The Vet Rang To Say Sorry And My Dead Horse Was Standing In The Yard

He was twenty-six and I had had him since I was nineteen, and if you have had an animal like that you already know everything I am about to fail to explain.

He was put down on a Tuesday afternoon in the top field, which is where he wanted to be, and I was there, and it was quick, and it was right, and it was the worst thing I have ever agreed to.

The vet rang at about eight that evening to say sorry. He did not have to do that. He is not a sentimental man and he has done this a thousand times and he rang anyway, and he said, "You did right by him," and I said thank you and I put the phone down and I went out to lock up because the yard does not stop needing locking.

He was at the gate.

Not a shape. Not a mist. A horse, in the place he stood every evening for seven years, with his head over the gate, doing the thing he always did with his lip on the bolt, which he could work, which is why we had a second bolt, which is a whole other story and one of the funniest years of my life.

I stood there. I do not know for how long.

I said his name.

He did the ear thing. The one ear. And then he was not there — not fading, not walking off, simply not there, the way a thought is not there — and the gate was shut and the second bolt was across, and I was standing in an empty yard at ten past eight with a torch in my hand.

I have told two people. My daughter, who cried, and the vet, who did not say anything at all for a long moment and then said: "That happens."

That is all he said. "That happens." Twenty-six years in practice.

I do not believe in much. I do not believe in an afterlife with harps and gates. I believe in feed bills and farriers.

But something came to the gate at ten past eight, because that is when he always came to the gate, and it did the ear thing, and I am not going to argue with anybody about it, and I am not going to be talked out of it.

The second bolt is still on the gate. I have never taken it off.