Dante of the Maury River

by Gigi Amateau

  “Chill, my man. You’ll go away, all right,” said Red.

  Sure enough, my turn came.

  No sooner had I inhaled my grain the next morning than did I hear Red — that hard-to-knock-down bull of a man — out in the drive, scrapping and cursing the truck. He influenced the engine with his brute force, I’m certain, and pretty soon the old rig sat idling in the driveway, right next to Grandfather Dante’s statue.

  Some kind of business was about to unfold. With no foal left in the barn but me, I figured I’d know soon enough, so I kept licking my feed bucket to calm my nerves, biting the plastic rim, too.

  I smelled Melody’s bubble gum before I saw her at my door with my halter. I knew why she’d come. Right behind her stood Mrs. Eden and Doctor Tom. Everybody had come up to the barn to say fare-thee-well. I traded breaths with the old horsewoman, and I didn’t kick or bite Doctor Tom.

  Melody led me out herself. “Take your time, Little Dante. I’ll never forget you. Even if you never get back here again. Which, well, you probably won’t.”

  A wisp of my mane got stuck in the stall door hinge, and I liked the thought of leaving some little part of me behind.

  Two hills away, off in the distance, I saw Marey standing in her field, watching me. She grazed alongside a freshly painted white fence in a field of tall bluegrass. She lifted her head to the wind and tossed her mane, and the most reliable light breeze in all the world — the one that starts and ends in Kentucky — carried Marey’s love and good wishes directly to me.

  I caught her final message by the tail. “Remember who you are. Race for your family.”

  I took one last look at Marey. Already her belly was starting to swell. A new foal would arrive in the spring. In the meantime, I planned to do right by my dam and by the colt or filly she was carrying.

  I halted before loading in order to make one last memory of my home. Marey lifted her head, turned, and trotted down the hill. Far behind her, upon my word, I think I saw the faintest trace of Grandfather Dante. I can’t be certain, but I nodded good-bye, even if only to his statue. Real or made up by my wishing mind, I was relieved to have a little something from both of them to take with me.

  Melody led me up the ramp, checked on my hay net, and patted my cheek. She wouldn’t let Red see her crying, but I felt those loving tears on my neck.

  “Be good, L.D.,” she told me. “And run fast, okay?”

  Red grew impatient to get moving, but Miss Feisty wouldn’t hear of it till she was good and ready.

  I whinnied good-bye, and Melody ran off the trailer. Before the doors closed, I saw her bury her face in Doctor Tom’s shirt. A new life awaited me, one of winning or losing or who-knew-what.

  I was stuck in that slow-moving trailer for pretty near a full day. Red wouldn’t know a hurry if it whinnied in his ear. I got to stretch my legs only when Red stopped to stretch his. Believe me, what Red lacked in speed he really did make up for in endurance.

  Along the way, I learned firsthand that the world is a big place outside Edensway. Mountains and rivers, forests and fields, highways and backcountry roads.

  On a secluded compound down one of these backcountry roads, at the first line of Virginia’s blue mountains, the trailer came to a stop, and I came to train for the track.

  Like Marey always told me, people have had plans for me since before I was born. Before I was bred, even. The plan was mine to follow, or mine to fail. See, my visit to the in-between, where I met my grandfather, awoke in me a spirit of questioning and left me with a sense that fate had tapped me to deliver something special for the bloodlines. “The very spit of Triple Crown–winner and legendary racehorse Dante’s Paradiso,” people liked to say, even though everybody knows that while horses drool and salivate as sure as the day is long, we never spit. Ever.

  In Virginia, where I had come to train for a year, it was the job of my trainer, a man by the name of Gary, who was always grumbling and growling about time, to mold me into the champion I was bred to be. Presumably, he had some prior experience in this, because he was highly regarded by the Eden family. Darn near every other racing family, too, it seemed.

  Gary’s place in the blue mountains was a whole lot different from Edensway. For one, the barn was crowded with young Thoroughbreds. For two, all four walls were enclosed, so we looked across at one another instead of across the farm. Sure, we each had our own window facing out, and, sure, there was always something going on inside to keep us entertained.

  My stall wasn’t even near the doorway. I expect Gary had some preconceived ideas and speculations about me. He about told me as much when he first brought me off the trailer.

  “Here you go, friend,” he said as he unlatched my stall and led me into a clean, boxy space with plenty of soft footing. “Putting you right next to my office. We’ll be neighbors.” His hearty clap to my withers sent up a little cloud of dust. Red hadn’t seen fit to brush me along our way.

  At my old barn, I could look straight down the breezeway and call out to the others. They’d all listen to me and show their heads and whinny. At Gary’s training facility, none of us even pretended at being friends. We knew we’d all be competing against one another in the baby races once we turned two. All of us were important yearlings from well-respected farms in Kentucky. And there was a filly from New York and a colt from Pennsylvania, to mix things up.

  I observed all the comings and goings-on at Gary’s. While the training farm hadn’t the acreage of Edensway, the campus was tucked into and surrounded by mountains as blue as the grass back home. I could partly see the mountains from my back window, and I took a lot of comfort from the solitude and knowingness of them.

  Those blue mountains were swarming with little and large critters that liked to circle around the farm, all scrounging for supper. A doe and her twins left the cover of the mountain forest every day at dawn and again at dusk. Bobcats liked to crouch up in there, screaming like a lady, most every night. I saw one once. Big cat. Terrifying.

  What I loved most about the mountains was to hear the owls screeching and hooting and the warblers trilling and chirping. Sounds pleasant enough to cause a lonesome colt to fill up and nearly burst with a longing for home.

  Gary’s barn was swarming, too, with those stern, upright predators that had been plaguing my whole short life. People with pitchforks, rakes, and wheelbarrows. Unfortunately for them and for me, people with needles and scary instruments of every sort.

  At the training farm, the days, like my life, were planned up one side and down the other. Those folks weren’t messing around. Always asking questions and writing down the numbers but not really listening. All talkers, no hearers, if you ask me.

  “How much grain did he eat? How much hay? Is he drinking enough water? Does he need a salt lick to make him thirsty?”

  “Tick. Tock.” Gary’s training motto didn’t include much time for listening to a colt’s wants or wishes.

  We had scheduled turnout. Scheduled lights-out. Scheduled exercise on a hot walker. Everything aiming toward one thing: racing.

  At first, I had a tough time adapting to this new way. I worked hard all day and barely had the energy to do all that was asked of me. I never got to eat enough. Being sore became my habit of being. My back, my hips, my legs. My everything always ached.

  Gary and his rank old horsemen didn’t seem to give a whinny about who my sire or my dam or my grandfather was. Some of the more seasoned hands walked around like the place was theirs. They spent hours a day hovering around at my behind, doing one invasive thing or another. People have been obsessing over my temperature my whole life. No different at training.

  Pretty soon, I’d had my fill of all of them. After I reared up once, to protest going out again to run, but only because I needed a rest, Gary had them put a chain over my muzzle.

  “Little Dante they call you? Well, listen up. Don’t matter a hill of beans to me who you were when you walked in here. I promise, you’ll be a different horse by the time you
leave here,” Gary said to me after that.

  Sure enough, the training changed everything about my body and my brain. I’ve always liked knowing what comes next, and at training I knew everything. Every day was the same, and eventually, that made it easier for me to act more like the horse that Marey wanted me to be.

  Still, even with all the monitoring and exercising and testing, there’re twenty-four hours to the day, and that’s a lot of hours to be good. After my workouts on the hot walker, I’d meet up with a fairly green young man who had developed the habit of shaking in his britches around me.

  That boy was half scared to hose me down in the wash stall — the other half too scared to scrape the sweat off of me afterward. Either way, I’d most always find myself standing in my stall with steam and sweat rising off me like I was on fire. I guess I was starting to grow into my name, Dante’s Inferno.

  My groom’s other job was to put a fly sheet over me at turnout. Gary liked to keep my coat black.

  “Tall, dark, and handsome, that’s for sure. Let’s keep him that way.” He instructed the staff to cover me at night to keep me clean, and on turnout to stop the sun from bleaching me out.

  To his abounding credit, the young man tried. Oh, how he tried. Dancing around me, holding his inhales till his faced darkened. I could hear his heart beating so loud that I could see his pulse a-thump-thump-thumping in his neck. His eyes bulged, exposing the whites, and those inexperienced hands shook something fierce.

  When a man is showing as so blatantly afraid, I have to wonder, What in the world is he about to do?

  When my groom came after me . . . Let me back up here. When my groom charged toward me with the fly sheet, I figured I’d best jack up my back left leg in order to demonstrate I wasn’t taking any mess from him.

  “Put it down,” he said, and his heart beat wilder and faster. Out. Of. Control. This guy.

  So, I put my left back foot down and swapped it out for the right one. Just stretched my leg out to test if I was within striking distance, should I need to be.

  He put in a mountainous effort to no avail. Let’s just say I eventually got bored and turned away from him. Same way a barn cat eventually gets bored of batting around crickets. The groom bolted from my stall, leaving my sheet half on, half off. And presently, it fell to the ground.

  Come evening time, though, somebody different tended to me. A girl.

  “May I come in?”

  I blinked. Not that I straightaway invited her in, but I did give consideration because she was the first to ever ask.

  I blinked again, then she did, too, and piped up with, “You gonna invite me in, or make me stand here all day waiting for Your Highness to decide?”

  All right, I thought. Let’s see what happens next. I stepped back. She entered my stall with her head down. She touched my neck, and I sensed no fear in her. Zero. A slow heartbeat, regular breathing, normal-looking eyes.

  Best of all, from her I felt wonder. Curiosity. Like she wanted to know me.

  “What are they talking about? You’re not scary, brother. No way. Not scary at all,” she said softly.

  She squatted down and picked up the sheet from the floor. The same one that the morning groom had bolted from. Even the manner with which she shook the blanket clean seemed like a natural, loving gesture.

  This smaller person was calmer. I was starting to wonder if the bigger a person got the more chaos they had going on in them.

  She stared at me, then looked away. Before I could react, she draped the sheet over my stall door, not over me.

  “Let’s get to know each other.” She stroked my neck. Her voice was solid, like the ground. No quiver there or in her hands. She patted my neck again and said, “Beautiful. Never in the days or nights of my life have I met one as majestic as you. Magic like midnight.”

  The blanket remained on the door. The more I looked at the soft, supple material, the chillier the air felt around my haunches and shoulders. She walked around to my right, making no move to cover me. “I have met many, many horses, Dante. Yeah, see? I know your name. Aren’t you curious about mine? Filipia. That means ‘the one who loves horses,’ and I love horses like crazy.”

  She turned her back to me and fiddled with the sheet. Its buckles sparkled in the dim light coming from the office where Gary and the other men were grousing about something or somebody or such and such. I walked up behind her to get a look and a sniff, because I like sparkly things, and because I thought I detected peppermint on her person. Maybe more than one.

  “That tickles.” Filipia lifted her shoulder to her ear, a gesture that sent me away. After a while, I came on back. She laughed again. “Okay, I’m ticklish. You win!”

  She started telling me a story, and I got so busy listening that I hardly realized what she was doing. The sound of her voice and the effort she was making wrapped me up and I felt safe.

  “Let me tell you about my home, Dante. I am from an island where horses roam freely. They walk straight up to the mayor himself. Some of them — the strawberry roan ponies — even belong to him. The tourists call these ponies the wild horses of Vieques. But they’re not really wild. They are free. The opposite of you, Dante from Hades. Ah, you prick your ears? So, you hear the nickname they call you? Well, you are the opposite of the wild horses of Vieques. You are wild but not free.”

  As she whispered into my ear, I’ll be honest, I tried to find a good reason to hold a grudge or at least start up a new one. But there was something honest and true about Filipia.

  She and I got off to a good start. Heck, a great one. ’Course she helped her cause immensely by keeping her hands free of crops, needles, and other sharp, pointy things.

  I even looked forward to her mucking my stall, so I could stand in there with her.

  One day, she told me, “I know your racing name is Dante’s Inferno. But that’s just what the Jockey Club says. All those numbers tattooed on your lip? If I trace those numbers I can then discover your birth date and place, and also your parents’ names. I could find out where you were born, though I know you are Kentucky-bred. A true Thoroughbred.”

  She was talking about the code that Gary had arranged to have tattooed onto my upper lip, shortly after I had arrived to train. There exists, for all Thoroughbred racehorses, a code in the form of one letter and five numbers. Get a look in my mouth, which I’m nowise suggesting will be easy, and there’s the gateway to my pedigree.

  Filipia stopped picking at my bedding and leaned on the pitchfork. Sounding all dreamy, she said something else. “Some people think that everything they need to know about you is carried right here.” She tickled my upper lip. “But I know there is something else about you. You are special, so I’m giving you a special name. Monkey. Okay? When you hear that name, you can relax and come to me when I call you. That way, you’ll be like the horses of my island.”

  After that, with Filipia taking good care of me, everything seemed to be unfolding exactly according to Gary’s ticktock. That is, until they tried to mount me.

  Around my second birthday, Gary brought over a saddle and a rider. I should’ve seen that coming. After all, everybody knows Thoroughbreds don’t race by themselves. Running takes two — one horse, one jockey.

  I don’t know what I had expected, but, sakes alive, I sure hadn’t wagered that the man would fling himself on top of me without first looking me in the eye, asking permission, and coming to know me.

  Now, there’s plenty of respectful ways to communicate with a horse. Even if your mind can’t accept the possibility that words can be understood, universal languages do exist between nearly all species.

  For starters, try making a soft sound that is not a growl or a bark or a yowl. For instance, those calico cats that like to hang around barns? They can purr or they can screech. Every animal on earth knows the difference and what means what.

  A respectful pause at the stall door? What a nice way to greet a horse. The equivalent of saying, “Hello! Do you care to receive com
pany at this hour?”

  These methods, combined with a good-intended heart, surely will help when approaching a horse for the first time. And, of course, planting yourself where you can easily be seen.

  The long and short of it is that many men at Gary’s facility tried to break me. Every one of them came at me like a twister in an open field, in a storm of force and emotion. And some of them seemed to have had anger issues.

  Well, I had issues of my own.

  Off, off, off. I wanted each of them off, so not one succeeded in staying on.

  No, sir, I wasn’t about to let a man sit atop my back who wouldn’t look me in the eye. Every one of them that tried failed because they didn’t care a lick about me. What they cared about was payday.

  So, off they went. This went on for several months. While winter turned to spring, the other two-year-olds went breezing around Gary’s track, and I fell behind. My tick wasn’t tocking.

  “Dante.” Gary shook a fist at me, more out of frustration, more to make a point, than to hurt me. He wasn’t intending on striking. He jabbed me with his words, though, sure enough.

  “You’re going to have to work this out. I’m burning through exercise riders right and left. The racing community is small and people are talking. Speculating you’ve got bad genes. A fella down in Texas says you’re a danger and that your head’s not right.”

  Now, that made me mad. I didn’t care for Gary or all that drib-drab he was spouting about the fat-cat Texan. I snaked my “not-right” head right at Gary.

  About that point in my training, I surely could have used some advice from Marey. I would have sacrificed a hundred breakfasts to visit Grandfather Dante again, and that’s no lie. I tried everything I could to imagine him standing there, off in the distance. Nothing doing. The bloodlines had left me to figure this out all by my lonesome.

  One morning, while I was resting, good old Gary started up about my being more cooperative. Truth be told, he liked to never stop.