| Short Stories |
| Stories From a Childhood in Maine |
| Essays |
| Poetry - Haiku |
|
|
|
The Horse PullingIf there was one event that could get a small boy's excitement running high it was the County fair in Cornish. As you might have guessed there wasn't that much going on in rural Maine, and the people who lived there prefer it that way. People visiting from out of state got nervous being there: Probably too many stars in the sky at night and something wrong with the smell of the air. New Yorkers would come up from the city in the summer for vacations and in the fall during the deer-hunting season to slaughter thousands of horses, cows, dogs, chickens, barns and assorted inanimate objects. Charlie Bradeen used to paint COW on the side of his cows in the hopes that those kill-crazy madmen from the city would read it and not shoot his animals. Didn't make any difference, if it moved they shot it. Before painting COW on the animals, he painted large white crosses on the poor benighted beasts, but those fellas from the city thought they were being told where to shoot so that idea didn't work out. The New Yorkers (Generic term for anyone out of state) seemed to have a lot of money because they bought expensive British rifles that would obliterate a rhino at a thousand yards. To really understand how bizarre this seasonal madness was you have to realize that Maine is a forested world and there probably isn't any place in the state where you can see a thousand yards without running into a tree. As for the deer, shoot, in the forest you are just as likely to step on one having a nap as see it at any distance. These New Yorkers would complain about the quiet, usually after being there a day. Weren't happy without the continuous din, I guess. We didn't mind if they came up our way, they had money which we were perfectly happy to get our hands on anyway we could. We could have done without all the cow and horse killing though. The County Fair was our big bash: low society, a lot of laughter, good food, and rides that probably wouldn't meet any known safety standard of today. It was always held in the fall. This was good because we could save our pennies and nickels for food and rides. We also had four days of sulky racing that was very popular, particularly with my mother who never saw a horse she didn't like or wouldn't bet on, but that's another story. I'll probably call it, "My Brother Bob, the Tout". There were competitions of every kind for the women in the home making skills: Food, flowers, sewing, arts & crafts. For the boys and men, farm related things, milking, races of all kinds, best livestock in every category and timber related competitions. And of course there was horse pulling. I don't know why these were so popular but they were. They still are. The way this worked was a sledge with two runners was loaded with several hundred tons of granite blocks. The horses, draft animals, big Percherons and Clydesdales, were hitched to the sledge and the owners would get the horses to pull that sledge as far as they could. So it wasn't two hundred tons, I was only eight years old and math wasn't my best subject, but I could write a decent declarative sentence even then. Looked like two hundred tons to me. I waited impatiently for the real excitement to start. I would get to see Norm Watson do magic. That's totally correct, magic. By now most people have read about "Horse Whispers" or at the least heard of them. Nice book, wish I had written it. I didn't know about these special people when I was eight, but I knew Norm Watson was special with horses, if nothing else. Some of the ladies in town called him a near-do-well, but they probably called the Pope a near-do-well too, so who cares. The rumor was that he had been a cowboy somewhere out west, working in rodeos and such. In hindsight, that could easily have been the overactive imaginations of little boys raised on cowboy movies and postmenopausal ladies with far too much time on their hands. There, that ought to get me shot at sunrise or worse by the politically correct. More on the rumor mill, which was very busy in that small town, manufacturing more fiction than Stephen King…another Maine boy who made good. It was said that Norm broke his back in the rodeo out west and had to quit the business…thus making his way back to Maine. I didn't care how he got there. He was special because horses loved him so much they would do whatever he asked. This is a fact; I saw it and remember it clearly to this day. I'll bet if he said, "horse, jump over that barn," that ole horse would up and leap over the barn like it was a low fence. I have heard that strange horses with dubious ownership would intentionally go to his pasture just to be where he was. I have heard… sorry, got carried away. Off to one side of the fairgrounds, near the ball field, which I knew like the inside of my first baseman's mitt, an area was set aside for the "pullin'". I'd get there early in the day as the horses started arriving. They came from all over the state, or maybe the world. In those sweet summer days, hyperbole was my middle name. They were huge, with wonderful warm breath and cyclopean eyes. There was a gentleness that filled the world around them and made you want to pet them and say, "Hello big fella. Hello beautiful horse." Of course it's pretty hard to hug an animal that is as big as a Peterbilt. Most of the owners were nice and would let you pet them and be there without a lot of, "leave that animal alone, Kid," or, "Get cher ass outa here Kid, before I kick it up between your shoulder blades," talk. I didn't much like that crap at all and managed to ignore it most of the time. It was America, I'd go where I damn well pleased. The owners spent a lot of time making their horses look pretty as though somehow it would make them pull harder. Maybe it did. I think I did better generally when I thought I looked good. The morning of the Pulling I arrived early. I didn't want to miss anything. There was a lot of talk among the men about the load, whether it had been measured accurately, was it distributed on the sled properly, you know, technical stuff. Then the first pair was ready. The owner fussed with the harness endlessly. I understood this. You get the harness wrong and you might hurt the horse, break a strap, or make it impossible for the horses to pull well. The owner carried a leather whip. It had a two-foot long solid handle with a three-foot leather strap attached. I hated that whip, I really did. My father took a strap to me enough times for me to know it wasn't any fun at all when wielded by a large powerful man with a bad temper. With the help of several other men the horses harness was hooked to the sledge with chains. I don't know what weight they started with but it was probably around a ton. There was a referee who watched over the whole process and told them when they could start. The driver of the horses usually didn't start right away. They could start whenever they wanted. It was for distance, which would be carefully measured after each pull. Some of those fellas got really crazy, walking around the horses shouting and making a terrible fuss. You could tell the horses were scared when they started looking around and rolling their great eyes. The owner would give a great shout and lay on with the whip. And how hard they would pull, their great muscles bulging, leaning forward, straining their utmost. There weren't but one or two fellas that didn't whip the horses unmercifully. The foam would fly from their lips and their flanks heave. The sledge would move with a jerk and if the horses were good and the owner knew what he was doing the horses might pull that sledge 30 or 40 feet. I really don't know how far they pulled. It looked a long way to me. Sometimes the horses couldn't move the sledge no matter what the driver did. They just didn't have what it took. Others were so strong they'd take off with that weight no matter what the driver did. Lots of times the driver would get right behind one of the horses and push on his hind end as hard as he could. That's allowed. When they were pushing on the one horse they'd be whipping the bejesus out of the other one. Was it me, I would dearly love to have taken a whip to the drivers. This went on for a long time, team after team. The teams were all as different as people. They had different ways of starting, of digging in. Some made it look easy, others looked like they were going to expire right there in their traces. Sometime after lunch it was Norm's turn. I was close by. He told me to stand off a way and was nice about it. I was sure he was going to tell the horse's secret things that only he and the horses understood, and as it went, that is probably exactly what he did. He got them hitched up and they pranced in place and didn't seem nervous and afraid as I had seen in the other horses. They looked proud and ready. He walked around them, laying his hands on each one gently, stroking them and telling them how beautiful and strong they were, and you could see they believed every word of it. He had no whip, nothing, not even reins. He just had magic in abundance. They snorted and neighed in their wonderful loud voices. Joe and Bess, they were as wonderful as animals get. Then he moved around in front of them and asked them if they were ready, really he did that. And he waited until he got the answer he wanted. Then he shouted. "Pullllll Joe, Pulllll Bess! And he would back up always looking at them and they would move toward him as though there wasn't anything heavy behind them at all. He would talk all the while walking backward. "Come, Joe, you can do it, you can do it, pulll you beauty. And the same to Bess…and there they were, going by the longest mark still pulling and moving that sledge perfectly. You knew it was magic. Sometimes they would pull that sledge full of granite two or three sledge lengths past the furthest pull of the day. It was like watching a long jumper almost jump out of the box. There didn't seem to be a limit as to how far they could pull. He'd stop them when they had gone far enough even if they could have done more. The other men would just shake their heads, wonder why their horses that were often bigger and stronger couldn't do that. It is simple to me now. What I instinctively knew in those long gone days, I now know with great certainty. Norm loved those horses and they knew it. He respected them and trusted them, and because of this they wouldn't, couldn't ever let him down. They would have pulled that damn granite to Kezar Falls if he had asked. Yes, it was magic. But it was a magic that anyone could have if they simply understood it and absolutely believed it. |
© copyright 2003 Donald P.Ladew All Rights Reserved