And it was in that gift of silence, that long beautiful pause, that I knew I could hold Lay Me Down’s head for as long as I needed to, because no one who surrounded me now would ever pull me away.
[ 18 ]
A WEEK AFTER Lay Me Down died, Hank and I sat across the table from each other at a coffee shop in Kingston. It was noisy, filled with a noon lunch crowd. I ordered carrot soup. Hank ordered a Swiss cheese sandwich and a cup of herbal tea. While we waited for the food he sat perfectly still with his hands in his lap. I folded my paper napkin over and over until it was the size of a fat matchbook. I hated him.
“When were you going to tell me?” I asked.
He was wearing a navy T-shirt and khaki pants, more or less his uniform. He almost never wore a real shirt, not even when he flew to New York to put together the money, as he called it, for one of his malls. It struck me that there was an arrogance to his insistence on informality. He was the rich man who surprised you with his regular-guyness. Imagine, he wanted people to say when he drove through town, all that money, and he drives an old pickup.
But that was only part of the message. The other part was a putdown of anyone’s standard but his own. What he really wanted you to know, what I saw in his squared shoulders across the table, was that he was above explaining.
“I just met her,” he said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
The waitress brought our food and smiled too much as she put it on the table. “Will there be anything else?” she chirped.
“No thanks.” Hank smiled back. It made me angry that he could smile.
“If you tell me one more lie I’ll throw this hot soup at you,” I said when she left.
“Why don’t we try to be sane about this.” He sighed.
The white man’s burden—an angry woman. “Why don’t we try to be whatever we are.”
He took big bites of his sandwich and crumbs fell all over his shirt and onto the table. I ignored my food and waited for him to say something. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to hear, what he could possibly say that would take away my rage. I unfolded and refolded my napkin. I pictured carrot soup dripping off his head.
Finally he shrugged. “We don’t want the same thing,” he said. “I want to get married, to live with someone, and it’s obvious you don’t. Not with me.”
That was true but beside the point. It wasn’t his ending the relationship that bothered me, not entirely. It was the way he’d done it. In my mind, a relationship should end before either party began a new one. It was then that I knew what I wanted him to say. I wanted him to apologize, to say he was sorry for beginning a new relationship before he had ended ours. If he could say that, it would mean he hadn’t lied about everything else. It would mean my feelings mattered.
“A woman in the grocery store told me,” I said. “We were in produce. In front of all the lettuce.” I could still see her hand fly to her mouth. I could still feel my wobbly knees.
He nodded and shrugged at the same time. As if to say, “People, if they would just mind their own business.”
I hadn’t touched my food and he had finished his. I saw him glance at my soup. “Go ahead,” I said.
He pulled the bowl toward him and started on the soup. All he wanted was to eat. “I’m sorry,” he said between spoonfuls. “I really did give it my best shot. Maybe if I’d been a horse.” He looked up and smiled.
My shoulders dropped and I stopped mauling my napkin and let it fall on the table. He’d apologized. He’d even given a reason, a pretty good one. “If you hadn’t been allergic,” I said.
Our incompatibility was no one’s fault. It was just there, huge and sad, a reminder that loneliness wasn’t going to end yet. I’d have to look elsewhere, the way Hank already had. We’d been doomed from the start. I’d always known. Still, it felt so lousy to be forty-four and still getting it wrong, still going through these terrible endings, losing bits of myself each time.
I leaned back against the booth, suddenly too tired to feel angry anymore, too tired to hate him. It wasn’t Hank I’d miss, or a warm body to hold, not really. What I missed was long gone, long before Hank. I couldn’t blame him, I couldn’t blame anyone for the stunning realization that I was no longer young, that I would never again be the “younger woman” with seemingly unlimited choices for love, for work, for a lifestyle. There was less time now, fewer selections at the buffet. The choicest portions were gone. A breathtaking fact—the passage of time. I was filled with sadness, with regrets for a misspent youth, a youth I had surely believed would go on forever.
I looked at Hank: the book hater, the mall builder, the horse avoider. Nothing so terrible, just terrible for me.
“I could go for something sweet,” I said, watching a piece of blueberry pie go by on a tray.
I ordered the pie and when it arrived, Hank picked up his spoon and let it hover over my plate. “May I?”
I pulled the plate toward me, out of his reach, widening my eyes at him. “And risk a canker sore?”
AFTER LAY ME DOWN died, Hotshot whinnied for three days. He’d pull himself up from grazing suddenly and whinny straight into the sky, as if he knew how far away she was and he needed to give it everything he had in order for her to hear him.
The day Lay Me Down died, but before Clayton buried her, Allie and I led the three horses over, one by one, to let them see her body. It was the humane thing to do, to let them know what had happened. Only Hotshot had reacted strongly. Georgia and Tempo had sniffed all around her with curiosity but without alarm. After a minute or two, both became more interested in the rich grass surrounding her than in her body.
Not Hotshot. When it was Hotshot’s turn, just as I clipped on the lead to walk him over, he jerked away from me and started trotting toward Lay Me Down on his own, dragging his lead line on the ground. I ran after him, catching the end of the lead, but he wouldn’t slow down, and I was dragged beside him into the back field. I never felt unsafe, as though he was going to hurt me. I only felt how strong he was, how impossible it was to control him, so out of character for this docile horse.
He dragged me into the field but stopped far short of Lay Me Down’s body. He couldn’t even see her. Thinking he was confused, unsure of where she actually was, I urged him forward in the direction of her body. As soon as he felt the pressure on his lead, though, his whole body went rigid, and he planted his front legs in a lock-kneed stop. His neck and head arched high above me, and, with a series of deep staccato grunts, his nostrils flared into the air as he swept the field for her scent.
His neck quivered at my touch, my presence clearly an intrusion. I didn’t know what to do, how to ease his distress or unfreeze this moment. I was afraid he might gallop toward her, falling into the hole Clayton had dug. He seemed out of his mind, completely unhinged.
Before I could do anything, he started dragging me backward, at first backing up before whirling around and, this time, galloping toward the barn. I let him go. I couldn’t have held on anyway. Allie saw him coming and once he was inside his own pasture, she ran and closed the gate behind him so he couldn’t get out again. He circled the barn a few times, miraculously not tripping on his lead, and came to a stop at the gate he had just run through. If it had still been open, he would have run out again.
He stood wild-eyed and rigid, sending panicked whinnies in the direction of Lay Me Down. He let me approach to unclip his lead, but his neck quivered under my hand as though it burned him. There were sweat marks under his halter and down the inside of his legs.
His grief was beautiful and ferocious; his whole body shuddered with the thrust of each call. I stayed near him, close enough to feel his whinnies reverberate in my chest, as if they were mine. It was as if at last my grief, too, had the power to shake the ground and shatter the air between me and my beloved. It was as if my grief had finally found a memory, a voice. It took two nurses to pull you away from her. My mother’s death was my death—a death and a birth at the same time. The death of the child I st
ill only knew through my mother’s eyes and the birth of someone unrecognizable—this new child, faceless without her mother mirror. A child with no proof of her own existence. The death of a mother is an annihilation of that first love, which is narcissistic and fierce by nature because survival hangs on it. Children understand commitment, the security of forever. They understand, too, the magnitude of its loss.
To love without an echo is the death knell of the soul. Foolishly, the soulless body grows anyway, marches into the future without its nucleus, without its self, bonsaied by this echoless love.
Hotshot’s grief was big and bold, as unrestrained and open as his affection had been. Like mine. Lay Me Down had given us that, an echo. For me, it was the first I could remember feeling such love and then such grief, the first since the numbing years of childhood and then alcohol. Perhaps for Hotshot, as for me, Lay Me Down had been his first experience of pure kindness, of complete trust. She had loved us, she had loved me, and with that I had finally felt all the sorrow and joy that comes with it. I had learned something about courage, too, seeing her through her illness and even allowing a man into my life. Hank was the wrong man but it was a beginning, the first shaky steps. I would try again. There was no going back.
Allie and I left and Clayton buried her. I couldn’t bear to watch this final step, to see her shoveled into the hole with a backhoe and arranged real pretty in the dirt. When he had finished and her grave was tamped flat, he used the bucket loader to scoop up a rock from the stone wall to use as a grave marker. The rock was large and flat, covered with curly green lichen. It would be a good place to sit on a summer evening, listening to the peepers and tree frogs.
Late in the summer when I was harvesting some leeks from the garden, I realized they were from Lay Me Down. They were Lay Me Down, grown in her composted manure along with Hotshot’s and Tempo’s and Georgia’s, but most joyously, Lay Me Down’s.
I drove to Allie’s house with the sacred leeks and laid them on her kitchen counter, four long stalks smelling of earth and onion. I started imagining all the ways Lay Me Down would come back to me: as leeks, as wild roses climbing along the stone wall, as the baby cedar growing next to her grave, as clover and timothy.
“We have to make something with these,” I said. I explained about the leeks, about how they were actually Lay Me Down.
Allie didn’t laugh. She didn’t inform me as to whether the leeks contained Lay Me Down’s DNA or not. She didn’t say horses can’t make cold, shut-down people into loving, open ones. She didn’t say horses can’t save us. She didn’t say anything. She put her arms around me and held me for a moment and then put some water on the stove to make us tea.
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to my wise and beautiful agent, Helen Zimmerman, who made a dream come true. Much admiration, praise, and thanks to my wonderful editors: Laura Hruska, Nan Satter, and Patricia Sims. To my friends for their unwavering support and love: Elaine Ralston, Patti Reller, Sara Beames, Dorothy Porter, Daia Gerson, Nancy April, Pat Whelan, John McCauley, Stephanie Speer, Alex Rambusch, and Barbara Scanlan. And much love and gratitude to my brother, Lloyd, the writer of a thousand encouraging, funny, and nourishing e-mails.
Susan Richards, Chosen by a Horse
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