A Good Horse (16 page)
Authors: Jane Smiley
It was dark by the time we were finished, and all of the cupcakes were gone. Mr. Goldman came home, and he and Mrs. Goldman watched us do the last scene, then clapped and shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!” so we were all laughing and excited by the time the parents showed up. Gloria’s mom came in and watched and clapped, too, and then I went to their car, because Gloria’s mom was giving me a ride. All the way to my house, she talked about how great the Goldmans were, and it was true. The plan was to go back Saturday and finish the play.
When I got home, it was after dark and Daddy had done all the work. He and Mom had ridden Lester and Sprinkles and Jefferson and Lincoln down to the crick. Lester seemed fine after his busy night Sunday, and Daddy had gotten Black George out and trotted him around a bit to see how he felt after the show. “Perfectly sound and not at all tired, as far as I can see.” Daddy ate a bite of his pork chop. He said, “You sure you showed that horse, Abby?”
“More than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jane—that’s what Miss Slater wants me to call her now—had us jump some bigger jumps in the afternoon. I meant to tell you that, but I was too tired to remember.”
“How big?” said Mom, setting down her fork.
“Well …” I could tell that Daddy wanted to know, but Mom really didn’t. I said, “Maybe … maybe four feet.” I scraped my fork around on my plate where the mashed potatoes had been.
Mom said, “That’s like jumping out of the pasture out there.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Daddy. “Those are four-six.”
“I don’t know—” said Mom, but Daddy said, “How did it feel?”
“Black George doesn’t care.” I looked at the two of them, Mom a little white and Daddy a little excited. I wished Mom would start eating again. After a moment, I said, “While we were doing it, I didn’t really realize how high they were. He just gallops down and jumps them.” I thought about the two ways I had felt about those jumps—that they were easy and that they were scary. How could they be both at the same time? So I said, “They were easy.”
“Oh dear,” said Mom. But she started eating again. She took a bite of salad.
It was funny the way her saying that made me both more confident and more scared at exactly the same time. But I thought if she knew I was scared, she would get more scared and make me stop jumping so high. I didn’t want to stop. I said, “You just get in the rhythm. Jane—Miss Slater—said she can’t believe what good horses we have.”
“We’ve had some luck this year, I think,” said Daddy. “Not every year is a lucky one, but the Lord does provide.” When he said this, Mom glanced out the back door. Rusty now had a blanket all her own on the porch and another blanket all her own, an old woolen horse blanket, in the barn. I could see her on her new blanket, her paws neatly together and her chin resting on them, but her ears up and her eyes bright, keeping an eye on things. I realized that that was what she had been doing since I first saw her, keeping an eye on things. Mom saw me looking at her and smiled.
Daddy said, “Which brings me to Lester.”
“Lester is such a good horse,” said Mom.
“I have a buyer for Lester.”
“That’s too bad,” said Mom.
Daddy shrugged, then said, “Jack Louis came down this morning to talk about the fence, and I was grooming Lester. He asked if he’s for sale, and I had to say yes, so he tried him. He liked him a little too much in the opinion of my heart, but just enough in the opinion of our bank account.”
I said, “How much did he like him?”
“He offered two thousand.”
“Gracious!” said Mom.
“Well, he’s a good horse. Chased those cows up the hill and thought nothing of it,” said Daddy. “We don’t get to keep the really good ones, no matter how much we like them.” He caught my eye.
I said, “I know that, Daddy.”
He said, “We all know that.”
Well, we did know that, but it was a lesson I kept having to
learn. After supper, I went out to the gelding pasture. I tried to be quiet, but Jack saw me, anyway, and nickered. Even so, he didn’t come over. He and Black George were finishing all the bits of hay they could find from every pile—it was like they were vacuuming. Lester and Jefferson were standing together, switching flies, and Lincoln was having a drink. All of a sudden, Jack reached toward Black George and gave him a little nip, then he jumped backward when Black George snorted and pinned his ears. Then he waited a moment, but when Black George went back to nosing the ground for hay, he stepped forward again and gave him a little nip on the haunches. Black George now pinned his ears and lifted his back end, as if to kick, but he didn’t raise his feet. He was saying, “I could kick you. Don’t make me.”
But Jack seemed determined to make him, because he trotted around to the other side and nipped him again, then he spun and cantered off. This time, Black George seemed to think that Jack was determined to be a pest, so he chased after him a few feet with his ears pinned, and then it looked like he decided to get in the game, because he picked up speed and caught up to Jack and reached out to nip him. Jack immediately turned and reared up, and so Black George reared up, and they tossed their heads at one another and squealed. They lifted their forelegs, but not as if they really meant it, and then Black George came down and galloped off, and Jack ran after him. Once he caught up (and he did that very quickly), the two of them took off around the fence line of the pasture, bucking and kicking.
It made me laugh to see them play, and reminded me that
the way I had been thinking of Black George at the show, as my perfect machine of a horse who just goes and goes and does whatever you ask so that you can sort of ignore him, was wrong. I knew right then all over again that Black George had his own ideas of what was fun and how to do his job. I thought that with just one bit of effort, I could see the courses we were jumping from his point of view, and that point of view would be lower than mine, but wider—he would see everything all around us, but nothing right in front of us or right behind us. And he would feel the earth under his feet, and he would hear lots more sounds than I could hear, as he flicked his ears back and forth. And he would feel me on his back.
The best thing about Black George—I thought I should always remember this—was that all those sensations that he had were fun for him. So he was not a machine, but a horse who enjoyed himself most of the time, even when, as now, Jack was racing toward him with his head down and his tail down, as if he were going to run right into him. But he didn’t. The two of them just reared up again and galloped past Lester and Jefferson, who pinned their ears and insisted on being left alone. So I called Jack over to the fence, and Black George came with him, and I gave them each a piece of apple. Then the others looked at us and decided that they had to know what was going on, so in about two seconds, I was surrounded by horses and handing out everything in my pockets, which wasn’t much.
It was Thursday when the next letter arrived from Mr. Brandt. It was a long one, and when I brought it in from the mailbox,
I really wanted to open it. It made me nervous. But I was too nervous to open it, so I didn’t carry it out to Daddy. I set it on the table and went to my room to put on my riding clothes.
We worked three horses each. It looked like this was going to be Daddy’s last ride on Lester, so we took him and Happy up the hill to see the cows. The fence was really fixed now—five strands of wire and some extra posts all along the section where they got out, because they never forget where it was that they did that once they’ve made it. Daddy said, “Some cows can jump, you know, just like a horse, but maybe these haven’t figured that out.”
I said, “Happy could really take to that cow-chasing thing.”
“That’s my next project, roping off of her.”
“I wondered why you got out the sawcow.” The sawcow was like a sawhorse, but it had sides painted like a cow, and it had horns.
Daddy said, “We’ll start slow. Something fun to do for a few weeks.”
Then we took Sprinkles and Black George down to the crick, and finally, we rode Jefferson and Lincoln in the arena. The problem with them was getting them going, not controlling them, so at least once or twice a week, we had to make sure that they walked, trotted, and cantered nicely. Jem Jarrow’s way of getting a horse to step under and loosen up was good for that, too, even though Jefferson and Lincoln were never grumpy, just lazy.
When we put them away, I rubbed Jack down while he was eating his evening hay and Daddy was dragging the hose around to fill the water tanks, and all in all, I just forgot about
the letter until I walked in the house and saw that Mom had opened it already, and it was lying there waiting for me. I picked it up. It read:
Dear Mr. Lovitt,
We have made considerable progress in our investigation into the disappearance of Alabama Lady, and I thought that I would bring you up to date on what we have found, as there is a possibility that something we have learned might trigger your memory in some way. We still have not heard from the party who purchased the other mare at By Golly Horse Sales, and now there appears to be a third mare of a similar description who was found somewhat closer to Wheatsheaf Ranch, but we have had little luck in tracing that mare as well.
The story as we now understand it:
Here in Texas, where the Wheatsheaf Ranch is located, October 14 of last year was an unusually hot day—Indian summer, which around here means in the nineties and humid. For this reason, Allan Wilkes, the farm manager, decided to leave the mares out in the larger fields, where they could stay cooler, rather than doing what he normally does in cooler weather, which is to gather them in smaller pens closer to the barns for the night.
The mares, therefore, were given a good feed of hay, and all the gates were checked and found to be locked with padlocks at approximately five p.m. Alabama Lady and four other mares occupied a particular pasture close
to the road and some distance from the hay barn. There are three other pastures close by. Each of these pastures contained between three and six pregnant mares.
At approximately midnight, Isabella Marquez, the wife of one of the foaling grooms, whose apartment is somewhat close to the road, remembers waking up to the sound of a truck engine slowing on the road, then stopping, then starting up again. Although this is not an uncommon occurrence near the ranch, given subsequent events, this evidence is considered to be significant in this investigation.
Sunrise the following morning, October 15, took place approximately six-thirty a.m. central standard time, at which point two workers, Mario Marquez and Sergio Marquez, Mario’s son, noticed that one of the pastures was empty. They subsequently found that the fence had been dismantled at the corner closest to the road—the nails holding the boards to the posts had been pried loose and the boards tossed in a ditch nearby. All five mares had disappeared. It was first assumed that all five mares had been stolen and taken away in some sort of trailer or van. Unfortunately, the weather had been dry, and there was no readable evidence in the dirt of the road of who the thieves might be or what their subsequent movements were.
Of the five mares in the pasture, four were rather young. The fifth was sixteen years old and in foal to one of the stallions standing at the ranch. Although she was a particular favorite of Mr. Matthews, she was
the least valuable of the five mares, and, fortunately, she was the first to be found. It is possible that she was left behind by the thieves, because she was discovered not far down the road, nuzzling some other mares across the fence at the far end of the ranch. She was in good shape and not injured in any way.
In addition to Alabama Lady, the other three mares were a chestnut with a white blaze and one white foot, named Lucy Lightfoot, in foal to a Kentucky stallion named Dedicate; a gray mare named Morethanenough, in foal to Sword Dancer; and another chestnut mare with a star and an idiosyncratic snip that ran up between her nostrils, then around the side of her face, named Leonia, also in foal to Dedicate. The fourth, of course, was Alabama Lady, the largest of the five mares, in foal, as I have said, to Jaipur. That the thieves should have focused on these four mares could indicate that they knew their way around Mr. Matthews’s operation. We have pursued a number of leads in this regard, and of course, every large business must have disgruntled former employees to watch out for.
Mario Marquez reported the theft before seven a.m., and police arrived at the scene by eight. Mr. Matthews was informed of the theft by telephone in London, England, where he had traveled on business a week earlier. When the police could make no headway in finding the four younger mares in the subsequent forty-eight hours, my firm was enlisted to help in the investigation.
Because the older mare was found, the local police
assumed that the theft was actually an act of vandalism and spent most of the next two days looking around the area for the four mares. As you may know, the area is ranch country, with few roads and lots of rangeland for cattle. It was thought likely that the mares would have taken refuge somewhere nearby, where there was hay and water. Local ranchers were enlisted to help with the search, and one man offered his small crop-dusting plane, but the mares were not found. At this point, I think it was likely that they were hidden somewhere. Perhaps you never realize how huge a landscape is until you are looking for several horses under a tree or down in a draw.
As soon as my firm entered the investigation, we decided to treat the disappearance as a theft. The difficult question is, what could a thief do with four expensive Thoroughbred mares in foal to four expensive stallions? and the answer to that question is, not much. All Thoroughbreds have pedigrees, and all Thoroughbred pedigrees are unique. All breeding stallions and mares are registered, and a stallion and a mare can only come together one time in a single year, and so any attempt to sell these mares and these foals as themselves would result in their being identified as stolen animals. Nor could they be raced anywhere in the world, since the system of Thoroughbred racing is worldwide, and registration papers with the various jockey clubs of the various racing countries are required in order for a horse to go to the racetrack and be entered in races.
The only hope that a thief would have of putting
these mares’ offspring to use would be to use them as ringers—that is, to substitute these well-bred foals for other foals similarly marked but of lesser breeding, and to put them in races at long odds in order to make money on large bets, but although this is a possible plot, it seems like an expensive and elaborate one not guaranteed to result in rapid or certain reward. I confess that given the nature of Thoroughbred horse racing, I was perplexed as to the motive of the thieves, if, indeed, they were thieves rather than vandals.
My firm did, of course, contact every horse auction facility and sale barn in Texas, and we also perused periodicals devoted to horse trading. On the thirtieth of October, we were alerted to the presence of a mare in an auction in West Texas, and a representative of our firm did go to that town and identify the pregnant mare as Mr. Matthews’s mare Leonia by the snip that curls around her nose.
She was not in as good a condition as we would have wished, and the manager of the horse auction said that he had received her from a man of average height and build, with a northern accent of some sort, who said that he had run out of money and could no longer feed his horse, and so he had to sell her for what he could get. The auction manager gave him two hundred dollars, thinking that he got a good deal for a nice mare who just needed some weight. The unknown man left in his truck, with his trailer. The auction manager did not think to get his license plate number. The man did
sign a paper, but he scribbled the name “Sonny Liston,” obviously not his own.
Leonia was quickly returned to Wheatsheaf Ranch and is in good health. She produced a filly in March of this year. After her reappearance, Mr. Matthews decided to offer a reward for the return of the other mares, five hundred dollars apiece. For one week, we heard nothing of note.
It was the fact that we found the mare Lucy Lightfoot at a farm in Arkansas that alerted us that the thieves, whoever they were, had abandoned the mares. The mare seemed to have been left by the side of Route 375 and to have wandered about before showing up at the farm of Walter Brinkhorn, near the small town of Mena. She was discovered one morning foraging in a harvested cornfield. She was in somewhat worse condition than Leonia, with an injury to her eye and another injury to her left ankle that looked like it had been caused by barbed wire. After we were satisfied that Walter Brinkhorn had indeed found the mare, we paid him his reward. Unfortunately, the mare suffered a tetanus infection from neglect of the wound to her ankle and could not be saved. She died at the ranch shortly after returning home. The foal, of course, could not be saved, either, as it was only at a gestational age of six months.
Two days later, the third mare, the gray mare Morethanenough, also turned up, but her fate was happier than that of Lucy Lightfoot. She was found near
Fort Worth, on a horse farm, in a pasture with twelve other mares. The owners had been out of town for two weeks, leaving the care of the farm to a manager and two grooms. The groom in charge of the mare pasture did not notice the addition of a thirteenth mare, especially as four of the mares were gray and one of them looked rather like Morethanenough. When they did notice her, it took several days for them to connect her with the reward notices for Mr. Matthews’s lost mare, but they turned her over readily, and there is no reason to doubt either the story of the farm owners (respected members of Dallas–Fort Worth society) or the grooms. Morethanenough was not as far along in her pregnancy as the others, and she produced a healthy colt last May.
The remaining mare, Alabama Lady, has simply disappeared from view. My guess is that the thieves, realizing that they could not profit from their theft, drove around Texas and abandoned the mares in widely separated regions, and that the mares then foraged on their own for days or weeks. Leonia was found hundreds of miles from Lucy Lightfoot and hundreds of miles from Morethanenough. If, indeed, Alabama Lady is the mare that you purchased from By Golly Horse Sales, then that location is, once again, hundreds of miles from both Wheatsheaf Ranch and the locations where the other mares were found.
Records at By Golly Horse Sales indicate that a brown mare was purchased on November 6 from a man who found her in Cheyenne and Arapaho country. She
was in bad shape, so he sold her to By Golly Horse Sales for $125. The young man who received the horse and paid for her did not remember to ask for a receipt for the cash he paid, so there is no record of who sold her to By Golly. She was turned out with the other mares, and the young man does not remember anything specific about her, except that “she seemed real hungry and thirsty.” Once she was turned out with the other twenty mares at the horse sales, no one noticed her in particular. She was one of four brown mares with no white markings. These were dispersed by the end of November.
I have since driven around the Cheyenne and Arapaho country. As you may know, that area is arid and in many ways desolate, with few towns. I did not expect to find the man who sold the horse to By Golly Horse Sales, and I did not find him. My work on another investigation may bring me to California in the near future. If so, I would like to visit you at your ranch and discuss your memories of Alabama Lady at the time when you saw her at By Golly Horse Sales and bought her. I would also like to have a look at her colt. I hope that this is acceptable to you. Please let me know.
Yours truly,
Howard W. Brandt