Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
Welcome to Dan's Tiki Bar, and welcome to this episode of Bits & Peaces.
You may recall that Martha and I had bought the farm and, as part of buying the farm, I did my first horse trading - real horse trading. I traded a paint job for the whole farm house for a horse called Go-Go. Along with Go-Go came a kind of side pony. The side pony's name was Goody Four Shoes. Goody Four Shoes was a brown pony with a white muzzle and four white socks, and Goody wasn't part of my purchase. It was made very clear to me that Goody was owned by somebody else, a woman who was going to pick him up eventually, but because he and Go-Go loved to hang out together, would I mind keeping him at the farm until she came by. And I said we were fine with that. Goody was Go-Go's constant companion and, you know, that seemed to make sense to us. The challenge was Goody had been abused sometime in her life and, as a consequence, she was mean and unapproachable, but she showed up for food. She came up to the barn and ate with Go-Go, and she showed up when I kicked hay out of the loft. She came and ate that. Otherwise, she by and large tried to avoid us.
After we had lived on the farm a little while though, Martha noticed that she wasn't eating like she was supposed to. When she tried to feed her oats or something like that, she wasn’t really eating very well, and so she called our friend Tim the vet. Tim is a short muscular sort of guy with almost a Fu Manchu mustache, pirate-looking with a glass eye, and he lived not far from us, just up the road from, and Tim was quick-witted. One time, I told Tim a natural joke that had occurred over the course of my life. When I was growing up in Florida, and I'd act up, my mother would threaten to send me to Alabama to go to reform school. Later, I went to Alabama to go to college, and one day my wife and I heard one of our professors threaten her daughter that if she kept acting up she was going to send her to Mississippi to go to school. So I told Tim this series of events, and said “Tim, so when you were growing up in Mississippi, what did your mother threaten you with if you acted up?”, and he immediately said, “Oh, she threatened to send us to school.” That quick wit was basically the product of a great education. Tim was one of the smartest people I know, and he taught me about Eudora Welty. He was actually an educational product that Mississippi should be very proud of. Tim said that the problem with the pony’s eating was her teeth, that horse teeth and pony teeth keep growing throughout their life, and they can grow so long that it's actually difficult for the animals to eat, and so the teeth needed to be filed down. So Tim came over to file down the pony’s teeth, and got in the stall with the pony. The pony immediately kicked a board loose from the stall. It went flying across the barn, and Tim was over the side of the stall and said, “I'm not sure today's a good day for this teeth filing thing.” I said, “Tim, this is not what James Herriot would be doing. James Herriot might be kicked through the side of the barn, but he'd be taking care of this pony.” Tim said, “You know, I castrated 20 bulls today, and I'm not feeling very Herriot like." It took a six pack of PBR, but Tim recovered his bravery, and went in the stall with the pony, gave her a sedative and filed down her teeth. She came to pretty quick and immediately kicked another board out the side of the stall, and Tim was over the side saying “I think that's enough for today.”
Later that same year, it was a big winter storm, the biggest storm we had that year. Lots of snow, and Martha and I had never really experienced taking care of big animals in the snow. But I went down to the barn to kick some hay out for the horse and the pony, and Go-Go was up at the barn, but the pony, his constant companion, wasn't with him. And so I knew something was wrong. I went back up to the house and got Martha, and we started looking. Now, we had to cover about 20 acres of field. The field went down a hillside to a creek and then up the other side. There were some trees around but most of it was open field - a lot of open field - in the dark. There wasn't much moonlight. It was still snowing and so it was pretty dark. We looked all around, and we didn't see the pony standing anywhere in the field. We’d decided maybe she lied down some place, that she was not feeling well and she'd lied down. That meant that every drift in the field was potentially the pony, and we went around sort of walking through drifts and poking drifts trying to find her, and we did. We finally found her completely buried under the snow in one of the drifts. We cleaned it off. We were sure she was gone because she was covered up. Her head everything was covered up, but she was still alive. We got her to her feet and got her up to the barn. She was fairly docile for a change, and we got her up to the barn and got her into a stall and by now it's about midnight. We called Tim. Now, I don't know how many of you could call a vet at midnight and get them to show up, but we had every hope that Tim would show up. The first thing Tim said when he got on the phone and we told him what had happened was “I hate that pony.” The next thing he said was “Make sure she doesn't lie down. Keep her moving. Keep her warm. Put a blanket over her, and I'll be there in a while. And Tim drove his Jeep through the snow drifts and the snow and came to Arcadia to help the pony. He got in the stall with her. She was really bad off, barely able to respond, so she didn't put up any fight. He led her around for a little while to make sure he knew what was going on. He knew that she'd colicked, and he told us the reason she colicked was because the water had gotten frozen up at the barn and so had the water in the creek, and so she hadn't had enough water to drink with her hay. He walked her around, and then finally he gave her a shot of adrenaline and a few minutes later, she kicked the stall and he was over the side saying “Well, you know, I really think she's all right, and by the way, I hate that pony.” She was fine. She made it through the rest of that winter.
The next winter though, she didn't make it. I came out on a very cold frozen day, and she was dead in the corral. And it was so cold that she was frozen solid, and the ground was frozen solid as well. I called Jim. If you remember, Jim was our friend, the farmer who’d sold us this property, and any time we had one of our many Green Acres type questions, we called Jim. And Jim said “Well, you have two choices. The first choice, you could call this number and they'll come and get the pony and it won’t cost you anything. They'll take away the pony no charge.” Now, for Jim this was the perfect result because Jim was cheap. He was classic farmer cheap. Jim didn't want to pay for anything. When we’d first been walking on the farm trying to decide whether to buy it, we went into the woods and we found 20 skeletons in the woods. “What are those?”, and he said “Well, a bunch of the cows were standing on a hillside and were struck by lightning, and we just hauled them off into the woods and let the critters take care of them. So a no-cost solution to the dead pony was perfect to Jim, but I asked “What will happen to her?” He said “Well, the guy who will get her has foxhounds, and she'll be fed to the foxhounds. I said “Jim, I live in a house with three women and I don't think that solution will go over well here. What's my next choice?” He said “Well, the next choice will cost you. You call this one, and the guy will bring a backhoe and he'll bury the pony.” And I said “Okay. How much is that going to cost?” He said “It'll probably cost $50.” “Okay. I think we can do that.”
So I called the number, arranged for him to come and he came along with his backhoe. I happened to be there that day. He came on a workday, but I made a point of coming because I wanted to see how this would go. And by the way, this was weeks after she’d died because we had to wait for her to thaw enough to move her and for the ground, more importantly, to thaw enough for the backhoe to even begin to dig the hole. Here's the backhoe, the ground is thawed, and he hooks the backhoe up to her and he drags her off into our front field. He dug a big hole, and I'm walking along behind the backhoe supervising this operation, and I look up, and all along the fence there in the front of that field are all of these kids. And they're all like up on the first board leaning over watching this. There's like two dozen kids, and the weird thing about this is Martha and I had lived there for several months and we hadn't seen any children. We had no idea there were any children within walking distance. We've no idea how they all knew to come there then. No idea. But here were a couple of dozen kids watching this operation, and they put Goody in the ground and they covered her up. And, you know, we said a few words. It was kind of sad, but then the interesting thing was in the spring.
Something happened and nobody really paid any attention to where we put her in the ground, but it was actually near where an old farmhouse had been. And the farmhouse had been bulldozed and pushed into a gully to sort of fill it up and to keep the cows from wandering in it, but in the spring where goody had been put in the ground, all of these daffodils came up from there at the old farm site, and they were just beautiful. It was just gorgeous, and it reminded me that in all of these old romantic period paintings, not in all of them, but in many of them, the artist would paint down in the corner a little skull and this inscription “Et in Arcadia Ego” and it was a reminder that even in Arcadia - remember the name of our farm, Arcadia - death came, but it was part of wonderful process. A process in which life also recurred in the cycle, and it was just part of being there on the farm.
Thank you for joining us today.
I hope you'll join us for the next session in which we’ll talk more about Go-Go, and the series of efforts we went through to provide him continuing company.
I'll see you next time at Dan’s Tiki Bar for Bits & Peaces.
Thanks!
Bye.
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