Saving Baby Read online

  It’s not that I wasn’t happy about having saved so many hundreds of horses. But that could never bring Baby back. And no matter how much I accomplished, all around me were horses who were horribly injured, in great pain, surrounded by people with the most blasé attitude toward them. I was plagued by constant anguish and sadness.

  Making matters more upsetting still was that there were now rumblings among some of the newer board members who never came to the back of the track that by taking in so many unsound horses who couldn’t be rehabilitated for other disciplines, we were cutting into CANTER’s profitability. CANTER was just a dumping ground for maimed horses, they argued, and we should be saving only sound horses that we could adopt out for more than we paid the trainers, insuring the organization’s financial viability and keeping us from the constant struggle for more donations, more grants.

  This unnerved me considerably. The whole reason I started CANTER was to save maimed horses, to save all the Babies out there. What was a rescue if not a dumping ground?

  Most of the original board members were all horse lovers. They were there at the track, touching the horses, looking into their eyes, seeing the horses look trustingly back at them as these volunteers haggled for their lives. They could never have put a price on the value of saving a Thoroughbred at risk. But the nonhorse people, while very impressive in terms of their credentials and their ability to attract funds and the attention of important people in other spheres, hadn’t had the same experiences. They might have appreciated animals but not with the same passion as those who dragged themselves to the track week after week to do the difficult, time-consuming work of saving horses from the brink. They hadn’t lived their lives longing for a horse. They never soaked a hoof with abscesses or cleaned and bandaged a laceration. In strengthening our board, I had diluted its singularity of purpose. Some of our board members would have let Baby hobble onto a double-decker trailer headed for the slaughterhouse rather than provide him with humane euthanasia.

  With time to think after quitting my job, I had wanted to create some balance in my life, put my family back into the center of the picture. Rebecca had become engaged a few months earlier, and I wanted to devote time to helping plan the wedding. I was looking forward to it, ready to scale back a bit on my CANTER activities. But worried by the attitude of some of the board members, and driven not to let happen to any other horse what could have happened to Baby, I was right back in the thick of things come the start of the 2003 season.

  We were dealt a blow early that year, in May, when Judy forwarded to me by e-mail an ad from a Web site called dreamhorse.com, where people could advertise horses for sale. The ad was for a horse named That’s R Groovy, listing him for $3,500 and declaring that he was capable of jumping. We were both frantic and furious.

  That’s R Groovy had come into our program three years earlier with fractures in both knees. He was never going to jump, even after surgery. We had paid $600 for him.

  After his operation to remove all the bone fragments, he came to my barn to recuperate for four months, and I fell in love with him from the start. He was more than flashy-looking, not simply red but bright orange, with a huge white blaze that ran from under his forelock to his upper lip. He also had one white sock—and, standing at 16.3 hands, was the largest horse I had ever had at my house, and even one of the largest ever at the track. Even his hooves were huge.

  His size intimidated me a bit at first. In came this gigantic horse with his front legs all bandaged from surgery, and I knew he had a lot of pent-up energy in him from having been laid up a couple of months prior to the operation. This was because he had had to wait for cortisone to clear from his body, as the drug greatly raises the risk for infection. How was I going to keep him content on stall rest and just a little bit of hand walking every day?

  I took him down to the barn with a lot of precaution, expecting him to be fractious, prancing around, and hard to handle. Yet he was none of those things. He wasn’t even bothered by the other horses in the pasture running around and whinnying at his arrival. He took it all in stride, never tensing his muscles or freezing and staring intently, let alone trying to bolt. Instead, I was able to lead him into the barn like a puppy dog, which right then and there endeared him to me. I loved his trust and the sense that I got from him that he felt he was “home.” I loved that he took an instant liking to me, as I did to him. It was like having just met someone yet feeling like you’ve known the person your whole life. There was an understanding between us, an immediate comfort level.

  If Groovy had an itch on the side of his face, he’d blithely use me as a scratching post, rubbing his head up and down my body the way Scarlett liked to, knowing instinctively that I wouldn’t reprimand him, even as I had to brace myself so I wouldn’t topple over while he relieved his itch. He liked to nudge everything, too, which I also loved. Five years old, just at the turning point between childhood and adulthood, he still showed an inquisitive nature. I could see the wheels turning.”Water pail,” he’d think, putting his nose up against it. “Boring. Feed pail! Anything in there? Nope. What’s down here? Ah, pockets.” Then he’d go sniffing, smelling my jacket pockets to see what I might have on hand, but not in a pushy, aggressive way, simply a curious one.

  As sweetly playful as he was, however, he made taking care of him so easy. Many horses, when you change the bandages on their knees, continually readjust their legs so you keep having to start all over. They can’t stop fidgeting. But not Groovy. He knew I was trying to help him and that bandage changing was serious business. He’d stand perfectly still.

  I was definitely his favorite horse at the barn. He got along well with the others, but he enjoyed my company the best. And although I may not have put it together at the time, that especially endeared him to me because it’s how Baby was. He loved his herd mates, but I was always his first pick.

  “Slow down, you move too fast,” I’d croon as I cleaned around his stall while he was in there, the buoyant lines from the Simon & Garfunkel song “Feelin’ Groovy” matching our mood. And in his high-jinx way, he’d follow me, making sure I didn’t miss any spots, whereas another horse might have stood off to the side. “Oh, one of the manure balls fell off the fork.” He’d let me know by nudging me with his chin on my shoulder, or even grabbing the fork handle with his mouth. “Life, I love you, all is Groo—vy!”

  I was horrified to learn that the original, CANTER-approved adopter who bought him from us for $700 sold him to a student of hers as a trail horse in violation of our restricted lifetime bill of sale, which stipulated that a horse couldn’t be sold, leased, or undergo a change in oversight without our explicit approval through notification by certified mail and that we’d take a horse back if such approval were withheld. It was the student who then listed him for $3,500, hoping to exploit him further and make a tidy profit by lying about his ability to compete in jumping.

  That scared me terribly. Thoroughbreds are known for their heart. They’ll go out and do what you ask of them until they die trying. Groovy, in particular, was that kind of horse.

  The original adopter insisted she was ignorant of the dreamhorse ad, and also refused to give us information on the whereabouts of the student to whom she had sold Groovy. The woman’s name was not listed on the site. We noticed that the ad was quickly removed, however, and then received an e-mail from the first adopter that her student was going to keep the horse for life. Of course, she was still in violation of the contract. More to the point, we didn’t believe her. We suspected that the sale of Groovy, sound only for trail riding or for grazing in the pasture, proceeded underground.

  I wanted to sue for breach of contract and retake possession of Groovy. But I needed an attorney near the woman, and she was hours away, in Northern Michigan on the western side of the state. And no lawyer I knew in Detroit or Ann Arbor would take the case pro bono.

  I had hit a wall, and I was inconsolable. I now went to sleep at night worrying about Groovy, worried that he w
ould do whatever was demanded of him, even if it destroyed him. “Where are you, Groovy?” I’d think to myself while waiting to drop off to sleep, as if he could tell me by telepathy. He, more than any horse I couldn’t ultimately save, haunted me.

  Rebecca’s bridal shower followed not long after the incident, bringing with it a lot of opportunity for retrospection. I remember, while writing out the invitations, pausing at the line that says “Given by.” I wrote “Family” but wanted to put down “Baby,” because that was the truth.

  The shower itself was particularly joyous and festive because only a week earlier, Jessica, too, had become engaged. The venue for the get-together, a meeting room at a golf course, had a beautiful view of the fairway. I was glad for my daughters, but for a few moments, while looking out over the links, I let myself be transported out of the moment I was in, away from everyone in the room and back to another time. There was Baby, alive, and I was happy.

  Rebecca’s wedding itself came at the worst possible time—October, right in the middle of fall rush. I was in Las Vegas for ten days, where the wedding was held. Rebecca had moved there after college. She had already danced in the Lexington Ballet, but when the doctor told her that an injured ankle would never heal enough to dance en pointe again, she dejectedly left the world of dance and received a degree in anthropology at the University of Michigan. As she was graduating four years later, an old dancing friend of hers suggested she come out to Las Vegas and audition for one of the major shows.

  Rebecca was thrilled to have the opportunity to dance—any kind of dance, even if it couldn’t be ballet—and was quickly accepted into Jubilee, one of the most prestigious and well-paying revues on the Strip. Like a CANTER horse, she had repurposed herself into a different kind of discipline after an injury and had made her peace with it, excelling in her new activity. I remember visiting her soon after she moved out there, when she had me try on one of the heavy, Bob Mackie–designed headdresses she wore as part of one of her costumes. In I Love Lucy fashion, I staggered about. But Rebecca, she carried it off like a swan.

  She met her husband in Vegas, too, and they were going to be making their home there, which is why the wedding took place out west. Some sixty of us flew out from Michigan for the event, not just John, I, and Jessica and her fiancé but also aunts and uncles and cousins and lots of friends. It was almost like a destination wedding. Yet as much as I tried to enjoy myself and be happy for my daughter, half of me was back home, worrying what was going on with all the intakes. Were the volunteers taking the extra time to go back through the shedrows at the end of the day in case someone decided at the last minute that he had a horse to list? Was every tactic being tried to wrest an unsound horse from his trainer? Joy and Martha Denver were in charge and were very driven, like me, so I no doubt worried needlessly. But saving the horses had become an obsession, probably not even a healthy one any longer, and I couldn’t help it. This simply was going to continue to be who I was. I kept phoning Joy, calling Martha, double-checking things.

  It turned out the ten days I was gone were among the busiest CANTER ever experienced, with one of the highest intakes of horses in such a short period of time. But the two of them handled it all beautifully, as did all the other volunteers.

  Whatever we did could never be enough, though. After I came back to Michigan, a few horses ended up in the wrong hands, as they always did, no matter how hard I tried to keep that from happening. One failure would loom over 100 successes.

  After the season ended, the year ended on a frightening note away from the track. Around four or five o’clock on December 31st, before things became crazy on the roads, I went over to see my parents and wish them a Happy New Year.

  “Your Dad’s been sick for about four or five days,” my mother said when she came to the door. “He even went to the pharmacist and asked what he could take to stop throwing up, and they gave him Pepto-Bismol. But he’s still vomiting.”

  I immediately suspected that my father had not felt well since before Christmas but hadn’t wanted to ruin the holiday for the family. He was that way.

  “Dad, Mom says you’ve been sick,” I told him. He was reclining in the La-Z-Boy, ashen, but rushed to put the seat upright and act normal when he saw me.

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t feel good, and I can’t stop throwing up. But it’s getting better.”

  “You need to be checked,” I said. I called Jessica, by then an emergency room doctor at a major hospital, and she came over immediately. “He’s going right to the hospital,” she said when she examined him. “It’s his gallbladder.”

  She was right. It turned out my father’s gallbladder, his whole intestinal area, was gangrenous. Surgery was performed right away to remove the corroded tissue, and when my father was wheeled out of the operating room, he put his thumbs up as he went by. Then the surgeon came over.

  “It doesn’t look good,” he said. The gallbladder had already ruptured. “We flushed and flushed the entire abdomen as much as we could,” the doctor went on, “but the idea that we could get all of it out and that it wouldn’t come back—it usually doesn’t happen.”

  I felt sick. My father, who was eighty-nine, was very tall and to that day retained his military bearing, always standing ramrod straight. He had been an MP in World War II, specially selected for extra schooling and special training in hand-to-hand combat, and subsequently chosen as one of General Eisenhower’s guards.

  When I was a little girl I used to badger him relentlessly. “But why can’t I have a horse?” We lived in a subdivision eight miles from the Detroit line. Each two-bedroom house was attached to a tiny backyard.

  My father, always my go-to parent, had indulged me as best he could. When he came home from a long day at work, he would sit at the kitchen table and read the paper while waiting for dinner. I would go and get a towel and put it over his knee—that was my saddle. Then I would bring out one of his belts and slide it behind the back of his knee and fasten it. That was my bridle, my reins. Finally, I’d climb up on my horse—my father was not just tall but also broad—and say, “Giddy-up. Come on, horsey.” My dad, a carpenter, would move his heel up and down to simulate the feel of a horse going along, all the while reading the paper, never complaining that he was tired after his day on the job.

  It took him a month to die. He would have turned ninety at the end of March. He had already booked a hall and an accordion player for the party, so excited was he at the prospect of reaching his tenth decade. But at two-something in the morning on February 1st, a Sunday, he passed.

  I went to the hospital every single day through January. I still had to write the annual Blue Horse Charities grant application, answer e-mails, and deal with some phone calls, but I was able to handle a lot of that from his bedside. Poor Jessica, there she was trying to plan her wedding yet checking in on her grandfather as often as she could.

  With my father gone and the hall picked—Jessica was going to get married over Thanksgiving weekend later that year—I headed into the 2004 racing season, continuing to grieve but knowing that I had to continue on.

  One Saturday in May, when things were still slow for CANTER at the track, I was going to drive out to Great Lakes Downs for the morning and then meet Jessica at a bridal salon to help her pick out her wedding gown late that afternoon. That would give me enough time to get home, take care of my own horses, and shower. I was looking forward to it. Because Rebecca lived in Las Vegas, she had picked out her wedding dress on her own, trying to describe over the phone the choices to which she had narrowed it down. Now, I’d be able to enjoy that motherly rite of passage with Jessica, not to mention have another “moment” with Baby, who was paying for the dress. I needed the respite from my work. It would be a chance to create some of the family balance to which I had given such short shrift.

  The day at the track proved uneventful, as I had expected it would. Just before I was getting ready to leave the backstretch and head back to the Detroit ar
ea, however, the track vet came up to me and asked if I had been to a particular trainer’s set of stalls.

  I responded that I had walked down that shedrow but hadn’t seen him.

  “Well, you need to go talk to him,” the track vet said. “He has a horse there that he won’t do anything with. It’s been colicking for over a week. See if he will give you the horse and let you put it down.” The track vet, Hal Davidson, had no problem injecting horses with ever more cortisone and other painkillers, as that was his bread and butter, but he also looked after them, whether to assuage a guilty conscience I don’t know. He even took thousands of dollars’ worth of X-rays of CANTER horses for free over the years and traveled to Judy’s farm a couple of times to treat horses for free.

  I found the horse Hal was talking about. Named Naseer Spirit, he had already raced three times for his trainer the previous year but earned only $171, just enough to pay his jockey fee.

  Naseer Spirit was down on his side. Unlike a dog or cat, horses cannot vocalize their pain. They suffer in silence, and the utter lack of any whimpering makes their physical distress all the more pitiful. If there was one thing I could change about horses—and I know it’s sacrilegious to talk about wanting to change something in beings so magnificent—it would be to give them voice when they’re in pain, allow them to moan. The lack of noise reinforces to people the notion that horses are not feeling pain when they are.

  I spent at least an hour with Naseer Spirit’s trainer, trying to talk him into giving me the horse. Finally, after much haggling, he agreed.

  “I can bring him to emergency at Michigan State right away,” I said, “but we have to find a trailer.”

  “I have a trailer,” the trainer responded eagerly.