Yesterday evening a little before six while I was helping Libby to arrange the trustees’ cocktail party at Selden and Hock’s house, it became clear that a colicky horse was going to die. Selden, who had been in her office trying to write her speech for later that night, was quite nervous and edgy, understandably. She planned not to go up to the barn, trusting Bonnie and Rachel could handle it with the vet’s assistance. But she checked in with them and they said they thought the horse was going to die. They were concerned its insides would explode, which apparently can happen, and thought it would be best to put the horse down. So Selden changed clothes and departed the cocktail party. I went with her, charged with finding one of the men to dig a hole. I found Jeremy, a maintenance man who also works with our kids, who was at dinner supervising a table. I beckoned to him and he came and I explained the situation tersely. I was just as nervous and edgy as Selden. He knew what was needed, got a replacement table head and moved quickly toward the garage and the tractor, which is a large John Deere thing with a backhoe bucket on one end and a big rectangular scooping thing on the other. We met John C. walking toward the garage, on the same errand. So John took over, as was best, and I went to my car and drove up to the barn.

I parked where I always do and saw that the upper barn light was on. The cows bawled. I was expecting to hear the horse’s screaming and was glad to recognize simply cows, not agonized horse. Inside were the vet, others and Selden. The horse was lying down in the center stall, and the goats and cows on either side were watching curiously. The goats were standing up against the fence, gazing at the action. I wondered if they knew this horse was terribly sick, if they were upset. They didn’t seem to be but I petted them anyway while I watched. Katika the black cow sniffed me suspiciously but then seemed to recognize me and went back to watching the horse and people. Bonnie has the greatest experience and was leading the activity, but the male vet was clearly knowledgeable and in control. They were trying to get the horse, Sparky, to rise. He just lay there in the fresh straw, covered in a dark blanket. They pushed his rump, rocked him back and forth, pulled on his bridle, but he wouldn’t budget. I learned later that he had just been given a powerful pain killer. Someone suggested removing his blanket and that took a while. The vet did it very gently, and then with rocking and pulling and pushing they finally got Sparky to scramble upright. He seemed totally fine to me, but what do I know. Bonnie led him out of the stall into the cement-floored hallway and then the barnyard. His hooves made that wonderful clopping sound and all seemed normal except for the white faces and somber, urgent energy.

Selden needed to be there because she is the barn manager, but there was no good reason for me to be there. I should have been back at their house helping my boss, Hock host the trustees. But I really wanted to experience this. I am getting to know the animals and barn routines—barn chores are my chosen beyond-the-job duty. I love horses, I care about all the animals, I want to learn, and this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to experience the death of a horse. Grim, gruesome, ghoulish; I did not feel any of those things. I felt sincere and earnest and good-hearted. I knew it would be ok that I chose to be with them and the horse rather than at the cocktail party.

John C. was by this time arriving on the tractor. They led Sparky into the upper field, a rocky slope to the right and behind the upper barn. John followed slowly and kept a good distance. I had never been in that field before. The horses often graze there but are usually closer to the barns when I am around. This is glacial terrain so the boulders are large and everywhere. The horse was curious—I saw his ears going around—and he whinnied a few times. I later learned that he was saying, “Hey, this is odd, why am I out here? Where is my herd? Why am I with these people and what is that noisy machine?” Selden and Bonnie petted and cooed to him, and he seemed so fine that I wondered if the colic had passed or they were going to let him live. But no—it was the painkiller making him seem ok. They led him to a particular place where it was flat and there was a bare patch. Selden and John conferred about where John would dig, and implicitly, where the horse would fall. He was so lovely, a smallish, well-behaved horse with a graceful arched neck and two perfect white socks on his back feet, freshly groomed except for his long chestnut tail, which was covered in wood shavings from where he had lain.

They spent a long while loving him and the vet waited patiently. Rachel, Bonnie’s daughter, stood several yards distant on a flat boulder, watching intently, resignedly. John stood a ways off as well, the tractor left behind, his hands clasped in front of him. I stood adjacent to everyone, a sort of triangle of support around the horse and its three caregivers. It was not too cold, and the sun was leaving—clouds over the mountains were gray with an inner glaze of fading colors. The wind blew firmly but not hard. The ground was cold and rocky and I was quickly becoming uncomfortable in my Birkenstocks. I tried to take everything in without thought, to record the weather and view and emotions, the singular experience of being on this rocky hill with these people, this dying horse, all of it after my first board meeting as the place's new development director, which now seemed so trivial when it had consumed me for weeks before.

Then through some word I couldn’t hear or signal I didn’t see, they knew it was time and the vet took out his syringes. He talked Selden and Bonnie through it, but I could hear. He said the needle was large and the horse might jump. He said he would use two syringes, and they should step back if the horse started to go down. Selden and Bonnie held the horse’s halter and talked to him as the vet bent to locate a spot in the horse’s neck, his jugular, I guess. The horse did not jump as the syringe went in, and then the second one. The vet stepped back, and in a moment the horse sort of grunted and its forelegs buckled. It landed on its knees and then fell over sideways, his round brown belly like a boulder, Selden and Bonnie and the vet at his head. His back legs stretched out straight and his front right leg was curled under his extended front left leg. He was motionless. There was much soothing and petting and soft talking to him, good boy, there there, good boy, that’s right, everything’s going to be fine now. Rachel and John and I shifted slightly, both of them as uncomfortable as I was, I would guess, but just as sincere in their desire to stay and honor the death of this large, loved creature and support Selden and Bonnie, who loved him.

As I write this my cat Smidgen is chirping and canoodling across the desk and around the office. She is very sensitive to my moods and responds when I have intense feelings. Also it is cold outside and she might be bored because she can’t be out as much as she likes.

Sparky groaned three times with long moments in between. His legs and body were completely still. Each time he groaned their voices rose and then dropped. And then some signal again, and I knew he was dead. Selden was crying gently. Bonnie looked simply grim. The vet rose and the others followed, and he helped them decide how to tell the children. Tell them at breakfast so they don’t go to sleep with sad thoughts. It was a bad case of colic. Sometimes horses get over it and sometimes they do not. The vet said we are such good caregivers. Selden thanked him, and he left. We all regrouped a few feet from Sparky’s body. Each of us knelt to pet and caress him. His coat was so soft and clean, quickly losing warmth. I tried to close his eyelid but it sprang back. His eye was opaque. His mouth was open and his lips and tongue slack, his large ugly teeth there against the earth.

Emotion left very quickly and they talked about where to begin digging and how to move Sparky’s body into the hole—chains pulling him. John began to open up the hole, the bucket biting easily into the dark soil and scraping out a growing trench. I stayed as he dug, listening to Bonnie and Selden and Rachel talking, asking questions. Selden said it was her first colic. Rachel reminisced about other horses she had lost, her own childhood pony, her mother’s two favorites. Selden said there were “a zillion” horses buried out in this field, along the fence. Twenty, to be exact. Years of horses. She said she used to sell their carcasses to meat vendors but did not any more. Someone said that Larry G. was thinking about digging up one of the work horses and putting its bones together to form a skeleton that we could display and use to teach the children. It got too dark for John to see well and Selden and Bonnie walked away down the slope to get the “gator,” a tractor-ish golf cart thing with headlights that they use to get around the farm. Rachel came to stand near me and cried into my shoulder for a few moments. I was trying to take it all in and manage all my feelings and keep myself together so I could return to my trustee duties. Selden was still going to give her speech about the farm, with the added intensity of having just put a horse down. I couldn’t comfort Rachel as I wished I could have. I didn’t need to cry myself.

They returned with the gator and positioned its lights as John continued to dig. The hole was probably five feet deep and three feet across. Sparky lay there next to it. We each knelt by him again in the new light. I petted his barrel belly, now like a rock with fur, slid my fingers along the skin over his ribs. As I rose, stiff from cold and standing so long, I leaned against him with all my weight and thought of his strength even in death. I guessed that they would put the horse in backbone first, legs in the air. Selden said, “They’ll be rigor.” Then a taxi entered the campus and we watched its lights proceed slowly up the dirt road toward the main buildings. I thought it was coming to pick up a trustee, and Selden said that it must be her son, returned from Lake Placid to take over babysitting so Hock could go to the board dinner. That is how I knew that it was seven p.m. Selden said she hoped Hock was doing the right thing and ushering people from their house to the dining room, and I knew then it was time for me to go back to my real life.