Horse girl stories

I bought him during a goat show at a southern Ohio fair for $500. I was 16 years old. Rather than watching the contestants position their goat’s legs on boxes and gesture proudly toward the udder I was walking along the nearly empty aisles of the horse barn. I should have been more alarmed probably, looking back, at the middle age man who approached me in the dimness. Outside a steady rain fell. Moms with the little brothers and sisters of showman were scurrying between barns with jackets umbrelled above their heads. I stopped my pacing.             

 “You like horses, huh?” 

He jeered at me. 

*

The ground beneath me melted into one wave of thundering gold as we careened through a ripe wheat field at daybreak toward the cover of the woods. The oaks were my ancestors. They were here hundreds of years before me, and will stand hundreds of years after. They opened their arms to us like grandma on her porch stoop and the steady galloping drum below me slowed as we skipped into the break at the tree line. I patted his neck, ruffled his white and black mane with my fingers. “Good boy,” I drawled out to him. He panted, shaking his head. My thighs, wrapped tightly around his sides, expanded below me as he took a deep breath. The sun filtered through the treetops scattering jagged shadows around the forest floor. The grass was midsummer full grown and wild with purple white flowers and the shoots of baby acorn trees budding. I flicked his reigns and we trotted along the path. 

Two years ago he was a year old gelding and barely halter broke. He was fresh off a Colorado horse ranch. Part thoroughbred and part paint. His coat was a pallet blending brown black and tan on an all white canvas. His eyes were bright blue. He’d been bred for racing but the owner didn’t like his color pattern and didn’t want him.

There was plenty of space in the barn at home, but no stall for him. So my mom and brother helped me build one. It was a basic pen with 2x4’s and a hinge gate that swung. Once it was finished I withdrew money from the savings I’d built up showing and selling steers at auction. I borrowed one of the farm trailers, and drove 94 miles in my grandad’s 1971 Chevy pulling the gooseneck to pick him up. “He doesn’t have a name,” the now previous owner told me from the other side of my driver’s window as I prepared to haul him away.

I contemplated what to call him the whole drive back. By the time I turned into the farm drive to unload him I’d settled on the name Phoenix because he reminded me of the Southwest and Apaches. Once I tame him, I thought, I’m braiding feathers into his mane. 

My dad met me at the barn where I was cautiously coaxing him from the trailer. “That the horse you bought?” He looked skeptically at the long legged wild eyes that Phoenix was hurling at me. I repositioned my grip on the rope that was fastened to his halter from between the slats of the trailer.

”Yep.”

I tried to keep how nervous I was from my voice. Dad watched me struggle a few more minutes before shaking his head, laughing. “Don’t kill yourself” he said over his shoulder on his way back across the gravel driveway to the garage.

I gave Phoenix a week to adjust to the barn before we started training. Already in the barn I had an old quarter horse we called Tuff, and Princess, the pony my parents bought me for my 8th birthday. They lived in stalls on either side of him. On the other side of the barn the fair steers my brother and I would show and sell in a few months were penned. My brother had two Pygmy goats, Lily and Daisy, that roamed freely, and any number of barn cats and mice were tangled up in straw piles and bails we’d stacked just a few weeks ago in the loft above the stalls. The smell of manure and wheat were embedded into the tree trunk beams that ran the length of the ceiling. They shed flakes into the air filtering it with a character all its own. 

I never step into the barn and smell the air of it without feeling sixteen again. 

“He’s not rideable” the goat show man in the horse barn had told me. 

“I’ll break him,” I said. 

He smirked at all one hundred pounds of me. 

“If you say so” he replied. 

First I use empty feed sacks to gently brush along his flanks during his evening feed after an afternoon loose in the pasture. Unlatching the pen hook I cautiously step in after tying off his halter to the post. He tolerates me. Like a lion might tolerate a cub. I start by rubbing his neck with a soft brush. He pauses his chewing and stares back at me using only his eyes to watch me. I pause, waiting while he decides whether he is going to tornado hurl me into the next county or allow me to continue. With a sigh he buries his face back in his bowl of oats and lets me continue. 

Next, I take the feed sack and rustle it against itself. This will accustom him to noise and make him less inclined to spook during rides. He pauses again, then lifts his head. In an immediate jerk he pulls against his tied off halter and snorts. “Woah, woah buddy,” I gently pat his side. He shakes his head and stomps a few times but resumes eating. It’s a whole week before I’m brave enough to actually touch him with the feed sack.

When I brush the sack against his hind quarters he whinnies loudly and jumps to the front of the stall, pacing his front legs, and skittering his body alongside the wall. The post he’s tied to shakes from the weight heaved against it. His eyes are furiously afraid of what I’ve just done. “Whoa bud, it’s okay,” I make my voice soft and low, trying to calm him.

The first time I ride him is a little more than a year later. I thought I was going to die. He was more powerful than any horse I’d ever ridden and taller, measuring a full seventeen hands when he was only two years old. I didn’t have a saddle to break a horse in on. I’d only ever ridden in show saddles on the backs of fully trained horses. 

The week of our first ride I take a trip East on route 303 to Valley City tack and buy a second hand western, leather saddle. While there I purchase a new girth for it and a pair of worn leather boots. 

Back at the barn I take an old coarse rag and a jar of leather conditioner to buff out some of the scratches in the saddle. While conditioning I realize one of the hobble straps looks a little worn. I untie it from the stirrup to examine it. After yanking on it and deciding it will hold I condition it and tie it firmly back in place.

I saddle him in his pen like we’ve practiced before leading him out of the barn and toward the back field. He chomps on the bit of his bridle and whinnies back to Princess who is still confined behind the barn pasture gate. She’s pacing nervously. Over the last year the pair has grown inseparable. She whinnies in return and he prances beside me. I pat his neck. 

Turning him back toward the barn he shimmies happily beside me.

 “The barn pasture it is,” I tell him.

 A few moments later I’m on his back. We’ve practiced this dozens of times but only with him tied in his stall. Then tied to the pasture fence with me just sitting in the saddle patting his neck and mane. The saddle beneath me feels slick from the conditioner and I wish I hadn’t treated it just before our ride. I slide my boots deeper into the stirrups and grip him with my knees.

 “Hyup.” 

I flick his reins and give him a gentle nudge with my heels. He gallops forward and springs out from beneath the lean-to attached to the barn. 

The first hundred steps are shaky. I’m nervous. He can tell. But, soon the ground beneath us melts into an ocean of grass and dirt. His stride falls into a natural cadence and he picks up speed. The air is bright and warm as we sail past fence posts. 

He jerks to a halt at the back end of the pasture. I’m relieved we’ve stopped. For a moment I thought he might jump it. As we turn back towards the barn I see a small white blur zip past us. Princess has galumphed to our side and positions herself in front of us. Phoenix swings his head, and nips at her back. I swear on all that is Holy that pony swung her head back to smile at me before beginning a series of bucks that would be my downfall. 

She jogs a few steps ahead and kicks her back legs up at him, nearly clipping his chin. He neighs loudly at her, snorting angrily. She whinnies and jogs ahead once more. He quickens his pace and I rock a little in the saddle. She rears her back legs again and he bucks up on his in response. I stand in the stirrups leaning forward to counter the balance and after a frozen moment he settles back on all fours. 

She trots ahead once more continuing to kick up her legs. He shakes his head angrily, flinging the braids in mane all around the reins. He bites at her and makes contact with her backside. She whinnies a loud chirp before planting her back hooves into his throat sending him reeling up onto his hind legs. 

Anticipating this, I stand fully in my saddle and throw my weight toward his head to keep from plummeting to the dirt below us. The hobble strap snaps from the stirrup compromising my balance as my foot gives out from underneath me and sends me flailing into the electrified pasture fence. 

Princess is on a full gallop, happily -I swear, back toward the barn with Phoenix at her hind hooves, biting at her until they disappear beneath the lean-to. 

I roll to my back and let the sun blind me. My side, where I’d smashed into the wooden fence, is on fire and my whole body tingles from the shock of the electric line running alongside it. Dirt has puffed up around all sides of me and fills my mouth with grit when I try to gasp the wind back into me. It takes me several minutes before I’m able to roll to my knees, then to my feet, and slowly make my way back to the barn.

I didn’t know I was looking for a horse the day I found Phoenix. I just needed to get out of the goat show barn. Riding is therapeutic for me, and without meaning to, I ended up breathing in the comfort of the smell of a horse barn. Buying him, training him was redemptive. Five months prior I’d had an abortion I didn’t want to have. 

I told my mom I was pregnant on the back porch of the farmhouse. The window panes were still blanketed in snow aglow with twinkling Christmas lights. The blackness beyond the panes was palpable. Mom remained calm, but ensured I was aware of what I would be giving up to keep my child.

“If you’re keeping it, you can’t stay here.”

She made it clear she would not support the consequence of getting drunk at a party where someone almost a decade older than me was poised to take advantage.

“This is a mistake,” she said.

Leaving the farm was inconceivable to me. It was all I’d ever known. I grew up on hay wagons. Two hundred years of my family members before me had dedicated their lives to the farm. I didn’t remember conceiving the baby.

But I remember the day I gave it up. 

*

“You looking to buy one?” the goat show horse barn man asks.

I hesitate. 

“I’ve got a cheap one,” he continues, “five hundred bucks and he’s yours.”