Gargantuan (6 page)

I was coming around the bend on Little Egypt Road when I saw it. A beautiful fenced-in field and, off in the distance, a dozen or so horses. It’s not like I’d never seen a field of horses before. Oklahoma was full of horses. But something about this field seemed magical. I wanted to go in.

I pulled the car up to the gate, got out, opened the gate, and drove on in. The horses were quite a ways off. I drove slowly so as
not to alarm them. I reached a grouping of huge gnarled trees and turned the engine off. I just sat there, staring ahead at that bunch of horses. After a few minutes, one of the horses, a big white one, walked over toward my car. I was slightly worried, like maybe I was offending the big beast. I stared out my window. The horse came closer and closer until finally he had his face pressed against the car window. I didn’t know how well he could see me, what with his eyes on the side of his head like that, but I could sure see him. As I sat admiring the horse’s big white face, he started leaning his massive chest into the car. The horse had to be a thousand pounds and I could feel the car rocking.

I was worried the horse was gonna get mad and really ram the car so I slowly rolled my car window down and tentatively patted his long white nose. This calmed him down some.

Eventually, I opened the car door and the horse backed away, letting me out. I patted him all over his body. He didn’t seem to mind. I felt more peaceful than I had since losing Dingo.

PRETTY SOON
I found myself going out to the horse pasture every day to spend time with that little gang of half-wild horses. I was working less and less. I wasn’t even eating or sleeping much. Just kept going to that pasture. One day, I was out there, sitting by the gnarled trees and watching the horses when this guy came up to me out of nowhere. He was an older guy wearing coveralls and his skin and hair were so yellow he seemed to match the yellow pasture he’d sprung from like some magical creature.

“You got business here, son?” he asked me, walking slowly around me.

“No, sir, just enjoying the horses,” I said.

The yellow-looking man grunted.

“I could use you,” he said then, after eyeing me from head to toe.

“Oh?” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of this.

“I seen you out here, talking to my horses day in day out. I got twenty more of ’em back about three miles down Little Egypt
Road. You come with me I’ll show you what’s what with the equine arts.”

I didn’t know what to think. It was the strangest offer I’d ever gotten.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Come on, son, get up off your moneymaker,” the old guy said. He was smiling at me, showing pointy teeth. His yellow eyes seemed to twinkle, which was odd because I’d never thought of yellow as the kind of color that could twinkle.

“That’s nice of you, sir,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” the guy said, bursting into a laugh that sounded like chain saws on dead trees.

“That there’s yours, right?” He motioned at the Chevy.

“Yes, sir.”

“You been driving into my pasture for three months. I seen ya,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Let’s go. You drive us back over to my barn.”

It was a little worrisome to think the guy had been watching me all this time and I wondered how he’d gotten over here in the first place if his barn was miles away. Plus, I’d never heard of any guy having twenty horses down on Little Egypt Road, so it all seemed a little strange. It’s not like I had anything better to do than see what would happen though.

We got into the Chevy and he was quiet now as I pulled out of the pasture and back onto the road, going where he told me.

A few miles down, we came to a dirt road with a gate and the guy got out and opened it. I drove in, waited for him to get back in, and then drove ahead.

The road was pitted and muddy and badly in need of work, but flanking it were beautiful pastures full of horses. Eventually, we came to a big red barn. The guy looked proud as we got out of the Chevy. He made a sweeping arm gesture, showing me what was his. The sky was a tender blue as it swept down over the strange man’s land.

We went into the barn that reeked of horse sweat and manure
and creosote. It smelled like heaven. There were horses standing in big wooden stalls. Some had their long noses poking out, others had their butts to us and didn’t look up from their hay.

“So,” the yellow guy said, pausing in front of one of the stalls, “I had a fella quit just yesterday and I need you.”

“Yeah?” I said, staring past him at the red horse in the stall nearest us.

“You start off mucking out stalls and we’ll take it from there. You can call me Sandman, by the way.”

“I’m Ben.”

“You got a last name, Ben?”

“Nester,” I said.

“I got a horse named Nester,” Sandman said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yup,” the guy said.

And that was it. He put me to work. Showed me how to muck the stalls out. Some of them, I had to change all the bedding, take out all the straw, and then put down a layer of lime and fresh straw. It took forever. I did about fifteen stalls and my back started aching but I didn’t mind. It was good pain.

Sandman had gone off somewhere and it was just me and the horses and the barn with all those good smells in it. It was a little eerie how there was no one around. I had no idea what Sandman did with all these horses or how many other people he had working for him but I didn’t see anyone else all day long.

Once it started getting dark out, Sandman came back and told me I was going to help him bring some of the horses in from outside. I’d never actually had much to do with horses other than hanging out and talking to the ones in the pasture but I wanted to learn. Out in the field, Sandman showed me how to stand at the horse’s left side, get the horse to put his nose through the halter, and then slip it over the ears, fasten it, and lead the horse forward. I had trouble with one little horse, a baby, only a year old. I’d get close to him and he’d prick his ears forward and his eyes would get bright but then, the moment I tried slipping the halter on, he’d bolt and
throw a little buck and make a squealing sound. Eventually, Sandman helped me by getting on the other side of the yearling so we had him boxed in, and I finally got a halter on him. As I led him though, he kept trying to take a nip at my arm.

“That one’s gonna race,” Sandman told me once we were back inside the barn.

“Oh yeah?” I’d put the little guy in his stall and he’d immediately relieved himself all over his clean straw.

“Yup. I got a couple trainers coming by tomorrow have a look at him. Kind of spirit he’s got, I bet he makes it. Might even make it to one of the big tracks, win some real money. His mama won a stakes race at Aqueduct in New York once,” Sandman said, looking thoughtful.

I didn’t really know what he was talking about that day but I learned pretty quickly.

Sandman had two other people working for him. A guy named James who was around forty and hunched over and kind of yellow, too, and a girl, Kathy Kitterman, a small but muscular girl, who was in her early twenties like me. Between those two and Sandman, I had a whole new world of knowledge within a week. I knew all about the different kinds of brushes and leg bandages and liniments. I knew how to muck out a stall and clean out feed tubs and I was beginning to understand about equine nutrition. I started getting a good feeling. I could sense that my mother was looking down from the ether and approving of what I was doing. I thought of my mother a lot on the day when one of Sandman’s mares got sold and put on a van headed to Versailles, Kentucky. My mother had been born in Versailles. I’d never been there and I felt like I should go because I know, in her last days, she was missing it badly and I was part of why she never made it back. My mother had been a quiet girl till she hit seventeen and went a little wild. She got pregnant by a guy who took off. Her parents kicked her out and she hitchhiked around for a while and ended up in Oklahoma. Her older brother, Edgar, eventually came and lived with her and helped her out, putting food on the table when she got so pregnant she couldn’t waitress anymore. Then
she had me. When I was fourteen, she got cancer and started wasting away. As she lay dying, she kept insisting that I had to make sure to get to Versailles one day. I told her I’d do my best. In turn, she hung on as long as she could. The pain from the cancer made her eyes huge and black. When she died, I thought I would die too. I felt so lost. After a few days though, I toughened up. I didn’t let anything get inside me. I just moved forward. Until now. With these horses, I finally felt like I’d found something and I was pretty sure my mother would be pleased for me.

ABOUT TEN DAYS
into working for Sandman, Kathy got sick and couldn’t come in. Sandman said it was time I got on a horse, he needed a bunch ridden and James couldn’t do it all and Sandman didn’t ride anymore, his bones were too brittle.

They started me off on Bethany, an old chestnut quarter horse mare that Sandman had bought cheap somewhere and hoped to sell as a starter horse to someone just learning to ride. Bethany was big and gentle and lazy and didn’t care at all that I didn’t know what I was doing up there. No matter what kind of signals I attempted to give her, all she did was walk around slowly, with her head down low. Once in a while, she’d stop and graze a little before eventually deigning to move forward again. I talked to her some while I was up there and she flicked her ears around a little, listening to the sound of my voice, deciding what she thought of me. I guess the verdict was good. She took care of me and made me feel safe. Within a few weeks, I was riding a lot. I fell off every other day and got knocked unconscious once but I didn’t mind. When I wasn’t riding I was busy mucking out stalls as well as feeding and grooming. I started feeling at ease. A lot of things that had bothered me for years started slipping away. All I cared about were those horses. I thought less and less about my mother. For a long time, I had carried her with me every day. I guess I felt like not having her in my head would be killing her all over again. Now though, with all the horses to think about, my mother went somewhere else.

I’d developed a strong bond with Darwin, the yearling, the one Sandman had been trying to sell off to some racing people. No one had bought him because he was still too wild, and by that age, if a horse was going to race, he needed to know how to get tacked up and handled a lot. And Darwin was a demonseed. Sandman put me in charge of him. I had to get him manageable and then Kathy would start riding him.

I spent hours each day teaching the little guy basics like how to pick his feet up so I could get in there and clean them out—and eventually the farrier could put shoes on him—and pretty soon I got him to take a bit and to stand somewhat still as I put a little saddle on him and tightened the girth.

I started sleeping on some blankets outside Darwin’s stall at night. Mostly because I just didn’t have any reason to go home. I lived in my uncle Edgar’s house even though I’d never felt at home there. Edgar had up and moved a few years after my mother’s death, leaving me to fend for myself. He hadn’t known what to do with the house so he’d just let me stay in it while he’d gone home to Kentucky. Now, though, Edgar had called the real estate lady in town and had put the house up for sale. There were people tromping through it at the oddest times. I didn’t feel safe in there. I had gone and gathered some of my clothes and a sleeping bag and I kept these at Sandman’s stable and pretty soon, that was it, I never left.

Sandman knew, I guess, but never chose to address the situation. I availed myself of the hoses in the grooming stall sometimes when I got to stinking. It was fine. There was warm water. And I’d heard how horse shampoo was good for human hair and this proved to be true.

Days turned to weeks turned to months. Kathy was riding Darwin now and we all realized Sandman had been right. The little guy wanted to race. I’d get on Murmur, a big brown gelding that had raced until he was six but now had James working with him trying to turn him into an eventing horse. We’d put Murmur on the makeshift half-mile track Sandman had in one of the fields and he still had the instinct to go. I wasn’t by any means an experienced
rider and I’d never yet been allowed on a real racetrack but I knew enough to balance and keep out of Murmur’s way and let him stretch out. And Darwin learned to run his little heart out with Kathy in the irons, poised with her rear end in the air, letting the little colt pull ahead of Murmur, giving him a taste for winning.

And then the day came when one of the trainers Sandman knew came by to have a look at Darwin. The guy was impressed. Gave Sandman five thousand cash on the spot. I had to load the little guy into the trailer. He behaved perfectly. My heart was breaking.

Somehow, it was worse even than when Dingo had died. I tried to get interested in some of the other horses. I liked a lot of them fine but I didn’t have the same kind of bond that I had with the little colt. I was sad but my life at Sandman’s was good. I never had to think too much or dwell on anything. At night, I slept in Darwin’s empty stall. It was fine.

What sent me over the edge was when I heard about what happened to Bethany, the chestnut mare who’d been the first horse I’d gotten on.

One night, Sandman came and found me in my stall.

“Ben, we got a problem,” he said, and I thought he was going to finally address my sleeping in the barn, like maybe he did actually mind it.

“What’s that, sir?” I said, because I still called him sir, particularly when I thought I was on the wrong side of him.

“That couple I sold Bethany to? The ones said the woman was gonna take up riding and they needed a nice quiet backyard kind of horse?”

“Yeah?”

“They ain’t treating her so good. I happened to be passing by there this morning and I stopped in to check on her. The folks weren’t home so I went around back to their little two-stall barn to see what’s what. What I found was not good. Bethany was inside there with no light, standing knee-high in filthy, soaked straw and she had sores on her back. Weren’t no water in her bucket and when I turned the light on she seemed like she was blinded, like they
haven’t let her into the light of day. Plus, mare musta lost a couple hundred pounds in the five weeks since she left here. I got sick to my stomach to see it.”