The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [139]
A horse is big and he needs a big hole to be buried in, and Harry and the boys were drenched in sweat when they were done.
After it was over, Harry walked back to the barn and got in his truck.
He drove away and did not come back home for two days.
Epilogue
The Galloping Grandfather
Charlottesville, Virginia, Spring 2005
At the age of seventy-seven, Harry de Leyer didn’t think it was unusual to be sixteen feet up on a loading platform, jerking hay bales into the hayloft of his Virginia farm.
He tossed the fifty-pound hay bales into the loft as though he had been doing it all his life—and he had. Though the setting of the farm was spectacular, in the beautiful horse country north of Charlottesville, Virginia, this was no gentleman’s farm. There was work to be done from sunup to sundown, and Harry did the lion’s share of it.
Though he had once thought he would live forever at Hollandia Farms, this had not come to pass. After Snowman’s passing, over time, things changed for the de Leyer family. Eventually, Harry and Johanna divorced. Johanna still lived on the farm in St. James. Now happily remarried, Harry had settled in Virginia, never having forgotten the beauty of the countryside from his time spent at Mr. Dillard’s Homewood Farms.
One thing had never changed: caring for horses was hard work. Harry’s body was powerful but compact, and his hands were even more knobby: somewhere along the line he had broken every finger at least once. The hair under his baseball cap was snow-white, and from under its brim, the blue eyes that his students called “mesmerizing” still twinkled with his characteristic good humor.
Harry jerked on the twine and tossed the bales like a man half his age. The platform rocked slightly as he hefted each of the bales into the loft of the barn. What happened next occurred in the blink of an eye. As he jerked one bale up, the twine snapped. Harry tumbled backward, his hands flailing, trying to grasp at thin air. But there was nothing to grab hold of. He fell sixteen feet straight down and landed on his head on the hard-packed dirt.
Harry’s first thought was shock. Then came anger. Having spent his life training and jumping horses, he had known his fair share of what he called “spills and thrills” and he was almost impervious to pain.
He lay in the dirt, stunned, for a moment, then shoved himself to a sitting position. How many times had Harry fallen from a horse? But deep down, he knew he had never had a fall like this.
Like a fallen horse, he instinctively wanted to stand. He tried to hoist himself up to his feet with his strong arms, but when he tried to walk, he tumbled to the ground. By then, a stable hand had come around the corner of the barn, spotted him, and called for help.
He was still trying to stand when the paramedics arrived. The EMTs were probably used to dealing with people in stress and pain, but Harry was not cooperating. Though they used hard talk and soft talk, nothing seemed to work. The two burly rescue guys tried to strap him to a board by force. Like a flailing bronco, Harry repaid the favor by punching one of them in the nose.
It was not until he was airlifted to the University of Virginia hospital that everyone realized how serious it was. Harry’s back was broken in several places.
Most septuagenarians are worried about walking. They’re not worried about never riding a horse again. Of course, Harry was a different breed. After almost fifty years in the show ring, he was known as the Galloping Grandfather. He never, ever planned to quit.
It had been many long years since his triumphs with Snowman—almost half a century. But every morning of Harry’s life still started out in the barn, caring for his horses, watching them, talking to them, observing them, showing off that intuitive bond that came from a lifetime of living and working alongside the beautiful beasts.
The family gathered round during the long days that Harry spent in the hospital. At first it was touch and