Horse Heaven (52 page)

“Okay,” said Sam. “You’ve got a set of stocks in the stallion barn, right?”

“Yeah.”

Let’s go.

They went. The only horse in there now was Himself, and when they turned on the lights, he blinked. When they led the mare in he came fully alert and began to give deep, impassioned snorts. Pete closed the top door to his stall, but they could see his nose over it, trying to get a whiff or a look or something. “Stand her in the stocks there, then rig these two lights up so that they shine right on her hip.” He went out to his truck and returned in a clean white coverall and surgical gloves. He had four syringes in his hand and a mask around his neck. The mare entered the stocks with perfect willingness, clop clop, and now she stood there, looking over toward Himself. Now Sam looked at Krista and said, “Krista, do you want to call the owner and tell him I’m about to do a three-thousand-dollar operation on her?”

“I should. Can the foal be saved otherwise? Or the mare?”

“Nope.”

Krista closed her eyes. If he balks, she thought, we’ll pay somehow. She felt a profound rush of financial vertigo. Then she said, “Do it.”

“You’re on, sweetie. Don’t worry.”

He gave the mare the injections, two in the neck and two in the spinal column. He said, “Ever heard of an epidural?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she just had something like that. I want her wide awake and standing up, but not feeling anything. Now watch her spine.”

Krista watched. After a few moments, it got a curve in it, almost a wave, toward the right. “See that?” said Sam. “All the nerves are blocked on this left side, but not on the right. That’s what causes that effect. It’s not permanent and it doesn’t hurt. Ready?”

“For what?”

“For something you may never see again.”

“I’m ready.”

Sam took his clippers out of his pocket and shaved the mare’s side, from the hip forward, then scrubbed it three times with three different scrubbing sponges. Then he stepped back, looked for a moment, and stepped forward.
Now he produced a scalpel and, in one fairly quick motion, cut a vertical incision into the mare’s side, maybe eight or ten inches long, exerting some effort to get through the grid of muscles as well as the skin. The incision opened up, but didn’t gape. Not much blood came out. Krista stared. Inside, revealed by the lights, was the buff-colored mass of the uterus, swollen and glistening. “There we are,” said Sam. “Take a look.” Krista took a look, and Pete came around and took a look, too. Actually, Krista expected to see more, maybe the outline of a hoof or a nose. Still, it was intimidating to think that only one membrane, like the membrane of a balloon, separated the foal from the world.

Now Sam had his long rubber sleeves on again, on both his arms this time. Once again, he said “Ready?” But it seemed as though he was saying this to himself more than to her. He faced front, bent down against the horizontal bar of the stocks, and reached the nearest arm into the incision, carefully but firmly. With his other hand, he grabbed the bar of the stocks and balanced himself. He muttered, “Got it.”

“Got what?”

“The, uh—” He was concentrating. Now he leaned against the side of the mare, and his shoulder seemed to Krista to press in an alarming way into the incision. “The, uh, the horn of the uterus. Okay, baby, easy does it.” There was a pause. Krista could see the cords of his neck stand out, and what had not looked like a lot of blood before looked like quite a lot as it spread around his collar and over his white front. He bit his lip. He said, “There’s the ligament. Oh, ouch, baby. No wonder that hurts, Mama. Good girl, stand still.” The mare seemed utterly indifferent to what was happening to her. She didn’t even look around. Pete was stroking her neck on the other side, crooning into her ear, but Krista could only watch Sam. Now Sam said, “Okay, I’ve got something.”

“What?” said Krista.

“Oh, I’ve got some part of the foal. Haunch, maybe. That’s what I like to get.”

The mare began to shift from side to side slightly, in a rhythm, and Krista realized that Sam was rocking her, rocking her uterus back and forth, the way you rock a car back and forth that has gotten stuck on ice. She said, “Omigod.” But quickly, so as not to break his concentration. Now she couldn’t watch the mare’s flank, so she watched Sam’s face instead. His eyes were wide and lips were pursed with the effort of exerting strength and kindness at the same time. The mare rocked. Sam’s arm moved back and forth. Sam rocked. Krista wanted to moan, it was taking so long. She glanced at Pete, but he had leaned his head against the mare’s, and the two of them seemed to be in a humming
trance, with Pete mumbling, “You’re all right, honey. You’re all right, baby. Good girl, good girl, good girl.”

Sam crooned, “Come on, my love, come on, my darling,” his voice pressed out with the effort, but gentle, too.

Suddenly, the vet pulled one harder stroke. Then his face relaxed into a smile, and he stood up, withdrawing himself from the incision. “There we go,” he said. “Up and over.”

“You’re kidding,” said Krista.

“Nope. She’s fine. The ligaments are good, no tears that I can feel, and the uterine wall seems to be intact, and the foal is moving around in there normally, though we’ll ultrasound him tomorrow or the next day just to be sure. Whew!” He stretched his arms above his head and rolled his shoulders, then closed his eyes and twisted his head and neck from side to side. “The hardest thing about this is trying to move that weight with your arm extended. Between the foal and the fluids and all, it must be fifty pounds. If you could just get in there with both arms. But you can’t do that. Well, hot dog. Good one. Better sew this mama up. What time is it?”

“After two,” said Pete, yawning. Then he handed Krista the leadrope. “I’ll check on Maia.”

She said, “You should go to bed.”

He nodded. He had work in the morning, and anyway, it was better for one of them to be in the house. She wondered if she would remember to get a better baby-monitor in the morning, or whether everything else would come up and overwhelm that thought, until the next time she was going to wish she had it. Sam was now taking neat little stitches. The mare seemed unconcerned still. Sam said, “I haven’t seen one of these since vet school.”

“Of course it would be here. Does it have to be a straw that breaks the camel’s back, or can it just be your usual truckload of large boulders?”

“Big established farms have emergencies, too, Krista.”

He didn’t sound unkind. In fact, he sounded deeply kind, but embarrassment seared her anyway, and she refrained from further whining. It was three-thirty by the time he drove away.

A half-hour later, she checked on Maia and finally got to bed. Actually, she thought, if you watched your baby sleeping through the night moment by moment instead of obliviously sleeping though the night yourself, it was all that much more amazing. Already, she could hardly remember what she had seen. What Sam had done seemed so unbelievable that her memory denied it, turned off the lights that lit up the scenes one by one, so that the normal darkness of an October evening enclosed it, shrank around it, finally
covered it over. Pete was snoring, a comforting sound in its way. She closed her eyes.

In the morning, she was so tired. Maia looked like she was crawling around underwater. There was no way Krista could make it to naptime, she thought, three long hours away if she was lucky, so she gave in about 10:00 a.m. and called her mother, who came over. All her mother said before mercifully taking the baby with her to Nordstrom was “Your grandfather loved Sam. I’ll say that.” And then, thank God, she didn’t start in, but just said, “Well, I’m glad everything worked out, honey. I really am. Oh, look at my darling sweetheart. Maybe if some of that first crop get to the track before the New Year—”

“Some are. No one’s winning yet.”

“Oh, well. I’m sure they will.” And then, for the first time ever, as Krista was buckling the carseat into her mother’s van, “You know, honey, if you need a bit of a loan, look at that babyface, my goodness—”

And Krista didn’t get defensive. She just said, “I’ll let you know.” And then, “Say, see if they have a better baby-monitor, one with a longer range.”

And her mother just nodded.

I
T WAS NOT
up to Justa Bob to analyze how and why he had come to this farm by this pond with these horses and mules and been, you might think, forgotten. In the first place, Justa Bob had only a hazy sense of time. The multitude of sharp pictures that constituted his memory were not sequential in the human sense. They were more like an account upon which current experiences drew. He had plenty of access to them, but he didn’t mull them over; rather, he sometimes had occasion to re-experience something remembered in conjunction with something taking place in the present. At the moment of the re-experiencing, he could not quite tell the difference between what was happening in the present and what it reminded him of, but he always got to where he could in a few seconds or minutes. That would be called learning—he could learn the difference between the past and the present. What set Justa Bob apart from horses of lesser intelligence was that he was ready, and even eager, to learn that difference.

He had now been in this pasture with these horses and these mules, being
taken care of by this old man, for a long enough time so that he knew how he stood. It wasn’t high, and it wasn’t low. On the one hand, several of the other animals were irritable and even, you might say, dictatorial. On the other hand, there was plenty of grass, and you could stand in the pond, which cooled his ankles. Justa Bob stood in the pond during part of every day, and dozed for a long time.

The fun, for Justa Bob, did not come from the old man, but from three other, small humans who were never around when the old man was, and often around when the old man wasn’t. For example, Justa Bob would watch the old mans white truck leave the place, and then, pretty soon after that, the jockey-like humans would show up, and while the old man was gone, they would run after the horses and mules in the pasture, pet them, give them carrots and apples, climb on them, fall off of them, kick them, yell at them, wrestle among themselves, run around, swim in the pond, and then, at the first sight of the white truck, run away.

He got more treats after the small humans realized that they could climb on him and not be bucked off. Justa Bob wasn’t a bucker. He had been a hard-working forward-looking racehorse for so long that it never occurred to him to object to a rider. They got on him in a very unjockeylike way, two at a time, pulled on his mane, yelled, stood up, rolled around, urged him into the pond, slapped, patted, and hugged him, then gave him carrots and sugar and apples. They called him “Sammy.” After a while, they would start shouting his name—“Sammy! Sammy! Sammy!”—as soon as they came over the crown of the hill, and Justa Bob would trot or canter out to meet them. He could always feel them, when they were riding him, sliding this way and that, so he would slow to a walk or a halt while they secured themselves or fell off, and he could see them under his feet and under his belly and behind him. Their noise and activity didn’t irritate him the way it did some of the other equines, because he was used to noise and activity, and found life in the pasture rather boring by contrast to life at the racetrack.

All in all, Justa Bob was having a lovely vacation.

And so he was not happy to see the face and figure of William Vance standing at the gate one morning. He had a perfect memory of William Vance, though he had not thought of him once since coming to this place. Along with his memory of William Vance came plenty of pain and discomfort, which Justa Bob did not feel as a thing that was happening, but as a thing that could happen in the presence of William Vance. And so, rather than going up to the gate as the other animals were doing (the old man was carrying buckets of feed), Justa Bob turned and trotted the other way, over the brow of the hill and down to the trees on one side of the pond, where he secluded himself in
the shade. Sure enough, after a while, here they came, halter and leadrope in hand, carrying a bucket of feed. Justa Bob was hungry for that sweet taste, but he recognized this trick and ducked out from his current spot. Because he was an enterprising horse, it didn’t take long for him to understand the possibilities of the pond, and so he waded into it, up to his knees and hocks, though the weather had gotten a little chilly for this sort of activity lately. It was not that he had the foresight to understand the reluctance of the men to go into the pond, it was that, once he was in the pond, he could see the men stop at its verge and stand there. He was in, they were not; that was enough. He swiveled his ears. He could hear them talking.

“God damn,” said William. “What now?”

“That guy loves this pond. He stands in here a couple hours every day.”

“I ain’t got all day. I want to get back to Chicago tonight.”

“It’s only about two feet deep. Go on in and get him. But we could also go get some breakfast ourselves. My bet is, he’ll come out and go up and eat with the others. I ain’t seen ya in, what, three or four months?”

And then the men turned and walked away, over the crest of the hill and out of sight. Justa Bob felt the urge, a primal urge, to see where they were going and what they were doing. That was the way it was with humans—when they turned their backs on you, you found yourself following them. Dogs were the same. Dogs ran into the pasture, you ran away; the dogs veered off in that easily distractible doglike way, and you trotted after them. But Justa Bob did not follow the men. The sense he had of William Vance, that wherever he was pain could be or would be, was too strong. And the chilly pond was soothing. Sometime later, the other equines appeared over the hill and came toward him, seeking a post-breakfast doze. Once they had situated themselves, Justa Bob felt even less motivation to leave the pond.

At some point, the humans appeared again. Justa Bob had moved, the water had sloshed around him, but it was still again. William Vance said, “Well, shit. You got any boots?”