Marin Smith
Sphincter Law
A hoof plunges into earth, raining dust and gravel down the hillside. I shut my eyes as the wind picks up; I bow my head as if in prayer. My horse, too, bends his head low, quickening his steps. Mercifully, we reach a shelf. We stop. Leather squeaks as I dismount, my fingers gripping wire cutters and a handful of large staples, the metal cold and heavy from its solo journey in my saddlebag. I step carefully over to the fence that runs up this ridge at a comically steep angle.
“Dude ranch wrangling is like puttin’ your grandma on top of a refrigerator on top of toothpicks,” is how the job was pitched; Rudy had spoken these words a few months ago over the phone.
“I want you to know I’m not a cowboy,” I had told him, “I mean, I’m not a cowgirl—I mean—I’m just a…a horse girl.” This felt like an important distinction. My credentials toward a wrangling job were a plucky willingness, quiet riding hands, and a solid riding seat. But I didn’t wrestle cows or know how to throw a rope.
“You’ll do great,” Rudy had said, “we need wranglers who know how to talk to people. Cowboys can’t talk to people.” He offered me $1000 a month plus meals and a bunk. That May, I drove to Wyoming feeling like I’d won the lottery.
Now here I was on a steep ridge. The valley stretched on for tens of miles below me, capped at its end by the mountains of the Wind River Range. I could squint to see the badlands that flank the river—dry, orange-banded temples that are homes of bighorn sheep. My horse, the color of smoke, was standing sentinel, his hide warming my back as I squatted to look at the barbed-wire fence. Rudy had sent me up the ridge to fix a fence, but I’d never fixed a fence in my life.
*
Wrangling was a tough grind. Every day, I threw dozens of saddles—saddles as heavy as my own body—over the backs of horses, then led tourists on rides through the valley. I wore boots, stiff jeans, a shirt buttoned up and tucked in, and a sturdy hat. The Wyoming air made my hair dry as grass—I wove it into a braid every day, a lingering token of femininity draped across my back. And eventually—clip, stretch, hammer, clip again—I learned how to fix a barbed-wire fence.
One of my chores on the ranch was to throw hay to the pregnant mare in the front pasture. Nutmeg was due to foal any day. She was a gentle, beautiful mare—her color was called, with the exactness of a paint swatch, “liver chestnut.”
A mare’s belly, when she’s full term, is laughably large. Her body evokes giant balloons in a Thanksgiving Day parade, her legs the long, thin cables that reach the ground. There was no telling when Nutmeg might give birth—it was likely that one evening she’d be standing in the field alone, and the next morning there’d be a foal standing next to her.
On the morning I walked out to the pasture to find Nutmeg on her side, I assumed she was in labor. She was at the pasture’s far end—rotund, motionless. I called out to her.
“Hey!” punched from my diaphragm, my voice echoed across the field, but she didn’t raise her head. With an almost instinctual pang, I knew she was dead.
We found out later that her baby was still inside her; her cervix was closed, and there were no signs of distress. At the time, I knew nothing about pregnancy or birth, so I didn’t know the significance of a closed cervix. It would be years till I had reason to pay attention to my own—that narrow passage beneath the uterus through which a baby passes to come out of the vagina. It’s the cervix that must be completely open for the baby to be born. Midwives will tell you the ideal birth is achieved when the cervix can open gracefully—in the safety of a familiar room, or in the Nutmeg’s case, bedded down at night. Midwives believe that if a mother feels threatened, the sphincter might stay closed. The sensitivity of the sphincter to external stimuli is known as “Sphincter Law.” The term was coined by the famous midwife Ina May Gaskin to refer to the finicky nature of the cervix—like an anemone touched by a child’s finger, it sometimes refuses to open. Though not a sphincter in a technical, anatomical sense, the cervix functions as one during birth—all this to mean, it does not simply open when asked. We’d never know for sure why Nutmeg’s didn’t open.
Nutmeg was hauled away with a tractor that afternoon, her legs straight and stiff in the air. That evening, a group of us went out to the bar.
“Nutmeg!” moaned Jake, the head wrangler, sipping his sixteenth beer, “Just up and died!” He took another sip, then closed his eyes.
“Such a nice mare,” he said quietly.
We all drowned her death with beer that evening—she and the unborn foal. But to carry on we had to shut out the memory the best we could. The wranglers never spoke about it again.
*
On a June morning seven years later, I went into labor. After about a half hour of riding it out myself, I called my husband.
I tried to be very casual, so as not to alarm him but also not to alarm myself:
“I might be in labor? I don’t know. Probably no need to come home yet.”
Like any good husband, he came home anyway. When we called the midwife, she told us to come into the hospital.
“Things seem to be progressing quickly!” she said, giddy.
A few hours later, my husband is pouring cold water over my head as I stand in a birthing tub, swaying back and forth. My head is pressed against the rim of the tub, my hair matted to my forehead, and I’m groaning. I get out of the tub like a goddess unveiled from a watery abyss, my jumbo belly leading the way, a nurse on one side, my husband on the other. With each contraction, I fiercely grasp the nearest object like a taloned beast, writhing as if possessed. My husband strokes my head helplessly. The nurse checks my cervix. It’s been too many hours, and it’s not opening enough.
Through the electric pain, I think of Nutmeg. Is this what she had gone through, alone in that field? Maybe I was dying, like her. “Just up and died!” someone might say at the bar after my funeral.
I turn to my husband. “I can’t do this,” I say. Then to the nurse, “Get the doctor.”
*
Buster was “bomb-proof,” as the expression goes. Anyone could ride him, and he never spooked. But when he was tied up, he would pull backward in terror—this was his only quirk.
“Time to teach you a lesson!” proclaimed Rudy one morning, taking his rope off its peg. He opened a loop, and slid it over Buster’s head. He cupped each hoof in hand with a brief tenderness as the rope climbed Buster’s body, slithering and settling around his belly. He threaded the long end of the rope through Buster’s halter and tied it to the hitching rail. If Buster had only relaxed, the rope would remain loose—but pull, and it became a noose around his belly.
“Try to pull back now,” Rudy said, inviting Buster into his sadistic idea of a training session. I stared at the trap in horror. Then it came: the inevitable zip of running nylon and a groan of wood as Buster sensed his captivity, squealed, and pulled, the muscles in his back and neck arching like a great fish on a line. He lurched, the rope growing tight around him, and fell to his side, the rope taught, legs shuffling. His eyes bulged wide, exposing their white perimeter, searching for some sense to the situation, or perhaps searching for help. He writhed, sides heaving, his head twisted sideways, held by the knotted halter—the training session gone terribly wrong.
Rudy was just standing there, looking at the mess he’d made of the poor horse. It didn’t matter if Buster relaxed now—he was hung. I wanted to vomit. My mind reeled for how to free him, how we’d possibly loosen the rope. Amateur that I was, I failed to realize that at a certain point a knot becomes so tight it cannot loosen—it must, instead, be cut.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” breathed the head wrangler, rushing forward with a pocket knife. He sawed vigorously at the rope with the teeth of the tiny blade. The rope snapped, releasing Buster, who untangled his limbs and got to his feet, trembling. Then he just stood there, looking at us betrayed, nostrils flared, sweat-turned-foam covering his neck.
*
Cut to me, on the bed, on my side, strapped down by a fetal heart rate monitor, my cervix frozen at five centimeters, and, as it turned out, my baby turned the wrong way.
“I think it’s time for this baby to be born,” came the midwife’s voice. I filled in the missing part of that sentence in my head, the words, “via C-section.”
I reeled. The two tragic horses rose up in my memory—the rotund one in the field, swollen in maternal death, and the terrified one in the corral. One alone, the other surrounded; one dead, the other traumatized—but alive. There was no real choice, of course.
Be cut open, came the realization, or die.
Have you ever been cut open? Have you ever felt, although numb, the sickening tugging of your gut, the sudden release of pressure as what you’ve grown is pulled from its sack? Splayed on my back, a small crowd of people in blue scrubs attended my open body, seeing all its insides in a way I never would, touching, I hoped with care, my organs, and siphoning my blood. In minutes, I heard my baby cry.
Then they handed me my daughter, slippery, red, and alive. Instead of a gradual journey through squeezing flesh and bone, she’d been carved from the depths where she’d curled up against my spine. She took her first breaths and I held her, trembling, wide-eyed, my husband still stroking my head, as if to soothe a frightened animal.
*
I’ve learned now that to move on from a dismembering, there must be a re-membering. As a mother now, my days on the dude ranch flood my mind. A mother, after all, is just a different kind of wrangler.
I breastfeed, holding my daughter’s head in my hand firmly; I guide a young horse over new terrain. I diaper and swaddle; I groom, saddle, grain. Lifting my daughter’s car seat into the car for the first time, I’m unsure how exactly to click it into place; I ride up a ridge with tools in hand, even though I’ve never fixed a fence in my life.
Marin Smith lives in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. She holds an MA in English and has presented at AWP and the American Literature Association. Her work can be found in Milk Art Journal, MER Literary Journal, Considering Disability Journal, Thought Catalogue, Elephant Journal, and Dead Flowers Poetry Rag.