Chosen by a Horse
A MEMOIR
By susan richards
SOHO
Copyright © 2006
Susan Richards
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-56947-419-2
Chapter One
It was a cold March day and the horse paddock at the
SPCA was full of mud. I stood shivering at the fence in the
drizzle as my breath billowed gray mist over the top rail. In
my hurry to get there I'd left the house without a hat or
gloves, grabbing only a windbreaker from its hook above
the basement stairs on my way to the garage.
If I had stopped to think, I would have responded as I usually
did when hearing a plea for help for animals sick and suffering
at the hands of humans: I might have done nothing, or
I might have sent a check. But this time when my friend Judy
called to tell me the SPCA had just confiscated forty abused
horses from a Standardbred farm and needed help housing
them, I ran for my jacket and jumped in the car.
I don't know why this time was different, why in an
instant I chose to do something I'd previously avoided. I was
not accustomed to going to the rescue. Mine was never the
face friends saw smiling over them as they woke up in the
hospital alter surgery. I wasn't the one they called to drive
them to get their stitches out or to pick up the results of lab
tests or X-rays or anything medical. I had a horror of sickness,
my own or anyone else's.
With such an aversion to illness, why was I standing at
the fence watching twenty emaciated broodmares with
their foals stumble in the mud? Why did I answer that call?
Perhaps it was just a knee-jerk reaction to a deep and abiding
love of horses, a love passed down to me by my grandmother,
a formidable, sometimes cruel woman who had
become my guardian when I was five. As always, I cringed
when I remembered my grandmother, and at the same
time I envied her a now-vanished world full of ocean liners,
Pullman cars, and best of all, horses. When I was
growing up, there were still carriages and odd bits of harness
in the stable at her home in South Carolina, lovely old
carriages that hadn't been driven in thirty years. I'd look at
them and feel cheated that I hadn't lived in a time when
horsepower provided the only means of transportation.
In my grandmother's attic was a trunk full of riding
clothes, hers and her mother's: brown leather field boots
that laced up the front, handmade in England; wool tweed
riding jackets with leather buttons and small tailored
waists; linen breeches with leather leg patches; and wide-hipped
jodhpurs with fitted calves.
There was also a coachman's heavy wool livery with
silver buttons engraved with an
H for Hartshorne, my
grandmother's maiden name and my middle name. When
I was six or seven I'd go through the contents of this trunk,
carefully lifting out the brittle fabrics with the frayed edges
and the disintegrating linings, and once, one of the coachman's
buttons came off in my hand. I turned it over and on
the back it said Superior Quality.
I put the button in my pocket, and thirty-five years later
it hung on the bulletin board above my desk at home. It's
small and round and evokes more images than a feature-length
film. One touch and I'm tugged into a world full of
horses and carriages circa 1900: traffic jams of horses,
horses broken down, horses parked at the curb, horses
eating lunch, horses whose coats shine like the waxed paneling
of the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue, and
horses as shaggy as schnauzers. A perpetual horse show:
every day, everywhere, all the time.
It was my grandmother who had given me my first
horse when I was five.
"Her name is Bunty," my grandmother proclaimed,
handing me the lead line as she herself marched out of the
pasture, leaving me alone with my new pony.
Standing at the other end of the lead, I squinted up at a
fat white body slung between two sets of shaggy legs with
a tail that swept the ground at one end and dark narrowed
eyes under thick lashes at the other. It was like leaving me
alone with a chain saw. I knew I was in mortal danger, but
I was holding a horse.
My horse. The best thing that had ever
happened to me. I wish I could say I was a natural from the
start. That I hoisted myself onto her back and, with a willow
twig for a crop, went for a wild gallop around the field.
But the truth is, I had no idea what to do. I stood trembling
in my pink sundress, staring at the pretty pony until she
lunged forward and removed some of the baby fat packed
around my upper arm.
It never got much better than that, not with Bunty. I
loved her anyway: blindly, doggedly, through years of her
biting, kicking, and embarrassing me in horse shows by
sitting down and refusing to enter the show ring, or refusing
to leave it. Occasionally her foul mood lifted and she
was a pleasure to ride, but most of the time she brought me
to tears. At ten I was given a Morgan gelding named Alert
and was shocked to discover that a horse could be gentle
and affectionate. I hadn't realized what a hostage I'd been and,
beginning with Alert, developed a lifelong love of Morgans.
Now when I walked into my barn, I walked into timelessness:
the coachman's button evoking the distant past, my
childhood, the present-all merged into one panorama of
horses. I already owned three horses, and the time I spent
with them wrapped around my day like brackets, the same
beginning and ending no matter what happened in the
middle. I worried, since turning forty, since I'd developed
a bad back. What if I got too weak to take care of my three
horses, a mare and two geldings? What if I got too stiff, what
ill got too old? My next-door neighbor, Henry, had owned
twenty-five dairy, cows. He loved every single one like a
daughter. Sometime in his late seventies he got old. Arthritis
twisted his lingers, and emphysema stole his breath. For
a year he crawled on his hands and knees from cow to cow
to get the milking done. He hid his lace behind his swollen
hands and wept the day the big cattle trailer came to take
away his herd. From time to time 1 had feared that something
similar might happen to me. And yet, I stood, waiting
to take on the care of yet another horse, one in
desperate need of a home.
A man stood beside me at the fence, an SPCA volunteer
named Ted, who had helped confiscate these horses. After
I'd signed the necessary papers, agreeing to foster a mare,
he'd come outside with me to help find and then herd her
into the trailer for the drive to my farm. Ted was hatless and
coatless, in blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, splattered
with mud from his leather work boots to his unshaven
chin. His brown ponytail hung dark and wet, coiled
between his shoulder blades. Ted wiped at the raindrops
gathering on his wire-rimmed glasses, smearing wet lines
across thick bifocals. He wore a small gold stud in one ear
and when I moved closer to look at the list he had pulled
from his back pocket, I smelled nicotine. He traced a thick,
nail-bitten index finger down the computer printout and
stopped at number ten.
"Here she is." He tapped the paper. "Current Squeeze."
It was a strange way to acquire a horse, sight unseen, by
choosing an appealing name off a Seized Merchandise list
from the Ulster County Sheriff's Department. The entire
situation was strange. I knew nothing about Standardbreds
beyond the fact that they were long-bodied, harness-racing
horses, sometimes called trotters because they raced at a
trot. I wouldn't have known what to look for beyond general
good health and a pleasant temperament, neither of
which was relevant in this situation. The closest I'd ever
come to a Standardbred had been the occasional high-speed
glimpse of a brown face looking out the window of
a horse trailer as it sped down the thruway on its way to the
track with one of the graceful-looking racing carriages
called a sulky strapped to the top.
So with nothing but a list of names before me, I had
picked the name I thought would be the most fun to shout
across a pasture. I'd already started practicing shouting it in
my head:
Current Squeeze! Curry! Squeezy! Names are important
to horse people. It was hard to come up with a good
one. Even though I'd had horses almost all my life, I'd only
had the chance to pick a name once. It had been fifteen
years earlier, when I was getting divorced and the lawyers
were lighting over who would get the horses. We'd had several
horses, including my Morgan mare, Georgia. After a
year of haggling, I was awarded custody of Georgia and was
then surprised to discover she was pregnant-the result of
an unplanned visit from a nearby Morgan stallion. My ex-husband
never would have agreed to give me Georgia if he
had known I was getting two horses for the price of one.
So when a filly was born a few weeks after Georgia had
been settled in my new barn, I named the filly Sweet
Revenge. I'd kept Sweet Revenge long enough to saddle
break and train, and when she was four, I had given her to
a friend's teenage daughter who had become serious
enough about riding to warrant having her own horse.
I still had Georgia, who would be eighteen this spring.
Along the way I had also acquired Hotshot and Tempo, two
quarter horse geldings, both now in their late twenties.
These three were my little equine family, perfect in number
and temperament. They had worked out the pecking
order years ago and everyone knew his or her place. Fur
rarely flew, blood spilled even less often, and probably
wouldn't have at all except for Georgia, who occasionally
picked on Hotshot because she was a mare and that's what
mares do. Hotshot let her because he was utterly devoted.
I'd never thought of getting a fourth horse, I didn't want a
fourth horse. I was forty-three, I lived alone, I had a herniated
disc that had prevented me from riding any faster
than a walk for the past two years, and I worked live days
a week as a social worker. Yet here I was, considering
appealing horse names listed on a police roster.
Ted and I squinted toward the paddock into the chaos of
twenty large brown mares shivering around the perimeter
of the fence with foals glued to their sides. We were trying
to locate a brass tag with the number ten on it hanging from
the cheek latch of one of the worn-out halters. The mares
struggled in the deep mud on swollen joints weakened by
malnutrition and untreated racing injuries. Many of the
horses had open, weeping sores on their legs and flanks. All
wheezed and coughed with respiratory illnesses, and green
phlegm oozed from eyes and noses.
Whatever misery they had escaped, there still was more
in this overcrowded paddock deep in filth, where it was
impossible to distinguish between mud and manure. The
well intentioned SPCA was overwhelmed. There was no
barn or shed to shelter the sick horses from the cold and rain.
The small stable attached to the paddock had only four stalls
and was already filled with horses that had been confiscated
before this newly seized group of forty. The SPCA had never
intended to house this new group of horses hut instead,
through radio and television appeals already on the air that
morning, hoped to place all of them in foster homes that
same day until their fate could be resolved in court. With
luck, no horse would spend even one night in this overcrowded
paddock.
It was impossible to read the numbers on any of the tags.
The herd jostled and huddled together on the other side of
the paddock, as far from the two humans standing at the fence
as possible. I felt a wave of fresh anger at this aberrant behavior,
at what caused it. Horses treated humanely don't run
from people. I'd never seen domestic horses react to humans
this way and here were forty, cowering against the far fence
as though we'd come to shoot them.
More SPCA volunteers appeared, two women to help us
find Current Squeeze and to herd her and her foal into the
horse trailer that was backed up against the open paddock
gate. Ted climbed over the paddock fence and joined the two
women, who were ankle deep in mud, waving their arms to
try to separate horses enough to walk between them to check
the tags for number ten. The herd seemed tied together as
they moved in tight circles of exhausted panic. In their panic,
some fell to their knees, unable to lift their hooves as the mud
gripped and sucked them down. A few of the fallen mares
groaned as they struggled to their feet, only to be knocked
down again by the frantic movements of the herd around
them. The high pitched whinnies of foals momentarily separated
from their mothers added to the terror in the paddock.
I couldn't hear to watch another minute.
"Never mind about Current Squeeze," I called. "I'll take
anyone."
A few minutes later, one of the bay-colored skeletons
stumbled up the trailer ramp, followed by, a muddy foal. Ted
scrambled after them, securing a thick rubber-coated kick
chain across the back, and then he lifted the ramp, locking
it in place. He took the list of names out of his back pocket
again and walked to the front of the trailer, disappearing
inside for a minute. When he reemerged, he hopped onto the
wheel fender and shouted across the paddock to me.
"Lay Me Down," he called, waving the list. "Her name's
Lay Me Down."
If the only criterion for choosing a horse was a name, I'd
gotten a loser. Lay Me Down? It wasn't a name, it was part
of a prayer children recited before going to sleep at night. In
a different context-say, shouted across a pasture-it
might even sound a little wanton.
Lay Me Down! Lay Me!
What would the neighbors think? Giving a horse a name
like that was almost as bad as not feeding her. You couldn't
even get a nickname out of it. But it was too late. Lay Me
Down was already in the trailer; this was no time to make
a fuss because of a name.
The parking lot was beginning to fill with trailers as more
people arrived to pick up horses. The SPCA had its hands full
orchestrating this heartwarming but overwhelming
response to its broadcasted appeal for help. Right now I had
to move to make way for someone else who could load
another horse. Timing was crucial. Every horse there was
critically ill and needed immediate medical attention, a
responsibility anyone fostering one had agreed to assume.
This was the part I most dreaded. My medical phobia. Since
Georgia had birthed her foal, when there had been strictly
routine visits for a healths horse, I had called in a vet once a
year for vaccinations.
"We're all set to go," a thin thirtyish blonde named
Laura called over to me as she climbed into the cab of the
truck that would pull Lay Me Down's trailer. After seeing
the appeal for help on television, Laura had offered the use
of her horse trailer. I'd met her for the first time when I
was inside signing papers She couldn't foster a horse herself,
she'd explained; she had too many of her own already.
I headed for my car, not at all anxious to leave this hub
of support and expertise to begin caring for two sick horses
on my own. What was I thinking, taking on two animals I
might have to bury in a back field by next week?
I drove around to the entrance gate and waited for
Laura's green truck to appear in my rearview mirror. It
would take thirty minutes to get home, forty-five if I
slowed down for the trailer. As soon as we got there I'd
telephone my friend Allie. If anyone could help me to keep
the mare and her foal alive, it was Allie.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chosen by a Horse
by susan richards
Copyright © 2006 by Susan Richards.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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