Horsekeeping Page 6

  “Maybe Janie, but I think we’ll have to leave him alone for awhile and give him some time.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to help him?” Elliot asked.

  “I don’t know much about birds, El, and that one may be sick in a way that we don’t want to touch it,” I said.

  West Nile virus had been reported among birds in the area. Later I heard a theory that birds commit suicide in this manner when unwell. That is certainly how this appeared, but I generally curb my anthropomorphic tendencies.

  “He may need a good long rest,” I said, giving Scott the nod which means the deep sleep, and we better think fast how to handle this.

  “I hope he’ll be okay,” Elliot said. “Here, Mom, catch.” He threw me the baseball.

  Our continuing glances did not work any miracles. We headed in for lunch and planned a funeral for the bird should it fail to fly again. Sure enough, the next day it remained, stiffening, until our caretaker George climbed a tall ladder to retrieve it with gloved hands. He dug a hole in the tall grass at the edge of our yard, and we buried the beautiful bird.

  “You were a good birdie, but now you’re dead,” Jane said, her voice sad, her lip pouting, a dramatic little mourner.

  “I hope you had a good life,” Elliot rejoined. “I wish you could’ve lived longer.”

  Jane sang a made-up-on-the-spot song, Elliot sprinkled a handful of torn grass over the mound, and that was that. No tears. No existential angst. But the bird funeral proved popular. When next a smaller bird hit a window and didn’t revive we staged another, more elaborate burial. We took turns holding the little sparrow and admired its intricate design—rubbery clawed feet, patterned feathers etched in infinite shades of brown, silky white breast—so delicate, soft, perfect.

  Jane sang more songs, a stone marked the plot, flowers were picked and laid in memoriam, and stories illustrating the bird’s imagined life and family were concocted. I wished I remembered my Tennyson. Both kids repeatedly visited the grave that day and tried to dig it up the next, but I put the kibosh on that, citing respect for the dead. In a few days it was completely forgotten.

  Bird trauma dogged us. The next summer a game of badminton edged us from the lawn toward the tall grass. A movement caught my eye, only about ten yards to my left.

  “What’s that?” I asked Scott, moving slowly toward it.

  “Is it a cat?” He thought of the feral opportunists that hide in the bushes under our birdfeeders.

  “I think it’s a turkey.” I motioned the kids to keep back.

  It is unusual to get this close to a turkey. They have keen eyesight and are swifter of foot than you might guess for such large, awkward fliers. When we moved to Salisbury sixteen years ago, turkeys were rare. The few released onto Canaan Mountain twenty years ago slowly multiplied, and now a large group often crosses our yard, nervously bobbing and weaving through their reclaimed territory. They espy every movement, even our still, barely breathing bodies through the glass in the house as we watch them, and our fast little dog Velvet doesn’t have a chance even when she happens to be lying in wait in the grass.

  This turkey sensed me and ran a few paces. At each sound of my creeping it raised and cocked its head in my direction.

  “It can hear but I don’t think it can see me,” I reported.

  A crust covered the top of its head, including its eyes. I inched within two feet, and it scurried only slightly away. This was a blinded turkey.

  “What do we do now?” I queried.

  “I guess we just let nature take its course,” Scott hit the badminton birdie back to the impatient kids. WHACK. “You know the animal control people” WHACK “aren’t particularly interested in helping.” WHACK. “You’ll never get anywhere” WHACK “with them.”

  He was right. Once we called about a limping, mangy coyote staggering around our field in the middle of the day. We started with the police and chased a long sequence of phone numbers from the EPA to local animal control. No “authority” could help. I remembered John Bottass, our neighboring farmer telling us, “You’re best off just shootin’ it yourself.”

  We do not own any firearms, but occasionally we hear a few shots go off nearby. Our next door neighbor, Mrs. Kilner, was known to prowl nocturnally, aiming an ancient rifle at coyotes who menaced her rescued greyhounds. I am not in favor of guns in most circumstances, but the one good argument for weaponry is to be able to put down, quickly and efficiently, an injured and suffering creature. That we euthanize animals is one way we are more humane to them than to ourselves.

  We left the turkey alone, allowing some space to avoid stressing it. But later that afternoon it remained, having scarcely moved. I thought of the possible nighttime scenarios. It could be quickly dispatched by a couple of coyotes. That would be the best. Or it could make it through the night, and the next and the next, panicky and ill until it starved to death. Either way, I knew I couldn’t rest with inaction. We eventually trapped the turkey with an overturned recycling bin and transported it thirty minutes to the Sharon Audubon Center where they examined and euthanized it. Our adventure had taken about three hours, and I hoped Elliot had learned something from it. A sad outcome, but we did our best and alleviated some suffering. Dying animals are tough for most people, and as my kids increasingly cozy up to our pets, from our wonderful seven-year-old poodle Velvet to the menagerie at the farm, they will suffer too. I hope they will agree, beyond the illnesses witnessed and losses keenly felt, that the presence of animals, their unconditional love and companionship, is well worth it.

  My husband Scott, however, has steadfastly kept his distance from our pet canines, and though he now denotes the first dog of our married life his favorite, this affection latently bloomed after “Peanut’s” demise. My stepmother surprised newly wed Scott and me with this shih-tzu puppy straight from a puppy mill in New Jersey. Only four months after graduation from college, two months of marriage, and two months of law school for Scott and work for me, we were already parents. Scott bristled at his mother-in-law’s imprudence, but I secretly delighted, and our little “Nutter,” inbred and crazy, barked and chewed her way through our new teak furniture and the baseboard moldings of a series of rental apartments for the ten years it took her to outgrow her puppyhood.

  Peanut never learned a thing: would not come, sit or stay and ran just out of reach every time we needed to catch her. Never fully trained, I scrubbed a lot of carpet, and my impatient father almost killed her several times—she was that infuriating. She craved water and would leap from my dad’s speedboat at forty miles an hour to take a swim: we would scoop her up in a fish net, eventually outfitting her in a tiny doggie life jacket with a handle on the back for easier retrieval. What she lacked in brains she made up for in kooky charm, and she saw us through the first sixteen years of our marriage, surviving six months of quarantine during our move to London, my first pregnancy, and the first two years of Elliot’s life. Putting her down was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.

  It took five pet-less years for me to realize I was not as happy a person without a dog in my life. More careful this time, through a breeder I found our current Velvet, a smart and slavishly affectionate poodle. Meek and sweet, she lacks Peanut’s high-octane personality, but is much easier to live with. Whereas Peanut would inevitably vomit in the car, Velvet dreams peacefully as we stop and start through New York traffic, sticks to me like glue, comes whenever I call her, and as the quintessential lap dog, contentedly drapes her black furry body across my thighs, resting her head on the armrest of my desk chair to keep me warm while I write. But Scott focuses on her only fault: she begs at the dinner table. Scott always sees the bright side, so how does he only see the bad in Velvet, I wondered?

  Unlike Scott, I had been weaned on dogs. A largish white miniature poodle “JouJou” loudly growled his teeth into my diaper to tug toddler me from the freedom of the front yard. Unfortunately, once I was safe in my mother’s care, JouJou would take off after his true passion�
�chasing every car on the road. He limped home from his last rampage to quietly die on the back door rug. Our subsequent small white toy poodle “Tigre” ate only table scraps and lived twenty-one years, toothless and blind but still perky to the end. Llaso apso “Boucher” served as child substitute to my empty-nester parents when I left for college. Alongside my immediate canine companions, my grandfather’s sleek black mutt Velvet hid deep in the closet under the eaves when it thundered, and my aunt’s clumsy rust-red Irish setter and my grandmother’s series of graceful afghans showed me the pleasures of the larger breeds. I remember them all fondly.

  Even the mean ones that scared me I revered. My cousin’s grandparents had a boxer-pit bull mix named Butch to protect their one-room home down the port in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Butch would just as soon tear your head off as look at you unless called off in Polish by Bubba or JaJa. But that dog adored the old lady, and I can still see Butch with his front paws up on the chipped lip of the porcelain kitchen sink smiling broadly while Bubba brushed his gleaming white, lethal teeth.

  Scott had only one childhood experience with a pet. Before he fully embedded into the household, a frothing springer spaniel named Rusty bit the neighbor kid’s bottom and was shipped off to the pound. Too bad: if only his parents tried another dog, maybe Scott would be more interested in our growing animal family. But we are formed by early experiences and follow our own inclinations. I make do with one house pet when I’d prefer several, and Scott had endured our problem child Peanut in our new marriage and now suffers my over-enthusiastic affection for our excellent Velvet. So in tune on almost everything else, we stare across a gaping divide when it comes to pet adoration. I envision other couples cozy on the couch, with a cat and a dog squeezed in between, waxing eloquent about their furry children, just as we do about Elliot and Jane.

  I have not given up: someday he may surprise us all with a deep and abiding affection for a dog, a bunny, a cat or even a horse.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Not Much of a Plan

  AS OUR MAY 1ST CLOSING DATE for El-Arabia approached, we fully registered our limited experience. Our romantic excitement did not quite prepare us for the responsibility of operation. Now what do we do, just up and run it? Plug in a few horses and throw them some hay occasionally?

  We had enough on our plates already—two homes, two kids, too busy. Moreover, we were not horsey material—we liked things neat, clean and safe. We are sensible, practical people, and horses are not sensible, practical animals—they are expensive, delicate and needy. Scott, a lawyer turned investment banker, grew up in small town Michigan, dresses in hand-tailored suits and works all hours not dedicated to me, the kids and sleep. While he can readily put together a merger of two titans of industry, he crumples when faced by a six-year-old’s unassembled hot wheels track or a “fun to do together” Lego space station. Talk of building a tree house turns him visibly pale. Although he claims to have picked cherries and asparagus for a nickel a pound as a kid, after twenty-plus years of marriage to the man, I still find it hard to believe.

  Scott had ridden horseback only once, a trail ride I bullied him into when we first moved to Salisbury. As we raced along a wooded path, Scott’s massive smart-aleck horse ran his knees into every close tree trunk and his head into all low-hanging branches.

  “Duck,” our fifteen-year-old leader repeatedly yelled.

  Scott’s wrathful eyes bored into my back as we recklessly flew along the mountain trail.

  I boasted a bit more experience. As an invincible teenager I rode western a few times at one of those backwoods operations where they took your money and cared little for your life. The horses meandered all pokey heading out from the barn, but look out once they turned for home. They would full-gallop back, and if you lost your grip you got dumped in the dust and left for dead. Later, when Scott and I lived in London, I hacked a few times in Hyde Park. The stable girls do not baby you there: their rule of thumb is that you are not a real rider until you’ve spilled a dozen times. Once mounted, ten or so of us would cross an unforgiving cobblestone lane and a honking London ring road to reach the park. The Dickensian charm attracted tourists, many who were riding virgins. “How hard can it be?” I imagined them asking their friends and spouses. “The British are so polite, so civilized.” Well, the British and their horses hide a wild streak—they invented fox-hunting after all—and few of the uninitiated could anticipate the Rotten Row, a half-mile stretch of soft dirt where the horses like to let loose.

  At the top of Rotten, our guide barked in Cockney English: “Those of you who fancy a gallop go on ahead. If not, hold your horses back and trot along.”

  A few of us nervously cantered off. Horses sense incompetence in a nanosecond, and incompetents are useless at containing a thousand muscled pounds of herd animal hard-wired to stick with his buddies. So off everyone explodes in a pack resembling the Derby, faster and faster because once they get going, horses love to race. A few bodies go flying, and I had dismounted more than once to help collect the rider-less horses that wandered off to eat the emerald grass amongst the picnickers. One Japanese woman, who spoke no English but communicated fluently through the universal language of hysteria, refused to get back on—who could blame her—and the two-leggeds led the four-leggeds in slow and dismal return to the stables, those quaint cobblestones clopping a more gothic music.

  Once Stateside, I rode occasionally at local barns in Connecticut, content to hermetically seal myself in riding rings concentrating on how to walk, halt, turn, trot, and, to a limited extent, canter. But I had only minimal technique and had yet to tack up or groom a horse. My son, on the other hand, started riding at eight. He immediately possessed balance, rhythm, confidence, respect, and listening skills: an ideal rider young enough to take the punishment, like when the grumpy lesson horse Sultan bit Elliot’s finger. He cried, hard, and I berated myself for encouraging him to feed the friendly horse. He also weathered his first fall, again courtesy of Sultan, a slow motion topple when the trot abruptly halted, and that mercifully I didn’t witness. Shook up, but with more respect, he climbed back on.

  After each of Elliot’s half dozen lessons, we would hold Jane up on the saddle and walk her a few paces.

  This was the sum total of our checkered past in the horse world.

  And now we owned a horse farm?

  What had we done?

  Buyer’s remorse took up residency in the stalls of our brains if not our hearts. A horse farm is reputed to be a black hole for losing money, a close third to roulette and the lottery, maybe tied with inn-keeping, a business Scott and I know a little something about. Since 1990 we have owned The White Hart Inn, the local watering hole that shelters leaf-peeping tourists and parents visiting their kids boarding at the resident prep schools, not to mention the regulars who imbibe at the popular tap room bar. Over two-hundred years old, it holds court on the village green as the foremost historic landmark in town. Its twenty-six rooms and restaurant have served the town well. The broad columned porch anchors a comfortable building with a patina that welcomes the casual and the posh. It seems everyone has a story about their experiences there, and no matter where Scott and I go in the world, we find six degrees of separation circling back not to Kevin Bacon (who has a house in the area and is an occasional customer), but to The White Hart Inn. The White Hart “family” echoes a soap opera and it is probably best we do not know even half of what else goes on alongside business, but, all in all, inn-keeping has been fun. We further integrated into the community and, though the business will never support us, it steeled our nerves to our next unplanned adventure of horsekeeping.

  In three months we would close on the horse farm property and have to hit the ground running with repairs and renovations on that May 1st or lie dormant over the long winter. Not the types to postpone gratification, intuitively Scott and I objected to years passing with the farm horseless. But even the basics were undecided: should we lease the farm outright, maintain total control, or so
me combination?

  What we needed was an expert: a competent, take-charge, honest, likable farm manager who could ultimately run the business but start immediately advising us how to set it all up. Logical yes, but Salisbury offered a limited employment pool. This job required someone multi-talented, dexterous and independent. On the one hand, we didn’t want to turn the place completely over to someone who ignored our input and evaded control; that was why we bought it in the first place. On the other, we could never educate ourselves, find the contractor, and oversee the planning, let alone the construction, from New York City in three short months. Scott may have purchased all the how-to books, which I gave a thorough read, but wisdom is realizing what you don’t know. We wised up rapidly.

  Word of our impending purchase grapevined through our small community.

  “Have you heard that the Boks bought that old Johnson place? What do they know about the horse business?”

  No doubt their chuckles descended to belly laughs with “They paid what? For that?”

  In the eyes of the local population, weekenders possess more money than sense, spending it lavishly on the real estate (thereby pushing up prices and the cost of living) and then expecting the locally provided services to come cheap. I am acutely conscious of the full-timers’ angle of vision, their long witness to the forgotten years of slow-moving properties and declining values. But we’ve been here long enough to remember and to have been burned. We lost money on our first house in Salisbury. Buying at the top of the market in 1989, we resold ten years and many improvements later at the same price. But since 2002, it has been a stretch of rising prices. The vast sums people cough up for their Litchfield County real estate is general knowledge with all transactions, including names, listed in the local newspaper, along with fender-benders, bad checks, domestic disputes, and “doo-eys,” the vernacular for DUI and DWI citations.