Like Velvet Brown in National Velvet, we dreamed of horses.
We dreamed of horses and we found them and brought them home. Just like Velvet’s, the best one was a piebald – a tall white horse with gray spots, like a child’s pull toy.
I had a big and beautiful house then, deep among the trees, that had once belonged to a veterinary surgeon. A horrible thing had taken place there. Once, while the owner was on vacation, the pipes had broken and the water backed up, drowning the horses in their stalls when there was nowhere else for the sludge to go.
We didn’t think of it as an omen.
Last night, we said goodbye to our girls.
A lovely woman took them, and will love them, and deserves them. We spent six years trying to figure out how to fit enough love and care for them into our lives, as those lives grew to include – between my friend Pam and me – first five, then eight, then nine kids. I was much worse. With travel and the writing that supports my family and me, I was unable to give the horses the time Pam gave them. My kids weren’t, to my regret, interested. At one time, we had four horses: Our two Clydesdales, a quarter horse and a thoroughbred with, someone once said, the personality of a serial killer.
The quarter horse mare died, in a sad freak accident, of a ruptured aorta.
The serial killer went to someone who could change her ways.
No one wanted Maggie and Tally, and in truth, we didn’t want to give them up.
But we had to sell the big beautiful house and now motorcycles sit in the big, beautiful barn. Maggie and Tally were living in makeshift quarters. We just didn’t have the money, or especially the time, to keep their manners up and solid.
On a winter’s day, six years ago, we met Maggie, a big, beautiful black Clydesdale whose given name was Black Magic. We didn’t know then that the phrase “horse trader” applied to her owner, who left out the vet records that showed Maggie’s foundering and subsequent foot and back problems. She said only, “She’s never been alone. I hope she doesn’t die.”
That was when I spotted the rocking horse. A full Clydesdale, Lady Natichia was also a blue roan, and not much use for traditional Clydesdale purposes. And so we asked how much that little weanling would cost. When she came home for the first time, Tally was actually able to kick with all four legs at the same time. My dog, then a puppy, lost four teeth and I learned the true definition of a pain in the rear as a result.
She became the gentlest of ladies, seventeen hands tall and so sweet she ran toward us and laid her great head on our shoulders.
Since Pam’s eldest and my two younger sons were born, the horses became a raw subject, a huge issue between Pam and me. We’re the best of friends, virtually sisters, and we co-owned the horses. There were green days when we were certain that it would all work out. We’d make time where no time existed. Pam worked full time and was busy with two young children. I had old and young children, and barely time for a little sorely-needed exercise. Sleep was hard to find for both of us.
And it was as Velvet Brown’s father, the butcher, said. The beautiful doe-eyed creatures simply ate and produced fragrant piles of what was left over and ate more, and needed medicine and bits of saddlery and were innocent and expensive.
Finally, the offer of a kind person was the offer we had to take.
Last night, I fortunately had a pressing appointment and so I could stop by Pam’s barn only for a moment. There they stood, lovely and tall, Maggie fit at 20 years old and Tally a grown mare, their halters with their brass name tags on their heads. Embarrassed, I kissed each of them on the nose, though, of course, they hardly knew me any longer.
Now they’re gone.
The pasture we often wished was empty is, except for Pam’s goats.
But last night I dreamed of horses, as I knew I would, because people, unlike horses, remain foolish forever.