Half Broke

by Ginger Gaffney

  Eliza walks over. “You better get to the gate, you’re next.”

  I’ve always felt riding a horse was like riding a wave. The wave rolls you along. You don’t kick the wave, or beat it, or even think you can control it. Every wave is unique. Some gather height quickly and close out fast. Some come in thin and build slowly. They make a smooth tunnel, no wake on their surface. You see the wave coming. You angle your board. You prepare your body to paddle. But once the wave turns over its lip and has you in its grasp, all you can do is glide along the surface like a lover.

  Many horses have taught me this, but Spirit, a little gray Arab, was the one I’ll always remember. She wasn’t mine to train. The owner had chosen to put her in training with another trainer at one of the barns where I ride. I could tell the trainer didn’t like her. He tried all his techniques, but still she pinned her ears and spun her tail in circles during every ride he put on her. Eventually he just left her standing all day in a stall.

  I don’t usually offer to ride horses for free, but when her owners came to pick her up, that’s exactly what I did.

  “Can you leave her another few months?” I asked them as they prepared to load her back in their trailer. “I wouldn’t charge you anything. I’d just like the opportunity to ride her.”

  They left her with me for three months. I took her for long walks around the ranch. I let her lead out ahead of me, fifteen feet. She was the leader; I was the follower. When I saddled her I never tied her, because I knew she couldn’t handle being constrained. On our first ride, I sat on her back for an hour, not asking for anything. We never moved. I got off. The next ride was the same. A week went by. On our seventh ride, she took me for a walk around the outdoor arena. Turning and bending, wherever she wanted to go was fine with me. She’d stop by the gate and watch the other horses being worked in the round pen. We stood there for as long as she wanted, until she was ready to move forward again. It took a great deal of effort to make no effort at all. I lost track of time. I lost track of myself. No longer the trainer, the one who calls all the shots, I wasn’t sure what I was.

  Spirit loved it. Her ears and eyes flickered lightly as she moved around on her own free will. Her tail swung free and loose, in cadence with her hind legs. We spent weeks riding in the pastures down by the river. Spirit would look up and see the yearlings romping in the field next to us. She’d roll into a trot and head toward the fence line, her head high, watching the youngsters run. I rocked in the saddle along with her. Never telling her where to go. Never telling her how fast or how slow. Never having an opinion at all. I let go of every idea I had about what I wanted, what I should do, what I thought I knew.

  “Be an open vessel,” one of my teachers always told me. “The more you open, the more they come through.” He was talking about riding horses. I was thinking about riding waves.

  “AND NEXT UP we have the DS Ranch, riding Rootbeer!” the announcer shouts through the loudspeaker.

  Rootbeer and I ride through the gate with the parachute dragging behind us.

  We are alone, all by ourselves in this giant oval, and she’s waiting for me to start the show. We stand in front of the grandstand, and I bow to the crowd. The clapping of a few hundred people startles her. I lay my hand on her neck.

  “It’s all about you,” I remind her as a breeze comes up. I see the parachute lift off the ground and rise above us. Rootbeer leads off at a lope. The parachute is ten feet in the air and following close behind. We didn’t prepare for this, I think to myself, but I let her go. We circle left, loping into the water. I see the colorful balloon traveling just off to the side in my periphery. In the three weeks we have been practicing this drill, the parachute has never lifted this high.

  We cross the arena, heading for the low jump Eliza has set up in front of the sponsorship banners. Rootbeer lengthens and lowers her neck in preparation. I loosen the reins. Just before the cross rail, she hustles her hind legs underneath and lifts her front legs two feet higher than necessary. At the top of the arch I see the parachute hovering above us. This, I think to myself, this is not something I would have ever thought I’d do, not in a million years.

  We trot a few strides, then lope off to the right. The parachute that is following us seems to be growing. Everyone is clapping. At the far end of the arena I slow down to a trot, and the balloon loses its sail. We halt, and I let the rope that connects us to the parachute drop to the ground.

  Rootbeer is calm. I feel my legs wave out, then in, as she takes deep breaths. I’m not sure she even noticed the hovering canopy that made me look like I was parasailing on horseback. Next, we head toward the ground poles. They are spread apart, wide enough so we can hit one stride of canter between each pole. Ever since I first saw her on the shelter’s website, I knew her body could do amazing things. She bounces across the ground poles like an elk over a fence.

  Past the poles we transition to a trot and weave through the standing boxes of flowers Eliza and Olivia have placed in a long row. Rootbeer’s ribs are twisting under my seat. I feel the snake of her spine as she curves between the beautiful flowers, her braided mane swishing against her neck. The weave of her body makes me feel weightless. Like I am no longer made of muscle and bone.

  At the end of the flowers, we trot through a narrow channel made of PVC pipes. The two-foot-wide channel takes a sharp right turn and we come to a dead halt. In front of us is a large bell hanging from a post. I reach in front of Rootbeer’s muzzle and clang the bell three times. The crowd erupts. We back out of the L-shaped channel, turn left, and take off at a gallop. Splashing through the pond like we are on a movie set, heading straight for the grandstand, full tilt.

  I sit back in the saddle and Rootbeer comes to a screeching halt. The crowd in front of us gives a loud applause. Rootbeer looks up and takes in the sight of it. Her head is higher than it has been all day. Underneath the sound of the crowd, I feel the rumble of her soft mutter crawl across her back. My body shimmies with the feel of it.

  “THE HORSES HAVE SAVED ME,” I hear Eliza tell a woman in a turquoise summer dress who is wearing an expensive Santa Fe cowgirl hat docked on the very top of her head. “I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been for the horses. They woke me up.” Eliza is standing inside the tent, behind the table, meeting this woman’s gaze directly in the eye. She smiles and hands the woman a brochure. “This is what we do,” she tells her. “We save lives.”

  OUR TENT IS FILLED with many people I don’t know. Everyone is crowded around trying to talk with Eliza, Olivia, or Charlie.

  Olivia is talking with my clients Carla and John. They have pulled their chairs under the tent and are engaged in an intense conversation.

  “When did you know?” I hear Carla ask Olivia in an inquisitive voice.

  Olivia takes her time. She measures her words. “I think I was eight years old,” she says. “That’s when I realized she was an addict. That she was using when she gave birth to me.”

  Rootbeer is resting in a nearby corral. She has a pile of hay in front of her. Her eyes are shut as she chews, systematically, on the wad inside her mouth. A third-place ribbon is pinned to the gate. I’m sitting on the fender of my trailer. Glenda gives me a kiss and long hug, then joins me, leaning against the aluminum trailer wall. We watch a crowd of people leave the grandstand and head into our tent. The visitors bend over to read the brochures. They stand up and stare at the three faces in front of them, confused. Are these three people addicts? Have they been to prison? What they see, versus what they believe, isn’t matching up.

  Eliza lifts her voice above the gathering crowd. “Please, come up and take our brochures. I’m sure everyone here has a friend or a loved one who’s been in the same position we once were.”

  Glenda and I sip on a cold bottle of water as we listen to Eliza, Olivia, and Charlie tell their stories. I’ve heard most of them before, but Glenda hasn’t. We watch the faces of the visitors as they read the brochures.

  “It’s a ranch
,” one woman tells her husband. “They trained the horse at their prison-alternative ranch.”

  John and Carla leave the tent and walk over.

  “Ginger, I have one question for you,” John asks me. Carla stands by his side, knocking him in the ribs to get the question out. “Do you think I’m too big for her?” He’s talking about Rootbeer. Our little Rootbeer. He’s going to bid on her in the auction, Carla tells us.

  Glenda and I turn to look at Rootbeer. Three girls are hand-feeding her carrots through the corral panels. I think about the first morning I went to get her from my barn. How she reared into the air, looking like a giant Thoroughbred. I remember how Tony slid off her backside on her first ride, as she sat down on her haunches like a dog. How Eliza rode her over three-foot jumps just the other day.

  “As a matter of fact, Rootbeer needs a big person,” I tell Carla and John. “She’s small in body, but not in her mind.”

  BELLE

  North Carolina / 1995

  When I raised my hand toward Belle’s mouth, she jerked and swung her big bone of a head so fast I fell backward, trying to avoid contact. Her lips pinched shut. Her fine chin hairs poked straight out like porcupine quills trying to fend off my touch. One long muscle, the one that connects her head to her neck to her shoulder, snapped back and forth like a bullwhip. Forget it, I told myself. Forget about touching her mouth, her lips, her tongue. I told her, you keep them. I don’t want them. I don’t need them. They were hers and never again to be taken.

  Bob had made me a bitless bridle from the thick leather harness he used to drive his team. Back when he drove a pair of Belgian horses around his farm, tilling the fields, every spring and fall.

  “She don’t need nothin’ in her mouth,” Bob kept telling me, hollering in his usual hard-of-hearing, louder-than-necessary voice.

  He had sewn a piece of soft leather across the noseband, with fleece tacked onto the underside. One ring sewn on each corner of the nose piece, where he snapped a pair of leather reins.

  I moved far away from Belle’s mouth and started cleaning her hooves, picking out the stones, the mud, the rolled oats stuck in the grooves next to her frog, leftovers from this morning’s breakfast. I picked her hooves up and laid them in the basket of space I built for them between my bent thighs. It was a place of rest, if she could trust it. The top of her hoof touched down on my thigh, then pulled up three times before she accepted my help. It reminded me of dipping my fingers in holy water at the back of church every Sunday when I was a child. It was my favorite part of Mass. Walking into the silence of the church, I would slow my pace and let my family hurry ahead to get the same pew they sat in each week. I came to the holy water like a priest or nun, head bowed with my hands prepared in prayer position. I would face the bowl, go down on one knee, then dip my right hand in the water three times. Not for the Trinity. Not for any reason really. Three was a perfect number. One is lonely. Two is not enough. Three holds magic.

  Belle’s hoof rested ever so lightly on my jeans. The bottom of it looking right at me, like a face concentrating so hard it distorts itself. The horn wall had separated from the sole and tiny pebbles were stuck in its crack. I took the thin tip of the hoof pick and started plucking them free. Underneath, a thick black goo of summer thrush began to stink in the air. I scraped it out and wiped it on the ground. Flies buzzed around us immediately.

  I cleaned one hoof, put it back on the ground slowly, then checked back on her. As the hoof reset on the earth, she rolled out her thick wet tongue, like a snail poking out from its shell. She touched the tip of it to her dripping nostrils, licked a few times, then curled it back inside the contours of her mouth. After cleaning each hoof, after placing it back on the ground, she repeated the same ritual: parting her lips, coiling her tongue out flat, then licking the salty drips from her flaring nostrils. This is how she began to teach me her language. That her hooves, her mouth, her brain were all connected down and over the long, lovely line of her body. Her legs were sentences that ended at each hoof. Her body needed the touch of the earth to be heard. I began to see every movement she made as a long paragraph, a story, a way to understand each other. I learned to listen with my eyes.

  After the last hoof was cleaned, she stood still with her lead line resting on the ground. I still couldn’t tie her to anything. Not a tree. Not the barn. Not anything besides my open hand or the soft drape of the rope on the dirt. When tied, Belle would thrash and pull backward in a panic, breaking halters and snapping the hitching post in two. But when she was free, she was as motionless as a great horned owl. Only her eyelids blinked open and shut. I could leave her to get the saddle, to get the brushes, the fly spray, even a drink of water from the hydrant. She wouldn’t take a step. Freedom gave her a kind of stillness I craved. When I would return to her, she would lower her muzzle and smell whatever offering I came back with: the saddle pad, the mane and tail conditioner, alfalfa pellets that I would serve to her with my wide open palm. She would tuck her chin close to her chest where her nostrils could meet the new gifts first, then her lips brushed over them, nibbling with the slightest motion that tickled my hand.

  Everything was language. Everything had life. She witnessed her world like a monk on a solitary pilgrimage. Sunlight bouncing inside the water trough, bluebirds with their toes wrapped around the top fence wire, calls of faraway dogs, a car door closing at the neighbors’; each event was profoundly important, worthy of recognition. I hadn’t seen the world from this vantage point in a very long time.

  When I was in first and second grade, I waited for the Catholic school bus at the corner of Elm and New Road. I would get to the bus stop early and sit alone on the white picket fence of my neighbors, listening to the absence of sound. There was barely traffic at that time in the morning, no kids on bicycles, no mothers yelling from inside our neighbors’ houses. Sitting atop the fence, I would try to keep my legs from swinging and steady my rump on the top rail. Then I would close my eyes. For just a few minutes, there was absolutely nothing. Silence was the color of white under my eyelids and the smell of morning air before anyone woke and touched it.

  Once the bus arrived, I’d sit near the front alone and hold that silence until the clatter from the kids in the back broke it into pieces. Sometimes I recognized it in everyday things: a single fish in a small round bowl, a baby resting in her crib, my grandmother kneeling in prayer in the front pew of the church. I wanted to know nothingness, that place where silence had a language. It seemed to me that other animals knew it. The shorebirds floating past the ocean break. Starfish being washed back and forth inside the rock jetty. Turtles spending all day inside their shell. I knew nothing was something, but I didn’t know what. I spent my whole life looking for it, and then I met Belle.

  Bob always liked to help me saddle. He was the one Belle trusted to put on her new leather bridle. He would send us off with Bud, his farm dog, leading us down the trail. With only the soft leather strap above her nose, I could steer Belle, pointing her head in the direction of Bud’s tail. I barely touched the reins, and rarely did I hold them in my grip. They dangled and swayed alongside her neck as we went into the woods, crossed the creek, and followed the trail that would lead us to the wildflowers. It was a short climb up a rocky hill, then back down. Belle lowered her head on the downhill, watching for the rise and fall of red-ant hills or a tangle of kudzu crawling across our path. In the woods, she was never afraid. Surefooted, she never spooked or balked or tried to turn for home. With Belle I never tried to be the leader, the number one, the alpha mare. It was always an agreement of our bodies working together. She set that rule, and I followed.

  We searched the wet woods for May apple, false Solomon’s seal, wintergreen, and black-eyed Susans. I’d climb off Belle’s back and walk us into a patch of wild geraniums just to kick their scent into the air. Bud would lie and wait on a nearby hill, resting his head on his forelegs, keeping his eye on us. The low-rolling hills were thick with young trees and grasses. Belle would
pick at the grass with her three-year-old incisors, then slide her jaw side to side, chewing the blades into a green mash that spilled from her lips. Her eyes closed as if she was in a dream. We walked through the geraniums, me on foot, looking for a fallen tree trunk to stand on and climb back into the saddle. Tall stalks of black cohosh grew where the trees parted and let sunrays filter down in strips. Riding past them, I could feel their healing medicine speak to us.

  After touching the holy water with the tips of my fingers, I would walk up the main aisle of the church, past my parents and sisters, toward the oversized, tortured, crucified Jesus hanging on the wall. I bowed my head again, genuflected, and sat down next to my grandmother, who regularly sat alone in the first pew. She would look up from her kneeling, praying position and scooch down the aisle, giving my small body space to enter. Kneeling next to my grandmother, I felt God more than I did anyplace else. Sometimes I thought I could smell God on her breath. Her hairspray was thick and metallic-scented, and it stuck her thin, almost nonexistent hair flat onto her head. As she made the sign of a miniature cross onto her forehead, she would open her mouth and push out a breath—a bouquet of meat and vegetables; turnips, cabbage, pork. The fleshy scent of corporeal earth mingled with the residual aerosol. The mixture smelled like gilded earth, and I knew God wasn’t far away. We kneeled there together, young and old knees aching, until the altar boy came out from behind a curtain, and the clink of incense at the end of a long chain raised us to our feet.

  BUD, BELLE, AND I passed trillium and hooded columbine on our way uphill to the old oak that stood alone on the highest point of ground in the woods. Its trunk was ten feet around in diameter. All three of us climbed onto the small, flat patch that surrounded the oak. This was our turnaround point. Our listening place. We rested there and stared into the woods that appeared to stretch into forever. A nuthatch hung upside down from the branch above our heads, pecking at the ants climbing in the crevices of bark. From the top of this hill we could see south to the open pastureland where purple martins swayed back and forth over the tall oat grass, picking mosquitoes out of the air. Farm dogs called from the north, past the creek and back toward home. Bud’s floppy Labrador ears lifted off his head. Belle let out a big yawn, then curled her upper lip back away from her gums, tilting her muzzle to the sky. There were so many things we loved about these woods. We wanted everything. And nothing at all.