Barnstorming

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
~Donald Hall “Name of Horses”

Today, we said goodbye to our last Haflinger mare after four decades of being a breeding farm. We have two geldings left on the farm, in their early 20’s.

I was dreading this day but knew it would eventually come.

Belinda, who I have written about here, flew from the Netherlands as a baby with her mother in 1998, bringing new bloodlines to North America from an East German Haflinger breeding program, at the time only recently accessible to breeders with the opening of the Berlin Wall.

She proved to be a great broodmare here on our farm and her foals all sold quickly to other breeders. However, her last twelve years of retirement were complicated by metabolic imbalance and a tendency toward laminitis. We finally had to make the hard choice to bring out the vet to gently help her pass with intravenous medication into eternal lush pastures she could tolerate. Then the local hauler picked her up for cremation. No bullets to the brain, no hole to be dug.

We have done our final parting with our horses in this way over our forty years of Haflinger ownership. It is certainly different from how it was done when I was a kid on a small cow and horse farm. Our family mare, Dolly, in 1965, was put down by a vet’s bullet to the head after an agonizing bout with colic. My dad sent me back to the house beforehand, not wanting me to watch. Still, I could not help but hear the gunshot as if it had gone right through me as well. It took Dad the rest of the day to dig a hole deep enough so she could be buried on our farm.

At first her grave was my place to cry where no one but the trees and wild flowers could see.

When my tears finally dried up, it was a place to sing loudly where no one but chipmunks and my dog could hear.

And before I left for college, it became the sanctuary where I retreated to talk to God when my church no longer was.

I suspect her bones lie there still, with tall trees now growing through her ribs. That dent in the ground will always betray the spot.

We’ll remember you fondly, Belinda. You traveled far to come here and gave us your best. We promised you would live here on this farm, in peace, until your last breath.