The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [66]
Harry’s own show had ended earlier that day when he had handed Sinjon’s lead rope to a groom for the United States Equestrian Team. He had watched Sinjon walk away from him, his bay haunches disappearing into the basement gloom. Harry knew that the horse was good. He probably knew better than anyone what he was capable of. Riders like young George Morris needed a lot of horses if they wanted to compete on the international stage. They didn’t need to count on any one horse working out for them. But if someone had asked Harry right then, he would have bet money that Sinjon had the ability to keep on winning, to make a name for himself.
Harry walked back to his truck empty-handed. He had no horse to trailer back to Long Island, just an empty van, rattling along behind him in the cold November night. As he drove, he thought about the skinny bay bumping into the hanging weights in his stall, nervous as a cat. On the seat next to him lay the white fourth-place ribbon, embossed in gold with the name that had a magical sonority for every horseman: the National Horse Show.
Harry’s life thus far seemed to be trying to teach him a lesson: don’t wish for what you don’t have. And yet, these past few days had given him just the briefest taste of life under the hot spotlights of big-time riding competition, enough to let him know that he wanted to taste it again. He did not have the money to buy a finely bred horse, and he was not in a position to keep a horse when the United States Equestrian Team came calling.
Generations of men just like him had contented themselves with working their magic on other people’s horses—men who possessed the kind of knowledge that could not be taught to the pampered young amateurs with their clipped upper-class accents, good manners, and limitless funds. Horsemen like Harry gleaned their knowledge by sleeping beside horses on their straw beds, nursing them in sickness, and patiently watching their foaling stalls in the dark. Take a nervous, skinny, overcharged racetrack reject—too fidgety to stand still in a stable, not trusting enough to jump fences with a man aboard—and then study that horse, learn his language, and figure out how to speak to him in that language. Harry’s hands were callused, and a couple of his fingers were twisted from having been broken. He did not think of his work as a gift; it was just the intuition of nearly thirty years spent around horses. But that was how it was—that talent, the one needed to make a horse, was not the kind that was given any importance.
Harry and Snowman share a moment of affection. (illustration credits 13.1)
Someday, Harry had no doubt, Sinjon would perform in front of European crowds, maybe even in the Olympic games. His rider would stand on a block wearing a scarlet hunt coat with a medal hanging around his neck and his national anthem playing. He would be proud, and rightly so. But when that horse was led back to the barn, the rider would hand his reins to a groom.
Making a horse and riding a horse were not the same thing. That was the way things were done, but Harry had never been one to accept the status quo. After all, he was here building a new life for himself and his family on the strength of his own crooked fingers and strong back.
Back when he was a young boy he’d had a village with a church and a school—it was an entire way of life that had seemed to him would endure forever. How wrong he was. Anything or anyone can change; Harry knew that now.
He belonged in that ring, with the men riding the open jumpers. He knew he could do it. A rider, however, is only one part of the equation. A rider must have a horse.
As he rattled east across Long Island, away from