Divided

Divided Pamela Royston Macfie (bio) 1 I remember nothing of the actual moment in which the horse and I fell to earth. Everything of the taste of blood, the crack of breaking bones, the groaning of a horse in pain, the smell of dust and lather. I couldn't move; neither could the thoroughbred. Later, I was told that he had struck the top of the fence with his upper forelegs and somersaulted forward. I had fallen to the right, by instinct perhaps, or training, or some strange pull of gravity. I do know that I had approached the jump, the last in what had been a clear round, with confidence. I had followed Beech as he took off; we were one. Then the sky sheered, and we went down. When I came to, the field felt like concrete. Hard ground increases the risk of a horse taking a "bad step," but I had not walked the course. Beside me, a twelve-hundred-pound red-gold horse I barely knew scissored his legs, and I worried I could still be crushed. Someone shouted, "Don't move. We're coming." The world had constricted: crowded together, there was me, flat on my belly, my right [End Page 626] arm forked unnaturally, and Beech, his back hooves near my head. When the captain of the riding team knelt beside me, I said, "Someone needs to get this horse up. Call an ambulance. A vet." I heard the coach say, "Your visor snapped off." She told someone to ride to the barn and make the calls. There were no cell phones in 1987. There was the wait, then the wail of an ambulance's distant siren, then nothing but the snort and shudder of the horse beside me. The driver, I was told later, had been asked to cut the siren before he reached the barn in order not to spook the horses. When the vehicle scraped to a stop a few yards in front of me, I smelled its engine's metallic heat and recognized the EMT in charge. He was a fifth-year senior who had failed my Early Modern poetry seminar focused on the art of dying the previous spring. John crouched down, studied the splintered club that had been my right arm, and said gently, "Professor Macfie, you have a compound fracture. We'll take care of you." The coach added, "She might also have a spinal injury; you'll want to immobilize her." I wanted to cry. It was my six-month wedding anniversary. 2 A rotational fall can be fatal for both rider and horse. If a rider does not fall clear when her horse somersaults forward, she may be crushed. If the center section of a horse's back bends too far, the horse may be paralyzed. As the ambulance bumped over the gravel road that led back to campus, I studied the traction chains that permitted my injured arm to be suspended above me. My arm swayed with the vehicle's motion, and I worried I would be sick. [End Page 627] My father had a recording of his own rotational fall in a point-to-point race from when he was seventeen years old. He and his thoroughbred, Pinecone, went down at the seventh fence, and he, like me, was carted off in an ambulance. The ambulance did not appear in the black-and-white footage; my uncle had dropped the camera when Pinecone tumbled forward. The picture lurched sideways, then went blank. Over the years, my father made light of his accident. Watching the film, he would laugh at the upside-down image of himself and his horse, then jump from his chair to show me how quickly he had gotten up. He failed to mention that he was nearly run over by several other horses in the field, that another had lost its rider when it swerved to avoid Pinecone's thrashing legs. My mother never watched the movie with us. She hated everything about horses and called my father a damned fool whenever he would mention the thrill of steeplechasing. She said it would be on his head if I ever...