This essay by Massachusetts writer Laura Rodley gives us an image and rides with it. Reading it makes me think of all the horses in literature and the horse books by Marguerite Henry. I love how Laura’s writing flows (it’s why I fell for “Addicted” in Solace in So Many Words). This lyric essay is timely to me too because it mentions a broken arm, and I am recovering from a broken arm (but not one as serious the fracture mentioned here).
To Be a Horse
I always wanted a horse. More I wanted to be one. And for a short while in my very young life, I was. I galloped miles around our property, ate imaginary carrots, and trained myself to jump fences and bars held up by willing boys on the playground. I could jump my height. I grew older but I was still a horse at heart but one that knew about the Olympics. I could win, I thought, in running and jumping. The boys that held out the bar- a long stick- knew I could do it, watching me jump hurdles with my skirt flaring. It was during recess, not gym. Alas, these skills were not taken seriously by my father and stepmother. I was a poor swimmer and that’s all they knew. I always came in last in the races in the Windybush Swim Team, no matter how many sugar cubes I allowed my inner horse, only two because I was watching my calories and a teaspoon of sugar was fifteen calories and each cube equaled a teaspoon of sugar. But I hustled in my striped bathing suit and always finished, but always last. The other girls had huge shoulders, even larger than mine- which on a horse would be withers- because they swam all winter long in Country Clubs and YMCAs and their own indoor pools. I was rich in desire but in the water I could not match the speed I had on land. On land I was weightless but in the water I had to push against its weight and it was very heavy.
At one away meet I was bored waiting in between races and I put the bit between my teeth and headed for a jump while wearing my striped bathing suit, not a saddle. The jump was a bicycle rack. I had jumped them before. This time I had bare feet. I collected the surge inside my arms and body for the leap but I caught my foot on the base of the rack while going up and landed short. I fell into the ditch, so-to-speak, as during a steeplechase such as the International Derby, and I broke my foreleg- my right arm- that braced my fall, snapped it completely in a long fracture along the humerus with one part of the bone pushing against the skin but not out of it. I got up, so I wouldn’t need to be shot as are horses that break their legs in the Derby on the track. I carried my arm into the little first aid tent, now surrounded by others and they did not have a horseshoe of roses to put around my neck. Again, I had not won the race.
But they did lie me on a table, which is good because when they touched my arm, I fainted. Horses weigh a lot and I could have crushed one of them had I fallen on them. Someone drove my stepmother to the meet and she came in and would have liked to shoot me, but I trailered along in a car her sister drove, and in the hospital they cut off my bathing suit and wrapped my arm to my body in a cast for it to heal around the top part of my body. All the surge of weightlessness I had for leaping jumps came tumbling down, it was like pushing through water to only be walking using your legs without the surge of your forelegs, your arms, to lift you up each step you take. I don’t know what I wore on the way home. Maybe someone had collected my pants and shirt. The swim team instructor came to see me the next day, but I was retired now from jumping and swimming, for the rest of the summer.
When school started I had to enter the trailer of the school bus first, before the other children. They didn’t know anything about how much space a horse had to have in a trailer but they gave me, in a wrapped-around-the-top-of-my-body cast, room to walk ahead without bumping me. They didn’t know anything about gathering the surge inside your legs, your arms, your heart, to leap over the jump, to run the distance. I took my seat beside them but I was not one of them. My cast came off and my arm moved, my foreleg slow to gather the surge for leaping again. But then we moved in February to England and there, none of the girls at the school in London that I attended swam in Country Clubs over the winter. When my P.E.- Phys Ed- teacher found out I could swim backstroke, crawl, butterfly, and breaststroke she signed me up for the meet and the relay. Wearing a borrowed black wool and scratchy suit from a classmate I won every race inside a crowded space.
The water still had weight but I surged forward and broke its hold on me. Each time I reached the edge of the pool and held on watching the others catch up, I couldn’t believe it. By the time I swam the butterfly, my forearms splashing through the water, I believed it. But by the time I reached the edge, the chlorine smell strong in my nose, I wasn’t a horse anymore. Somehow I had left her saddle with the striped bathing suit that had been cut off me in the hospital room, and dropped pieces of the bit and the bridle off me as I swam the last quarter lap. I needed to open my mouth wide to swallow in enough air for the surge of winning the butterfly lap and the bit completely fell out.
I was no longer a horse, ever, just a girl winning the swimming race when I’d never won one before that day. All the school cheered, their cheers echoing in the room. As they pulled me out of the water, and wrapped a towel around me I patted the towel in place on my shoulder and watched the horse I was gallop out the door. She was happy to be free and didn’t look back. I turned to shake the hand of my P.E. teacher who asked, demanded, that I swim again in the next meet. I said yes. But first I had to help them win the relay. Which I did.
Laura Rodley © 2015
Laura Rodley received a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Resurrection,” (originally in The New Verse News and now in Pushcart Edition XXXVII), and she has had work published in Best Indie Lit New England, Massachusetts Review, and Hunger Mountain among others. She is editor and publisher of As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, a compilation of memoirs from seniors age 70 through 95.
Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing.
More recent poems by Laura Rodley featured on The New Verse News include “After the Bad News,” which appeared January 23, 2015 and “Snow Before Thanksgiving,” which appeared on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2014.
Laura also writes features for Country Folks, the Weekly Farm Paper Highlighting Agriculture.
She has two chapbooks from Finishing Line Press: Rappelling Blue Light and Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose.
Thank you Laura Rodley for letting me share your prose.
A transformational tale with strong images.