Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  Outside, Stan had latched shut the back of the trailer and stood with his hand on the door handle next to the driver’s seat, waiting for me to emerge. He’d be making the twelve-hour round-trip in one day so, understandably, he was anxious to get going.

  It was difficult to ignore the chorus of frenzied whinnying coming from the barn, but there was nothing I could do about it. Lay Me Down didn’t respond, which I took to mean she wasn’t distressed to be leaving. When I rode Georgia and we left Tempo and Hotshot behind, running the fence and whinnying after her, Georgia always responded, echoing their fear of separation. Either Lay Me Down didn’t mind, trusted it was temporary, or she just wasn’t vocalizing her feelings.

  We’d agreed that I’d follow Stan because he’d been to Cornell and knew the way. By following I’d also be able to keep an eye on the trailer for the two disasters I feared the most. The first, the trailer and truck coming unhitched, had actually happened to a friend of mine while he was crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge on his way to a horse show on Long Island. He’d looked in the rearview mirror and seen nothing. Fortunately, it was dawn on a Saturday morning, and there was almost no traffic. The other miracle was that the trailer had kept rolling in a straight line and had come to a complete stop all by itself.

  The other disaster had never happened to anyone I knew but seemed like something that would occur more often than trailers coming unhitched and that was being rocked over by the horse inside. I’d seen plenty of trailers rock as the horses inside swayed from side to side from boredom or fright, and it hadn’t looked like it would take much to tip a trailer right over. Why this had never happened was a mystery and a miracle. By following, I’d be able to tell if Lay Me Down was swaying and I could signal Stan to pull over and stop.

  I followed Stan out of my driveway, pausing at the house to pick up Dorothy and the food. When I handed the basket through the truck window to Carol, she laughed in happy surprise. Then she reached out the window and hugged me.

  “I knew you were sweet the minute I heard your voice on the phone,” she said.

  It was the first good feeling I’d had all day.

  [ 14 ]

  THE SIX-HOUR trip went smoothly and at two-thirty Dorothy pointed to a sign with an arrow that read CORNELL UNIVERSITY. We turned and followed Stan up a steep two-mile drive and arrived at what felt like the summit, an alpine village of Ivy League architecture sprawled across an open plateau of blowing snow. He turned into the almost empty parking lot in front of a large stone-block building that looked like an airplane hangar but said EQUINE CLINIC over tall glass-fronted doors. He idled the truck while I pulled into a nearby space and parked.

  As soon as I got out of the car I was blasted by a wind so cold it tore my breath away. Four-foot snowdrifts rimmed the parking lot, and the fields around the clinic were rippled in frozen white waves. I ducked my head into the icy needles of wind-driven snow and ran to Stan’s truck.

  “I’ll find out where they want us,” I shouted through the window.

  He nodded, and I turned and raced across the parking lot toward the front door, wondering how anyone survived four college years of Ithaca winters. The front door was locked and for a second I panicked, thinking we’d come all this way and no one was there. I was shivering as I squinted through the glass doors, gazing down a long, wide corridor. I rapped the back of my ring hand on the glass pane, but the place looked abandoned. There wasn’t a human or a horse in sight. Then I noticed a little note posted about waist level near the middle of the door: USE SIDE ENTRANCE.

  It didn’t say which side, and it felt like I might die of exposure before I figured out how to get inside. I debated whether to go back to the car for my coat but couldn’t bear the thought of crossing the windy parking lot twice. Instead, I crept around the edge of the building, trying to stay out of the wind, hoping I’d bump into the right door.

  I did. Another sign said RING BELL. I rang and waited. I didn’t have much tolerance for cold, and whatever I had was now depleted. I was ready to smash the glass and throw myself against the heat vent I saw in the entryway. Some of my reaction was nerves, but more was genetic. No one in my family liked cold. Movies like Doctor Zhivago and Fargo fell into the category of Weather Horror Films to me. When I was little and taken to the beach for the first time, I stood in the Atlantic Ocean up to my ankles and wept at the cold. And that was in Palm Beach, Florida, in summer.

  No one came, and I pounded at the small red button, feeling frantic. Just when I was ready to give up, a shadow appeared at the far end of the corridor, and as it got closer, it turned into a young woman carrying a ring of keys. She unlocked the door, smiling and apologizing, as I rushed past her into the warmth and quiet.

  “How can you stand it?” I blabbered through stiff blue lips.

  She smiled again. “Come back in the summer and you’ll see.”

  I shook my head: no, I’d never see. If I lived here, I’d spend July and August dreading December. I’d get cold remembering this cold. I’d move.

  Still shivering, “I’ve brought a horse,” I told her. We were standing at one end of a corridor that must have had twenty-foot ceilings. Glass skylights extended the entire length, flooding the building with natural light. The floor was made of beige rubbery tiles with a raised dot pattern designed for good horse traction.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” she said. “Lay Me Down?” We introduced ourselves; her name was Eva.

  I nodded and followed her for a few feet. Then she turned right into a smaller corridor lined with offices on one side.

  “You just need to sign a few things and then you can bring the horse right in,” Eva said.

  I couldn’t quite believe I was doing this—bringing a horse to a veterinary hospital. It was like walking back into my childhood, back to the place where I had learned hopelessness, where I had first connected the smell of floor wax and disinfectant with the feeling of being crushed. Then, just saying the word hospital had made me carsick. For me, the connection between a hospital and loss was intractable and vivid. It evoked the day my heart broke. I could not forget.

  Yet part of me was excited and hopeful. It was like the first time I dove headfirst into a lake. I was six, standing with ten toes curled over the edge of the dock in a death grip. I arched over the water with my straight arms clamped so tightly against my ears, ready to lead on the way down, that I was deaf to the instructor standing right next to me. I was beyond listening and beyond reason. I was all adrenaline, ready with outstretched fingers and pointed toes to launch myself forward into oblivion. I didn’t understand death, but it was all around me and inside me, pressing against me, pulling me down like the cold lake water I was staring at. I would be pretty for death, like my emaciated mother, a vision I would always remember. I dove off that dock in pure terror, understanding it was the bravest thing I’d ever done.

  It would always be like that for me; I would have to fling myself off the edge to confront some fear. I had so many fears, so many adrenaline-filled moments, that there were plenty of chances for me to feel brave and daring.

  My hand shook as I signed the forms that said I’d pay my bill, I’d allow tests, I was willingly handing over my horse. The office was small and clean. The woman shoving the paperwork across the desk for me to sign was friendly and efficient. The building hummed with heat and electricity. It was safe here, warm and quiet. Still, I couldn’t escape my five-year-old horror of anything medical. It was at the center of me, the core memory that structured this experience, thirty-eight years later. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even try. I would survive it. That’s what I knew how to do.

  So, both fearful and daring, I smiled at the woman. She had come here on a Sunday, a week before Christmas, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering around zero. She was already a hero to me.

  “Do you have a horse?” I asked her, tears springing into my eyes. I looked at my lap, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  “Yes, I do,” she said in a v
oice that told me she didn’t know I was already functioning on overload. But then she reached across the table, touched my sleeve, and said, “And this is where I’d bring him if he ever got sick.”

  She did know. I rummaged through my bag, pretending to hunt for something. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, to speak. I didn’t want to cry in front of a stranger, not even a stranger as nice as she was.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I’ll meet you at the front entrance. When the doors open, drive the trailer right inside, all the way in, so I can close the doors behind you. Then we’ll unload your horse.”

  I braced myself to go back out in the cold. She let me out the side door, and the wind flattened my sweater and jeans against my body and sprayed my face again with stinging snow. I pulled my turtleneck up to cover my chin and made a run for Stan’s truck. He rolled down his window, and I explained, he nodded, and rolled the window up fast.

  Back in my own car, I caught my breath and told Dorothy what we were doing.

  “Here’s your coat,” she said, pulling it out of the backseat and handing it to me. “The radio just announced that it’s ten below zero, not counting the windchill.”

  “And people pay a fortune to go to this school,” I said, burrowing into my parka.

  “It’s beautiful. I’d go here.”

  I looked out the window at this campus perched like a religious shrine on a mountaintop. There was a stadium that looked like the Roman Coliseum, a row of greenhouses that belonged to the horticultural school, a building similar to this one called the Bovine Clinic, and a high-rise that could have been a Hilton Hotel but that might have been a dorm. Below us in the distance was a long frozen span of white that must have been Lake Cayuga. It felt like we’d reached the top of the world.

  As I was looking around, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the large front doors beginning to slide open.

  “Time to go,” I said.

  We ran across the parking lot together, this time entering through the large hydraulically controlled doors that slid open effortlessly along a track in the floor. When they were all the way open, Stan drove the trailer in. Even with the truck and the trailer fully inside, the building felt enormous. There was easily fifteen feet on either side of the trailer, and the corridor stretched beyond the truck another fifty yards.

  The giant doors rolled shut behind us, and it felt like we had entered some sort of biosphere, a world apart from the raging cold outside. Here all was light and warmth and sparkling clean surfaces with a reassuring mechanical hum in the background like the faint rumble in an ocean liner three decks above the engine room. We were dwarfed by the scale of everything. Even the pickup and trailer seemed swallowed up by the expanse of this corridor lined with horse-sized doors labeled SURGERY, RADIOLOGY, INTENSIVE CARE.

  I was anxious to get Lay Me Down out of the trailer after her six-hour ride. I also wanted her to know that I was here, someone familiar in this place of strange sounds, smells, and sights. Stan and I lowered the ramp, keeping the kick bar in place until I could unhook her lead and help guide her down. Eva stood at the bottom of the ramp with the others. Lay Me Down backed down the ramp with no fuss and greeted the cluster of people with a misty sigh.

  “What a beauty,” Eva said, stroking the velvety neck.

  I was speechless with pride, as though I had anything to do with creating this remarkable horse, as though she wasn’t already a jewel of a being the day she staggered into my life from her muddy paddock at the SPCA. The five of us gathered around her, hands irresistibly drawn to the sweet face, the graceful neck and chest. Lay Me Down lowered her head, the way she did when she was relaxed or sleepy. But her eyes were awake, her brow slightly furrowed as she swept her nose among us at pocket level, politely searching for treats. I got a couple of alfalfa cubes from her treat bucket and broke each one in half so everyone could feed her.

  While she ate, I took off her blanket and put it in the trailer to send back with Stan. The clinic felt warm, probably in the midsixties, and she wouldn’t be going outside. I unloaded her grain, hay, and treat bucket, stacking everything near a Garden Cart wheelbarrow that was propped against the wall in the corridor.

  Stan and Carol were anxious to get going so I hugged them good-bye, and we agreed to stay in touch. Stan had already agreed to return when Lay Me Down was ready to go home. I hardly knew them, yet we were connected by our love of horses and by my gratitude to them.

  Eva pushed a button, the big doors slid open, and we watched as the trailer disappeared into the fading afternoon light and whirling snow. They had a long, dark drive ahead of them on icy roads. I looked at my watch and figured if they stopped for dinner, they’d get back to Olivebridge around midnight. I planned to call to make sure they did.

  For the time being, we left everything stacked by the Garden Cart, and, with Dorothy on one side and me on the other holding Lay Me Down’s lead line, we followed Eva down the long corridor to where Lay Me Down would be stalled. We passed different hospital rooms and two adjoining corridors and finally turned down the last one on the right.

  For the first time we walked by large rectangular stalls, double the size of the stalls in my barn, with black, rubber-mat-covered floors. Most were empty but we saw several healthy-looking horses who nickered at us as we passed. Lay Me Down looked at them but didn’t nicker back. It must have felt good to stretch her stiff legs, to be able to walk after being confined in the small trailer for so long, especially to walk on this floor, a wonderful surface for horses that combined the cushiony support of a sneaker with the grip of a snow tire.

  Lay Me Down showed no fear of her surroundings. The lead line sagged between us, more a formality than a necessity. She would walk as long as we walked, turn when we turned, and trust that wherever we were going, it was where she wanted to go. Once again I wondered how this kind of trust and gentleness had survived her background. I didn’t understand it at all, but it’s what made her so special. It’s what had opened my heart.

  We were nearly at the end of another long corridor when Eva pointed to a stall on the left with Lay Me Down’s name on a plastic-coated index card already in a holder on the front of the door. Eva rolled open the door, and Dorothy and I walked in with Lay Me Down. I unclipped her lead, and Eva shut the door behind us.

  “I’ll bring the wheelbarrow with her things,” she offered. “Why don’t you stay and visit with her.”

  When Eva left, Dorothy and I took off our coats and dropped them in a corner of the huge stall. There was a long opaque window at the back, a clear skylight above, and a well-lit view across the corridor to a black Percheron stablemate. At the moment, Lay Me Down was more curious about her stall than the handsome Percheron across the way, and she walked around sniffing the floor. It was close to her dinnertime and I was sure she was hungry. I didn’t know if she was allowed to eat because I didn’t know what tests they’d be giving her tomorrow. I slid open the door and looked to see if there was a chart or instructions about food. Sure enough, hanging on a chain outside her stall was a blue spiral notebook with her name on the front. I opened it and found a complete medical history forwarded from Dr. Grice, copies of her sonograms, and the amount and brand name of the grain she ate, information I had provided over the phone when they called to confirm that she would be admitted. Still, there was nothing about whether I could feed her tonight.

  I was impressed at how quickly Dr. Grice had gotten the medical information to Cornell, and that it was all here, organized and accurate, before we even arrived. There was nothing to do but wait for Eva and hope she’d know if Lay Me Down could have food and water. When I returned to the stall, Lay Me Down came right up to me, expecting her dinner. I gave her a hug instead, knowing it was a poor substitute for a horse who was hungry.

  In a few minutes Eva arrived, pushing the cart stacked with hay and grain, the treat bucket swinging from one of the handles. It would be OK to feed Lay Me Down; none of her tests required fasting. I f
ollowed Eva to the storage room, one stall away at the end of the corridor, and helped her unload the wheelbarrow. We wrote Lay Me Down’s name on labels and put them on her bag of grain, the treat bucket, and the hay. Then I filled a bucket with grain and another with water and walked back with both to Lay Me Down.

  Eva said she had things to do and told us we were welcome to stay with Lay Me Down as long as we wanted and to let ourselves out the side door when we were ready to leave. We thanked her for everything and listened to her footsteps fade down the empty corridor until all we could hear was a dull hum coming from the large heat vents placed low along the concrete walls.

  While Lay Me Down ate her grain out of a bucket hanging in the corner, Dorothy made a cushion out of her coat and sat on the floor of the stall with her back against the wall. I went to the storage room to get a flake of hay so I could spread it around near where I’d join Dorothy. I bunched up my parka and slid down the wall next to her. And there we were. At Cornell. I felt tiny in the big stall. I felt tiny in the big building. I felt dwarfed by the immensity of Lay Me Down’s illness.

  I watched my gentle horse eat for a while. With her nose deep in her bucket, her chewing made a nice hollow sound. I couldn’t see her bad eye. From where I sat, she was perfect.

  “She seems OK,” I said. “Not worried or anything.”

  “She’s like Zone, but bigger,” Dorothy said.

  Zone was Dorothy’s black Lab mix, a dog whose sweetness we had run out of ways to describe, who forced us to say things to each other like “Zone’s so sweet she’ll give you cavities.” We called her Zone-Zone the Sugar Cone, or No-Baloney-Zoney-the-Sugar-Coated-Boney, which made no sense but that’s what we called her. And Dorothy was right. Lay Me Down was like Zone, but bigger.

  “My Lay Me Downie Brownie,” I said.

  We watched Lay Me Down finish her grain, and then she came over and sniffed her hay. She was right in front of us now, and we could both see her bad eye. No one who walked by and looked at her would wonder why she was there. There it was: wet, pink, gelatinous, the wrong thing to see on a horse’s face. It was alarming, too, because it was impossible to look at and not wonder if it hurt.