HORSE PEOPLE — BENJAMIN HENRY DeVRIES

Bookmakers rate Gerald Murnane pretty highly to win the Nobel Prize for Literature at some point. I didn’t get to ask Mr. Murnane how he feels about this, but I suspect he’d be flattered. He’s a gambling man. He even wrote a book about horse racing. It’s a memoir called Something for the Pain. I often bring it up when people ask me why I went to Australia.

The rest of Mr. Murnane’s literary output, fiction mostly, is stuff you wouldn’t readily assume comes from a man who spends a lot of time at the track. Landscapes figure prominently; so do long sentences wherein the author disfavors the use of pronouns in favor of relentless clarity within the bounds of that sentence. Some find it fussy; I find it lyrical and also fussy. When reading his prose I often get the sense he would be direly disappointed with himself if a sentence could be taken any other way than that which he intended. It’s a rigorously truthful way of writing.

I don’t think there’s a single description of a horse in Something for the Pain. Mr. Murnane is more concerned with specific color combinations on jockey silks, betting systems advertised in old magazines, and the running tally of everything he’s ever won or lost. I don’t have a copy of this book on my desk right now (gave it away), but I can remember the part that made it dear and consequential to me. It’s the part where Mr. Murnane details his invention of an island devoted to horse racing. He drew a map. He sketched out patterns for the jockey silks. He invented results for race after fictional race. Mr. Murnane was advanced in age when he invented the island, but somewhere a child who would grow up to be a gambler was probably inventing a similar place. This made me feel warm: people who write generally like to hear about great writers doing their best work (or at least retaining a sense of play) in their later years; it bucks us up for an attempt at living a long life.

If I really wanted to be like Gerald Murnane (or Proust, his hero) I would have stayed in New Hampshire, where I was born, and limited myself to writing about people within a strictly defined radius. Mr. Murnane rarely leaves the town of Goroke (pop. 200). He does not use the internet nor does he own a television. He has never flown in nor does he desire to ever fly in an airplane. The irony of traveling a great distance to see this author is not lost on me.

I bought Mr. Murnane what I thought was a handsome edition of In Search of Lost Time, wedged it into the seat back pocket of the Chook, and L and I drove to Goroke. Neither of us were expert parkers yet, so we counted it a boon that the town had plenty of empty spaces.

Our plan was to enter the post office, ask nicely where Mr. Murnane lives, and pay him an unannounced visit. Should we fail to obtain his home address, we planned to leave the book with the postal official.

The official turned out to be obliging. But she also told us that Mr. Murnane was in Melbourne, celebrating his eightieth birthday. We’d picked the one day he wasn’t in Goroke.

Two things stood in the way of outright disappointment. For one, it’s not like I’d prepared any brilliant/penetrating questions for the admired author. Secondly, I wouldn’t have to deal with the possibility he’d be a letdown.

On a bench outside the post office I penned a note to go along with my gift. When I reentered, I found that the postal official had revised her story. She’d called the Murnane residence and learned that the author had just returned. He’s very tired from the drive, she said, but he said he’d come down.

Coming down did not take long. He pulled up in a sea green car and reiterated the postal official’s statements: can’t stay long, tired from the drive. We talked about where we’d come from, where he’d come from. He may have left his car running.

I want you to know, he said, they had me do a reading in Melbourne, and I did it without the use of reading glasses. Not many eighty-year-old men can do that.

The gift was wrapped and he didn’t open it in front of me, which means I don’t know whether or not he liked it.

Animals and plants don’t care whether it’s Sunday or Tuesday, which means that if you work on a farm you might forget what day it is. My burgeoning interest in horse racing re-sensitized me to the rhythm of the conventional week. The big races are on Saturdays.

While working on Kelly’s farm I got into the habit of driving to the nearest newsagent to get the racing paper when it came out on Wednesday, then driving to the pub in the second nearest town to bet on Saturday or Sunday. Or on both days. I started hoping for rainy weekends because horses that thrive in mud were often undervalued by the TAB. If you can’t make it to the track, machines are stationed in pubs all across Australia. The machines come with clear and concise instructions for betting. This turned out to be valuable, for I had gained little actionable intelligence from Mr. Murnane’s book. It covers horse racing in theory, not practice.

My mom sometimes tells me I have an addictive personality. I did not become addicted to betting on horses in any true sense. But had I stayed in Australia… you never know. I liked betting on horses because I like to win. Some kids my freshman year of college taught me how to play bocci, and I remember one of them turning to me, after a few games, and saying, You’re actually really competitive, aren’t you? Maybe. I know I don’t look it. And all this is very perplexing when you consider that there’s no winning in writing.

When L and I got the idea we wanted to work on a horse farm, people we spoke with started warning us about horse people. They’re nuts! A different breed! Not much specificity to these statements, but in my experience, warnings are rarely specific. When warning someone about a haunted house one rarely mentions the names of the ghosts. It’s just, ‘Don’t go in the haunted house.’

Because I often look at life in terms of its narrative functionality, I appreciate vague warnings. A vague warning is more suspenseful than a specific one. And from the moment a warning is given, it foreshadows the confrontation with that which one is warned about.

Kelly is a horse person. Self-described. She gets along better with horses than with people. Having met other horse people in Kelly’s orbit, I can now put forth the following as my subjective definition of a horse person: they put horses first. There seem to be different levels to this, like, would you put a horse before your child? Kelly might, but she doesn’t have kids.

If a conversation doesn’t involve horses, Kelly can usually find a way to steer it around. Movies, choices of vehicle, vacations — all of these things she sees through horse-tinted glasses. The movie should have a horse in it. The vehicle has to have enough horsepower to pull a horse trailer. Montana is a great place for a vacation because there are cowboys. She loves Native Americans, too, for she sees them as fellow horse people.

Most of Kelly’s stories are about horses. Of these stories, a significant subset are about horses doing horrific physical damage to themselves and their riders.

Pulled the fence right out, broke her own neck doing it. Crushed Louise right under her.

L and I need to hear this kind of thing; we would prefer to stay uninjured, so the warnings reach us. I’m not supposed to find the stories as funny as I do. It’s mainly the repetition; repeat anything enough, it becomes farce. I’m not sure why Kelly’s able to chuckle along with me, though. Many of the ill-fated horses were ones she loved. Why doesn’t she go to pieces in the recounting?

My theory on this is a bit complicated/far-fetched.

Domesticated horses are perilous to themselves; there remains a filament of wildness in all of them, and that’s why they sometimes act against their own self-interest. Kelly knows this; it’s the point of many of her stories. Wild horses, on the other hand, do not have the problem of pulling out fence posts and crushing their riders, for they have no fence posts to pull out, no riders on their backs. Kelly knows this, too. And so I believe there is an unspoken acknowledgement in Kelly’s stories that the system of care that occupies her days is a cyclical/perpetual arrangement; the trainer tames the horse, but tameness brings its own dangers from which the trainer must now protect the same horse. Horse people surely realize, at some level, that in addition to providing care and love to horses, they have deprived them of freedom. They have set a timer for the wildness to return, but when it may go off remains mysterious. They have imperiled that which they love.

Those who realize this must feel conflicted. Maybe guilty. Kelly laughs. Guilty laughter sounds like other laughter.

Whether you buy my theory or not, I still think Kelly’s stories prove her purpose. She cares for creatures that would destroy themselves without her. Horses are better off for the existence of Kelly. And it seems to bring her joy to pass the knowledge on to me and L. The knowledge how to care.

Had a politician put themself forward as the candidate for horses, Kelly would surely have voted for them. Instead, she holds a high regard for politicians with a populist appeal. This includes Donald Trump. She’s the only Australian I spent time with who voiced support for him.

It was baffling. And because it was baffling, I’m going to engage in some pure speculation here. And since I’m making certain assumptions about how Kelly thinks, feel free to view her as a purely fictional character if you wish. But here’s what I observed:

Kelly’s horse farm will not outlive her. She knows this. She lost her parents — they started the farm — and her partner within the span of a year. Her brother makes visits to divide up assets and discuss the sale of the farm at a future date that seems, from the bills Kelly is behind on, to be approaching more rapidly than once assumed. Food, medicine, shelter: these things Kelly provides to the kinds of horses others would have long ago euthanized. She drains her resources doing it.

She blames cities. People in Melbourne don’t care about horses unless they’re at the track. And yet she pays taxes — taxes that are drowning her, to hear her tell it — to subsidize the social safety net Melbourne provides its immigrant poor.

She blames immigrants. While her partner was dying, she’d come back from hospital visits muttering about the doctor, an Indian man just biding his time out here in the country before they’ll let him move to Melbourne and lead the life he really wants (doctors in Australia are assigned their first positions).

It has all gone horribly wrong, says Kelly. It didn’t used to be this way.

On the highway there are billboards rendered in yellow with black lettering: Make Australia Great. Kelly voted for that guy.

I’m certain that I’m flattening her worldview quite a lot. My evidence is what I have observed and what she told me over the course of six weeks.

Our conversations about politics all occurred while in the midst of providing care to horses. We talked while shoveling mud and manure. While distributing precise combinations of hay and alfalfa. While wrapping horses in blankets. It often felt strange to see her doing empathetic things and voicing less than empathetic opinions. But like I said, she puts horses above people.

I gave Kelly my copy of Something for the Pain. She didn’t like it much. It was clear to her that the author had not spent time around horses. It’s a book about horse racing with no horses in it, she complained.

She’s right. Gerald Murnane is not a horse person. He’s a horse racing person, maybe, though he’s even at the fringes of that; ever since his invention of the island he doesn’t bet on horses much anymore. His horses have crossed over.

I gave Kelly the book not because I thought she’d love it but on the off chance that her countryman’s odd perspective might overlap in some ways with her own — also because I like giving gifts, especially to people who have put me up in a cozy trailer and run an extension cord out to it so that I may enjoy the space heater she has also provided; especially to people who have sent me to the grocery with her bank card and PIN to buy groceries of my choice because she knows L and I buy organic, and while she couldn’t care less about that, she wants to see us happy; especially to people who have taught me how to oil a fence post so a horse won’t chew it into a matchstick, how to approach a horse, where to touch one, where not to touch one, which brush to use in which order, and what it means when a horse is weaving their head from side to side.