Saving Baby (24 page)

 

CHAPTER TEN

I spent the winter healing in the barn, the decision not to go back to the track made easier by the Detroit Race Course's announcement that the coming 1998 season would be its last. The higher-ups had been hoping to install slot machines and transform the racecourse into a racino. But the state of Michigan turned them down. Casino Windsor had already opened just across the river from Detroit in Canada, a true Vegas-style casino just thirty-five minutes away. And downtown Detroit, just twenty minutes along the expressway, was due to get three casinos, approved on a ballot by popular vote. All these new casinos, very powerful with a lot of money to throw behind their claims to the local territory, were never going to let a racino materialize. The track would be closing.

Two years earlier, I had worked very hard to procure slot machines for the racecourse, pushing for it as a member of the HBPA's political action committee and even participating in a press conference held in the state capitol. My personal stock with the track's higher-ups had risen astronomically. “I never want to be on the other side of you,” Ladbroke executive Bill Bork said to me at the time, pleased with my presentation. Now here we were, exactly in that position. With my suing the track, I couldn't be more on the other side.

The decision to close helped explain why Ladbroke dragged its heels fixing the racecourse and did such a shoddy job of overseeing the repairs. It had no doubt already known that it would be shuttering its gates.

My wish to make right on Baby's death notwithstanding, my resolve never to return was only strengthened by the news. Rather than feel I could handle trying to save horses for just one more year, I knew that an imminent permanent closing would mean the need for trainers to get rid of more horses than ever—a number I would find too overwhelming.

Michigan had always been a racing state, with a lot of trainers who actually put down roots there rather than travel nomadically from track to track throughout the country, as many do. In the 1950s, the Detroit Race Course was considered one of the premier tracks, right up there with Churchill Downs, so to work there had once come with a certain prestige. Once the track closed, trainers who had made their homes in Michigan would not take their horses somewhere else; they would get out of the business—and get rid of their Thoroughbreds as expediently as possible. I had already been through a season during which I lost more horses than I saved. I knew that in this climate of trainers needing to get rid of even sound horses, my efforts would be futile. Besides, I had already exhausted potential sport discipline buyers with my articles in local newsletters. There was no one else to tap into.

Taking care of my own horses at home had the effect of a tonic. Being near them warmed me, and I could feel my depression lift some. Just grooming them, letting them in and out of the pastures, scrubbing their water pails, removing debris from the crevices at the bottom of their feet—it all proved restoring.

Scarlett wasn't there. She was training through the winter, which was fine with me since she had done so well the previous year, and I continued to visit her several times a week.

But in the barn I still had Beauty, Pumpkin, Pat, and Sissy. Sissy, now going on two, had grown to the size of a bull moose. So muscular and strong boned had she become, like Baby, that you would not immediately have perceived her as a filly. And with her forelock perennially covering the star on her forehead, and her bushy mane and tail, which, like Baby, she had inherited from Pat, she looked uncannily like him, down to her iron hooves.

While I tried to bond with her, exhaling into her nose and giving her treats, it did not bring me comfort that she looked like her brother. Instead, it was a reminder of what I hadn't accomplished despite my having gotten the track fixed and saving dozens of horses. I was never going to bring Baby back, never going to fix what I had done to
him
.

Sissy was the only one of the four who elicited in me mixed emotions. The others were pure joy.

Beauty, my very first horse, I had already had for almost fourteen years, since 1984. We bought her even before we closed on the house. I loved to ride her, and she loved to be ridden, so it was easy to go on the spur of the moment. It's difficult to get most horses away from the herd. But Beauty was never barn sour, meaning unwilling to leave her mates. For her it was a treat to quit the barn, the pastures. “Come on Beauts,” I'd say. “Let's go visiting.” It didn't matter how many days had passed since I had last ridden her. She never acted silly and bucked, or raced off, the way some horses do when they haven't been mounted in a while. She never needed to be warmed up with lunging—having the “vinegar” taken out of her by being exercised in a circle on a thirty-foot line with a lunge whip with which you strike the ground if a horse refuses to move. I didn't even need a saddle. I could just grab a bridle and throw it on. She was only 15.2 hands high—easy.

Beauty had a naturally fast walk, which I like in a horse, and as she moved away from the house, the other horses would all call out to her while running around in the pasture, going crazy that one of their own was leaving. But she'd just keep going. Baby had been the same way. I loved it because it made me feel they'd rather be with me than with the rest of the herd. Once in a while Beauty would whinny back to the others, but not as a rule.

On the main gravel road near the house, a lot of people have horses in their backyards, so sometimes I'd go riding with a neighbor. But more often, we went ourselves, and the world disappeared.

Winter was such an especially wonderful time to ride her, as long as there was no ice. Her body kept me warm—it was like sitting on a heater—and if it was snowing, her all-black hair would become covered in white, making for a beautiful apparition. We never galloped but rather just enjoyed the sights in the woods, perhaps a deer running or birds foraging for food. With no leaves on the trees, you could see far into the distance.

As a Quarter Horse, Beauty would grow a very thick winter coat, heavy and furry, and I would open my fingers and push them along her neck, feeling the warmth coming off her body. It was fun to move my hands through her wooly covering, and when we'd come home, I would just hop off. Beauty was never even sweating, as we only walked, never trotted.

Nobody was ever more glad to see Beauty return to the barn than Pumpkin. Our second horse, Pumpkin had been advertised in the paper for $400, saddle and bridle included, and when we went to see her, it was clear she was starving. She had on her heavy winter coat of hair, but even through that, each rib was easy to see.

It was December 1984, the same year we brought Beauty home. A bucket of water for Pumpkin to drink had frozen over. At the same time, the ground remained soft; she was standing in mud that rose well over her feet.

After calling the vet to come give her a prepurchase examination—she looked so bad that I wondered whether she might need to be put down—we took her home on Christmas Eve. My neighbors told me years later that when we first brought Pumpkin to the barn, they thought, “Jo Anne has got to be crazy.” She was so very skinny and miserable looking. But by the next May, after Pumpkin shed her winter coat and had already been well fed for months, her new coat had the look of satiny, polished mahogany—a deep brown with orangey highlights.

That beautiful, docile horse—part Morgan and part Quarter Horse, the vet thought—became the one on which my daughters' friends would ride if they had never been on a horse before. She would canter for Jessica and Rebecca, but if Pumpkin knew you didn't know what to do, she wouldn't go faster than a walk.

Lowest in the pecking order, she was particularly attached to Beauty, who was definitely the leader of the herd. Pumpkin depended on Beauty; it had been just the two of them for years. Often they went out together, me on Beauty and one of the girls on her. But if I went out alone, she, more than any of the others, would run around and whinny. We'd hear her in the distance, and neighbors would tell us she whinnied from the time we left until the moment we arrived back home, beside herself with worry.

It wasn't as bad once Pat came to stay with us and Baby was born, but Pumpkin never became truly comfortable with Beauty's leaving, even for very short periods. “Is it really you?” she'd say with her scent, blowing into Beauty's nostrils upon her return. “I'm so glad.”

Now thirty-one years old, Pumpkin was retired. With Jessica in medical school and Rebecca away at college, she didn't get ridden anymore, nor did she need to. It was her time just to eat and enjoy the sun on her back. But she was my connection to my daughters; I loved having her with me. Always gentle, she had absolutely no bad habits. She loved apples over carrots, and I was happy to oblige. I was happy to put a fan in the barn near her in the summer, happy to do whatever I needed to let her know she'd never lack for anything, the way she once had.

When Pumpkin and Beauty had first come to live with us, I loved listening to them munch their hay in their stalls at last check every night, around ten o'clock. It was so relaxing. I knew they were safe. They were eating. They had everything they needed. I could go to bed happy and sleep well, comforted that despite what had happened to Pumpkin, I had been able to save her. The world then was a good place.

It was what I was trying to re-create, at least to some degree, in the winter of '98, and I thought I was succeeding. Not only did I have Beauty and Pumpkin to complete the picture, and “little” Sissy, I also had Pat, the mother of my “children,” who herself had been through a lot. Although she was such a large horse, almost sixteen hands, she was so very people-oriented, a true pet. You would never have been able to guess that she had been a racehorse before she became a broodmare. But Don Shouse, her owner before me, had indeed raced her until she was found to have bone chips in her knee and could no longer run, which was why he turned her into a mother.

She had actually broken her knee during a race. When she became mine, I had the vet x-ray her to see if we could take out the pieces of bone, but by then her body had already reattached them. It was too late. You could even see protrusions on her knee.

Pat wasn't in pain, but, like someone with arthritis, she did have some restriction of movement, which worsened as she grew older. It didn't hamper her activity when she had Baby. She could still run around the pasture freely at that point.

I enjoyed making sure Pat and the rest of the herd were always cozy in the barn, closing the barn doors if it grew very cold and always checking to be certain they all had lots of bedding. It was such a comfort to be in the barn with all the horses chomping on their hay, everyone healthy. Such solace. And it was easy to enjoy because I wasn't coming home after work every day to an answering machine full of messages from people wanting to talk to me about buying a horse.

But sometime in March, I did receive a call that put everything in a different light.

A man named Jeremy Bricker phoned out of the blue and told me he knew of me because people at the barn where he boarded a Paint horse—a multicolored breed—had talked about me. But he couldn't find my Web site online, he said.

I barely was using e-mail at that point, let alone designing Web sites. I was still faxing virtually all of my communications, and I told him so.

“I would like to help you,” he said. “I think what you're doing is really good. You could reach the world if you had a Web site. Your search for people who want these horses wouldn't have any geographic bounds. I'll create the site, design it, and maintain it. It won't cost you any money. It would be my part to help you help the horses.

“You wouldn't be limited to lists of people with descriptions of horses they were looking for,” he added. “You could take pictures of horses that trainers were trying to unload and put them on the site so people could
see
available horses for sale. That would pique interest in Thoroughbreds that didn't match the wish lists of potential buyers.”

A soon as he said “no geographic bounds,” I realized I had never truly been healing, never making real peace with my decision to keep away from the track. I had simply been feeling defeated, knowing my efforts would be only a drop in the bucket compared to what was needed.

I was back in before he finished his pitch. It wasn't a thought, something I had to weigh. What I had been feeling all along simply bubbled to the surface. I couldn't leave Baby lying there in the form of all the slow and injured horses and now, in the form of all the horses who would be sent to their deaths because their trainers were going out of business. In truth, I never could. It would have gnawed at me terribly if the season had started without my saving horses. My conscience could never have come to terms with such a decision.

“I don't have the money to pay you,” I blurted out, even though he had already told me it wouldn't cost me anything. Whatever extra money I had, I wanted to devote directly to buying horses slated for slaughter.

“I told you, don't worry about the money,” he said. “This is my way of helping you help the horses. We will do it.

“What is the name of the organization? That will have to be on the Web site.”

“It doesn't have a name,” I replied. “It's just something I've been doing.”

“Well, the first thing we have to do is think of a name,” he answered.

Thus began my true entry into e-mailing. Not just Jeremy and I but also a woman named Jill Rauh, a librarian in eventing who lived on the other side of Michigan and knew about my work, began brainstorming online about a title for connecting people who wanted a horse with those who wanted to get rid of one. I said I wanted it to be an acronym so that whenever it was put into print, it would be in all capital letters—no periods between them—and have to jump off the page.