I've been putting off writing about this for multiple reasons that will rapidly become clear. But it finally caught up with me yesterday, so I know if I don't go on and do it, it's going to dog at my heels 'til I do. Not that this will necessarily make it better, mind you, but it's damn sure not going to make it worse.
Last Tuesday night, my mother sent me an email, asking if she could come up Wednesday. (She only works half-days on Wednesdays.) This isn't exactly something unusual for her, so I just told her "sure" and didn't think anything else about it. I met her Wednesday afternoon at the appointed time so that she wouldn't have to drive all the way across town to pick me up or whatever. I asked--out of curiosity, not douchiness--what brought her up that day, and she kinda dodged the question. I didn't think too much about that, either. I figured she just didn't really have anything better to do but didn't want to come right out and say it. So I let it go.
Anyway, we went to eat, and when we finished and got back in the car, she told me why she'd really come--to drop this bit of bad news.
Last Sunday evening, after Daddy'd left to go back to work, she got a call from (someone, I forgot who) saying that one of our horses was down in the pasture. So she went out there, and sure enough, Fergie was down. She called a couple of people, and they were able to get him up, but he went back down shortly thereafter. She said he was lying funny, not like horses usually lie when they're uncomfortable, but on his back with his legs splayed out awkwardly.
More help arrived. It was determined that my baby boy had had a heart attack--or possibly more than one--and wasn't getting back up. Because of his age, the decision was made to put him down.
Luckily, my parents have wonderful friends because all this was taken care of for my mother, and he was buried in the pasture immediately afterward. Also luckily, he was found within an hour of going down the first time, so he wasn't out there suffering an inordinately long amount of time before he was found.
That is literally the only good news about this situation.
Fergie--who also had an incredibly stupid name he was registered under, but we always called him Fergie--had been with me since I was in the 9th grade. I'd had one of my show horses (Bubba--yes, we like to give our horses stupid names, shut up) for a couple of years, and we'd decided that it'd be cool if I had another one, too. Daddy found an ad in one of those Trader's Helper/Bulletin Board/whatever type of papers about a 5-year-old registered Tennessee Walking Horse gelding for sale for a reasonable price. So one Saturday in March, Daddy, Mother, Crazy Trainer #1 (yes, I've had more than one), and I went to bumfuck Beulah, Alabama, to check out said horse.
This was 1999, but it seems like so much more recently than that. Weirdly enough, I remember that that morning, I was changing the sheets on my bed when my trainer called to say we could head down to see the horse that would become Fergie later that day. I only had it half-done, so the quilt and comforter were lying on the floor when the phone rang. I tripped over them on my way to answer it and broke one of my toes. So when I met Fergie for the first time, I could hardly walk because my broken toe hurt so bad. Funny what sticks out in your memory. (Although me breaking toes--then and now--was hardly anything unusual. I've broken all of them at least three times apiece because I'm clumsy and have a propensity to gravitate toward things that induce bodily harm.)
Anyway, when we got there, the dude, who was a horse trader, pointed to a terribly dirty, pitifully thin horse standing in the middle of a muddy field. Seriously, he was so skinny that I was afraid to test-ride him and could only be persuaded to do it for a couple of minutes. Daddy said later that he had serious doubts about buying him because he was afraid he'd be dead before summer.
But there was something about this poor, ragged, filthy, scrawny-ass horse. And I was a sucker for hard-luck cases (which is something that hasn't changed a bit, incidentally). So in a day or two, we went back down there, picked him up, and carried him home.
We ended up being right about him. When he got healthier and shed his raggedy old winter coat, he was a gorgeous blood bay. "Bay" doesn't so much describe a color as a pattern; a bay is a horse with a black mane and tail, black legs, and a black nose. Most bays are a kind of dull brown color, but Fergie was a slick, fiery red (hence, "blood bay") with the aforementioned black points and a mane and tail that grew insanely long. He topped out at about 16.2 hands (which is about 5 feet, 6 inches at the top of the back) and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 pounds. He was a big boy.
On the other hand, he was built really funny, so he wasn't exactly a majestic steed, the poor thing. His head was about two sizes too large for the rest of him, and his ears were too long, and his (lovely) dark eyes were too big. Otherwise, his front end was built more or less correctly, but his back was too short, his butt too cramped, and his lower legs and ankles much too thick. But I didn't care.
He was pretty if you didn't care too much about conformation, but in the summer, his slick fiery-red coat and sparkling black mane and tail made up for his weird build, God love him.
It became obvious pretty quickly that he'd lived a rough life on top of the near-starvation. He was nervous, high-strung. But he'd been trained as a show horse, you could tell. Apparently, he hadn't made the cut at whatever trainer's barn he'd been at, and they sold him, which is how he ended up half-starved to death in a shithole in Central Alabama.
He may not have made it there, but he was the first "real" show horse I ever had. Bubba, I had made into one. But Fergie was bred to be one, born to be one, trained to be one. So to my 15-year-old self, he was, of course, the second coming.
I'll spare you all the stories of the things we did together. But I will say that even though he was high-strung and would never be the kind of horse you could plop a beginner on safely, he was also uncannily intelligent for a horse, and he never once lifted a hoof to hurt anyone. (Well, except for that one time when he ran away with my college boyfriend who just knew he could handle Fergie and nearly decapitated the dumb bastard by running under a clothesline, but I think he was just trying to keep me from suffering said idiot's presence any longer.)
He'd do anything you asked him, and he was never afraid of anything. Seriously, I used to take him for rides down the side of the road. My other horses would spook at oncoming cars or other people's asshole dogs coming out to terrorize us, but he never batted an eyelash. I knew that when I was riding Fergie, I never had to worry about anything extraneous because he had ice water in his veins in that regard. He'd even terrorize people's asshole dogs back when I let him. You have no idea how much fun it was to chase them on this massive red horse and listen to them yelp and run, after they'd chased and snapped at my other horses who'd shy away from them. (Still hate fucking dogs to this day, by the way.) I always secretly thought that we must look like the First Horse(wo)man of the Apocalypse to those fucking asshole dogs, with me on the giant red horse, bringing War to other people's shithead canines.
I also may have been entirely too prone to flights of fancy...which is something else that hasn't changed.
I had all kinds of insane mishaps on other horses, but I owned Fergie-man for 16 years and never once even thought that I might fall off of him. He was a fucking rock.
We eventually became the terror of show rings in our part of the country for awhile, too. My parents never had the money to really finance a push toward the big-time for me (even though if you had asked anybody at that time, they'd have told you I had the talent--this isn't bragging, just observation), so I had to settle for the small-time.
And the greatest moment of my life took place on Fergie's back. I was...17 maybe? We were at a horse show somewhere near Sylacauga, and we'd made the (frankly bizarre) decision for me to ride in the Championship because fuck it, I guess. Fergie performed even better than usual that night, and in the middle of that thick, hazy summer night in a show ring on the other side of the middle of nowhere, everyone fell in love with us. The whole crowd, every single fucking one of them, was on their feet...for us. People I'd never met before in my life, people I'd never see again, they were standing up, cheering, screaming, applauding, shouting my back number to the judges, and every time the announcer called for a gait change, it just got louder.
That had never happened to me before, and it has never happened since. We won the Championship class (and I've still got the giant ribbon they hooked on his bridle for our victory lap). And there was a guy there who had, just earlier that week, basically told me to my face that my horse and I weren't shit, watching every minute of it. According to my father, this dude looked at my trainer (Crazy Trainer #1) and admitted that he was painfully wrong.
(Well, naturally. It couldn't have been the greatest moment of my life if I hadn't been able to spite somebody in the process. I just hate I didn't get to see it.)
Every moment of my life since then has been nothing in comparison. Nothing.
Eventually, Crazy Trainer #1 ended up ruining him--show-horse-wise, I mean, not life-wise. Crazy Trainer #2 only made it worse when he claimed he could fix it. So for the last ten or so years of his life, Fergie never saw the inside of another show ring. But it was ok because he'd been amazing in his day, and it wasn't exactly his fault that my parents entrusted my horses to idiots. I just rode him at home, and it was fine.
I've had lots of horses come and go since then. He and Bubba were the only ones I couldn't bring myself to sell. (Bubba and I have done plenty of crazy shit together, too.) And even though he was a couple of years younger than Bubba, I always knew that Fergie would probably be the first to go because he'd had such a hard life before he came to live with us. Baby boy never forgot going hungry when he was young because he would absolutely eat his weight in food and never slow down. But, hell, I don't blame him. I'd have done the same.
I hadn't ridden him in years, but that was fine, too. He deserved his retirement. And when I was down there at Easter, I went to go visit the horses (which is not something I do often anymore because it's a reminder of things I always wanted and could never have). Now I'm glad I did because I don't think I'd seen them since Christmas at the time. I'm glad I got to see him one last time.
Anyway, Mother had come that day because she didn't want to text me or email me or call me to tell me what had happened, and she knew enough people around home knew, so she didn't want me to accidentally find out some other way. So she came to tell me. And she was so upset, both at what had happened and having to be the bearer of bad news, that I did my best to not act completely devastated. I didn't want to make it any harder for her than it already was, and it wasn't like it was her fault. Say what you want about her--and I will--but nobody can ever say that she was cruel to the horses. I know that whatever decision she made, she did it with his best interest in mind.
He'd gotten sick a few times over the winter. I'd told her then that if something happened, and I wasn't there, to please, please, please not let him suffer. I didn't care if she had to call someone to come shoot him--which, while she didn't come right out and say it, I'm almost sure is what ended up happening because they'd have had to wait so long for a large-animal vet to get there (assuming you could find one who'd even come to start with)--I just didn't want him to suffer. I could stand anything but that. So she knew how I felt about the issue. And while I wish baby boy could've stuck around a little longer, there was no way in this world that I could have possibly insisted that she keep him alive and in pain just so I wouldn't be sad. I'm selfish, but I'm not that selfish.
He died just a few weeks short of his 22nd birthday.
Baby boy lived a (relatively) long life, and I'd like to think it was pretty happy for him, for the most part. It was only right that he got to go out with some amount of dignity. He deserved that much at the very least. I hate that I didn't get to see him and say goodbye, but I don't hate my mother for that, either. She was trying to spare me, I know, and I wouldn't have wanted them to wait while he was in pain just for me to get there. That wouldn't have been right, either.
I guess the only good thing is knowing that, since he was never afraid of anything in life, he wasn't afraid in his last moments, either. He was always fearless.
I tried to hide how fucked up I was over it when my mother was here because, like I said, she already had enough to deal with. And afterwards, I just kinda tried to bury myself in my work and other things. I made it a grand total of four days before it broke me. I lost my shit yesterday, and I'm still mostly losing it now. It just doesn't feel right to be referring to him in the past tense.
You know how people always say that they don't have a favorite child or whatever, but secretly, they always do? I love all my horses, but Fergie was the one that I loved the most. I tried to not treat any of them differently, but he was the one with the special place in my heart, and I like to think that he knew it, too.
I've had animals die before, never a horse. And I don't care what anyone says, it's different. I guess it's because they live so much longer and remain in your life so much longer. I had him for 16 years. That's more than half my life. And while I knew he (and Bubba, too) were getting old, I guess I never wanted to think that one day, they might be gone.
So, yeah. I'm not ok. And I probably won't be for a very long time. And this on top of the fact that my father fell at work a few weeks ago and broke his wrist/arm in three places (and narrowly avoided having to have surgery)...well, it's just a lot to deal with. (And also knowing that Bubba, too, just turned 25, so I'll end up going through this again in the next few years. Fuck.)
It just doesn't seem right that the next time I go down there, there will only be four horses in the herd instead of five....
God, I miss my baby boy. This is so much rougher than it has any right to be.
Rest in peace, Fergie-man. You've earned it, my precious baby boy. You've earned it.
