The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (10 page)

Except she didn’t. Some horses were so scarred from her whip work that they had sunken spots in their hides where you could fit your finger in. We began to understand: these beatings happened, like wind or weather. We started to scan the sky.

We were twelve girls with twelve tongues, girls thick with gossip and giggles, but about the beatings, we did not speak.

I remember Splash, a large, baby-faced gelding who, smelling dinner on our very first trail ride, took off towards the barn no matter how hard Jenny yelled, “Ho there, Horse!” Back at the stable, Rose undressed Splash. She unbuckled his girth, slid the bit from his maw, slipped his halter over his head, hitching that halter to a hook anchored deep in the barn’s main beam.

“What a bad, bad horse you are,” Rose said.

At these kinds of times, her voice took on a little lilt, and she tongued the dentures she’d showed us just days before, when, without warning and during a ghost story she’d popped them into her palm, enjoying our sudden shock.

And now, with Splash, we could see her tongue her teeth; slip them from their sockets, the brief gap in her gum line, the sudden snap back in.

We knew. The horse knew. Rose brought out a long crop and flicked it towards Splash’s face. His anus let go. “Stinker,” Rose said. And then she did what she did, but this time no touch, Rose coming closer, slashing sideways so the horse must have felt that buzzing breeze, the edge of expectation sharper than any actual instrument.
Could
is such a wide word, composed completely of corners. Rose kept the crop at him, but always a skin-shaving away, here and there, now here. As for Splash, he wept, but not from pain—from
could.
He wept sweat and droppings. And we just stood there, dangled dryly. On and on Rose went, toying with this … pure possibility.

And all that night our sleep was slashed. I saw an angel in an orange grove. Her wings made a buzzing sound as she rose into the sky, mouth full of pulp; I snapped awake. The cabin was dusky with dawn just coming on; in the other beds were the bulky forms of girls on the move, girls deeply dreaming, troubled, tossing here and there.

Splash, huge in stature but delicate in psyche, got sick after that. We were, by then, ten days into camp—at most. But already every one of us girls had grown frightened of Rose, while we were also equally enchanted, numbed by some spell, the feeling as if for forever. Splash circled in his stall. He stopped eating. Dr. Fascal came out in her van. She put her ear to Splash’s heft and listened. She pressed his sides and stomach. She used her stethoscope and let us hear his insides, the secret sounds of horses. “Maybe a torsion?” the vet said, clearly confused. Splash’s bedding was matted and stunk from slurpy shit.

“Has his diet changed?” Dr. Fascal asked Rose. “Don’t know, I mean, no. No,” Rose said, stumbling in a way that was all wrong for her, eyes cast down. The vet left, with instructions. For the next twenty-four hours Rose massaged Splash’s sides, sang him songs, slept in the straw so she could walk him on the hour. Had she answered Dr. Fascal smoothly, had she not slept in the straw, had she sailed instead of stumbled, we could have simply hated her.

Rose. Nothing simple. Sweetly pretty. She slept in the straw. She loved Mr. K. Every evening she bathed her horses; hose on, loofah sponge; she massaged each animal, humming as she worked, her feet bare in the sudsy runoff. She was a woman lovely to look at then, pale and vivid both.

It didn’t take me long to map out Flat Rock Farm. Within days I knew how to find the pond, the pastures, the far field. Within the first week I’d seen the whip work and adjusted to my mandates. The goal, Rose told us over and over during the group lessons that dominated the day (we were taught all together despite differences in our abilities, and I was the least experienced rider at the camp), the goal for every rider was to practice balance by finding the body’s core. One must not grip the mane or reins: balance was
ultimately
a matter of mind.

And also, I discovered, a matter of physical work, so different from the cerebral pursuits of school. Each dawn at Flat Rock Farm Alice fed us warm biscuits, then sent us to the stable for scheduled chores just as the day became blue. We took up pitchforks, wheelbarrows, brooms. Balance could also be found in labor, in the repetition of small tasks that occupied the body as they freed the mind. We learned to wash the tack. We climbed ladders, crawled into the cupola with a rag and a tin bucket. Once inside that cupola, I found an intact but dead dragonfly. Its body glinted green, like the ones I’d seen in the woods. The wings were netted and reminded me of the nylons my mother wore. How odd, something similar between two species that shared next to nothing. And yet, maybe the spaces between them were not so great. Weeks went by. I learned to balance on the broad back of a horse. As I did I found I could do more than just hold on. I found I could talk to the horse with my legs, my hands, my weight, and that the horse, in turn, could talk to me.

Reassuring, yes. Apparently nature had these built-in bridges, and who knew how far they could go? If a thousand-pound, hard-hoofed beast could understand you, and vice versa, well then, who or what could not? Horses proved that there was no such thing as an impossible conversation.

I think we came to Flat Rock Farm for this impossibly possible talk. We were all girls between eleven and sixteen, but the gaps in age were irrelevant here. All the ordinary dividing lines dissolved: old/young/fat/thin/pretty/ugly/well-dressed/slob/rich/poor. Here all girls were equaled by shoveling shit and putting in bits. When everyone stinks, no one does.

While Freudians posit that girls are drawn to horses as a form of heterosexual practice (in both its private and public manifestations), maybe the opposite is the case. Perhaps girls are drawn to horses because these grand animals provide girls a rare opportunity to be together, as females,
unsaddled
by cultural conventions. At Flat Rock Farm, Jenny, the fat girl, was friends with Theresa, the prom queen. I remember one rest hour going to the barn, all twelve of us girls, and finding there in the back tack room an old trunk.

“Open it up,” Emily whispered.

Outside it was high noon, glaring and hot, but inside the tack room the air was dark and quiet, the saddles on their mounts looking haunted, their shape suggesting a rider we couldn’t see.

We opened the trunk. It was from another century, lined with crumbling floral paper. In there we found a black-and-white photograph of a stern, slim woman sitting high on her high horse. With one hand she held the reins, in the other a bouquet of roses. Beneath her a judge was pinning a ribbon and rose to her horse’s bridle.

We found flouncy skirts held up by hoops; jodhpurs padded with threadbare suede; boots that laced up the front with tiny tarnished fishhooks; a postcard showing a massive ship, its prow raised above the wild waters of what must have been the Atlantic, on the backside someone’s spidery script, impossible to read except the end:
Love to you all, to the farm, to Lady–Moi.

“‘Moi’?” whispered Amy.

“‘Me’ in French,” whispered Jenny, holding the card, turning it over and over.

“Why are we whispering?” shouted Theresa.

All twelve of us girls jumped as though we’d been stuck with a cattle prod.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!” said Jane. “Jesus!”

“Look at this,” said Elizabeth, and she pulled from the trunk a straw hat banded by a cucumber-colored ribbon; she put it on.

That was the beginning. Someone else pulled on the old black boots, another girl the once-white skirts. That trunk had no end; from its interior came more and more clothes, came pearls and brooches, hard hats and sun hats, multiple corsets with ribbon and eyehooks, crumpled kid gloves. Despite the heat, we shucked our standard uniform and dressed ourselves right out of this world, and when we were done, we walked around, bowing to one another, admiring.

Not long ago, Amy Brisbee, a girl who’d been at Flat Rock Farm during the same summers I was, e-mailed me a picture of us dressed up in the mystery clothes from the old trunk. “Remember this?” Amy wrote. “I found it in my dresser drawer.” The picture, scanned in, was grainy but unmistakable; there we were in various stages of Victorian regalia, behind us the saddles and the sunbeams through the shuttered windows, our real clothes visible in piles on the floor. “Who could forget?” I e-mailed back. But there is one part I did forget, or maybe never knew: Who had taken that picture? Not Amy, because I found her. I found everyone, following form after form with my finger. All twelve of us accounted for. “Who gave you the photo?” I asked Amy, and she wrote back, “Don’t know.” Was someone looking in on us from outside, perhaps peering between the shutters; someone spying. Hank? Rose? Someone seeing.

That picture is remarkable for the way it captures a group of girls at play, in whim, but it is more remarkable if you realize we were so absorbed we never knew we were being watched. Or if we knew, we didn’t care, and thus forgot. We were twelve girls learning to do the work of womanhood—the shit-smeared feeding, cleaning, muscle-aching labor of loving an animal dependent upon you and
not
losing yourself in the animal. In fact finding yourself in the animal and all the associated tasks of care, shaping as you were shaped.

Practicing. Twelve in all. Girls, learning our mothers’ lives were not our future’s only form, and that, unlike those older women, we need not be diminished by the need to nurture. Twelve girls. Washing the tack on Sundays, cleaning the cupola on Mondays. We grew so strong those summers. Twelve girls freed in our faux corsets. Standing sure, we were. Learning. “My, you look lovely, madame.”

That I was the worst rider at camp seemed more a matter of character than skill, a fact that I accepted with an odd equanimity. My heels flew up; my reins tangled. I kicked when I should have squeezed, squeezed when I should have kicked. When the other girls cantered, I had to move my mount to the center and stand idle. Sometimes my mounts, probably bored beyond reason, would lift their heads and let loose a plaintive whinny, or a deep soft nicker, as though chuckling to themselves over me, the clumsy one who belonged in a Schul, not a saddle.

The fact is, my bloodline was entirely irrelevant. Religion did not hold me back; philosophy did. I rode like I lived, and vice versa: in a state of foreboding. What so scared me up there? Was it that I could feel, though the thick wedge of saddle, the orchestration of many muscles moving me, so I was moved, a passive person, a rider only in name? Or was it simply the gap between me and the ground, that descent decorated night after night with tales of horse lore as we lay in our beds; someone knew someone who had died going down, her neck snapped when the horse bucked her off, or worse,
had we heard
, or still worse,
there had been
… In the dark girls swapped stories, the purpose of which seemed to be to tether us to horses through terror, like a frightening film one can’t wait to see. I’d cover my eyes one second, peek out the next.

What is the purpose of loving what haunts you, of returning, time and again, to terror, or its kinder cousin, fear? What is the story here? Well, for starters, there appears to be no single story when it comes to girls and equines. Terror on the one hand, reassurance on the other, and then we run out of hands, but not contradictions. What is wild and domestic both? How can you find the ground by learning to leap? How can you hate what you love? Some researchers posit that the female brain has a thicker corpus callosum than does the male brain. What might this mean? In the female brain there could be more fibers connecting the separate hemispheres, so left and right swap stories, blend concepts, come closer. Male brains, in a vastly generalized sense, are better at keeping their twin bins on separate sides of the shelf, verbal here, spatial there, image to the right, logic the left, tears east, talk west. Male brains in general don’t court inconsistencies, while the female brain seems to be built for these. Obviously there are abundant exceptions, but let’s look for a moment at the mass. Horses, their mass, one thousand pounds on average. Horses, piebald or chestnut, stubborn or sweet, stallion or mare—either way all this bulk and its associated contradictions may fit with more ease inside the circle of female skull.

Maybe this is why—short on talent, constantly criticized—I still went back (we still went back), lesson after lesson. Possessing a brain built to perceive paradox, females, or some subset, may find a resonant focus in the horse. In my own particular case, add in the sole certainty of uncertainty that is part and parcel of every equine encounter, along with an entrenched tendency to see a universe ringed by risk, and what better way to practice my perseverance, to entertain my compulsions?

But what I was mostly chasing up there, I think, was what I’d found that first day on the Bedouin pony—a total concentration, both a focus
and
a frame for my fear. And when that happened—focus and frame—I got just what I wanted. The click came. I cantered and forgot to call it cantering. There were two beings but one beat. I started streaming.

And when the ride stopped, the horse stopped, the rhythm stopped, when I slid off the animal and slipped back into the singular, then for a little while objects appeared brighter, sounds suggestive of worlds beyond themselves, a simple sip of water—like drinking diamond. It is hard to hold such joy. Its brimming feels nearly painful, but not quite. No one else knows. The day is as ordinary as country cotton. The milk is as it always is, tinged bluish in the bottle. And yet you look here and there you see new angles in the day, every person a prism. The grass a thick impasto. Horses look different too when you are saturated with such joy, already leaving now, its life span shorter than a fruit fly’s but still enough so you can see the animal anew.

“Doesn’t it seem weird,” I said to Aggy as we stood by the pasture fence, the lesson over, the click clicked, “doesn’t it seem really weird that horses could kill us in a second if they wanted to?”

“Yeah,” said Aggy, her hard hat still on. She took it off, dangled it by its strap.