Saving Baby Page 9

  I didn’t have to say anything more on that score.

  “Is there anything wrong with him?” Pam asked.

  “Not other than that he needs to gain weight because he wasn’t fed properly. He’s sound.” I also had to tell her that Baby had developed a habit of not wanting to come out of the gate. He’d linger after the bell went off. It hadn’t happened with Coburn, but it started, and became entrenched, with Belker.

  Pam didn’t like that he was what she called “gate sour,” but she didn’t rule him out because of that. She just knew it would require some retraining.

  Then I told her about Scarlett, and she said that before she committed, she wanted to come to the house with her assistant trainer and see the horses. Her assistant was Jerry Bennett. Jerry’s father, Gerald, was pretty much the leading trainer at the track, with a huge stable of some forty to sixty horses in training. His shedrow was right across from Pam’s.

  When Pam and Jerry visited the house, she noticed the osselet right away, and I assured her it was “cold.” She didn’t seem overly excited, like other trainers who wanted to pick up an extra horse. Instead, it was really she who was interviewing me, not drooling over the extra money she might make. She was more concerned about her win percentage. She wanted to take on horses who represented quality because their wins would reflect on her.

  I liked that Pam had a lot of questions, that she wasn’t hungry for a couple of extra horses, and I liked that while she seemed a little hesitant when I told her I’d be at the track everyday, it wasn’t a showstopper for her.

  Baby and Scarlett, for their parts, turned their heads to whoever was speaking, literally listening to the conversation. They were relaxed, but clearly showing interest with their ears pricked forward. They seemed to know that Pam and Jerry were there for a purpose, and that the purpose was them and decisions were being made.

  “Here’s the deal,” Pam said, finally. “Racing is going to open at the track in March next year. “That means the horses have to start training in January. How are you supposed to get a horse fit here in the winter so it can run in March? There’s three days in a row of snow and ice, they can’t get out on the track, they backslide. What we do is go down to Florida after the first of the year—Ocala, about an hour north of Orlando. We get the horses conditioned down there in beautiful weather, and just before they’re ready to race here, we ship them back up. It gives them an edge. So if you want us to train your horses, they’ll have to come to Florida.”

  After talking it over with John, who also met Pam and liked her, I said yes. It was scary, because now Baby—and Scarlett, who would be turning three—wouldn’t be within driving distance. I’d have to check in by phone. It made me feel a little paranoid, but Pam told me the place was terrific, with training in the morning and pasture turnout for the rest of the day, where the Thoroughbreds could frolic and just be horses.

  It was still only mid-fall at that point, so we were months away from shipping off Baby and Scarlett. In the meantime, I kept seeing other things at the track that took some of the shine off the “Sport of Kings.” One day at the rail, somebody was talking about a trainer who got suspended because he got caught with an overage of drugs; one of his horses tested over the allowed threshold level.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked. “He has at least forty horses that he trains. Does that mean they don’t get to run?”

  Everybody started laughing. “Look, he’s right there,” one of the guys said to me. And there he was, on the other side of the chain link fence separating the track from the parking area. His assistant trainer kept running back and forth to get instructions about what to tell the exercise riders to do.

  In other words, suspension meant the trainer was not allowed on the grounds for a certain period of time, but it was business as usual. If cell phones had been in use by that point, the assistant wouldn’t even have had to keep going back over to the fence.

  I was glad to find out around that time that I had, in fact, been elected to the HBPA board. I’d be able to look into complaints better, learn more, improve things. I took office immediately after the election was over. The president of the board chose me to be chair of the communications committee; chair of the PAC, or political action committee; and a member of the purse committee, which looks at how the purses are structured for each race. I was going to be able to effect change from within.

  While things were moving along on the ground, emotionally it was a difficult time. Before, feeding Baby when he first came home, riding him in the quiet, I was able to be a horse. That is, I allowed myself to live in the moment, which horses do naturally. They don’t anticipate the future or mull over the past. Like someone in a deep meditative state, they have only “now,” and so did I, and I relished its centeredness. But once Pam was chosen, I was anticipating again, anxious about time. I knew I’d have to see Baby and Scarlett go off.

  The weeks of fall went by until Thanksgiving came and, with it, growing apprehension. I was glad to be able to excuse myself from a dinner table filled with twenty people that day and put on my barn clothes so I could check on the horses. I have always appreciated that about having horses. No matter how many people you’re entertaining, you get to have that time away from them and just be with your animals and in that way reinvigorate yourself. You plan your day around going to the stalls, in fact, and no one can take that from you because, after all, you have to take care of them, of Baby, of Scarlett, of the others. But I was ticking off the last days of November on a calendar, and Baby and Scarlett’s departure was now only six weeks away.

  Throughout the Christmas season, their leaving made me more and more nervous. I couldn’t just lay my face on Baby’s shoulder and breathe into his body, recognize him by his scent and push all else from my thoughts, like I could in late summer and early fall. Whereas before that left me calm, renewed, like the way a special scented candle might for a non-horse person, now it left me longing for him before he was even gone.

  And Scarlett, who was the whole reason all of this started—she had been with me in the backyard for the better part of three years. How was I going to let her go? I wouldn’t be able to check on either one’s eating or on the quality of their hay.

  Then Christmas did come and go, and I filled the holiday stockings I had hung not just on Baby and Scarlett’s stall doors but also on Pat’s, Beauty’s, and Pumpkin’s—with special treats like apples and carrots, and, just this once, sugar cubes. After all, it was a big moment for everyone. The herd was going to be separated in a new way, and we all had to say our good-byes. Then New Year’s arrived, and apprehension evolved into a kind of dull, ever-present dread until finally, on January 5th, 1995, the huge trailer that would take Baby and Scarlett away came down our little road. It was so enormous it could not turn around in our driveway, so the driver had to back down our entire road from the main street.

  I watched as Baby and Scarlett stepped inside for a two-day ride to Florida. Both loaded easily, unlike many other Thoroughbreds, with whom you have to fight for an hour before they walk on, and I was glad. Horses who have a reputation for being rank, or hard to handle, get treated more roughly. They don’t receive the same kindnesses.

  I gave them both a last kiss, worried that I wouldn’t be able to check their legs for heat or swelling, that I couldn’t assess ahead of time the conditions they’d be living in. I had just had two pretty bad years with poor trainers, and now my horses were going to a place I had never seen with someone I barely knew.

  Still, I reminded myself that I did have a good feeling about Pam, and that she came recommended. Picking her didn’t feel like such a crapshoot. I was relieved to some degree, too, about the trailer. It was an air-ride, specially made for animals to give them a smooth trip during which their slender legs wouldn’t have to feel the constant rumble of vibrations and thereby make it difficult for them to keep their balance. And it was brand new. The man who drove the rig was very warm, friendly even, and had asked abo
ut Baby and Scarlett’s personalities, saying he put them in the spot that would give them the most comfortable ride. With that, my never-ending roller-coaster ride of emotions took another turn and dip, a bit slower and easier than I had expected. Off the horses went, with me watching the huge trailer grow smaller and smaller until it was out of sight.

  I had made a decision a few weeks earlier that I would check out the Florida facility for myself before training got underway in earnest and pull Baby and Scarlett out of there if I did not like what I found. So two days later I flew down, and I was overjoyed to see the place. It was immaculate, with a well-maintained track and hardly anyone there. It was as if Baby and Scarlett had been enrolled in private school. They were turned out when I arrived, and when I clapped, the two of them came running, first breathing into my nose over the fence, then letting me breathe into theirs. Baby out-jostled Scarlett to be nearer to me, pushing her out of the way with his shoulder. “No, she’s my mother.”

  Baby (left) and Scarlett came running as soon as I clapped.

  Of course I had treats with me that I had bought at a farm stand on the way from the airport. It helped me immensely that my coming so soon might help them to think I was only thirteen minutes away from them by car, as if they were no farther than the Detroit Race Course.

  Both Pam and Jerry showed me around without any defensiveness, and Jerry said the two horses had traveled very well. “We saw ‘Surpriser’ come down the ramp,” he told me, “and I thought, Boy, he’s lookin’ good. Then Scarlett came down—“

  “I grabbed Jerry’s arm,” Pam said, interrupting him, “and told him, ‘Jerry, there’s our Sire Stakes horse.’”

  The Sire Stakes is the most important race in Michigan, with the largest purse—$200,000.

  “She is just incredibly put together,” Pam went on. “She is a champion. You can see it in the way she walks, the way she moves. He’s a good horse, but she’s a classic distance horse. That’s her conformation.”

  I was caught off guard. I don’t know that I loved Scarlett any less than Baby, but with Baby the bond was so strong. There was just something between us—he truly acted like my little boy, my rough-and-tumble boy with his shirttails untucked—so I was surprised to see anybody passing him by to lavish more attention on another horse.

  “We’re going to keep the two of them in their own pasture for now,” Pam said, pointing to a spot close by. The pasture was beautiful and even had automatic waterers. A horse could push on a lever when it was thirsty, and the water would come out into a big dish. That way, the water was always fresh. No standing water in dirty troughs.

  The upkeep in the shedrows was immaculate, too. And the stalls themselves were huge, and very deeply bedded.

  During the short time I was there, I could tell Baby and Scarlett were relaxed—and proud to show me what they could do. They were anxious to get out on the track. There was no dragging them.

  Outside of practice times, I lavished as much attention on them as possible, even picking grass for them. They could chew grass of their own choosing in the pasture, but I would pull up grass right outside the fence, and they would eat it from my hands. They preferred it that way, standing there and waiting for me to pick more handfuls when they could have gone anywhere they wanted and eaten as much as they felt like.

  I loved watching them get their baths, proud of them that they stood so quietly, and happy for them that they would stretch their heads forward just so as the water sprayed onto them in the warm Florida sun—“Ahhh.”

  I flew home two days later, hugging Baby and Scarlett in their stalls before leaving and exchanging breaths with them through our noses, comfortable that they were in good hands. Letting go with Scarlett wasn’t as hard as it had been with Baby, and not only because of my bond with him. It was like sending my second child off to school. I was more familiar. Also, they had each other. And Scarlett wasn’t going to get green osselets or bucked shins, or any other problems of two-year-olds. She was closer to three now than two.

  The plan was to stay in touch with Pam by phone, but it was actually she who called first, about four or five days after I arrived home. I hadn’t wanted to appear overly intrusive.

  “I’ve got to talk to you about these horses,” she said.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Maybe she was going to tell me it wasn’t worth pursuing with Baby. He had run eleven races, and nothing. And maybe Scarlett was going to be a pretty show horse rather than a racehorse.

  “Are you sure Reel Surprise never won a race?” Pam continued.

  “Most definitely,” I answered. “I can guarantee you that I have never stood in the winner’s circle with that horse.”

  “Well, this horse can run,” she responded. “Now tell, me, what is this problem with the gate?”

  “He’s reluctant,” I said. “They’d always announce it over the loudspeaker: ‘Reel Surprise is reluctant to load.’ It wasn’t that he was nervous,” I explained. “One of the jockeys had even told me that once he goes inside, he completely relaxes. Sometimes he even falls asleep. But he breaks from the gate really slowly, spotting the other horses ten to fifteen lengths before he takes off.”

  “Okay,” Pam said after I finished my explanation, “but I have to tell you, when Jerry gallops him, he says, ‘there’s a lot of horse there.’”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I responded.

  “Now I want to talk to you about our star,” Pam said, referring to Scarlett. “You told me this horse is not broke to ride, right?”

  That was correct. But Pam then explained that Jerry just basically got on her after leaning over her back a couple of times, and they rode together. She had no problem with a man on her, no problem with the saddle. Jerry just took her to the track, and she galloped beautifully.

  It was, no exaggeration, astounding. It usually takes a couple of weeks to break a Thoroughbred. The process starts out in the horse’s stall, with the rider simply laying his chest and arms over her back and someone at the horse’s head watching for a reaction—holding a lead line in case the horse tries to buck the rider off and inadvertently steps on him. All the while, the rider is talking soothingly, trying to inch forward a little further without having the horse “erupt.” The goal is to eventually go from leaning over the horse to hanging over it with the rider’s feet off the ground. From there, the aim is for the rider to be able to sit on the horse’s back, first without a saddle, then with one. It’s all two steps forward, one step backward, each short session infused with a lot of encouragement in a soft voice and ending on a positive note, just like with dog training, until the day the rider can actually ride the horse out to the track.

  “If you hadn’t told me,” Pam said, “I would have thought Scarlett had been in training before. She’s not a typical Thoroughbred—not the least bit flighty or nervous, just interested. She is so smart, we can’t get over it.

  “Both horses will do anything Jerry asks them to do,” she continued. “They stand quietly while being hosed for their baths. They listen. They are just perfect to work with.

  “I don’t usually tell people too much about what I expect from a horse,” Pam said, “because you never really know, certainly not after just a few days. But I have to tell you, Jerry is very high on Scarlett. Not just him. When she came off that trailer, there were other people waiting around for their own horses, and you could tell, they were looking at her. And now she’s showing us that she is that horse.”

  I could feel my heart swell. I was bursting.

  A month later, in the middle of February, John and I went down to check things out for ourselves. Even though the place was beautiful, and even though Pam said to call anytime and showed no reluctance to talk with me, we figured that in a month’s time, things could change quickly. Once they really start training in earnest, they burn a lot more calories. Maybe Baby would lose weight again. And Scarlett was brand new to galloping. Maybe they were pushing her toward an injury.

  But both horses looked fantas
tic. Each was gleaming. They were standing side by side in the pasture when I first came upon them, just like at home, grazing. I was so glad they had each other.

  Because it had been a while, when I clapped this time, at first they looked up and stood still for a moment. Then, when it clicked, they came at a gallop to greet us. Baby beat Scarlett to the fence, but since John was with me, they both could get attention at the same time.

  On our first day there, Jerry said, “I just have to show you about your horse. I don’t know what the problem was with Surpriser at the gate. But he has no problem coming out of it. He breaks sharply.” And indeed Baby did.

  “He’s really on the muscle,” Jerry said. “He wants to run.”

  Then Jerry explained about Scarlett. He said it can take a long time for a horse to feel familiar with the gate. “But I gotta tell you,” he went on, “she went through the whole process in a day. Nothing fazes her. Watch this!” he said, leading Scarlett through the gate. “She’s just looking around, all relaxed. That’s the sign of a class horse.”

  It was clear that Scarlett was Jerry’s favorite. He didn’t just ride her. He sweet talked her, patted her on the neck. His grin with her was ear to ear. “Did you see that?” he would ask excitedly when he showed me something else she could do.

  I truly felt like a proud mom, and proud of myself for working so carefully with Baby and Scarlett at home—teaching them not to be afraid of things, treating them like the intelligent creatures they were, even tying beach towels around them within weeks of birth so they would have some memory of that feel, that pressure around their middles, when it came time to put on a saddle.