I was just starting last night’s evening chores when I heard the year’s first woodcock singing somewhere on the rim of the lower hayfield. It’s been a mild winter, but even so, the 19th of February is early for us to hear woodcock. I stood there at dusk, a spring peeper chorus bringing down the day. I checked the iPhone for the fifteen day forecast. The promise was for frost-free weather into the beginning of March.
Three years ago last night was warm, too, a dense fog rising from high snow banks piled around the parking lot of the Fairfield Inn, an assisted living facility. My longtime friend and bird dog/gaited horse mentor Bob Thompson had been there since November. He’d begun the decline we’d been warned about when the cancer finally took hold and was bedridden for only the second time in the 28 years I’d known him. We’d watched an Ohio State basketball game together, but he was irritable and restless in his chair. He seemed almost anxious for me to leave.
My horses were pastured for the winter at my parents’ house, and I was rustling feed for them just after dawn the next morning when a call came in from the Inn. The nice lady who worked the front desk couldn’t mask the concern in her voice.
“Mr. Thompson is very upset this morning. We cannot get him to settle down, and he’s asking for you.”
It took almost a half hour to drive across town. As I was self-consciously wiping my wet barn boots at the front door, one of Bob’s caregivers was walking by. She saw me and swung open the front door. “He’s had a bad dream. We can’t do anything with him.”
I clomped down the long hallway and into the private room. The wreath I’d made for him at Christmas still hung on the wall where he could see it from his bed. It was decorated with grouse, goose, and pheasant feathers stuck between ornaments that were totems from his life – Labrador retriever, bluebird, English pointer, rainbow trout, mule, and a wooden river float boat.
Bob reached out his hand. “Oh thank God you’re here. I had a bad dream.”
I told him that I understood, that I had them often.
He looked at me as if I’d dropped in from Mars. “I’ve never had one in my life.”
“You’ve never had a bad dream in your life. Ever.”
“No. Never.”
I looked at the hospice worker holding his hand on the other side of the bed. She shrugged and offered him a sip of water from one of those sippy-cup things they use in hospitals.
“88 years and you’ve had one bad dream in your entire life. I’d call that pretty good.”
He turned to me, closed his eyes, and said, “I had a dead horse and a dog dead, and I couldn’t find you to help me bury them. It was awful.”
I pulled up a chair next to the head of the bed. “I’m so sorry. I wish somebody had called when you woke in the night.”
“He wasn’t awake in the night,” the hospice worker offered. “He woke in a panic when we came in first thing this morning. That’s when we called.”
Bob lay there with his eyes closed. “I couldn’t find you,” he said again. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t know I’d been staying at his home during the big snowstorm and hard freeze, keeping the pipes thawed, his dogs and mine crowded in the kitchen. “Bob, everything’s OK at your farm. I was just doing horse chores at my folks’ place when I got the call. The mule’s got ‘em all up on the hill, doing fine. The dogs are all fine. Everything’s fine.”
He took a deep breath and shuddered. “It was just so real.”
“Well, the best thing about bad dreams is that we wake up and know that they’re over. You’re OK. It’s all good.”
I stayed another half hour. He was weak, but had begun to relax a little bit. The second hospice attendant stopped in and thanked Bob for the slide show from the week before. Bob’s youngest son Pete had found slides and an old projector in storage at the farmhouse and had put together a collection of images from fishing trips to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Montana, pictures from the quail shooting he’d had on the farm, of dogs and gaited horses long passed.
Bob had forgotten about many of those old photos, and he’d gotten a big kick out of Pete showing them to the nurses and attendants with whom we’d become friendly over the past several months.
I stood to leave and shook his hand. “I’ll be back tonight to check on you,” I promised.
I returned to my mom and dad’s farm, gathered grain buckets and whistled the horses down off the hill. Fat from a winter of inactivity, good hay, and forage, they ambled easily into the feed lot, led by the big black mule Sister Sarah. All present and accounted for except Rosita, the grey mare…my favorite, bought from the Clattenburg Ranch in Louisiana, my first registered Peruvian horse; my main ride, the one who roaded my dogs, the one I’d taken to Gettysburg; Rosita, the mother of my friend Dora’s mule Cisco, the patient horse who’d ferried countless novice riders around the farm…
Herd-bound and as obedient as she was, this wasn’t like her not to come down to the grain call. I looked back up the hill to see if she was still standing along the fence with the neighbors’ horses. No Rosita. I fed the others, then trudged through the rotting snow up the hill.
I walked the entire pasture, calling for her. I checked the gates. All solid. I went back into the feedlot and through the corridor my dad had rigged across the lane so our little herd could settle in his big bank barn. I noticed a gate had been shoved in to a lower bay where round bales were stored. The horses had been eating at those bales. I walked by the mounds of hay and turned on the light to the big back stall beyond them. No Rosita.
My stomach churning, I finally went to the little pond, frozen for weeks but sagging into a thaw from the last three warm days. Maybe she had fallen through the ice. The banks and slushy surface were undisturbed.
I made the rounds again – feedlot, hill, all through the barn, back to the pond. She was simply gone. At my wit’s end, I decided that, crazy as it seemed, maybe she’d been stolen. Rosita was the only horse on the hill with a halter on. She was also the quietest one, the one that would go with anyone. She was the one I saddled to go into the village, to travel on the roads that wagon-wheeled away from town. People around knew her, knew she was fancy, figured she was gentle. Somebody had stolen my horse.
I checked the gate that opened to the back lane, the one closest to the road, farthest away from my parents’ home, the one a thief would take if he was going to steal a horse. On the south slope of the hills pasture, much of the snow was gone. I could see no horse or human or trailer tracks, but the ground was still mostly frozen. Finally I called the sheriff.
As patiently as possible, I explained to the bored dispatcher that I thought one of my horses had been stolen. She took my information and said there was a deputy in the area, that she’d ask him to stop by.
Twenty minutes later, the black sheriff’s department car rolled up to the big bank barn. Behind the wheel was a good-humored young man I knew, a former student who’d taken my writing class down at Hocking College while working toward his degree in police science. He took down the information, then handed a copy of the report sheet to me.
I pointed out that he had spelled, “mare” as “mayor.”
He looked over at my dented-up Toyota truck and said, “Professor Lawrence, if you had done a better job helping me with my spelling, maybe I could have found the time to teach you how to drive.”
We both laughed. He said, “Honestly, we answer calls like this a lot more than people think. Almost always, the animal has jumped a fence, wandered off, gotten in with somebody’s else’s stock. She’ll turn up.”
None of that squared with anything I knew about Rosita, but I thanked him and was shaking his hand good-bye when the phone buzzed in my pocket. The call came up “Fairfield Inn.” This time it was Janet, the head nurse. She asked that I come quickly.
When I got to Bob’s bedside, he was barely conscious. He had had a dose of morphine to calm him enough to ease his breathing, but as I came into the room, an attendant was wiping a spittle of blood from the side of his mouth. One of his feet was uncovered; I went cold all over when I noticed his skin was blotchy across his instep. We’d been warned about all of that coming near the end.
I let Bob know that I was with him. He opened his eyes and gave a slight nod. Nurse Janet was in the room. She shot her eyes to the hallway, and I followed her out.
“You’d better call Pete,” she said. “I don’t think he has much time. I’ve contacted the hospice office. He is refusing the morphine now, though, and that’s not good.”
“He hates morphine,” I reminded her. “He doesn’t want to feel loopy.”
She just stood there, looking at me.
“I mean, what would you do if this was your dad, your brother?”
She looked into the room. “I’d do whatever it took to make this easy.”
I went back to stand by the bed. Bob waved toward the blinds, gesturing that they be drawn against the wan February sunlight. The room grew dark and close, the open door to the hallway the only light. I spoke softly to my old friend.
“Bob, Nurse Janet says it will be easier to breathe with another dose of medicine. I know you hate that junk, but you know Janet. She’s been with us the whole way. She wouldn’t recommend it if it wouldn’t help you.”
He was propped up in the hospital bed, his thin shoulders stark against a grey insulated undershirt. Finally, he nodded.
I stepped back out where Janet was already waiting with the medicine. I told her to go ahead, then stepped down the hallway to call Pete. He was about 40 minutes away.
The visiting hospice nurse, a woman we’d never met, made it in before Pete. She flicked on a small table light, quietly introduced herself to me, and bent over Bob’s bed to gently tell him her name and that she was there to help him. He was unresponsive as she pulled out a stethoscope and began listening at his chest. That’s when I noticed her jacket.
Tan and hip length, it was printed with game bird feathers, as if the fabric artist had studied Bob’s wreath. There were long spikes of pheasant tails, a grouse fan, single grouse feathers, and the curled drake feathers from mallard ducks. And while she spoke to Bob and to the aides in attendance, I knew he was in the hands that were meant to usher him out of this world with grace, and with the dignity he carried with him every day of his life.
It was nearly dusk before I made it outside to call friends and let them know that Bob had passed. I checked my text messages. There was one from my sister marked “5:15,” thirteen minutes before the hospice nurse had folded her stethoscope for the final time, straightened from the bed, and told Pete and me that it was over.
The text read, “Found Rosita dead in the barn down between the round hay bales.”
I stood there in the gathering twilight, the relief that Bob’s ordeal was finally over overpowered with the horror of the horses moiling around in that lower barn bay, of Rosita somehow getting caught between heavy bales, struggling, losing her feet, and dying a brutal death. I had walked six feet from her body three different times and never saw her.
And then it hit me… Bob’s dream. Three years ago tomorrow, we had a horse to bury.