The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [59]
After the show, Harry loaded up the van and headed out for hamburgers with his children. Maybe nobody knew who he was. Maybe people wanted to laugh at him for riding an old plow horse. But he had ribbons on the dashboard of the truck to bring home tonight. Not the ribbons he had been winning for other people, like Sinjon’s owner. These ribbons belonged to him, to his family, to Snowman, and to Hollandia Farms. From where he and Snowman had started out, those ribbons represented a huge accomplishment.
After the North Shore Horse Show, a desire lodged deep inside Harry and would not let go. He’d felt such pride upon hearing the announcement over the loudspeaker: “Snowman, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Harry de Leyer, ridden by Harry de Leyer.” Sometimes it seemed to Harry that for a man in the horse business, his desire to be his own man worked against him. He still smarted from that time he had gone to his boss at the riding stable, cap in hand, to ask for a raise and had been turned down. But then he thought about Mickey Walsh, who had a particular jauntiness in his step because no man was his master. Harry could stand having the mistresses of Knox peer around corners at him because the one thing they never interfered with was the horses. Harry wanted his own champion—not a horse that would be sold away from him or that he would train for someone else’s glory.
Back in Holland, especially during the war, his family had faced extreme scarcity. They had been forced to make do with what they had—and in comparison his life in the United States was one of abundance. He remembered the war years when there were no horses, and how they had cut corners to keep the farm going. If you want something badly enough, he understood, sometimes you have to work with the materials you have.
That night, in the barn, as Harry plied his pitchfork, bedding down the horses for the night, he reflected on Snowman and how the horse had jumped fences to come home. Harry was smart enough about horses not to be too sentimental about them, but he also thought that people could underestimate them.
He always visited Snowy last at night. They spoke the same language, the language of survivors. Just closing his eyes, Harry still remembered the day during the war when the thatched straw roof of the small Catholic hospital in St. Oedenrode caught on fire. He, along with many of the other young men of the village, were members of the volunteer fire department. They assembled close enough to see the flames, but there was gunfire coming from both directions. The much-needed fire hose lay behind enemy lines. The men decided to draw straws to see who would go. Harry looked around that circle of men, their eyes barely illuminated in the dark. He knew each one of them, had gone to school with them, worked alongside them, seen them courting their girls at carnivals, and sat next to them in the pews at church, their heads bowed. Harry was the youngest, and the only one who had no wife or children. Before giving it a thought, he volunteered. His father said, “You don’t have to go, son,” but he made no move to stop him. He was a quiet man, but Harry knew he was proud.
Crawling on his hands and knees down the alleyway toward the hospital, Harry could hear the pock-pock of gunfire, but he was so concentrated on his task that he didn’t think about the danger. When dawn brightened the sky, the hospital was still standing, and the American and British troops had driven the Nazis out of St. Oedenrode. Among the patients at the hospital, there were two wounded American soldiers. The nuns invited Harry in to meet the soldiers he had helped save, and the GIs gave him a bar of American chocolate. After the war, Harry was surprised to receive a plaque for his bravery. He did not think what he’d done was brave—it was a job that needed doing, and he had done it. Some horses were like that too, Harry thought—born with a strong will to do what