Nick

Author's Note: This is a true story.

 

Nick was a lovely horse. He was gentle, good-natured, highly trained and smart—just an all around good guy. He was a blooded Morgan, a gelding and I think he was a dark bay, but it’s been fifty years since Nick died and there aren’t any pictures left of him, so I’m not sure anymore. I was only about four when he died and I don’t remember much beyond him being dark brown but he belonged to my grandfather heart and soul, although Papa wasn’t supposed to have him.

You see, Papa was a mounted police officer in New York City back in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s; that's where he met Nick. I’m not quite sure what path brought my grandfather there, but I like to think that since he was an animal lover and Irish he simply put the two together and signed on as a mounted cop. It’s as good an answer as any and doesn’t really matter now.

Papa told me that he hadn’t known all that much about horses before the New York Police Department hired him. Horses were still common when he as growing up—he’d been born in 1902— but he was a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks in Newark, New Jersey and the horses he saw were work animals. No one he knew rode for pleasure; no one had the money for that kind of thing, even if they did have the time. His father was a train engineer who, according to family legend, was part of Sherman’s March to the Sea back during the Civil War. His mother was a housewife and former concert pianist who’d lost an arm in some kind of accident which clearly changed her life and, I assume, not for the better. Papa’s closest brother was twenty when Papa was born, his father elderly, retired and in the early stages of what was probably Alzheimer’s. Life was pretty tough.

So he applied and was accepted, provisionally, by the NYPD—provisionally based on his making it through the training for the mounted force.

He told me once about some of his training and he claimed that they started out with weeks of classroom work and endless hours of basic horse care, everything from mucking to grooming to proper feeding and first aid. This was when he was assigned Nick as his mount. They were partners from the start.

I remember him telling me the police stable always kept a filled bucket with water next to a full bottle of ammonia in the barn in case a couple of the horses got into a fight with one another. Pour the ammonia into the bucket and throw it on the fighting horses, aiming for their heads. It forces them to separate to breathe and then you should be able to get them apart…just one of the old police tricks Papa taught me.

The men, and it was all men back then of course, started riding bareback in an empty ring to get the feel of their animal and to build confidence. Slowly, over weeks, they increased the pace; they moved from a sedate walk to a slow trot and then up to a gentle canter, all bareback. Finally, the cadets who hadn’t fallen along the wayside—literally—the ones who could stay on and in control at a full gallop were permitted a saddle, minus the stirrups.

Without stirrups they took low jumps, then a series of jumps, and then they guided their horses through obstacle courses. Sometimes they used reins but just as often they didn’t. At the end of a couple of months the men had either washed out or become decent riders and were allowed full tack. Papa told me that they had to custom build their own saddles from parts, but I always figured that belonged in the blarney file.

Nick and Papa both passed—Nick was three or four years old then and as much of a rookie as my grandfather—the two of them were mustered in as partners. Their assigned beat was Central Park and crowd control.

He never talked much about his life as a cop, so I spent a lot of time when I was a kid imagining my grandfather sitting on Nick in the park on a perfect spring day. Both handsome in their police uniforms, sun dappling through the trees while they protectively guarded their charges. In my mind’s eye there are butterflies flitting about and children happily playing and petting Nick’s nose. Though there likely were days like that, the reality could also be a bit darker.

We were sitting on the porch one summer when Papa told me why he quit the force.

One day there was a threat of a riot in the city and a number of the mounted units were called in to respond, along with the foot police.

Now, you have to understand that police horses are highly trained service animals. At the time the NYPD used Morgans because they were believed to have the best disposition for the job, as well as being considered among the brightest and calmest breeds. Police mounts are trained to keep their cool, to not react to a rioting crowd, to not step on feet, to not rear unless asked to, to behave and do as they’re told. A policeman’s life can depend on the horse doing its job. A panicked horse out of control can kill someone.

The cop has to trust his horse completely, and vice versa. The horse has to know, without question, that his rider won’t let him be hurt.

He and Nick were on the front line as the crowd went out of control. There were a lot of people, emotions were running high, some of the rioters were probably drunk. It was close to a chaos situation when my grandfather saw one of the rioters coming at Nick with a broken bottle, intent on doing as much damage as he could—or so Papa assumed in the seconds he had to respond.

My grandfather was a large man, over six feet and strong. He took his billyclub and hit the rioter and, with some shame, admitted to me that he wasn’t sure if he killed the man or not, nor did he care. He did know the man went down and Nick was unharmed.

There were no official repercussions at all, no one said anything but Papa resigned from the department, uncomfortable with what he’d felt forced to do. He returned to his home in what was then farm country in New Jersey. (He’d left Newark years before.)

A month or two later he received a call from one of his old police friends. There was a problem with Nick. He’d stopped eating and wasn’t doing well. They were worried and out of ideas. Nothing the vet was doing seemed to help. Could my grandfather come into the city?

Going back to the police stables, he visited Nick and it became clear the animal simply missed my grandfather. He loved Papa and without him around the horse’s heart was broken and, as happens sometimes with horses, he was pining, starving himself to death with grief. There was nothing the vet could do, the prognosis was bleak and everyone believed that the horse was going to die..

Now, mounted cops are pretty much all animal lovers or they wouldn’t be mounted cops. No one wanted to see Nick kill himself but the problem was that, as a valuable piece of police equipment, he was owned by the force and couldn’t be sold unless he was declared unable to work. The official plan was to have him recover and be reassigned to another officer. However, hope was fading quickly as the horse became weaker.

When asked if he might, possibly, have a place to keep a horse, my grandfather answered that, yes, he lived in an old farmhouse that had a barn with two empty stalls. He could fence the lower yard.

The decision, probably illegal and fudged by the police vet, was easy. The doctor mustered Nick out of the force and declared him permanently unfit for duty. He was retired out and sold to my grandfather for five dollars. It saved his life.

Trucked to New Jersey, he lived out his life, quite pampered, and living well into his thirties.

The last time I saw Nick, Papa was babysitting me, along with several of my cousins. It was a warm summer or spring day and, as always, we swarmed the then ancient Nick out in his field, giving him endless carrots and apples, petting and grooming him. Between his gentle disposition, old police training and great age, Papa knew we were completely safe with the horse and easily agreed to let us give the old boy a bath.

Taking the garden hose and an entire tube of Prell shampoo (anyone remember Prell?) we had at it. A little while later Papa came out to see how we were doing.

He found us standing around the horse, poor Nick completely covered in soap bubbles like a bad sitcom, his ears sticking up from the suds and silently begging Papa for rescue. Barely managing to keep a straight face, Papa suggested to us, “I think Nick is clean enough now.”

We hosed him off and brushed him, quite pleased with ourselves for a job well done.

Nick died later that week—of unrelated causes, I hasten to add. However, he died very clean.

A decade or more later I found an old horseshoe down in the then empty barn and carried it up to the house to show my grandfather. Pleased, he took it from me. “It must be one of Nick’s.” Then added, remembering and smiling, “He was a good horse.”

2/16/08

 

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