The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [85]
Growing up during the war years had taught Harry something about endurance. He knew that the privations he’d faced during the war were nothing compared to the sufferings others had endured. It pained him to think about the St. Oedenrode tailor who had once altered school uniforms for young Harry. The Jewish tailor had been forced to wear a yellow star, and had survived the war only by hiding underground in a sealed concrete tank meant to store cow manure for fertilizer. A friend of Harry’s had helped blow up a train bridge to impede Nazi movement, and he had paid the ultimate price: transport to a concentration camp, from which he had never returned. Harry’s own father had been targeted by the Nazis and had spent the last couple of years of the occupation in hiding, visiting his oldest son only rarely and in the dark of night. Harry had grown up understanding that life was far from easy and that sometimes people just had to endure.
So now he kept working the same long hours on little food and tried to ignore the sore on his tongue. He kept himself going with extra milk, but he had lost more than ten pounds. He was also getting so weak that sometimes he felt dizzy in the saddle.
By late July, at Lakeville, in Connecticut, he could not swing up to the saddle from the ground; he needed a leg up to mount. He trusted Snowman to carry him around the course, but the horse had to make up for the fact that his rider was almost too weak to stay on. When Snowman took down poles in both classes, Harry tried to reassure the gray, who was giving it his all, but he had to admit the truth to himself: in this weakened condition, he was more of a hindrance than a help to his horse.
Only then did he finally make an appointment to see his local doctor, who was immediately concerned. He spotted a small tumor on Harry’s tongue, and sent a sample to pathology to have it tested. Still, Harry put the soreness out of his mind. He was a young, strong, and healthy man—not a likely candidate to develop a serious health problem. But the doctor had laid down the law: no riding at all, until the pathology report came back.
But the Smithtown Horse Show is coming up this weekend.
No riding, the doctor said. No exceptions.
Smithtown was one of the oldest and most prestigious horse shows on Long Island, and it was right here, practically in his own town. Snowman had just won three back-to-back championships on the road, but this was to be his first appearance at home. Also, Harry had promised to supervise William in the lead line class, where the youngest riders walk in the ring with a mother or father holding the horse on a line.
Harry confided in his friend Dave Kelley about his health problems, and Dave offered to show Snowman for Harry. This would mean that Dave would be competing against himself on Andante. But Dave was always honest and fair, a true sportsman in the best sense. Harry knew that Dave would ride true and give Snowman his best shot.
On the day of the Smithtown show, Harry dressed in regular clothes, prepared to join the throng in the stands to watch his horse perform. Because he was so gaunt his pants hung loose on him now, and he sometimes caught Johanna studying him with a worried look in her eyes.
That morning, Harry put his young son up on Snowman, looping the stirrup leathers