The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [102]
At night, at home with Johanna, Harry plotted out the fall. There were a few more local weekend shows he could go to—but the rest of the season looked hopeless.
The horses in contention for the big year-end prizes would spend the fall campaigning, from the Pennsylvania National at Harrisburg down to Washington, D.C., where a brand-new international show was promising to make a big splash. Then it was on to Madison Square Garden. Horses would be racking up points faster than ever at these weeklong shows. In a single show, a horse that did well could match the points earned over the entire summer season.
Harry looked bleakly at the calendar: a day to drive to Harrisburg, another day to drive back, and seven days of show. The same thing for Washington. He and Johanna talked it over. Snowman and Harry had already qualified for the Garden. If only one or two of his students could qualify for the junior division, then the Knox headmistresses would have to let him go. But the Pennsylvania National and the Washington International were out of the question. Even if Harry and Snowman won every class they entered, he could not earn enough prize money to support the horses and his family. He needed his job at Knox; that was an incontrovertible fact of his life. And the truth was, he was grateful to have the job, grateful that the swank school had taken a chance on someone like him—an immigrant who was just learning English and who had no social connections.
Maybe somebody else in his position would have felt thwarted—here he was on the cusp of an unthinkable triumph and he had to fold his hand. But Harry was a teacher. He stood in the sun in the middle of the arena on hot days. He stood in the courtyard getting wet when it rained. Day in, day out, Harry was there with his students, watching them, analyzing their riding styles, and sharing his wisdom. And Snowman was a teacher, too. Fat girls and timid girls, shy girls and stiff girls—any girl, whoever needed him, climbed aboard the big gray teddy bear and grew braver.
“Grab the mane!” Harry hollered. “Because that’s what the good Lord put it there for.” One after another, the girls grabbed Snowy’s thick white mane to anchor them over the fences. One after another, the girls gained confidence, fell in love with the horse, and brought him extra carrots and apples, tucked into their pockets.
Harry was proud of his girls. He loved to hold them to high standards, and to ask them to do things that they did not know they could accomplish until they were done. The girls gave a little extra for their young instructor because they sensed that he believed in them—sometimes more than they believed in themselves.
Back at the de Leyer house, Johanna had started a scrapbook with clippings of Snowman’s exploits, and they had placed the trophies and hung ribbons all around the tidy living room.
At Knox, in the rain and the sun, Harry put away the glorious quest of summer and focused on the present, just as he had always done. He planned a schedule of local shows and thought about his stellar pupils—the ones who might be able to ride at the Garden.
Sure, in the mornings, up early, working alongside Jim Troutwell, cleaning stalls, he thought about that PHA championship. When was the last time a horse in the lead for the trophy had dropped out of the competition? Probably never.
Luckily, Harry had no time to dwell on that question. There were back-to-back junior shows for the next two weekends, and Snowman came along, carrying his students around the courses.
Harry let Bonnie ride Snowman in the junior jumpers and she got a little cocky, thinking he was a piece of cake to ride. Instead, he fooled her, ducking out from the side of a fence rather than jumping. From the sidelines, Harry had to chuckle at his four-legged teacher. Now sixteen, Bonnie was one of his most gifted students—one he could trust with the green and challenging horses. She had taken old Teddy Bear for granted—and he had been too smart for her.
Harry saw the tears of humiliation brimming in her eyes when she rode