Walk
by Mina Austin
When he’s ready, Dr. Morris, veterinarian, lifts his stethoscope and speaks down from his six feet of height. The barn has held its breath while he’s communed with Chad’s insides, where fluids trickle, then cascade like the flush of a toilet. The barn around us has stood for over a hundred Pennsylvania horse years—for other owners, other horses. Tall sliding doors still wall away the weather from the barn aisle. Light bulbs burn yellow, but a sunlit shaft through a stall window outshines them, bits of dust exploding through it. This time Chad hasn’t thrown himself to the ground to roll, a horse’s try at self-management of pain.
“We need more information,” Dr. Morris says. He’s cared for horses here for twenty years, still looks the same with his headful of dark hair that has a curl, conservative cut. He gives it a gloss of what could be Brylcreem, several dabs, if that product isn’t buried along with its mad little radio jingle. It’s a small vanity. He is less modest about his value, his brains, vet school–honed by the University of Pennsylvania. This morning, forty minutes late, he stepped through the people door cut into the double barn doors and saw immediately the horse he was here to examine wasn’t stalled and waiting. I watched anger draw his features together in the center of his face in a forbidding, congested way, Is there somebody in charge here? But he corks up the irritability, and what I end up saying is nothing, having arrived after all this time at the art of nonresponse, so we pass from what isn’t an exchange to the horse himself. Dr. Morris has never missed a diagnosis.
“Horses have episodes of colic surprisingly frequently, all the times we don’t see,” Dr. Morris says now, turning to speak. He peels away the three-feet-long clear plastic glove that has made the passage through Chad by way of a monstrous, generic hand shape splayed wide. I stand straight to listen. “They’ll eat something in the pasture, usually early spring or late fall, when there’s less of what’s appropriate. And it causes upset. So I wouldn’t be concerned, but this is not a normal rectal exam. There’s gas that’s not exiting.” Where was the gas, I didn’t ask. How could he palpate gas, track its recalcitrance? I waited for the proposal I didn’t want.
“Chad might benefit from a workup at Sullivan County,” he says, meaning the well-known large-animal hospital nearby. I say nothing. Dr. Morris says nothing. Better that I not say I will let summer dry out to fall, let the light die in successive weeks on into winter, go on objecting with silence since there is nothing I can say that he will not argue into irrelevance—before I commit Chad to a trailer heading that way. Things went very wrong for another thoroughbred, a gray color I could never define, who walked up the trailer ramp here in order to get to the hospital. Horses must be trained to walk up a trailer ramp. They distrust its black hole at the top, and question by way of their nervous system whether the owner has a decent reason for this passage up a narrow bridge to the unknown. I can’t forgive myself for the gray thoroughbred’s trust in his new home, in me.
The summer does dry out, the light does diminish in an unpleasantly calm way, as if with the tools of euthanasia, and I have to admit Chad hangs on the edge of not better. My employee, Emilio, reports now in the shorthand we both use, verbs hamstrung by tense and agreement when switching each to the other’s language, Chad no finish grain. Emilio might be sixty, a man stooped from work, but wiry, a star marathon runner in Mexico. He reads, writes English better than anyone who has worked here, but freezes under the chill of Dr. Morris’s orders given in that thinned, acidic voice, move the horse to the left,to the right,back him up,stop,that’s wrong. What Emilio hears are sounds that shatter in the air, undecodable.
Walk, is what is clear among Dr. Morris’s words. Walk is what to do for symptoms of colic. Chad’s unfinished grain is a symptom. So is the small mountain of shavings out in the run-in shed. These mean Chad has cocked his forefoot like a backhoe, dragged the stuff back, lifted the hoof up and forward again. Then the repeat: the lift, the reach, the dig, until there’s nothing more to move but the dirt of the run-in floor. Pain drives him to it. Because he can’t speak, Dr. Morris explained of Chad once, with unusual intuitive flare. Facts drive his own thinking.
At ten one July night, the mountain of shavings out in Chad’s run-in is high. Dr. Morris gets the call. Walk:Emilio executesuntilhearrives. We bring Chad to his stall. For the next two and a half hours, the doctor is a different person, the vibe of impatience gone. He proceeds through deliberate movement: to shoot Banamine in a vein in Chad’s neck to blot out pain and its tension. He draws a bucketful of sudsy-looking warm water, oiled, and inches a long plastic tube into Chad’s nostril and down his gullet. A make-or-break moment, the passing of the tube. Chad tolerates it. Then, on to the pump. It heaves water up, soughing as it works the air. Dr. Morris works the handle, his sleeves rolled up just so for the slop of water against the bucket’s sides. The scene has an old-fashioned feel: the farm outside tucked into darkness, the simplicity of the tools of pump and bucket, the lights in the barn that burn their yellow tonight through misty rings of rain not yet arrived. He could pass for a happy man, for whom the horse’s need is all-absorbing, with the blight of his own personality irrelevant.
Were there an impaction of manure, the pumping and oily water would shovel it along the horse’s intestines, and out. But there isn’t, ultimately, and Chad’s symptoms are not speaking clearly.
Walk: if Chad could concur in this order, would he? I would have said yes, the way he cooperates. The way the walk always produces manure. Manure puts a check in the column of better, rather than worse. He’d been here for three years, a pleasant, subdued thoroughbred who’d transformed to boisterous good humor after he arrived and stretched into the big fields here, the attentive care. I’d met him at his old place, a dirt paddock crowded and confined, limited turnout. His owner said he’d self-loaded the day she transferred him here. Meaning, when she arrived with her trailer, he walked, unattended, toward the dark that waited past the rattle and bang of the metal plank.
Now, he’s a less confident, less happy horse. To run a hand down his back, or along his rib cage, makes him flash his tail in the air, not the approval of a dog’s tail. The horse owner needs to hear, instead, don’t touch me. If a horse appeared to think clearly, was it thought? No thought without speech, was the theory back in the day, when I might have tackled Noam Chomsky.
Chad’s ribs were standing out too much. He was losing weight. Dr. Morris didn’t allow him more grain. He didn’t allow any grain, when symptoms struck. Cut the next feeding out. Then cut down the one after that. “Your enemy is grain,” Dr. Morris put it. “It’s what upsets the system of this kind of horse.” But what about the weight loss? “He should be able to maintain his weight with hay,” he said. Chad ate hay but wanted grass. It was too hot out, the dark brown of his coat a sponge for the sun. To escape it, he retreated to a corner of a run-in shed for three-quarters of the day. What if I could help get his weight up and preempt the colic by night walks and grazing?
On a night early in August, I tried. “Here we go,” I said. A horse can acknowledge, or not, the forced cheerfulness of here we go as he’s led into the dark, alone, away from the herd. His willingness reflects the way we want their well-being, as if tied to something inside of us that’s constantly at risk of being harmed.
The tight circle of my flashlight made what lay beyond it darker. An insignificant gate gleamed in front of us, a lightweight wire mesh—narrow and hung so that if we didn’t get through in time, it could swing back fast through its closing arc to swat him on the rear, so that he’d jerk forward, step on my foot.
The bridge was next. Its rails were there for him, but also there to make him spook, twitch to the side. This could slam me into them.
“We’re going to douse the flashlight, give the light here a chance,” I said to him once we stood safely in the pasture. The air was summer thick. Above us, stars looked sparse and random, delivered by slingshot. Under my feet: complete darkness, unseen orchard grass. I felt off-balance. My rubber boots could have been planted in water. Now I could hardly see Chad. He was eating. Through the lead line, I could feel the yank.
The sluggishness of minutes made the air thicker, hotter. I wore an old Laura Ashley hat, its brim brief. But I was glad of it when wings large enough to batter the air to a hum moved over my forehead. Six, eight inches, wing tip to wing tip, in slices of greater darkness whirred, then shot off, a very real, investigative presence, or induced from the dark and a state of anxiety.
“Write down the colic episodes,” Dr. Morris had said. They could blur or blend from one to the next, or evaporate, as did whatever had flown and hovered.
He hadn’t repeated his recommendation of Sullivan County Hospital. Sullivan County, where people trailered from hours away for its excellencies. Standing here with Chad out in the pasture, I couldn’t remember a single excellence, certainly not for the gray thoroughbred, silver when he arrived, the color of sky at first light. His coat had just been buzzed. The thoroughbred’s name: one of those lineage-assembled names, Wise Talk. The guys who worked here then called him Sabio. He’d had a moderately successful local racing career.
Early in his time here, he’d been standing by the pasture fence, parallel to it. On the other side, my young goats, new to my place, ignored my voice as I tried to get them to follow me back to the barn. I called, shouted, walked back and forth. They kept their heads in the spring grass. Wise Talk’s stance was attentive. Then he made a sudden break. A racing start. Standstill to gallop, it had nothing as to speed. But the goats, the goats: startled, they broke into their own reckless, racing start and scrambled toward me. Their Nubian ears flapped. We made our way to the barn. I looked back at Wise Talk. The way he regained his stillness, the way he held his head, all four feet squared up, showed a certain complacency. Done. Solved. What was his action if not a thought executed?
Now, in the dark, Chad stopped grazing and looked outward in the meditative way a horse looks inward. The rich reek of manure rose, confirmation. I welcomed it. The smell meant there were molecules of gas in the air. So couldn’t the gas, in fact, exit?
“Now you’re talking,” I said out loud, as the eastern sky glowed with radioactive light, then produced a moon, almost full. Chad took longer strides. The moonlight redrew on the ground in pen-and-ink the fence rails and posts we passed. It rescalloped the shapes of trees outside the pasture, traced them across its interior. It made a colorless world, but the pasture grass itself picked up a glow of sepia, its edges finally visible and clear-cut.
Chad was close-coupled, as they say, with a short back, massive chest, legs on the short side. No one would have tried to put him on the track. Under the moon’s radiance, he became almost stately, his expression serene. His average coat took on the look of satin. I studied him from the side as he grazed. His ribs still cast shadows, deeper.
“I want to have a conference when Antonio is here,” Dr. Morris called to say. “If Chad’s having an episode every week, we’re not making any progress.” Antonio’s English was not much better than Emilio’s, but he was as tall as Dr. Morris, and not easily intimidated. The appointment: cancelled, one of Antonio’s children sick. What might interrupt the next conference? Anything would do. Anything to cheat the vet, undermine his effectiveness by avoidance; to subvert evidence, play for time, for a break.
We displayed the calendar when Dr. Morris did come the following week. He spoke with a voice no longer sour and condescending (and I’m going to ask you again,he used to say as a point of inquiry, is it the right leg or the left). He always spoke with reduced volume, a little menacing, implying the volume would be deployed shortly, but today he sounded enthusiastic in an unfamiliar, wholesome way, in a way I couldn’t identify. Like a coach?
“I think what we should do is treat him as if he has ulcers,” he said. “Do you remember how he had ulcers over a year ago? They were a four, which is the maximum of severity.”
I hadn’t thought of the ulcers, that they could happen again. “No scoping?” I asked, of the procedure of sedation and tubing that was Sullivan Country diagnostics, brought home. A team of doctors, husband and wife specialists, put the horse out on the floor in your barn in the aisle, an act of faith with a signature required, acknowledging that something could go wrong, a puncture of the intestine.
“No,” he said. “We go straight to treatment.”
One tube of ulcer medicine a day.
“That’s what we’re going to do,” Dr. Morris said. He bent his arms, swung them forward in that jolly coaching motion. Here we go, his move registered.
“He stick his head into other horses’ feed,” Antonio said one day in September. We stood in the barn aisle. Chad was outside. He was on the medicine. No episodes of colic. I thought of how he looked, and what horse people called the top line. This was Chad’s back, stem to stern. It looked on the verge of sinking. At his rear, on that top line, a bone stuck up, something that must hinge the skeleton underneath for bones and muscle to arc down to either side to set up as the drivetrain of rear end and back legs.
“This is it,” I said. “Enough. We’re going to increase his feed.” I said to add a cup of this grain, a cup and a half more of the other grain, to what he was getting in the morning. We had to add grain carefully. Cuidadosamente,I said. Estilo conservativo.
Two weeks later, Chad looked better. Were they adding feed just in the morning, as I asked? No, Antonio said. Every meal. All four meals. He looked alarmed as he watched my face. So they’d upped even the four o’clock, the feeding that was meant to distribute the third feeding’s total.
Jesus Christ. It was a massive increase for delicate digestion, a massive management error to conceal from Dr. Morris. But there’d been no symptoms of colic. And look at him in the pasture, where the afternoon sun hung low in October and hit his sides with warmth but not the heat that used to send him back to his run-in. He had a massive barrel, that part of the horse from shoulder back to his rump, everything within his rib cage, essentially, and never were there ribs so wide-sprung and hard to cover. He was doing it. And that bump at his rear, the skeleton hinge; his flesh there, too, rose up on the way to engulfing it. His chest, always broad, looked ready as a warhorse’s for full armor. Fall around us was in full tilt, lances out at tree tips that held yellow banners tearing up and off in a south wind: the browned yellow leaves of willow oaks flying by; the broadness of hickory leaves, gold. And the larches in the swampy meadow hanging on in shrill mustard with some green needles still tight as tight.
At night the sky was clear, the constellations unreadable, cold sparks on imaginary lead lines, taut, stretching this way and that. There was not so much need to walk and graze with Chad, but I did. In early November, heavy mists gathered halfway up a rise of the pasture to the south like a long, ghostly hedgerow. Saturn, if I had it right, moved away from a comradely spot to the side of the moon and slipped farther westward. In that direction, just beyond the fence that closed off the biggest pasture, the mist found a different home. It rolled itself up along the ground to something the size of big loops of wire on top of a penitentiary wall.
Chad raised his head to look into it. He began to track what he saw. His head moved precisely and evenly, left to right. It could have been resting on a level. I saw nothing. He saw something. Surely it wasn’t deer. Chad had had enough of deer, a grouping of does scattered once in a light rain lying around thirty feet away from us like dogs.
What if it were something else, a single file of horses? The gray thoroughbred, Wise Talk. He’d be the first in line, healed, another chance at grazing, his coat and bones reconstituted from a dissolution that had left him formless as mist. I could hardly stand to think again of the weeks of his nonhealing, finally the release from that hospital to come home. The bars of his hospital stall had looked like jail, where he stood shifting from front foot to front foot. Why? Something was wrong. “Oh, he’s just—” What? What had one of the staff there said, as she refused to look at me? She looked away because Wise Talk was foundering, an inflammation that causes a certain bone in the foot to rotate, the grotesquely named coffin bone, its turning unbearably painful. They were discharging him to come home to die.
He could be out there, leader of all the horses I’d taken in who’d gone down, eventually, with gallantry; the big draft horse, a Percheron, one hind leg forever crippled en pointe, like a ballerina. Chad went on watching whatever he was seeing. His expression remained curious and evaluative. His head followed the line of motion through the mist, until he could track it no farther. Yet a sense of connectivity remained in the air. He’d had an offer. It came from the field and those moving shapes. “Not yet,” was what he said back.
Mina Austin lives on a farm in Pennsylvania with her rescue horses and goats.