Behind the Bonehouse (10 page)

Toss came out of the last stall and pushed the wheelbarrow into the tack room, then told Jo he'd pulled up the handle on the pump in there so the hose was ready to go.

He walked past Jo and Sam to the back door, and gazed across the small paddock at a dark bay mare and her new foal nuzzling at her side. Toss squinted as he took off his battered straw cowboy hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “You looked at the new foal? The colt by Tap Dancer out of Virginia Dare?”

“First thing this morning. Why?”

“Virgee had kinda a hard time. I don't reckon he lacked for oxygen. We got him breathin' right quick, but he seems kinda weak.”

“I didn't notice anything, but then—”

“I called Mr. Breckenridge, and he'll be along first thing tomorrow. He's real partial to old Virgee, and he's done real well with her foals.”

“He has.”

“I'm gonna go ahead and call Doc Dutton. The little guy might need a supplement or somethin'. He don't seem to be nursin' real good.”

“Has her milk come in the way it should?”

“Seems okay, but I'd like to get 'em both checked to make sure we ain't missin' nothin'.”

Jo kissed the side of Sam's snoot, and patted him on the shoulder as she walked past him to stand by Toss, who was scraping mud off a flat-heeled boot on the edge of the concrete floor.

Jo watched the tiny bay colt walking behind his mother, a collection of bones in a tight skin bag, as Virgee led him away. “He is wobblier than some, but there's a whole lotta variation when they're this young.”

“I know. I know. And his confirmation looks real fine, but … You hear somebody walkin' on the drive?”

Emmy was flying toward the front of the barn, and they both turned to look after her, and saw a short plump man with tiny hands and feet silhouetted against the sun at the other end of the aisleway. He was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, holding a briefcase in his other hand, while Emmy sniffed both his shoes and he looked uneasy. “A woman at the house said I should try here. I'm looking for Jo Grant Munro.”

“I'm Jo. Emmy, come.”

She came, and sat next to Jo, close to Sam's head.

“I'm from the Internal Revenue Service. I'll be auditing your farm business, your LLC architectural firm, and yours and your husband's personal tax returns.”

“Why? We've never—”

“I'd like to establish an office here today so I can get straight to work first thing tomorrow.”

“So you're Carl Seeger's neighbor, Terry.”

“Carl Seeger has nothing to do with it.”

“Right.” Jo looked at him as though he'd offered her the Brooklyn Bridge, while he pulled a card from his suit coat pocket and held it in her direction.

“If you wouldn't mind stepping out here …” He was watching Sam and Emmy with a wary, disapproving look on his smooth round face.

“You can come in the barn. Sam and Emmy won't hurt you.”

Toss hooked his thumbs inside his belt, then smiled serenely at the man by the door. “You oughtn't to pressure him, Jo. You can see the little fella don't want to risk it.”

“I beg your pardon! I don't want to get my shoes dirty.” He was looking at the piles of hair around Sam.

Jo raised an eyebrow at Toss, then walked over to the IRS man and took the card from his hand. “You'll have to wait for me to finish grooming my horse. You could walk back to the house and sit on the porch if you'd like, and I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

He considered it, and turned around, and started off down the north-south drive that ran along the high ridge from the barns back to Jo's house.

“Damn!” Toss's fists were on his hips, and blood was flooding across his face, as he kicked the barn cat's water bowl out the back door.

Sam's head jerked toward the ceiling, and his whole body levitated like a tennis player leaping for a serve that doesn't clear the net. He kept himself from jumping into Jo, and then stood right where he'd been and shook all over.

“Sorry, Jo. I wasn't thinkin.”

“Sam's okay.” She laid her arm across his withers and told him he was just fine, and then went back to currying him. “You know it's because of Carl. This guy spent eight whole weeks at Equine. Here he's got two separate businesses, plus Alan and me. He could be here for months!”

Toss went out and picked up the cat's bowl, and set it back on the floor, then took his hat off and ruffled a hand through his thick graying hair. “You fight in their wars for 'em. You hard-scrabble every day trying to make a livin', and maybe, if you're lucky, you put somethin' by for your old age so you won't be a burden to your family. Every year ya live they tax your every dollar, and then they do it again when you die—when you already paid taxes on every cent you ever made! What gives them the right?”

“You're preachin' to the choir here, Toss.”

“You and me, we never even thought about cheatin'. We've cared for horses as good as we can, and treated their owners fair, and paid our dues to federal, state and local. And what do we get for it? A fireant like Carl Seeger tellin' his buddy to make our lives a livin' hell! This here, Jo, this is real persecution! What's to keep 'em from turning you inside out 'cause they don't like the way ya vote?”

“You know that'll happen. What am I saying? I bet it already has.”

Thursday, March 12th, 1964

Spencer wasn't completely asleep when he got the call. Tracker had had a mild case of colic, and he'd walked him around from eleven o'clock on. He hadn't been in so much pain that Spencer'd thought he had to oil him, and when Tracker had finally pooped on his own just before two-thirty, Spencer'd come in to get some sleep, before he checked on him again at four.

He was just dozing off, finally, when the phone rang at three. He rubbed his eyes, as he said hello, and felt his chest pound the way it does from a call in the middle of the night. A voice he didn't recognize said, “Mr. Franklin?”

“Yes.”

“This is Chief Anderson from the Fayette County Fire Department. Blue Grass Horse Van's on fire. We're doin' our best to save it, but I reckon it's touch and go.”

“What!”

“Blue Grass Horse—”

“Sorry, I heard you. Was anybody hurt?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Thank God for that. I'll be there as fast as I can.”

Saturday, April 4th, 1964

They were racing at Keeneland, and although Alan and Jo hardly ever went to the races, a three-year-old she and Toss had foaled and raised the first nine months of his life was running in his fifth race, so she and Alan and Toss got dressed up the way everybody did—Jo in a dress, Toss and Alan in sport coats—and went off to the races.

They talked about Blue Grass burning, wondering what caused it, and what it would mean to Spencer, all the way to Keeneland, where they drove in the west gate, and parked on the backside next to the track kitchen. Then they walked up the road to where the runners were stabled on both sides of the drive in long rows of shed roofed stalls—facing each other, most of them, across pea gravel paths, with ovals of grass in the center.

They talked to Wilder Son's owner, and the trainer Toss had known since they were kids, while the groom finished the final brushing and wrapped the big colt's legs. They walked with them to the paddock, where there were two rows of trees planted in the center of small circular walks numbered according to post position.

They led Wilder to circle number six, where Toss talked to him, and stroked his shoulder, while the groom held his lead shank and the trainer discussed the race with his jockey as he smoothed the purple and turquoise cloth across Wilder's broad chestnut back.

He threw on his lightweight racing saddle and half tightened the girth, as Jo and Alan talked to the owner again, a quiet woman with wavy gray hair whose mares Toss had cared for for six or seven years. They stood to one side then and watched Wilder and his people walk round and around the number six tree. They studied the other runners Wilder seemed to be eying too, comparing conformation and discussing who was riding whom, till a gate was opened and the horses were led into the walking ring outside the jockeys' room.

The trainers and jockeys conferred, while the horses were led around the oval, completely surrounded outside the fence by race goers watching their every move. When the “jockeys up” call came, the trainers tightened girths and gave their riders a leg up, then walked their horses around the ring one more time in postposition order before leading them across to the tunnel that led out to the track.

Jo and Alan and Toss walked through the north entrance under the grandstand, and out toward the track, having decided to stand by the rail and watch the horses warm up with their lead ponies, before they were called to the gate.

When Jo and Alan were halfway across the sloping concrete apron, heading toward the rail, Carl Seeger stepped in front of Alan, staring directly at him with a lopsided smirk.

“I hear you're in trouble with the IRS.” He was grinning under his narrow mustache, squinting up at Alan, sunglasses perched on top of his head.

Alan stopped and stared at him, letting go of Jo's hand, his eyes furious, his jaw a ridge of knotted muscles, his wide soft gentle-looking mouth clamped in a fierce line. He stepped straight toward Carl with his arms clamped at his sides.

“Get away from me!” Carl stepped back as he said it, bumping into an elderly woman who was reading the race program behind him. “Don't come any closer!”

“Why? You're not afraid, are you Carl? You haven't done something to me that's making you nervous?”

“No, of course not! I haven't done anything to you!”

“Stealing my formulas? How 'bout that? Siccing the IRS on Bob,
and
me,
and
my wife,
and
her uncle? You think that might tick somebody off?”

Carl looked around him with a half-amused, condescending expression at the bystanders who were listening now, even when they pretended they weren't. “
You
are a liar, and this attack's unprovoked.”

“
I'm
a liar!
That's
interesting! If you'd fought in the war with the rest of us you wouldn't have gotten away with the kind of crap you pull. Maybe it's time somebody taught you how to act like a man!”

“Is that a threat?” Carl stepped off to the side this time, and the watchers cleared him a space.

“You and your IRS buddy don't have a principle between you.”

“Alan?” Alan didn't look at Jo, but she still said, “Why don't we go watch Wilder? The race is about to start.”

Toss was staring at Carl, his hands on his hips, his old tan sport jacket tucked behind them, his face hard, his mouth pinched under his Sunday Stetson, when he said, “Your mama'd be ashamed. 'Least mine wouldda been, if I'd carried on like you.”

“You! Who do you think you are?”

They turned away from the rail, Alan walking fast enough Jo had to trot to keep up. Toss walked backwards for a minute, straightening his tie as he stared at Carl, then he turned and followed Jo and Alan on their way to the grandstand stairs.

Toss got waylaid by Virgee's owner, and the trainer who worked for him.

But Jo and Alan climbed the stairs together, her hand tucked under Alan's elbow. She could feel the anger in the iron in his arm as he took the stairs fast. “Alan?”

“Yeah?”

“I haven't seen Carl since November, but I think he looks different. Did you? Thinner, maybe, or—”

“I was trying to keep myself from picking him up by the neck and crushing his windpipe with my thumbs.”

“I think you did rather well.”

“No. I should've ignored him. He wanted to get me going, and he did. I stood there and insulted him in public when I should've walked away.”

“Still—”

“What do you think of Wilder's chances?” Alan was telling her he was done talking about Carl.

And Jo squeezed his elbow, as she said, “Hey,” to a farmer who lived up the road. “He's alert without being nervous, which is good. He's fit, and he's fast. But I never have an opinion. There're too many other factors. Heart. Guts. Getting out of the gate without getting mugged. Luck, as much as anything.”

As it turned out, Wilder Son came in second. Though neither Jo nor Alan could've told you if you'd asked them two weeks later. Their world cracked in two in between. An avalanche swept in from the outside and drove everything before it.

Monday, April 6th, 1964

Alan woke up at two. His left leg ached the way it always did, the scarred tendons and sliced muscles more usually than the bone grafts. He stretched it and kept it moving for a minute—and used it to remind himself that he was alive when too many others weren't.

Tens of thousands of vets were in much worse shape still. He'd seen them from his hospital bed after he got back from France. He'd watched, and worried for them, and tried to help whatever way he could for more than a year in the hospital, and what he'd seen still woke him up in the darkest part of the night and made him pray for the faces that floated across his brain.

He turned over on his right side away from Jo, trying not to wake her, and listened to Emmy dreaming on her bed on the floor next to Jo. He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, so he slid out of bed in his boxer shorts, and grabbed a T-shirt from the chair by the door.

He walked through the living room, then passed the front stairs and went on into the dining room, where he turned right, along the length of the table, and limped down two ten-foot-wide steps into the farm office/ studio/study, and on through to the kitchen. He drank a glass of water, staring out into the silvery dark, then opened the back door and walked out under the arbor toward the big oval pond.