Half Broke

by Ginger Gaffney

  “Quiet, quiet!” I call out. “You are welcome to stay, but please be quiet. And step back, please, two feet from the rail.”

  I set the boundaries, and everyone comes to a hush while Flor, Sarah, and I return to our positions. I can see doubt forming on their faces, like maybe we won’t be able to do this, won’t be able to catch them or halter them. We won’t be able to separate them and clean Luna’s wound. Sarah looks at the ground and kicks at the dirt. Flor hasn’t spoken a word since the crowd gathered.

  “Are you two alright?” I walk over to Sarah, put my hand on her shoulder, and check the gashes in her forehead. “We can stop if you need to,” I say, “and start again tomorrow.” Flor walks over and stands so close I feel the heat of her body rise onto my face.

  “I’m not stopping. No way. Look at her.” She juts her chin at Luna. “We’ve gotta help her—today.” We turn toward Luna and see the yellow pus drooling across her cheek. Flor’s arms are relaxed and down by her sides. Her breath is even, and she holds her head at such a tilt I can see her nostrils flaring in and out. She’s calm; she’s confident; she’s ready.

  Sarah agrees. We get back into our positions, which sends the sisters rushing around the perimeter of the pen. Luna leads once again. Estrella dragging behind now. She’s tiring. Her footfalls are no longer fueled by panic and fear. Flor steps into the slot and cuts her back to the right; the connection between Estrella and Luna is broken, again.

  Sliding together, long strokes, we move as a band of feral horses. The space between our bodies swells with purpose. We push Luna’s torment into the back of our minds as Estrella starts to change. She’s running half rounds now, pivoting off our cue as we swing our needle left to right, right to left in a syncopated dance. A quiet balance comes over her. She runs for five more minutes and stops, parallel with the rail, breathing heavy, both eyes facing us. I see something familiar in her face. Her wildness disrobed, her domestic breeding peeking through.

  We stay motionless and let Estrella rest. Her body quivers, muscles loosening their grip. Her mind begins to untie itself from Luna. I move toward her from the center of the ring. If she is to take a step or try to bolt, Flor and Sarah have my corners and can cut her back. I reach out to touch her, scratch her neck and shoulders, the middle of her chest. She sucks in a half-caught gulp and then blows out the extra with one soft snort.

  Flor and Sarah are overwhelmed with emotion. Tears catch on their lower lashes. They have lived a long time on this ranch, unable to touch these mares. This ranch is small. Every person and every animal is tied to the whole. Luna and Estrella have been on their own, isolated and traumatized, for far too long. Flor and Sarah know what it’s like to live that way.

  We keep an eye out for Luna, who’s pacing back and forth in the other half of the pen, pitching a mournful wail every few strides. I leave Estrella and hustle to the box that holds the purple and red halters Flor has picked out for today, the same colors as her fingernails. I take soft steps back to Estrella and resume my hand massage with the halter and lead line draped over my shoulder.

  Without even the slightest flinch, Estrella lets me slide the noseband over her muzzle. I latch the brass buckle, and Estrella follows behind as I move toward the gate. I know now that Estrella has been handled by humans before she came to this ranch. She accepts my touch, offers a quick sense of trust. Horses who are damaged don’t make these changes with ease. Luna has stopped her desperate calls and, for the first time, stands quiet and watches Estrella walk away. Everything is crisp, clean, silent. I gesture for Flor to come get Estrella. We change places.

  At a slow walk, Sarah, Flor, and Estrella exit the pen. Estrella’s head and neck are low and swing loose from her body. Her eyes are round glassy marbles. They no longer glance sideways looking for trouble. I’m amazed how fast she can change families. It carves a piece of loneliness from the middle of my chest. As they stride out together, I notice Sarah’s limp is gone. Her bent leg is straight as a walking cane.

  I turn and widen my stance, waiting for Luna to burst toward her sister as she leaves the pen, but Luna is motionless, standing parallel to the rail on the opposite side of the pen. Her one good eye, a shotgun.

  Flor told me how the sisters arrived at the ranch two years ago. They were dropped here by a small-time breeder from a nearby town.

  “They’re too small,” he told the livestock crew. But what he meant was, they’re mares. People like geldings. Neutered males bring a higher price and sell easily.

  No one from livestock knew enough to look in the trailer, to see if they had halters on, to ask the man if they’d been handled before. They swung open the trailer door while the owner banged on the side walls with a stick, trying to frighten the horses out. Luna and Estrella twisted and crashed against each other and then, in a panic, leaped out the back and took off across the pasture, never to be touched again. Until now.

  One of the men from livestock asked the owner if they had names.

  “They ain’t got none. They’re sisters, though,” the breeder said. He slammed the trailer door and jogged around to the front cab of his truck, wishing them luck as he hurried out the gate, the livestock team in his rearview mirror.

  “Flunkies,” Sarah told me. “They’re flunkies, just like us.”

  Barely touched. Thinly loved. Not even given a name.

  WE ALL COME FROM somewhere, but that does not mean we belong. Sarah’s mom tried to strangle her two weeks before she took her own life. Now Sarah stands with her short beefy arms wrapped around Estrella’s black-and-white neck, her head pressed into Estrella’s forehead. Both close their eyes. Flor pulls down with her fingers and struggles to unravel the tangled knots locked solid into Estrella’s mane. Inside my truck, I drink a cold bottle of water, catch my breath, and watch the three of them. About a half dozen men gather around and dote over Estrella. On the back seat of my truck sits the lariat I brought over, hoping I would not need to use it. Resting flat and docile against the fabric, it looks nothing like the noose I may have to float over Luna’s neck if I can’t catch her.

  Luna’s no longer crying for her sister, no longer looking up. Her one open eyelid half covers her good eye. She paces around the perimeter, hits the middle of the gate, paces back again. A sick, empty rhythm comes from her hooves. When horses are in distress, they turn inward and ignore the world around them. They look more like robots than animals of prey. No longer alert, their ears fall sideways and face the ground. They move like caged animals, purposeless. They stand still, staring out into the distance, without blinking.

  I take another sip of water. My throat begins to burn. I know this sunken place. For the first six years of my life, I rarely spoke. Silence was my inheritance, like my blonde hair and broad forehead. Like the worried wrinkles around my baby eyes. I came into this world choosing to stay mute. I would not speak, not even in the confines of my room. I lived in a dead space, where silence kept me protected. Language was not to me what it is to most people—power to express. Power to understand. To me language sounded like a knife, cutting everything apart.

  I was born into a fast-moving family. They talked fast. They moved fast. One paragraph rolled into the next, without a breath. The space to listen, to form a thought, to build a sentence, was infinitesimally small. Every conversation was a simultaneous avalanche of sounds that roared and circled around us, a constant spray of words that seemed to squeeze the air out of the room.

  Unable to speak, I learned to watch bodies. My family became a cacophony of motion—fingers, hands, arms, touching, twitching, scratching, and picking. Torsos rocking, twisting away from each other when they got too close. Eyes darting around the room, staring at the ceiling, out the window, downward toward the ocher-colored linoleum floor. Lips that held stiff wrinkles in their corners, always prepped for the clamor of thought waiting to exit their heads.

  I sat in the center of this human storm until my torso curled forward into a small ball. I would crawl between their roiling bod
ies toward the couch where our dog, Sandy, slept. Taking refuge under the living room table that sat in front of the sofa. There I watched. From the knee down, their legs were like the branches of trees caught in violent weather—rubbing, twisting, a snap and crackle of joints. Looking up, I could see Sandy’s chest take in long deep breaths, her body a still point where my eyes could rest.

  LUNA’S HEAD HAS sunk low to the ground She has quit her pacing and stands shoved up against the corral wall. I lean back, pick up the lariat from the seat of my truck, and walk toward the round pen.

  Tony and Randy have arrived and, along with the rest of the men from livestock, they arrange themselves around the outside of the pen, like boulders, just as I begin to make my underhand loop. I’m not great with a lariat. I learned it a number of years ago from an older cowboy. Mostly I take practice swings at a plastic cow’s head outside my barn a few days each month. Catching poor terrified Luna will be a much harder target.

  Luna’s pain enters my body through my eyes and I see what I must do. She will never give herself up. She won’t do this on her own. She will fight for her freedom, even if it means losing that eye.

  Luna has a break in her. Either she was born with it, or someone put it in her. Either way, she has no home. I’ll have to make her come to us. Not ask her, not love her, not try to change her. I’ll have to rope her. I’m nervous, but I have no choice. She looks half dead before I start to swing, but then she wakes and takes off in a gallop.

  Angles. It’s all about angle: three, four, five feet. I’ve got to think ahead. Step back behind her. Straight across from her and all I’ll do is throw this loop right at the side of her face. The loop must come in like an unseen cloud, something that drops in and over her before she knows what has happened. If I miss, if I hit her face with this rawhide hanger, she’ll try to break through the walls.

  Some of the men have their hands on their hips, legs spread to the width of their bodies, as Luna peels around the pen. Tony and Randy hold their arms out wide, waving them, trying to distract her. She races around the pen in a rage, watching my loop grow. Sweat drips down the back of her legs. Her ears are flat, and her tail is pinched up between her butt cheeks. She’s ready to kick the shit out of me if I get too close.

  Counting again, my loop grows slow. It’s long and narrow, but I need it wider. The front edge of my loop keeps hitting the ground as I swing. I flatten my elbow, move it closer to my body, and straighten my wrist. My hand faces the sky as my loop bloats big enough to cover half her body. One . . . two . . . three, I let it fly. It’s coming up from behind her, shoots out in front like a massive Frisbee, and hovers. It’s three feet ahead of her and she freaks, kicks herself into fifth gear to outrun it, and the loop drops in around her shoulders.

  Take out the slack. Damn it, take out the slack. Don’t let it slide down toward her legs and tangle things up. I’m running backward. Coiling my lariat, snatching it up around her neck. I grab the rope with both hands and tuck my arms close to my body, hands out in front of my stomach, ready for her to hit the end. Contact! She’s in the air. Her front legs jump above my line, she turns, and the lariat pulls from under her belly. Another hit, and I take her momentum and swing her back the other direction. She’s tangled and pissed. She’s thrashing her front legs at the line as she gallops around trying to unravel herself. One more revolution around the pen, hopping and bucking, and the rope hangs again from her neck. I coil the lariat tighter, grab hold, and with all 122 pounds of me, I pull her around and she faces me at a halt. Steaming.

  She bolts. Again she turns, trying to outrun the connection, but there’s nowhere to go. We’re tied to each other. Fifteen more minutes of wheeling, back and forth. I’m coiling the lariat in, closer and closer. I have her five feet in front of me at a standstill. I can smell the stench of her infected face from here. I’m not making a friend today. Today we are going to save that eye.

  I move off to the side of her, not too close to her hindquarters, and fold her neck around to her rib cage. From this position, she’ll have to bend those hindquarters under her body and reface me. From this position, she can’t bolt, and she can’t level me. I bend her side to side, for ten more minutes, until her neck feels half as stiff. My mouth is dry, my jaw tight, my skin trembles as sweat tingles under my shirt.

  “Two men. Two men,” I shake the words from the back of my throat. “I need two volunteers. Somebody get the hose hooked up to the hydrant. We need to clean her up.”

  Tony jumps the round pen wall.

  “I can hold her,” he says. I have Luna’s head bent so close to her body that her muscles are fatigued and shaking. The lariat burns in my hands.

  “You can’t let her straighten out,” I tell Tony. “She’ll line her hindquarters up and kick the hell out of you.”

  “I got the hose!” Rex yells, then pulls the green snaking monster toward Luna. She gurgles and huffs at it like it is going to kill her.

  “Slow! Move slow, Rex!” I shout at him, then pump my arms toward the ground to settle his forward motion. “Turn up the water. Just a little at a time, please. We don’t need to spook her any more than she is.”

  I hear the squeaky hydrant handle lift upward and a dribble of water slips from the mouth of the hose.

  “Ready, Tony?” I ask.

  He nods one quick bump of his head; Rex holds up the end of the hose, and water starts to leak across Luna’s face. She twists her head in jerks trying to get loose, opening her mouth then snapping her teeth together. Clack. Clack. Clack. Even restrained she’s fighting for her life.

  “It’s only water, Luna,” I say in a soft voice, then tell Paul, who’s over at the hydrant, to pull the handle up a little farther. Water is pouring over Luna’s face. Tony has her in a firm grip. Luna’s good eye twitches back and forth, looking for what might come next.

  “Turn the water off,” I instruct Paul. The hose runs dry. “Tony, with your right hand, can you scratch her a little?” I know if we take this in stages, Luna will learn to trust us.

  Tony takes the edge of his fingernails and scratches the bumpy mosquito bites that cover her neck.

  “More. Just like that. Keep scratching,” I tell him. Tony digs in, and Luna starts to lean in to his touch. She chokes out a cough and green alfalfa leaves spray out of her mouth. Then she licks her lips and swallows. Licks her lips and swallows. Drops her head and sighs.

  “Turn on the water, please. Slowly again.” Paul turns on the hydrant. Rex places the hose against her face. Luna takes a long, loose breath and allows the water to seep into the deep crack along her forehead. The crusty pus starts to let free, one small chunk at a time, until the larger chunks give way. I walk in closer to see the damage. I can see bone. The edges of the skin around the break are already dead. Blood flow to this area has ceased long ago.

  Sarah and Flor come up behind me and breathe on the back of my neck as they stare at the damage. Luna’s face looks like a topography map. Layers of pink, gray, and hints of green line the three-inch crack.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Flor whispers.

  I look around and see their faces leaning in toward Luna’s pain.

  “I don’t know. Just keep the water coming.”

  SKINLESS

  North Carolina / 1992

  The sound of frantic hooves fills the night air. She is knee deep in autumn oak leaves raked this afternoon from the east side corner of the old goat shed. Not the best bedding for a high-strung horse, but the only option I had. As I near the barn, I hear the sound of leaves being crunched and flung against the stall wall. The half-moon creates long shadows across the barn lot, spreading the shapes of tree branches on the ground beneath my feet. She stops and listens for me. I peer between the harvested pine boards wrapping around her twelve-by-twelve stall. The boards twist and rise the way old trees grow. With my forehead against the furry splinters of unfinished wood, I see the outline of her body. The arch of her neck meets her back, flowing into a long flat valley before
it curves up again over her rump into a low rising hill. She returns to her pacing. Her body twisting around the four corners of her cage.

  Tiny branches snap like miniature bombs under her hooves, creating a cascade of tremors that ripple over her taut skin. She blows hard from her chest. Out of her wet nostrils, mist leaks through the space between the boards and tingles my cheeks. The intimacy of it fills me with the same fear I’ve had with lovers. How dangerous are you? How close will I have to get to know you?

  She stops in front of me, lowers her head to the height of my gaze, and peers back through the thin space between the boards. We are inches apart, eye level. I try to take a breath. It goes halfway down my throat. I close my lips and the air pushes out my nose in a half-choked grunt. She spooks to the opposite corner, then blows out a cold snort. A high-pitched squeal fills the old barn.

  NO ONE THOUGHT I should buy her. Not my lover, nor any of my friends. No one except Bob, whose seventy-acre farm abuts our ten acres and old log cabin. When I asked about keeping a horse at his barn, he went right to work on the old manual water pump, replacing it with a brand-new red one, stiff and squeaky. It demanded fifteen upward tugs and fifteen downward pulls to fill a mere five-gallon bucket of water. It would work itself loose, he said, and then went to oiling it in all the noisy places.

  We drove over to meet her in Bob’s old farm truck one afternoon after work. A twenty-minute drive west on I-40 and then a turn south on I-85. Driving as fast as the old truck could go, we stayed in the right-hand lane. A steady stream of newer vehicles passed us. Drivers and passengers staring sideways through the truck window as they went by. I wondered, as they stared at me, which woman they saw. The quiet, invisible ghost of myself or the woman I was about to become.