Horse-Famous: Stories by Natalie Keller Reinert

Author:Natalie Keller Reinert [Reinert, Natalie Keller]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: english riding, horse, equine, horse racing, horse breeding, literary fiction, thoroughbreds, horse stories, short stories, equestrian
Publisher: Scrawl Books
Published: 2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Long Walk

It was April, but already the sun was hot in the middle of the day. Mornings were still cool and misty, those delightful Florida fogs that weave through the moss-hung oaks and amplify the sound of hoof beats from the training tracks around the farm. You could hear our horses, but just as easily you could hear Briarwood’s, a mile down the road, and Forsyth’s, across the road and on the far side of their property. Whinnies, shouts, curses, all came rippling through the dense fog as if the horses were just next to us. Farther out, the sounds of a police car on I-75 gave me a strange reminder of the constant siren whoops in the streets of Manhattan.

I came tripping down the stairs from the grooms’ quarters, bleary-eyed and thankful that I didn’t have a commute through the road-block of fog out on the country roads. There wasn’t much I liked about living on the farm, but mornings like this certainly showed off the advantage. I flipped on the lights and waited in the gray darkness for them to warm up and light the stage for the morning’s chores: stalls to be hayed, grained, and watered, fifty-odd mares to be brought in for breakfast and grooming, teasing and breeding, the vet’s truck rattling up the stony driveway and all the ultrasounds and exams to be done. . . Then perhaps a few minutes for lunch. Breeding season wasn’t easy.

Most of the mares were Florida-bred and Florida’s climate had shaped their reactions to the seasons’ changing -- they were late to grow winter coats and early and easy to shed. But at least a dozen had been shipped down south in the past month, and the sudden warmth and longer days had shocked their systems. They were in a perpetual state of shedding, hair drifting down from their wooly backs and necks, blowing down the barn aisles and through the pastures like tumbleweeds, and no amount of currying and brushing seemed to end the cycle. No matter what you did, these arctic mares always seemed to have more hair to lose.

They lost most of it all over me and the other grooms. A day in the broodmare barn was like being tarred and feathered: you came out in the evening pasted all over with horse slime, nose bogeys, fragrant little green leaves of alfalfa, sharp stabbing stalks of straw… and that was before the foals came along with all of their accompanying body fluids…

But still, I felt lucky to have this job. I'd been working the sales for a long time, traveling back and forth from Ocala to New York, Kentucky, Maryland, anywhere there were Thoroughbreds for sale, there was a job for a slim young woman who could stand them up prettily for the buyers to survey. And be surveyed. But I was tired of the long hauls on horse trailers, sitting in a folding lawn chair between the sheepskin-padded heads of tireless Thoroughbreds, fussing the

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