THERE WERE A HALF-DOZEN wonderful family shots in our batch of holiday Polaroids — but so far I’ve had eyes for only one picture in the pile. It shows Tom, our older boy, and my wife holding a horse, with James, our grandson, in the saddle, steadied by myself, Granddad. A New Yorker, 3 years old, James hasn’t been on a horse before. He’s looking at the camera, not at us, or at Terence — Terence is the horse — but what is his expression? I keep coming back to the shot, trying to read James’s face. Is he enjoying himself? Is he the kind of kid who, a bit older, will think it’s cool — or whatever they will say then — to spend a horsy summer in the Berkshire hills?
Behind this heavy speculation stands a shameless truancy. I’m an English professor, aged 60, with a load of unfinished, overdue projects on my plate — errands that have to be done before quitting time. Furthermore, I’m well aware that lots of people in and around my age cohort are getting their errands done. My friend Page has made it into the 20th century with a first-class multivolume history. My friend Jay has his ninth novel out. Still, envy and guilt refuse to take hold. Day after day, in midwinter, in prime work time, I ride horses and slope off.
I muck about slowly and happily in the barn. This means using a long-handled fork to lift horse dung from the deep sawdust bed of a horse’s stall into a wheelbarrow, thereafter emptying same into a manure pile. I ride horses and shoot whole mornings watching a friend changing leads at the canter on Teddie, her long elegant jumper; then I take my own turn on a big appaloosa named for a samurai warrior.
I go to auctions: classy affairs at Saratoga, and friendlier, homelier sales in Crowley’s horse auction barn in Feeding Hills, Mass., where female auction riders in tight white jeans rocket back and forth on quarter horses in front of bleachers, checking hard like poloists, bantering all the while with Crowley himself, a witty-eyed Irishman, and with the dudes and fakers in the crowd.
This isn’t, I admit, the first time in my life I’ve been caught malingering with horses. In my first year of teaching, almost 35 years ago, when I was in serious debt and worried sick about losing my job, I took over exercising a nice black hunter named Johnny, stabled out of town. Goodbye Ph.D. dissertation, at least for a while. I can also remember various great party nights over the years directly connected with horsiness: a wedding anniversary of ours at the C Lazy U Ranch in Colorado; a night during race week at Goodwood, in England, wherein I was locked out of my digs by a sedate innkeeper who believed in curfews.
I know that an element of family piety figures somewhere in my goldbricking. The first thing an old schoolmate said to me at reunion last summer was, ”Do you remember how your Dad used to hitch up the horses to the sleigh with 20 kids strung out behind on their sleds?” That memory made me feel freshly linked up with my father, a remembrance I liked. I fought plenty with him, but I did know enough to value his love of horses. I remember that when my mother called me into their bedroom after he died to give me the Rolex and the dinner-suit jewelry, nothing was quite flowing between us; it was only when she went away and came back with a smart bridle ”saved for you” that I wept.
And of course I can, on demand, promote my vagrancy as personal exercise. Lately, for instance, I haven’t just been riding, I’ve been practicing mounts and dismounts out on the trail, using tree stumps or flat solid places in the stone walls as mounting blocks. At this writing, less than $1,000 separates me and the owner of an Irish hunter named Campo, and I’ve come to realize I need stronger legs to climb back up on the big boy — the horse stands 18 hands, which means he’s enormous — if a branch knocks off my sunglasses, say, or there’s other trouble on the trail. The first time I went up on him at the owner’s barn, I used three stepped bales of hay. In time, as the Bible says, the weak go to the wall. Hunger for physicality, fear of its passing — undoubtedly these play a part in my behavior, late-life determination to go on using the body, regardless. Also love of truancy in itself. Moving through the immense snowy stillness after a storm, trotting in meadow paths smoothed by weekend snowmobiles, Terence blowing and headshaking, horse and man simply enjoy the sight of their steam, sharing a delicious secret: it’s a workday elsewhere. Then too, there’s love of surprises — joy when the world suddenly decides to talk back. The scary, no-warning swerve of a horse spooked by grouse that the rider failed to notice behind yonder wall. . . . Wake up, rider! Cope! In literature teaching — my trade — Francophilia has the young by the ear, belief that the world, not just books, is made totally of words. Sir, I refute you thus, says Terence in his crossties, producing a fresh pile of dung for the edification of the barn floor. ”A bit mindless, don’t you think?” said a colleague who, out of (very mild) curiosity, came along with me to Crowley’s auction barn one day to watch the girls ride. Yes and no, I argued. At a certain point in time, the force of a horse’s strong heavy head burrowing into your shoulder, trying to rub off the bridle, can seem instructive. The same for the weight of the front legs as hoofs are picked, or the collected power underneath at takeoff.
I should have mentioned the mouth. Here’s how wisdom arrives straight from the horse’s mouth. I gallop up my hill on Terence and, coming in quiet, unsaddle him, unbridle him, halter him, and start the good rubdown. Where’s my apple? says the boy. I go to the bin — marvelous nose inside — find him a beauty and wait while he rolls it into position on his chops. Grshronkk! The cold, fresh, rich final sound of his chomp carries all the juice of the world alive into my ear. Yum, says the boy, licking around, swallowing. More. I rub on him a while longer where he’s still wet and stinking. Then, happy in the chore, happy in our joint steam — happy in the sound of his snowpad-shod hoofs and my black boots banging the barn floor together — I go back to the bin and get us the two apples our shared wisdom damned well deserves.
Originally published in The New York Times in 1986.