Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Well, everyone thought, they only had to put up with him for a while longer. That was a relief.

  It could not be said that Epic Steam, standing in his stall, neatly wrapped for the night, spotlessly clean, and strikingly beautiful, had all that many intentions. Yes, he was a monumental hassle from the moment the groom got to him first thing in the morning until everyone was happy to dispense with him for another twenty-two hours. But he didn’t exactly mean to be a jerk. That was the way he knew how to express himself. In fact, now that he was at the track, he was happier than he had been ever in his short life. Without knowing what a track was, he had known when he set foot on it that he was right where he should be. He loved to run. He expressed his love of running by rearing, bucking, bolting, veering to the left or right whenever his rider tried to rate him. He thought maybe if he got rid of the rider he would be able to run in his own way and for his own purposes. It was clear to him that the purpose of running, as of everything else in life, was to make contact with fillies. Fillies gave off a loud and clear signal that they were waiting for him and that the other colts on the track were very much in the way. It was his job as a colt to get those other colts out of the way, even though plenty of them were older and more experienced and tried to demonstrate to him that they were in charge. Mornings out on the track were, for Epic Steam, a gauntlet of challenges by older colts. Almost all of the older colts and the fillies, too, knew plenty that Epic Steam did not know—they had been in races, knew about running, strategizing, winning, knew about being cared for, liking others, and being liked. They lived in a social world of humans and horses. Epic Steam, in this context, was a primitive and a brute. He was not truly crazy, as his sire was, but the rumors drawing a genetic connection between the two of them were in every mouth. Epic Steam was getting famous around the track already, and he hadn’t even run in a race. As he stood munching hay in his stall, was he nursing his grievances and getting ready to make trouble? Everyone thought so.

  He was doomed to get bigger than life, doomed to be discussed and exaggerated about, doomed to live up to his fate, or so it seemed.

  17 / SCHOOL’S IN

  THE TRAINING FACILITIES at Tompkins Ranch California Headquarters—Central Valley Complex, Worldwide Racing and Breeding, The Finest Thoroughbreds, which were located five miles down the highway, past the resort and the restaurant and across the road from the almond and apricot orchards, did not allude, in their architecture, to England, Ireland, France, or Kentucky; that is, the buildings were not elegant, or mossy, or old-looking. They could have done that—the Tompkinses could import and pay for anything, even the sort of drippy, misty moisture you needed for mildew and eternal damp—but the architect they’d hired in the thirties had done his last work at a grocery-store/movie-house/department-store complex in Hollywood, and saw everything in terms of the Baghdad/Mecca/Culver City axis, so the training facility had tiles, fountains, and flowers; domes and pendentives distributed along the length of the roof of the barn; a minaret growing out of the hay-storage facility. The windows of the large-equipment shed were domed and pointed and outlined with mosaic pictures of small boys in turbans. The horses in training were groomed and saddled in a garden courtyard before being led to the training track under an arch that sported a faded mural of Bedouins galloping their Arabian mounts across the sands. It was here that Froney’s Sis was transported, along with four of the other forty-two two-year-olds still belonging to the ranch, when she was brought back into training after two months out in pasture, on the first of February.

  She was put in a stall. Froney’s Sis had been in a stall the last time she was here, but she was otherwise accustomed to a large, sunny, irrigated pasture with only some tin-roofed sheds for shade. She was accustomed, as well, to the constant physical companionship of other fillies, who bumped her, nudged her, groomed her neck and withers, bit her, kicked her, and in general told her every minute of the day and night what she was supposed to be doing. In her new accommodations, she could see one filly on one side, one filly on the other, and several colts and fillies across the way, but the most she could do to touch them was to stick her upper lip through the bars between them. Her relationships, which had been endlessly palpable, had suddenly gotten abstract. And so Froney’s Sis paced her stall. Her groom noticed it the first night and the second night and the third night, after all the other fillies and colts had begun to settle. Back and forth, back and forth, from one front corner to the other, turn right, turn left. The other youngsters ate up their hay with contemplative gusto, but Froney’s Sis left much of her hay and most of her grain. By day four, she had lost, Jack Perkins estimated, fifty pounds. “She’s still a worrier,” he said.

  Nor were her daily lessons going well. The horses came out in a group. The first day, all he did was lead them around the Moorish complex, showing them the bushes and the flowers, the fountains and the gravel paths. They were led around the large-equipment storage shed and allowed to snort at the John Deeres inside. They were led out to the training track. When they snorted and reared and backed away, their handlers followed them with soothing words. The older horses, called “ponies,” there for reassurance, looked on without interest. Each session on the first day took about an hour. Froney’s Sis’s first session took two hours and tried everyone’s patience, including that of the pony, an old paint horse who began to pin his ears at her approach. Finally, though, she managed to make trembling progress from fountain to garden to shed to training track to garden to fountain. At the end she was so covered in sweat that she had to be bathed, which, fortunately, she was too tired to mind.

  The next day, when the other youngsters were progressing to a pleasant stroll around the perimeter of the training track, Froney’s Sis had to repeat her lesson of the day before with another, more gracious pony. At the end of that day, the trainer had consigned her, in his mind, to the slow-learners group. Orphans were sometimes like that. He could count on one hand the orphans he’d had that made racehorses. Somehow, they just seemed to have less sense than other horses.

  Still, though the filly’s progress was slow, for seven days or so, it was steady. She was not an ill-disposed filly. She seemed to like her groom. She stood for bathing, picked her feet up nicely. She never pinned her ears or got irritated. She was just nervous, or confused, or both. New experiences seemed to do her in. On day eight, the groom brought her out, stood her next to the pony, and placed a light racing saddle on her back. Then he went around to the left, pulled the girth underneath her chest, and buckled it on the first hole. She stood still. The groom looked at his assistant, who looked back at him, then tightened the girth one more hole. The filly stood still. The groom smiled. The third hole was the charm. The worst thing that could happen would be for the saddle to slip around the filly’s barrel and get under her legs. At the third hole, it would be tight enough not to do that. He gently pulled up the girth, and got one buckle into the third hole. The filly stood still, and the groom thought he was home free. He began tightening the other buckle. Normal procedure, normal reactions. Everyone felt hopeful.

  The filly fell down as if she had been cold-cocked.

  The pony jumped back two steps.

  The groom’s assistant ran for the trainer.

  The four of them, groom, trainer, groom’s assistant, pony, stood around the filly in a circle, regarding her. The groom’s assistant thought she was dead. The groom thought she was a pain in the ass. The trainer thought she was too complicated for a man whose heart was no longer really in his work, now that he had taken up golf as a sideline avocation and had a two-sixteen tee time on the resort course. The pony could not remember ever making such a big deal of anything as this filly made of everything.

  The groom’s assistant said, “You want me to throw water on her or something?”

  “We can wait her out.”

  The pony gave an eloquent grunt.

  She came to, bucking.

  The groom kept firm hold of her and followed her bac
kward, sideways, forward, sideways again, backward again. She bucked as if born to do it, twisting her head from side to side, kicking forward and backward, rearing, humping her back. The three other yearlings and their handlers had scattered at the first buck, and now watched her from the barn entrances, as did the trainer. The groom, he thought, was handling her nicely. He was a young Mexican boy, about twenty-five. He was utterly impassive, as if the bucking were not even taking place. That was just the sort of attitude the trainer liked to see in a horseman. Horses, especially young horses, were exquisite receivers of emotional signals. A good horseman had to have feet of lead, hands of silk, and the temperament of a sandbag, in the trainer’s opinion. He didn’t even like to see the handler talk soothingly to a horse in a state. If you talked soothingly to a horse in a state, then the horse concluded that his state was justified.

  At last, the filly came down on all four trembling legs and stayed there. She was still in a funny posture, shrunk in on herself as if she could make a space between her skin and the saddle, but she was standing still, maybe too tired to move. The groom stepped toward her and stood by her head. After a moment, he began stroking her around the eyes. She was covered with sweat. The groom looked at the trainer, who nodded and made a gesture that he should lead her forward, which he did. She took a step or two, stopped, humped her back, then took another step and another step and another step. After about ten steps, she relaxed her back, shivered once, and then walked forward more agreeably. As soon as she had done so for maybe a minute, the trainer held up his hand, the groom stopped the filly, and between the three of them, with the pony standing right there, quickly ungirthed and removed the offending slip of leather. The groom took the filly off and gave her a bath.

  IT WAS WELL AFTER DARK the same day, and Joy Gorham was driving Elizabeth Zada to the ranch. Elizabeth Zada was the largest woman Joy had ever known—six feet tall, anyway, and 175 pounds for sure. It was reassuring for Joy to be in Elizabeth’s orbit, because of her Paul Bunyan quality. Large objects, Joy thought, like renegade space stations, could fall from the sky, and Elizabeth would deflect them without stanching her conversational flow. Elizabeth’s conversational flow was prodigious. Elizabeth was sixty years old. Right now she was discoursing about her sexuality.

  “You see, when you have an orgasm, it’s an outward flow of energy. Just dissipated, gone. You can’t afford that. I realized years ago, even before I began my studies of this, that after a certain age, which turns out to be twenty-four, actually, you dissipate that energy and you have less. You have to keep that energy within yourself, so that it builds up.”

  Joy, who was driving her truck, shifted on her seat cushion, thinking of a pressure cooker, its little gauge rattling and knocking.

  “And then it goes out through your head.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Well, it goes out through your head. The top of your head. You see, there’s an energy space there, where spiritual energy shoots upward toward the Godhead. Personally, I always think of a baby’s fontanel. You want that fontanel back. It closes over in the first year as the baby separates from the Godhead, but later on, through meditation, you open it. But that’s my own thought. There’s nothing about that in any of the teachings that I’ve read. All this other stuff, though, it’s well attested.”

  Joy, a trained scientist, knew better than to ask by whom.

  “At any rate, here you have this sexual energy in your lower self. You contain it, move it upward through your spine—there’s a pathway there, you know, a narrow channel—then it blossoms in your head, you might say, and then, whoosh, out it goes. Lovely feeling, I must say.” She cleared her throat. “My goodness, I haven’t been around a horse in so long. Five years anyway. But thank you.”

  How it happened that she and Elizabeth Zada were driving to the ranch after dark was that Joy had been at her dentist’s office having a filling replaced, and the hygienist had brought this loud woman into the room and had said to Joy, “Elizabeth here is looking to read some horses’ minds. No kidding. I saw that you work out at the ranch.” And before she knew it, Elizabeth had overwhelmed her reserve and taken her out to dinner, and started talking and kept talking, and here they were.

  Joy said, “I feel like I haven’t been around anything else. When I think of the people, they seem like they’re on TV or something, even Mr. Tompkins, especially Mr. Tompkins, but when I think of the horses, they seem like they’re all in the room. The thing about horses is, they’re always right there with you.” Joy made the last turn to the back entrance of the farm. It was nearly eight. She said, “There’s about a mile to go.”

  “Men are not responsible for your orgasm. That’s a trap we fall into, especially in marriage. I know I did. For years I complained to Nathan Zada that his technique was off. You know, touch me higher, touch me lower, be more tender, be more masterful, be someone else, for God’s sake! Who am I, the princess Elizabeth, to be stuck with you, Nathan Zada, a mere furrier? Poor Nathan, may he rest in peace.”

  “Is your husband dead?”

  “Oh, my goodness, no. He left me for a florist. They live in Arizona now.”

  “Oh.”

  “I meant, may he rest in peace after he dies in that burning car crash on the highway.” Elizabeth laughed a big laugh, and they pulled through the back gate of the farm and turned toward the stallion area, where Mr. T. now resided. One of the stallions had been sold, and so Mr. T. got an eyeful every day, an eyeful of mares walking by, to the breeding shed, an eyeful of stallions capering and prancing and showing off. Even though he was a gelding, he did a little capering and showing off himself. Joy wasn’t sure it was the best place for him, but the paddock he lived in had good, expensively irrigated grass all year round, and he had improved his condition in only a few weeks. He still needed about a hundred pounds, but he was a different horse from the one he had been in Texas. Everyone who saw him thought he was one of the stallions—proximity fooled them—but to Joy he was the absolute model of that most useful of equines, a gelding. The difference was in his neck. Testosterone always thickened a stallion’s neck, made it heavy and cresty. Mr. T.’s neck was refined, so that when he was too thin he looked ewe-necked. But when she put him together, or when of himself he trotted around his paddock with his ears up and his neck arched, it made just the right curve, tapering upward out of his shoulders, tucking delicately into his throatlatch. He was light and athletic, the sort of pure working organism that only a horse without reproductive urges could be.

  Joy parked the truck and she could see him, a white blur in the darkness. He lifted his head from the grass and walked over to the gate, ears pricked. The other paddocks were empty, because the stallions got put in for the night. As soon as she got out of the truck, he greeted her and she heard the gate creak as he pressed his weight against it. He drew her toward him, that’s what it always felt like, whether out of friendship or beauty or something more basic. She loved the old guy. She bragged about him until the others she worked with rolled their eyes at her, but look at him, she thought. She had investigated his pedigree, for example, and discovered that he was inbred to St. Simon, the greatest horse of the nineteenth century, about whom the book she read claimed, “Having no faults, he passed none on.” When she looked at the painting of St. Simon, there was Mr. T., his head black instead of white, staring back at her. Joy was as proud of that classic head as if it were her own. She was proud of his tendons, too. They had tried a pasture buddy, a pony from the track who was laid up, but on the second day, he had bitten Mr. T. below the hock. When the vet ultrasounded Mr. T.’s tendon, she said, “How many starts did you say this guy had?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Amazing,” said the vet. “What does he do now?”

  “A little hacking out so far.”

  The vet shook her head. “Normally, I don’t see tendons like this on a racehorse after they’re about three years old.” She might as well have said, “Your child is a genius and we know t
hat the DNA comes directly from you.”

  “This,” said Joy to Elizabeth, who had been talking the whole time Joy was contemplating Mr. T., but whom Joy had not heard, “is the horse I was telling you about. You could start here.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Mr. T.”

  “Hmmm,” said Elizabeth.

  This is what Joy had brought Elizabeth out to the farm for, and late, too, in the dark, after all the others were gone. Elizabeth had explained to Joy at dinner that her ability to communicate with animals was tied to her awakened sexuality, and both had come on late in life, after menopause, but, after hearing the words “animal communicator,” Joy had lost the thread of the argument, as she lost the thread of arguments about sexuality. Elizabeth was not to be denied, however, and here they were.

  “Now,” said Elizabeth, “I’m more accustomed to communicating with predators, whose thought patterns and sensory patterns are more or less similar to ours. But there are so few of them. I thought I would try horses because it’s a larger sample population.”

  Mr. T. stood between them, thoroughly alert. First he looked at Joy, then he looked at Elizabeth. Actually, thought Joy, if I believed in this, I would think that he looks ready to talk. She patted him on the neck, but he moved away from her hand. “Hmmm,” said Elizabeth. “Let’s go inside. Can we do that?”

  Joy opened the gate and followed Elizabeth into the enclosure. Mr. T. placed himself between them. After a moment, he bumped Elizabeth on the chest. Joy thought that was interesting, because normally he wasn’t a very physical horse and he liked his personal space. Then he bumped Joy on the chest. Elizabeth said, “He’s streaming.”