The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [2]
By the end of the auction, two to three hundred horses would have been trotted through the arena, looked over, bid upon, and sold. For some horses, the transaction would be their salvation—a dud on the racetrack snatched up to be groomed as a horse show star. For others, it was a step down—a retired show horse might be sold as a lesson horse. At the end of every auction, there were always a few that found no buyers: the ones whose lameness couldn’t be masked, the sour-tempered ones who lashed out with hooves and teeth, the broken-down ones who stumbled their way into the ring.
But no horse left New Holland unsold.
The same man always made the final bid: the kill buyer. He purchased horses for the slaughterhouse so that their carcasses could be ground up for dog food and their hooves boiled down into glue.
The auction lasted only three or four hours, a testament to how quickly the horseflesh would move through the arena. At the end of the morning the Amish farmers would clamber back into their buggies, the race vans would head back to the track, and the new horse owners would coax their horses into trailers and go home.
No one would be left on the grounds but the kill buyer, loading up the last of the horses to take to the slaughterhouse.
That Monday, in February 1956, Harry de Leyer was running late. The headlights didn’t work on his beat-up old station wagon—not surprising, since he’d paid only twenty-five dollars for it. A new car, for close to fifteen hundred dollars, would have been far beyond the Dutch immigrant’s modest budget. Although he had arisen long before dawn on this wintry morning, the snow and a flat tire had set him back.
By the time Harry finally arrived at the auction, the grounds were deserted and there were no horses to be seen. After the long drive down from New York, now he’d have nothing to show for it.
Only one vehicle remained, a battered old truck with slatted sides, more cattle car than horse van. A bunch of horses, fifteen or so, were crowded in its back. A rough man dressed in a barn jacket and dungarees was just closing up the ramp.
Unwilling to give up after his long drive, Harry leaned out his car window and called to him.
The man seemed as though he didn’t want to be bothered. “Nothing left but the kills,” he said.
Harry got out of his car, walked over, and peered through the vehicle’s slatted sides. It was a cold day, and the horses’ breath made steam rise up in the air. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of seeing a horse bound for slaughter will attest that the animals seem to sense when they are hitting the end of the road. Sometimes, horses react with fear, feet scrambling for purchase on bare wooden floors, metal shoes clanging against the van’s sides. Other times, they just look haunted, as if they know where they are headed.
A pit formed in Harry’s stomach. He would never be able to think of a horse as a collection of body parts to be turned into horsehide, dog food, and glue. Back in Holland, old horses past their prime were put out to pasture. His father had taught him that a horse who had served man deserved to live out his days in peace.
Could none of these horses still serve some useful purpose? He peered into the truck’s gloomy interior. In a proper horse van, horses travel in padded stalls, their legs bandaged in thick cotton batting, with fresh hay suspended within reach. But this van offered nothing like that. More than a dozen horses were packed together on the bare metal floor, fenced in by rough slats that did nothing to protect them from the elements or from one another. Harry could smell fear rising up from them; the sound of hooves striking metal was almost deafening, and in the shadowy interior he saw flashes of white in their eyes.
But one of the horses stood quietly, crammed up against the truck’s side, seeming to pay no mind to the chaos around him. Between the slats, Harry saw large brown eyes. When he reached out his palm, the horse stuck his nose