A Good Horse (27 page)

Daddy said, “Abby, Mr. Matthews has some good news for you.”

I felt myself waking up, or something like that. Something like my hair standing on end or my skin prickling. I said, “Really?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the old Mr. Matthews. “We’ve been talking things over with your dad, all about the mare and this colt, Jack, and we don’t feel that we can rightfully take him away from you. It still isn’t absolutely certain that he’s Alabama Lady’s colt. Mr. Brandt here can’t trace her every movement to By Golly Horse Sales—too many missing pieces. By Golly didn’t happen to take any pictures of her, and neither did you, as we know.”

Mr. Brandt said, “There’s that other brown mare. Never did find her new owner, so there’s just too many variables. Lord, I wish there was some sort of test for these animals, but there isn’t.”

I said, “What about the cowlick in his forelock? You said the mare had that, too.”

“Oh my,” said Raymond Matthews. “There’s no evidence that cowlicks are inherited. You can use them to identify a horse but not to identify the offspring of that horse. Same with white marks. However the parents’ white marks are arranged doesn’t mean a thing for the foals.”

“Just random, in my experience,” said Warner Matthews.

Daddy said, “Did she ever run in races? I saw that she had a tattoo, even though I couldn’t read it very well and didn’t think to try and write it down.”

“No, she never did,” said Warner Matthews. “That trainer is very picky about running fillies. If their breeding is better than their speed, he sends them back to the ranch. Sometimes it just makes me mad, but he was right in her case. She might have done nothing as a runner, and she was a good producer from the get-go.”

There was a long moment of silence while we stared at Jack, then Raymond Matthews said, “I think the lesson here is, if you got good stock, then you’ve got to hold on to it.”

“Here’s the plan,” said the old man. “We are going to go to the Jockey Club and explain everything we’ve found to them. They are going to have to rule whether this colt is the son of Jaipur and Alabama Lady, and the likelihood is that they will decide that the doubts are too numerous for them to register him. In that case, the colt is yours, free and clear, to do with as you please.”

Oh, the punch line. The Jockey Club, I thought, would be a club of jockeys. What jockey could look at him and not want to ride him? I stopped grinning. Out in the gelding pasture, Jack reared up, then galloped off, kicking all the way. All the men laughed. Raymond Matthews said, “Well, he is a lively one.”

Warner Matthews said, “Yes, he is, and my private opinion is, how could he not be as well bred as we think he is?
But
you rescued the mare and you’ve done a wonderful job with the colt, so on the off chance that the Jockey Club rules that this is the son of Jaipur and Alabama Lady, we will own him jointly, and in another year, we can have another look at him and decide about his future. There are eighteen thousand Thoroughbreds born every year in the United States, and not many of them get to the races. I’m not going to take your horse away from you, Abby, with that kind of odds. He’s thriving here. He should stay here.”

Mr. Warner Matthews looked down at me and patted me on the shoulder. But I reached up and threw my arms around him, and gave him the hug of a lifetime.

The three men stayed for supper. We had fried chicken and peas and mashed potatoes, and Mom made a pumpkin pie. Raymond Matthews kept looking at Rusty, and in between supper and dessert, he got up from the table and went out on the porch. I could see them from my seat. Rusty sat square in front of him, the way she always did, with her ears up and that look on her face that made you think she was about to say something. He leaned over her and petted her once on the top of the head; then he said, “Rusty? Do you know how to roll over?” And Rusty got down and rolled over, as if she had only been waiting for someone to ask. Daddy was watching, too. He said, “That dog is beyond me.”

Mom just smiled. Then she said, “It’s not like I can’t teach a dog a trick.”

We all laughed.

It was Jane Slater who solved the mystery of the first Raymond Matthews. He was not a friend of Rodney Lemon’s but a drinking buddy. Jane said, “Maybe you don’t know the difference, but there is one. Remember the story I told you about Rodney and the horse knocking themselves out together? Well, there was another fellow involved in that, a man who exercises horses up at Bay Meadows, which is a racetrack south of San Francisco. Bit of a shady character. He and someone he knew concocted the plot, and the other guy was the one in the—what did you say?—white Caddy. Rodney was going on about there being a Jaipur colt from Texas in the neighborhood, and they looked up what mares had been bred two years ago to Jaipur, and there was only one from Texas. They went from
there. Would Rodney have gotten a cut of the profits? He swears not, and Colonel Hawkins believes him.”

I didn’t know, either. I didn’t blame Rodney, though maybe I would have if those men had gotten away with our money. But knowing that Rodney knew this person who knew that person who knew another person was sort of like knowing (and I did know, no matter what the Jockey Club might say) that Jack was the son of Alabama Lady and Jaipur. Right here in our pasture on our little place in our valley was a colt. When I took out my horse notebook and wrote the name of his sire next to his name, I thought of Kentucky, where Jaipur lived, and New York, where he had won famous races, and I thought of that city in India he had been named for, which I looked up in the
World Book Encyclopedia
at school. When I thought of Alabama Lady (I wrote her name just below Jaipur’s), I imagined Texas and Alabama, of course, and how she must have felt wandering in the open spaces of Oklahoma. It was funny how you could imagine places you had never been. Thinking of them made you want to find out about them, look for pictures, go see them for yourself. When Raymond Matthews sent me the pedigree of the foal who was lost and maybe found, I wrote down all the names: Nasrullah, Mumtaz Begum, Rare Perfume, Eight Thirty, Sir Gallahad, Hyperion, Bull Dog, Asterus. When I closed my eyes and thought about them, they seemed to take me everywhere.

Jane Smiley is the author of many books for adults, including
Private Life, Horse Heaven
, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning
A Thousand Acres
. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.

Jane Smiley lives in Northern California, where she rides horses every chance she gets. Her first novel for young readers,
The Georges and the Jewels
, also features Abby Lovitt and her family’s ranch.