Four Foundations

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“Feed him oats and carrots,” I said. The man who was walking across the golf course was definitely out of earshot by now. My wife was not home yet, and so I was talking on the telephone with the woman across the street. It did not matter, I said, which came first. “Just make sure that the food is placed in an additionally protected area within the already protected area where your horse boards and sleeps. Is this clear?” I waited for a response. She must have had a question or comment. It is not a simple matter, this process of protecting food. In addition, this is the one section of the rules regarding horses that I know, with certainty, interests the woman across the street. She has said as much, explaining that her husband, when he was alive, was preoccupied with food and safety, and that she developed an interest in the topic as well, at first for him, but eventually for reasons of her own. The reasons, she has said, have to do with the danger that is present in the world, and how it can best be avoided. She is acquainted with danger. Her husband, a young man, died suddenly, and doctors were mystified why they had not been able to prevent or at least predict his demise. Last year, about a month after he died, about a week after I took up with her, she told me that she had accompanied him to the doctor and waited while he underwent a battery of tests. She sat in the waiting room and tried not to think of what could be wrong. “It is the same,” I say, “if your plan to protect the horse’s food fails from within. What I mean by that is that if you come to feed your horse one day and you find his food scattered around the stall, you will know immediately that there is something wrong. What that is, and whether there is anything to be done about it, will become a source of worry long before it is a source of enlightenment.” Waiting for a veterinarian was an ordeal. So many thoughts raced through the mind. Blood pooling around the heart. Indigestion. A brain fever. The scattering of food rarely results from a physical injury. Its cause is generally impossible to detect from simple observation and far more tragic as a result. She told me that the doctors threw up their hands.

“How you feed the horse, and what you feed him, are matters that require your attention,” I said. I had crossed the street, and was sitting in the den with the young woman who had lost her husband the year before. “Equally important,” I said, “is maintaining the horse’s physical state.” She was getting dressed, the young woman across the street, and I arrested her midway through the process and asked her to stand in the middle of the floor, unclothed, so that I could demonstrate. She refused to be completely naked and so stood there in a brassiere only, submitting to a host of nervous habits. She tapped her right foot. She tilted her head to one side. She swayed her shoulders back and forth in a tight shuttle. I asked her to stop moving so that I would not be distracted. She snorted at me but was still. The maintenance of physical state, I explained, starts at the level of the stable floor. If the floor is too damp, it will cause the horse’s hooves to become unhealthy. The floor should also be uneven so that the horse does not slip, and so the feet can be strengthened as a result of the pressure delivered upward. A perfectly pristine surface will not work to build the horse’s foot. Here, the philosophy is the opposite of the philosophy of food: where the latter is to be made as easy to obtain as possible, walking should be a fair and productive challenge. “Do you know what I mean?” I asked the young woman. She walked across the floor, away from me. When she returned she had an unhappy expression on her face. She told me that she could not hear another word about horses, that she was starting to feel faintly insulted by the whole thing.

“Exercise is also vital,” I said. I had called back across the street; my wife answered. “Hello,” I said, “you there?” She said yes, she was there. “I walked over to the store,” I said. “Had to run out and get a few things.”

“Are you going to exercise?” I asked. Yes, she said, she had considered it. “Can I meet you at the house before you go?” She said that I could. “Wait for me,” I said. I took my time coming back across the street so that it would appear that I had been at the store. When I arrived, I asked her if I could say a few more things about horses. She said that she did not mind, so long as I did not mind if her attention drifted. I said that I understood. Marriage is sacrifice. “Exercise,” I said, ”is also an opportunity to put the horse to test. Here, you are looking for a number of behaviors, but this one primarily: will the horse, when mounted, listen to the orders of his rider, or will he start? When a horse exhibits a willingness to listen to the rider, he can (and should) be rewarded. Place a cube of sugar on the palm of your hand and extend it almost to the horse’s mouth. Do not, however, put your hand into the horse’s mouth. This is not for your safety, exactly. A horse that too easily obtains his reward will come to expect that reward, and learn that he need not work for it, and soon enough will grow weak in the mind and the legs, and be of no particular use to himself or to you. You can also dissuade him with the crop.” My wife was turned toward me now, showing no sign of turning away. She looked as if her attention was focused entirely on me, that she was not drifting in the least. I felt my face growing hotter. It was time to wrap things up.

“Shelter, food, exercise, reward: these are the four foundations of horsekeeping,” I said. “You will know when you have dealt with them satisfactorily, because your only thought will be about the continued health of your horse.” She turned to head to the bedroom and I followed her, still talking. “I do not know if you have a genuine interest in these rules,” I said. “But rules are hardly a trivial matter. In the storm season, in the stall, next to the box that you have taken pains to fill with carrots and oats, on the ground that is neither too flat nor too damp, beneath the shelf that holds the bit and the crop, you will think about all four of them, in combination and in isolation. You can also dissuade him with the crop.” I was tired and beginning to repeat myself. I could tell that I was not living up to the standard I had set. My wife put a hand on my shoulder to gentle me. Then she took back her hand and began to undress.

“I saw,” she said, taking off her shirt, “a man walking the other day without a horse.” I had not expected her to say anything. I must have looked puzzled. A small smile sprouted on her face. She finished undressing before she continued to speak. “This man was going from a spot in the meadow that was exposed to the elements to a spot that was protected by a grove of maples. It took him so long to move from place to place that I could see the disappointment on his face turn to frustration and then to simple sadness. On a horse he would have closed the gap between the two places in a flash. I was riding but I stopped to look at him. I could have gone faster but I slowed down for him. Do you understand? I slowed down for him the same way I am slowing down for you now.” She was at the foot of the bed, my wife, her legs set powerfully apart from one another. I wasn’t certain if she had absorbed the lessons I had taken such care to prepare, but we were going the same speed now, and that was enough.

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—photo Thowra_uk/Flickr