Breaking El Shaddai

Breaking El Shaddai

Three months after we moved to Tennessee, my Grandmother Charlotte was diagnosed with Stage Four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Even when the cancer began nipping at my grandmother’s bones until more were broken than whole, Mother continued sending her prayer cloths made limp with anointing oil and letters crammed with verses of healing and hope. When my grandmother died, some of Mother’s faith seemed to be buried with her. She would spend long hours silently staring out over the meadow next to our cedar-sided home; and perhaps to recapture the innocence of childhood found on the Hilltop Road Farm in Pennsylvania, it was during those times she started yearning for a horse.

But with only her waitressing and my father’s construction job to cover the needs of two young children and a mortgage, my mother knew her desire would only remain a dream. Time shuffled by, and my family moved on to Springcreek Christian Camp as its caretakers. Even though my mother knew we still could not afford to buy a horse, she could not stop herself from falling in love with a sleek sorrel who grazed in a pasture bordering the road she drove every day while taking my brother and me into school.

After weeks spent murmuring prayers every time we passed, Mother could not take it any longer. She careened our Subaru Station Wagon into the drive, knocked on the door, and asked the stocky beef farmer what he would take for his horse. Hobbling down the porch steps, he grabbed his Stetson between fat fingers, beat it on his leg — sending a whirlwind of grime flying — spit a strip of tobacco, and said, “Lorda Mercy, Lil’ Lady, I don’t think ya know what she is! That there’s Sonny Dee Bar’s daughter, Winifred!” Giving my mother a look of pure country condescension, he continued, “She’s a prize-winnin’ Quarter Horse–not jest some purty pony to look at.”

On the way home it became obvious, even to my naïve seven-year-old ears, that his response to her inquiry had not thwarted my mother’s determination to one day own his horse. But even with her weakness for romanticism, she knew the creature could not be acquired through normal means. So, despite her faltering faith due to her mother’s death when she’d asked God for her healing, she continued to pray every time we drove by Winifred, the prize winnin’ Quarter Horse mare.

Months passed, and the crackling heat of summer slurped at the land. As my father futilely tilled the parched earth in between the camp’s garden rows, he shook his head and sighed. Little did we know that through the draught, mother’s prayer of petition had been heard.

When my mother first spotted Dell and Gwen leading the sleek sorrel down the camp’s lane, her heart twisted. She assumed our more affluent camp neighbors had purchased Winifred for themselves and were taking her to the pasture across from the slave quarters where we lived. It wasn’t until they had all crested the hill, and she saw Jerry Brodie zoom in on her face with his video camera, that she folding in on herself like a collapsed fan and began to sob.

“Bev, she’s yours,” Gwen said, putting the lead rope into my mother’s hand.

My mother, with tears still curving down her cheeks, ran a hand over the horse’s flank and turned to look at the group. They were all there: the now five-member Brodie family; Jim and Lydia Gentry, and Dell and Gwen Lebrun–those lovable, musical hippies who’d orchestrated it all.

“How’d you know?” my mother asked.

A wry smile tweaking his silver mustache, Dell said, “I think you might’ve mentioned it once or twice.” He laughed a moment and then paused. “But, seriously, we talked to the owner about it, and it just so happened the horse kept driving his cattle away from the water.” Dell shrugged. “There was nothing he could do except sell his horse or lose his herd.”

“Oh, one more thing,” Gwen added, her green eyes bright with tears. “She’s expecting a foal in the fall.”

My mother — always the pursuer of signs regardless if they were literal, figurative, or imaginative — began to both laugh and cry while running her hands over the sleek sorrel’s belly. And months later, on a crisp fall day, when Winifred birthed a toddling colt, my mother named him El Shaddai: Hebrew for “God Almighty.” To her, the small foal’s birth was a seed of faith planted in a day of draught.
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When the camp’s relationships disintegrated due to a denominational divide that could not be crossed, the women were subjected to the witch hunt first. Gwen’s artistic temperament and love for animals were deemed New Age; Mother’s feisty personality and doctrinal viewpoints were said to resemble those of a domineering Jezebel. So, as punishment, Jim Gentry, the camp’s owner, simply told the women no animals were allowed beyond the borders of their yards. To Gwen, this was more of an atrocity than if Jim Gentry had placed her under house arrest. For, despite her pet fawn’s certain demise after she was sent to Land Between the Lakes, Gwen had continued rescuing every stray creature with a broken bone, back, wing, or womb, and there was no way her motley crew could cram within the confines of her yard.

For Mother, this was like knifing open a wound that had been carefully stitched shut and sealed with time. The comfort she’d found through our Quarter Horses was remarkable. It was as if every time she brushed down their sleek sorrel coats or picked out the pebbles wedged inside their hooves she was taken back to the days of her childhood when her mother was still alive, her sister Cecilia was by her side, and her dreams had not yet been diminished.

The day we sold three-year-old El Shaddai the sky festered like a boil and a warm rain began pelting the men as they cross-tied and led the horse — whose will had never been broken — into the trailer.

“You shoulda named him You Shall Die not El Shaddai,” the man muttered, wiping a mud-splattered hand against his Carhart jacket. “If he don’t quit carrying on, he’s gonna do us all in.”

El Shaddai’s piercing neighs caused both his mother and my own to begin pacing back and forth, frantically trying to soothe his pain while realizing no remedy could be had.

When they loaded him up, he kicked his legs and struck the man on his right. After they pulled the man out, his knee cap shattered, El Shaddai continued flailing around so much the trailer looked like it was on shocks. El Shaddai had filleted his flank and — white-eyed and frothing with pain from the chain bit slicing into his tongue — he finally surrendered to his fate and stood still.

We continued watching the horse trailer until its winking red tail lights no longer penetrated the gathering darkness. It was then that my mother knelt in the mud and began to weep with the sleek sorrel’s whinny echoing her cry.