(~2000 Words, Memoir, Personal Essay)
My least favorite fairy tale has always been The Ugly Duckling. Though Hans Christian Anderson claimed it was based on his own life story, when my grandfather first told me the tale to my sister and me as children, during car trip to Agusta where he had served as in the Maine State House of Representatives, I didn’t buy it.
It wasn’t the beginning that tripped me up, though I found it highly suspect that this Duckling wouldn’t have had some inkling earlier on that he wasn’t, in fact, a duck. It was the ending. As a child, I didn’t believe that the Duckling would so casually migrate away with his fellow swans and spare no further thought for the farm family with whom he was raised. I consider myself a bit of an authority in this area. After leaving at the age of eighteen, following decades long tenures as a city dwelling twenty-something, then thirty-something, then forty-something, I find myself back in rural northern Maine by choice. Don’t we all miss our families, the places we grew up?
I was raised on a potato and horse farm; a great source of hilarity to anyone who knows me even casually. And I can say without any trace of exaggeration that I made a terrible farmer’s son; afraid of animals, allergic to everything that grew. My siblings seemed to thrive on the trappings of farm life, the tilled fields, the endless acres of frozen pine; as if they could metabolize the scent of potato blossoms, convert open space to robust vigor. These were genes I had apparently missed. Despite a steady diet of wholesome, nutritious Yankee food, by the time I was seven, family photos showed me to have the stunted pale look of a child interred in a forced labor camp. If ever one of Aroostook County’s native sons was meant for a life of keyboard typing and designing presentation slides, well that then, was me.
As a youngster, my distance from my brothers and sisters was never more apparent, never more painful, than when my family tried to fit me in. And to their credit, try they did. After we started proper school, my parents gave ponies to both me and my sister Jesse, who was one year older. Tiny little Shetland things, they had the large soulful black eyes and the long fluttering eyelashes of the chronically adorable; like something molded and marketed with palace-princess accessories by Hasbro. Matched with endearing dispositions, these were the ponies young children everywhere dreamed of riding through blooming wildflower meadows dappled by rainbows and frolicking kittens.
My sister’s was a gelding. A happy creature who loved to be around people, he would follow my father around the barn yard like a puppy when my sister was not at hand. He was a muted brown, like molasses cookies dusted with powdered sugar, and she named him “Ginger Jingles.” The pony given to me hailed from my grandfather’s farm, a licorice black mare. She was quieter, and I imagined, demure. She sported a dark shaggy mane in a layered cut that was forever falling into her eyes, giving her a shy, intellectual look as she peered tentatively out from under it. For reasons now beyond understanding and recall, she had been named “Cheval.”
As my parents had probably hoped I would, I remember the moment I saw her thinking that she was perfect. That we, boy and pony, were meant to be together forever and ever. And perhaps creating the template I would follow well into my late thirties, our relationship was proved to be both brief, tempestuous, and doomed from its inception.
I don’t remember much of the period between Cheval and I meeting and our parting. There are memories there, but they are just captured images mainly, not vibrant living things. Faded and washed out, they sit in shoe boxes under the bed in my mind, like photographs from the seventies printed on kodak film; the ones we all sometimes look through baffled, knowing in our hearts that wasn’t what blue actually looked like back in the day. It was far more vivid.
I must have had Cheval for a while before the accident happened. Certainly, long enough to gain some modicum of riding skill and to earn my mother’s trust. When it happened, she was letting me ride in the paddock in front of the barn without my father walking along side me as she had insisted at first. She was on the outside of the fence, a short distance up the hill nearer our house, watching me when what I now refer to as “the incident” occurred.
My family had a working farm, and as part of its working, at least on the equine side, foals were reared. My father had gotten a new breeding stallion some weeks before, probably at auction, a proud beast he insisted was of reputable stock. The animal, Spirit, was a big one, large and looming. Nineteen hands or more, a towering, muscled chestnut thing, with a star on his forehead the angry glaring off-white color of a sun-bleached skull. That afternoon, Spirit had been placed in the corral adjoining the one I was riding in, most likely to acclimate and await his upcoming dates with a series of fertile fillies. His was not to be an idle life; Spirit had work to do, a vocation required to earn his keep.
As is the case with most disasters, the one about to unfold probably could have been avoided, but for two significant unknowns. As with many a literary heroine, my little pony Cheval was revealed as not the shy, reserved type I had at first imagined her to be. As it turns out; in biology if not yet in deed, she was a bit of a vixen. She was very likely, my sister Jesse would inform me years later as a young adult, “showing heat” that afternoon, scenting the air with a captivating siren song of little pony lust. Spirit too, waiting impatiently next door for a date he was not aware was in the making, had unsung skills of his own. One of his former owners had at some point trained him to jump.
I was trotting around the front pasture happily, riding toward my mother when I heard the noise behind me; a single distant thudding sound and then the repetitive throbbing of hooves moving rapidly, rhythmically, toward me from behind. My mother began to wave her arms and run the short distance down the hill. The thundering sound behind me grew quickly closer, quickly louder.
Spirit of course, impatient as a sailor with limited shore leave, had become aware of Cheval and jumped the fence, probably intending to have the briefest of consensual dalliances; ships in the night and all that. Sadly, in the fine tradition of beer addled bar flies everywhere, Spirit had charged forth toward conquest with neither a clear understanding of the actual desirability of his potential paramour, or a fundamental grasp of the mechanical difficulties he was sure to encounter once he arrived. The basic problem was a simple one. Cheval was about forty inches tall; at over eighteen hands, Spirit was seventy-five inches if he was a foot. There was nearly a two-fold difference in height between the suitor and his intended target. I, unfortunately placed atop my pony, made up the thirty-five-inch difference.
I don’t recall the specifics, I was very young at the time, but I like to think that with the naïve joy of a child, the expectation of something interesting and exciting, I twisted in the saddle to see who was approaching. Perhaps a new friend coming to greet me. I do distinctly remember a shadow falling across me as I turned; dark, cold and sudden. There was a rush of air and the sense of something huge hovering above me, off to the side.
Then something smacked the side of my head. The object which struck me was long and sort of solid, but not dense per se; it had some give to it. I remember a rubbery, moist sort of texture. It was warm, about body temperature. A wiffle ball bat? A thick, hearty sausage in casing? I’ll never forget the noise it made. Thwack. Though the sound haunts my dreams, I can’t describe it further or than to say you should think of all the different types of thwack sounds you can, and then discard any dry leathery types. The hit from the unknown thing was well placed and had power behind it, sending me tumbling from the saddle. I landed about three feet away, somewhat stunned but relatively unharmed, with an eleven-inch bruise rapidly forming across my right temple and down the side of my shoulder.
I recall only bits and pieces of what happened next. I remember Spirit was rearing near me, pawing the air with a frustrated neigh. His fore legs fell heavily back to the ground, slashing hooves landing near me, and he continued his ferocious charge around the pasture circling predator-like. I remember Cheval, who had spooked when I fell, trotting back to stand protectively near me while my mother rushed to my side. I remember her fretting at the angry red welt, which for all the world looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to the side of my head, concerned about how to explain the shape and size of the injury to a skeptical doctor. How best to position the injury so as not to have child protective services take me away; open honesty or make up a tale about a staircase banister?
Ever naïve about the workings of life, I long assumed that I was the intended target of Spirit’s malice; that he was an equine activist ideologically opposed to happy children riding ponies, that he’d swept me off with his soft fleshy muzzle, slammed me with a damp chin. It was again Jesse, the sister who would eventually go on to study Community Health Education at the University of Maine at Farmington, the sister who was the first of us to latch on to anything worth knowing, certainly anything carnal, who would years later explain to me what the thing that struck me actually was.
We were at the lake one evening, young teenagers then, sitting around a crackling campfire. I was trying to describe my accident, my fear of horses, to a visiting cousin; the “attempted trampling” as I’d come to think of it. He’d gone riding that afternoon with my sisters and I declined; he was curious why. Jesse was there but not attuned, the beginnings of the gulf that would soon rapidly stretch between siblings moving into adult lives already a tangible thing. At that moment, though, she caught what I was saying and turned slowly to look me full in the face. The eternally distant, bored expression that many girls her age wore took on the sympathetic, patient look she now wears so well as the mother of her own like-aged daughter.
I imagine that to our cousin we looked so similar in that moment, Jesse and I; that by the orange glow of flame my dull pale complexion was as luminous as her own tanned freckled countenance, that our features seemed similar when traced in firefly trails of upward sweeping cinders. By that trick of the light, I like to think we appeared for once to be the kin our accident of birth had named us, as she leaned in toward me and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. Once again, my protective older sister, without a trace of laughter or derision, explaining it all to me very slowly.
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