The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (7 page)

When we three arrive at the fence, the visible parts of the pasture are always empty, the horses down and around. The sky sprawls above us, everything quiet, as though waiting for some show to start, and it does; it always does. Amy takes each pinkie and pulls back the corners of her mouth so a keen whistle sluices through the air and makes its way over the land, a whistle so strong you can almost see it, dipping down and around the curves, sliding over the modest mounds, racing between rocks, and eventually reaching the horses, whose sensitive ears fork forward as they rise up from grazing, turn their majestic necks towards the call, their bodies, all at once, breaking into a trot, and then a canter, the whole herd of them, thirty, no forty, galloping towards the sound so we always hear the horses first before we see them, or rather we
feel
them first, through our feet, the ground vibrating, the thunder building, building to its breaking point just as they round the bend and burst into view, silvers and bays, chestnuts and golds, their bodies surging as though they are one mass moving, as though they will not, cannot, stop; they pound towards us with no sign of ceasing, and each time Clara and I start to step back—an instinct, a preservationist impulse—and each time Amy says
no.
“Stay still,” she commands and so we do, putting our faith in her and the herd, who are now no more than thirty, then twenty, then ten feet away, their necks extended as their hooves lift and hit the ground, closer and closer, our hearts in our throats as the whole hustling lot of them screech to a bunched, sudden stop right at that electric line, their huge chests heaving, their long faces hanging over the wire. Laughing, we open our hands and offer them carrots and apples, loving the ways their dry, rippled lips search our skin for more. We love the huge pools of their eyes. We love the veins visible in their faces. We love their wild gallop just as we love how the chosen one demurely, politely, lowers his head for the halter Amy slips on him, Clara now holding the rope as the horse walks behind her. I stand back and watch. All three—Amy, Clara, and horse—enter the darkness of the barn, the horse flecked with dirt and streaming sweat from his run. Five minutes later the three reappear on the concrete path, the horse totally transformed in his tack, gone domestic, it seems, in a matter of moments. A clip and a clop and my daughter’s chosen mount now stands obediently in the center of the ring as Amy tightens the girth, pulling up the saddle straps so they cinch the horse hard; he doesn’t protest, never protests, and then the stirrup proffered, Clara’s booted foot slipped in, and, with a boost from her teacher she’s up and over, sitting straight—remade, my daughter is—taking on height that isn’t hers.

And as I watch the lesson progress I wonder what sense we might make of this sport and the undeniable draw it has for millions of girls growing into adolescence. Does it have something to do with the paradox at the heart of being female in our time and place, girls told to stay strong and yet to be soft, this contradictory message reflected in the body of a horse, with his mixture of power and delicacy, size and fragility, animals who inspire fear even as—pure prey—they are full of it themselves?
How powerful your daughter must feel up there
, some feminist might proffer, an unfulfilling explanation, too easy, too pat, the flip side of the horse-as-phallus theory that, from what I can see, most people buy into without much reflection.

Like Clara, my own love of horses was paired with a desire to ride, and when there were no horses available, I spent my time locked away in my room with equine novels and plastic ponies, my fascination eclipsing every other childhood interest: the Schwinn bike I’d so loved and on which I’d pedaled my way out of the Golden Ghetto, now hung on a hook in our garage, its sparkling seat furred with dust. I don’t know what became of that bike, or the box I used to warm the egg I found in the forest. I have not carried those things with me into my adulthood, hanging on hard to my ribbons only, in pinks and reds and glory blues.

By the time I was old enough to understand the prevailing theory about females and equines, I was already sliding off the saddle and on to other adventures. For my daughter, though, I suspect riding will be a lifelong love, if only because we have bought a house in the country and will be moving there soon, the antique barn equipped with stalls, all ready for the pony we plan to purchase. My parents never encouraged my riding, believing it to be a fundamentally dirty sport, but for Clara, well, the case is very different, and it won’t be long before she’s old enough to understand, and worse internalize, the psychoanalytic viewpoint that I believe brings shame to the prismatic and fundamentally irreducible love a girl has for her horse.

I want alternative theories for my daughter. I believe the current understanding—the horse as phallus, the horse as practice for later heterosexual love—is not only wrong but—more problematically—damaging, transmogrifying a relationship packed with profundity of a highly unusual sort. And yet I’ve no choice but to admit that when I try to express what this profundity is, I come up tongue tied, stuttering, my head swirling with disparate images from my past; Rose riding Mr. K in the pasture stacked with cubes of hay; the glitter of the trees we raced towards; the flash of a stirrup, the resounding crack of her crop, rain on the roof of the barn, a deep-green show jacket lined with luminous yellow silk—thousands of images but nothing of substance to offer my daughter or any horse-loving girl. See her there, riding round and round the ring? See her, going in circles?

As for me, how odd to rediscover this love in my middle age, when I was so sure it had disappeared. Sometimes, during my daughter’s lesson, I sneak off to the barn and whisper to the piebald pony, combing his blond mane with my weathered fingers. And then sometimes I simply walk the aisles, reading the nameplates affixed to each stall door. I have always delighted in the way we name our equines:
Smokey Raindrops. Pride’s Starlight Tanya. A. M. White Night. Praise Be. World Peace. Lay Me Down. Amen.
And my favorite:
Sweet Revenge.
What do these names tell us? There are fourteen domesticated large land mammals—alpaca, cow, cat, goat, pig—to name a few, and I have never heard any of them referred to in such a, a … magisterial manner. Can you imagine a sheep called “Praise Be” or a dog called “World Peace”? The horse is the only domesticated mammal that can carry his ceremonial title; on any other it sounds absurd; it breaks the back. Were the bond primarily sexual would not a girl pick a designation that reflected lust rather than reverence? But what is this reverence made of, and why do boys in the presence of horses seem not to feel it, or to feel it less? I need to ride my mind back, and back, trying to find, in the scraps of my own particular past, alternative explanations for the bond between girls and horses.

So here I am, a girl of ten, then eleven, then twelve, a girl who saw in the hugeness of a horse terror and beauty both, a girl who felt, sitting up in that saddle, and only on my best days, that she had some kind of connection with an absolute
other
, and the elation that went with that, my body a bridge over which it seemed all the animals could come. And they did come, Clara, in some dream sense they did, and then later, back down on the ground, the ride now over, I’d open my hand clutching carrot peels, apple halves, or even a dark chunk of chocolate, the horse’s limber lips taking it in,
all gone
, but that small smear on my skin somehow proving it had happened, proving I’d been freed, if only for a moment, from the prison that a person is, my human halter off, my whole self dilated, trees and teeth, fur and wind and every kind of weather pouring through me.

According to myth, Pegasus lived a brief and noble life on earth before ascending to the sky, whereupon he atomized into a spray of stars that bear his name as an immortal constellation. Thus, on any clear night, you can look up and find him, his sequined eyes staring at you from a vast blackness in which he is either trapped or forever free, depending upon your view of infinity.

I find it ironic that the horse of all horses does not gallop on the ground but rather lives his life amongst celestials, in a dark field of silver florals. Because to me, in my mind, and for my body, horses were the one, if not the
only
, way to tether my broken being to the earth, from which it always seemed I was drifting, disassociated, radically severed from self and soil.

Surely I was not born this way. I arrived on March 21, 1963. Of my very early childhood I recall little, or little I wish to mention here, for in this story of horses and history, my life, it seems, started one spring evening. I don’t remember the date, but let’s call it May 28, 1973, ten years after my actual birth and just at the cusp of the sweetest season—June—when the gardens drop their modesty and begin their driven bloomings.

I know on that evening I smelled summer coming right around the corner. At ten, I was cradled in the stage called latency, a peaceful time well past the throes of infancy and long enough before the next leap into adolescence.

And I was playing that evening in the church’s empty parking lot, as I often did, with the children from a few streets over, let me call them the Callahans, a Catholic family and thus an oddity in the Golden Ghetto.

The Callahan kids were six in all, ranging in age from Mary, fifteen, who smoked and sulked in a corner of the lot, watching us younger ones with the slight sneer that teenagers perfect, to Joey, aged three, his face a splatter of Irish freckles, slurry always running from his nose.

We had a red wagon. It must have been the Callahans, and they must have left it behind in a hurry that evening because days later, after what happened had happened, the police found the wagon with Mary’s bracelet inside it, her name inscribed on the silver plate.

The wagon had a long, black pull handle, and the body was rusted here and there. One wheel was loose on its axis, so it clattered crazily on the church’s bumpy asphalt. Each kid took his or her turn pulling while the rest of us crammed into the cart and screamed with delight as we ricocheted around and around the empty church lot, the split-level houses across the street so silent, so stubbornly suburban, with their little lawns and little windows and dark doors. The world, it seemed, was emptied of everyone except the Callahan children and me, one kid pulling the rest, stuffed into the rusted red wagon circling the asphalt beneath a fiery sky, the streaked clouds painted pink and welt.

We had no notion that anything was or might soon be askew. Presiding over us was the gothic church with its windows of gorgeous glass that soared to the uppermost story, windows everyone in the Golden Ghetto, regardless of their religion, admired for their artistry and size, windows we all presumed were fixed because they seemed far too big to open and close, and much too special for such prosaic purposes.

It was a Thursday. It could not have been much past 6 p.m., because I recall the setting sun, the svelte shadows on the cracked concrete of the lot. Soon, we knew, our mothers would call us in and so—would it be fair to say—we sensed our time was short? We were, all of us—minus Mary blowing smoke O’s into the cooling air—crammed into this rusted wagon, the loose wheel making such a very loud sound, the person pulling (was it Andrea’s turn?) making a show of our enormous weight and her enormous strength, groaning and spitting as she used all of her horsepower to propel this mass of youth and laughter over the wrecked asphalt of the empty lot.

And thus it was that we did not immediately hear the strange sound, nor notice that one of those gargantuan and supposedly forever-frozen stained-glass windows was moving, yes,
moving
, inching out, and out, accompanied by a series of rusty bronchial screeches that suggested, in retrospect, hidden, unused hinges on every one of those supersized works of art.

“What’s that?” I recall someone said, and then a “shhh,” and then, “Goddamn it, guys,
shut up
.” That did it. Andrea stopped her Clydesdale imitation, and, as if on cue, we all looked up, searching for the source of this strange sound. And that is when we saw it, the ten-, maybe fifteen-foot panel opening above us with a crackling, sickly creak that was still somehow strong enough to move a giant Jesus through the air, his crown and cross captured in the cut of glass and careful curves of lead.

I was sitting smushed up against slurry-nosed baby Joe, who right then and there wet his pants, my pants soaking up his seepage and his smell. “Shhhh,” someone said again as the window kept coming, moving slowly out, and out, the late light landing on the colored glass, inflaming it. “God,” Andrea said, meaning, I think, that she thought God was making the window move, but I thought I saw the dark shadow of a person and a hand clutching what could have been—must have been—a crank, and then the crank cranked up and released the most unearthly rasp, a sound arthritic and scraping, as though the Jesus pictured on the moving panel had begun to speak of his agony in the only way he could.

And the last of the light turned the blood of that approaching Jesus dark and darker still, until finally Jesus’s blood was the color of gravy falling from his form. We all froze solid fear. Mary, who had been standing the entire time smoking and sneering in the corner of the lot, dropped her cigarette, just let it fall from her hand and then held her hand there, in the same stuck posture.

And now, appearing in the open window, the upper half of an old, old man, only a few wispy whites on his scraped scalp. The old, old man was wearing, I could see, a stiff white yoke around his neck, and when he stretched his arms towards us, his black robes billowed in the breeze. “Mary,” the man said, and Mary’s sneer fell from her face so quickly and completely I could practically hear it hit the ground, and her face turned soft and scared, both at the same time. “Joseph,” the man now said to the boy crammed next to me, and then one by one he recited the names of those six Roman Catholic Callahan kids—his congregants every Sunday—from his ledge on high, the man’s hands on the sill of a window gone wide, so Jesus entered the Golden Ghetto with all his horror and none of his purported peace. The old, old man pronounced the six names of the children he must have baptized at their beginnings, articulating each name with a purpose so pure and so mysterious that the names kept echoing in my mind all that evening, the man pointing with one rickety finger to each child as he titled them,
declared
them, and then, when he was done, his finger found me—the singular Jew and, for a reason I still today cannot say, a great fear filled me, perhaps because I did not want to be declared, could not be called by a man in billowing black, his finger fixing me to some barbed spot. I sensed danger—
what danger? why danger?—
the stained glass burning in the last of the light as he pointed straight at me, his eyes beaming blue beams until a bird blew by, breaking his gaze with a sound I could almost hear: sweet snap. I was free.