Horse-Famous: Stories Read online

  “I had no childhood. Everything I did was for the Council, to make the Manual, to redefine English horsemanship. I got away as quickly as I could and swore I’d never go back. That horse I slid off that day, Count, was the last horse I rode until last year.

  “Tea?”

  He looks nervously at me, like I’m not really the sort of person who ought to be handling kettles of boiling water right at the moment, but assents with a nod, and I splash water into his mug and toss him a box of teabags. “Help yourself.”

  There is silence while he dunks his tea and makes a great deal of fuss about pouring in sugar and stirring it precisely, trying desperately not to clink his spoon against the edge of the mug. I find that noise grating on the best of days and decide to be nice to him in gratitude for his forbearance.

  “I’m sure you can understand how I would have liked to gotten the inspection without letting on who I was. Because now, of course, what does it matter?”

  “Well,” he says cautiously. “There’s still the little matter of whether or not you’re mentally fit to be running a livery. I mean, why are you doing it all? It’s been fifteen years. One would think you’d left horses behind for good.”

  “Do we ever?” I ask him softly.

  There is quiet.

  “I couldn’t,” he admits at last, more to his teacup than to me.

  “You tried?”

  “My mother wanted me to be a doctor,” he admits. “My father wanted me to do anything at all that didn’t involve horses. Hates them. I could run the council and be a disappointment to them.”

  “Fucking horses,” I say blandly. “They own us.” I look past him, out the window, to the sparkling twenty-stall barn I’ve been pouring my soul into, where the horses that I adore are comfortably eating from their haynets, snoozing in their shavings, talking in their nickers and whinnies to Brigid, who seems to speak their language and no other. “You can’t leave them behind. You’re always thinking of them. You’re always looking into fields when you’re driving down highways. You’re always peering down paths when you’re in parks. You’re always perking up when you see them on TV. You’re always analyzing their bridles when they’re in a movie. Horses get inside of you and there’s nothing you can do about it. I know. I tried.”

  The inspector looks at me, a long searching look, and I meet his eyes unflinchingly, which is saying something for me. I shy from human contact. I grew up without it; I’m not used to it. I’ve been a hermit for fifteen years, run away from the only thing that ever made sense to me. The horses, the horses, the horses.

  “You pass,” he says finally.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He gathers up his clipboard and signs the certificate. “You’ll receive a password in your e-mail which allows you to order the signs for the property and the logos for your website.”

  “Thank you,” I say again.

  “It wasn’t a hollow victory, after all, was it, Inspector Healy’s daughter?” he says with a small smile.

  “I’ve still got it,” I laugh. “After all these years, I’ve still got it.”

  He steps through the front door, pulling on his coat. He looks back at my narrow hallway, the bridle hanging over top of a torn raincoat, the saddle slung upside-down under the hall table, the dirty saddle pads lying on top of a pair of my own jeans in the clothes hamper that jostles for space in the open utility closet. “They’ve got you, Ms Blakely,” he says with a wry smile. “They’ve got all of us.”

  The Long Walk

  It was April, but already the sun was hot in the middle of the day. Mornings were still cool and misty, those delightful Florida fogs that weave through the moss-hung oaks and amplify the sound of hoof beats from the training tracks around the farm. You could hear our horses, but just as easily you could hear Briarwood’s, a mile down the road, and Forsyth’s, across the road and on the far side of their property. Whinnies, shouts, curses, all came rippling through the dense fog as if the horses were just next to us. Farther out, the sounds of a police car on I-75 gave me a strange reminder of the constant siren whoops in the streets of Manhattan.

  I came tripping down the stairs from the grooms’ quarters, bleary-eyed and thankful that I didn’t have a commute through the road-block of fog out on the country roads. There wasn’t much I liked about living on the farm, but mornings like this certainly showed off the advantage. I flipped on the lights and waited in the gray darkness for them to warm up and light the stage for the morning’s chores: stalls to be hayed, grained, and watered, fifty-odd mares to be brought in for breakfast and grooming, teasing and breeding, the vet’s truck rattling up the stony driveway and all the ultrasounds and exams to be done. . . Then perhaps a few minutes for lunch. Breeding season wasn’t easy.

  Most of the mares were Florida-bred and Florida’s climate had shaped their reactions to the seasons’ changing -- they were late to grow winter coats and early and easy to shed. But at least a dozen had been shipped down south in the past month, and the sudden warmth and longer days had shocked their systems. They were in a perpetual state of shedding, hair drifting down from their wooly backs and necks, blowing down the barn aisles and through the pastures like tumbleweeds, and no amount of currying and brushing seemed to end the cycle. No matter what you did, these arctic mares always seemed to have more hair to lose.

  They lost most of it all over me and the other grooms. A day in the broodmare barn was like being tarred and feathered: you came out in the evening pasted all over with horse slime, nose bogeys, fragrant little green leaves of alfalfa, sharp stabbing stalks of straw… and that was before the foals came along with all of their accompanying body fluids…

  But still, I felt lucky to have this job. I'd been working the sales for a long time, traveling back and forth from Ocala to New York, Kentucky, Maryland, anywhere there were Thoroughbreds for sale, there was a job for a slim young woman who could stand them up prettily for the buyers to survey. And be surveyed. But I was tired of the long hauls on horse trailers, sitting in a folding lawn chair between the sheepskin-padded heads of tireless Thoroughbreds, fussing the whole night through while I tethered myself to a lead shank hooked to a railing so that I could doze off without falling off the chair and under their aluminum-shod hooves.

  Of course, every job has its drawbacks. And this one's drawback was Elmer.

  Elmer was a wiry little man, with red hair and a permanent sneer fixed on his deeply wrinkled face. He had seen plenty of grooms come and go in his time, and he didn’t expect I would last any longer than the rest of them.

  My first introduction to Elmer came as I was strolling out of the broodmare barn with a tall bay mare on the end of a lead shank. She was heading off for an assignation with a stallion, who awaited her attentions in the breeding shed, a colossal Grecian palace sitting at the end of a half mile’s walk down a steep hill and back up a still steeper slope. The mare was on her toes, revved up and excited by the prospect of leaving the security of her herd and her stall, and too full of hormones to think properly. She swung around her hindquarters as we left the barn and lashed out viciously with both hind legs at a bush which she had taken a violent disliking to.

  I didn’t react, outside of letting the leather lead shank slide a little through my fingers, before taking up the slack and giving a gentle tug to let her know that I was still there, and still expected her to follow. She hesitated, tail up and ears pricked at the horizon, unwillingly to concede that there was a human on the end of the rope. I waited. I could wait. The stallion could wait. The whole world could wait for a promising maiden mare.

  At last she snorted, showering my sweatshirt with a noseful of equine bogeys, and came jogging along beside me, huffing through wide red nostrils with every footfall.

  No one but grooms and mares ever traversed this pebbled road between the broodmare barn and the hub of activity at the main farm on the hill, where the breeding shed, yearling barn, training barn, and track all converged together in a mass of equine an
d human hysteria. In the fall the weanlings shrieked for their mothers here, in the winter the training barn came alive with the newly broken two-year-olds shouting at all hours for their stablemates across the aisles, and now, in the springtime, semi-trailers bearing mares from farms near and far came, creaking torturously through the dips and ruts, with trumpeting, kicking Thoroughbreds inside, overwrought, like the one I led, with hormones and herdlessness.

  In the breeding shed was a din of a different kind: shouting men, the occasional hoof connecting with the rubber-padded walls, the high-pitched whinny of a frightened mare and the deep triumphant roar of the stallion inspecting his victim.

  It all sounds so violent, but it isn’t. . . it’s just loud. Racehorses, by dint of being kept indoors, with walls between them all the time, are more talkative than saddle horses that are used to being out with their friends part of each day. Here it is a constant call for reassurance, “Are you there? I’m here, just over here. . . And you’re there, right? Oh good. . . I’m here, you know.”

  They take that talkativeness with them in their afterlives, as stallions, or stable ponies, or broodmares. And you’ll often walk through a jumper barn or a dressage stable and hear someone say, “Oh that Thoroughbred in the end stall, he never shuts up, the most noisy horse we’ve ever heard.”

  But of all the pent-up blood-horses, the broodmares are the lucky ones. Broodmares tend to live outside, in large bands, kicking and biting and grooming and swishing flies from one another’s faces, and their whinnies and neighs are often saved for mealtimes, unless they have a foal at their side to keep track of. So it was quieter there, in the broodmare barn, and Elmer came but rarely, because we minded our own business and our horses thrived in the quiet and the still, away from the mania. The vet came once a day in the spring to palpate the mares in heat, and to ultrasound the mares that had been bred ten days earlier, but other than that, it was only we grooms, alone and quite content.

  So it was a bit of a surprise, to the mare and the groom alike, when a golf cart came rattling up on the rough road. All golf carts at breeding farms rattle, covered as they are with old halters and buckets and bits of baling twine that were tied too tightly to double-ended snaps or screw eyes and then left out in the rain, so that the twine has to go everywhere that the hardware does. This golf cart had the weasel-like face of a little red-haired man peering over the steering wheel, glaring right at me, and I had the uncomfortable realization that I was about to meet the storied temper of the Boss.

  The mare felt equally uncomfortable in Elmer’s malevolent presence and began to hop up and down energetically, as if she was practicing some sort of calisthenics. Horses can sense cruel characters, they say. It was enough of a distraction that I had to turn and face her, asking her quietly to focus on me again, wiggling the chain over her nose, wagging the leather end of the shank in her field of vision. Meanwhile, Elmer was able to creep up behind me. When I turned back to the road, his face was inches from mine, lips drawn back like a bad-tempered weasel (I keep coming back to weasel, so you know it must be true), red eyebrows drawn together over eyes the color of pea soup. The color I always imagine bile to be, should I be so unfortunate as to imagine bile.

  “And who is, this, eh?” he snapped. “Do ya know who you’ve got here, miss, do ya, eh?” He looked disapprovingly at the loose shank in my hand. “I could see her dancing a mile away. Why doncha have the chain under her lip? Doncha know she could get loose and break a leg? Lose me a good mare? Who hired you?”

  We're expected to know everything about the horses, in theory, so that if an owner shows up unexpectedly (they are not encouraged to do this, but rich people have boundary issues, I have found) we can answer all their questions without looking like we're trying to hide information. The racing industry is run by old-time horsemen (not the most well-reputed lot) but the money for the horses comes from new millionaires (not the most trusting lot). The combination is really just a pain in the ass, to be honest. There were more than fifty mares in the breeding barn and I couldn't say I knew everything about all of them. I didn't even know some of the new girls' names. I looked back at the mare, who had calmed for the moment and was cropping grass in short, hurried bites, the way horses do when they’ve been bad and hope you will ignore them and pretend nothing happened. Her halter plate read, “Wild Welsh.”

  “She’s Wild Welsh,” I said, thinking back quickly. “By Mr. Prospector. One of his last crop. Out of a black-type mare by the Minstrel. Unraced. Really nice cross, though. Maiden mare. Headed up for her first cover.”

  I stopped. That was truly all I knew about her. We had old sales catalogs piled up in the feed room, mildewing records of the last twenty years of American bloodstock, that we read on lunch breaks, and she happened to have come from the last sale.

  But that ought to be enough.

  “And?” he snapped out.

  I couldn‘t imagine what else there was to tell. Who broke her? Why she didn't go to the track? How many centimeters her uterine follicle was? Okay, he could reasonably expect me to know that, except that I hadn‘t been the one holding her during her veterinary exam that morning, so I‘d have to ask Aimee. Where the hell was Aimee? Oh, right. Taco Bell run. Damn. I was reduced to my first thought: playing stupid. “And, sir?”

  “What else? Leading a good mare to the shed without a chain! Look at her dancing around you!“ he cried, gesturing at the grazing mare, who was growing more relaxed and convinced of her own invisibility by the moment. “Where’s the chain? Dangling from her halter! Get it over her nose where it belongs, before you lose her!”

  She was a good mare, but there was one little thing she had a problem with, and that was a chain over her nose. The twelve inches of chain shank were looped through the bottom ring of her halter, where they couldn't touch her sensitive face and set her off. We'd seen her flip over the first time the vet had shown up to take a culture. He'd only just gotten out of the way. It would have been nice if the owners had sent along the warning that she couldn't stand a chain, but like most mares, she came without an instruction booklet.

  I shook my head, even though refusing to give in would probably cost me my job. I had heard what happened when you didn‘t take Elmer's orders straight away. He wrote you a check, and you got into your car and you left. “She'll flip if you put a chain on her. But the breeding crew won't need it. They'll sedate her. She's a maiden, after all. Shouldn't be an issue."

  He frowned at me. “Did I hire you?”

  I nodded. There was really no telling whether he was being sarcastic or not. I decided deferential would be the best approach, after my quick and easy defiance of his edict on using the stud chain. “At the winter sale, sir,” I said, choking out the word sir without any sarcasm at all, most impressively. “You hired me for the sale and said I handled the horses well in the walking ring. So you brought me back to the farm and had me stay on in the broodmare barn.” I didn’t expect to be remembered. It was better not to be. To be young and slim and blonde in the racing industry is to watch your back. I suppose it’s true anywhere, but it can be doubly so out here in the country, I think, where the girls are considered to be naïve, or easy, or stupid, or all three at once.

  “Well,” he said, taken aback. “Well.” His weasel’s face drooped when he wasn’t angry, the long deep furrows in the skin giving him a look closer to a basset hound, or a shar-pei puppy. He was considerably less frightening and it occurred to me that he knew it. Then his eyes gleamed and he chuckled, plotting complete. “Lead her up, then, miss witch, and show me how good y’are with my mares.”

  I picked the mare’s head up, gave her a stroke on the neck for calmness, and luck, and strode on up the hill. She went with me nicely for a moment and then shied and bolted, breath coming loud and fast. I reined her back and swore to hear the cracking and popping of pebbles from under the hard tires of the golf cart. The bastard was following me, only about twenty feet behind us.

  The mare was in a state, eyes pop
ping and dripping with sweat. And we were only half-way to the breeding shed. It's a sadistic man that will risk a horse's safety to get a groom fired, but that was Elmer. That's working horses for you, really draws the best of society. I chose not to give him the satisfaction of a glance behind, but kept walking calmly, letting Wild Welsh jog beside me, swinging her hindquarters on the soft verge along the roadside, in a shoulders-in maneuver that might have gotten her a second look from a dressage breeder. Every so often I ran my right hand along her neck, just under the line of her mane, and she rewarded me by flicking a left ear away from the horse-eating golf cart and down towards me, to admit that I was there to comfort and protect her.

  Oh, it was a long walk! It would have been longer, too, because as we began to reach the crest of the hill, within reach of all the hysteria of the farm activity, ready to set the poor maddened mare on a course of completely unhinged mania, Elmer saw something else that completely captured his rage.

  Near the yearling barn, some poor gormless groom was leading two yearlings into the paddock together, one on each side of him. It is a common enough way to lead horses, especially ones you know quite well, and who know each other. A well-brought up youngster, who has had a lead rope hooked to his halter in his stall so that he learns to step on it and not frighten himself, who knows that a sharp yank means to knock it the hell off, and who is concentrating more on the desired destination than the journey, can usually be led quite easily this way, and of course it saves time and tedious to-and-froing.

  But if Elmer didn’t understand that I could keep a mare quiet on a walk without a chain on her nasal bones, he certainly wouldn’t stand for a groom walking two expensive sales yearlings to the paddock in a pair. I couldn’t help but watch as he got out of the golf cart, a much more respectful distance from the yearlings than he had been from my mare, in deference to their tender age and capacity for wanton self-destruction, and very kindly and helpfully took the lead shank of the right-hand colt from the groom.