The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [4]
Harry knew what it felt like to be powerless.
Beat up or not, this horse seemed brave: Harry noted the quiet way he stood there, the gaze that said he was ready to trust. Horses are herd animals. They smell fear, and sense danger. But this horse held out hope; he seemed to put his trust in a strange man, even though it was clear that, thus far, men had treated him poorly.
The horse stood motionless, square on all four, looking straight at Harry.
“How much you want for him?” Harry asked.
The man said again that he would bring sixty dollars for dog food. Harry felt his resolve melting under the horse’s steady gaze.
He repeated his question. “How much you want for him?”
The man grinned broadly, probably thinking he stood a chance to make a buck on this guy. “You can have him for eighty.”
Harry averted his eyes, fingering the rolled-up bills in his pocket. He could buy a lot of meals for his family for eighty dollars, a lot of bales of hay and sacks of grain for the horses. It was hard to imagine facing his wife with his money spent and nothing but this broken-down ex–plow horse to show for it.
Hadn’t Harry gotten over being a sucker for horses?
But there was something about this horse. Harry turned back and the horse was still watching him intently: he was wise, an old soul, a horse whose steady demeanor seemed to cover hidden depths.
Man or beast, Harry did not like to see a proud soul held in captivity.
“Might make a lesson horse, if we can fatten him up,” Harry said.
He handed over the eighty dollars and never looked back.
2
On the Way Home
St. James, Long Island, 1956
Eighty dollars poorer, Harry had made a deal. Now it was time to hit the long road home. The truck driver was heading back to New York anyway—to the rendering plant up in Northport, not far from St. James. The eighty-dollar price tag included ten dollars to drop the horse at Harry’s barn. Ten dollars in the pocket for the butcher’s driver was enough incentive to spare the horse’s life. Nothing left for Harry but the long drive back through the snow in his beat-up Ford. On the front seat of the car lay the flashlight he used when the headlights went on the blink. Maybe he could make good time and get home to his family before nightfall.
As he drove, Harry pondered his purchase. A horse for sale is more than a flesh-and-blood animal; he is also an embodiment of a promise. Along with his physical attributes—coat color, four legs, a strong back, a facial expression—he also carries hope: that he will be strong and brave, faithful and true. For a man in the horse business, a horse is a financial transaction as well. A good buy made a safe lesson horse; a better one made a profitable resale. Harry fell in love from time to time along the way—an occupational hazard. He considered himself sensible, though he also had to admit that he seldom met a horse he did not like.
Leaving New Holland, Harry navigated his way around black carriages pulled by Amish teams that reminded him of home; the simple farms, the horse-drawn wagons harked back to St. Oedenrode, the village he had grown up in, before it had been ravaged by the Second World War. His route back to Long Island took him along the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike. Now a modern highway, the turnpike was first built for heavy six-horse coaches pulled by sturdy Pennsylvania Conestoga horses. In horse-and-wagon days, New York City and its suburbs had one of the highest equine populations in the country, and eastern Pennsylvania was home to the farms where these workhorses were bred. Harry was only the latest in a long succession of men who had taken this route in search of a good horse.
But the farther Harry got from Pennsylvania, the more the world around him changed, as if the road itself mirrored his own journey, just six years earlier, from a small Dutch farm to America. When he and his wife had arrived from their village, Harry possessed