Dante of the Maury River (7 page)

“He’s sure pretty,” Junie said. “Black as tar, not a speck of white.”

“Great looking,” agreed Doctor Tom.

“How ’bout I take some measurements, Tom?” he said, and didn’t wait for permission.

Junie knelt down to that interesting hard silver case. He opened it up, and I stepped back. The Texan began to piece together a real monster of a stick. He called it his measuring stick. I called it Trouble. I trotted sideways and back.

Junie grabbed ahold of my halter. “Steady, now. Steady.” His grip was full strength and full-on.

“He don’t like new things,” said Red.

“He also don’t appear to be a very intelligent animal,” Junie replied.

Now, a half hour wasn’t nearly up, but was I going to let him get away with insulting me like that? Not a chance. I started pawing and scraping my front hooves along the ground. First my right, then my left. Wanted to let him know I meant business and that I possessed the agility to go with either a left or a right kick. I brandished one leg, then the other.

The Texan tightened his grip on my lead, yanked my head down, and stepped in close to me. A tad too close for me to set my aim upon his shin, but I tried.

Junie didn’t care for my behavior a lick. “What else have you got to show me, Tom? This colt isn’t all I’d hoped he’d be.”

I didn’t cover Doctor Tom his half hour. The appointment didn’t take anywhere near that long. Red took my lead while Junie packed up his stick. I danced and trotted right back to my box and sputtered my great relief to be done with Junie.

Before my door was shut tight, Doctor Tom piped up: “How about I show you a different colt with even more potential than the black one? Great breeding, big heart. Also a grandson of Dante’s Paradiso.”

“What color is he?” Junie asked.

“All chestnut.”

“No white?”

“Not a speck.”

Junie rubbed his palms together. “I do love a redhead. Let’s get a look at him.”

Covert Agent accepted the measuring stick and Junie’s hard grip without a stammer. In return, Junie stroked a smooth check for seven figures to Doctor Tom. Looked like my cousin was now the top foal of the season. Not me.

I
’ll be a crossbreed if pretty soon after Covert left, every one of the remaining foals in my barn didn’t get loaded up and hauled off to one September sale or another.

All I could do was stand and watch. Helpless, moving toward hopeless. The only colt or filly left in the barn? Yours truly. Little Dante.

Marey was the first one I thought about, and it made me sad for her that I was a disappointment. I looked out over my stall door, hoping maybe there was a private trailer waiting to take me to Lexington, too.

“You’re not going, so whatcha lookin’ at, Boss?” Red said to me. “Not to any of those fancy sales. This mess is your own doing, I’m afraid. Lucky for you, the Edens are old-school. Every now and again they keep ownership over a foal for themselves.”

He scratched my neck, and even though his hands were rough enough that he could have curried me with his bare palm, I let him. I watched the cloud of dust from the horse trailer zip down the drive. Good-bye to the chestnut filly, the bay, and the brown, and all the other colts.

“Chill, my man. You’ll go away, all right,” said Red.

Sure enough, my turn came.

No sooner had I inhaled my grain the next morning than did I hear Red — that hard-to-knock-down bull of a man — out in the drive, scrapping and cursing the truck. He influenced the engine with his brute force, I’m certain, and pretty soon the old rig sat idling in the driveway, right next to Grandfather Dante’s statue.

Some kind of business was about to unfold. With no foal left in the barn but me, I figured I’d know soon enough, so I kept licking my feed bucket to calm my nerves, biting the plastic rim, too.

I smelled Melody’s bubble gum before I saw her at my door with my halter. I knew why she’d come. Right behind her stood Mrs. Eden and Doctor Tom. Everybody had come up to the barn to say fare-thee-well. I traded breaths with the old horsewoman, and I didn’t kick or bite Doctor Tom.

Melody led me out herself. “Take your time, Little Dante. I’ll never forget you. Even if you never get back here again. Which, well, you probably won’t.”

A wisp of my mane got stuck in the stall door hinge, and I liked the thought of leaving some little part of me behind.

Two hills away, off in the distance, I saw Marey standing in her field, watching me. She grazed alongside a freshly painted white fence in a field of tall bluegrass. She lifted her head to the wind and tossed her mane, and the most reliable light breeze in all the world — the one that starts and ends in Kentucky — carried Marey’s love and good wishes directly to me.

I caught her final message by the tail. “Remember who you are. Race for your family.”

I took one last look at Marey. Already her belly was starting to swell. A new foal would arrive in the spring. In the meantime, I planned to do right by my dam and by the colt or filly she was carrying.

I halted before loading in order to make one last memory of my home. Marey lifted her head, turned, and trotted down the hill. Far behind her, upon my word, I think I saw the faintest trace of Grandfather Dante. I can’t be certain, but I nodded good-bye, even if only to his statue. Real or made up by my wishing mind, I was relieved to have a little something from both of them to take with me.

Melody led me up the ramp, checked on my hay net, and patted my cheek. She wouldn’t let Red see her crying, but I felt those loving tears on my neck.

“Be good, L.D.,” she told me. “And run fast, okay?”

Red grew impatient to get moving, but Miss Feisty wouldn’t hear of it till she was good and ready.

I whinnied good-bye, and Melody ran off the trailer. Before the doors closed, I saw her bury her face in Doctor Tom’s shirt. A new life awaited me, one of winning or losing or who-knew-what.

I
was stuck in that slow-moving trailer for pretty near a full day. Red wouldn’t know a hurry if it whinnied in his ear. I got to stretch my legs only when Red stopped to stretch his. Believe me, what Red lacked in speed he really did make up for in endurance.

Along the way, I learned firsthand that the world is a big place outside Edensway. Mountains and rivers, forests and fields, highways and backcountry roads.

On a secluded compound down one of these backcountry roads, at the first line of Virginia’s blue mountains, the trailer came to a stop, and I came to train for the track.

Like Marey always told me, people have had plans for me since before I was born. Before I was bred, even. The plan was mine to follow, or mine to fail. See, my visit to the in-between, where I met my grandfather, awoke in me a spirit of questioning and left me with a sense that fate had tapped me to deliver something special for the bloodlines. “The very spit of Triple Crown–winner and legendary racehorse Dante’s Paradiso,” people liked to say, even though everybody knows that while horses drool and salivate as sure as the day is long, we never spit. Ever.

In Virginia, where I had come to train for a year, it was the job of my trainer, a man by the name of Gary, who was always grumbling and growling about time, to mold me into the champion I was bred to be. Presumably, he had some prior experience in this, because he was highly regarded by the Eden family. Darn near every other racing family, too, it seemed.

Gary’s place in the blue mountains was a whole lot different from Edensway. For one, the barn was crowded with young Thoroughbreds. For two, all four walls were enclosed, so we looked across at one another instead of across the farm. Sure, we each had our own window facing out, and, sure, there was always something going on inside to keep us entertained.

My stall wasn’t even near the doorway. I expect Gary had some preconceived ideas and speculations about me. He about told me as much when he first brought me off the trailer.

“Here you go, friend,” he said as he unlatched my stall and led me into a clean, boxy space with plenty of soft footing. “Putting you right next to my office. We’ll be neighbors.” His hearty clap to my withers sent up a little cloud of dust. Red hadn’t seen fit to brush me along our way.

At my old barn, I could look straight down the breezeway and call out to the others. They’d all listen to me and show their heads and whinny. At Gary’s training facility, none of us even pretended at being friends. We knew we’d all be competing against one another in the baby races once we turned two. All of us were important yearlings from well-respected farms in Kentucky. And there was a filly from New York and a colt from Pennsylvania, to mix things up.

I observed all the comings and goings-on at Gary’s. While the training farm hadn’t the acreage of Edensway, the campus was tucked into and surrounded by mountains as blue as the grass back home. I could partly see the mountains from my back window, and I took a lot of comfort from the solitude and knowingness of them.

Those blue mountains were swarming with little and large critters that liked to circle around the farm, all scrounging for supper. A doe and her twins left the cover of the mountain forest every day at dawn and again at dusk. Bobcats liked to crouch up in there, screaming like a lady, most every night. I saw one once. Big cat. Terrifying.

What I loved most about the mountains was to hear the owls screeching and hooting and the warblers trilling and chirping. Sounds pleasant enough to cause a lonesome colt to fill up and nearly burst with a longing for home.

Gary’s barn was swarming, too, with those stern, upright predators that had been plaguing my whole short life. People with pitchforks, rakes, and wheelbarrows. Unfortunately for them and for me, people with needles and scary instruments of every sort.

At the training farm, the days, like my life, were planned up one side and down the other. Those folks weren’t messing around. Always asking questions and writing down the numbers but not really listening. All talkers, no hearers, if you ask me.

“How much grain did he eat? How much hay? Is he drinking enough water? Does he need a salt lick to make him thirsty?”

“Tick. Tock.” Gary’s training motto didn’t include much time for listening to a colt’s wants or wishes.

We had scheduled turnout. Scheduled lights-out. Scheduled exercise on a hot walker. Everything aiming toward one thing: racing.

At first, I had a tough time adapting to this new way. I worked hard all day and barely had the energy to do all that was asked of me. I never got to eat enough. Being sore became my habit of being. My back, my hips, my legs. My everything always ached.

Gary and his rank old horsemen didn’t seem to give a whinny about who my sire or my dam or my grandfather was. Some of the more seasoned hands walked around like the place was theirs. They spent hours a day hovering around at my behind, doing one invasive thing or another. People have been obsessing over my temperature my whole life. No different at training.

Pretty soon, I’d had my fill of all of them. After I reared up once, to protest going out again to run, but only because I needed a rest, Gary had them put a chain over my muzzle.

“Little Dante they call you? Well, listen up. Don’t matter a hill of beans to me who you were when you walked in here. I promise, you’ll be a different horse by the time you leave here,” Gary said to me after that.

Sure enough, the training changed everything about my body and my brain. I’ve always liked knowing what comes next, and at training I knew everything. Every day was the same, and eventually, that made it easier for me to act more like the horse that Marey wanted me to be.

Still, even with all the monitoring and exercising and testing, there’re twenty-four hours to the day, and that’s a lot of hours to be good. After my workouts on the hot walker, I’d meet up with a fairly green young man who had developed the habit of shaking in his britches around me.

That boy was half scared to hose me down in the wash stall — the other half too scared to scrape the sweat off of me afterward. Either way, I’d most always find myself standing in my stall with steam and sweat rising off me like I was on fire. I guess I was starting to grow into my name, Dante’s Inferno.