rather than from the pasture.

With great relief she switched from whinnying to nickering, from “Where
are
you? I can't
find
you,” to “It's you, it's you. I was so worried about you. Don't do that to me anymore.” The two were immediately nose to nose as usual, continuing to live in the moment, as horses do.

What I realized, remembering that incident, was that Scarlett could definitely compete in anything that involved jumping. A lot of horses leave a leg dangling as they jump, or both legs, and hit the obstacle, whether it be a rail or other object. That's why, when training, they start out simply walking over poles laid out on the ground, then proceed to jumping obstacles only a foot high, and get to five-foot fences much later. But not Scarlett. At two, without any training, she already had it down.

Between the jumping, the running, and the dressage, horses who compete at high levels of eventing must be sound and more physically fit even than racehorses, who use only one set of muscles over and over as opposed to the muscles throughout their bodies. That appealed to me. I also liked that winners at most levels get ribbons. Money doesn't change hands until a horse gets to the very highest levels. And even at those levels, I learned when I probed, there were no scandals, as there often are when you mix horses and money. Eventing doesn't involve plying the horses with drugs. It doesn't involve sending horses to slaughter; it's a clean activity, a sport in the Summer Olympics, even.

In fact, I came to learn that rather than “going through” their horses, eventers more often than not really bond with them. When it comes time to move on to another horse, say, because the current one is not able to go to the next level, an owner generally doesn't dump his animal for the highest price he can fetch. He tries to find someone who needs a lower-level horse by talking with fellow competitors.

I can't say the conditions at the training facility where I boarded Scarlett for her training in eventing were perfect. I was nervous to send her away after Christmas. One problem was that Ann Arbor was a drive in the opposite direction from my court reporting work, so I knew that while I'd make it a point to go see her several times a week, I wasn't going to be able to get out there every single day. Also, there was no grass in the paddock where Scarlett was turned out for free time, so she couldn't graze.

But she was such a spirited horse. I really couldn't see keeping her confined to our little farm. And eventing seemed like such an all-around workout. If I were a horse, I thought to myself, particularly an athletic horse like Scarlett, that would be the kind of competition in which I'd want to engage.

Having Scarlett in a new pursuit and having to worry over her also gave me some relief from thinking about the track non-stop, selfish as that might have been. But the relief was meager at best. Although the track was closed for the winter, I still had to attend HBPA board meetings, more of them than usual, in fact, in preparation for the racecourse's resurfacing. It was hard to be there. I couldn't bear to look at the exact spot where Baby had pulled himself over. I understood, in a way I never had, why people put crosses at spots along the highway where loved ones have died in crashes. If I could have marked Baby's spot in some way, I would have.

*   *   *

Not until February did workmen begin removing the top, cushiony layers of the track. During board meetings, we'd see massive pieces of equipment out there on the racecourse, followed by growing mounds of clay and sand in the customer parking lot, which was paved, unlike the trainer/owner lot. The cushion materials would be reapplied to the track once the limestone base was rebuilt.

Toward the end of March, the board was told that the base was ready. We were asked to walk the course and approve it before the soft materials were added back.

But approval was out of the question. Every so many feet, you would step in a hole so deep it literally swallowed your ankles. Extending down eight to ten inches, it buried a man's entire work boot. The company hired to do the work had not had those heavy rollers go over the track to make it compact, as is done on highways.