CHAPTER SIX
Danica
I fully expected my child to be more nervous than she was, stepping into the stall with the horses.
But it was like she was born to do this.
All the animals seemed to believe it too.
Even Mouse let Sam pet her cheek for a few more seconds than she did yesterday, which of course just caused my daughter to light up like a birthday cake for an octogenarian.
Today’s fiasco with Clyde seemed almost entirely forgotten as she swept the big brush down Monarch’s body.
I was on the other side of the enormous gray giant, brushing him and dodging his curious tongue, as he curled his neck around and kept trying to lick me.
Sam and I were both giggling and telling Monarch to behave himself when Tommaso came bursting through the barn in a panic.
“Danica!” he hollered.
The way he bellowed my name with that thick accent of his should not have made parts of my body tingle the way it did.
I raced to the front of the stall where the horses usually poked out their heads. “Yes? Is everything okay?”
“No!” he said plainly, going to a vacant stall that didn’t seem to have a horse assigned to it and throwing open the door.
My eyes met Sam’s, and together we made our way back out of Monarch’s stall, watching as Tom unfurled a hose from the far end of the barn and lugged it to the empty stall. “What’s wrong?”
“I have a horse. A severely neglected, very sick horse, coming.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now!” he almost snapped. His voice wasn’t harsh, but it was frantic, which was probably where the clipped tone came from. “They’re on the ferry with her now. Normally, I have more time.”
“Can we help at all?” I asked. “What can we do?”
He paused for a moment, the spray nozzle for the hose in his hand, and he just stared at me. That’s when I realized he’d been doing this all by himself for so long that he’d never had anybody to help him. Let alone offer.
Finally, he nodded. “Si. You can clean this stall. I need to get fresh hay and straw, and call the vet.” He thrust the nozzle into my hands and took off back out of the barn. “Grazie!” He called out just before the door slammed shut.
“A sick horse?” Sam said, her voice soft as she came to stand beside me. “How sick?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, matching her worrisome tone.
Oh, my empathetic little animal lover. She rescued everything from bees to ants to butterflies.
Even wasps she found in distress were freed rather than squashed.
Unlike some kids who changed their minds about what they wanted to be when they grew up, almost as often as the seasons changed, Sam had been steadfast in wanting to become a veterinarian and had never wavered.
So, of course she would take to being with the animals this way, and of course she would be worried about a sick, neglected horse coming to the ranch.
Running my hand down the back of her head, I offered her a small half-smile. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Her nod was half-hearted as she went back to Monarch’s stall to brush him while I hosed out the empty stall for the new arrival.
I was just coiling up the hose when the barn doors opened and Tom entered, towing a big wagon loaded with straw. Or was it hay? I didn’t know the difference.
With a pitchfork, he started filling the stall, a sense of urgency in his eyes that I felt down to my toes. I wanted to ask him if he knew what condition the horse was in, or how sick she was, but based on his jerky movements and the laser focus in his eyes, I knew now wasn’t the time.
Our attention was pulled at the same time to the rattle of a diesel engine and the crunch of gravel under tires. Tom finished with the straw just as a horse trailer came into view, backing up to the opening of the barn.
Sam came to stand beside me as we watched Tom and the man in the truck shake hands.
“Was headed to the glue factory, this one,” said the man with the tattered, denim ball cap and olive-green khakis, remorse thick in his voice.
“Neglected, as far as we can tell. Starved. You should see her feet.” He shook his head, removed his hat to reveal a bald head, and swept his wrist over his forehead.
“Poor thing. We tried to find a sanctuary on the mainland, but they’re all full. ”
“I have the space. It is fine,” Tom said, nodding. “She will be loved here.”
The man replaced his ball cap back on his head and went to open up the trailer.
I gasped, and Sam murmured a stunned, “Oh my god,” when the boney, brown hindquarters of the mare came into view. She stomped her overgrown hooves that seemed to curl under themselves and made noises of distress as the man cautiously reached inside to grab the reins.
She spun around, and the whites of her eyes glowed in the shadows of the trailer as she took in her new surroundings. Her nostrils flared, undoubtedly because of all the new smells and all the new horses surrounding her.
Tom stepped forward and took the reins from the man, approaching the mare slowly, his hand out. He rested it against her neck and waited patiently for her to stop jerking her head. Then he pressed his forehead to her cheek and whispered something I couldn’t make out.
Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a carrot and held it in front of her nose.
Her lips wiggled, reaching for it. He let her eat it, but then produced another, moving it forward so she had to step toward the door of the trailer to get it.
That was how he got the emaciated-looking horse out of the trailer and into the stall.
He made sure she had water, a salt lick, hay, and other treats. But she’d need a hell of a lot more than that before she even began to resemble the healthy horses in the other stalls.
The man in the ball cap stuck his hand out. “Thanks so much, Tom. I know she’ll be safe here.”
“Farrier and vet are on their way.”
As if on cue, they both tilted their heads to the ceiling when the sound of a chopper overhead grew closer.
The man in the ball cap chuckled. “Oh, you millionaires and your money. You just helicopter a vet and a farrier over at your whim, do yah?”
Tom chuckled. “Why have money if you can’t do something good with it?”
The man closed up the trailer. “I wish more rich guys were like you.”
“Does she have a name?” Tom asked, following the guy around to the driver’s side door.
“‘Angel’ was what I was told.” He snorted. “Gonna need a miracle to keep that one from getting a real halo and wings. Best of luck to you, buddy. Take care.”
“Ciao,” Tom said, making his way back toward Sam and me, as we now stood at Angel’s stall watching her growing increasingly agitated.
She ignored the food and pawed the straw-covered ground with her gnarled hooves.
Her nostrils flared and her ears pointed forward as her breathing picked up tempo like she was cantering through a field and not standing still in her stall.
“This makes me so sad,” Sam said, her voice choked. “Look at how bony she is.”
“I know, sweetie.”
Angel grew more and more frantic as the other horses started to make noises of either greeting or distress.
Tom had disappeared when the truck and trailer rattled away, only to come back into the barn with two men in his wake.
One was short with thin, gray hair on top of his head and round glasses, probably in his fifties.
The other was tall, fit, and with two sleeves of tattoos disappearing beneath the sleeves of his rolled-up flannel shirt.
Both carried big bags of supplies for their trade.
They walked right past us, and only the farrier with the tattoos acknowledged us, giving me a friendly smile and a small hello.
“She is here,” Tom said, unlocking the stall.
The short, bespectacled vet stepped in, reaching for the reins, and started doing a thorough examination of Angel while the farrier checked out her feet.
“Fuckin‘ ’ell,” the farrier said, grumbling.
He had an accent I wasn’t expecting. Was that Scottish?
Irish? Welsh? I was terrible with accents.
“Look at ’er hooves? You ever seen hooves this bad, Morty?
” He glanced at the vet, who now had a stethoscope in his ears and was pressing the other end to Angel’s chest and around her sides.
“Never,” Morty, the vet, said. “We have a problem though.”
“Another one?” the farrier said.
Tom, who’d stood by the door of the stall until now, stepped forward. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m hearing two heartbeats,” Morty said. “Our sad little Angel here is going to be a mother.”
“You’re shittin‘ me?” the farrier said, his accent even thicker. “This wee lass is up the duff?” He ran his big hand over her belly carefully. “She’s just bones. Where’s the babe?”
“I’ll get the doppler,” Morty said, reaching into his bag.
As much as I wanted to stay, and I knew my daughter wanted to stay, I felt like we needed to go. To give them space to work. We certainly weren’t of any help, and while Sam would be content just brushing horses for the rest of the day, I didn’t want our presence on the farm to add to Tom’s stress.
I tugged my daughter to the side by her elbow. “We should leave them to Angel.”
Her eyes widened. “What? No. I want to watch. You know I want to be a vet, Mom. Maybe I can help.”
I highly doubted that.
“I’ll stay out of the way. I promise. I’ll go back to brushing Monarch or one of the other horses. Just please don’t make me leave.”
What she seemed to forget was that I was also here, and I had things to do at home. I had a job, chores, and dinner to make. Mind you, I was the bookkeeper for our vineyard and had a vegetarian potato curry soup in the slow cooker ready to go, but that didn’t mean the laundry would fold itself.