by Jane Smiley
The baby’s back legs, still attached at the chestnuts, were stretched out and sadly deformed. The hooves were clubbed, bent awkwardly backward. The forelegs were still caught in the amniotic membrane, though the mare had apparently licked the head and neck free. The ribs, countable, expanded while he looked, and the foal gave another of its pitiful squeaks. It seemed very large, possibly because it was stretched out, or because it was past term. Near its head lay the afterbirth and a pile of manure. It was then that he noticed how dirty the stall was, as if it hadn’t been cleaned in days. All the straw was mucky and wet, trodden flat, black. Whose fault? His? Though he couldn’t remember, the answer would be jotted in black and white on the chore bulletin board in the kitchen.
The foal squeaked again, Herbie neighed, and he switched off the light before opening the door, drenching himself in sudden darkness. He was very afraid. The ghastly and malevolent foal grew very large, seemed to cover the floor of the stall, to encroach on the cringing mare, to tap with its horrible hind hoof on MacDougal’s stall, with its enmeshed front knees on the partition between itself and Herbie. Everything stank of blood and manure. The ribs had expanded, were still expanding. And contracting. Its breath got enormous, subsumed the breath of the other horses, his own breath, made them all breathe in unison. He swallowed, then swallowed again. At last he opened the barn door, as quietly as previously he had closed it, and stood solitary in the moonlit driveway.
Now was the time to run into the house and shout for Kate, but as with Peter’s saddle, he could not. The thought of having his nighttime presence abroad discovered and questioned was unbearable, and unbearable too was the idea of breaking the silence all around him. The foal, he knew, would not be saved. Its back feet were too deformed for salvation to be worth it, either to mother or to the animal itself, but something dictated that he make the fuss, rouse the family, do what seemed to be the right thing. Even so, he could not. Nothing was saved. With perfect stealth, but having to swallow continually and make himself breathe, he crept back into the house, up the stairs, into his bed. Jeepers thumped his tail. The dog had made himself a nest at the foot, where he wasn’t allowed, but John paid no attention. He breathed and breathed, and fell asleep dreaming that the foal had followed him up the stairs. He woke up thinking he saw something in the doorway, then lay on his back, his eyes wide open, until morning.
He heard the others get up one by one. First father, who went downstairs to put on the coffee, then Margaret, then mother, who slammed the back door as she went out. In the bathroom, Margaret washed her face and brushed her teeth, stumbled over something in her exercise sandals, caught her balance. “O.K.!” she shouted. “Now’s the time! Don’t forget that today is corn, not sweetfeed. Peter, bring in the geldings!” The back door slammed again, at last. Footsteps to the bottom of the stairs, then a muffled “Margaret!” John groaned and put his feet to the floor.
Margaret’s distraction had persisted since the horse show. She felt a kind of humming serenity. She hadn’t wept in days, weeks; Margaret the Weeper was an alien being of whom she rather disapproved. These days the smallest details attached her to themselves. If there was sadness or dissatisfaction within her, anything diverted her from it. How had it not always been this way?
Sometimes, maybe once a day, she thought about the smiling man, and made up a little fantasy about seeing him later in the season. Such a fantasy was more alluring for the fact that he had probably gone straight back to Virginia days ago, and so she was free to populate all the coming horse shows of the summer with him and not fear embarrassment. She had been like this twice before, once in high school about a boy a grade ahead of her, and once in college about a member of her geology class. Such self-propelled love affairs were entertaining and faded graciously, leaving behind a fondness for these men that made her feel selfless and full of virtue. She wished only that she had somehow learned the man’s name.
And she noticed that she had become a good daughter. Her eyes opened before the alarm and ranged over the walls of her neat room. The pictures on the walls were straight; rose drapes that had spent her infancy in the living room hung crisp to dustless sills. Every drawer, every door was thoroughly closed, every item of clothing hung up or tucked into her laundry bag. The floor, after all these years, was free of boots, shoes, fogged tumblers, face-down books split at the back. By the window was a plant, only a coleus dug from the garden, but it was actually growing. Beneath her, beneath the mattress and the box spring, under the dust ruffle, there was exactly nothing. Nothing under the bed for the first time in as long as she could remember. When, at exactly the proper moment, she set her feet in a patch of sunlight on the floor, she not only did not have to kick anything aside, she could see her shoes, instep to instep beside the dresser, and her blouse, still eminently wearable on the second day, hung smoothly over the back of the desk chair. As she stood up, she reminded herself of a very spruce lily rising, at last, from the muck of her own childhood, which seemed to have ended sometime during the horse show.
Perfection was just within reach: certain to follow the washing of her face and the brushing of her teeth, the donning of clean underwear and clothes worn to just the proper degree the day before. It was true that she stumbled in the bathroom when she wanted to be perfectly silent, but it was a tiny mistake that blocked little of the perfect morning she hoped to achieve. In the kitchen today there was even the perfect breakfast: a quarter of a canteloupe, whole-wheat bread, cream cheese, and milk purchased at the dairy just yesterday. “O.K.!” she called. “Now’s the time!” When she was sure she could hear them all, she went back to her room to get dressed and make her bed.
“Margaret!” said mother from the bottom of the stairs. Her tone was odd, neither commanding nor monitory, almost, in a way, conspiratorial. Margaret grew afraid and hesitated in her dressing. “Margaret!” This time it was louder, more usual, more exasperated. “Yes! Coming!” she called, zipping her pants and grabbing her oxfords.
The foal lay bloody and inert in the muck, half netted in the amniotic sack, its visible eye open and opaque. In the corner of the stall near the window lay the mare, also still, also bloody. Kate opened the door, but the mare did not stir, and Margaret lifted her eyebrows. “Both,” said Kate, “though Queenie’s still warm. But look.” She raised the animal’s crusted tail. The vaginal opening was stretched, terribly torn, black with dried blood. “Too big,” said Kate. “Three weeks past term, and there’s why.” She pointed at the foal’s grotesque back legs.
“I don’t under . . .” said Margaret, and for the first time Kate showed anger.
“Listen,” she snapped, “sometimes when it’s not right, they abort it, sometimes they carry it longer, as if it could somehow be made right.”
“Oh.”
“I should have known.”
“Well, you . . .”
“Be quiet. Who’s in charge of the stables this month?”
“I am.”
“Who’s supposed to be cleaning this stall?”
“I don’t know. It’s on the list. I’ll look right now, if you want.”
“Too late.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a disgrace.”
“I know, I . . .”
“Don’t apologize. Just think very hard about it, all right?”
“Yes, I . . .”
“You’d better get this cleaned up. And move those two. They’re anxious enough as it is.”
“I will, I . . .”
“Well, do it, then.”
As usual, it was impossible to express sympathy to mother; Queenie had been one of Kate’s first and most preferred broodmares, proof of her contention that considerable talent lay outside the realm of the Jockey Club. Margaret found a halter and lead rope and led Mac to the fence of the warm-up ring, where she tied him. When she went back for Herbie, Mac reared and broke his lead, and when she returned he was trotting gaily around the ring, snatching leaves off the apple tree in the middle, and bites of g
rass from underneath the fence. She got to the open training field gate before he did, but he was stubborn about coming, even though no one had been fed and she offered him corn. Finally she bellowed, “Peter! Peter!” Always so slow! “Peter!”
“Well, what!” He was shouting from the kitchen window.
“Will you come out here please and help me with your horse?”
“What’s he doing out of his stall anyway?”
“I’ll show you!” At the sight of the mare and the foal (which was already shrunken, somehow, already bony, even leathery, after just six or eight hours since a birth the thought of which made them both shudder) Peter grew silent and helpful.
Soon everyone was outside, and it was known that John and Henry had both been assigned to the mare’s comfort. The task had fallen between them as between two stools. Recriminations began in the house, but were thoroughly squelched, first by Kate, who said they were irrelevant, then by Axel, who said they were childish. The sight of so much blood and dirt and pain made everyone slow and dumb, so that they were only beginning chores when the first car arrived. Father said they would have to bury the animals, and he had just gotten the tractor out. Margaret hated to think of the lesson girls and their mothers oohing and ahing over the accident, their respect for mother perhaps diminishing, as though foals, and even mares, weren’t lost on the most-expensive, best-equipped horse farms. But it was no use. Every time she came out of the barn, another car was pulling in. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” and the story was told over and over and over, and everybody had to have a look.
The morning lesson began long past nine, and John did not participate. He and Henry were to help father with the burial of the mare and foal. John did not dare ask why mother didn’t simply call a livestock disposal company. He and Henry weren’t speaking to one another. When father carried the foal out in his arms, they stood elaborately aside, and when they had to help one another attach lines to the mare’s forelegs, their courtesy completely interfered with the knots. Father yelled at them to get out of the way and did the ropes himself. Somehow this was the most shocking thing, for father never yelled.
John stood tightly against the stall door, trying to think nothing. Father tested the knots with a few jerks, straightened the canvas he had spread in front of the door (the boys were to hold the corners of it down as the mare was pulled out of the stall, then fold them up and tie them over the corpse), and climbed onto the tractor. John tried to think that after all it was just a horse, one of too many, one of mother’s hydra heads. The tractor sputtered, died, started up, and John could hear it on the gravel before he could see it move. The ropes tightened. Henry knelt down beside his corner, abashed by father’s temper into preparing himself. The ropes tightened further, creaking slightly, but there was no movement, only tension. Queenie, John tried to think, was kind of old anyway, almost eighteen, really too old to have been bred, and then the mare’s forelegs stretched out, and the neck; the nose twisted and came to touch the knees. There was a sucking sound, smooth slipping in the muck, and the mare started. But then something got caught in the doorway—a hoof it was—and father was pressing the accelerator and not looking, and the pastern joint and knee were bending and the head seemed to be straining toward the canvas, rising off the ground. The boys squirmed, then Henry shouted and John ran forward to tell father to stop. After they straightened the hoof and leg, and held the canvas down where it wanted to curl up, John started to cry, though he told himself that this was only a stupid horse. There was no way not to think of the mare in the moonlit dark, standing steadily, her eyes on him.
Soon Henry was crying, probably because John was, and the mare was on the canvas. Father paused, and then lifted the corners, tying them together with baling twine through the grommets. The pink roundness of the mare’s muzzle showed where the flaps gapped open in the front, and the bloody white tail dragged in the driveway, its sinews already too rigid for them to fold it discreetly on top of the bundle. They sniffled and followed the slow-moving package, stooping to remove sticks and large stones from its path, and to lift the head over the edge of the concrete wash rack, closing the upper halves of a few stall doors upon suspicious equines within.
The canvas must have ripped, because bits of hide, then red morsels of flesh smeared a trail on the rough concrete. The horse was heavy, the surface uneven, the canvas thin. John grew afraid, as he had in the night, imagining the mare’s lower side a gaping cavity, red, organ filled, slippery, perhaps still warm very deep within, as if death were a seepage from the outside, and the heart had only just stopped beating, and the brain still knew him. Father stopped again, and John ran forward to open the double gates into the back pasture.
Something caught, apparently on the two metal gate stops, canvas, or something worse. The bundle would not budge. Father set the emergency brake, and then they had to find more rope, and slip it in loops under the horse. Henry tied one end to a rafter of the gelding shed, father checked the knot, then he and the two boys (“It’s too late to cry,” he said, “so cut it out”) threaded the other end through the top slats of the corn bin. John was allowed to get up on the tractor and put it in gear. (“Don’t jerk it, and remember where the brake is. If it dies, that’s O.K. this time.”) It didn’t die, though John was careful to pretend that he knew nothing. Father and Henry pulled hard on the rope, the hindquarters lifted a little, then a little more. Father shouted a breathless “O.K.!” and John released the clutch. When the tractor had just barely moved, father shouted “O.K.!” again, and he jammed the clutch back in. Axel and Henry were leaning against the grain bin, wiping their red faces on their shirts. In a moment, father moved the mare into the field. She slid more easily on the grass. The gate stops glistened wet; John tied the gate shut, then ran to catch up.
There was a cleft at the bottom of the pasture, where a shed had once stood; the footing was bad, the grass sour, and the geldings who roamed the pastures were unlikely to venture nearby. Father untied the mare and went back for the two-wheeled wagon with the shovels and the foal. It was hot. Flies disappeared into the gap at the front of the canvas and found the moisture of the mare’s eyes, the mucus left in the nostrils. Others settled on the gory tail. The boys moved away, though it was uphill and into the sunshine. There was nothing to say. Their faces were strained and stiff, but they had stopped crying.
“You said when we got home from the horse show that you would do all the stalls in that barn for a week,” remarked Henry, more out of obligation to the absence of authority than real self-justification.
“I did not.”
“You told Margaret that.”
“And she said we could both do the mare’s stall and that’s what she wrote down on the assignment sheet.”
“You said you would.”
It was boring to go on, and Henry didn’t feel any antagonism anyway. He almost never did, especially toward John, whom he rather liked because of his unremitting interference with mother’s self-satisfaction. “Do you think mother’ll get any insurance money?”
“How should I know?”
But then it was too hot even to go on with that.
John sniffed profoundly, and wiped his eyes. He wiped his eyes again. “It’s just a horse,” remarked Henry. “You don’t even like horses that much.”
“A lot you know.”
“More than you think.” This was just a bluff. Henry thought that really he didn’t know much, but it wasn’t right to admit it. Finally he observed, “There was a light on in the barn last night.”
“Huh?”
“There was a light on in the barn last night. First it went on and then it went off.”
“Bullshit.”
“I saw it.”
“Your room isn’t even on that side of the house.”
“I was in the bathroom.”
“Bullshit.” John was peering carefully at the grass between his feet, as if seeking four-leaf clovers, except that there wasn’t any clover anywhe
re nearby.
“I did,” returned Henry, with more nonchalance than he felt, since he had been half asleep, and it might not have been last night at all. Though it seemed like last night when he thought about it, John was like mother—very definite and persuasive just in the modulations of his voice.
“Shit, what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, I . . .”
“You’re always poking around looking for things and seeing things. Why are you so nosy all the time? You think you know everything and you don’t know bullshit.” He seemed actually angry.
“I saw . . .”
“You saw. Well, take a look at this!” The fist was imperfect, because John was unused to fighting. He hadn’t hit anyone in ten years, since the early rivalries with Peter. He smacked Henry on the cheek, hard enough to leave marks of his knuckles across the bone. The younger boy, surprised, shouted, “Hey!” and dove at John’s stomach. They were pushing each other and rolling around when, with the roar of the tractor, father reappeared.