Saving Baby Read online

  That was the state he was in when he drove down our driveway. Getting out of the car still teary-eyed, he walked up to me and, in front of Pam and Jerry, threw his arms around me and cried even harder. A lesser man would have tried to hide his emotion. But John wasn’t ashamed that he loved, and I loved him all the more for that.

  Pam and Jerry left soon after, but before they did, I told Pam that I would be arranging for Scarlett to come home as soon as possible, that we were officially out of racing. She started to say that maybe I wanted to think about that a little bit because Scarlett was doing so well and was due to race the very next week but that it could be postponed if we needed more time. Jerry, who was head over heels for Scarlett, enthusiastically pressed for her to continue. But I told them no, that I would never again sit in those stands and watch a horse of mine—or any horse for that matter—come out of the gate. How many other horses were dying out there that I didn’t even know about? It was a moment too late, but I had learned my lesson.

  They still told me to think about it, that I had time, before they drove away. But I had never lost a close family member before this. I even had both my parents. And I lost Baby because of my own poor judgment. I would never take that risk again.

  Once the car drove out of sight and John and I started walking back to the house, I realized I had in my hand a ziplock bag with a piece of Baby’s mane and one of his shoes, still grouted with the sand from where he pulled up. I don’t remember Pam putting those items into my hand, although I had called her before John left for the track and asked her to please get them for me before Baby was removed.

  I was glad no one had cleaned the sand from the shoe. I wanted it just the way it was, never opening the bag, even to this day, but always keeping it with me. If I was sitting at the kitchen table, it was next to me there. If I was watching television, I would set it down gently on the couch with me. When I went to bed at night, it stayed on my end table. Eventually, the shoe came to rest by my computer mouse. I am looking at it now. Pieces of sand have fallen to the bottom of the bag.

  * * *

  Scarlett arrived home two days later. As usual, the whinnying and neighing began as soon as the trailer pulled into the driveway, and it was then that I realized that what I thought would feel therapeutic, like pure relief, would be yet another reminder of my grief and all I had done wrong.

  I was relieved. The track was a dangerous, lawless place, and I had already started making noise about its surface before Baby’s death. Someone not wanting things stirred up might take revenge, so I knew I needed Scarlett out of there fast. But the relief was by no means unalloyed. Each one of the horse’s voices was unique, and the clamor was euphoric, with bellows of joy coming from deep within. But there would be no distinct foghorn of a sound, no Canadian goose honk, joining in with the others. Scarlett’s presence without Baby was further proof that I had failed, that all my dreams of winning played out as mistakes, bad judgments. The missing voice, so pushed into relief now with Scarlett’s whinnies breaking across the field, echoed to me my defeat. Rather than putting the horses first, I had plunged ahead blindly, leaving their lives in the balance with disastrous, unfixable consequences.

  Once I had Scarlett in her stall, she blew into Beauty and Pumpkin’s noses and vice versa, only driving home the point further. “I told you it was her,” Beauty was saying to Pumpkin as she confirmed it by exchanging breaths, but next to Scarlett’s stall was the empty one, the one that should have had her brother. It represented what I hadn’t been able to do—keep Baby safe, even though I had promised him that much five years earlier, when he was born. I couldn’t even follow through for five years. What I had done felt like child abuse ending in the worst way possible. There could be no repair, and I would never again be able to know the complete solace I had always felt with my horses—hearing their rhythmic munching, watching them bond, graze in the pasture. That lack of perfect contentment that I finally achieved when we bought our little farm and first horses was going to haunt me forever. That was my sentence. Was Pat waiting to hear Baby’s voice along with Scarlett’s, I wondered. The two had been coming and going together for some time.

  Everything became a reminder. When I turned Scarlett out, I should have been turning Baby out, too. I could see the two of them playing together in the pasture, but his figure was a ghost, a memory.

  The walk from the house to the barn was down a slight incline, and every visit there I felt a heaviness in my chest. The downward slope felt like the physical truth of what I was experiencing, each step drawing me lower emotionally as I crossed into the barn and had to see his empty stall. I continued to cry as I tended to the barn chores, but just as often my eyes were dry and I could feel a numbness and a gnawing in the pit of my stomach.

  John, like I, was aggrieved, but it soon became apparent that we were at odds in how to cope with Baby’s death. For the longest time, he could not even drive down the expressway that went past the track, even though we used that road regularly. You could see the track from it, and he couldn’t bear that, so he would drive miles out of the way to avoid the view.

  But I was back there within four or five days. I felt that if I didn’t do something—prove that the uneven track surface killed Baby—that if too many weeks passed, my role on the HPBA board would be diminished to the point that I wouldn’t be able to effect change, that I’d be forgotten. That Baby would be forgotten. I had to act fast. They were not going to just gloss over this and let other horses die. Yes, I had wrongly trusted Jay Fortney in his suit and tie rather than James Jackson and the others in their horse clothes who had been complaining, saying things were worse on the track than ever. I mistook Jay’s dress for class, and because he was the track’s general manager and was browbeating me when I questioned him, I backed down and put my trust in the wrong person. But if I just went away quietly, Baby’s life wouldn’t have meant anything.

  John was irate at me for my decision, horrified. “How could you go back and have anything to do with those fuckers,” he asked, “for those people who care nothing?”

  A child’s death is one of the top stressors in a marriage, often leading to divorce. One parent wants to try to leave the death behind. The other wants to investigate, bring the wrong doers to justice and make sure it doesn’t happen to others. That was John and me, and if it didn’t push us to the brink, it pushed us as far from our zone of comfort with each other as we had ever been.

  He didn’t want to hear a word I had to say about the track. When it was time for me to leave for a board meeting, he would make a face and roll his eyes, clearly showing his displeasure. I was alone in my quest to make good on Baby’s death. I could not have handled it John’s way.

  Yet it was unfathomably difficult to go back there, in no small part because I wasn’t getting any real sleep those first couple of weeks. I’d wake up well before dawn and think, “This didn’t happen,” followed by a moment of peace. But then reality would quickly sink in, and I couldn’t fall back.

  Each time I reached the track parking lot, I wasn’t sure I could manage. I’d sit there crying for long intervals. But I knew I couldn’t go to the backstretch like that, that I wouldn’t be taken seriously. So I would compose myself and walk briskly, confidently, inside. The board understood that I was not going to continue in racing. But they were happy to have me stay on and try to improve track conditions. Horses into whom they had sunk considerable time and money were at risk.

  I also started writing letters to the State Racing Commission, goaded on by the increasing number of breakdowns I was learning about by dint of going to the track every day—other tibia fractures, pelvic fractures, fractures of the humerus, or shoulder bone, fractures that should have been exceedingly rare. There were specific rules and regulations on what had to be done to keep the track in the best condition, to avoid situations in which a horse could place his foot on the surface at thirty-five miles an hour and fall victim to a catastrophic injury, and I knew those who ran th
e operation were in violation. I would talk to people in the kitchen, and they would tell me that there was equipment to maintain a safe track, keep it level, but that, for instance, a certain piece of equipment was broken and hadn’t been fixed in years.

  I began building a case by creating a form, or survey, to compile a record of the horses that died out there and left copies at the receptionist’s desk in the office of the HPBA board. Trainers started to fill it in, answering questions such as whether any of their horses died during a race that season or suffered a catastrophic injury during morning training.

  While collecting my burgeoning statistics, I asked in my letters to the Racing Commission, “What is being done to insure an even track surface?” quoting from the official language of the general rules of racing put out by the State Department of Agriculture.

  I received few replies, all of them vague. “Thank you for your letter. We appreciate your concern.”

  One day, while I was writing one of my letters, we received the call that Baby’s ashes were ready to be picked up. We had already received the necropsy report and learned that Baby had been biologically sound and that nothing about his conformation would have caused his fatal injury. When I told the veterinarians that the jockey said it was like the sound of an explosion, they said that was typical for a tibia shattering. The tibia is massive—one of the largest, densest bones in the body. When you do research on the tibia and put it in a vice and squeeze as hard as possible, they told me, you still have a hard time breaking it. In other words, it was apparent that it took the force of Baby’s foot stepping at lightning speed onto an improperly cushioned track surface to torque his leg and destroy it.

  I don’t know what I was expecting when we went to retrieve the ashes at Michigan State; something somber, funereal, I suppose. So I was surprised when the girl behind the desk didn’t say anything like “I’m sorry for your loss” but, instead, just reached for one of several containers on a shelf next to her. It looked like one of those five-gallon, white, plastic ice cream tubs. When she set it on the counter, we could hear a distinct clinking inside. Cremations do not just contain ashes. They also contain little pieces of bone. On the top, in black magic marker, was the date Baby died and his formal Jockey Club name, Reel Surprise.

  I hugged Baby to me, my knees almost giving out from a new round of grief, and John and I staggered out to the car. It was just like being at the track right after we had Baby put down, and we were holding him between us and sobbing, grabbing on to each other.

  “I don’t know about you,” John finally said as the heaving of our shoulders subsided, “but I need a drink.”

  “I do, too,” I told him.

  It was only about 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning, but because we were in East Lansing, a college town, it wasn’t hard to find a bar open.

  “Are you ready?” John asked.

  “No, I answered. I can’t leave him.”

  “Take him in,” he responded. So on a chair between us sat Baby, who I knew loved me as much as he loved his own dam, finally getting to “have” the drink with us that he didn’t get to have when he won his first race and I wished he could have been there celebrating. Once we came home, we set the big, ugly white tub on the coffee table, where it sat for an entire year.

  As the weeks wore on, I conducted more and more research. I learned from a man named Steve Wood, the superintendent of the well regarded Santa Anita track in California, that on top of a hard limestone track base, there were supposed to be so many inches of clay, and on top of the clay, so many inches of a very specific blend of sand and silt that would let water run off. Never, ever, was a horse’s foot to break through those inches of clay and sand and strike the limestone, which was like cement. The soft cushion on top was supposed to be uniformly thick enough all the way around the track, and all the way from the rail on the inside to the track’s outer edge—some 90 feet.

  But it wasn’t. The protective cushion at the Detroit Race Course was much higher near the inside rail. That’s why jockeys preferred not to run right alongside that rail, even though it would have been the shortest distance around. In fact, most of them tried not to run within five feet of it. Too deep of a cushion would slow a horse down, like trying to run on heavy sand on the beach.

  Just how deep the sand-clay cushion was at the rail no one knew, and it also wasn’t known why so many horses were breaking down. To find out, I convinced the HPBA board to pay for an independent evaluation by Steve Wood himself. Along with being the superintendent of a top-level track, he was the vice president of the International Race Track Safety Board.

  Steve agreed to come to Michigan for a fee of a few thousand dollars—a lot of money for our board—and do an inspection himself.

  Part of what he told us was just what the jockeys and trainers already knew through experience. Near the rail, the combined layers of clay and sand were as deep as ten inches.

  But what came as a shock to all was that out a ways, the clay-sand cushion was sometimes only a quarter inch deep, much too shallow to protect a horse’s leg from the hard limestone surface beneath. The whole of it was supposed to be on the order of six inches. While the jockeys and trainers were aware the horses could run faster there than they might have anticipated, they had no idea just how dangerously thin the soft, protective layer had become. It explained to them why they might have had at least one, if not two, horses die on the track that season but hadn’t lost any for five seasons before that. Routine maintenance had deteriorated to an astonishing degree.

  Worse still, Steve found, the limestone was a mess. In spots it came up like waves. In other areas there were dips and gouges. No wonder horses were now breaking down in record numbers. They were running on just a sliver of soft material above a hard surface in complete disrepair.

  Steve told us that industry standards called for measurements to be taken in several spots around the track every single day—and posted for everyone to see. That way, if the cushion were deeper in one area, bettors would understand why there was a bias in where the horses were being run. They could then use the information in handicapping winners.

  But our track never checked to see that the racecourse clay-sand combination was of a uniform consistency and depth all the way around and all the way across. Workers would drive harrows and graders around, but no one ever followed up by taking measurements to determine whether that made the track level. We didn’t even have a track superintendent, let alone someone to take measurements.

  Steve recommended that the track be shut down for two weeks for the necessary repairs and that two weeks be added to the end of the season so no one would lose any money. If the night lights were used and work went on twenty-four hours a day, he said, the waves in the limestone base could be shaved, the valleys filled in, and then an even layer of clay and sand installed and leveled. After that, he said, there would need to be daily track maintenance. The top layer of sand would naturally drift toward the center, toward the inner rail, since the track was built on a bit of a slant for rainwater to drain off.

  Steve put his recommendations in writing for the HBPA board to file with both the track and the State Racing Commission, and when we presented them, to our great surprise, the track agreed to do the work. We couldn’t believe how easily the higher-ups acquiesced and were thrilled that our efforts were going to bear fruit. Even the trainers were glad, despite the fact that they would not be earning any money for two weeks. Too many horses were going down.

  A week later, the HPBA board paid for Steve’s assistant, Danny Houck, to fly out from California and oversee the repairs, but Danny soon called me and said, “I don’t know what to do here. I’ve phoned Steve for advice because they are not repairing the base.”

  It turned out the track heads were now saying Steve wasn’t qualified to evaluate our track because he was from California, where tracks are built differently to accommodate different weather conditions and, further, that they had never agreed to make any repairs. The
y said they would spend three days smoothing out the soft top layer but were not going to touch the base, which of course was going to leave the larger problem unsolved. They also refused to take measurements.

  When we brought this up to Steve, who had supervised the building of tracks from Argentina to Hong Kong, in all kinds of climates, he responded in writing: “It does not matter if you are from the east coast, west coast, or the North Pole. Irregularities in the limestone base were visible to the naked eye of either an expert or nonexpert … it was quite obvious there was a problem.”

  From those in the Racing Commission, whose salaries depended on money being made by the track, we received no communication at all.

  By that point—the middle of July—more horses had died on the track than had died all through the previous season, which lasted through Thanksgiving.

  “Why are you still sending your horses out there?” I would ask various trainers.

  “Jo Anne,” they answered, “you can take your horses home. This is something you did extra. But it’s how I make my living, how I pay my mortgage. My kids go to school here. I can’t just pick up and go to another track.”

  I wasn’t having an easy time of it emotionally. It was impossible for me to walk down Baby’s shedrow. If I went to see a trainer because his horse didn’t finish a race and I wanted to find out why, I would just look down when I passed the gravel road where Baby’s stall had been. He was on my mind all the time. I think what drove me was not so much vengeance as incredulousness. How could this happen to my horse—and still be happening to other horses—with everyone now having no doubt about what was wrong but not lifting a finger to fix it?

  Yet every day I had to steel myself, have a cry before getting out of my car, reapply my makeup, and then go back there business-minded so I would be taken seriously. Otherwise, people would have told me to get over myself, that what happened to Baby happened to horses all the time. It would have been seen as my issue rather than as an endemic problem.