By T W Ladd
Part whatever we’re up to now. 11/12/20

The Horse You Rode In On

            My brother worked for Old Man Sunday for almost a year. He went up the road a quarter of a mile and took care of the sheep. There was also a cow. Gladys. And there were four ponies. Saving up his dollar a day, my brother’s goal kept changing. He thought of buying his own TV. Or maybe a minibike. I think it was my dad’s suggestion that he consider a horse. Somehow, I must have missed that conversation. I don’t remember how it came about that he was going to save up and buy a horse. It’s likely I just didn’t think it would happen for a while. But Bret’s pile of George Washingtons kept getting thicker. Months later he had a hundred and fifty one-dollar bills. Dad said we were ready to start shopping. He had talked to a guy who knew a fellow.

            I thought that if we were going to buy a horse that I wanted in on it. So I kicked in my whole piggy bank – all twelve dollars of it. Bret thanked me. It may have been his politest moment in his life. Then he said that twelve dollars would make me the owner of at least the tail.

            My brother was ten. I was seven. Together we came up with half of the price of our Appaloosa mare. Dad paid for the other half. He also paid for the fence. We had to help with that. We boarded Pepper in Old Man Sunday’s barn that winter, for a small fee. I still remember the first time Bret was bucked off. He went flying over the horse’s head and landed face first in a snowdrift.

            And that was how I got hooked on horses.

            Over the next eighteen months or so we stretched a lot of fence, barbed wire, on our twelve acres. A lot of fence from my perspective as a kid. It’s a pretty neat thing to watch the fencing cable get pulled tight while someone is cranking the come-along – not me. I wasn’t strong enough or it was considered unsafe for me to do that first year.

            Bret and I twisted on a lot of the wire pieces that hold the fence to the post. And we tied a lot of slips of white rag to the fence – this was so Pepper would see the fence. Horses have to get used to seeing some things. This was one of the things Dad had read about in one of his horse magazines or books. He did a fair bit of reading that year about caring for a horse. He took the responsibility of training a horse very seriously. It was all a new adventure for him, too. He had grown up in the city and never had any experiences of horse riding. But he had worked with training bird dogs to hunt, and I’m sure that was what convinced him it wouldn’t be impossible for him to break a horse to saddle and bridle.

            And then Old Man Sunday succumbed to his age and emphysema. All the property and livestock would be auctioned off. I wanted one of the ponies – red-brown and white pinto. He would let me sit on him while Bret fed the sheep and other animals. I’d gotten to like the sweet boy.

            There were four of them and they were all severely neglected – at first I had no idea just how severe. What did I know? I was just a kid and these were really the first horses I’d ever seen.

Nothing had been done with their hooves in it don’t know how long. It was completely criminal and deeply cruel – it’s the kind of thing that makes you start to favor men being horsewhipped. The winter I was nine, I learned about a foundered horse, and about severely damaged hooves.

            The pony’s name was Frisky. That’s what Old Man Sunday had told me. We all thought this was a horrible name for a pony. I knew then that it was a word that got laughs on Happy Days. Even though it suggested cat food, we didn’t think it was right to change his name. I have no idea why. This probably owes something to my dad’s time training dogs. You just don’t change a dog’s name. If that wasn’t the reason, then I really can’t explain this mystery. It strikes me as useful to reflect on the problems we can’t resolve in our own autobiographies. The more we meditate on some questions, the less satisfying any possible answer becomes. Hadn’t I named about a dozen cats, came up with band names, superhero names, spaceship names, names for secret clubs and clandestine societies? But I couldn’t even come up with a nickname for my pony?

            Does that reveal something about me? Should I see that as an indictment against my character? Maybe I should. Be that as it may, I refuse to use the name Frisky any further. Although I never changed his name while he lived, I’m changing his name now. The other name just seems too insulting. From here on, I’ll refer to him as Ricky and Good Ole Rick.

            Part of me has to wonder, Was I guilty of any crime against this pinto pony? Maybe it haunts me that begging my dad to buy the pony was my own wicked cruelty. Even though Ricky’s hooves were not as bad as the other three ponies, they were more curved than elves’ shoes. They suggested sleigh runners. The pony’s front ankles were badly displaced. Instead of walking on his “toe,” he was walking on what would be for us the back of the wrist. The rear hooves were in better shape. But the ferrier examined Ricky and said the case wasn’t completely hopeless. He didn’t sound very convincing.

            Yay! I had my pony!

            But –

Did I ever stop to think that maybe the horse was in too much pain? My dad did. I didn’t trust his opinion. The other three ponies had been sold to the slaughterhouse for dogfood and glue. No one was going to put Ricky down!

            Even if that was better for him.

            The digit that a horse puts its weight on – the tip of it – is called the coffin bone. Sometimes with founder the coffin bone will pierce through the bottom of the hoof. That hadn’t happened yet with Ricky. But his coffin bone was rotated, the tip upward. This stretches the tendon at the back of the hoof. There is another problem with the coffin being rotated. It causes inflammation in the laminar tissue. Eventually, the blood flow to the laminae can be cut off. This will create other problems and, of course, more pain for the animal. The coffin bone itself can shrink – gets its blood from the laminae. I’m not sure that was what happened to Ricky. The front of his hooves was not wrinkled and cracking like I’ve seen in many cases. But his weight was always placed farther back on the heel than it should have been. My dad worked very hard with the farrier to remedy the problem but it never resolved. The back hooves returned to normal, but the front never did.

            He lived for another nine years. He should have been shod. That may have corrected the problem almost totally. I’ve talked to vets since then. I’ve obsessed over it. Agonized. . .

            That year, the same year I was in Cub Scouts, the year before band, from the end of 1979, I spent a lot of time with my pony. I became very accustomed to using the curry comb, so much I had dreams of combing out horses. My dad took care of the hoof trimming after he learned how from the farrier, but I was supposed to do the daily cleaning of the hooves with a pick. I also gave Ricky his daily dose of minerals the vet had recommended. You scooped the powder into a pail with a little oats and molasses. Ricky loved the stuff. Actually, the daily treat was how I got the pony to agree to be tied up so I could pull up a hoof at a time and work on it, runt that I was.

            Ricky and Pepper got to be good friends. You could tell they bonded. There was no riding Ricky away from Pepper. I could ride him and follow Brent on Pepper, but he absolutely refused to venture off on his own.

            And I did ride him. If Pepper (and sometimes neighbor kids on horses) wanted to gallop and Brent gave her the OK, Ricky would run his heart out to keep up with them.

            My dad made us ride as much as we could through the fields for the sake of Ricky being footsore. Our gravel roads were mainly clay but there was enough gravel on the cement-hard clay to cause problems for the pony. And there was a good route we liked to take through the woods and a gravel pit – the road there was very sandy, part of it was even like a dune.
            I rode a lot the two summers when I was ten and eleven. I didn’t have a saddle. I can’t imagine letting my boys when they were nine or ten bounce around bareback on a trotting pony! But I did it countless hours. I fell off numerous times without too much injury. I recall one time in particular when I flew off and landed on my back in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace.

            In the late summer of 1981, just before school started, just before we started going to the Christian school (student body, under sixty kids), I fell off Ricky. It was almost exactly half way through our ride. We liked to take the horses down this huge hill – we’d been down it a number of times. It would have made a great toboggan run, it was that long and steep. We were nuts. And it was all loose, fine, sand – the kind of thing guys like to go up with their motorcycles. My brother and the two boys we were riding with got ahead of me. Thinking back on it, I can’t figure out how I ever managed to stay on that pony with no saddle. The others had saddles. I squeezed with my legs and held onto the main for dear life. Down a sixty-foot drop. If Ricky had put his head down I would have fallen under him. Somehow, I made all the way to the bottom every time – including the last time I pulled it off.

            But then I fell at the bottom of the hill. Just before it flattened out, Ricky took off at a fast trot. But when he hit the hard clay, he made a hard right. He zigged, I zagged. I fell forward and the palm of my left hand hit the hard ground. I broke the wrist in one place and fractured it bade on the opposite wrist bone. I think the radius had the break and the ulna had the fracture. However, it was, it was the worst pain I’d ever experienced – so far as I could remember. And I’ve never felt anything that bad since. I thought I was going to throw up. Everything went white. I nearly passed out but never did. I definitely had to sit down. I didn’t ride Ricky home. We got over to our friend Matt’s house – one of the boys we were riding with – and called my dad. Brent led Ricky home. I went in the truck. He didn’t think it was broken though. Or he didn’t want to believe it was broken. He’d broken bones before and knew that a cast is no fun. He knew I was in pain. After all, he was the one who so many times had said sprains could be as painful as a broken bone.

            We waited the weekend for the swelling to go down – even if I needed a cast, Dad said, we’d have to wait for the swelling to go down. The next Monday we went to the hospital and got X-rays. Sure enough, a clear break.

            Ha! I was getting a cast! People could sign it! (I’m not sure why that was important.) I was vindicated. My brother couldn’t say I was being a baby, now. I don’t remember if he had said anything like that, but I’d lived adventurously. I’d broken bones, brother!  

            I bring up the hours I spent with my pony to underscore a point: in 1979 and 80, I wasn’t a fanatical believer. I was a lot more like one of those kids in an After School Special than I care to admit.

            My daily thoughts did not turn to God or the Devil. I certainly had never heard of Roe v. Wade. I’d heard of Jimmy Carter’s “windfall profits.” They made me think of windmills. I thought about the hostages in Iran more than church – my whole class at school had discussions about the hostages. Who doesn’t remember the failed rescue attempt and the helicopter that crashed into the supply plane? That was probably the first time I heard and remember the word “abort.”

I had not heard that Jesus was coming back to earth, but I knew Skylab was going to fall ahead of schedule. My mom was the elementary librarian at the public school, even though she had no college education. She was the one who told me about an art contest for kids. You had to make a picture of the Voyager 1 satellite (I didn’t win). I still remember seeing the pictures it sent back of Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot and then later Saturn’s rings. My dad called me into the room when the Jupiter images came on TV. He kept commenting on what a marvel it was that the images were beamed back to Earth from Jupiter, which is about 500 million miles away.

“The Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun!” I chirped. I learned that fact in third grade and never forgot it.

We saw these fabulous images of Jupiter early in 1979. About nine months later we got even more stunning shots of Saturn, its many moons and mesmerizing rings. Dad and I tuned in for that too. I don’t remember my brother being very interested but I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I was imaging going there. I didn’t learn that Jupiter’s gravity was 8 times that of Earth until I was in fifth grade, so in my mind I was in my rocket and on my way to explore the Red Spot, buddy!

(Yes, I realize that’s incorrect about Jupiter’s gravity – the gravity there is only about 2.5 times Earth’s, but there’s still no surface to stand on with gas giants. But somehow, I got the idea that Jupiter’s gravity was eight times stronger than Earth’s when I was in Mrs. Brennenstuhl’s class. It was not her fault. Another kid and I were looking at an encyclopedia.)