Horse Sense

I’d never ridden a horse before, but I didn’t think that an obstacle to doing so on this particular day. The weather, which was treacherously close to falling below sixty degrees, even though it was June, just a day earlier, had finally begun acting right, and it was a robust seventy-five by 10[sc]am[sc]. I awoke early and came downstairs to my host’s huge kitchen. She was already up and drinking a Bloody Mary to go along with the cigarette, and she smiled broadly. “Ready to ride some horses?” “Born ready,” I answered with my usual bluster and she and Katherine laughed and we agreed that we should all have either some coffee or some hair of the dog that had attacked us viciously last night, as Margaret was doing with her Bloody Mary. Katherine and I had come up the previous day from the city for the conference which was being chaired by Margaret and were being put up at Margaret’s house, a massive converted and modernized farmhouse attached to a ranch where Margaret’s four horses were being kept. We were in Canton, New York, where one had to fly into an airport on something like a station wagon with wings, which was so close to the Canadian border that it flew both flags. I opted for coffee.

After coffee I returned upstairs to put on jeans and shoes. I opted to remain shirtless. I was never one much for clothes and by the time we ambled on out to the barn it was approaching eighty degrees and I was basking in the heat. I craved the heat on my skin, still do. It is perhaps what I miss most about Trinidad, about home.

The groom was a sixty-year-old man named Paul who was a shade over six feet and 150lbs. He was wiry and his arms seemed criss-crossed with cables of muscle. Several teeth were missing, but there was no mistaking his authority out there in the barn, his easy confidence with the animals. He was a congenial man, who spent much of his younger years in Kentucky in the horse-racing industry. An aspiring jockey in his youth, he grew too tall and a little too heavy to make it on the pro-circuit, but he loved the horses and stayed around them his whole life. He walked with a slight limp, which he had explained the night before was from an injury many years before, trying to break a horse, but he moved so easily with the faulty gait, you could imagine he’d been born with it.

In one of the stalls was a massive young stallion. Its withers were well over my head, and its entire bearing was haughty. Of all the horses, it was the one that seemed least respectful of Paul. It wasn’t disrespectful exactly, but clearly it felt itself on equal footing with Paul. My breath caught in my stomach when I saw it and I pointed. “Do I get to ride that one?” Everyone fell out laughing. “That horse will kill you as easy as it’ll look at you,” said Paul, “he aint broken yet and it’ll be a minute before we kin even git a saddle on ‘im. Besides, if you aint never rode befo, I suggest we put you on this old mare right here. She’s easy and she knows how to handle an inexperienced rider.” I laughed at myself and discarded my cowboy fantasies for the day. “No doubt,” I said, “sounds like a good idea.” The old mare was much smaller than Black Beauty, but an impressive sized animal nonetheless. I made up my mind to develop good rapport with her. Margaret and Katherine were both riders, and comfortable on all sorts of horses. They were designated the two young, frisky white Arabians. They were beautiful animals. They looked fast.

Paul taught me how to saddle up the horse. I talked to her, fed her an apple, and in the few minutes before I draped the blanket over her back, nothing felt...