Buzz and Jetty

Buzz died after falling down the shit hole. Not immediately, but it was the beginning of the end.

He'd always warned us: "Watch your step, don't fall down the shit hole!"

I suppose I should explain. The barn he was renting was a real New England old style, and really old, barn. It was built in such a way that the main entry was level with the drive while one side of the barn faced the street. The other side faced the field, and on the field side there was a whole other level of the barn evident - a basement of sorts. In past years it had been retrofitted by the owners for I think pigs; before that it probably had had stalls on that level.

The barn was old enough that the upper floor, though the planks were thick and solid and worn so smooth that they almost seemed to be one big plank, sagged quite a bit. Buzz was constantly vigilant about checking the joists he had put in in the basement that were holding the floor up; but where joists weren't, dips were. It was a floor with character.

There was a trap door in that floor, right outside the tack room - about 2 1/2 ft square and about 6" thick, with a big iron ring to lift it up with. In the winter, when the snow piled up so high that trucking wheelbarrows full of manure out to the back of the field became impossible, Buzz would lift the trap door and dump the manure down that hole. In the spring, with the snow gone, he'd spend weeks traipsing it all back out to the back of the field.

That was the shit hole. In the dead of winter he'd hoist the heavy trap up with a hay hook looped through the ring, to dump the brimming wheelbarrows. It seemed as if he was opening up a portal to the pits of hell: the malodorous steam would billow up in the cold air, the warmth of it hitting our faces as we giggled nervously, trying from a few steps back to see down through it to the manure mountain below. We were all a bit afraid of and fascinated by the shit hole.

So it's kind of ironic that Buzz himself fell down the shit hole. It must have been late winter, since he didn't fall too far, but he did scrape his leg up badly. He didn't take care of it, it got gangrenous, and he ended up in the hospital. He delegated care of the horses to Karen, since she lived so close it only made sense, I suppose. My memories of this time are a bit hazy; I think I also had a new boyfriend at the same time, my first, and so my attention was elsewhere. A typical self-involved teen.

I don't have a good sense of the time line: I think he was in the hospital for a couple of months before he finally died; but I also seem to remember he came out for a bit, then went back in. He had lost a lot of weight before he died, so he probably had more wrong with him than that he'd fallen down the shit hole, but I don't think anyone ever told us (or at least me) what the whole truth was. His was the first wake I'd ever attended, and I remember thinking how that body wasn't Buzz at all - it was too tiny, and too waxy, and too wrong.

After he died, his family and Karen argued about the horses. She said Buzz had told her she could keep them; I don't know if he did or he didn't, but he never put it in writing and they were his family so they had the last word.

They had the oldest ones - Little Dick and the little gray pony Smokey - trucked off to the killers, and I suppose must have sold most of the others, though I don't know that for a fact. I do know that they ended up keeping Jetty and a little white welsh pony named Jessie.

I don't know why they kept them - they had no love for them - unless it was just because Karen had been such a pain in the ass they did it for spite. And because I was Karen's friend, I wasn't allowed to see Jetty either.

I don't remember how it happened - I think I just got up the nerve to try again, and stopped at Buzz's ex-wife's house where they were being kept - but about a year later I was allowed to see Jetty.

They'd almost killed him. He was so thin, I could see all his ribs, and his hip bones jutted out like wire coat hangers. I begged them to let me start bringing food, and they said "Sure, it's your money". So I started bringing food for Jetty and Jessie.

For about a month, I'd bring over grain and some hay. I'd gotten maybe a hundred pounds back on Jetty - his condition wasn't great, but he wasn't quite so skeletal any more. For the first time in over a year I climbed on his back for this photo -

I'd thought the photo in the previous post was my only one of Jetty; I'd forgotten this one, which I just found recently looking through an old photo album.

He seemed so frail, at first I wasn't sure if he could support my weight, and I didn't want to ask him to move. But he knew he had a rider up, and he arched his neck and tucked his head in, proudly. I got off him quickly but I was encouraged: he seemed to be rallying. I went home happy that day.

A few days later, I brought over some worm medicine for them. I mixed a bit in Jetty's and a bit in Jessie's grain. Jetty ate it hungrily, but Jessie was suspicious. I left it there, hoping she'd eat it later. Neither one of them had been wormed in a long time.

After I left, Buzz's family saw that she wasn't eating her grain and, even though I'd told them that I'd mixed wormer in it, fed that to Jetty as well - they didn't want any to go to waste - as if they'd been the ones to actually put up the money for it.

Jetty colicked that night - the double dose of worm medicine (and it was very harsh stuff back then) was too much for his already stressed system. They called me, and I walked him for hours, and I called Billy Cash, Buzz's friend, who came over and got mineral oil into him, and whiskey (these were the things the old-timers did for colic), and we walked and walked into the night.

I went home exhausted; he didn't seem as stressed so they told me to go home. The next morning they called to tell me he'd died.

He was a good horse.