Horsekeeping Read Free Page A

daughter, Jane, helmeted and smiling on a white pony with a flowing mane. I imagined our ten-year-old nature-loving son, Elliot, growing muscular and competent mucking out stalls. I sighed over visions of the sun gleaming on the river, the restored-to-their-former-glory barns, and solid, perfectly aligned fences corralling fit, contented horses kicking up their hooves in emerald green pastures. I considered all the animals I could justify having—chickens, goats, pigs or whatever else fills up a barn. They wouldn’t be in the house, so how could animal-averse Scott object? My vision beamed vivid Technicolor until my dark side, the monochromatic pessimist always alert to lurking disaster, concocted a scene of my silly ten-pound poodle kicked in the head to fly across the barn into a too-still heap. But this was minor in my schemes of calamity, and the only negative I could conjure.
    Like Bill, I decided to get on, and enjoy the ride.

CHAPTER TWO
    Farm Livin’ Is the Life for Me

    T HE DAY CAME FOR US TO SEE exactly what we had already agreed to buy. Excited despite the soggy grey air, we drove through eroding mud and parked in front of the barn’s open doors, its grinning maw ready to gobble us up.
    â€œReady to see what you’re in for?” asked Pat, our real estate agent, who smiled and swept her arm across the scene, her auburn highlights shining despite the lack of sun.
    â€œWe have to be the easiest clients you have: we agree to buy sight unseen and don’t even negotiate,” Scott joked.
    â€œYeah,” she laughed, “you probably win the prize.”
    Pat and I serve on the board of the local musical theatre company in an old barn of a playhouse, so we are good friends. This wouldn’t be the usual smarmy real estate tour, all of us being novices when it came to horse farms.
    We stepped through the middle of three double sliding doors and a few paces into the mammoth building. I could not see a thing. Thinking I was temporarily blinded by the limp November sunshine, I blinked to adjust to the abrupt change in light, but the place remained practically pitch black at high noon. A long slit of a weak glow intervened where one wall met the roof-line on our right: a “window” of mustardy corrugated plastic yielded, once our eyes adjusted, only a miasmatic gloom. The close air smelled old-person-poorly-groomed musty. As Pat fumbled for the lights, a thickened atmosphere pressed down on my shoulders, and though not mystically inclined, I registered a malevolent energy. Damp cold emanated from the dirt floor through the treads of my hiking boots and penetrated the bones of my legs. My back began to ache.

    Several hot-wired tubular fluorescent lights blinked to strobe a miracle of cobwebbery that echoed a horror film version of the snow-filled country house in Dr. Zhivago. Dust-laden spider houses hung like fishing nets opaquely thick from ceiling to floor, pillowing webbed balloon shades from every rafter, peg and seam, so weighty and abundant, I imagined them gathered up and sold as fiberglass insulation. Generations of insects industriously worked many undisturbed years to build this webbed metropolis, and I considered renting the place out as a movie set before a much needed power wash would flush them away.
    The lights decided to hum a slender illumination.
    â€œI’d definitely have an electrician check out this wiring,” Pat said.
    â€œI thought the inspector initially gave it the okay?” I complained, flipping the switch a few times.
    â€œIt’s probably not the only surprise,” my usually upbeat husband scowled, hands in his fleece-lined pockets for warmth and maybe to protect his wallet from this money pit.
    We focused our attention on the double rows of ten stalls leading to an open cross hall and then more stalls beyond. I saw the barn continued on, but against all our neck-straining peering the light reached no further. The splintered