Chosen by a Horse Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by Susan Richards

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Richards, Susan, 1949—

  Chosen by a horse : a memoir / Susan Richards.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-56947-486-0

  1. Horses—New York (State)—Anecdotes. 2. Richards, Susan, 1949—

  3. Women horse owners—New York (State)—Anecdotes.

  4. Human-animal relationships—New York (State)—Anecdotes. I. Title.

  SF301.R53 2006

  636.1’001’9—dc22 2005052337

  v3.1_r1

  This book is dedicated with love to Allie Dorion, and to my niece and nephews: Marguerite, Nate, and Evan Richards, because they fill my heart with joy.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  [ 1 ]

  IT WAS A cold March day and the horse paddock at the SPCA was full of mud. I stood shivering at the fence in the drizzle as my breath billowed gray mist over the top rail. In my hurry to get there I’d left the house without a hat or gloves, grabbing only a windbreaker from its hook above the basement stairs on my way to the garage.

  If I had stopped to think, I would have responded as I usually did when hearing a plea for help for animals sick and suffering at the hands of humans: I might have done nothing, or I might have sent a check. But this time when my friend Judy called to tell me the SPCA had just confiscated forty abused horses from a Standardbred farm and needed help housing them, I ran for my jacket and jumped in the car.

  I don’t know why this time was different, why in an instant I chose to do something I’d previously avoided. I was not accustomed to going to the rescue. Mine was never the face friends saw smiling over them as they woke up in the hospital after surgery. I wasn’t the one they called to drive them to get their stitches out or to pick up the results of lab tests or X-rays or anything medical. I had a horror of sickness, my own or anyone else’s.

  With such an aversion to illness, why was I standing at the fence watching twenty emaciated broodmares with their foals stumble in the mud? Why did I answer that call? Perhaps it was just a knee-jerk reaction to a deep and abiding love of horses, a love passed down to me by my grandmother, a formidable, sometimes cruel woman who had become my guardian when I was five. As always, I cringed when I remembered my grandmother, and at the same time I envied her a now-vanished world full of ocean liners, Pullman cars, and best of all, horses. When I was growing up, there were still carriages and odd bits of harness in the stable at her home in South Carolina, lovely old carriages that hadn’t been driven in thirty years. I’d look at them and feel cheated that I hadn’t lived in a time when horsepower provided the only means of transportation.

  In my grandmother’s attic was a trunk full of riding clothes, hers and her mother’s: brown leather field boots that laced up the front, handmade in England; wool tweed riding jackets with leather buttons and small tailored waists; linen breeches with leather leg patches; and wide-hipped jodhpurs with fitted calves.

  There was also a coachman’s heavy wool livery with silver buttons engraved with an H for Hartshorne, my grandmother’s maiden name and my middle name. When I was six or seven I’d go through the contents of this trunk, carefully lifting out the brittle fabrics with the frayed edges and the disintegrating linings, and once, one of the coachman’s buttons came off in my hand. I turned it over and on the back it said Superior Quality.

  I put the button in my pocket, and thirty-five years later it hung on the bulletin board above my desk at home. It’s small and round and evokes more images than a feature-length film. One touch and I’m tugged into a world full of horses and carriages circa 1900: traffic jams of horses, horses broken down, horses parked at the curb, horses eating lunch, horses whose coats shine like the waxed paneling of the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue, and horses as shaggy as schnauzers. A perpetual horse show: every day, everywhere, all the time.

  It was my grandmother who had given me my first horse when I was five.

  “Her name is Bunty,” my grandmother proclaimed, handing me the lead line as she herself marched out of the pasture, leaving me alone with my new pony.

  Standing at the other end of the lead, I squinted up at a fat white body slung between two sets of shaggy legs with a tail that swept the ground at one end and dark narrowed eyes under thick lashes at the other. It was like leaving me alone with a chain saw. I knew I was in mortal danger, but I was holding a horse. My horse. The best thing that had ever happened to me. I wish I could say I was a natural from the start. That I hoisted myself onto her back and, with a willow twig for a crop, went for a wild gallop around the field. But the truth is, I had no idea what to do. I stood trembling in my pink sundress, staring at the pretty pony until she lunged forward and removed some of the baby fat packed around my upper arm.

  It never got much better than that, not with Bunty. I loved her anyway: blindly, doggedly, through years of her biting, kicking, and embarrassing me in horse shows by sitting down and refusing to enter the show ring, or refusing to leave it. Occasionally her foul mood lifted and she was a pleasure to ride, but most of the time she brought me to tears. At ten I was given a Morgan gelding named Alert and was shocked to discover that a horse could be gentle and affectionate. I hadn’t realized what a hostage I’d been and, beginning with Alert, developed a lifelong love of Morgans.

  Now when I walked into my barn, I walked into timelessness: the coachman’s button evoking the distant past, my childhood, the present—all merged into one panorama of horses. I already owned three horses, and the time I spent with them wrapped around my day like brackets, the same beginning and ending no matter what happened in the middle. I worried, since turning forty, since I’d developed a bad back. What if I got too weak to take care of my three horses, a mare and two geldings? What if I got too stiff, what if I got too old? My next-door neighbor, Henry, had owned twenty-five dairy cows. He loved every single one like a daughter. Sometime in his late seventies he got old. Arthritis twisted his fingers, and emphysema stole his breath. For a year he crawled on his hands and knees from cow to cow to get the milking done. He hid his face behind his swollen hands and wept the day the big cattle trailer came to take away his herd. From time to time I had feared that something similar might happen to me. And yet, I stood, waiting to take on the care of yet another horse, one in desperate need of a home.

  A man stood beside me at the fence, an SPCA volunteer named Ted, who had helped confiscate these horses. After I’d signed the necessary papers, agreeing to foster a mare, he’d come outside with me to help find and then herd her into the trailer for the drive to my farm. Ted was hatless and coatless, in blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, splattered with mud from his leather work boots to his unshaven chin. His brown ponytail hung dark and wet, coiled between his shoulder blades. Ted wiped at the raindrops gathering on his wire-rimmed glasses, smearing wet lines across thick bifocals. He wore a small gold stud in one ear and when I moved closer to look at the list he had pulled from his
back pocket, I smelled nicotine. He traced a thick, nail-bitten index finger down the computer printout and stopped at number ten.

  “Here she is.” He tapped the paper. “Current Squeeze.”

  It was a strange way to acquire a horse, sight unseen, by choosing an appealing name off a Seized Merchandise list from the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department. The entire situation was strange. I knew nothing about Standardbreds beyond the fact that they were long-bodied, harness-racing horses, sometimes called trotters because they raced at a trot. I wouldn’t have known what to look for beyond general good health and a pleasant temperament, neither of which was relevant in this situation. The closest I’d ever come to a Standardbred had been the occasional high-speed glimpse of a brown face looking out the window of a horse trailer as it sped down the thruway on its way to the track with one of the graceful-looking racing carriages called a sulky strapped to the top.

  So with nothing but a list of names before me, I had picked the name I thought would be the most fun to shout across a pasture. I’d already started practicing shouting it in my head: Current Squeeze! Curry! Squeezy! Names are important to horse people. It was hard to come up with a good one. Even though I’d had horses almost all my life, I’d only had the chance to pick a name once. It had been fifteen years earlier, when I was getting divorced and the lawyers were fighting over who would get the horses. We’d had several horses, including my Morgan mare, Georgia. After a year of haggling, I was awarded custody of Georgia and was then surprised to discover she was pregnant—the result of an unplanned visit from a nearby Morgan stallion. My ex-husband never would have agreed to give me Georgia if he had known I was getting two horses for the price of one. So when a filly was born a few weeks after Georgia had been settled in my new barn, I named the filly Sweet Revenge. I’d kept Sweet Revenge long enough to saddle break and train, and when she was four, I had given her to a friend’s teenage daughter who had become serious enough about riding to warrant having her own horse.

  I still had Georgia, who would be eighteen this spring. Along the way I had also acquired Hotshot and Tempo, two quarter horse geldings, both now in their late twenties. These three were my little equine family, perfect in number and temperament. They had worked out the pecking order years ago and everyone knew his or her place. Fur rarely flew, blood spilled even less often, and probably wouldn’t have at all except for Georgia, who occasionally picked on Hotshot because she was a mare and that’s what mares do. Hotshot let her because he was utterly devoted. I’d never thought of getting a fourth horse, I didn’t want a fourth horse. I was forty-three, I lived alone, I had a herniated disc that had prevented me from riding any faster than a walk for the past two years, and I worked five days a week as a social worker. Yet here I was, considering appealing horse names listed on a police roster.

  Ted and I squinted toward the paddock into the chaos of twenty large brown mares shivering around the perimeter of the fence with foals glued to their sides. We were trying to locate a brass tag with the number ten on it hanging from the cheek latch of one of the worn-out halters. The mares struggled in the deep mud on swollen joints weakened by malnutrition and untreated racing injuries. Many of the horses had open, weeping sores on their legs and flanks. All wheezed and coughed with respiratory illnesses, and green phlegm oozed from eyes and noses.

  Whatever misery they had escaped, there still was more in this overcrowded paddock deep in filth, where it was impossible to distinguish between mud and manure. The well-intentioned SPCA was overwhelmed. There was no barn or shed to shelter the sick horses from the cold and rain. The small stable attached to the paddock had only four stalls and was already filled with horses that had been confiscated before this newly seized group of forty. The SPCA had never intended to house this new group of horses but instead, through radio and television appeals already on the air that morning, hoped to place all of them in foster homes that same day until their fate could be resolved in court. With luck, no horse would spend even one night in this overcrowded paddock.

  It was impossible to read the numbers on any of the tags. The herd jostled and huddled together on the other side of the paddock, as far from the two humans standing at the fence as possible. I felt a wave of fresh anger at this aberrant behavior, at what caused it. Horses treated humanely don’t run from people. I’d never seen domestic horses react to humans this way and here were forty, cowering against the far fence as though we’d come to shoot them.

  More SPCA volunteers appeared, two women to help us find Current Squeeze and to herd her and her foal into the horse trailer that was backed up against the open paddock gate. Ted climbed over the paddock fence and joined the two women, who were ankle deep in mud, waving their arms to try to separate horses enough to walk between them to check the tags for number ten. The herd seemed tied together as they moved in tight circles of exhausted panic. In their panic, some fell to their knees, unable to lift their hooves as the mud gripped and sucked them down. A few of the fallen mares groaned as they struggled to their feet, only to be knocked down again by the frantic movements of the herd around them. The high-pitched whinnies of foals momentarily separated from their mothers added to the terror in the paddock. I couldn’t bear to watch another minute.

  “Never mind about Current Squeeze,” I called. “I’ll take anyone.”

  A few minutes later, one of the bay-colored skeletons stumbled up the trailer ramp, followed by a muddy foal. Ted scrambled after them, securing a thick rubber-coated kick chain across the back, and then he lifted the ramp, locking it in place. He took the list of names out of his back pocket again and walked to the front of the trailer, disappearing inside for a minute. When he reemerged, he hopped onto the wheel fender and shouted across the paddock to me.

  “Lay Me Down,” he called, waving the list. “Her name’s Lay Me Down.”

  If the only criterion for choosing a horse was a name, I’d gotten a loser. Lay Me Down? It wasn’t a name, it was part of a prayer children recited before going to sleep at night. In a different context—say, shouted across a pasture—it might even sound a little wanton. Lay Me Down! Lay Me! What would the neighbors think? Giving a horse a name like that was almost as bad as not feeding her. You couldn’t even get a nickname out of it. But it was too late. Lay Me Down was already in the trailer; this was no time to make a fuss because of a name.

  The parking lot was beginning to fill with trailers as more people arrived to pick up horses. The SPCA had its hands full orchestrating this heartwarming but overwhelming response to its broadcasted appeal for help. Right now I had to move to make way for someone else who could load another horse. Timing was crucial. Every horse there was critically ill and needed immediate medical attention, a responsibility anyone fostering one had agreed to assume. This was the part I most dreaded. My medical phobia. Since Georgia had birthed her foal, when there had been strictly routine visits for a healthy horse, I had called in a vet once a year for vaccinations.

  “We’re all set to go,” a thin thirtyish blonde named Laura called over to me as she climbed into the cab of the truck that would pull Lay Me Down’s trailer. After seeing the appeal for help on television, Laura had offered the use of her horse trailer. I’d met her for the first time when I was inside signing papers. She couldn’t foster a horse herself, she’d explained; she had too many of her own already.

  I headed for my car, not at all anxious to leave this hub of support and expertise to begin caring for two sick horses on my own. What was I thinking, taking on two animals I might have to bury in a back field by next week?

  I drove around to the entrance gate and waited for Laura’s green truck to appear in my rearview mirror. It would take thirty minutes to get home, forty-five if I slowed down for the trailer. As soon as we got there I’d telephone my friend Allie. If anyone could help me to keep the mare and her foal alive, it was Allie.

  [ 2 ]

  WE REACHED MY home and drove back to the pasture.

  “Ready?” Laura said, s
tanding at the back of the trailer, waiting to pull the dead bolt that would release the ramp. Lay Me Down and her foal stood quietly together in the trailer, apparently too weak to raise much of a fuss.

  “Ready,” I nodded, and we pulled out the bolts and let the ramp down slowly, unhooking the kick chain at the same time. Neither horse moved. Either they didn’t know the ramp was down or they didn’t want to get out. I was holding a lead line hooked to Lay Me Down’s halter to help guide her backward. I gave it a gentle tug. No response. Laura walked to the front and peeked through the little door at the front of the trailer, clucking softly to encourage them. I called Lay Me Down by name and tapped my fingers lightly against her rump.

  “She’s asleep,” Laura reported.

  Asleep? I dropped the lead line and walked toward the front, ducking my head to walk through the trailer door, and stood inches away from Lay Me Down. She was a tall horse, sixteen hands—about five foot four at the shoulder. Face to face, my eyes should have been level with her nose. But she had dropped her head so low I could look along the ridge of her mane straight down her back to the top of her tail. She looked like a complicated wire coat hanger draped with a mud-caked brown pelt. Bones protruded everywhere. I watched her ribs heave up and down for a minute and listened to her wheeze. Her eyes were open but droopy, weeping a whitish discharge that streaked the dried mud on her face. The same discharge was coming out of her nose. I knew she had pneumonia and had been started on antibiotics before leaving the SPCA. She couldn’t keep her head up because she was too weak.

  The foal was four weeks old and seemed healthier. She was the same color as her mother, a bay without markings, and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. When she saw me enter the trailer she put her ears flat back and glared. She wore a blue nylon halter that was already too small, cutting into the downy fur that covered her cheekbones. I wondered if she’d let me close enough to remove it. She stood edgy and hostile at her mother’s flank, waiting to see what I was going to do.