The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [101]
One half fault, for a hind touch.
Harry felt the big meaty hand of Jim Troutwell clap him on the back, almost knocking out his breath.
A few minutes later, Harry stood on the grass in the center of the ring, holding Snowman’s bridle with one hand and patting the horse on the neck with the other. He paused to smile at Johanna and wave to the children, but then he turned his mind back to the business at hand. He could almost hear the murmur in the crowd: Who is that? Is that the one they call the Flying Dutchman? Have you ever heard of him? I heard he bought that horse for only eighty dollars.
Snowman blinked sleepily as the cameras flashed around him. Harry cradled the big gold cup in his arms, then raised it up for his horse to take a sniff. While they pinned a tricolor rosette to his bridle, Snowman stood quietly, as though wondering what all the fuss was about.
As the summer of 1958 drew to a close, the Soviet Sputnik missile was orbiting the earth, and the possibility of change seemed to vibrate in the air. But at the Piping Rock Club, horse show mothers gathered up their charges as they talked about golf, tennis, and the upcoming fall foxhunting season. They were comparing notes on their summers in Maine or Europe and getting ready to send children back to boarding schools, or Chapin or Spence in New York. They were discussing the girls who would make their debuts later in the fall, and they were talking about meeting again when they would officially mark the start of the social season in the boxes of the National Horse Show, just as their families had been doing for the last seventy-five years. And they murmured to one another about the handsome young Dutchman and his astonishing gray horse who had snatched the gold cup from Miss Sears. Perhaps they would see him again at the National.
Back at the de Leyer stables, Harry was dressed in coveralls again. He and Jim Troutwell were packing up, hefting the tack boxes and hay bales into the van. Snowman had his shipping bandages and blanket on. He was ready for a ride home and a well-earned rest. But on the front seat of the station wagon, along with an empty lunch hamper, sat a tricolor ribbon. And in the clubhouse of the Piping Rock Club, the big gold Blitz Memorial trophy waited to be sent out to the engraver, then put back on display.
Next year, when the fifty-fourth horse show started, that gold trophy would be engraved with the name of a newcomer, a Dutch immigrant named Harry de Leyer, and his slaughterhouse-refugee horse, Snowman.
18
The Indoor Circuit
St. James, Long Island, Fall 1958
It was back to the routine at the Knox School, and even though the giddy summer had passed in a flash and the big gray horse had returned a champion, there was no sign that Mrs. Phinney and Miss Wood were impressed. Education was a serious business and whatever horse show frippery Harry may have indulged in on his off time was of little interest to them.
If they had seen the pictures or read the headlines, they gave no sign. Snowman returned to his stall in the semicircular stable and seemed perfectly content to carry the girls in their lessons. The days continued balmy and sunny through the first few weeks of September, and Harry enjoyed his teaching schedule even though the girls also gave no notice of Snowman’s summer triumphs. They had all gone off to their vacation activities and had most likely given no thought to their school horses and where they had been.
Harry put Snowman right back into the lesson lineup. The horse needed to earn his keep, and the Knox ladies had always approved of him because he was quiet and never gave the children any trouble. More than once, a girl had come back from the barn, smiling and thrilled by some new accomplishment—a girl who had never trotted or cantered before, a girl who had been too timid to jump. Snowman’s manner was so unassuming, and Harry was so encouraging, that the girls always felt that the triumph was all