by Mim E. Rivas
Rogers and Key missed the irony of the fact that Jim Key was most likely conceived in Bell Buckle, a burgeoning academic enclave set in the wooded rolling hills and a place so picturesque and serene it had been chosen in 1870 by William R. Webb for the location of a boys’ private college preparatory boarding school. Old Sawney, as Webb was known, believed that by fostering character as well as a devotion to learning, Webb School’s students would go on to excel at higher levels of education and in life. His philosophy would be borne out, making Webb School, later a coeducational institution, the most prestigious college preparatory high school in the South, producing over the decades to come an impressive ten Rhodes Scholars and three governors of different states, including three-term Tennessee governor Prentice Cooper, a native of Shelbyville. Old Sawney’s presence would linger long past his life, forever freezing the look and feel of the town in the time of the 1880s—when Webb’s original classroom building was built.
If Doc Key had been paying attention to the signs, he might have interpreted the significance of Jim’s conception in Bell Buckle as an indication that Jim was destined to become a horse of higher learning.
But for once, the Doc misread the signs. At least that was his conclusion for nearly a year following the birth of Lauretta’s foal.
May 1889, foaling time in Bedford County, was marked by the kind of raucous explosion of nature that the season was known for: the air, warm, thick and wet, pungent with the smell of regeneration, its moistness a match for the black rich earth long fed by the Duck River, which had lured the early settlers of Shelbyville to its banks.
The profusion of color and fragrance, everything growing and living and being born, in so extravagant a manner as to be downright dizzying, conspired to create signs that could have seemed to the expectant doctor like a welcome celebration for the foal.
“Knowing he was the finest bred horse in the country, I was very anxious to see what he would turn out,” Doc Key told Rogers, recalling his ambitious visions of owning a famous, noble racehorse. “I had some very fine Bible names picked out for him.”
And why not? Rogers was shocked to hear the Doc say that the foal he had planned to name for a revered prophet or disciple “pretty damn near broke my heart.”
The foaling apparently proceeded normally, starting with the incomparable, overpowering smell of equine amniotic fluid, which summoned the Doc and his stable hands to Lauretta’s stall at night—often a dam’s instinctual time for avoiding predators by giving birth under the blanket of darkness. Lauretta frantically paced, then lay down, her whinnying crescendoing with the night-splitting universal cry of a female in hard labor while Key coaxed her with his indecipherable, whispered words—a self-created language based on the practices of his African and Cherokee ancestors. As the foal emerged in its white sack, he was there to help the weakened Lauretta by tenderly clearing the white cloak off the foal.
In answer to his prayers, he at first rejoiced in seeing that the foal was a male. As close to a son of his own as he would have in this life. But as he continued to examine the colt, Bill Key saw that he was as misshapen and bony as any sickly foal could be.
Neither Lauretta nor the foal improved over the next twenty-four hours. The dam, in fact, was to deteriorate dramatically over the next eight months, the ordeal of procreation having depleted whatever reserve of health Doc Key had helped her regain before breeding her. From the beginning of the colt’s life, it was obvious that his dam’s ability to care for him and guide him into his journey as a young equine was to be impaired. His first efforts to stand and walk were not unlike most foals’—with bent, splayed legs teetering up only to slide down, then hunkering up and flailing into an attempt at balance, only to wobble from side to side, making scant progress at forward motion.
That was normal, sometimes for the first hours or day of life, even for a day or two longer, before most foals—some with maternal nudging—find the natural dance of movement that is part of their genetic gift, and are soon galloping with finesse. But after weeks, Lauretta’s colt could barely walk or run.
The Doc kept hoping he’d improve as the days went by. “For almost a year I had no hope for him. He was the most spindled, shank-legged animal I ever did see.” His coat was a dingy, tufted brown—not even a hint of dark bay—and he appeared to be in a pain so severe from an unidentifiable infection or injury that the grooms working for Doc Key begged him to shoot the foal and put him out of his misery.
“I made up my mind to kill him,” Key said to Rogers, a statement made for the sake of his dramatic narrative, since it was impossible for anyone who knew Bill Key just in passing to imagine him committing such an act, even if committed in mercy. Despite his supposed intention, he focused his energies instead almost exclusively on saving Lauretta’s life and easing her colt’s ailments, hoping and praying that Keystone Liniment and his other remedies would provide the solution. Doc Key was sure the foal wasn’t going to make it, but not giving up, as he confirmed to Rogers, “I took mighty fine care of him.”
Yet his disappointment was so pronounced that instead of the biblical name he had planned to bestow on the stallion that he had once imagined being immortalized on the turf, he refused to give the misfit the name he’d chosen. “It would have been blasphemy.”
Searching for a name that would fit, after watching the colt attempt to walk, he had an encounter with a Mr. Jim Hunter, a bowlegged, no-account drunk who wandered by his stables on occasion. “If this raggle-taggle, trashy man had attempted to walk through a wheat field, he would have ruined it.”
As though to mock his own audacity, perhaps having in his own mind, as Tennesseans like to say, “gotten above his raisin’,” Bill Key named his raggle-taggle horse Jim. But just in case Jim understood and took it as a lack of kindness, he gave the unpromising young Arabian-Hambletonian his own last name.
Jim Key was a member of Bill’s family now, but still a long ways from being beautiful.
3
The Human Who Could Talk Horse
Horses are herd animals, and so are we. Both species survive in groups, keenly attuned to the gestures of dominance and submission in play around us. We both bluff, exaggerate, ignore; maintain alliances, betray loyalties, reward courage, seek affection; we annoy one another out of boredom; we mock our betters; we respond to flattery; we punish and humiliate those we can, and with those we can’t we cultivate appearances. We try to get along. We know the real thing when we see it.
—KEVIN CONLEY,
Stud: Adventures in Breeding
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. Patterns of repetition occur not only throughout collective history, but across the individual histories of those who belong to different collectives.
On August 9, 1897, when the train transporting Albert Rogers, William Key, Jim Key, and company pulled into New York City, they still had more to learn about one another. But what they had now discovered was a piece of shared history, a pattern of experience in each of their disparate lives that was the same. They had intuitively found a common bond that is the root of communication among beings born to dissimilar cultures, which in their case was the sense that each in his own way was born somewhat strange. Each in his own way did not belong entirely to the herd from which he sprang; each in his own way—by choice or force or necessity—came to live for a time among other herds. Each learned to speak other languages, bridging communication gaps between class, culture, race, gender, and specie.
Jim Key in his first half year of life didn’t just look and walk strangely, his behavior was also to become even stranger. At first Doc Key—so consumed by the daily decline of Lauretta Queen of Horses and with nursing Jim through his early ailments—barely noticed the colt’s unusual preoccupations. Nor was he conscious of the fact that during the time he spent rubbing his liniment onto Jim’s nubby coat, over underdeveloped muscles and twisted tendons, massaging and relaxing the colt’s crooked, spindly bones with his human hands, he had created a primal connection—a form
of language in itself. In the process Jim seemed to first understand that Doc Key was worried about him, that he was sick and likely to die. And then out of the unspoken but palpable human expressions of concern a message from man to horse came through: I want you to get better.
Just as many a champion racehorse has been urged to accomplish athletic feats beyond known limits, Jim strove to do the impossible—to live, even when the Doc had pretty much given up on him and when stable hands were telling their distraught employer to kill the colt and save him from a more painful death. By the force of his own will to please Doc Key, Jim succeeded in living, transmitting the message back: I will get better soon, honest.
William Key recognized that message, but what he missed was the way that Jim was watching him, as if learning the practical means for getting better.
Jim watched Doc Key open and shut the gate to his stall. He watched the retrieval of vials, bottles, papers, books, and instruments from the black medical bag, noticing how the Doc examined labels on the objects containing the medicines, and he saw that the lines and shapes on the labels were different. Jim paid close watch to the frequency with which the Doc referred to one booklet in particular (“Bell’s Handbook to Veterinary Homeopathy,” Bell’s Homeopathic Pharmacy, New York, 1885) and how some form of communication conveyed by those lines on the paper caused Doc Key’s face to alter—from puzzlement to assuredness, or from mild consternation to dread.
Jim watched Doc Key in his interactions with other horses in the stable and with the various dogs, cats, chickens, goats, pigs, sheep, and other barnyard creatures that gravitated to the veterinarian’s side, as well as the Doc’s interactions with the other humans. Jim watched and he listened, concluding early on that William Key was the head of the herd, a benevolent ruler who was good and kind, though sometimes stern. Jim recognized his own name and understood that the other herd members—whether animal or human—each had a different name. Jim watched and listened, and not only did he sense that the differently named members of the herd looked and acted differently from one another, but he also grasped that each was capable of many different emotions, many of which were spurred by the behavior of other members of the herd.
As he was led out in Doc Key’s attempt to exercise him each morning, the weakling colt who wobbled from side to side on knotty, spindly legs seemed to sense from the mix of the other species that to them he was strange, even to be scorned. An unsightly nuisance. He may have perceived that he was in danger, threatened by the others who—sensing his fear—would fight him, hurt him, take his food or his place in the herd, or worse. Without the strength to put up a fight, Jim inadvertently cultivated the survival skill of using humor to distract potential bullies and snobs, thus becoming the barnyard jester. Without being taught, the still sickly Jim had found his usefulness as a source of amusement. Comic relief. In time, it became apparent to William Key that the lame wobble was no longer physiological; Jim was feigning it for the human laughter and the animal attention and distraction that the funny walk brought him.
Even before Doc Key came to that conclusion, he started to spot the watchful way Jim followed him in his rounds of the stables, sometimes wobbling behind him as the Doc trekked up to his house after a long day. After leaving Jim out to graze in the pasture on a summer afternoon, Doc Key returned to his yard and began playing fetch with one of his dogs. “Sit,” he told the dog as the canine happily obeyed.
“Good dog,” said Doc Key, rewarding him with a generous scratching and massage around his furry head and ears. The Doc continued through a series of physical and verbal commands for routine behaviors, adding his own murmuring in a language that, though unintelligible to other humans, contained the commonly recognized commands: “stay”; “lie down”; “roll over.” Each effort, successful or not, was followed by ample praise and encouragement.
Doc Key must have thought it somewhat odd when he turned back to the fence and saw that Jim had stretched his head over the rails with his eyes fixed on the dog, as if studying the behaviors that went with the commands.
The Doc forgot about the incident entirely until the following winter, when, just days after Lauretta’s ill health had finally taken her life, something happened to bring the memory into the moment. If the disappointment of Jim’s birth had broken William Key’s heart, as he’d told Rogers, the death of his treasured pure Arabian gray mare nearly killed him. He was inconsolable. For the first few days, his wife and the Keystone stable hands attended to Jim and the other horses while the Doc kept to himself. When he returned to his regular rounds, the others seemed to know to keep their distance. That is, except for Jim Key, who refused to leave Doc Key’s side, kicking at his stall gate when he was led back in, neighing and blowing foam from his lips until the Doc reluctantly let him out again, put a blanket over Jim, and allowed the colt to wobble out into the cold air.
Doc Key was looking away in a far-off direction, most likely at the spiny filigree of bare winter trees clinging to a nearby rocky ridge, when he felt Jim nudging his elbow. He turned his eyes back to the colt. In Jim’s mouth was the stick that William Key and his dog had used for playing fetch months before. Jim pushed it toward the Doc’s hand and waited. Doc Key understood. He threw the stick, and Jim launched into a doglike run, moving faster than the Doc had ever seen him move. When he returned, stick in his mouth, he placed it back in Doc Key’s hand, then lowered his head, bobbing it to indicate he wanted his reward of praise and scratching around his ears.
That’s when the first glimmer of Jim’s strange intelligence had flickered through. Dr. Key explained to Rogers, “He was a knowing colt, I tell you. He showed me that he could fetch, and proceeded to try to do the other tricks that the dog could do. And so I taught him. He learned to sit, play dead, roll over, those kinds of things.”
When that same evening arrived, instead of allowing himself to be led back toward the stables, Jim stood his ground, shank-legged and all, immobile, unwilling to budge. The enticement of a sugar cube or two produced no reaction other than a nostril snort. Not that Jim had ever responded to treats of sugar before. Doc Key cajoled him in a good-humored, schoolmarmish voice, telling the mulish colt he was welcome to remain outside in the cold and wet for the rest of the night. Then the Doc hurried up to his house, where Lucinda was already lighting the gas lamps and fanning the flames in the fireplace, her husband’s supper warm and waiting on the potbellied stove.
As soon as William Key reached for the door, he felt Jim’s breath on his shoulder. He tried to step inside and turned to the colt to coax him back to the stable, but Jim again stood his ground, clearly intending to follow the Doc into the house.
The episode, recalled by Bill Key for Albert Rogers, was not what the promoter had expected to hear. Instead of commencing his human education as a humanlike horse, it was apparent that Jim Key had crossed the threshold into his life among humans as a would-be favored pet dog, with canine aspirations.
Albert Rogers no doubt made sure he had heard correctly what Dr. William Key had told him. Did Jim actually live inside the Key household?
Doc Key confirmed that impression, saying, “He just lived and slept in my house and followed me around like a dog. Pretty soon he began to pick at me, trying to imitate me.” Key explained, “He was inclined to be busy all the time and was not satisfied to be idle. He wanted to know what everything was and I commenced to teach him simple things.” Jim learned to identify everyday household items. In return for rewards of stroking, praise, and pieces of apple—which became his favorite treat—he would fetch anything Doc Key might request.
Secure in his role as an indoor colt and member of the Key household, Jim then started to become more independent, exploring on his own. “One of the first unusual things he learned,” Doc Key remembered with a chuckle, “and I didn’t teach him either, was to unfasten the gate and let himself out on the road.”
The scenes repeated themselves: the ungainly colt wobbling along the road on his own as a throng of
Doc Key’s grooms ran after him, each blaming the other for leaving the gate unfastened, and the befuddled face of Doc Key after refastening the gate himself and departing by buggy for his veterinary office on North Main Street (also known as the Shelbyville and Murfreesboro Turnpike), discovering moments later that Jim was following not far behind him.
As a yearling, Jim Key at last no longer weaved and teetered with his every step. Dr. Key admitted his own surprise, describing how Jim finally managed to shirk the different illnesses that had plagued him his first year while, sure enough, his crooked legs straightened out and his proportions began to conform into the regal lines of both his Arabian and Hambletonian ancestries. Pampered with a diet of only the best oats and hay, drinking the purified mineral water that was used in formulating Keystone tonics and liniments, sleeping indoors in a warm room in the Doc’s house on a bed made of fresh, clean straw piled high, over which blankets were laid, Jim metamorphosed. No longer the ugly shank-legged colt, by the summer of 1890 his spindly long-legged frame turned muscular and robust as his tufted, dingy-colored, sparse coat grew glossy and sleek, deepening into the rich, mahogany bay color for which he would one day be known as beautiful.
Despite his physical transformation, Jim nonetheless continued to be a quirky character. For one thing, Jim was house-trained, which certainly impressed Albert Rogers. It seemed Jim had become as discreet as any gentleman as a result of spending a critical period of his development watching human members of the Key household exit their home and make their way to the privy out back, as well as paying attention to the toilet habits of what he may have assumed were his fellow canines who lived in the house.
Jim’s early lessons to seek privacy and the out-of-doors for his bathroom needs served him throughout his career, later causing a couple of reporters to note that in all his years performing in public—including some of the most famous halls in America—he was never known to once have an accident or even a gastric faux pas.