Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  Even though I knew we had no future, it was hard not to like someone who said he had wanted to call me for six years. Ten years ago, the men I knew said all kinds of nice things to me. After enough Scotch and sodas, they said they were looking at the prettiest girl in America, and after enough Gallo, I thought they were, too. There were whole evenings filled with boozy platitudes, a whole decade.

  And then a decade of neither. No men and no Gallo. A decade of sorting myself out alone, of growing up. Emotionally I had gone through my twenties in my thirties, and now, in my forties, I was beginning to date. It seemed both too soon and too late. But I’d forgotten how nice attention from a man could feel. Maybe my friends were right. I had to give Hank a chance.

  Our third date was a picnic dinner at a park overlooking the Hudson River. As we lay on the itchy wool blanket, eating Greek olives, Hank turned to me and said, “I want to marry you.”

  It felt like a Gallo flashback. As though we were two strangers spinning on bar stools, picking out potential baby names from the wine list. I doubted we’d spent six hours together. He was allergic to everything I loved. He was still married to someone else. I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. I didn’t know if it was because his question was horrible or wonderful.

  Hank started to laugh, too. We rolled onto our backs and laughed up at the sky, big, body-shaking laughs. I laughed so hard tears rolled down my cheeks and into my ears. We laughed and laughed. When we were finished with the big laughter, when it had subsided to an occasional chuckle, Hank rolled back onto his stomach, and I could feel him looking at me.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  I was still on my back, hooting into the sky. “Just what’s in those olives?” I stammered.

  But I knew that being wanted was the most wonderful feeling in the world.

  [ 12 ]

  LAY ME DOWN’S eye worsened steadily all fall. By December, it protruded so much that a large pink mass the size of a golf ball had appeared along the bottom of the eye. It wasn’t the tumor, it was the third eyelid being pushed out by the tumor. Because it was December, flies weren’t a problem, and Lay Me Down still showed no signs of discomfort. However, it meant the tumor was growing, and even if Lay Me Down seemed otherwise healthy, come spring, flies would be a serious problem.

  It was hard for me to look at her bad eye and yet, twice a day, I checked it carefully to make sure she could still blink, to make sure it remained moist. For as long as I could remember I’d been squeamish about medical problems. I assumed it was a result of watching my mother get sick and die. My brother was the same way. Neither one of us went to the doctor for yearly checkups because it made us too nervous. Merely hearing the word cancer could give either one of us an anxiety attack. We didn’t want to hear about illness and we certainly didn’t want to be around it. It was probably a blessing I’d never had children.

  But in caring for Lay Me Down, for the first time I felt a shift in the way I handled sickness. I hadn’t rushed to euthanize her, and I hadn’t hired someone else to do what I couldn’t face doing myself, although, so far, there hadn’t been much to do. Besides her general care and administering the homeopathic remedies, which might or might not be working, the only thing I’d done was watch for symptoms.

  What it actually felt like was a heightened awareness about everything she did. I’d always been able to distinguish between the four horses vocally. I could always tell who was whinnying in the middle of the night and sometimes even why. For instance, if Georgia lost sight of Tempo, her call whinny was long, loud, and quivering with panic as though she was trapped in a burning barn. Tempo’s answer was a series of muffled, staccato grunts that sounded like he was underwater.

  Hotshot’s voice was the most poignant, the most operatic. It started low and ended high, hitting every note in between. He used his whole body to project his distress across the pasture whenever he couldn’t see any of the other three.

  Lay Me Down wasn’t much of a talker but when she did, her whinnies were quick, high-pitched grunts directed at me. Besides greeting Hotshot the first time she met him, I’d never heard her whinny at the other horses or make any sound other than sighing when she was content. My bedroom window faced the pasture so I could hear much of what went on there at night. One of the things I listened for now was any new sound from Lay Me Down or any new vocalization from the other three that might signal something was wrong.

  But nothing changed, and Lay Me Down remained openly affectionate. Even Allie, always ready to squelch illusions about what horses were capable of, agreed that Lay Me Down was unusually expressive toward me. It was incredibly flattering. I basked in her devotion, her partiality. She greeted me as soon as I appeared on her horizon. Sometimes I was still in the house when she’d glimpse me through a window and send out her quick little grunts.

  If Georgia wasn’t vigilant, Lay Me Down would rush to meet me at the pasture gate. When Georgia prevented this by getting to me first, Lay Me Down knew to wait for me in her stall. In the stall she sighed, made eye contact, sniffed my head, my neck, my hands, and let me examine her bad eye without displaying any anxiety. After she finished her grain, I’d pick the ice and mud out of her hooves and then brush her.

  Over and over I wondered at Lay Me Down’s sweet nature, given her background. It was impossible to understand how she had come through sixteen years of maltreatment with no animosity toward humans. It made her attachment to me feel particularly special, as though in me she sensed a fellow survivor.

  My connection to Lay Me Down felt unique in other ways, too. My relationship with her was different from that with any other animal I’d ever had. From the beginning, it felt like it was I who had something to learn from her, I who would ultimately benefit from “saving” her. Her past had surely been as bad as mine but she showed no bitterness, no resentment, no neurotic need to isolate herself from other horses (or people) in order to feel safe. She seemed willing to take big risks—first by being willing to enter the trailer the day I went to the SPCA, and then by attaching herself so strongly to me and then to Hotshot. Her capacity to love seemed enormous. Where had she learned that? Why couldn’t I?

  Lay Me Down had found a sanctuary here and so had I. This small farm was the answer to a thousand prayers, prayers I had uttered to myself during the moments when my childhood seemed unbearable. I’d sit in a locked closet or the basement after being beaten and imagine the place I would live when I grew up. Several details never changed. I imagined a sun-drenched farm with open pasture dotted with grazing Morgans, a big gray barn, several large dogs, and a house with lots of glass. Sometimes the fantasy included a kind and loving husband who shared my passion for horses, but sometimes I saw myself living alone. There would be no yelling or hitting in my fantasy future. I was always the master in my imagined house.

  It was nothing less than a miracle to me that my childhood prayers had been answered, especially after the lost decade of my twenties when it looked like I was throwing my future onto the dung heap. Somehow I’d been able to pull myself out of that self-destructive spiral and, with the move to this farm, had found the first serenity I’d ever known. Lay Me Down and I were survivors, both stumbling onto this farm in the nick of time and both as firmly rooted here now as the umpteenth generation of swallows who flew over a thousand miles each spring to reclaim their barn.

  I realized it was a sanctuary I wasn’t willing to leave, certainly not for someone like Hank. Maybe it was time to risk a relationship with a man, but Hank wasn’t the right one. When Hank said he wanted to marry me on our third date, I was flattered. It didn’t matter that we hardly knew each other, that our interests were incompatible. What mattered was being asked. What mattered was that I was wanted. This was the legacy of having been a parentless child; a knee-jerk reaction to male attention. In some ways, that need had controlled my life. All those years of brief, meaningless relationships and the following years of avoiding men completely were opposite sides of the same coin. It was as
if I’d thought abstinence could solve an intimacy problem the same way it had solved a drinking problem.

  Or maybe abstinence had worked. Maybe so many years of not being with a man had allowed me to see something I wouldn’t have seen otherwise: that being wanted wasn’t enough. This was something I imagined most people learned before they were twenty but I hadn’t learned it until a few days before my forty-third birthday.

  I was afraid to tell Hank we wouldn’t be getting married, we wouldn’t be having children. I was afraid to go back to loneliness, but I sensed it was crazy to prolong the relationship. How could I pretend I had a future with a man who was allergic to animals, who couldn’t walk into my barn without feeling like all the air was being squeezed out of his lungs? Even if I had been close to loving Hank, I realized I wouldn’t give up horses for anyone. But for months friends had told me to give Hank a chance, that we could work around our differences, though they never said exactly how. For months I’d listened to everyone but myself. How could I not? I was the village idiot where men were concerned, the one most likely to fail. So I continued to see Hank and said nothing one way or another about our future.

  ONE MORNING, A week before Christmas, I looked at Lay Me Down’s eye and knew it was time to do something. The pink mass at the bottom of it seemed bigger, but I knew that the urge to save her, to take some definitive action came from someplace deeper in me. It had to do with the approach of Christmas, the day my family ceased to exist. Mother, father, brother, dog, house—dead or gone, it was all the same to a five-year-old. The Christmases that followed had been spent in other people’s houses in which I was alone no matter where I lived, because I was with relatives who didn’t want me.

  In one house each of my cousins was told to write his or her Christmas wish list on a piece of paper and drop it into a shoe box kept on the coffee table in the living room. I was eight and my list was written in the loopy cursive I’d recently learned in school.

  “No, no,” my uncle had said when he saw me pushing my folded list through the narrow slot in the top of the box, “we didn’t mean you.” He was the same uncle whom I’d come upon a week earlier as he was erasing my name and height where I had penciled them on the dining-room doorjamb, adding them to the names and heights of everyone in the family already recorded there.

  Later that spring I was sent on, to live with an alcoholic grandfather and his raging wife, in a home where Christmases were boozy days of slurred sentiment, always ending in some kind of violence, as most days ended in that house. Later, I referred to the four years I lived there as my Holocaust years.

  What helped sustain me during those four years was my great-grandmother, to whose house, a few blocks away, I frequently ran away. She never knew it, but I was her Lay Me Down, her fugitive from injustice. In her eighties then, Granny Blake intrigued me with her elegance and intelligence, as well as her unconventional lifestyle. She had been born into one of the richest families in Baltimore, but while in her midthirties, following the premature death of her husband, she had relinquished her role as a society matron and begun a career as a journalist. She went on to write five books, one of which was about her ten-month imprisonment in the Lubianka Prison in Moscow on suspicion of espionage, charges that were made while she was a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun covering the Bolshevik Revolution (she was fluent in nine languages including Russian).

  After her release from prison, she spent several years traveling through Asia, writing about foreign policy and the rise of communism. She returned to America briefly before her spirit of adventure led her to team up with filmmakers Merian C. Cooper (producer of the film King Kong) and Ernest Schoedsack in 1924, to make a documentary film called Grass about the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (now Iran). For a year, the three traveled a thousand miles on foot or horseback with the Kurds of Turkey, filming from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf. The most extraordinary footage began in Basra, where the three filmmakers joined fifty thousand Bakhtiari tribespeople and half a million animals on their twice-yearly migration across six mountain ranges and the Karun River to take their herds to pasture. It was the first film of its kind and featured scenes of my lipsticked great-grandmother, waist deep in a howling snowstorm, scaling the summit of one of the over-four-thousand-foot peaks of the Zagros Mountains.

  She spent her later years lecturing around the country, warning about foreign policies she felt would create something she called third world countries. She also denounced the seeds of hatred being sown by apartheid policies in Africa.

  Her house reflected her life as a nomad, with art and artifacts from all over the world gathering dust on her walls and shelves. She’d greet me at the door—a tall, elegant woman, still slender in her eighties, holding one of the Camel cigarettes she chain-smoked in one hand, unaware or unconcerned about the trail of fallen ash that followed her everywhere. “Hello, dearie,” she’d say, and I’d follow the high heels and shapely ankles just visible below the hemline of her black silk dress to the living room. We never talked about her son (my grandfather) or his angry wife, but I think she suspected why I so often showed up at her door. Instead, she’d talk about her adventures, especially her months in the Russian prison and the time she’d spent traveling in Africa. Her stories soothed me and helped put my own life into a different perspective. What was a drunken grandfather or an abusive stepgrandmother compared with a cramped cell in a Russian prison or the disenfranchisement of millions in South Africa? She talked about the plight of women and children all over the world, uneducated and impoverished by sexist, patriarchal policies. Even though I was only eight, I knew it was unusual for someone of her class and age to express such sentiments, and I loved her for it. She was the only person in my family who talked about political and social inequities. Perhaps it was there, sitting on her couch and eating butter cookies from a tin while she told her stories, that the seeds of my own desire to write and to work with the marginalized were sown.

  Sometimes she’d wrap herself in an enormous musty old fur coat speckled with cigarette burns, and we’d walk a few blocks to the movie theater, where she’d promptly fall asleep and snore through the entire film. Once a week she’d come for dinner at her son’s house and invariably singe her hair while lighting a cigarette from one of the candles at the table. I thought she was brilliant so nothing she did embarrassed me, and when I was twenty-one, I honored her by naming my first cat Blake.

  I survived my legacy of terrible Christmas memories best by working. Since becoming a social worker, I’d spent every Christmas at my job. My office was on the top floor of an old mansion surrounded by two hundred acres of rolling lawns overlooking the Hudson River. From my window I could watch everything from Windsurfers to oil tankers making their way along the river. Across it, on the distant horizon, were the Catskill Mountains, their high peaks tracing a graceful dark line against the western sky. Behind my desk was a pink marble fireplace and above me was a white vaulted ceiling. It was not the typical office of a social worker. The staff liked to say they worked there for the architecture, and there was no question that the beauty of the place was a perk on days when the tedium of paperwork, voluminous in any social service agency, threatened to drive us into new careers.

  The mansion, known as the Manor House, housed twenty adults, all in treatment for alcohol or drug addiction. There was also a stone stable on the property and several other substantial buildings, which at one time had housed the workers on the estate. All these buildings had been converted into treatment facilities for adolescents with substance abuse problems, who resided there for periods of six months to a year.

  In the morning I drove through the two stone pillars that marked the entrance to the estate along a narrow winding drive that ended in a manicured, heart-shaped lawn in front of the Manor House. The original owner of the estate had created the lawn as a daily reminder to his wife of his great love for her. For me it had become a reminder of what was missing in my own life. I often wondered wha
t it was like to be loved like that, to be the recipient of such a grand gesture.

  The idea that this estate—originally built for the comfort and pleasure of the very rich—was now the home for the desperate and marginalized pleased me. I liked to believe that the original owner would have approved of the new occupants and approved of the humanitarian mission of our agency. Then, one day, the original owner showed up. She burst into tears as she stood on the pecan floor of her former front hall.

  “They’ve ruined it,” she sobbed to no one in particular, “ruined it.” And she refused to go one step further.

  She was rather elderly at the time and so distraught about the condition and decor of her former home that she had to be helped from the building and escorted to her car. A uniformed chauffeur whisked her away. It was easy to imagine her shock. Perhaps we should have done more to prepare her for the changes she would see. When she left, for a moment I, too, felt her enormous loss. It was the way I had felt as I stood in my grandmother’s stable in South Carolina, surrounded by the decayed finery of her old carriages, missing a world I’d never even known.

  Christmas at the Manor House was so depressing for the patients in treatment that working there left me no time to ruminate about the trials of my own past Christmases. For most of those in treatment, holidays and their accompanying stresses represented a time of increased drug or alcohol use; for many, this was their first experience coping with a holiday sober. I listened to their stories of previous Christmases spent in soup kitchens, in crack houses, and in jails for violence, theft, or prostitution. The hardships of my own past seemed paltry in comparison. Working on Christmas Day proved as therapeutic for me as it was intended to be for them.