Horsekeeping Read online

  One day John hailed me down.

  “Did you and Scott really buy El-Arabia?”

  “Yes John, I’m pretty sure we’re getting it.”

  “Are you keeping it a farm?” he asked, anxious.

  “Yes sir, I think we are. We’ll keep the land open at any rate,” I fired back, happy to report some solid action to fortify our heretofore verbal lines of defense. His effusive gratitude embarrassed me: much of the purchase being made in self-interest after all.

  Another neighbor, Bill Binzen, is an accomplished photographer whose home borders El-Arabia at the northeastern end. He is elderly, and an impossibly thin six feet four, but he gave me a hug that lifted me off my feet when he heard.

  “If I were a little younger, I’d saddle up Western-style and help you out.”

  I tried to envision it. In May he had collapsed at the town Memorial Day celebration: a modest parade of fire engines, the ambulance squad cars, daycare kids in wagons throwing wrapped peppermints to the crowd, the elementary school band blaring marches and the seventy-five year old Salisbury Town Band in their gingham-ribboned cane hats keeping them on key, the giggling Brownies, the self-conscious Boy Scouts and the not so modest roster of Salisbury veterans, crisply uniformed, armed, and humbly serious with memories of time served. The scene never varies: a hush falls on the townspeople as they follow the soldiers into the old pine studded cemetery. The master at arms reads the names of all the Salisbury war dead, Episcopal and Congregational ministers and a Catholic priest invoke God’s blessing, a local child recites the Gettysburg address, Taps hangs in the air twice—to begin near the crowd, and to end, poignantly far away, an anguished cry from deeper in the cemetery. Four guns salute. The shock of the blasts sets a few babies wailing and nervous dogs howling as the older kids pounce for a prized shell casing.

  It is a time to be grateful for these soldiers’ sacrifices, whatever one’s politics. A few feeble veterans ride in fancy convertibles, but most still march, including Bill as he had done for over thirty years, handsomely outfitted in his full khaki WWII regalia, under an airless, sunny sky. He regally stood at attention in the cemetery until the premature May heat got the better of him, buttoned up tight in his uniform. Down he went, stretched out lean in the dandelions and fragrant wild thyme. Conscious and loathe to go to the hospital but unable to fully rally, he was ambu-lanced by the on-hand EMTs. I sadly wondered if Bill’s time had come.

  Two days later, Scott and I watched him ride along our road atop a vintage bicycle, arms vigorously working the handlebars to stay vertical. It seemed dangerous, but I deeply admired his perseverance in filling life to the brim. I hoped I’d have the guts to do the same.

  Relatively young if not as vigorous, Scott and I cottoned to the idea of our kids hanging around a working stable. Some parents pay good money for their coddled offspring to experience “farm life”; here we’d have the real thing in our own front yard. I waxed romantic about the sound of horse whinnies in the distance and pictured our five-year-old pixie daughter, Jane, helmeted and smiling on a white pony with a flowing mane. I imagined our ten-year-old nature-loving son, Elliot, growing muscular and competent mucking out stalls. I sighed over visions of the sun gleaming on the river, the restored-to-their-former-glory barns, and solid, perfectly aligned fences corralling fit, contented horses kicking up their hooves in emerald green pastures. I considered all the animals I could justify having—chickens, goats, pigs or whatever else fills up a barn. They wouldn’t be in the house, so how could animal-averse Scott object? My vision beamed vivid Technicolor until my dark side, the monochromatic pessimist always alert to lurking disaster, concocted a scene of my silly ten-pound poodle kicked in the head to fly across the barn into a too-still heap. But this was minor in my schemes of calamity, and the only negative I could conjure.

  Like Bill, I decided to get on, and enjoy the ride.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Farm Livin’ Is the Life for Me

  THE DAY CAME FOR US TO SEE exactly what we had already agreed to buy. Excited despite the soggy grey air, we drove through eroding mud and parked in front of the barn’s open doors, its grinning maw ready to gobble us up.

  “Ready to see what you’re in for?” asked Pat, our real estate agent, who smiled and swept her arm across the scene, her auburn highlights shining despite the lack of sun.

  “We have to be the easiest clients you have: we agree to buy sight unseen and don’t even negotiate,” Scott joked.

  “Yeah,” she laughed, “you probably win the prize.”

  Pat and I serve on the board of the local musical theatre company in an old barn of a playhouse, so we are good friends. This wouldn’t be the usual smarmy real estate tour, all of us being novices when it came to horse farms.

  We stepped through the middle of three double sliding doors and a few paces into the mammoth building. I could not see a thing. Thinking I was temporarily blinded by the limp November sunshine, I blinked to adjust to the abrupt change in light, but the place remained practically pitch black at high noon. A long slit of a weak glow intervened where one wall met the roof-line on our right: a “window” of mustardy corrugated plastic yielded, once our eyes adjusted, only a miasmatic gloom. The close air smelled old-person-poorly-groomed musty. As Pat fumbled for the lights, a thickened atmosphere pressed down on my shoulders, and though not mystically inclined, I registered a malevolent energy. Damp cold emanated from the dirt floor through the treads of my hiking boots and penetrated the bones of my legs. My back began to ache.

  Several hot-wired tubular fluorescent lights blinked to strobe a miracle of cobwebbery that echoed a horror film version of the snow-filled country house in Dr. Zhivago. Dust-laden spider houses hung like fishing nets opaquely thick from ceiling to floor, pillowing webbed balloon shades from every rafter, peg and seam, so weighty and abundant, I imagined them gathered up and sold as fiberglass insulation. Generations of insects industriously worked many undisturbed years to build this webbed metropolis, and I considered renting the place out as a movie set before a much needed power wash would flush them away.

  The lights decided to hum a slender illumination.

  “I’d definitely have an electrician check out this wiring,” Pat said.

  “I thought the inspector initially gave it the okay?” I complained, flipping the switch a few times.

  “It’s probably not the only surprise,” my usually upbeat husband scowled, hands in his fleece-lined pockets for warmth and maybe to protect his wallet from this money pit.

  We focused our attention on the double rows of ten stalls leading to an open cross hall and then more stalls beyond. I saw the barn continued on, but against all our neck-straining peering the light reached no further. The splintered sliding doors hung askew on the empty stalls, their rusted, bent metal bars suggesting a prison from which rebellious inmates hurriedly escaped. What could have bent those bars? I wondered, only to conjure frantic, desperate animal strength.

  Our wandering revealed another row of twenty or more stalls running the entire length of the barn on an aisle to the left, interrupted by a cozy pinewood tack room that recollected happier days, a few spooky storage closets we all backed away from, and two beat-up wash stalls. Split hoses hung flaccid, and bent black rubber buckets lay upended. This cavern of barn held a whopping fifty-eight stalls, and I traded my early prison impression for the more comforting one of an equine Motel 6.

  The far end of the barn was capped by an indoor riding ring with the same cobweb castles but also some of the lovely honey-colored wood I’d glimpsed in the tack room. The ceiling dripped some viscous liquid, pooling in the dirt. I sneezed.

  “An indoor ring is a real plus for our cold winters,” Pat offered. “It would certainly draw boarders if you decide to go that route.”

  One end of the ring held a metal fortified wooden door that we unbolted and stepped through. A horse whinnied loudly and thumped his feet, shaking the floor. The three of us cowered, raising our arms in self-defens
e: its cries and ours echoed through the empty dark. Pat fumbled with some lights. Not two feet away paced a white horse, his bulging eyes defiant. He kicked at the stall walls with a ferocity that scurried us down this long side aisle that was mostly underground against the hillside. We squinted through the small barred plastic windows at the top of the back walls of the stall, eye-level to the grass outdoors. This buried barn side whispered tales of troubled inmates and solitary confinement. A damp rot seeped into our nostrils, clothes and hair. I shuddered. The wooden posts and stall walls were whittled with teeth marks, hieroglyphs from the secluded who gnawed away at insanity. I re-edited my equine Motel 6 image to that of an asylum.

  The vibrant snorts and whinnies of the lone white stallion still cut the otherwise dim quiet. His agitation was understandable. He was the farm’s last prized stud Stanislav, imported from Europe in El-Arabia’s heyday at great cost, but now half-crazy with neglect and an even more isolated than usual stallion life. The farm hands, first too lazy and then too afraid to deal, locked him away in that interior chamber, the creature rarely encountering the outside except through the yellowed plastic eyebrow of a window. Could this place ever have been good, I wondered?

  Speechless and depressed, we hastened from the barn to the small office building that the help camped out in when not working. It was well-worn from mucky boots and barn-male non-hygiene. Only the inhabitants proved remarkable, sitting amidst a layered fog of smoke. Two loose-skinned men slanted on two legs of their respective chairs, feet stacked on a rickety table, staring blankly at a soundless, static-screened TV rigged with a cockeyed rabbit-ear antenna. These good old boys acknowledged our hellos only by dragging more deeply on their cigarettes, blowing rings. Their contempt indicated they knew their days were numbered—the new bourgeois was moving in. I hated that feeling of pushing them out, of my better circumstances: Why couldn’t they be nice? We’ll need help here and might have hired them, I thought. Taking the high road, Pat cheerfully informed them that we’d have a look around, and so we did.

  The little house needed an overhaul, but the layout made sense: a living room, a bedroom and two grossly offensive bathrooms, one we decided could be converted to a kitchenette. Just enough room to house a stable hand on round-the-clock duty for nighttime emergencies, when horses supposedly morph into equine drama queens. I already vaguely understood how they excel at developing infections, colic—the coverall term for myriad intestinal/digestive problems, panic attacks, and simply get their feet, heads and bodies stuck in the most unlikely crannies, usually when no one is around to help. Their legs are ludicrously delicate given their size, enabling them to run like the wind. More of air than land, they are exquisite creatures when all goes right with their polished hair shining in the sun and their manes blowing in the breeze, but they are also labor intensive and pose consistent challenges to their owners and handlers. Given the expense and the heartache and the wear and tear they impart to a barn, I began to wonder why on earth anyone bothers with them.

  Scott, ever systematically practical in his due diligence, had already purchased some books about running a horse business. I dutifully read them. The unending list of crises even the experts can’t avoid intimidated me. I also had experienced enough “projects” to know that we only knew the half of it. Doubtless this one belonged to the camps of renovating a house and having babies—if we knew fully what was coming at us and for how long, we might never have undertaken either. Scott was interested in the land, but the idea of large riding animals gripped me such that I subtly persuaded him over the coming weeks to keep the farm operating rather than demolish the buildings in favor of crops. Sure we had a lot to learn, but with the right help, maybe we could pull it off.

  My confidence was short-lived. About this time we met the horse-farming Billingsly family. Tammy and Ken parent Keira, my daughter’s schoolmate. Shared interests of school, weekend territory and now horses brought us together. It started off pretty swell. We paid a visit to their farm in Hillsdale, New York, just northwest of Salisbury, on Christmas Eve to sing carols amidst their horses on a cold, moonless night. An immaculate barn cozily housed their fuzzy, winter-insulated Icelandic horses. With manes braided and tails beribboned, they snorted and nuzzled us as long lost friends. Warming up with mulled wine and steaming cider, we sang Frosty the Snowman and It Came Upon a Midnight Clear led by two neighbors, an elderly trumpet player and a robust opera singer. We chatted with interesting people bundled in festive scarves and hats. Children and dogs, powered by their snatch-ings of truffles and chocolate chip cookies with each end run around the food table, completed what could have been a film set. This is perfect, I thought to myself, picturing a similar shindig someday in our own cobweb-free, renovated barn.

  A couple of weeks later Tammy and Ken met us in Salisbury for a dinner at The White Hart Inn. As Tammy, Ken, Scott and I huddled in front of a crackling tap room fire, the talk quickly turned from kids to horses. Ken and Tammy had ownership in a large Thoroughbred breeding operation. In deep, they imparted the nitty-gritty: how unmanageable the stallions can be, and sometimes vicious; how some masturbate in their stalls: how some brood mares are hobbled when the stallions mount them to avoid injury, mainly to the valuable stallions; how the best time for a mare to become pregnant is only seven to ten days after giving birth; how dangerous it is for the handlers; what a factory it all is. Not much different from those dreaded puppy mills, I thought.

  “You wouldn’t want to come back as a brood mare, that’s for sure,” Tammy said.

  I quizzed them about the darker aspects of racing life, about the doping of horses and unscrupulous trainers who knowingly run them unsound, the controversy of running two- and three-year-old horses before their bones and ligaments are fully stable, the betting fixes and the sad afterlife of too many washed-up, but still young Thoroughbreds. Losing racers are shifted to ever lesser tracks as their winning prospects dim. Some get rescued and patiently rehabilitated as pleasure horses, but many remain unaccustomed to life off the track and make troublesome companions. Few horses in any discipline enjoy lifelong security but the racing industry pushes the envelope. I had gleaned these ideas from newspaper accounts that appear around the big three races—the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes—and also from Jane Smiley’s account of her adventures in this great sport of speed and bravery, but my friends’ experience had been a good one overall, and I imagine that the Billingslys’ operation is humane and well-run. Many others aren’t so. It is akin to factory farming—once remote, large scale specialization “improves” productivity, cruelty and nonsensical practices can creep in. If we witnessed the brutish life of cows, pigs and chickens, we’d force change for our own physical and mental health. But we don’t see these feedlot animals—the barbaric conditions and slaughter. In the case of expensive horses bred for the track, the mare’s plight of live cover while confined in a stall is not even alleviated by artificial insemination, a good practice banned for no reason other than tradition.

  Back in Manhattan two days later, I ran into a morose Tammy. Her horse, one that she had nursed back to health after an infection two months before, relapsed and was put down. Oh, boy. I can already hear the sobs of my children prostrate over the stiffening body of some ill-fated pony; not to mention my own agony. I mourn every chipmunk I roll over, and brake for frogs. More pets mean more love, but I have also opened my family’s hearts to more pain. Many mourning owners opt for a pet-less future, eschewing any more grief. I need animals in my life and make that compact, but I know Scott would prefer to avoid them and their dramas altogether.

  Two weeks after our visit to El-Arabia we awaited the inspector’s full report. Braced for the worst, I half-hoped a bad verdict would rescue us from our folly. How could it be good? But Pat called with surprising news: a sound main building, but some boards would have to be replaced and improved doors and a new roof put on. The inspector deemed the electrical wiring safe, but advised better light fixtures. The beams and in
terior woodwork, if ragged, stood stable. Most of the work tended toward cosmetic. Suspicious but willing to suspend disbelief, and despite our poor qualifications, we were green-flagged to buy fencing by the mile, have our kids’ fingers mistaken for carrots, and probably go broke in the horse business. Optimistic businessman Scott considered himself that one in a thousand who could make it work.

  Our imaginations about the possibilities for our “farm” ran wild. My kids thrilled at the idea of baby animals—from horses to piglets. Jane would finally get the cats her father forbade in the house, and I pictured black-and-white downy chickens and speckled brown-and-blue eggs. Clucks, oinks, neighs, baas and cock-a-doodle-doos orchestrated in my head. Elliot would learn about sex surreptitiously through animal husbandry. Goats and cheese sounded fun. And I’ve always liked the sage look of highland cattle—those orange shaggy coats and long horns. We’d find safe, grateful horses that Scott and I would ride around our property like Ron and Nancy Reagan, and as a family we’d gallop off into the sunset. We could play as gentleman farmers, and maybe, just maybe, not get our hands too dirty and our hearts too broken.