Saving Baby (18 page)

The hardest thing to do was to step away. I wanted to be able to stay with him and keep my hand on him, be touching him while it happened. But Larry said I had to step back because you never know how the horse is going to go down—it could rear or stumble toward you—and they don't want anybody caught underneath.

I watched Baby's face as the syringe went in, shuddering as I wept, looking for some sign of forgiveness. But by then Baby had gone somewhere else himself. As soon as the drug entered his bloodstream, he sank to his knees, then rolled over on his side, in the position in which he loved to nap. I was grateful that it seemed relatively peaceful, Baby taking a last couple of deep breaths, his eyes still open.

I knelt down and kissed him again, after which Larry touched his eyeball to make sure there was no response.

I recall thinking that I wasn't going to be able to walk away from him. But I don't really remember how things went after that. When I had Baby to focus on, I could act, but now I was back in that trancelike state, as if I'd been hypnotized, functioning, but at other people's direction. I don't think there would have been any other way I could have left Baby lying there in the dirt.

I can't remember walking away, getting back in a vehicle, driving off the back acres, returning to the shedrow, saying good-bye to anyone, getting into our own car.

The only thing I remember is being with John in the parking lot outside the security gates. We were about to get on the highway, but John suddenly threw the car in park. We grabbed onto each other, and he was sobbing, and that brought me out of my trance to the point that I began wailing myself, rocking back and forth as we held each other.

“No, no, nooo!” I kept saying, and my wails turned into hysterical crying. I don't know how long we sat there. I don't know how we made it home, in fact. At some point John would have had to compose himself enough to drive, but my mind draws a blank about being on the highway. I didn't know where the girls were or how they got back to the house. It was a very selfish moment.

To pull into the driveway and see the “It's a filly sign” in pink for our ten-day-old newborn, and then the barn, stung like a hard, deliberate slap. The barn had always been my source of comfort, a place of solace. I could go there, sit on the hay, and cry if I needed to. My horses loved me no matter what, and I drew fortitude from them. They exuded strength, a phenomenal power, with their unconditional love. It gave me peace, cure, comfort.

But driving up now felt like someone was hitting me, shaking me. It was physical, the knowledge that the barn would never again be the same.

I knew I had to go and check on everyone, Pat and the new foal in particular, but for the first time since we had horses, I almost couldn't bear to bring myself in there. Beauty and Pumpkin actually would have been okay because I left their stalls unlocked—they could have walked out into the pasture whenever they wanted and grazed, and the outdoor trough always had plenty of water in it.

But Pat, since she was nursing and confined to her stall with the newborn when I wasn't home, would need more hay, as well as water. A lactating mare needs a greater amount of food than usual, and she definitely would have drunk all the water in the two pails I had left her that morning.

I also had to clean the large foaling stall that Pat and the baby shared. Every time Pat gave birth, I heavily bedded her stall so both she and the baby would be as comfortable as possible. And I couldn't stand the thought of a newborn foal lying in urine-soaked straw or anywhere near manure, so I always made sure the stall was picked up, freshened, and cleaned. You could even go in there and sit on the floor with the sleeping foal's head on you, or lie down right next to the little horse and cradle it. I felt it was especially important to keep the stall spotless because a tiny foal is in there almost all the time. You can't let it wander into the pasture when you're not home because it's not safe. What if a coyote came through the fence, or one of its little legs became caught in something?

I became racked with sobs all over again, thinking of how I had tended to Baby as a newborn just five years earlier.

All the horses were inside, even though Beauty and Pumpkin could have turned themselves out. A herd likes to stay together. Walking over to Beauty, the first horse I ever owned and the dominant one in our herd, I lay my head on her shoulder, still crying. A horse knows your emotions, just like a dog does, if not more. She tensed at first because my mood was not what she anticipated, and then turned so that her face was right next to mine. “What's wrong?”

Her muzzle became wet with my tears. “It's so bad, it's so bad,” I told her. “We're not going to see him anymore.”

The air from her lungs was pumping out through her nostrils right next to mine, warm and alive, signaling her affection. “
I'm
here, I'm here,” she was telling me, but her scent, so familiar—each horse has her own scent, like people have—wasn't bringing me the comfort it usually did. Not even the beautiful feel of her velvety muzzle as I rubbed my nose and lips against it could console me, not her ears up and pricked forward in her sweet, anticipatory way. Pumpkin tried to help, too, but Beauty told her not to come near, laying her ears down flat to warn her, and all she could do was slink back to her stall.

Then I had to enter the foaling stall, which I dreaded. How was I going to be able to face Baby's mother and his ten-day-old sister—and not just a half sister like Scarlett but a full sister with the same sire and dam? I couldn't even bear to call her by the barn name we had given her, because “Sissy” referred to the fact that she was
Baby's
sister, and now she was full sister to no one.

To be able to be in such close proximity to a newborn foal, with her rounded head and coat as soft as that of a newborn kitten, and the way a baby horse tickles you with her curly whiskers when she walks up to smell you inquisitively, her long lashes fanning out—normally, that would have been such a privilege, such pure delight. A horse will never be that way again after its first couple of weeks. Yet there was no joy for me, no comfort, even though the same blood coursed through her veins as through Baby's. In fact, it made it harder that she looked so much like him.

When I opened the gate to her stall, she at first just stood there and then came over to me on her long, spindly legs, her little tail only six inches long. Ordinarily, I would have immediately been on my knees hugging her, smelling her breath and enjoying the precious scent of milk on her mouth. But in my grief, it was all I could do not to avoid her. It wasn't fair of me. I just couldn't help it.

Pat was pacing, which was easy to do in that big stall. She was tense because of my odd behavior. I went right to her head and cried some more and ran my face down her nose to her muzzle and buried my own nose there.

Her breathing out increased, not in the almost rhythmic way Beauty's had in order to comfort me, but more erratically, and with more effort, or intensity. She was considerably more nervous. As a Thoroughbred, she was naturally edgier than Beauty, a Quarter Horse. I told her we had lost Baby and began crying much harder. After all, we were both mothers to him.

And then I looked up, and there was Baby's stall right across from Pat's, next to Scarlett's, with the photo there of me standing by him the day Scarlett was born, when he felt forlorn that she was getting all the attention and I went over to give him a kiss, telling him he'd always be our baby. “I'm here, Baby,” I had told him. He was just a year old then.

As perfunctorily as I could I went through the chores—dumped the old water, filled the pails up again, brought over more hay, mucked out the soiled straw, picked up the manure—and then walked out as quickly as possible. Seeing the reminders of Baby made me feel literally nauseated. I had to leave his house, their house.

I didn't know how I was going to keep doing this four, five, six times a day, every single day, the way I had now for so many years. How I was going to work on imprinting with Sissy—getting her used to being touched by people, working my hands all around her body while talking sweetly and quietly to her; getting her accustomed to strange objects so she wouldn't spook? How I was going to come down to the barn to turn her and Pat into the pasture, so important so the foal can run around and build strong bones and muscles, and just as important for the new mother to get back into shape? How was I then going to come back down a while later to bring them back into the barn so the flies wouldn't drive them crazy?

Once I was back in the house, everywhere I looked, there were pictures of Baby. There were more pictures of my horses, in fact, than of my daughters. The girls understood that. I had waited longer for the horses.

As I walked about, I was looking at pictures of Baby in the pasture, Baby as a baby, on the refrigerator, on the hallway wall, in the great room. There was Baby's win picture hanging prominently.

At some point, the girls arrived home, but what happened after that remains shrouded. I do know I had a fierce headache, feeling like my head was going to burst. I went upstairs and curled into a fetal position on the bed, hiding under the covers even though it was already late May and still light out. I wanted to disappear, to not exist, to not have to think, to recall, to feel. I couldn't take what had happened, what I had done.

I slept on and off, waking periodically to wonder to myself whether what had occurred actually did happen, then regaining more consciousness until the “Oh” set in again within seconds and the pit in my stomach grew and my head continued to hurt and I didn't know what time it was even though I kept looking at the clock.

Toward early morning, as the first hints of light seeped through the curtains and in some faraway place I was wondering whether you could make something unhappen, it hit me. “Oh my God, how did I
leave
him there, in the dirt, in the dark, on those acres of death? The truck was going to come and pick him up—it was too warm to have too many horses back there at once—and what if it came right away? They would take him and grind him up.

I still had a pounding headache and had not wanted to get out from under the covers, but rousing myself from an inability to do anything or think coherently, I darted from my half-conscious state. John had not come up to bed. We were each in our own world, so I went running down the stairs to him in the great room. He, too, was awake. “We can't leave him there,” I started shouting. “They'll take him to the rendering plant. We've got to get him out of there. I'll call a transporter.”

Because it was a holiday weekend, it was going to be hard to find somebody, but I needed that task. I needed to keep taking care of Baby, and to make sure the track did not get to decide what to do with him. I had already made the most awful decision for him in listening to Jay Fortney instead of James Jackson. I had allowed my head, my desire to win, to obscure something in my gut. But the track had also made the most awful decision for Baby in not spending whatever money it would have taken to keep the racecourse safe. It wasn't going to get to make this choice, too.

It was too early in the morning to be making phone calls, and besides, I knew I had to get down to the barn. Again, I performed my chores there robotically, just wanting to check things off in my head as I went through the motions and get out of there as soon as possible.

When I came back to the house, I got on the phone, early as it still was, and started making calls until I found a transporter that could reach the track that morning and take Baby out of there. I also called Michigan State University, which takes in equine emergencies twenty-four hours a day. They have a pathology department and perform necropsies there, the equine version of autopsies. My legal background as a court reporter had already kicked in, and I wanted to be able to prove that track conditions killed Baby and not some kind of conformational problem that had never been detected. After that, I'd give him the end he deserved—cremation, rather than being ground up at some rendering facility.

John was going to have to direct the transporter on the back acres. It's kind of a maze at the track, and it was necessary for him to meet the trailer in the parking lot, sign the driver in, then lead him to Baby.

He left right away, and as soon as he did, I began to wonder whether Michigan State was the best place in the country to look at Baby's leg. I didn't want anybody second-guessing what had happened to him.

Making a couple more phone calls, I decided the best person was a vet named Susan Stover at the University of California, Davis, largely because California was the only state in the country that required every horse who broke down on the track to have a necropsy, and the horses were often sent to her. Moreover, she had published the most research papers on catastrophic racetrack injuries. But I would have to ship the leg. So I called Michigan State back and told them I still wanted a necropsy but that I wanted the leg sent to U.C. Davis.

While I was waiting for John to return home, I was extremely touched to receive a number of phone calls from people at the track, some of whom I didn't even think had my home phone number and, more importantly, would have seen something like a horse breaking down as all part of the business. I'm quite certain, in fact, that I was made fun of behind my back for all the love and attention I lavished on Baby. But they understood my attachment to him, and that gave their calls all the more meaning.

One came from James Jackson, who had somewhere between forty and sixty horses that he trained and had little time to offer me condolences. But he went out of his way to find my phone number, probably from someone else on the HPBA board, and told me how sorry he was. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I am with you if you ever need me. I know the condition of that racetrack, and I know what caused your horse to break down.” It was particularly meaningful because he could have said “I told you so,” as he was the board member who kept sounding the alarm that horses were breaking down with increasing alacrity.