Chosen by a Horse (7 page)

“Um,” Rick said, separating himself from me. “Need any help backing out?”

“I hope she kicked the shit out of you!” the reincarnation of Granny called out. But my granny would never have said “shit.” It’s possible she didn’t know the word existed.

“Just keep it real straight through that narrow opening in the stone wall and you should be OK,” Rick said as the man swung into the seat and slammed the door in Rick’s face. The truck started and began slowly backing down the dirt drive, trailer first.

Allie came over and put her arm around me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “she definitely kicked the shit out of him.”

I felt awful—awful for the foal, awful because I had turned into my grandmother, and awful because Lay Me Down was going to be alone in her pasture that night.

The truck made it to the end of the driveway without hitting anything and backed slowly into the road. Rick and Allie and I stood around Lay Me Down, watching the blue trailer until it disappeared over the crest of a small rise.

We were left with a huge stillness, like an empty school yard after the children have gone home. The air was sweet with pink apple blossoms, blooming in the old orchard behind Lay Me Down’s turnout. The pasture grasses had turned a tender green. A pair of killdeer exchanged high-pitched cries as they scuttled around the pasture on long ternlike legs. They would lay their mottled eggs in the middle of the field, perfectly camouflaged on a lichen-covered rock. By mid-July the fledglings would teeter on the fence not too far from the young swallows, all of them taking shaky practice flights across the field. The day the babies flew away for good would feel a lot like this day. Empty. Quiet. Lonely.

“Come for dinner later,” Allie called as she and Rick pulled out of my driveway.

After they left, I decided to brush Lay Me Down to help distract her from the foal’s absence. She followed me across the pasture into the turnout and waited patiently while I fetched the grooming kit, a long wooden box with a wooden dowel grip filled with combs and brushes. I put it on the ground next to me and pulled out a shed blade: a two-handled flexible aluminum blade with small dull teeth on one side, used to pull out the hair of a horse’s thick winter coat.

I started right behind her ears, scraping the blade along her neck in the same direction the hair grew, pulling out the short, dull undercoat as I went. The hair fell to the ground in perfect crescent-shaped clumps. Later, I’d gather up the hair and sprinkle it in the bushes around the pasture for birds to use as nesting material. I had a collection of bird nests in the house, blown down in windstorms, all made with hair from my horses. The nests were incredible works of engineering, some made entirely of horse hair, others mixed with twigs and long grasses.

Lay Me Down pushed her neck against the blade, savoring the feel of a good scratch. Shedding is an itchy business, and most horses enjoy the help of a shedding blade. I had put down some hay to keep her busy while I brushed, but she didn’t seem interested in it. Maybe the newly green pasture had spoiled her taste for hay or maybe she just liked being brushed. She looked sleepy. Her head hung low at the end of her long neck, and her eyes gave a slow, droopy blink.

I’d never known a horse this obliging, this relaxed. I was used to being bossed around by Georgia, always on my guard lest I offend her in some way. It didn’t seem horsey, this calm, endless good nature. It didn’t even seem human. She had so many good reasons to be skittish or mean or difficult, but she never was. Except for when I led her into the trailer, I didn’t even keep a halter on her. There was no reason to, she came as soon as she saw me.

Unlike me, Lay Me Down seemed to feel no rancor. In
spite of everything, she was open and trusting of people, qualities I decidedly lacked. It was her capacity to engage that drew me to her, that made me aware of what was possible for me if I had her capacity to … to what? Forgive? Forget? Live in the moment? What exactly was it that enabled an abused animal, for lack of a better word, to love again?

I switched to the other side of her neck and worked backward toward her newly fleshed-out shoulder. She was a pure bay without a single white marking. It made her seem bigger to me, an ocean of deep brown as far as the eye could see.

“You’re beautiful,” I told her, letting the blade drop and running my hands over the newly sleeked neck. “My Lay Me Downie Brownie,” I said.

She took a deep breath and let a fine mist flubber out of her nostrils and slightly parted lips. I felt it on the back of my neck, her big, wet sigh. I felt it on my heart.

A
LLIE AND
I referred to our young womanhood as colorful. We had been colorful in a lot of the same ways but not together because we hadn’t known each other then. We didn’t meet until our midthirties, and by then we were in our spiritual phase, grateful we had survived our previous phase. It was the mideighties when we met and lying in the backseat of either one of our cars might have been books like
The Road Less Traveled, Men Who Hate Women
, or the
AA Big Book
.

For some of us, it was news to find out the whole world didn’t wake up most mornings hungover, with a man they’d met the night before asleep on the pillow next to them. But that more or less described my twenties if you threw in two packs of Marlboros a day. Somehow I’d managed to get
through graduate school and to become a high-school English teacher in Boston.

What I remembered about teaching was the clock, the big round clock at the back of the class, and how long it took the hands to get to noon, when I could leave and eat aspirin for lunch. Afternoon classes were better. The aspirin would start to kick in, and before I knew it, I’d be heading with a group of teachers to Happy Hour at a sports bar in Beacon Circle.

Nobody was happier at Happy Hour than I. By my third glass of white wine the hangover was gone, the shyness was gone, and I was brilliant.

I was pretty and guys liked me. It didn’t hurt that I was as hard to pick up as a beer nut. I drank and laughed, gave expert advice on subjects I knew nothing about, danced in my underwear, and hoped everyone noticed how smart I was.

What I really wanted was to buy a horse and get a lot of new riding clothes and be Meryl Streep in
Out of Africa
. First I needed to find a husband, and when I was twenty-nine years old I did. Instead of a baron, my husband was an angry Vietnam vet who looked good in a T-shirt splitting wood. He had once been a world-ranked tennis player and later became the tennis pro at a nearby country club. When he wasn’t being surly, he was charming, so we got married and bought a hundredacre farm in the Africa of America—Vermont.

During the day Jerry taught tennis, and I bought expensive appliances with money I had inherited from my mother.
At night we drank and hurled slurred accusations at each other while gourmet dinners burned on the new Viking range.

A month after we were married, he hit me. From that moment on I hated him, even though a psychiatrist tried to persuade me I didn’t.

“Why don’t you look at Jerry and tell him how you
really
feel,” the doctor would prompt, as though the worst thing the man in the chair next to me had ever done was to leave the toilet seat up. So I’d turn and look deep into Jerry’s eyes and say, “I hate you.”

This went on for months while I worked up the courage to leave. I would have left the day he hit me except I was embarrassed that my marriage had lasted only a month. Then Jerry had a heart attack. He was only thirty-six years old and, as it turned out, we made it to the emergency room in the nick of time. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about that.

On the spot, Jerry swore off red meat, butter, and Camembert. “What about Scotch?” I asked.

So he swore off Scotch, too, and a few weeks later he was home and sober, cooking Pritikin on the Viking, and I felt trapped. How could I leave someone who faced quadruple bypass surgery within the year?

One night at dinner as I started on the second bottle of wine all by myself, he turned to me and said, “I think you have a drinking problem, too.”

Then I really hated him. To get out of the house more, I
went shopping for a horse. Someone had actually loaned me a horse, two horses if you counted the companion pony that came with the pretty bay mare. They had come from a young woman who had left the area to go to college and didn’t know when she’d be back. The mare was a quarter horse and her name was April. Our farm bordered state land on all sides with miles of wide dirt logging roads, and I’d go on daylong trail rides with April, letting the pony follow us loose.

But I wanted my own horse, not for showing but for riding trails, jumping fallen trees or stone walls or small streams. I wanted an all-terrain vehicle of a horse, a horse with strength and stamina and beauty. I wanted a Morgan.

I’d never bought my own horse, and I decided to take my time looking for one. Horses can live thirty or forty years, and since I planned on keeping him or her forever, it was important to make the right choice. If only I’d put the same care and thoughtfulness into choosing a husband.

I spent almost a year taking short trips all over New England and New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, looking at every Morgan for sale and also seeing a lot of other horses besides. At the same time, I knew I’d leave my marriage eventually, so while I was shopping for a horse, I was also looking for an area that could become home.

In late fall about a year after Jerry’s heart attack, I found myself in upstate New York. It was cold and windy, and all the leaves were gone as I drove up a long dirt driveway on the way to visit a big Morgan horse breeder who had several horses for sale. On either side of the drive were pastures
full of Morgans, five or ten to a field, stretching away as far as the eye could see. Everywhere fences were in need of repair, barns needed roofing, and the main house looked like it hadn’t seen a new coat of paint in my lifetime. In the past year I’d seen all kinds of horse farms, from climate-controlled stables with airportlike security systems to simple backyard barns where horses and cows shared a muddy paddock. This farm looked big and broke. But whatever money the owner still had, she must have put it into the horses because they looked healthy. I drove slowly and checked: trimmed feet, shiny coats, clear eyes, good muscle tone. They looked terrific, every single one.

I had spoken to the owner on the phone. Sarah Nicholson’s voice had been farmer tired and unpretentious. She told me exactly what I needed to know about her horses and not a word more. I already knew from the
Morgan Horse Breeder’s Guide
that she owned the top-ranked Morgan stallion in the country.

I stopped the car at one of the enormous falling-down barns at the end of the drive. It must have been a dairy barn once; there were a few cow stanchions still visible at one end. I got out of the car and looked around for a human being. The barnyard was full of odd bits of farm equipment, chickens scratching around in the dirt, barn cats sunning in the doorway, and a couple of scraggly-looking black dogs who came over and peed on my tires. But no people.

I could see the color of the air that day, clear and sharp, the way the light is in late fall, the sun low in the west,
bouncing off all those shiny rumps in fields that were still green. In the distance I could hear cars on the New York State Thruway, a steady hum floating on the wind across the wide-open fields. The barnyard smelled of manure, diesel fuel, and hay.

And then, in the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, turning into the same dirt drive I had just driven down, I saw my horse. There’s a line I read in a book once:
I knew it was her by the feel of my heart in my
chest. That’s how it was for me.

All I could really see from that distance was a chestnut-colored Morgan with a wavy red mane pulling an open two-wheeled cart driven by a large man holding a buggy whip. But the word
pulling
didn’t do justice to what the horse was doing to that cart. Maybe it was the excitement of the wind, lifting and twirling her mane like towels on a clothesline, or maybe it was the sight of the barn, signaling the last stretch toward a bucket of grain, a warm stall, and some sweet hay. She seemed out of control.

She’d look great for fifteen seconds or so, with an extended, high-stepping trot, pretty as any carriage horse in a period film. Then suddenly she’d toss her head and buck, kick the cart behind her, break into a run, jerk the cart from one side of the road to the other, and just as suddenly resume the pretty trot. It was a miracle she didn’t run into the fence or overturn the cart. The other miracle was that her driver never once used his whip or raised his voice. I could hear him talking to her, but he didn’t yell, even at
her most out-of-control moments. By the time they reached me, I wanted to take them both home.

The driver’s name was Bob and he was a professional horse trainer. The red horse was a three-year-old named Georgia, who had just completed her first lesson in harness.