OTHER THAN THE THICK SNOW on the ground, there was no other sign that it was Christmas Eve. I was far from home, and I wasn’t the only one. At that moment, Joe’s ship was mapping the ocean floor off the coast of Australia. The day before I had finally found a library that was actually open and had internet access. Hallelujah. I sent Joe a brief, upbeat email but had no idea when he would get it or reply.
While I stowed the saddle and bridle, I made a valiant attempt to stave off the blues by singing Christmas carols. It wasn’t working.
Lou walked past the tack room and lingered for a while. “Come on over for a drink when you’re finished here,” she said.
Aside from quick sprints to use the Bridgmans’ bathroom and helping myself to coffee or hot water for tea, I hadn’t been inside their home. In fact, until Caleb woke the family up with his blasted greetings and I caught hell for it, I had believed that the building was a tack room or office, and that the family lived elsewhere.
When I entered Lou’s kitchen, she had already put the kettle on to boil. With a cup of tea in hand, I followed her through a dim hallway and stopped to examine a dusty display of medieval-looking iron bits, chains, and straps — accessories deemed necessary for the successful control of donkeys and mules. Included among the options were some thick double-chain mouthpieces that looked intimidating enough to control an elephant. Did longears require all that stuff? Surely not my donkey.
I caught up with Lou in what I assumed was the living room, a large, empty space lined with the same bare, unsanded wood planks on the walls as on the floor. Jack sat in a wooden rocking chair flanking a woodstove, sipping his drink. Lou joined him on another chair near the stove. Farley arrived, beer in hand, and took her seat on the hard bench next to me. I was sure they thought I was a teetotaler by then, as I had consistently turned down their offers of morning picker-uppers. So, when I lifted the bottle of Kentucky’s finest from my day pack, Lou and Jack smiled and held out their glasses. Farley declined, so I poured a drop of bourbon into my teacup.
After we wished each other Merry Christmas, Jack and Lou talked quietly about farm business. When the topic veered toward donkeys or their training, I said, “I’ve read that. . .” or “Is that true?” I wondered if the Bridgmans spent their free time talking about donkeys, or whether my single-minded prompting had steered the conversation toward them.
Meanwhile Farley continued sitting by my side on the hard bench, saying nothing. The wind shrieked around the house and I shivered, too far from the woodstove to feel any heat, except for a warm flush that spread through my chest from the hot bourbon. I looked around the spare room for holiday inspiration. A couple of red-and-green greeting cards piled on an end table next to Lou were the only signs of Christmas for this hardworking bunch. No TV, no radio. I got up to stretch my back and to get nearer to the stove, and peered at the framed pictures on the walls. The whole family was represented, all holding ribbons and trophies as they posed with their steeds. A youthful Jack sat on a Tennessee walking horse in the special saddle, set far back on the horse’s kidneys. In his prime, the grizzled old manure slinger must have been a serious showman as well as a trainer. Other photos showed Lou in spangled Western finery, a blonde Dale Evans, holding ribbons next to her sleek palomino. On the opposite wall Farley stood at attention in a black velvet helmet and jodhpurs, a rack of blue ribbons in one hand, the reins of a tall brown mule in the other.
I felt awkward sitting next to the bored or resentful Farley, who merely mumbled answers to my queries — if she bothered to answer at all. I mused about her coolness, which I assumed was based on my utter incompetence with Caleb. I began to notice, though, that her sullenness also extended to her parents, whom I overheard offering her obviously unwanted advice regarding her training methods. Her impatient, dismissive rejoinders reminded me more of a teenager than a thirty-year-old woman.
When I returned to the bench, the room fell silent except for the pop and hiss of logs in the stove. I wiggled on the cold wood, attempting to ease my aching back. Not only was it sore from the donkey’s torquing me around in my daily struggles to groom and ride him but also from the sagging bed in the cheap motel I returned to every night.
The Bridgmans carried on discussing their business. They were obviously devoted to training longears, for they spoke of them with gruff affection. I wondered: Did this mean that they were perverse masochists? Or had they glimpsed reflections of themselves mirrored in their donkeys’ misbehavior — as untamable outlaws or underdogs? I realized, with a jolt, that this had once applied to me, too — the tomboy explorer of my childhood, and the college student who persisted in studying geology despite barriers to women. When had I become such a conciliatory, conflict-adverse wimp of a college professor who shrank from controversy? What had happened to the bold outlaw in me?
Well, maybe not all was lost. After all, I had gone out and bought myself a donkey.
As if Jack could read my thoughts, he asked, “Why did you buy a donkey, anyway?” The awkwardness and abruptness of his question yanked me out of my brooding. The Bridgmans had probably been speculating about this at some length. The question could be interpreted several ways: Why a donkey instead of a horse? Why a donkey instead of, say, some other impulsive midlife purchase like a sports car or sailboat? Why me, a middle-aged, obviously clueless rider?
“I loved donkeys from the first moment I discovered an ad for a ‘Genuine Mexican Burro’ in the Sears catalog.” I was about to launch into a charming Christmas story about my childhood obsession, when I noticed that everyone was staring at the floor. Time to regroup. I ventured into what I hoped was a more reasonable explanation: “I first encountered donkeys when I worked in the Dominican Republic. Downtrodden but playful. To me they looked like horses with low self-esteem. . .” Even that story sounded naive at best, if not delusional. My voice trailed off to nothing.
Lou broke the silence. “I’m going to fetch some refills. How about you, Margie?” I raised my cup, grateful.
She returned with a steaming cup of tea and offered me a choice between it and the bottle of bourbon she’d lifted from the side table. I accepted the half-filled teacup but held it up and nodded at the bottle. Lou filled the cup to the brim and topped up everyone else’s drinks.
She finally interrupted the uncomfortable lull: “You know, Caleb weighs close to seven hundred pounds. If you want him to do anything, even just to move him from a paddock to his stall, you must establish control.” The alpha thing again.
My head swirled with conflicting thoughts: Did I want to have Caleb obey me? Well, yes — up to a point. Could I force him to follow my instructions? Possibly. But did I want to use force? I shook my head as if answering myself.
“But more than anything,” Lou said, “before a donkey will submit, he needs to trust you.”
Jack picked up the theme: “That’s right. He needs to trust that you know what you’re doing, that your commands are reasonable and safe.”
Even Farley agreed. She said, “The commands, most of all, must be consistent.”
My head filled with images of jerking reins, wobbling posture, and random yelling, and I felt a sudden wave of discouragement. I looked out the window, where the dark silhouettes of trees whipped back and forth in the wind. What am I doing here? Here I sat, far from friends and loved ones, in a godforsaken frozen hell, trying to gain the approval of a crusty bunch of mule skinners. And what sort of people lived in unheated, unfinished houses in this no-man’s-land with a bunch of mules, anyway? The kind who quaff bourbon for breakfast, that’s who! Struggling year after year with intransigent longears would drive anyone to drink. I gulped my laced tea and coughed from its bite.
Lou tapped her cigarette against an overfilled metal ashtray. Perhaps picking up on my disillusionment, she said, “You know, Caleb is just testing you, figuring out where you fit into his family group.”
Family. Besides my globe-trotting husband, my family consisted only of a sister and three very dear friends, all of whom lived far away. Would Caleb and I ever become a family? And what would a donkey’s family look like? So far, all I knew was that wild donkeys live semisolitary lives yet seek out and enjoy company and novel experiences. It sounded rather uncomfortably close to home.
Jack’s words pulled me from my reverie. He picked up on Lou’s main point, which I had forgotten: “Oh yeah. Donkeys and mules just love to test you.”
“Okay, so are you telling me that Caleb knows exactly what I want him to do but is thwarting my efforts on purpose?”
“Sure looks like it, sometimes.”
“But, why?”
Lou and Jack looked at each other and shrugged. Jack offered, “Because he’s a donkey.” They broke out laughing. I felt a vast sense of release from my chronic feeling of inadequacy. I joined them in a toast: “To longears!”