Saving Baby (3 page)

He, in turn, expressed his feelings for me. He would hear me coming to the barn to say “hi” to him and let out his gooselike honk. Not all horses are vocal, but this one liked to talk.

Baby not yet twenty-four hours old.

Sometimes he'd come over to me in the pasture and immediately turn around and present his rump. Usually, when a horse does that, he intends to kick you. But Baby, as we had taken to calling him after referring to him only as “the baby” for the first couple of weeks, was asking me to scratch around the dock of his tail. His head would tilt slightly to the side as if he was saying, “Ahh, that feels good.”

All was bliss, and when Baby was about a month old, we sent him with Pat to the breeding farm, as planned, so he could continue to nurse while she became pregnant by Secretariat's son with the foal that was to become ours. Pat was pregnant again within a month or so—in foal, as horse people say—and we brought her and Baby back home. A horse pregnancy lasts about eleven and a half months—anywhere from 320 to 360 days—so we knew we'd have Pat for that amount of time plus about six months more for our own foal to nurse before Pat went back to her owner. Baby, in the meanwhile, would be going to his owner in just a few more months. He was already a couple of months old and needed only a few more months of nursing.

I hated to think about it. It wasn't just I who had fallen head over heels for him—we all had—and I didn't know how we were going to give him up. We had watched him take his first wobbly steps in the moments right after his birth, then gallop across the pasture hours later, as horses do. It's why, in part, they're born in the middle of the night—to give them a few hours to learn to run with the herd come daylight.

Baby giving Pat a kiss.

Baby and our German shepherd, Cookie, liked to chase each other around the pasture. Baby would eat a carrot if you chewed it in your mouth first and then offered it to him. The girls did their homework in his stall while he lay sleeping with his head resting on their legs. We all fed him apples and carrots when he came up to the sliding glass doors to the kitchen after walking up the patio steps. It wasn't unusual, in fact, to see Baby and Pat standing at the kitchen door waiting for a treat.

I taught him to walk up the patio steps to the kitchen not just because I loved him so much that it was a pleasure to be near him but also because I didn't want him to be afraid to step up into a horse trailer; of the bricks on the patio, which were a different kind of surface than he was used to; of the sliding glass doors as they squeaked open. Horses evolved as prey animals, flight animals rather than predators, and they bolt at the slightest sign of danger. Thoroughbreds, in particular, are skittish. I wanted to teach Baby not to react to every strange noise and sight so that he wouldn't flee unexpectedly and hurt either himself or his rider. I wanted to help him to like people so they would like him back, make his future safe for him, help him to feel calm and stable rather than prone to feeling spooked. Even though he wasn't mine, I was determined that Baby was going to grow to adulthood strong not just in body but also in mind so that nothing would ever hurt him.

My elder daughter, Jessica, with Baby in his stall.

Sometimes I would take New Year's Eve noisemakers and blow them nearer and nearer to Baby in the barn, walking through so he wouldn't be surprised. I would go into the barn softly and slowly open and close an umbrella in front of him, letting him smell it.

When he was in the pasture, I would take a black garbage bag and wave it at him from a distance. He would stop what he was doing and stare, and I'd call out gently, “It's okay, Baby. It's just a bag.” He'd walk over and sniff it, then I'd drop it and he'd paw at it. I'd touch his body with it. His owner planned on racing him. Who knew when a plastic bag was going to blow across the track?

Other times I'd put a piece of plywood in the pasture. I thought it might teach him not to be afraid of the wood's texture when he walked on it, or of the sound it made. Or I'd shake out a large white sheet while calling to him, then fold it up while walking toward him. After all, maybe somebody would shake a horse blanket in front of him, and his memory of my shaking the sheet would make it not so frightening.

Memory was key to Baby's learning. People use the phrase a “memory like an elephant,” but they should really say “memory like a horse.” When given scattered pairs of patterns to look at and identify for a reward of food—a circle versus a semicircle, for instance—not only can a horse often correctly identify the pairs with almost 100 percent accuracy (performing almost twice as well as zebras and donkeys), it will also retain the ability to distinguish the patterns and shapes a full year later, better than most people could. So of course I felt it was my job to teach Baby, especially while he was young and absorbing information like a sponge, how to get on with people, how to deal in a world away from our little farm.

One day all the connections I had built between us helped save his life. Jessica, my elder daughter, took a look out the window and started to scream so loudly I couldn't understand what she was saying. Baby was running through the pasture in terror, a plastic patio chair stuck on his head. Sometimes, after bringing down a chair from the patio to the field outside the barn so I could sit and watch Pat and her baby, I left it out in the pasture—one more thing for Baby to smell, to get used to.

But he had apparently stuck his head in the space between the seat and the arm and now couldn't get it out. He tried to get near Pat, but she was terrified of the sight and kept running from Baby as he inadvertently jabbed her with the chair.

Oh my God, I said to myself. I was afraid he was going to trip and die from breaking his neck or suffer a fractured leg in a fall and have to be euthanized. I yelled at Jessica to stay out of the pasture, then walked out there as calmly as I could and started talking soothingly, all the while inching closer and closer. “It's okay, Baby,” I called out. He was in an absolute panic, his sides heaving, but finally, he let me approach him. I tried to lift the chair off his head, but it wouldn't budge.

My mind was racing. What can I use to cut through the plastic? Do I need to call the fire department? As I deliberated, I continued to try to maneuver the chair, Baby trusting me sufficiently by that point to stand relatively still. Finally, I was able to turn the chair just enough, at just such an angle, that I was able to remove it. He immediately ran to his mother, and she to him, and he nursed, which provided solace for both of them. It had been a terrifying ordeal.

How, I wondered in the wake of that and other experiences, was I going to be able to part with him? How were John and the girls going to say good-bye? There was not one among us who hadn't fallen completely in love with him. “Remember,” I kept telling the girls, “he's not ours. We can't keep him.” My heart would sink with each reminder.

Don Shouse came once to see Baby soon after he was born, but he did not come or call after that. Beside the fact that he was still recovering from his heart attack, Baby was a racehorse to Don, not a family member, and it was simply expected that the horse would be picked up six months after his birth. I dreaded the phone call, alternately letting the idea overwhelm me and pushing it from my thoughts.

“You know,” I said to John as we were having coffee one morning, watching the horses play together in the pasture, “the time is going to come when Don comes and gets him.”

“I know you're not going to be able to part with that horse,” John responded.

“No, I can't,” I answered back and started crying. Baby felt like ours. He was born here. He lived here. “Oh, come look at Baby!” I loved to cry out. “He's racing around the pasture with his mother.” Or, “see how he's sleeping among the dandelions.” I would run outside with the camera and take pictures. You just can't describe the beauty of a foal, those great big eyes with the huge eyelashes.

“I know what you're going to ask,” John said, “and the answer is yes. See what the guy wants for Baby. And buy him.”

In the unlikely event that Don was never going to claim Baby, I didn't dare call him ahead of time. But come fall, I did hear from him. By that point I wasn't too nervous because John and I had already agreed that we would pay for Baby whatever Don wanted. But I was surprised at what he had to say.

“I should be picking up my colt, but my health is really not good,” he told me, “and I'm not well enough to care for the horse. I will offer him to you for sale before I offer him to anyone else. And I will offer him for no more than the price of the stud fee so I can recoup my initial investment—fifteen hundred dollars. But on one condition.”

“What's that?” I asked. I didn't know at that point that a Thoroughbred of Baby's pedigree might have gone for as much as $5,000.

“You must race the horse,” he said. As the breeder in the state of Michigan, he would get $500 every time Baby won a race. And his hopes were high, because other racehorses sired by the same stallion were already doing well. Baby was expected to do a lot of winning.

My heart sank. I was going to have to go back to John and say there were strings attached. The girls had already been told we'd be keeping Baby.

“But I don't know anything about racing,” I replied.

“There's nothing to know,” Don answered. “Just find a trainer and get out the checkbook.”

“What does all this mean?” John asked when I told him about the deal, that we could keep Baby as long as we raced him.

“I don't know,” I said. “But it can't be that bad. The track is 13 minutes from our house down the expressway. It's close. I can go every single day and make sure he's okay.”

Despite our misgivings, we allowed ourselves to get more and more excited about the idea of Baby racing. Jessica had been a competitive ice skater at a high enough level that she traveled out of state to participate in meets. Rebecca, our younger daughter, had competed in dance. But now the girls were nineteen and seventeen and Jessica, in particular, realized years earlier that she had hit her plateau and was not going to be able to take her skill to the next level. Thus, we were missing the rush of watching our daughters give everything they had for medals and trophies. With Baby, our new child, we could indulge our family's competitive nature and experience the same kind of heady excitement—reverse time a little bit. What fun it would be to have our friends and family come to the track—and celebrate after the races!

Better still, we learned that a racehorse is considered an investment, with significant tax advantages. Our accountant explained to us that the minute Pat arrived at our house, the expense of taking care of her while she was pregnant with a Thoroughbred racer was a tax write-off, as was the cost of raising Baby. Thus, if we bought gravel for the road to the barn, we could deduct 50 percent of it, as two of our four horses were “business assets.” A heater for the water trough—50 percent deductible. Hay, fencing, whatever—all partial write-offs. In that way, Beauty and Pumpkin could enjoy the material advantages afforded Pat and Baby. Once Pat's next foal arrived, our write-offs would shoot to 60 percent—three out of our five horses would be Thoroughbred “investments.” And of course we were going to race that horse. There was no way we could keep a grandchild of Secretariat in the backyard and be racing another horse.