paddling
chelsey clammer
Before Tulsa was put down around noon, she went down in the morning. A deaf, mostly blind, malnourished, twenty-four-year-old horse got on her knees at some point early in the a.m. and was lying on her side by the time the cops arrived. Neither of the two officers was the cop who showed up last week in response to an animal report. That cop will do a follow-up in a few weeks. These cops were responding to a new call. Apparently the neighbors have noticed some things.
Tulsa was being unintentionally starved. Accidental neglect. A lot has been going on ’round these parts—this six-acre property out in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Eleven deaths in eight months. Two cats, five chickens, two goats, a horse, and one mother—all dead in the past 195 days. I did the math. That’s an average of one death every 17.1 days.
After her mother died and one goat died and two cats died, Courtney, the official property owner of the now neglect-riddled ranch, found an oar in the chaotic clutter of her spider-webbed and dirt-coated barn. The oar was the perfect opportunity to paint and decorate, a thing to express how she felt at that point. Art therapy of sorts. She glued some letters on it. “SHIT CREEK,” it reads. The oar is hanging outside her bedroom door where Courtney’s mom bled to death in her arms 195 days ago.
So with a mother dying and cats dying and goats dying and chickens dying and a dog dying during these past eight months, the horses fell to the wayside. They were put to pasture, left to fend for themselves, to graze on the brittle grass and drink from the muddy pond. Out there, they were forgotten about more often than not. It’s the “not” that led to Tulsa turning skeletal. That led to the neighbors making calls. Too malnourished, too old, too many pre-existing health conditions; the horse is now a corpse.
A green tarp is draped over her body as we call an organization whose specialization is hauling off dead horses and is called—get this—Final Ride.
Earlier this afternoon, before I helped Courtney cut off the hair on Tulsa’s lifeless tail—a common keepsake among country-living folk—I watched the vet stick so many drug-filled needles in Tulsa’s neck that blood oozed out of the new wound. She took a long time to die. Courtney says that horse was always stubborn. Finally, there were a few final grunts. The heartbeat stopped, and her lungs and nerves twitched themselves until there wasn’t enough life in Tulsa to keep twitching.
Her ribs were clearly visible. Hipbones jutting out just so, that they reminded me of supermodels because when it’s not in reference to animals, malnourishment in our society is sexy. Approved of. Praised. This is more than appalling.
Though it is not as appalling as how the high, sharp peaks of Tulsa’s hipbones arrived because of forgetfulness and distraction—a common thing ’round here now that Courtney’s mom suddenly and unexpectedly left her daughter to fend for herself.
Grab your oar.
Tulsa’s death was inevitable—all deaths are. But like Courtney’s mother, Tulsa too died too soon. Even though a sixty-nine-year-old woman isn’t the youngest thing, and neither is a twenty-four-year-old horse, they’re still young enough to assume there are a good number of life years left. Their final ride doesn’t seem so close. But life isn’t a certainty.
The day my dog and I moved into Courtney’s house to keep her company was the day Codi died in his doghouse. Heatstroke, I suspect. Another issue of neglect. And so on the day a puppy arrived on this property, the four-year-old dog who was living here left.
There was an equal amount of animal arrivals and departures that day.
There have almost been as many departures in these past 195 days as there have been survivors.
The survivors: ten cats, two horses, two chickens, one duck, two dogs, and one daughter. Eighteen life-sustainers. Though staying-aliveness is obviously not a given in this house.
Along with humorously decorating discarded oars, Courtney recently discovered a new crafting obsession—fake floral arrangements. There’s something to say here about the certainty you feel when you know—without a doubt—that something won’t die on you.
The fake flowers hanging around the house haven’t died.
Yet.
Final Ride finally arrived. It’s been two days. Two days of the tarp over the dead horse. Two days of sun crashing down on the covered corpse. Two days of decomposition and so when we pull the tarp off Tulsa, I’m surprised by how much better she looks. Her gut is bloated, and aside from the sack of whatever that is hanging outside her ass and is filled with liquid and please God don’t let that thing pop, she looks good. Not a rib in sight.
Never did I ever think I’d watch a woman wrap a cable around a dead horse’s neck and pull the horse—its eyes still open, dead blue orbs piercing my vision—up onto a flatbed trailer, like it’s a car being towed. Within minutes, Tulsa is whisked away for her final ride to the horse cemetery and Courtney and I go back into the cluttered house to pretend we didn’t just see that.
And now it’s a few hours later, and Courtney and I are in the dining room talking about whatever when Skylar, my dog, starts barking ferociously at the closed blinds that cover the sliding glass door that leads out to the backyard.
“What the hell are you barking at, dog?”
Probably Casey, the half-German shepherd and half-great Pyrenees who lives in that back section of the yard. I peek my head through the slats to assess what Skylar is barking at. I don’t see her at first, but then—oh look. There’s Casey. The top of her big white head poking up from the other side of the deck, and there are her big black eyes, staring right into mine.
Unblinking.
She’s still staring.
And there’s the chain she’s tied to, wrapped around the post of the railing. A sliver of her pink collar seen.
She’s still staring.
Unblinking.
Chain. Collar. Post. Four-feet-tall deck. Just the top of her head poking out.
And those eyes still staring at me.
Unblinking.
Click.
“Casey’s not okay!” I scream.
The horror doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end when Courtney rushes through the door. It doesn’t end when she screams, “Casey!” Or when I ask, “Is she okay?” even though I know the answer. Or when Courtney says, “She’s dead,” and I put my dog in her kennel and go back out to Courtney who is sitting on the deck steps, sobbing.
The horror doesn’t end when I see Casey’s stiff body on the ground—it only gets stronger when I notice the bloody chew marks in the side of the deck, right next to where her head was.
There is no end to this horror because I will never be able to un-see those desperate, bloody gouges in the wood, the blood on dead Casey’s teeth. And I can never un-see those eyes, unblinking. Her final look as she gasped out her final breath—pleading.
Courtney and I consider the timeline. Neither of us heard her struggling, so she must have died before we came back into the house. Which is to say that as we were watching a dead horse get winched up onto a flatbed trailer, a dog was getting hanged to death on the other side of the house.
Math update: 12 deaths in eight months.
That’s 1 death every 16.1 days.
Skylar barks from her kennel—it’s music to me. It means she’s alive—which is apparently an extraordinary feat to achieve in this house. Her barking breath is a reassurance. Never have I ever loved her barking as much as I do now.
Courtney’s mom died and now Courtney’s animals are dying because she doesn’t know how to live. I look at the squalor all around me. The way I must brace myself for another death. Or steady myself so I don’t trip over the messes that list to the left. Piles of junk swaying to the right. Everything is everywhere and so Courtney’s days are spent in a continuous cycle of questioning, “Have you seen _____?”
Her items are as lost as she is.
The main thing dying here is Courtney’s spirit. And the effects of it are rippling out, literally killing everything around her. I think of the concept of a catalyst. Regina’s death. Courtney’s trauma. A short matrilineage of death. Courtney has no children, so next in line are the animals. They’re dropping faster than the flies that circle the broken sink, the piled results of a hoarder, the fermented bag of grapes that was sitting on the counter for weeks. “I’m gonna clean it,” Courtney declared. After another couple of weeks, I gave up on seeing her intentions come to fruition and I threw the mush and ooze of green grapes out, hundreds of gnats and dead fruit flies included.
There is so much that’s going wrong here. These things shouldn’t be happening. But they are. They keep happening. All I can wonder is when God will stop beating a dead horse.
The sunset is gorgeous tonight, by the way.
Beauty found in a diminishing thing.
