Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “It’s up to you, John,” said Farley, congenially. But after the owner turned away, Oliver saw Farley’s face fall, just for a moment.

  “You gonna claim her back?”

  “I don’t think so. Let’s say the quickest I can get her back is a month from now. She’ll undoubtedly have run a time or two by then, and worked hard in between. No telling what kind of shape she’ll be in. No one I know who’s ever claimed a horse back from Buddy has been able to run it in the same class as when it got claimed away. Stress fractures, tendon inflammation, wind problems. Better to let her go.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Farley looked at him. They both knew that Oliver was referring to the larger issue. Farley held his gaze, then smoothed down his mustache and beard in a habitual reflective gesture, running his thumb and forefinger along the line of his jaw. He said, “Every trainer goes through cycles, Oliver. The horses are earning their feed.”

  “But what if the owners start stampeding?”

  “I don’t know. You know, owners always think of themselves as predators. But they’ve always seemed kind of spooky to me. I don’t know.”

  “But—”

  Farley rocked back on his heels and his eyes began to twinkle. He was getting fatherly. He said, “Oliver, it’s okay not to know for now. Eventually we will know.”

  “Farther along,” said Oliver.

  “Farther along,” said Farley. “Did you get any of that soup? That was great soup. I loved that soup.”

  Oliver nodded, and Farley walked away with his university-professor walk, a little stiff, a little remote, a little awkward. Everyone who had ever worked for Farley said the same thing—he was a great guy, but deep as a well and twice as dark.

  9 / A MIRE

  IN THE WEEK between Christmas and New Year’s, it was time for Wow to go off to the training center near Fair Hill. The other four yearlings Krista Magnelli had at her breeding farm had gone already, in September and October, but the Maybricks’ trainer, Dick Winterson, had thought Wow, a May colt, needed some time to mature, which was fine with Krista. The months she had him to herself had lulled her into thinking she could do this impossible thing—be twenty-six years old and have a baby and a breeding farm at the same time. Maia was almost five months old now—she had been born seven weeks after the end of the last breeding season, or August 4, as time was normally measured. She was an easy baby, who let Krista so take for granted that she would sleep soundly, eat well, and play happily that Krista had let the nanny her mother hired for her go early. It was a dream—nurse the baby, put the baby down, turn on the monitor, go out and work with the colt, listen to the baby wake up and chuckle to herself, go in and nurse the baby. All of her friends from college were unemployed or hardly employed (if you considered graduate school employment), and here Krista was, running the farm her grandfather had left her, standing a stallion, breeding and foaling out mares, weaning, training babies and sending them off to learn to be racehorses, bookkeeping, sending out bills, doing taxes. This was her fourth year. Of course, she and Pete hadn’t planned to have a baby in their fourth year—their fourteenth would have been more realistic, but mistakes had been made that, in their usual fashion, had turned out to be destiny, and Krista felt pretty self-confident most of the time.

  She had polished the horse up quite a bit, and it made her think of herself as something of a horse-trainer. She taught him how to load in and out of all the trailers on the place, how to stand for clipping and the farrier, how to have a blanket flapped all over him, how to take a bit in his mouth, even how to longline around the place. He let you do anything with him, was never coltish or wild. And then, after you were done, you put him back out in the pasture and he showed you his secret, his giant, oiled ground-covering stride. Now it was time for him to go. Krista was proud of him, of the good appearance he was going to make at the training farm. Sam the vet was to come out and give the colt a going over before the van was to pick him up, all easy and organized.

  Except that, when Krista went out to feed at 7:00 a.m., she saw that Wow was out and covered with wet mud from eyeballs to hocks, and that, in that luxuriant tail that she had combed through just the day before, there were now cockleburs and twigs. It wasn’t as though Krista hadn’t thought of this. The rain in the night had come without thunder or lightning, and upon half waking up to it, Krista hadn’t even considered that the colt might be out: she had put him in herself.

  She brought the animal in and surveyed him. He could conceivably be hosed off, though the weather was cold for that. If you had plenty of warm water, plenty of wool coolers, some help, and plenty of time you could always get a horse clean, even in the dead of winter. Krista had none of the above. And then she heard a noise on the baby monitor, the noise of Maia waking up and crying. She did not, in the next few minutes, hear the other noise she expected to hear, which was the sound of the door to the baby’s room opening, and her husband, Pete, entering the room and picking the child up. After another minute, she threw the horse in a stall she had bedded the day before for a mare who hadn’t arrived yet, and stomped into the house.

  Pete played right into her hands. Between the kitchen, the bathroom, and the baby’s bedroom, he handed her three marital red flags: there was a dirty plate with four cigarette butts stubbed out in a piece of a bagel on it; his clothes lay in a pile right in front of the toilet, where he had stepped out of them and left them: socks in boots, with jeans, boxers, shirt accordioned on top, baseball cap hanging from the handle of the toilet, toilet seat up; his own self, naked in bed with a day’s growth of beard, sleeping through the lonely grief of his very own daughter, who was now sobbing and catching her breath in Krista’s arms.

  Krista thought luxuriously that it was all too much, and said, “I hate this. I am at the end of my rope. I’ve had it. Enough is enough. This is nowhere.”

  “What?” Pete opened his eyes.

  “Oh my God,” exclaimed Krista, and marched out, the baby on her hip.

  Now, it was true, as her mother had often said, that a wife was allowed a certain number of temper tantrums, and in fact the occasional temper tantrum was invigorating to a marriage. The breakage of a valued object was not to be sneered at, either, since everyone had too many things anyway. “In a good long marriage,” she had said once, “the wedding presents go one at a time, so that by the time you’ve been married fifty years there isn’t a plate or a soup tureen or, God forbid, a Hummel shepherdess remaining as a burden for the children.”

  Krista sat down on the couch and lifted her sweater and turtleneck, then undid the latch of her nursing bra. She maintained a noble motherly calm all through the right breast and then the left breast, and she was selflessly happy to see Maia settle and take her deserved nourishment. Time was passing, of course. Someone could have offered to give the starving child a bottle, but he hadn’t, and that was perfectly all right with the mother, who never forgot her responsibilities. When Maia was full and satisfied, Krista did herself up again, all the time talking sweetly to her child, and went back into the bedroom. Pete, she saw, had drifted off again. She allowed this to go unremarked upon, though hardly unnoticed, and sat down gently on the bed. She said, “Honey, do you think you could change her? You put Wow out last night and he’s quite a mess and the van will be here in an hour, I think.”

  “Hey, baby,” said Pete to Maia, as if nothing was wrong.

  Krista marched out of the house, her footsteps as eloquent as they could be, and past the stallion barn, where the stallion her grandfather had left her three years before, along with this place, the very stallion who had gotten her into this fix, was innocently passing between his stall and his paddock. His chestnut coat was dirty, too, and he happened to have allowed himself a leisurely drop in the penis department. He hadn’t bred a mare in five months, so he was beginning to think again upon his lifework. His penis hung, as white as a girl’s leg, nearly to the ground. Krista exclaimed, once again, “Oh my God!” and the sta
llion pricked his ears and looked at her. Unfortunately, he didn’t think to sheathe his member, and the sight of it annoyed her no end. “You!” she said. “Look at you!” The horse lowered his head and turned right around and went back into his stall. She called after him, “Keeping a stallion is too much for me! I need help here! What if I have to sell you? You’re the best horse my grandfather ever bred! Don’t you dare go anywhere else! I am not acting hysterical!” And then it began to rain again and she sat down on a hay bale and burst into tears.

  It was after nine. She curled up on the hay bale and put her face in her hands and who was going to comfort her or help her now? What if she drove Pete away with her temper tantrums and he took his outside income with him? Then she and Maia and Himself (her nickname for Lake of the Woods) would have to move into a trailer park somewhere, and that was good enough for them and it would be so embarrassing. She would have to sell the farm. She could see the article in The Blood-Horse, because her grandfather had been famous, and Himself had won the Gotham and the Woodward and gone to England and won the St. Leger and the Cambridgeshire, which made him not quite the thing, fashion-wise, as a stallion, so he had to prove himself, especially since he didn’t have a drop of Mr. Prospector or Northern Dancer blood in him. It would be a very tragic story, and there would be a picture of her holding Himself by the leadshank, with the baby on her hip, and the headline would be something like “Young Mother, Breeder, Sacifices All for Unproven Stallion.” And then there would be all the stories about the farm and about what a great horseman her grandfather had been and how she was trying to follow in his footsteps, but it was always hard for a woman in the racing world—

  And so she didn’t hear Sam’s truck pull in, and, yes, he found her dripping wet curled up on the hay bale, her face pressed into her hands. She exclaimed, “I’ve got to sell the farm!”

  “First you’ve got to sit up and go into the tackroom, because you are soaking wet. And shivering.”

  “Am I?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She was.

  The tackroom was cold, so Sam turned on the kerosene heater and found a wool cooler and wrapped her in it. Then, very Sam-like, he took a clean towel off the stack she kept there and wiped her face and hair. But she had to look it straight in the face. “I’ve got to sell the farm. Pete is going to leave me, and I would never take any money from him other than child support, and the farm is the only thing I own besides Himself, and I can’t sell Himself. I told him I might this morning, but I can’t.”

  “Did Pete say he was going to leave you?”

  “Not yet, but I’m such a bitch that he would be a fool not to.”

  “When is he going to leave you?”

  Krista thought for a minute. “After I go in the house and scream at him for not getting up with the baby and for leaving Wow out last night, when I spent all day yesterday getting him ready to go off to that place in Fair Hill where all the horses are sons and daughters of Seattle Slew and Nureyev!”

  “Then we have time to go over this colt today, before the van gets here.”

  “Oh, God! He’s so dirty! You aren’t going to want to touch him!”

  “Well, it’s ten. Let’s have a look.”

  Krista sighed and unwrapped herself, then took an old waxed coat off a hook and put it on. She followed Sam out into the barn. Now she was really depressed. There was nothing heroically tragic about a dirty horse, and that was a fact. She said, “He’s over here. A mare hasn’t arrived yet, which I suppose is a good thing.”

  Wow was gazing inquisitively over the stall door, and as they approached he knocked his knees gently against it and tossed his head. Krista picked up a the halter and leadrope she had thrown on the ground. Sam said, “I’ve got this friend out in California, and he was the expert witness for a trial this week.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “They got the plaintiff on the stand, and the opposing lawyer says to him, ‘Is it true or not true that you told the highway patrolman after the accident that you felt fine?’

  “And the guy says, ‘Well, I was walking my horse down the side of the road—’ And the lawyer says, ‘Answer the question yes or no. Is it true that you told the officer that you felt fine?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, I was walking—’ And the lawyer turns to the judge and says, ‘Please tell the witness to answer the question,’ and the judge says, ‘Actually, I would like to hear what the witness has to say’ ”

  Krista had her hand on the latch.

  “So the witness looked at the judge and said, ‘Well, I was walking my horse down the side of the road, minding my own business, when this big semi-truck came barreling up the road and hit us broadside and knocked us over the edge. Well, I was lying there when the cruiser pulls up, and I hear him crash through the brush and clamber down there, and he says, “This horse looks bad,” and he shoots him right there. So, when the guy comes over to me, he says, “How you feeling?,” and I say—’ ”

  “Fine!” Krista said, laughing, though her face was stiff with tears. “That’s the worst one yet.”

  “Worst what?” said Sam. “It’s a true story.” But he smiled.

  Krista opened the stall door and put the halter over Wow’s head, then led him forth. Sam said, “Well, he doesn’t look all that bad, Krista.” And it was true, he didn’t. He was dry and actually fairly clean, though sprinkled all over with wood shavings. Sam said, “He must have dried himself off rolling in the stall while you were otherwise engaged.” They peeped over the stall door, and sure enough, the deep clean bedding Krista had put in for the mare was mounded up and pushed around, a little dirty but not too bad for the mare. She said, “That was smart of him.”

  And so they worked companionably together. Sam spent a few minutes checking the horse over, which wasn’t hard, since he had no known problems, then he brushed him off while Krista picked the burrs out of his tail, then he wrapped his legs while she washed his face with a damp sponge and picked a few burrs out of his mane, too. When the van pulled in, the horse didn’t look perfect, but he did look like a healthy winter horse—fit and furry, well brushed, and neatly wrapped in cottons and green Vetrap. He was only going about twenty miles down the road and two social classes up. He got on the van like an old pro, and only at the last minute did Krista run up the ramp and give him a hug. Then she turned to the van driver. She said to him, “Just remember one thing.”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “This yearling is as closely related to Secretariat as any yearling in the world.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Maybe. But it sounded good, and it reflected Krista’s perfect faith in Wow’s future, which from now on she would only see from a distance. She kissed the colt on the cheek and turned quickly and walked down the ramp. In five minutes, with a great wheezing and squealing, the van was out on the road.

  Since she had cried enough already, she only turned away from its disappearing tail with a sigh, and there was Sam, right behind her, smiling. The simplest thing to say after such a tantrum seemed to be “Thanks for helping me. Don’t you have work to do?”

  “Some shots here, some teeth there. Nothing urgent. Would you like to talk?”

  Krista knew his beeper could go off at any moment—colic, choke, laceration, skull fracture, subluxation of the stifle joint, abortion, pierced cornea—so there wasn’t much time. She said, “Yeah. Yeah, I would.” She had been doing this for three years now, letting Sam’s large, practical presence calm her. It was almost worth all the vet bills, just to have him come over.

  They went back into the tackroom, which was now even a bit too warm, and fragrant with well-soaped and much-used leather. Krista sat on a trunk. Sam sat in the desk chair. Right there on the desk were the bills she was already ten days late sending out. Krista sighed and turned her gaze into Sam’s face, just so she didn’t have to be reminded of that, but everything reminded her. She said, “We can’t last much longer here
, Sam. If we get through this foaling season—Well, I don’t see how we are going to get through this foaling season.” But then she sighed. “Okay. Well, I guess we are going to get through this foaling season. But I know that everyone around here just looks at us and thinks, Haven’t they let that place go, don’t the horses look dirty, surely she’s neglecting that child. I almost don’t dare go out anymore. My grandfather had this place spotless. It was like he knew how to solve every problem before he got up in the morning and knew what the problems were. And he got up at four a.m. I’ve tried that, but Pete doesn’t want to go to bed at eight o’clock, so I don’t get up until six and then I’m ashamed at not getting things done until midmorning—”

  Sam opened his mouth.

  “I know we have to hire someone, but we can’t afford anyone. I mean, some junior-high-school girl would come out here and clean stalls until she dropped and be grateful for the opportunity to be worked to death, but I can’t do that.”

  Sam coughed. What was he, Krista thought, about fifty? Kind of paunchy, but big-shouldered and quiet, the way men who spent their lives stemming the tide of equine disaster often were.

  “And you know what my mother said? She said, ‘Don’t do it, Krista, don’t move there. Sell the damned place and the damned horse and do something more fun than horse-breeding, like working as a data processor at the Pentagon in a stuffy little cubicle for fifty years at ten thousand dollars a year.’ She was sure when told her I was pregnant that the next thing out of my mouth was going to be that I was selling the farm.”

  Sam smiled. Maybe, she thought, she should have married a much older man. Her best friend from college had done that.

  “And a guy from Texas did approach me right after they ran that article in The Blood-Horse about me taking over the operation, and he offered me, well, a lot of money, and I didn’t take it, and I haven’t dared to tell my mother about that, but—”