John Adler's Horse

    When I was recently down in Indiana, I revisited an area in my neighborhood where an abandoned farm used to be, that I often explored as a youth.  The old photo above (taken by Ann Moore) shows the barn that exist there.  Now all of the old buildings have disappeared, but the daffodils still come up every year.  When I mentioned to my uncle that I went down to the old Adler farmstead, he told me an interesting story.

    It seems that John Adler had a horse (no doubt it lived in that barn).  Anyway, one day while out in the field the horse suddenly and unexpectedly died.  John Adler hired a couple of boys to dig a grave and bury the horse where it dropped.  The boys started digging the grave right beside the corpse and it took quite a lot of digging for the boys to make a grave big enough for the horse.   Once dug, they rolled the heavy dead horse into the hole.  

    Unfortunately, the horse landed in the grave on its back, with its legs sticking up.  More unfortunately, the legs stuck up about a foot (30 cm) higher than the ground level.  There was only one way to solve there problem and the boys then had an additional task; they had to saw the horse’s legs off so the whole horse could be buried.

You can see my paintings at: www.davidmarchant.ca