W here to put Gabe was our most immediate problem when we ended up at Lot no. 78 in the Enchanted Hills Mobile Home Park.
Gabe — and I say this without trace of hyperbole or hint of exaggeration — was one of the most beautiful geldings ever to bear hoof upon the earth. I see him again each time I go to a movie theater and the logo for TriStar Pictures appears on the screen — the strong white chest, the thundering legs, the wings of Pegasus spreading across the darkness, illuminating each person’s face for a moment. Gabe too was pure white, and built like he could carry the world yet still take flight. Because of his Arabian dam, Gabe had a finer nose, and his eyes were rounder, blacker globes. The pink-and-gray speckled skin of his muzzle showed his Appaloosa side, but apart from those small differences he could have been that Pegasus. The fact that his name was Gabriel never felt like coincidence, archangel of the Annunciation, bringer of new order, of mercy and redemption for those who responded to him. Our love for our Gabriel was the only point of total agreement my mother, grandmother, and I ever shared.
I will write about him many times in my eventual career, and I will once receive a dismissive note from an editor at a New York publishing house going over one of my essays, incredulous that it was possible for me to own a horse if we indeed lived in a trailer park. Oh, Tiffany-Buffy-Madison of the hunt club ponies and the show horse circuit, of the Connecticut address and the Seven Sisters education, three words made it possible: Sacrifice. Determination. Delusion.
MOM WAS ALWAYS ADEPT at securing me free or cheap horses, owing to the confidence with which she said everything. She had a Scotch-and-cigarette voice, wore black cowboy boots, and could raise her eyebrows independently of each other. She was tall, big boned, and wore her extravagant auburn hair long, and then later in a wavy cap around her face. She bore only two expressions normally, either anger or amusement, as if she were perpetually getting a big joke going over everybody else’s head.
The way I remember it, a friend of a friend in Santa Fe had this beautiful white horse she was afraid to ride; he shied, he bolted, he was too much of a handful. “My kid can ride him. She can ride almost anything,” Mom told the woman.
She exaggerated, of course. I have never been that talented a rider, but I am tenacious, thanks in no small part to Mom setting me back up on a young bay who had run away with me when I was only seven years old. I was too young to ride that horse, and that horse was too young to be ridden by anyone, so I don’t remember how the circumstance happened in the first place. But there I’d been, shaking and crying after someone grabbed the reins of the runaway bay. Mom was at my side and put her arms around me for a moment, then was telling me I was OK and to goddamn get back up there. It was scarier for me to look into the disappointment on her face than to return to the saddle, so that’s what I did.
Anyway, Mom assured the woman with the white horse that I could ride. We would give him a good home and pay her a hundred dollars when we could, as I needed a new mount right away. A gray Arabian gelding she’d procured for me — a mean son of a bitch prone to biting and kicking that she’d gotten from the estate of some doctor who’d been her “friend” — I didn’t ask questions — had died suddenly of a brain aneurism. Right away I fell for another horse, a lanky buckskin named Sunny owned by a cowboy in Santa Fe, but we hadn’t been able to come up with the five hundred dollars to buy him, so off he went to a ranch near Clovis. It was my first real heartbreak; I cried for a good two days after seeing his black tail hanging out the end of a trailer on its way south.
My fickle heart recovered the instant I saw Gabe, before I even put my foot in the stirrup. It didn’t matter that he sidestepped and tossed his head, bolted like a sidewinder and had the power to whiplash the neck of any timid rider. Whatever had made him that way, I understood. I knew that kind of anger; I was at home with it. In exchange for my understanding, he gave me his beauty when I rode him, he gave me power to move freely, and it seemed that his arched neck and even gait conferred on my family a kind of nobleness, a respectability, that was otherwise hard for a single mother, an aging grandmother, and a young girl to come by on their own.
Man’s best friend may be the dog, but for a girl such as myself, the horse is not only best friend but also protector and confidant. I rode Gabe so much, so far, that I came to believe my heartbeat was the sound of his hooves. I rode him as if we were running for our lives, until he was so tired his head hung like a dog’s, and then I would get off and walk beside him for miles into the open horizon of the New Mexico llano. I swam with him in lakes. One time I rode him in a relay race at a gymkhana and the saddle slipped at a full gallop. I was knocked out, a tangling rag doll underneath him as the herd of other riders thundered around us, but he stood stock-still, not daring to lift a hoof. He was still standing still, muscles quivering, when people reached me. Gabriel, angel of mercy.
MOM HAD ALWAYS MANAGED to pay for board at various stables and for riding lessons for me with a former rodeo queen named Kathy, who told me Gabe’s only problem was that he’d kill himself trying to please me. Mom even paid for my membership in the Santa Fe Junior Horseman’s Association, and the occasional entry into a local horse show, so that Gabe and I could run the barrels or vie for a ribbon in pole bending. Mom could pay for this only because she never bought clothes for herself, had my grandmother cut and dye her hair, manicured her own nails, said yes to every double shift and any chance at overtime, and took payouts rather than vacation days. She seemed to know instinctively which bills could be paid late or totally ignored, and she was also the kind of woman men called “saucy.” A knowing laugh, a smart retort, a dirty joke delivered with impeccable timing — these made for their own currency and could buy another week or a month of nonpayment, or sometimes get things thrown in altogether for free.
But by the time we made it to the Enchanted Hills Mobile Home Park, it seemed to me something had extinguished her ability to conjure. She had quit wearing makeup, her deep-set green eyes seeming small and no longer so catlike without the deft application of mascara and eyeliner. She had gained so much weight her polyester pants pulled across her rounded stomach and hips. Bad credit might have been the reason we arrived at Lot no. 78, but it was also a problem in finding a place to stable our Gabe, and so Mom ended up striking a deal with some guy across the road from the trailer park who had a few horses in a dirt corral with a sheet-metal lean-to for shelter and two old bathtubs for water troughs. The guy said he’d feed Gabe along with his small herd if we just supplied the hay. Deal.
I rode Gabe the few miles from the place he had been pastured to this corral as Mom dropped off some bales of alfalfa. While I hugged Gabe around the neck, she put my saddle in the station wagon. Around us, chickens scratched at the dirt. A rusting car fender and some old bald tires littered one corner of the corral.
“We’ll figure something out,” she told me. I continued to hug his white neck and felt the warmth of his breath as he nuzzled my side.
“This is only temporary. C’mon. Sam, damn it. C’mon.” Mom sounded annoyed. She always sounded annoyed.
THE NEXT PART IBLAME ON MYSELF.
I was busy with school, the weather turned rainy for a few days, I tried out for the track team and, because the coach needed “big” girls for the shot put and discus, I got in — even though I couldn’t run fast enough to save myself from a burning building if I had to.
What I’m trying to say is that two weeks went by before I went to the corral to check on Gabe. Mom always worked and Gram didn’t drive, and besides, the deal was that if I wanted a horse I had to take care of him. The guy who owned the place was feeding him, I reasoned, so Gabe could get by without his usual grain and carrots and grooming for a couple weeks. We’d all had to get by, make do; this was Gabe’s part. Besides, he’d probably even be happy for some time off from our long rides.
I got up on Saturday morning to walk the good mile it was through the trailer park, over the old highway, and down the road to the corral with Gabe’s bridle slung over my shoulder like a purse and carrots stuck in the back pocket of my jeans. When I got there, it took a moment for my brain to understand what my eyes were seeing, to even recognize my own horse.
Standing head down in a corner with his hind leg cocked was Gabe, or what had to be Gabe, but I could see the ribs on this white horse, his hide bloodied from the kicks and bites of the other horses. Tangles pulled at his mane and a piece of baling wire snarled the end of his tail.
“Gabe!” I yelled, climbing over the aluminum gate and running to him. He lifted his head for a moment then looked down, as if embarrassed, not walking toward me.
I threw my arms around him, feeling his bones, seeing the eye sockets sunken from dehydration. If any food or water had come his way in these two weeks, it had been by chance. I felt the pain of guilt like a smack to the face, which made me want to either cry or kill something. Luckily at that moment the guy who had made the arrangement with Mom came out of his grubby adobe, saving me from having to cry.
I think this is what happened: I think I turned on him the way women in my family are known to do, with shoulders back and teeth bared, my body drawn to the fullness of its five feet eight inches, a flood of the most vile Spanish words ever known to a white girl spewing from my mouth.
“¿Que estas haciendo, carbon? ¡Pinche puto! Have you looked at this horse lately? Have you, pendejo, have you?” I am pretty sure I screamed at him. He stood with his hands on the hips of his dirty jeans, not wearing a belt, his face red but his shoulders shrugging.
“Don’t be talking to me like that!” I vaguely remember a scruff of gray beard and mustache hiding what must have been surprise on his face. “Your momma don’t pay me nothing. I was doing her a favor — ”
“Oh, just callate, you stupid asshole.” Respect for my elders was never a concept well taught to me. I slipped Gabe’s bridle over his head and started to lead him from the corral, my look daring the guy to say anything else.
He shook his head and turned away.
GRAM PUT HER HAND ON THE SPLINTERY RAILING of the porch as if to steady herself. “Well, Christ Almighty.” She looked back over her shoulder and yelled to the door. “Deanne! Come see this! Dee! For god’s sake!”
I’d put a halter on Gabe and had looped the lead rope through the chain link in front of the trailer, crying now as I picked up the brushes from the grooming box I’d pulled from the shed.
Gram reached out to run her hand down the length of Gabe’s head, murmuring there, boy, easy, boy, as she did. She bent and kissed his muzzle, leaving a red bow from her lipstick in the center between his nostrils. She knew how to touch a horse, her fingers expert and reassuring. Growing up on Yankee Bush in rural Pennsylvania, she had never known life without horses. The way she told it, she was riding a pony named Buster as soon as she could walk, and then later her grandfather’s saddlebred, Belle. As an adult she would have Salty and Becky and Captain, an iron-mouthed Morgan purchased for my grandfather that he never could ride successfully. Gram never rode now; in fact, I hadn’t ever seen her on a horse except in the old black-and-white photos stashed in the cedar chest, but I never doubted she was a horsewoman.
“Sammy, go get some carrots from the fridge, and get my shampoo and conditioner from under the vanity.” She didn’t take her eyes off Gabe as she spoke.
I didn’t say anything as I headed into the trailer, passing my mom in the kitchen as I went to the bathroom to find the Breck shampoo and conditioner Gram always used. I could hear the loud bellow of Mom’s voice outside and Gram’s sharp nattering that followed, the two going on like that for some minutes. I didn’t need to hear the words, because I knew the tone, so I stayed in the bathroom and thought about what a bad person I had been to let Gabe suffer. Gabe, the only totally good thing I had ever known. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and hit my thighs with my fists, but no matter how hard I hit I could not hurt myself the way I thought I deserved.
I seem to remember hearing Mom on the phone after a time, her voice shaken slightly, absent the usual resonant swagger. I think she was talking to Fred, our farrier and a sheriff ’s deputy. I think she said, “I need your help.”
By the time the sun was leaving a terra-cotta trail across the horizon, Fred and his brother, and maybe a few other off-duty deputies, had strung some barbed wire across the open section in the otherwise fenced couple acres next to the trailer park. Mom had found the land’s owner, managed to talk him into leasing the pasture, and prevailed on Fred’s good nature to spend his one day off putting in a fence. He promised to come back the next weekend and put up a loafing shed for some hay and shelter against the elements, and he did. I think the men worked for beer, but I don’t know about the money for the pasture, where Mom came up with it. Those things never occurred to me then. I just wanted life to work, and when it did I didn’t ask questions.
On the pavement outside the trailer, Gram and I had bathed Gabe with her Breck so that his coat looked almost as silvery and lustrous as usual. Gram put iodine on the cuts, and I put Vaseline on the outside of his hooves — a useless gesture for a horse in pasture, but I wanted him to feel my care as I held each hoof in my hand and massaged the petroleum into it.
For a water trough, we scrubbed out an empty garbage can and filled it with a garden hose we ran across the pavement and into the pasture. I was happy when at last he was in the pasture and he ambled up to the can, drinking long and deep from it. I stood by the bay window and watched him until dusk bled out into night.
OF ALL THE YEARS WE SPENT TOGETHER, Gabe and I, the images of that day play back as if they were happening now. Maybe it’s because the day signaled the first in a series of times I would not be able to protect he who had protected me.
Eventually I was lucky enough to get out of the trailer park, first as an exchange student and then to college. Gabe, well over twenty years old by then, was turned out to pasture on a nearby horse farm, acres of lush grass. An idyllic retirement.
After a while, though, money got tight — again — and we fell behind in the board for his care. I didn’t find this out until one Easter when I went back to the Enchanted Hills, Lot no. 78, on a break from school. I was ferreting around in the shed, looking for Gabe’s halter, when my Gram asked me what the hell I was doing out there.
“I thought I’d go over to that farm and see if I can’t catch the old guy in the pasture. Maybe take him out bareback,” I told her.
And then I saw the look on her face, the pinched corners around her mouth. “What?” I said. “What?”
“Oh, Sammy,” and I knew by her calling me by my childhood name that she meant to deliver bad news.
The story she told was that she had sold Gabe to a children’s summer camp to pay off the back board. I asked her the name of the place; she said she’d have to look up the papers, and the papers were buried away in the cedar chest. And I shed a few tears at that, but then imagined happy children’s faces as they sat on what was now his swayback and bounced at his choppy trot. I imagined his big hay belly growing fatter, his mane ever shaggier.
But then a few days later I woke up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, my chest so tight I couldn’t gulp enough air. There were no children’s camps around here. And even if they’d shipped him somewhere else, what kind of a camp would take an ancient, swaybacked gelding? Gram, a horsewoman, would know only one kind of horse buyer would be interested in such a prospect, and that was the feed-lot buyer, headed for the slaughterhouses in Texas.
No.
Nonononono.
Then, another possibility occurred to me. Maybe Gabe had merely died, as old horses will, and Gram, not wanting to upset me, made up a story — truth never having much currency in our home as it was.
The only way to know for sure would be to go to the farm and ask. Once Gram committed to a story, she was not one to change it. So, I made a plan to go there the next morning.
Except, I didn’t.
Either way, I knew how powerless I was. I was a college student lucky to make my tuition every semester. Of the three possible fates for my Gabriel, one offered me comfort, another sadness but acceptance, and the final one more anguish than I could possibly deal with. And so I took the path of not knowing, which, as the years have gone by, has meant a kind of purgatory, the image of a white horse forever invoking my lost Gabriel, angel of mercy.