The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [28]
Each time Harry chose a new home for a horse, he saw it as a grave responsibility, ever since the first time he’d been tapped for that duty. When the Germans surrendered the horses they had stolen during the war, Harry, a member of Dutch 4-H, was assigned the job of examining the horses. No one would ever know exactly what atrocities these horses had witnessed during the war—or in what ways their horsepower had been harnessed to the Nazi cause. When the horses came back to St. Oedenrode, in many ways they resembled the Dutch people: once fat and shiny, now gaunt, with new scars on their bodies and a wilder look in their eyes. But like the people, they had survived. With his father and brother, Harry examined each of these horses, picked up their feet, looked over their legs, checked their eyes and wind, their tails and backs. Every once in a while, they recognized a horse—one with distinctive markings—and could return it to the original owner. But most of them came without pedigrees and would be going to new homes: one horse for a one-hectare farm, two horses for two hectares. Young Harry felt the weight of each decision. For each horse, he chose a new owner; for each farmer, that horse might make the difference between success and failure, between bringing back the farm and losing it.
Harry would never know exactly where Snowman came from, but he knew how it felt to be displaced, neglected, and undervalued, and still face the future with ears pricked forward. A farm nearby and a boy looking for a quiet mount—it seemed to portend good fortune. Still, on the evening of Snowy’s departure, sadness hung in the air as Harry did his rounds and checked the other horses. The air on the spit of land where Harry had made his home often has a briny tang from the nearby sound. On summer evenings, it is filled with birdsong and the chirping of crickets. The familiar scents of the barn—straw and sawdust, Propert’s boot polish and neat’s-foot oil—were overlaid with the scent of the air that swept over the marshes bordering Long Island Sound. Thinking of Snowman, it was hard for Harry not to feel a lonely pit settle deep in his stomach. He thought of his mother and father and all of his brothers and sisters left behind in Holland; he thought of his brown mare Petra, who had made him proud in jumping competitions; and for a moment, he leaned on his pitchfork and looked out across the darkening horizon.
But soon he straightened up and set himself back to work. Here he was, on his own little patch of ground, his own Hollandia Farms, taking care of his wife and family. Harry so missed the gray’s three friendly whinnies trumpeting from the barn like an equine reveille, but he brushed aside the hollow feeling inside. He knew that to make a go of it in the horse business, he couldn’t get himself attached to every old plow plug that came through the barn.
7
How to Make a Living at Horses
High Point, North Carolina, 1951
Harry was twenty-two years old, he and his wife, Johanna, part of a wave of postwar immigrants who came to the United States from Europe, when the Dutch flagship Volendam pulled into the port of Hoboken in August 1950. Out of about two million new immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1950 and 1960, some fifty-two thousand were from Holland, or about five thousand Dutch immigrants each year.
The early 1950s was a time of brash new developments that would forever change the face of the country—the biggest of them being the advent of television. In 1951, Edward R. Murrow debuted his television show See It Now by showing a split-screen image of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge—the first time the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had ever been seen simultaneously. In 1950, Diner’s Club introduced the first credit card and Xerox manufactured the first copy machine. The cost of a gallon