The God of Animals
Chapter Two, pages 33—35

There were two kinds of horses that my father would never sell: The broodmares were functional, they had a purpose, a job that they performed year after year. Besides, they were older, with dusty coats and creaking legs. No one would ever want to buy them. And then there were the geldings that my father kept in the back pasture. These were the horses that he picked up over the years at the sort of auctions he didn't talk about with clients.

The Kill Sales took place on the outskirts of town in dusty parking lots, attracting buyers who came with makeshift horse trailers held together by caulk and rope and duct tape. The horses had matted tails and manes, their legs and bellies crusted with dried mud, their coats patchy with malnourishment. My father would walk among the rusty pens, looking for the horses marked with and X of orange paint across their flanks — a sign to the buyer that they were damaged beyond repair, killers, good for nothing but rendering plants and schoolroom glue.

The horses were auctioned off by the pound and my father paid next to nothing for them, then brought them back home where he worked, rebuilding them like broken cars. With the show horses he trained, my father was often sharp and swift to punish. But with the Kills, he was gentle and patient, filled with quiet respect. The Old Men, he called them, and gave them names like Ace and Admiral, Chief and Charlie. He worked with them in the evenings, after all the clients had gone home. And though my sister and I often watched, we could never understand exactly what happened while he worked with them, what sort of understanding passed between them.

It took months, years sometimes, but when my father was finished, the Kill horses were solid, unshakable. Then he put them in our back pasture, where they grew fat, barrel bellies and walked on creaky bowed legs.

"Why do we keep them around?" Nona used to ask. "They don't do anything."

"Do anything?" my father said. "They don't do anything? Look at old Ace. We don't have a more solid, steady horse in this whole barn than Ace. You could shoot a cannon off his head and he wouldn't even blink."

"That's because he's practically dead, Daddy. He's, like, a million years old."

But my father would not part with them. He told their stories to anyone who would pause to listen: Chief had been dragged behind a moving truck until his hooves were ground to stubs and had to be bandaged, cared for, regrown like endangered plants. Charlie had been starved to the point of madness, then left in the desert to die alone. Old Ace had been beaten with a hammer, his skull misshaped, his hindquarters stooped. My father said it was not the Old Men's age that made them so sturdy, so dependable. They had seen the depths of hell and they had come back. Nothing that happened from this point forward would ever spook them.

And so he put children on their backs, old people who had never been around horses, troops of Girl Scouts who came to us for one-time-only lessons to earn their patches. Other than that, my father left the Old Men alone. He kept them in the pasture that couldn't be seen from the road. When anyone asked, he said they were retired.