You have your bandages laundered, rolled up, ready. You have your sheet cotton and your hoof packing. You groom them and put on leg liniments, run bandages. You might freeze their legs with ice or put them in a turbulator with epsom salts. They love to stand with the warm whirlpool water up past their knees. If their shoulders are stiff, you rub salve on and wrap them in plastic and pin a wool blanket around their neck. Pretty soon the sweat starts dripping. It loosens them up, makes them feel good.

On race days, you sprinkle this green powder — it looks like dope — onto a little piece of sheet cotton and light it on fire under the horse’s nose. There’s belladonna in it, among other things. You put a bucket on the ground and drape the horse with a raincoat so he can really steam open his head. All this crap — snot, phlegm, mucus — pours from his nose into the bucket.

Once, some trainer’s kids who hung around the track thought they’d be smart and smoke it, too. They smoked it, then ran around like squirrels.

YOU CHECK IT, YOU SHAKE IT

You got your triple-tie timothy hay bales, a hundred pounds each. Oats come in ninety-six pound sacks. No one’s going to run up and say, Oh, Miss, let me get that for you! You carry your own. You lift them.

No mold, no dust. A feed man with iffy thistle hay won’t get through the track gates, but there could be a leak in your barn roof, so you check it, you shake it. With a heave-y horse you might have to soak the hay even if it don’t seem dusty no more.

Some horses want a wet mash to eat — you put beet pulp and boiling water in their feed and mix it up. You check their stool and make adjustments. This one’s a little loose. This one’s hard like road apples — he needs more bran. A bleeder will get extra alfalfa for the K-C vitamins, which helps clot the blood.

Vets and farriers make their rounds. Everything all right here? Need anything? You might want to hang a jug on a horse. The vet’ll give copper, iron, arsenic, strychnine, a B12 cocktail. A nervous horse you give thiamin, B1 — it takes the edge off. Others need electrolytes to help them bounce back after a race.

If a horse is bored or hurting, he’ll paw a hole in the ground in his stall. You fill it with water because he won’t like the splash, or you pack it with dirt and smooth it level and sprinkle a little hot red pepper on top.