The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [32]
In the afternoons, Harry often walked a quarter mile down the road to help out at his neighbor’s dairy. Calvin Ross ran a small ice business and a farm. He had a gas-powered engine to blow the hay up into the silos, but he used a horse-drawn wagon to pull the corn in from the fields. Harry offered to drive the wagon. He enjoyed being around the animals, and the dairy, with its predictable rhythms, reminded him of life back home. Life in St. Oedenrode had been marked by activities that changed with the seasons—swimming in the summer and ice-skating in the winter when the ponds froze over. Every spring, the children had gotten excited when the circus came to town, bringing the Cossacks—Russian riders who performed tricks and daring feats on horseback.
One day, Cal told Harry to set aside the weekend so that he could drive him to the North Carolina State Fair. Harry had never seen so many tractors in one place. He and Cal walked around with awe, looking at the contraptions. In the early 1950s, there were still many small family farms in America, and many of those farms still used horses to pull their plows. The fancy tractors cut down on the time necessary to work the fields, making farming more efficient, but they also required much more capital. A tractor was many times more expensive than a horse. The shiny tractors and farm equipment that Harry and Cal admired that day would soon permanently change the face of American farming, as small family farms were sold off and consolidated, leaving in their place large industrial farms with sufficient money to invest in farm equipment.
Back at Cal’s farm, horses still did much of the work. Nobody had thought to use the workhorses for riding, but one day Harry caught one out in the field and saddled him up—the ride was rough, but solid. Experimenting with all three horses, and making makeshift fences from old posts and rails, Harry found that one of them could even jump a bit. He called the mare Petra, after the beloved horse he had left behind in Holland.
People scratched their heads at the sight of Harry and Petra out in the fields, late in the afternoons, when everyone else wanted nothing more than to relax in the shade with a cold beer. They couldn’t help but stare at the young man, dirty and sunburned from being outside all day, riding in the field on the clunky old plow horse. Still, if a person who knew horses happened by, it was clear from the way the young man sat in the saddle, from his erect bearing, the ease and suppleness in his back, and the light hands on the reins, that this man knew how to ride. The language he spoke to the horses was mostly silent, but sometimes he muttered a few words in Dutch.
Circling around, galloping, and jumping, for a few minutes Harry could forget everything and recapture that feeling of flying. Afterward, he groomed the horse carefully, gave her an extra measure of grain, and then released her into the pasture. Tomorrow, he would hitch her up to the wagon to lug corn to the silo, and he knew the horse would plod along, as quietly as before. But just because you are hitched to a burden does not mean that you do not sometimes want to fly.
The entry fee for the local horse show was three dollars; it bought a rider the chance to vie for a ten-dollar prize. For Harry and Johanna, the cost was an extravagance. But riding mattered to Harry, deep down in his bones. He worked so hard all the time, they reasoned, that it couldn’t hurt for him to ride in the show. The old plow horse didn’t stand a chance, but Harry groomed her as though she were a top thoroughbred. Back home in Holland, the same horses who pulled the plows and carriages were saddled up and ridden to horse shows on the weekends. This seemed normal to Harry. He dug out his riding breeches and jacket from his suitcase, and Johanna carefully mended and ironed them. He blacked his tall boots and slicked down his hair. Harry was ready to go.
There are no photographs to record the moment when Harry de Leyer arrived at his first horse show on American