In a weather-soaked barn in the countryside where I live, I once met a horse that swam away with my heart. His owner, a backyard dealer in Arabian horses, had found him on a ruined estate — a sac, she said, of beautiful bones. In proof his instincts and hers, she now had a small herd of colts and mares in foal, and a fully restored antique stud that looked like it had leapt from the Parthenon frieze. And landed here in mud season, alive and intact.
At the colossal age of 27, the horse lived at the end of the barn, away from the mares. Elderly stallions can still be rowdy, but this one only turned its elegant head as we rolled back the door. It stood stone still, struck white with the years, breathing the cold wet air of a New England spring. Its back was straight. Its chest was square. The head was the sort that turns horsemen into fools: wide in the brow, square in the chin, with small cursive ears and the huge soft eyes of an odalisque. Koranic tradition puts a woman’s face on the horse that flew Mohammed to heaven. Now I saw why.
This, said the dealer, is the Bedouin war horse, fetched from the Ottoman Empire to improve the American cavalry mount. She spoke of the blood type and its fortunes in America, of the Arabian’s mystique in the annals of horse history. The pedigree went on forever. I could hear the men talk under the Macedonian sun, as they watched the boy Alexander tame a wall-eyed horse called Bucephalos, “bull-headed.” And Achilles and Ajax,whittling away the years outside Troy, chatting blood lines and chariot design. (Achilles might have talked less; he’d have heard his death prophesied in the mouth of his horse.)
A universe lives inside a horse. But the beast that is mainly discussed is the money horse: the show horse, the race horse, the pride of kings and the id of horse hungry girls. This is the totem for privilege and status — for what the horse has chiefly signified in history has been military might. Until machines took over, the horse was how nation plundered nation. Consider the horsemen of the Apocalypse bringing War, Famine, Plague, Death. Or the war horse of Job pawing in the valley, going to meet the armed men, bugling “Ha Ha” among the trumpets, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.
But horses are only as bold as their riders. In their chameleon souls, they will smell weakness and fear, tossing the feint of heart into ditches — or like the runaway horses of Helios — out of heaven. For the horse is a prey animal, prone to flight: a thousand pounds of volatility, obedient to tremors and wind.
To know horses, it’s best to keep quiet. When the telephone rang and the dealer ran to answer it, the barn relapsed into silence. Water dripped from the eaves. Chickens pecked in the aisle. The sounds of rustling hay and chewing echoed through the plank walls. And Job’s war horse became another creature entirely. Lowering long white lashes over bedroom eyes, the horse parked his chin on my shoulder and blew into my ear. His breath smelled like an ocean of grass. The sea rocked in his chest. The velvety nostrils were the insides of conch shells. Star light swam in his eyes.
Bringer of war, the horse also brings revelation. The Romans kept oracular white horses in sacred groves, divining the fate of the Empire from their stamping and snorting. At the end of time, both the Messiah and Vishnu are supposed to descend from the clouds on heraldic white horses. It was a dragon-horse from heaven that revealed the universal forces, the Yin and the Yang, to the Yellow Emperor of China
But this horse was more water than sky — like the sacrificial world horse in the Upanishads whose element is the sea. Or the steeds of Poseidon, ruler of horses. And then I recalled a fishy tale concerning white horses: lustrous, pearly white stallions that come ashore on moonless nights and travel hundreds of miles on cleft hooves to court mares. These horses are tame and will do prodigious work. But they must be kept away from rivers and lakes, or they revert to their ancient nature and swim away.
When the dealer returned, she could see something had happened.
You old flirt, she said to her horse.
As she slid the door of the stall shut, the ancient seducer tossed his head and showed us the whites of his eyes. And I thought: Yes indeed, that’s the Old Man of the Sea. I’d have given my left arm to grasp that fish by the ribs and hold him to his horse shape.
But there was, understandably, no invitation here to do any such thing.
If I were my hostess, if I owned such a horse, I would not let any stranger climb on my antiques.
Besides, there were streams on the property and a lake down the road. And I doubt I could have been trusted not to let the horse go. ♦
— Alice van Buren
Adapted from the original in Parabola Magazine, Volume 8, No. 2, “Animals,” Summer1983.
