Painted Horses (7 page)

“If you happen to be out in the fall—late September, early October—the aspens on the hill come into their own. Just for a day or two. The leaves turn gold, the most gorgeous gold you can imagine. Not the color of a coin, exactly. More the color of fire.”

His voice trickled back as he walked away, flowed in and out of the hiss of the river, like the flutter of leaves in the trees on the slope.

“The smallest wind and the entire mountain lights up. The flicker of all those leaves, shimmering at once. Thousands of leaves, all one color. Hundreds of different trees. All one tree.”

He caught up the reins and put his toe in the stirrup and mounted. He patted the neck of his horse with his yellow palm. “See you.”

He started his horse toward the river and she called to his back. “The writing in the trees. What’s the writing, up in the trees?”

Man and horse turned back in a graceful step, did not strike her as separate species. All one tree.

“Euskara,” he said. “It’s Basque.”

John H

I

Even as a boy he can walk into a pasture and catch a horse, even if no one else can catch the horse. Even if the horse doesn’t want to be caught. He’s eight, nine years old. He’s noted for this.

His father is a moon in the orbit of horse people. He exercises two-year-olds, horses that might become the next Man o’ War, at a stable near Baltimore, Maryland. They live in a converted carriage house behind a great federalist mansion, a second home to the people who own the stable. The owners are rarely here.

His father is one of a legion of American also-rans, an entire caste whose star has been fatally and permanently eclipsed. Disappointment, tragedy, circumstance. John H knows few of the details, only that in his teens his father won a number of trap meets for money with a Parker shotgun, that he lost an eye working on a rivet gang a week before the Washington Senators sent a scout around with a wad of cash and a baseball contract. The scout took one look at the bandaged eye, took cash and contract back to Washington. John H knows his mother left when he was four, though he does not know why, where to, or with whom.

Now his father works under the tutelage of an aging trainer, a stubborn old German who is nearly deaf from the cannons in some fifty-year-old war. John H’s father has begun to believe that horses are his last lucky break. In truth he is not a natural judge or handler of horseflesh, cannot fully grasp the psychology of a prey animal. He is adequate at his job but he is not spectacular.

John H on the other hand has never known a life without horses, never known a day without them. He seems to talk in a language the animals understand. As a very young boy he walks between their legs and beneath their bellies and the horses seem to regard him as natural kin.

When he is small the German trainer allows him to ride on the backs of the mares with a fistful of mane. The German rode for the Kaiser in the Prussian cavalry, regards proper horsemanship to be the zenith of human endeavor.

He puts the boy in the saddle and schools him with formal riding drills, European theories of equitation descended from centuries of mounted combat. John H has a natural seat and no trepidation. He learns principles of balance and rhythm that work in concert with a horse’s carriage. By age eight he could ride in any steeplechase, pursue any running fox.

He also excels at drawing. When he is not riding horses he sketches them, with an expert’s knowledge of horse anatomy and musculature, a prodigy’s sense of depth and perspective and shadow. Early on he works out a schematic, his profiles built around a line that looks in isolation like a pair of low curving hills.

The German trainer dies when John H is eleven, drops like a stricken bird in the training arena while John H is at school. John H’s father takes over the training duties.

Within a year it becomes obvious he will never have the abilities of his mentor. Even the boy can see it. The horses place less frequently, and one day at the track John H overhears a stable hand refer to his father’s horses as a known quantity.

When the owners of the stable approach him about hiring another trainer, they wrongly assume the discussion goes well. They emphasize the reshuffling as strictly business, in the interest of the stable and of the horses themselves. They tell him he is welcome to continue in the carriage house, welcome to retain his original position.

For years his father has worn a glass eye, a marble ball that stares straight ahead and appears noticeably smaller than his good eye. The oddness of this, a defect glaring from the very effort of concealment, discombobulates the world. He leaves the meeting seething but by the time he arrives at the carriage house, he’s simply defeated. Over the next few days John H watches him descend to unplumbed depths. He refuses to work the horses, declines in his static rage even to feed or curry them. John H stays home from school and handles the work himself, and after four days a truant officer appears to find his father unshaven, unshirted, and piss drunk while John H exercises a filly out in the arena. The truant officer returns in the afternoon with a social worker and two state troopers, a savvy bit of foresight as John H’s father greets this party at the door with his Parker shotgun. A standoff ensues.

After a few minutes John H’s father loses enthusiasm and surrenders the Parker, which turns out to be unloaded. With the immediate menace in handcuffs, they go looking for the boy.

By the time they reach the stable John H has a horse saddled. The troopers and the social worker and the truant officer form a line blocking the doorway to the long run of stalls. The social worker tries to explain his situation but John H goes to the saddle with the agility of a monkey. He wheels the horse toward the door.

The younger of the troopers announces he’ll shoot that horse right here. His older counterpart tells him to shut his mouth. John H only says, “Move,” and when no one does he charges the lot of them. They scatter for the corners like mice.

He gallops down the mansion’s long lane and crosses the highway for the cover of the woods, forgetting until he encounters it he will first have to skirt a long span of whitewashed horse fence along the roadway. He gives the horse its head and is nearly down the fence line when the growl of a siren reaches his ears. He looks over as he turns the corner post and sees the troopers’ sedan, heading his direction. Then the trees surround him, and he keeps right on riding.

The woods follow a creek in a shallow gully between farmland and pasture country. He winds through a green dusk of sycamore and rhododendron, crashes through the gauze of a hundred spider webs. The silent shadow of an owl crosses the verdure before him. After awhile he turns the horse up the side of the gully and emerges from the warren of trees onto the edge of tilled cropland, the burst of sunlight brilliant as glass.

New furrows carve along the contours of the gully, black rows bristling with the stubs of last year’s cornstalks. A red tractor, tiny with distance, purrs along the far side of the field. John H has no real plan, only a bad feeling about the past week and about his own future.

All he can think to do is ride toward the sun. Head west. The natural route for an American horseman. He’s twelve years old and alone, wondering where he can find some grain for the horse tonight.

By sundown he’s gone wide around two farmsteads and cut through another thick lot of trees. He hears an automobile rush down a road where the woods end. He’s barely emerged from the trees when a Model T pickup with a bed full of crated hound dogs sputters out of a farm lane. John H debates bolting for the woods again and decides this will look entirely too obvious. The pickup slows alongside.

The driver is an older gent with a cold pipe in his teeth and wire glasses and a Borsalino hat. He says, “Howdy son. Nice-looking horse.”

John H only nods.

“Reckon you need a place to put that horse for the night.”

John H says nothing.

“Son I reckon you know something about bloodstock. Thoroughbred if I’m not mistaken.”

He fills his pipe from a pouch, not appearing to pay John H any mind. He may as well be talking to himself. Only he isn’t.

“You’ll follow what I have to say. These out back are champion scent hounds. My great-great-granddad or maybe his dad or his dad’s dad started ’em up. The personal history’s a little fuzzy. What I do understand is the dogs. Two hundred years of line pedigree, started in a holler on the other side of the Piedmont to run bears and ’coons and for all I know run-off slaves.

“Scots and the Irish come into that country on the Georgia Road out of Pennsylvania. Looking for land, looking to be left alone. Looking for something not English. Brought their foxhounds, their wolfhounds, what have you. Country was full of critters then. Bears, panthers, all manner of livestock stealers and henhouse raiders.

“Germans and Moravians started to trickle into the Blue Ridge about the same time. Called that country Wachau, after the woods along the Danube River. You can get lost in them hills and hollers quicker ’n a rabbit down a hole and I guess that right there was a lot of the appeal.”

His pipe is tamped and he fishes in his vest for a match, which he pops to life with a thumbnail. He says, “Invention of the century.” He fires his pipe and proceeds.

“Funny thing about breeding: it can undo its own perfection. You see it in Europe’s royal lines. Hemophilia, overbites. You start with Will the Conqueror, end with George the Fool. You’ll know what I refer to from horses—weak hocks, weak hooves. In dogs it’s bad hips and tumors. Got to get new blood in the line now and again.

“Scots and the Irish began to mix with their German neighbors. Whiskey-stilling highlanders with towheaded German girls and so forth. Also mixed foxhounds and wolfhounds with Steinbrackes. German scent hounds. So starts the line you look at now.”

The dogs peer lazily through the bars of their kennels. They lack the exaggerated droop to ear and eye possessed by the other coonhounds he’s seen. These dogs have ears set higher on their heads, less jowl than a black-and-tan or a redbone. One dog whines when he fixes his eyes on it.

“Son, I don’t know what your story is or where you’re headed. I’m sure you’ve got a good reason to be out here, or what seems like a good reason at the moment. But I can tell you this. These dogs have had a long noseful of you setting there. Believe it.

“Local law just rang and asked me to bring my dogs to track a kid on a thoroughbred racehorse. I said what’s the kid weigh and can he ride. Law said he reckoned eighty pounds, tops, and he didn’t bother to answer the second question so I said now this here might make an interesting chase.”

He gestures with the stem of his pipe through the window.

“Law didn’t tell me why, didn’t explain your side of the story, and I don’t expect you to explain it now. Truth be told I’m halfway wishing you’d put heels to that horse and give a good run so I can show off my dogs, but it wouldn’t be fair to the horse. Or to you. You light out through those trees and one or both of you will wind up injured. Or dead. So what I want you to do is ride ahead of me up that lane to my house. Make this simple on both of us.”

John H sits his horse a moment while the man chews his pipe and watches through curls of smoke. He does not seem unkind but neither does he give off any suggestion of a bluff. One of the hounds whimpers in its crate.

John H considers the options. His horse shakes its head against bridle and rein.

“Choose your time to run, boy. This ain’t it.”

John H turns toward the lane. The man backs his truck around and follows.

He talks to his father one last time, in a jail cell in Baltimore. The law did not take kindly to the Parker shotgun and things remain tenuous. For a long time his father just sits there on a bunk looking tired, his glass eye gone and nothing but a squint to mask the empty socket. When he finally speaks his voice catches and cracks though the words he uses sound like a recital of something stored away a very long time.

“I was cursed with my own luck. Early on. You never saw the place I was born but I want you to picture the mansion we’ve lived behind these past years. Now picture it with the glass gone, shutters askew and the porch torn away for lumber. Parlor open to rain and overtook with vegetable growth. That’s what I was born to.

“My own ma was broke down time she was twenty-five years old. Was a time a girl from her lot saw training as a lady. Fine dresses, French lessons. As it was she never had clean hands a day in her life, hands that weren’t stained black by dirt and tobacco leaves.

“My grandfather and his father before him owned slaves. That’s a fact, and I suppose it’s the source of the ruination.” He laughed a little. “Source of the clean hands, too. Bible says children and children’s children are made to pay for the sins of a parent. It does. ’Course the Bible also commands slaves to obey their masters, so how you stack one against the other I don’t know. I ain’t that smart.

“I met your own ma before I lost an eye. I still considered myself lucky. By the time she lit out I didn’t think I had enough heart left to break, but she proved me wrong. I don’t even blame her. People talk about for better or worse but when it comes down to it talk is exactly what it is. Words people say in the moment when they’re young and don’t know a goddamn thing.”

Years later he will look back and understand his father is in the midst of a crack-up, what will come to be known as a nervous breakdown. At the moment, in the dim light of a cell with the shadow of the bars and his father’s good eye gleaming, John H considers for the first time what an odd upbringing he has had. Not entirely bad, but odd.