by Gigi Amateau
And we were off.
Like I did in my very first race, I stumbled out of the start box. My two front knees grazed the grass, but Ashley lifted my head with the reins and raised herself slightly out of the saddle. “Up, up, up, Dante. Here we go.”
She wouldn’t let me canter, at first, but posted right purposefully to keep me at the trot. I heard Mrs. Maiden yell, “Good girl, Ashley. Let him settle.”
She was riding smart, and I was glad, otherwise my natural inclination would’ve whirled us around and raced us back to the trailer.
“Log jump first. Just like home,” Ashley said, and we sailed. “Nice.” She almost sounded surprised.
We cantered to the rolltop and took it with ease, then Ashley brought me back to the trot again.
As we neared the bottom of the first hill, I caught sight of a brushy spread. Problem was, I couldn’t judge how deep it was, and I thought I might fall into a powerful-strong state of colic. A little part of me considered that perhaps if I refused then, maybe Ashley would quit, give up, and we could go home. But I was more afraid to face Daisy than to give it a try.
I had quit on the track many, many times. I wasn’t going to quit on Ashley. We might crash the jump, but I was going.
Napoleon whinnied his little heart out. “Lift and hurl, Dante!”
On the approach, Ashley picked up the canter and began counting. “One, two. One, two.”
She kept both legs on me, and in the right perfect spot she rose into her two-point.
“Got it! Good boy! Almost to the creek.”
With every jump my confidence was growing. I could feel that Ashley’s was, too.
We trotted into a cool, shadowy narrow strip of pines, flushing small birds and rabbits as we passed through. As we exited the woodsy part of the course, my eyes needed time to adjust back to the sunshine. Ashley slowed down a bit. Up ahead, I saw the next obstacle: log jump–two strides–log jump. Ashley finally asked for the canter, and she was smiling. I knew why: because I was cantering not galloping, just like she’d asked.
I took a long spot over the first of the two logs in the combination, and Ashley lost a stirrup. She managed to stay on, and we got over the second one clean. She picked up her stirrup and let me run across the flat stretch toward the creek.
“Let’s play, Dante! Are you ready?” Ashley dialed me down from a canter to a forward trot through the creek. I flicked my feet to make the water splash us both and I whinnied for more water, but before I could even attempt to misbehave, she flashed her crop.
Once out of the water, the scariest obstacle yet, a stone wall, presented itself on the course. “Nailed it,” Ashley said as we popped right over and cantered away.
We rolled back, picked up two more easy fences, and headed toward the creek for our last pass through. This time, I snorted as we got close because I was so happy and the water felt so good.
“Dante, you’re crazy.” Ashley started grinning and kept on smiling over a brick wall, a variety of brushy verticals, log jumps, and one last combination.
Off in the distance, up near the start, our Maury River Stables family looked small and far away, but I could still hear Napoleon’s voice and the cheers of our people, calling our names.
By then, I could feel that Ashley’s smile was about to come off her face it was so broad. I got a good spot over the last jump, and we had one thing left to do to finish.
“Run, Dante,” Ashley said. “We made it. We’re home free.”
Ashley didn’t need to tell me what to do then. Something shifted in me. Out there with her, everything was open and natural and free, and I was a part of everything. Nothing could stop us, and nothing did.
We crossed the finish line to cheering and jumping and hooting and hollering — the sound of my people feeling happy. Noise I had come to love. Maybe, finally, I had figured out what it means to use your heart.
Or, maybe I hadn’t figured out anything at all.
Oh, for sure, over the next two years Ashley and I went on to achieve more than anyone could have expected or even imagined. We rode our way to High-Point Horse and Rider at the Tamworth Springs jumper series. We returned, with confidence and joy, to the Horse Center many a time.
Kentucky Bloodlines even ran a story on OTTBs, featuring yours truly, Dante’s Inferno, son of Dante’s Beatrice, grandson of Dante’s Paradiso. They sent a reporter all the way to Saddle Mountain to meet and photograph me. That picture, all framed and pretty, now hangs inside Mrs. Maiden’s office with a golden plaque bearing my name.
Heck, we even caravanned to Riverside once when they held an OTTB festival to raise funds for the retired racehorse program. My friend John did not join us, but he asked me all about it later.
Life was, as they say, good.
Success must be a funny, fickle prize. When you think you’ve got it, well, that’s exactly when you don’t. The year I turned ten was the year I learned that as far as I had come, I had that much farther to go.
The real test of my life arrived then. A new horse.
No, not a new horse. An old one. An old, broken-down, going-blind, half-starved all-white Appaloosa without spots showed up to the Maury River Stables in a trailer.
His name was Take-A-Chance; Chancey, they called him. And that’s what Mrs. Maiden decided to do. She hadn’t the heart to send him away, which is exactly what I would have done.
I thought he was too far gone to be of any use or any good to anybody. For two seasons prior, Chancey had been abandoned in a field with no hay, no shelter but for cedar trees, and no water in his tub. Left to die or survive on his own, it seemed. Struggling through barbed wire to reach the Maury River he had cut up his face and legs and entire body. His ribs protruded and his eyes hollowed.
And I, the horse with the largest of hearts, couldn’t stand to look at him. Couldn’t stomach his aging smell or tolerate his feeble voice.
To me, Chancey was no longer a horse. He was a ghost. A lingering reminder that no horse is truly his own horse, and every horse is a dependent.
Chancey was not a testament to trust but to fear, the great fear stored away deep inside each equine: that we will become too much of a burden for our people to carry. That our people will, in the end, forsake us.
If Chancey thought life before the Maury River Stables was hard, life was about to get harder.
Because of his weak blue eyes and the damage that the sun did to his pale pink skin, Mrs. Maiden instructed that on turnout Chancey should always wear a fly mask for protection. Napoleon panicked at the thought of the old horse walking around in the dark. He took to pulling the mask off, and I let him.
The boarders chased the App around the field, much as they had chased me when I first came. As they did Mac, when he arrived, too. But Chancey wasn’t young like the two of us were. Wasn’t strong like us.
When they chased him and bit him and kicked him, Chancey squealed and whinnied for help, but no help came.
The truth is, not only the boarders treated him cruelly and wanted him gone.
I confess.
I admit.
I ask forgiveness, for I participated. I have no excuse save that his condition and his presence frightened me, because he could have been me or Macadoo or any one of us, mares or geldings.
Looking back, I imagine there were times Chancey wished that he had been left alone in his field after all. Except, I imagine wrongly.
Despite my own abhorrence of Chancey, Claire loved him with all her heart. And he loved her back. In time, Gwen and Macadoo came to Chancey’s defense, too, in a way that no horse had ever come to mine. Add jealousy to my sins against him.
What they saw in him, what Claire and Mrs. Maiden saw in him, I did not see.
He had no papers. He was vacant. He hadn’t grace or beauty or speed. He did nothing but take up space and eat our hay.
When Mrs. Maiden rearranged our stalls and situated Chancey beside me, I protested the decision mightily all through the first night — and the seco
nd. I kicked our shared wall nonstop, so that I wouldn’t have to listen to Chancey’s labored breathing, reminiscent of the lame mare who had arrived at Riverside with me and was gone by morning. I kicked out so that I wouldn’t have to watch him wince and pace as so many I had met in my racing days, those for whom pain and suffering was a way of life till there was no more life.
The old App had come limping into my wildly successful life, dragging the real past and imagined future. I couldn’t abide it. I did not consider Chancey one of mine to protect. I wanted him gone.
I confess.
I admit.
I was wrong.
For two nights, I kicked and threatened Chancey through the bars. On the third night, the old App placed a mouthful of grain on the ledge between our stalls.
“Here. I’m growing stronger every day. This is for you. I don’t need it.”
Chancey stood still and watched while I ate it.
“Someday, you can repay me,” he said.
I turned away.
The old App and I always kept some space between us. He did grow stronger, and many came to believe him beautiful. Mrs. Maiden and Mac and Gwen trained him to join the therapeutic school. I watched, incredulous that he could be so still and that for some students stillness, not speed, was exactly what they needed.
I had conquered the three tests of eventing time and time again. I had surrendered my heart to Ashley and joined with a herd. A greater test awaited.
On a cold, snowy afternoon at a time after Chancey’s eyesight had completely left him in the dark, Claire took him up Saddle Mountain. She was grieving the loss of a friend, and her heart needed the solid presence of the old App. He did as he was asked to do. He carried Claire across the frigid Maury River and up the mountain, where he stood with her while she grieved. They returned at nightfall, and again, though many years later, Chancey was led into the stall next to mine.
He was cold, shivering, and consumed all his grain and hay in an instant. He asked me for not a thing. The choice was mine to turn away or to recognize Chancey as my brother.
I placed two mouthfuls of grain on the ledge between us.
“Here. I don’t need this.”
Chancey ate, and I gave him more.
“Thank you,” he said. “You are a true friend, Dante.”
In that moment, I realized that if the old App was, indeed, a reflection of my future course, as I had once feared, well, I should be so blessed.
Some say the fate and fortune of every Thoroughbred boils down to the alchemy of bloodlines. Centuries of mixology endeavoring to produce one horse that will race and win, all for riches and fame or plain old bragging rights.
My own pedigree begins with my dam and my sire, then spirals back through the ages to the three stallions of the Orient: the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian.
Some say the original stallions were stolen. Others swear they were gifted by men of wealth and power in the East to men of equal wealth and power in the West. Either way, the founding sires tasted the salt of the sea as they journeyed to the British Isles, where the lost mares of Great Britain brought size and strength and heart into the family. Together they made history by creating a new breed, my breed, the Thoroughbred. Every Thoroughbred heart since the merger of the three Eastern stallions with the English mares has beat for the sake of winning races.
But all that might be changing.
I imagine that Grandfather Dante understood the changes facing our breed. I reckon that’s why he called to me from across the ancestral plain.
For the longest time, I misunderstood what Dante’s Paradiso meant when he told me that our breed needed a new kind of champion. When he described to me the three great tests and urged me to use my heart, I could not comprehend his meaning. Not until I had lived the journey.
What Grandfather Dante knew long before I did was that there are many more losers than winners at the track. Like me. Legions never even get to put hoof to the dirt that will lead but one to the winner’s circle.
Just what happens to all these Thoroughbreds who never race or never win — and to those who win big, but for whatever reason aren’t selected to continue the bloodlines?
After all — just ask Chancey — horses can live thirty years. Or longer. And that’s a fact.
If you’re me, with my pedigree, my training, my grandfather’s striking good looks and large heart, and my dam’s intelligence, science says you’ve got it all, you’re destined for the history books as a great racehorse and nothing less. But don’t bet the barn on what science predicts, because life may hold other adventures, and the science of the heart is not the same thing as the spirit of the heart.
Every horse has his own race to run. For sure, neither fame nor fortune is the destiny of everyone. In my case, Marey surely did try to ease me out of my stubborn willfulness and into the mold of a champion racer. As it happens, I discovered that my heart was not made for the track, after all.
I can recall my sour old trainer, Gary, explaining his disappointment in me: “Even the best-regulated families will throw a dud now and again.”
By dud, he meant me.
I was born on February fourteenth; an ironic beginning for a horse who would end up needing years and more years to learn what it means to use your heart. Maybe the clue lives in those wise words of Filipia’s Melon: God’s greatest act was to make one day follow another. If that’s so, then I reckon that the greatest act of my heart in response is to rise each new day and try again to offer my best.
But to those who say the fate of every Thoroughbred comes down to pedigree, I say, no, our fate is sealed by the heart. And I say, now is the time for a new kind of champion. Now is the time for a Thoroughbred revolution, and I am just the horse to lead it.
THANK YOU
While I was writing Dante, we lost our dear Albert, who inspired Chancey of the Maury River. Thank you to all of my readers who asked about him and comforted us after he left this old world. We recently brought a little paint pony named Angel into our family. She truly lives up to her name. Albert and Angel impressed many a hoofprint onto this story.
I thank my generous friend Meg Medina, who helped me to imagine the jockey Filipia.
Much love and gratitude to these horses for their inspiration: My Sweet Albert, Angel Sent From Above, Norman, Payita Mia, Morning Latte, Personal Keepsake, Valentina, Pete, Moo, and Dartanian.
Thank you to these good people: Jennifer Wright, DVM, and the folks at 3 Oaks Equine; everyone at Campbell Springs Farm; and the superheroes — equine and human — at the James River Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. I especially thank Mrs. Nellie Mae Cox, who shared her passion for and knowledge of the amazing Thoroughbred breed.
Thanks also to the James River Writers community. Thank you to my extraordinary agent, Leigh Feldman. Thanks a bunch to my excellent early readers: Judith Amateau, Bella Stevens, and Elena Zerkin.
Thank you to the awesome Candlewick Press team: Maggie Deslaurier, Angela Dombroski, Kate Herrmann, Katie Ring, Rachel Smith, and a duo I love very much: Kate Fletcher and Karen Lotz.
To my generous, loving family: Mom, Mary, Leigh, John, Betty, and always, Bubba and Judith.
DON’T MISS THE FIRST TWO MAURY RIVER NOVELS!
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by Gigi Amateau
Frontispiece illustration copyright © 2013 by Lindsey Windfelt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form o
r by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2015
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2014945450
ISBN 978-0-7636-7004-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-7332-1 (electronic)
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