Saving Baby Read online

  Between the jumping, the running, and the dressage, horses who compete at high levels of eventing must be sound and more physically fit even than racehorses, who use only one set of muscles over and over as opposed to the muscles throughout their bodies. That appealed to me. I also liked that winners at most levels get ribbons. Money doesn’t change hands until a horse gets to the very highest levels. And even at those levels, I learned when I probed, there were no scandals, as there often are when you mix horses and money. Eventing doesn’t involve plying the horses with drugs. It doesn’t involve sending horses to slaughter; it’s a clean activity, a sport in the Summer Olympics, even.

  In fact, I came to learn that rather than “going through” their horses, eventers more often than not really bond with them. When it comes time to move on to another horse, say, because the current one is not able to go to the next level, an owner generally doesn’t dump his animal for the highest price he can fetch. He tries to find someone who needs a lower-level horse by talking with fellow competitors.

  I can’t say the conditions at the training facility where I boarded Scarlett for her training in eventing were perfect. I was nervous to send her away after Christmas. One problem was that Ann Arbor was a drive in the opposite direction from my court reporting work, so I knew that while I’d make it a point to go see her several times a week, I wasn’t going to be able to get out there every single day. Also, there was no grass in the paddock where Scarlett was turned out for free time, so she couldn’t graze.

  But she was such a spirited horse. I really couldn’t see keeping her confined to our little farm. And eventing seemed like such an all-around workout. If I were a horse, I thought to myself, particularly an athletic horse like Scarlett, that would be the kind of competition in which I’d want to engage.

  Having Scarlett in a new pursuit and having to worry over her also gave me some relief from thinking about the track non-stop, selfish as that might have been. But the relief was meager at best. Although the track was closed for the winter, I still had to attend HBPA board meetings, more of them than usual, in fact, in preparation for the racecourse’s resurfacing. It was hard to be there. I couldn’t bear to look at the exact spot where Baby had pulled himself over. I understood, in a way I never had, why people put crosses at spots along the highway where loved ones have died in crashes. If I could have marked Baby’s spot in some way, I would have.

  * * *

  Not until February did workmen begin removing the top, cushiony layers of the track. During board meetings, we’d see massive pieces of equipment out there on the racecourse, followed by growing mounds of clay and sand in the customer parking lot, which was paved, unlike the trainer/owner lot. The cushion materials would be reapplied to the track once the limestone base was rebuilt.

  Toward the end of March, the board was told that the base was ready. We were asked to walk the course and approve it before the soft materials were added back.

  But approval was out of the question. Every so many feet, you would step in a hole so deep it literally swallowed your ankles. Extending down eight to ten inches, it buried a man’s entire work boot. The company hired to do the work had not had those heavy rollers go over the track to make it compact, as is done on highways.

  The holes weren’t the only problem. There were extended grooves, maybe five inches deep but three to four feet across, that had been created when water eroded some of the limestone. Water drainage had been set up improperly, with some areas more heavily drained than others.

  The track did go back in and have the compaction executed properly to get rid of the holes, and also fixed the problem with the ditches. But we had to fight them tooth and nail to do it.

  And that wasn’t the whole of it. When the cushion material had been picked up from the customers’ paved parking lot, the graders went too deep and took up asphalt along with the clay and sand. The workmen were supposed to have sifted through the top layer to remove all those pieces but did not. The track cushion now had big chunks of asphalt mixed in. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent, with no one working for the track monitoring the progress. It took more haggling, with the HBPA board’s finally bringing out the track’s own independent consultant from Belmont Park in New York, to force the sifting.

  The racing season was finally allowed to start once this correction was made, but there was already talk by the track that it didn’t want to pay for Phase II of the repairs—fixing the shoots that led from the starting gates to the oval. It was a staggering combination of incompetence and corruption.

  I wasn’t too worried on that score, as once Bill became involved, tremendous headway had been made in getting the track to fix the racecourse despite its trying to shrug off its responsibility at every turn. I figured his involvement would force their hand with the shoots, too. But he had not been able to bring the track heads to the table to offer a settlement for Baby’s death. I thought it would be easy once the track agreed to make the repairs to the racecourse. I thought their willingness to fix the track surface was an admission that something was wrong, the definitive proof we needed to make them own up that they were liable and settle rather than go to court. I was wrong. In May, with no movement on that front despite Bill’s many requests to meet with the track executives about Baby, he and I started discussing whether to file suit.

  Don’t do it, people on the board, as well as others, warned me. They said they had never known anyone who sued the track and managed to see the case through to the end, let alone win. “Their attorney will take your suit and file a motion to dismiss every other week,” I was told. “They will keep hauling your lawyer into court. They will drag it out for years, to the point that it will cost you so much money you’ll finally go away.”

  Moreover, they couldn’t consider joining me in the suit even though many of their own horses had been maimed, and many more still had to be put down. The track would blackball them, refusing them stalls and banning them from the premises. And because racing was their livelihood, they couldn’t afford to take that step.

  Incongruously, in the middle of my deciding what to do about a suit, Scarlett entered her first competition. It was just a dressage event rather than a three-pronged eventing competition because the trainer wanted to see how she was going to fare. She had never done anything but race, and, the trainer wondered, would she be able to get on with a lot of horses in an entirely different arena?

  The trainer needn’t have been concerned. Scarlett won. She did so well, in fact, that someone came up to me after the show and offered me $15,000 for her.

  In truth, I can’t say I was terribly surprised. Stepping off the trailer, she had the same air of confidence she had about her at the track, the “look of eagles,” as they say of class Thoroughbreds. She was good, and she knew it.

  Others did, too. During the winter, a world-class coach visiting from Virginia who had been watching her train wanted me to send her to him for more elite preparation. I refused. I would have been able to see her only a few times a year and, having already lost one love, I was not going to give up my life with another.

  Scarlett’s success, juxtaposed against having to make the decision about whether to file a lawsuit on Baby’s behalf, was made more emotionally fraught by the fact that this was May. May 8th would have been Baby’s sixth birthday. And May 25th, the anniversary of the day he died, loomed like an approaching eclipse. The previous year, that date had been filled with such promise, such excitement. Now, the grief was just as intense as ever, but people were going to expect me to have gotten over it, the way they want people to get over the death of any loved one once a year has passed and a Christmas, a birthday celebration, has come and gone without the departed person. Yet I would still wake up sometimes wondering for a moment whether it was all a dream. That’s how close it all still felt—not just that awful day but his whole life.

  Like a movie reel running through my head, I thought of how the vet teased me by saying “you’ve got a pro
blem” when Baby was born because I had gotten the gender wrong, of how I blew noisemakers in the barn to desensitize him to startling noises, of his honk, of how he stuck his nose through the “prison” bars at his first training facility.

  On the afternoon of May 25th itself, John and I sat in the great room, the clock ticking interminably while I looked from Baby’s ashes back to the clock’s slow-moving hands. The room was unbearably quiet—John and I said nothing to each other—but inside I was roiling, as if it were happening all over again. I felt swept along as if struggling in overwhelming waves—we were once more waiting at the picnic table outside the stalls on race day, sitting in the stands—until the moment arrived, 6:20 P.M., and as though swallowing too much water, I was gasping, then a zombie again, the breath knocked out of me.

  I went up to bed, although it was still daylight, to cry and bury myself under the covers for not having been able to stop it, to stop time, holding the bag with the horseshoe and the piece of his mane in my hand rather than putting it on the end table, as usual.

  Three days later, on May 28th, Bill filed suit.

  I remained in an emotional well through most of June, finally sprinkling some of Baby’s ashes in the pasture where he used to like to walk and putting much of the rest of them in a beautiful stein that I turned into an urn and kept in my office.

  The Detroit Free Press covered the story of the suit—“Horse owners sue Ladbroke,” the headline read. (The official name of the track ownership was Ladbroke Racing Corporation.) “Reel Surprise was injured May 25, 1996, during a race.…The lawsuit contends Ladbroke knew or should have known that the track was unsafe and should have made repairs.…Ladbroke officials did not return calls.”

  The track, in a veiled threat to Pam, told her to “control your owner.” They also wrote a letter to the HBPA board saying they reviewed the board’s bylaws and that I didn’t meet the requirements to be a member and, further, that I should not be on the board at any rate since I had a lawsuit pending. To my great relief, the board wrote back that it was well aware of its own bylaws and that I was properly seated as a member and would remain so.

  Through all of this, I continued to see horses break down and be carted off, not at the rate at which breakdowns occurred before the track was repaired, but horses sustained injuries all the time even on an even track surface, especially horses in the cheap claiming races for which our track was especially known. So many had already been running for their lives for some time, having been shot up with drugs to mask the pain of fractured ankles and knees and other problems and were on their last legs, literally, before being shipped for slaughter for a few hundred dollars while different horses took their place to keep the gambling money, the money that paid everyone from the jockeys to the track executives to the Racing Commission, flowing. How, I kept wondering, was I going to save them? How could I stop the slaughter pipeline?

  I had learned through Scarlett’s entry into eventing that Thoroughbreds were the breed most sought not only for that discipline but also for dressage and hunter-jumper competitions, or at least Thoroughbreds crossed with a heavy draft-type horse to create what is known as a Warmblood—an animal with the musculature of a draft horse but the grace and speed of a Thoroughbred. And I knew that many horses sent to slaughter did not have unfixable injuries but were simply too slow for racing, or had slight injuries that required only a couple of months of rest, for which owners were unwilling to pay. I knew, too, that many of these horses were three or four, the age at which trainers in the various sport disciplines start working with their charges.

  What I couldn’t figure out, however, was how to connect the two worlds, the racing world and the sport discipline world. If people in dressage or eventing could have come onto the backstretch for themselves, they could have easily picked out horses slated for slaughter. Thoroughbreds going to slaughter who would have been perfectly suited for those other disciplines would have been much, much less expensive for sport horse people than Thoroughbreds who hadn’t been “spent” in racing, even if the buyers had to pay a little more than the kill buyer’s fee. But the backstretch was a highly restricted area. There was no way in which the eventing world was going to get carte blanche permission to go “shopping” there.

  The answer came to me by a fluke. I was standing at the rail one day, and a trainer asked if I would come back to his shedrow and take a look at one of his horses. I didn’t want to go. I was constantly being approached by trainers who wanted me to get back into racing, offering to go halves on a horse with me so they could make some money as an owner in addition to the money they made on training. But I felt a responsibility to hear the trainer out. One of my main purposes for staying on the board was to remain visible, to continue to be a presence at the track both to figure out a way to save horses as well as to keep abreast during the lawsuit.

  When we arrived back at the shedrow, the trainer brought out of a stall a drop-dead, gorgeous gray gelding, 16.2 hands tall—a perfect height, I knew, for sport horse people. I waited for the trainer to give the usual spiel, but he took me by surprise.

  “Do you know any of those jumping people?” he asked. It brought to mind a picture of people on pogo sticks. “Do you know any of them who would want a horse like this? He’s totally sound, but he can’t run a lick.”

  The man knew the alternative. And although he needed to sell the horse one way or another, he recognized the pure waste of sending it to slaughter.

  There was no doubt about my being able to find a buyer. Not only was the horse the right height, but people in the sporting world love grey horses, and greys make up only a small percentage of Thoroughbreds.

  I approached the horse to see if he was going to jump out of the way, if his eyes would go wide. But when I touched his neck, he remained quiet. There was no prancing or trying to avoid me. He had not a bit of fractiousness in him.

  “He’ll try as hard as he can,” the man was saying. “He really wants to please—”

  The horse stood quiet, docile, as I bent down and ran my hands along his legs to check for injuries, agreeably smelling the top of my head. “Who are you?” he was asking. He reminded me of my own horses, so easygoing he was.

  “Let me ask around,” I said, especially excited because it seemed there was absolutely nothing wrong with that horse. “Can you give me a few days?”

  “Yeah, sure,” the guy answered.

  As soon as I arrived home, I made a few phone calls. “We’ve got this horse at the track, grey, appears sound, really sweet disposition.…”

  Two or three days later, when I went through the track kitchen to get to the backside, as I did every single day, people started coming up to me. “Would you go with me to my shedrow and take a look at this horse I have?” “Do you think one of those jumping people might want my horse?” I couldn’t go twenty feet without someone stopping me.

  It turned out the gray horse had sold. When I had made phone calls from home to see who might want it, I gave the trainer’s number. Someone had called him and struck a deal. The price of horsemeat could fluctuate down to thirty cents a pound—$300 for a 1,000-pound horse—and if someone were willing to pay him $500, or even $1,000, it was definitely worth it for him to sell it to that person instead of to the kill buyer, who would either take it to auction or straight to the slaughterhouse. Then, too, not everybody on the backstretch felt fine about killing horses; it was simply an economic necessity. If they could assure the horse a second life while turning a profit, it was preferable to them on both counts.

  More people approached me when I reached the rail. “Do they only want geldings? I’ve got a mare. Would they buy a mare?”

  “Sure, they’d buy a mare,” I said. Those in the sport disciplines did in fact like mares, not just for competitions but also for breeding. They could breed the mare to a draft horse and make their own Warmblood instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars for one. Even a mare who was too injured from racing to participate in a sport could
be used for that purpose.

  Another would ask, “They probably don’t want a horse with an injury, right?”

  “Well, it’s possible. What’s wrong with the horse?”

  I was literally bombarded that morning, and somewhere in the space of about ninety feverish minutes, it came to me. I could save horses by connecting the two worlds in some kind of systematic way. It was so isolated back there behind the track, but the solution seemed obvious once others had connected the dots for me. I could be the middleman who wouldn’t take any commission on the sales. That way, if it was later found out that the racehorse couldn’t event or breed or otherwise prove useful in the sporting arena, no one in the sport disciplines would think I was in cahoots with the trainers trying to unload their horses for more money than they’d make sending them to slaughter. Just as important, the trainers wouldn’t think I was getting a cut of their take.

  My mind started racing. I needed to collect the names of people in the sport horse disciplines who were interested in finding out when a suitable horse from the track might be for sale, then get those names to the backstretch. How to do it? I literally lost sleep thinking about it.

  Finally, I decided the best approach would be to write an article. Each discipline has its own newsletters, which are always looking for stories. And when I went to the editors of these publications, they all agreed to print an article I prepared called “Looking for a Thoroughbred?”

  If you have considered purchasing a retired racehorse but were not sure how to make contact with their owners or trainers, you may now have your name and telephone number placed on a list … you may indicate your price range or other particulars such as height and sex … There are no commissions or fees involved in this service …

  Even the Equine Times, a four-state monthly newspaper that went to my market as well as to people involved in Western disciplines, a whole other world from the English disciplines like eventing and dressage, printed the piece—on the front page.