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Hooves In The House | A Story Of A Pony
By: Kip Mistral
One soft spring morning long ago, I stood with my back to the screen door I had propped open, concentrating on a phone conversation with my mother. Yes, I assured her, I had finished vacuuming the house and was shaking rugs on the back porch. Suddenly, I felt warm breathing on the back of my neck. I froze in fear; I knew I was alone in our house! Dropping the phone, I shrieked as I whipped around to face the intruder.
He stood his ground calmly behind me. From this vantage point in the middle of the living room, he slowly turned his head from side to side, surveying all before him. My dapple-grey Welsh cross pony, Tony, who had a puckish sense of humor few people would ever attribute to a horse, was greatly enjoying himself.
“Hmm. Not sooo very great…I don’t know why they are always keeping me out.” (I could read his mind.)
My mother’s voice shrilled from the telephone handset dangling from the wall.
“What’s the matter?! What’s the matter?!” I fumbled for a moment, but what could I say but the truth?
“Well…it’s, ah, Tony. He’s in the house.”
“What do you mean Tony is in the house?! How did he get in the house?! Where in the house is he?! Did you let him in?! What is he doing?!”
“He walked in through the back door. I had it propped open to shake the rugs. He’s standing here in the living room.”
“What has he done? Is the glass table all right?”
“Everything is fine. He’s just standing here.”
“Well, get him out of there and call me back right away!”
I hung up the phone and looked at the horse standing in the house. He wasn’t really a pony—at 14+ hands he was near the official borderline of height between pony and horse—and he did, after all, fill the room with an unaccustomed presence. It says everything about me that I began enjoying it.
At that time we lived on a quiet street in Phoenix, Arizona, and Tony had the run of the back part of the property when he wasn’t in his corral. When I turned him out into the citrus grove for a change of scene, he usually chose to stand on the patio and watch the family through the screen door. He would stand there all day outside the screen door, switching flies and dozing on his feet with lowered head. If someone walked by the door he would lift his head quickly to press his face to the dark screen, curious about what was going on.
Why this fascination with human activity? Tony was an only horse, but it never occurred to any of us that, deprived of the company of another of his kind, standing day after day and year after year in the pen surrounded by a grapefruit grove, that he might be really lonely. With me in the same room, he had managed to slip noiselessly over the threshold, over the gold shag carpet, between an armchair and the sofa, past the glass coffee table and diagonally across the room to put his nose on my neck in greeting. He was quite pleased with himself.
Not knowing how good his self-control would be if a call of nature were to come upon him (and knowing what trouble I would be in if the worst were to happen), I put my hand under his chin as I so often did to lead him around. He locked his knees and gazed at me reproachfully with the liquid, almond-shaped brown eyes framed so beautifully in his white face.
“I just got here.”
“Come on, Tony, let’s go.”
“No. I want to stay with you.”
“Tony, turn around. We have to get you out of here.”
He made a disgusted face very well-known to me. We stared each other down. Finally, he lowered his head and, after looking around as if for one last time, slowly followed me through the living room and back onto the lovely spring morning. I closed the screen door and he resignedly resumed his position of watching from outside. What I should have done, if I were thinking, no, if I were feeling, would have been to go sit out on the porch with him and pass the time of day. But I was “on task,” so instead of spending some time with my lonely pony I went right back to my chores like I was supposed to.
As the teenage years went by and I got busy with work after school, studying and friends, I rode less and less. So, sadly, not only did he miss me but Tony rarely saw other horses either. I remember that he used to neigh over and over when he could hear us talking. If we had visitors he would whinny to be let out of his pen so he could stand on the patio and watch and listen to us through the screen. He even stood outside the closed glass door if it was winter. If allowed, Tony would hang his head and neck inside the living room and watch with great appreciation and interest anything that happened…the ultimate easily-entertained guest.
Looking back, on many levels my family was very attentive to our animals. It was clear to us they had personalities and preferences, and we thought fondly of Tony as being a somewhat eccentric character with strong opinions. But at some certain point, he became a subordinate. We could accept the idea that he had opinions, but we couldn’t acknowledge the possibility of him experiencing emotional pain. After all, he was “just a horse, not a human.” At that certain point, I could be talked out of my suspicion that he felt deep, dark feelings of isolation because only recently have I begun to claim my own.
Two photographs in my album from that time long past really haunt me. In a black-and-white Polaroid so faded that it looks ghostly, Tony holds his old familiar pose, frozen in time forever looking longingly over the gate of his secluded pen toward the house.
The other photo is faded as well, but still glows with some cheerful color from a Christmas past. Tony the pony has braved ejection one more time to join the crowd. He poses in front of our Christmas tree of 1970, surrounded by family, blinking in the glare of the camera’s flash. How funny everyone thought it was that Tony was so insistent that that he should be inside with us. Now I see that it wasn’t funny at all; his wistful presence seems sad to me. I just wish I knew then what I feel now. Just a horse? Not a chance. Those hooves in the house would be plenty welcome.
Tags: Amazing Horse Story, Emotional stories, Great Horse riding Story, Horse 2 Heart, intresting Horse Stories
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