The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (24 page)

In the gerbil building, I was subjected to my father’s critical eye and constant scoldings about waste, money, and the terror of fleas. But in the stable, I felt welcomed and useful as I fed the horses before school and turned them out into the pastures with a thundering of hooves. I loved to watch the horses run with heads and tails held high, looking as if they might, at any moment, take wing.

W
HAT
is it about girls and horses? People love to equate the passion that young girls have for horses with burgeoning sexuality, but girls who ride know that true horse lust is all about power.

Within a year of opening her riding school, Mom had collected a group of enthusiastic barn rats, girls whose zealous affection for horses was equal to my own. The girls never minded helping us shovel out stalls, fill water buckets, or comb burrs out of tails.

To these girls, I was a TV idol. I gradually learned to en joy living up to their high expectations by fearlessly climbing onto even the most headstrong horses to help train them. One particular resident horse—a sorrel half-Thoroughbred colt appropriately named Derringer—was completely psychotic. Anytime someone mounted him, Derringer would take off like a
bullet, head low to the ground, body flattened so that your only chance for survival was to press your body against his neck. Finally, I broke him of this by pulling his nose toward my knee and nearly flipping us both onto the ground.

The stable was the one place in my life where I felt in control. It was also a place where age meant nothing. Women and girls who love horses have a natural common ground, and I found myself in demand as a riding partner on the trails. I didn’t have many friends at school, but there was always someone to talk to at the barn, so I was much less lonely than before. School became something I had to get through before riding.

Joanne and Mystique were among my mother’s first riding students. They lived together in an apartment overlooking the Catholic church in town with a fuzzball of a gray dog that was perpetually panting, no matter what the weather. Mystique was a philosophy professor at Radcliffe College, and Joanne had a little leather shop in Brookfield, where she made belts and sandals and handbags for the tourists who came apple picking or leaf peeping through central Massachusetts.

It took us a while to catch on to the fact that Joanne and Mystique were a couple, despite the fact that both of them sheared their hair shorter than my brother Donald’s and dressed in identical blue jeans and T-shirts. Once we did, though, we accepted them as they were. Mom shared her coffee every morning with Joanne as they watched the horses in the back pasture, and Dad liked to linger at the kitchen table whenever the women rode in the ring, since neither wore a bra.

Joanne was a sumo wrestler of a woman with serious dark eyes and sleek black hair. She was one of the first eight adults to sign up for riding lessons when Mom started offering beginner
classes for adults. For that lesson, I helped Mom tack up the gentle school horses we’d picked up at auctions and loop their reins over the top rail of the ring. Mom instructed the nervous women to stand at their horses’ heads while I demonstrated how to mount a horse in the center of the ring.

“Hold the reins in your left hand and the pommel of the saddle in your right,” Mom lectured. “Then lift your left leg—that’s your
left
leg, Sandra, otherwise you’ll end up sitting backward—and put your left foot in the stirrup.”

The women all dutifully took hold of their reins and saddles. Unfortunately, the lesson was cut short when one of the barn cats, a black and white tom we called Rocky, flung himself kamikaze style off the top rail of the ring and onto the neck of one of the horses. Panic ensued. The horse that Rocky had speared with his claws reared back, tugging at the top rail and startling the other horses so that they pulled back, too.

The reins were only looped around the top rail, but they held fast. The collective strength of the horses was enough to pull the top board right off its fence posts, though; the horses set off with it and dragged the fence rail halfway across the ring before we managed to stop them.

The women screamed, terrifying the horses even more. In seconds, there were horses and reins and broken boards and cats and dust flying every which way, unsettling even my unflappable mother, who yelled, “Calm down! Please, all of you, if you calm down, the horses will, too!”

The noise caused my father to run up to the barn from the house, shouting something to my mother about lawsuits and lessons not being worth the risk. My mother was not dissuaded. It took us several minutes, but we eventually had all
of the horses settled along the rail again. One by one, my mother taught the women how to mount their horses, and soon they were plodding around the ring, all of them looking pleased with themselves for not giving up.

Every woman there wanted to be my mother.

A
MONG
the boarders, the woman I rode with most often was Savage Jones, a former film agent married to a pediatrician. Savage was fiftysomething, but with her tight red curls, stocky build, and pink Keds sneakers, she looked like an eight-year-old girl on coffee, bouncing along on her toes beside her giant bay horse, Bongo. Savage always carried a mayonnaise jar filled with a clear liquid that she sipped throughout our trail rides.

“It’s only vitamin water,” she assured me. “You can never get enough water to flush out the poisons from your system.”

Bongo had been gelded too late and was so wild that Savage appeared to fly around beside him like a trapeze artist dangling from the lead line. Yet she wouldn’t ride him in the ring.

“Too many eyes watching,” she confided. So I ended up leading Savage on trail rides through the woods, keeping Ladybug solidly in front of Bongo so that he couldn’t take off.

One summer morning, Savage showed up at the stables wearing a flea collar. “There’s no reason this wouldn’t work on a human,” Savage said, pulling the plastic collar a little tighter as we set off down the trail through the state land across the street.

Usually we followed the main logging road over tiny streams, beneath towering pines, and through an ancient orchard of gnarled, graying apple trees. One part of the trail was
like a fairy-tale forest, with pine trees so tall and thick that nothing but moss grew in the damp blackness beneath them.

As we rode, Savage talked about her former life in New York. Her chatter was as constant as the deerflies that needled our faces and shoulders, forcing us to tuck branches into the horses’ bridles and into our riding helmets for protection. Between Savage’s constant monologue, the rocking horses, the buzzing flies, and the swishing branches, I’d be lulled nearly to sleep. So I was startled when one day Savage yanked Bongo to a halt in the middle of the path and cried, “I know. Let’s have an adventure today!”

“What kind of adventure?” I asked uneasily. I trusted Savage about as much as I trusted her horse.

“How about taking this trail for a change?” Savage pointed at some flattened grass next to the logging road.

“That’s just a deer path,” I warned, but Savage had already turned Bongo away from Ladybug to nose through the thick brush.

Against my better judgment, I followed her; Mom had drilled it into me that my job was to safeguard the boarders. And so I was right behind Savage when her horse stumbled into a nest of digger wasps.

The wasps buzzed around Bongo and Savage in an angry mob. The horse reared and took off with Savage bouncing in the saddle like a rag doll. I spurred Ladybug after the bigger horse; half Arabian, Ladybug was fast, surefooted, and very determined. She caught up with the bigger gelding easily and I leaned over to grab the other horse’s reins, which Savage had dropped while she was making sounds like a fleet of fire trucks.

Once we’d halted, Savage righted herself in the saddle,
adjusted her flea collar, and gave me a shaky smile. She hadn’t dropped the mayonnaise jar. Now she lifted it to her lips. “You know, maybe Bongo is too much horse for me,” she said. “He’s just like my husband.”

B
EFORE
long, Mom had accrued so many riding students that she had to hire an assistant teacher. She spent some of her earnings on an indoor riding arena—a metal building that was like a huge, empty gerbil building—and, between boarders and school horses, stabled over forty horses at a time.

Yet Mom was still restless. “I think I’ll breed Arabians,” she declared. “I’ve always loved their pointy little ears and muzzles, and the way they run with their tails in the air like fountains.”

“You can’t do that. You don’t know one thing about breeding horses,” Dad argued.

She shrugged. “I’m sure the horses know what to do,” she said.

Mom bought a chestnut Arabian stallion named Nahill and had me help her train him. As long as there were no mares within smelling distance, Nahill was personable enough. His nastiest habit was nipping our pockets in search of treats and pinching our skin by mistake; I cured him of this by biting him on the ear. Before long, he was so tame that Nahill would trot by my side on a lead line as we hopped over rails on the ground together.

But breeding horses wasn’t as easy as breeding gerbils. You couldn’t just let a stallion run loose with a mare, Mom
explained, or the mare might get hurt because the stallion was too forceful.

Our first attempt at breeding Nahill was with Justice, an Arabian mare that a woman from Springfield boarded at our stable; Justice’s owner wanted a foal to train for her son. We waited for Justice to show the edgy signs of being in heat, and then Mom asked me to cross-tie the mare in the riding arena.

When Mom led Nahill out of the barn and into the echoing metal arena, I was startled to see our playful stallion transformed into a head-tossing, rearing beast, snorting and pawing the ground because he’d scented the mare. With a roar, he launched himself at the mare’s rump, breaking free of Mom’s hold on his lead line. The stallion reared and mounted the mare.

Justice’s eyes rolled until the whites showed. She tried to spin around to escape the stallion, but the ropes held. Nahill’s penis dropped from its shaft, as long as my arm and bright pink. I was nearly as terrified as the mare.

“Mom!” I cried. “He’s going to hurt her!” I made a move to release the cross ties, but Mom grabbed me just in time.

“Stay back,” she ordered. “This is how it’s got to be done. Don’t worry. It’ll be over in seconds.”

It was. The stallion gripped the mare’s quivering sides with his front hooves for a moment more. Then Nahill groaned and collapsed on top of her, nearly toppling the smaller horse beneath him.

Mom shoved at Nahill’s sweat-foamed shoulder to get him off the mare and led the staggering stallion back to his stall. I untied Justice as quickly as my shaking hands would allow.
The mare was suddenly, oddly calm, almost sleepy. I fed her a carrot in the flat of my hand.

The pregnancy took. And, amazingly, we were all there to watch Justice give birth. This, too, was much different from what I’d seen in the gerbil building.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and Joanne and Mystique were at the barn. So were Savage and her pediatrician husband, Whitney. Mom stood next to the stall door with them while Joanne, Mystique, and I climbed into the hayloft for a better view.