Be Well, Beware Read online

  Gramp taps and listens. Gran puts her hand on Lily’s back and gives her a little push forward. “You should know, too,” she says.

  When Lily puts her ear against Beware’s warm side, she doesn’t hear anything at first. Then, as if far away, she hears some high, whiny pinging sounds inside Beware.

  “Now, if you listen over here”—Dr. Shore goes to Beware’s left side—“you won’t hear anything. That’s bad, too. You should be hearing some nice gurgly, rumbling sounds. She’s blocked on the right side, and that’s not letting anything through to the rest of the bowel. But that should start to change pretty soon now.”

  “Should I walk her?” Lily asks. That is what she’s always heard you are supposed to do for a horse with colic—keep it walking.

  “No, I don’t think that’s necessary,” Dr. Shore says. “You do that to keep them from rolling, and this mare’s not rolling. Just keep her warm and let her rest.” He closes his bag with a snap. “And call the clinic if she doesn’t pass some manure by morning.”

  “How soon should she start to get better?” Gramp asks.

  “Soon,” Dr. Shore says. “She’s going to be better soon, or she’s going to be a whole lot worse.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN HE IS GONE, Gran and Lily and Gramp just stand for a moment looking at Beware. Beware’s head hangs low. Slowly, slowly she tips toward one side. Then she catches herself and slowly, slowly tips the other way. Her lips droop. Her ears flop limply.

  “Well, let’s get her comfortable,” Gramp says.

  Gran starts toward the door. “I’ll get supper going. You two come up when you’re ready.”

  The blanket Gramp finds for Beware is big enough for a workhorse. It reaches almost to the floor. A mouse has chewed the edge, and the lining hangs out.

  Gramp helps Lily fold the blanket so it fits. Then he goes to get some baling twine. Lily lifts the blanket and listens to Beware’s right side.

  “You won’t hear any change yet,” Gramp says. “It’ll take awhile.” He ties the baling twine around Beware’s middle. “There. Not handsome, but it’ll stay.” Gramp and Lily make a deep bed of shavings in the nearest stall, and they help Beware inside. “Let’s go up and get some supper,” Gramp says.

  “You don’t think she’ll start to roll?”

  “All she wants right now is not to fall down,” Gramp says. “While that shot’s working, she’ll brace against it. She’ll be all right.”

  The kitchen is warm, and it smells good. Lily is glad to sit down in a chair. Gran hands her a big plate with pot roast and red cabbage and potato, and Lily eats it all.

  “Your mother’ll be home around eight,” Gran tells Lily. “She’s working late at the store.” While they eat, Gran tells Gramp about bringing Beware down the hill. “We weren’t sure it was the right thing to do, Linwood,” she says, “but it didn’t seem to be doing her any harm.”

  Gramp smiles at her. “We’ll make a horsewoman out of you yet, Gracie!”

  “It would be strange if I hadn’t picked up a thing or two living with you all these years!” Lily feels them both looking at her.

  “Apple crisp?” Gran asks.

  “Maybe I should go check her.”

  “Eat your dessert, Lily,” says Gramp. “We haven’t been up here but twenty minutes.”

  When Lily goes back to the barn, she is warmed up and full. Gramp walks down, too. Loose change jingles in his pocket. “She’ll prob’ly be feeling better,” he says. “We’ll find a nice pile of manure in the corner, and she’ll be asking for her hay.”

  But there is no manure, and Beware just stands there. She turns her face away when Gramp brings her the water pail.

  “It’ll take a little time,” Gramp says. “Come on back to the house.”

  “I’ll watch her,” Lily says.

  Lily sits in the corner of Beware’s stall. The two walls push against her shoulders. The shavings smell fresh and piney. The barn is very quiet. Beware does not stir.

  After a while Mom’s car drives up, and Mom goes into the house. A few minutes later she comes to the stall door. “How is she?”

  “The same, I think.” Lily listens to Beware’s stomach. It sounds the way it did before. The ridges of muscle are still tight along Beware’s sides.

  “Well, she’s no worse anyway,” Mom says. “I brought you some tea.”

  Lily wraps her cold fingers around the mug. The tea is milky and sweet. “I wonder if Beware would like some.” In the summer Beware shared Lily’s soda. Lily would pour a little in her hand, and Beware would lick it off. Lily pours a warm pool of tea into her palm and holds it out to Beware.

  Beware’s ears prick up. She sniffs the tea. Slowly she licks it off Lily’s hand. Then she looks down at the hay on the floor in front of her. She winds a few strands into her mouth and chews.

  “That’s encouraging!” Mom says. “Come up and get warm, Lily. You can check her again in an hour.”

  In an hour the pile of hay is no smaller. There is no manure in the stall. Beware’s belly is making exactly the same noises. She is no worse, but she isn’t any better either.

  “Well, I’ve seen sicker horses,” Gramp says. “Why don’t you go to bed, Lily? I’ll check her again before I turn in.”

  Lily thinks maybe she should stay up all night. But what would she do? That is the worst thing about this. There is nothing she can do for Beware, nothing at all. She can’t rub her, she can’t walk her, and she can’t even feed her.

  Gramp thumps Lily on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. She’ll be better in the morning.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN LILY WAKES UP, it is early, and the house is quiet. Lily dresses quickly and runs downstairs. Big wet green tracks lead across the frosty lawn to the barn. Gramp is there already.

  He is looking into Beware’s stall. When he hears Lily, he turns and shakes his head. For a second fear reaches inside and squeezes Lily’s heart.

  “She seems about the same.”

  “Then she isn’t worse?” Lily opens the stall door. Beware’s ears twitch forward for a moment and then drop back. The pile of hay is still in front of her. The water pail is full. There are no tracks in the bright orange shavings and no manure. “She’s no better,” Gramp says, “and she ought to be.”

  Lily puts her ear against Beware’s right side. The propane tank sound is still there. On the other side there is no sound at all. The two lines of muscle stand out. When Lily offers a handful of hay, Beware turns her face away, as if the sight of it makes her feel sick.

  “Can I call the clinic this early?” Lily asks. “Will they be open yet?”

  “There’s somebody on call for emergencies,” Gramp says.

  Lily runs up the path. The cold air freezes her throat. Her mind feels frozen, too. With a cold red finger she dials the clinic number.

  A strange voice answers. It’s not the nice lady from last night. “This is the answering service. Give me your number, and Dr. Brand will call you right back.”

  Lily sits down to wait. Mom comes downstairs in her warm bathrobe. “No better?”

  “She won’t even try to eat hay,” Lily says.

  “Maybe a piece of carrot,” Mom says. “She might—”

  The phone rings loudly. Lily jumps and answers it.

  “Hello, Dr. Brand here.” Dr. Brand is the woman vet. Lily knows her. “Horse with colic?”

  “Yes. She was sick last night, and Dr. Shore said she should be better soon, but she’s just the same.”

  “Okay, tell me what he said it was, and what he did.” Dr. Brand talks Lily through everything Dr. Shore did last night—listening to her sides, the shots, the nose tube.

  “Have you been walking her?”

  “He said not to,” Lily says, “because she wasn’t rolling. He said to let her rest.”

  Dr. Brand is quiet for a few seconds. Then she says, “I’d start walking her now if I were you. I’ll be there in about an hour.”

  Lily hangs up
the phone, and Mom hands her a bowl of hot cereal. “Eat this before you go out.”

  “We should have been walking her!” Lily says. “I knew it!” She can’t put even one spoonful of cereal in her mouth. It makes her feel just the way hay makes Beware feel.

  Gramp is haying the other horses. “Dr. Brand says walk her!” Lily yells. She snaps a lead rope into Beware’s halter and pulls. “Come on, Beware! Walk!”

  “Whoa, Lily. Calm down.” Gramp steps into the stall. “She’s stood still all night. She’ll be stiff, just like when you found her.” Gramp puts his shoulder against Beware’s rump. “All right, now.”

  Gramp and Lily push and pull Beware outside into the frosty morning. Beware hangs her head. She doesn’t want to walk. “I’ll get my whip,” Lily says. Beware has to walk. Dr. Brand says so. But it seems horrible to haul her around and maybe even hit her when she is sick. When Lily has a stomach ache, she stays in bed, and Mom gives her ginger ale.

  “I’ll just push her along,” Gramp says. “Lead her in a circle right here in front of the barn. Come on, little mare. It’s the best thing for you.”

  Dr. Brand is a small woman with a thick black braid. The braid is streaked with silver, and Dr. Brand is getting wrinkles beside her eyes, just like Gramp. Those kinds of wrinkles come from working outside and squinting against the sun. They come from smiling.

  “Hello, mare,” she says to Beware even before she says hello to Gramp and Lily. She holds her hand out for Beware to sniff. Then she takes hold of Beware’s halter, gently and firmly. She lifts Beware’s lip and looks at her gums.

  “If a horse is in shock, the gums change color,” Dr. Brand explains. “Hers look pretty normal. That’s a good sign.”

  Dr. Brand takes Beware’s temperature. She finds Beware’s pulse and counts, looking at her watch. “Vital signs aren’t bad.” She takes out her stethoscope and listens and taps all along Beware’s sides, just the way Dr. Shore did.

  “Well, we could tell a lot more if we could see inside her,” Dr. Brand says finally. “But I think Tom was right. She has an obstruction—a hard mass of food stuck over here on the right side of the bowel.”

  “Why would that happen?” Gramp asks.

  “Sometimes they don’t drink enough water. Sometimes in the fall they’ll eat something strange along the edge of the pasture, when the grass is getting low—acorns, or some weed that forms a mass instead of moving through. Most times we don’t know why, and it doesn’t matter. We’ll give her a shot for the pain and tube her again.”

  Dr. Brand doesn’t give Beware a tranquilizer. Instead she gets out a twitch—a stick with a short loop of chain on the end. Gramp puts the chain around Beware’s top lip and twists the chain tight. It squeezes and scrunches Beware’s velvety lip. Beware’s eyes show white around the rims. She stands perfectly still.

  “It doesn’t hurt, Lily,” Dr. Brand says. “The pressure on the nerves makes her stand still. It’s better than a shot because it wears off right away.”

  “Should have seen your gran when the doctors put her nose tube in!” Gramp says. “They put a twitch on her, too. Had to get the janitor in to hold it!”

  Lily tries to smile because that is what Gramp wants. She holds the tube up while Dr. Brand pumps. In a minute all the water is inside Beware. Dr. Brand slides the nose tube out, and Gramp untwists the twitch. Beware shakes her head and steps away from him.

  Dr. Brand says, “Give her water if she’ll take any.”

  “Hay?” Gramp asks.

  “I wouldn’t like to put more food in on top of what’s stuck,” Dr. Brand says. “A wisp of hay, maybe, or a carrot—that might help get her system moving. And walk her.”

  “How much?” Lily asks.

  “Half an hour, rest her a couple of hours, then walk her again. Gentle exercise can help the gut get moving.”

  “How come Tom Shore didn’t tell us that?” Gramp asks. He sounds angry at Dr. Shore.

  “Everybody has a different idea about colic,” Dr. Brand says as she packs her bag. “Some people think that it’s cruel to make a sick horse walk and that it doesn’t do much good. I think it helps, but none of us can see inside the body, so nobody’s really sure.” Dr. Brand looks at Lily. “Still, if she were my horse, I’d walk her.”

  “I will,” Lily says.

  “Call me if she doesn’t pass some manure by late afternoon,” Dr. Brand says. Then she laughs. “Funny, isn’t it? I went to seven years of college so I could talk about horse manure. Oh, well. Everything is beautiful in its proper place.”

  As they start up toward the house, the school bus stops at the end of the driveway. Gramp just looks at Lily and shakes his head. The bus waits a moment with the door open. When Lily doesn’t come, the door closes, and the bus rattles on down the hill.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GRAMP AND MOM go to work, and the house gets very quiet. Gran washes dishes. Lily dries them. Then she puts on her coat again and goes down to the barn.

  Beware stands where Lily left her. She isn’t asleep, but she isn’t wide awake either. She seems to be listening to something deep inside herself, and she hardly notices Lily.

  “Beware,” Lily says, “look.” She holds up a bright orange carrot and breaks it in half. The broken carrot smells fresh and sweet. Lily holds out a piece for Beware.

  Beware looks at the carrot. She takes a piece in her mouth and crunches, very slowly. Shreds of carrot drop into the shavings. Beware does not try to pick them up. When Lily offers her the rest of the carrot, she turns her head away.

  “Oh, Beware,” Lily says.

  She folds back the blanket on Beware’s right side and listens. She hears the whining, pinging sound. On the left side she hears nothing. It is like opening your eyes in the dark. Beware’s stomach is pulled in tight. Her muscles make long ridges down her sides.

  It will take more time, Lily tells herself. Dr. Brand is a good vet, but the medicine does take time. Time, and walking. Lily snaps a rope onto Beware’s halter. “Come on, let’s go!”

  Lily doesn’t have a watch. She leads Beware in a big circle in front of the barn, and she counts to herself. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three,” all the way to sixty. In one minute she can go almost twice around the circle. So they have to make almost forty circles before Beware can rest.

  Beware’s step is heavy and slow. It gets even slower. Finally Lily has to go get her riding whip and show it to Beware. Beware isn’t afraid of the whip, but when she sees it, she knows she must do what Lily says.

  When Beware is back in the stall, Lily listens to her sides. They sound just the same.

  Lily walks around behind the barn. The other horses are eating hay out of the big rack. Lily listens to the rustle as each horse gathers a mouthful of hay and the hard, grinding sound as they chew. She looks at the horse manure on the ground. Dr. Brand is right. In its place even horse manure is beautiful. If Lily could see some in Beware’s stall, she would be very happy.

  Gran thinks Lily should read a schoolbook since she is staying home today. Lily looks at her math for a while, but it doesn’t make sense. The math she is doing today is clock math—a half hour walking, two hours of rest. It is walking math. Twenty slow circles in one direction, and twenty in the other.

  When Lily goes back to the barn, there is no manure in Beware’s stall. She hasn’t drunk her water. The sounds inside her are just the same.

  All day long Lily walks Beware, and rests her, and listens. The day gets grayer and colder, and the wind starts to blow. The circle in front of the barn gets dark and trampled. Lily’s legs ache. She feels cold all the time, even when she’s in beside the stove.

  And Beware gets no better. Sometimes Lily can hear a tiny, faraway grumble in her left side, and sometimes she can’t. But the pinging sound on her right side doesn’t change. Whatever is blocking Beware’s bowel doesn’t move.

  Lily is walking Beware again when the school bus goes by. When she gets back to the house, Gran says,
“Mandy wants you to call.”

  “Lily!” Mandy says. “What’s the matter?”

  “Beware has colic.” Now Lily starts to cry. Up to now she hasn’t cried at all.

  On the phone Mandy is quiet. Then she asks, “Lily … Lily, how sick is she?”

  Lily can’t answer. It doesn’t seem possible that Beware’s life is in danger. She isn’t rolling. She isn’t groaning. In some ways she seems almost normal. But she might die. She really might.

  “Oh, Lily,” Mandy says, “I wish I could come over.”

  “She won’t eat anything!” Lily says. She has almost stopped crying. “Not even a carrot.”

  “If I could come, I’d bring her cough drops,” Mandy says. “Remember how she loved those herbal cough drops?”

  Mandy sounds as if Beware is already dead. Lily sniffs and wipes her eyes. “I might still have some,” she says. “Mandy, I have to go. I have to call the vet again.”

  Dr. Brand is at another farm, miles away. She has two more calls to make after that, and then, the lady at the clinic says, she will come see Beware.

  Lily goes to the pantry, where Gran is mixing a cake. She finds the cough drop bag. There are four left.

  “Dr. Brand coming again?” Gran asks. Lily nods.

  “Your gramp has a lot of faith in her. If anybody can help your horse, she can.”

  But maybe no one can help Beware. For a minute Lily doesn’t even want to go to the barn. On the way down she will start to hope. But when she opens the stall door, Beware will just be standing there, no better than before.

  “Gran,” Lily asks, “what was it like when you had your gallbladder? I mean, when you were sick, before they took it out?”

  “I don’t think it was much like a horse with colic,” Gran says. But Lily doesn’t know. From the outside it seems the same. Gran was hurting, and she seemed to look inside herself, not out at the world, just the way Beware is doing. And there was nothing Lily could do to help.

  But when Gran was sick it was different, too. The ambulance came, and she was carried away to a hospital. Lily remembers a bed that adjusted up and down. She remembers the nose tube, and she remembers the IV—water with medicine in it that dripped down from a bag, through a tube and a needle into Gran’s arm. Nurses kept coming into the room to look at Gran, to see if she was okay.