The Mare

Velvet

The Spindletop trainer was not like Beverly or Pat; she was more like Estella, but smaller in her body and face. Her name was Jeanne and when she asked what I wanted to work on, I said jumping. We warmed up like usual: walk, trot, canter. About two minutes in she said, “Good hands, excellent hands!” and when she did, these two girls stopped to watch. It made me nervous, so I missed my diagonal when we went to the trot — but I sat a stride to fix it and Jeanne said “Good!” again, her voice surprised and her mind on me then.

But then she said, “Let’s see your two-point” and suddenly everything I did was wrong. “Stretch, don’t lean,” she said. “It’s bad form.” I even grabbed the mane bad form-ly. The girls walked away from the fence like they didn’t need to bother watching. She made me two-point for half an hour until she liked how it looked, walking, cantering, posting, then going from two-point to sitting trot and back. When we finally jumped I felt good, but she said I was too far forward in the saddle and I was releasing too much and I was supposed to stop after the line of jumps, that the horse couldn’t just canter. Pat never said that.

Joanne and those two other girls were watching again toward the end, and I felt like shit — even when Jeanne said, “That was outstanding. I hope you come back soon.” I didn’t believe her until I saw the way one of the girls was looking at me. Like I was a problem. The blond one.

—

The next day I went to Pat’s house. I wanted to talk to her about Spindletop; I wanted to hear what she had to say. But I couldn’t because there was an emergency and Pat had to stick her arm in Nut’s ass to save his life. It sounds funny, but it wasn’t. She had to do it because he was sick with colic and could die, and the only thing she could do was try to pull shit out of him herself. It was freezing and windy, and when I came, she was in the barn wearing rubber gloves almost to her elbow. She said it would be “educational.”

I was first afraid he would kick her, but then I saw him with his head way down, looking so weak and hurt he could hardly stand. I thought he would cry out when she went in, but he didn’t; his poor body just got crunched up and horribled, like when the dentist is getting in your mouth. Pat talked soft to Nut and worked her arm. The wind got bad and started shaking the barn and the mares talked to each other. Pat pulled out the shit and handed it to me. “Feel that,” she said. I did feel it — it was like a cooked rock.

“At least it was warm in there,” she said.

Then we cleaned the stalls and groomed Chloe and Girl. By the time we were done, Pat said Nut would be okay. Later when we were in the house getting warm, Pat told me you shouldn’t do what she did. Her face was sick-white when she said it, and her fat cheeks were hard. She said she could’ve killed Nut by tearing his butthole. I asked why she did it, and she said she couldn’t afford a vet. She said she had to face reality. She said she had to do that a long time ago. She said it old and tired, like she forgot I was even there. “I have the ability,” she said. “I have the quality animals. But I don’t have money, and it’s all about money in this business.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt the dirt and the broken things around us. There was wind and the sound of the furnace. There were all the ribbons on the wall saying “First prize” and “Scorpio” and “Handsome.” I didn’t know what to say, but I did know not to talk about Spindletop. Not then, maybe never.

But at night I was wondering, Why was I at the poor, dirty place? I used to think it was so cool, but now it just seemed like crap — as Ginger would say, literally, like it had to be pulled out of the horses.