Chosen by a Horse (19 page)

It would always be like that for me; I would have to fling myself off the edge to confront some fear. I had so many fears, so many adrenaline-filled moments, that there were plenty of chances for me to feel brave and daring.

My hand shook as I signed the forms that said I’d pay my bill, I’d allow tests, I was willingly handing over my horse. The office was small and clean. The woman shoving the paperwork across the desk for me to sign was
friendly and efficient. The building hummed with heat and electricity. It was safe here, warm and quiet. Still, I couldn’t escape my five-year-old horror of anything medical. It was at the center of me, the core memory that structured this experience, thirty-eight years later. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even try. I would survive it. That’s what I knew how to do.

So, both fearful and daring, I smiled at the woman. She had come here on a Sunday, a week before Christmas, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering around zero. She was already a hero to me.

“Do you have a horse?” I asked her, tears springing into my eyes. I looked at my lap, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

“Yes, I do,” she said in a voice that told me she didn’t know I was already functioning on overload. But then she reached across the table, touched my sleeve, and said, “And this is where I’d bring him if he ever got sick.”

She did know. I rummaged through my bag, pretending to hunt for something. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, to speak. I didn’t want to cry in front of a stranger, not even a stranger as nice as she was.

“Now what?” I asked.

“I’ll meet you at the front entrance. When the doors open, drive the trailer right inside, all the way in, so I can close the doors behind you. Then we’ll unload your horse.”

I braced myself to go back out in the cold. She let me out the side door, and the wind flattened my sweater and jeans against my body and sprayed my face again with stinging
snow. I pulled my turtleneck up to cover my chin and made a run for Stan’s truck. He rolled down his window, and I explained, he nodded, and rolled the window up fast.

Back in my own car, I caught my breath and told Dorothy what we were doing.

“Here’s your coat,” she said, pulling it out of the backseat and handing it to me. “The radio just announced that it’s ten below zero, not counting the windchill.”

“And people pay a fortune to go to this school,” I said, burrowing into my parka.

“It’s beautiful. I’d go here.”

I looked out the window at this campus perched like a religious shrine on a mountaintop. There was a stadium that looked like the Roman Coliseum, a row of greenhouses that belonged to the horticultural school, a building similar to this one called the Bovine Clinic, and a high-rise that could have been a Hilton Hotel but that might have been a dorm. Below us in the distance was a long frozen span of white that must have been Lake Cayuga. It felt like we’d reached the top of the world.

As I was looking around, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the large front doors beginning to slide open.

“Time to go,” I said.

We ran across the parking lot together, this time entering through the large hydraulically controlled doors that slid open effortlessly along a track in the floor. When they were all the way open, Stan drove the trailer in. Even with the truck and the trailer fully inside, the building felt enormous.
There was easily fifteen feet on either side of the trailer, and the corridor stretched beyond the truck another fifty yards.

The giant doors rolled shut behind us, and it felt like we had entered some sort of biosphere, a world apart from the raging cold outside. Here all was light and warmth and sparkling clean surfaces with a reassuring mechanical hum in the background like the faint rumble in an ocean liner three decks above the engine room. We were dwarfed by the scale of everything. Even the pickup and trailer seemed swallowed up by the expanse of this corridor lined with horse-sized doors labeled SURGERY, RADIOLOGY, INTENSIVE CARE.

I was anxious to get Lay Me Down out of the trailer after her six-hour ride. I also wanted her to know that I was here, someone familiar in this place of strange sounds, smells, and sights. Stan and I lowered the ramp, keeping the kick bar in place until I could unhook her lead and help guide her down. Eva stood at the bottom of the ramp with the others. Lay Me Down backed down the ramp with no fuss and greeted the cluster of people with a misty sigh.

“What a beauty,” Eva said, stroking the velvety neck.

I was speechless with pride, as though I had anything to do with creating this remarkable horse, as though she wasn’t already a jewel of a being the day she staggered into my life from her muddy paddock at the SPCA. The five of us gathered around her, hands irresistibly drawn to the sweet face, the graceful neck and chest. Lay Me Down lowered her head, the way she did when she was relaxed or sleepy. But her eyes were awake, her brow slightly
furrowed as she swept her nose among us at pocket level, politely searching for treats. I got a couple of alfalfa cubes from her treat bucket and broke each one in half so everyone could feed her.

While she ate, I took off her blanket and put it in the trailer to send back with Stan. The clinic felt warm, probably in the midsixties, and she wouldn’t be going outside. I unloaded her grain, hay, and treat bucket, stacking everything near a Garden Cart wheelbarrow that was propped against the wall in the corridor.

Stan and Carol were anxious to get going so I hugged them good-bye, and we agreed to stay in touch. Stan had already agreed to return when Lay Me Down was ready to go home. I hardly knew them, yet we were connected by our love of horses and by my gratitude to them.

Eva pushed a button, the big doors slid open, and we watched as the trailer disappeared into the fading afternoon light and whirling snow. They had a long, dark drive ahead of them on icy roads. I looked at my watch and figured if they stopped for dinner, they’d get back to Olivebridge around midnight. I planned to call to make sure they did.

For the time being, we left everything stacked by the Garden Cart, and, with Dorothy on one side and me on the other holding Lay Me Down’s lead line, we followed Eva down the long corridor to where Lay Me Down would be stalled. We passed different hospital rooms and two adjoining corridors and finally turned down the last one on the right.

For the first time we walked by large rectangular stalls,
double the size of the stalls in my barn, with black, rubber-mat-covered floors. Most were empty but we saw several healthy-looking horses who nickered at us as we passed. Lay Me Down looked at them but didn’t nicker back. It must have felt good to stretch her stiff legs, to be able to walk after being confined in the small trailer for so long, especially to walk on this floor, a wonderful surface for horses that combined the cushiony support of a sneaker with the grip of a snow tire.

Lay Me Down showed no fear of her surroundings. The lead line sagged between us, more a formality than a necessity. She would walk as long as we walked, turn when we turned, and trust that wherever we were going, it was where she wanted to go. Once again I wondered how this kind of trust and gentleness had survived her background. I didn’t understand it at all, but it’s what made her so special. It’s what had opened my heart.

We were nearly at the end of another long corridor when Eva pointed to a stall on the left with Lay Me Down’s name on a plastic-coated index card already in a holder on the front of the door. Eva rolled open the door, and Dorothy and I walked in with Lay Me Down. I unclipped her lead, and Eva shut the door behind us.

“I’ll bring the wheelbarrow with her things,” she offered. “Why don’t you stay and visit with her.”

When Eva left, Dorothy and I took off our coats and dropped them in a corner of the huge stall. There was a long opaque window at the back, a clear skylight above, and a
well-lit view across the corridor to a black Percheron stablemate. At the moment, Lay Me Down was more curious about her stall than the handsome Percheron across the way, and she walked around sniffing the floor. It was close to her dinnertime and I was sure she was hungry. I didn’t know if she was allowed to eat because I didn’t know what tests they’d be giving her tomorrow. I slid open the door and looked to see if there was a chart or instructions about food. Sure enough, hanging on a chain outside her stall was a blue spiral notebook with her name on the front. I opened it and found a complete medical history forwarded from Dr. Grice, copies of her sonograms, and the amount and brand name of the grain she ate, information I had provided over the phone when they called to confirm that she would be admitted. Still, there was nothing about whether I could feed her tonight.

I was impressed at how quickly Dr. Grice had gotten the medical information to Cornell, and that it was all here, organized and accurate, before we even arrived. There was nothing to do but wait for Eva and hope she’d know if Lay Me Down could have food and water. When I returned to the stall, Lay Me Down came right up to me, expecting her dinner. I gave her a hug instead, knowing it was a poor substitute for a horse who was hungry.

In a few minutes Eva arrived, pushing the cart stacked with hay and grain, the treat bucket swinging from one of the handles. It would be OK to feed Lay Me Down; none of her tests required fasting. I followed Eva to the storage room, one stall
away at the end of the corridor, and helped her unload the wheelbarrow. We wrote Lay Me Down’s name on labels and put them on her bag of grain, the treat bucket, and the hay. Then I filled a bucket with grain and another with water and walked back with both to Lay Me Down.

Eva said she had things to do and told us we were welcome to stay with Lay Me Down as long as we wanted and to let ourselves out the side door when we were ready to leave. We thanked her for everything and listened to her footsteps fade down the empty corridor until all we could hear was a dull hum coming from the large heat vents placed low along the concrete walls.

While Lay Me Down ate her grain out of a bucket hanging in the corner, Dorothy made a cushion out of her coat and sat on the floor of the stall with her back against the wall. I went to the storage room to get a flake of hay so I could spread it around near where I’d join Dorothy. I bunched up my parka and slid down the wall next to her. And there we were. At Cornell. I felt tiny in the big stall. I felt tiny in the big building. I felt dwarfed by the immensity of Lay Me Down’s illness.

I watched my gentle horse eat for a while. With her nose deep in her bucket, her chewing made a nice hollow sound. I couldn’t see her bad eye. From where I sat, she was perfect.

“She seems OK,” I said. “Not worried or anything.”

“She’s like Zone, but bigger,” Dorothy said.

Zone was Dorothy’s black Lab mix, a dog whose sweetness
we had run out of ways to describe, who forced us to say things to each other like “Zone’s so sweet she’ll give you cavities.” We called her Zone-Zone the Sugar Cone, or No-Baloney-Zoney-the-Sugar-Coated-Boney, which made no sense but that’s what we called her. And Dorothy was right. Lay Me Down was like Zone, but bigger.

“My Lay Me Downie Brownie,” I said.

We watched Lay Me Down finish her grain, and then she came over and sniffed her hay. She was right in front of us now, and we could both see her bad eye. No one who walked by and looked at her would wonder why she was there. There it was: wet, pink, gelatinous, the wrong thing to see on a horse’s face. It was alarming, too, because it was impossible to look at and not wonder if it hurt.

“Does it bother you?” I asked Dorothy.

She shook her head. “You know those things don’t bother me.”

True. She’d seen worse. Dorothy was a hospice volunteer. She’d held her boyfriend, Charlie, in her arms when he had died of cancer nine months earlier. The end hadn’t been pretty but, in spite of that, Dorothy said being with him when he died was one of the most beautiful experiences she’d ever been through.

Lay Me Down pushed the hay around with her nose, sniffing for her favorite grasses. Maybe she was looking for clover. Horses loved clover. I’d never sat on the floor of her stall like this. My stall floors weren’t clean enough, and there was always too much to do when I was in the barn. I would
have felt guilty just sitting. However, I didn’t feel guilty now, sitting on the spotless rubber floor with Dorothy, watching Lay Me Down eat hay. I felt relaxed and protective of this beautiful animal who blinked at us with drowsy affection.

I looked at my watch. Six o’clock. The snow sounded like sand blowing across the blackened skylights high above us, and shadows filled the corners of Lay Me Down’s stall where the overhead lights didn’t reach. I hadn’t realized it was night already. The outside seemed as remote as the moon, as uninhabitable. If it had been ten below this afternoon, what was the temperature now? At some point we were going to have to leave, make a run across that wind-whipped parking lot for the car. I couldn’t bear to think about it.

“Want to look around?” Lay Me Down seemed content and tired. She’d be OK if we left her alone for awhile.

“Sure,” said Dorothy, getting to her feet.

We gave Lay Me Down hugs before we let ourselves out of her stall. We visited the Percheron across the aisle, a sleepy black gelding who glanced at us from his hay but didn’t come over. I looked at his chart and saw that he was from Connecticut, and he, too, had an eye tumor. It must have been the eye ward and all the horses there, patients of Dr. Rebhun. There were two other horses in this section and sure enough, both had eye tumors, and both charts listed Dr. Rebhun as the vet. Lay Me Down had the only tumor where a mass was visible.

We wandered all over the huge complex, fascinated by the
humanlike services offered, all on a scale for horses. There were operating rooms with two large padded tables, upended and close together like stanchions that the horse stood between to be anesthetized. Once anesthetized, this horse sandwich pivoted until the side of the horse requiring surgery was facing upward on the now horizontal table. This was all done by the push of a button mounted on a wall panel.