by Sally Wright
“So you’re Carl Seeger’s neighbor, Terry.”
“Carl Seeger has nothing to do with it.”
“Right.” Jo looked at him as though he’d offered her the Brooklyn Bridge, while he pulled a card from his suit coat pocket and held it in her direction.
“If you wouldn’t mind stepping out here …” He was watching Sam and Emmy with a wary, disapproving look on his smooth round face.
“You can come in the barn. Sam and Emmy won’t hurt you.”
Toss hooked his thumbs inside his belt, then smiled serenely at the man by the door. “You oughtn’t to pressure him, Jo. You can see the little fella don’t want to risk it.”
“I beg your pardon! I don’t want to get my shoes dirty.” He was looking at the piles of hair around Sam.
Jo raised an eyebrow at Toss, then walked over to the IRS man and took the card from his hand. “You’ll have to wait for me to finish grooming my horse. You could walk back to the house and sit on the porch if you’d like, and I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He considered it, and turned around, and started off down the north-south drive that ran along the high ridge from the barns back to Jo’s house.
“Damn!” Toss’s fists were on his hips, and blood was flooding across his face, as he kicked the barn cat’s water bowl out the back door.
Sam’s head jerked toward the ceiling, and his whole body levitated like a tennis player leaping for a serve that doesn’t clear the net. He kept himself from jumping into Jo, and then stood right where he’d been and shook all over.
“Sorry, Jo. I wasn’t thinkin.”
“Sam’s okay.” She laid her arm across his withers and told him he was just fine, and then went back to currying him. “You know it’s because of Carl. This guy spent eight whole weeks at Equine. Here he’s got two separate businesses, plus Alan and me. He could be here for months!”
Toss went out and picked up the cat’s bowl, and set it back on the floor, then took his hat off and ruffled a hand through his thick graying hair. “You fight in their wars for ’em. You hard-scrabble every day trying to make a livin’, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you put somethin’ by for your old age so you won’t be a burden to your family. Every year ya live they tax your every dollar, and then they do it again when you die—when you already paid taxes on every cent you ever made! What gives them the right?”
“You’re preachin’ to the choir here, Toss.”
“You and me, we never even thought about cheatin’. We’ve cared for horses as good as we can, and treated their owners fair, and paid our dues to federal, state and local. And what do we get for it? A fireant like Carl Seeger tellin’ his buddy to make our lives a livin’ hell! This here, Jo, this is real persecution! What’s to keep ’em from turning you inside out ’cause they don’t like the way ya vote?”
“You know that’ll happen. What am I saying? I bet it already has.”
Thursday, March 12th, 1964
Spencer wasn’t completely asleep when he got the call. Tracker had had a mild case of colic, and he’d walked him around from eleven o’clock on. He hadn’t been in so much pain that Spencer’d thought he had to oil him, and when Tracker had finally pooped on his own just before two-thirty, Spencer’d come in to get some sleep, before he checked on him again at four.
He was just dozing off, finally, when the phone rang at three. He rubbed his eyes, as he said hello, and felt his chest pound the way it does from a call in the middle of the night. A voice he didn’t recognize said, “Mr. Franklin?”
“Yes.”
“This is Chief Anderson from the Fayette County Fire Department. Blue Grass Horse Van’s on fire. We’re doin’ our best to save it, but I reckon it’s touch and go.”
“What!”
“Blue Grass Horse—”
“Sorry, I heard you. Was anybody hurt?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Thank God for that. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
Saturday, April 4th, 1964
They were racing at Keeneland, and although Alan and Jo hardly ever went to the races, a three-year-old she and Toss had foaled and raised the first nine months of his life was running in his fifth race, so she and Alan and Toss got dressed up the way everybody did—Jo in a dress, Toss and Alan in sport coats—and went off to the races.
They talked about Blue Grass burning, wondering what caused it, and what it would mean to Spencer, all the way to Keeneland, where they drove in the west gate, and parked on the backside next to the track kitchen. Then they walked up the road to where the runners were stabled on both sides of the drive in long rows of shed roofed stalls—facing each other, most of them, across pea gravel paths, with ovals of grass in the center.
They talked to Wilder Son’s owner, and the trainer Toss had known since they were kids, while the groom finished the final brushing and wrapped the big colt’s legs. They walked with them to the paddock, where there were two rows of trees planted in the center of small circular walks numbered according to post position.
They led Wilder to circle number six, where Toss talked to him, and stroked his shoulder, while the groom held his lead shank and the trainer discussed the race with his jockey as he smoothed the purple and turquoise cloth across Wilder’s broad chestnut back.
He threw on his lightweight racing saddle and half tightened the girth, as Jo and Alan talked to the owner again, a quiet woman with wavy gray hair whose mares Toss had cared for for six or seven years. They stood to one side then and watched Wilder and his people walk round and around the number six tree. They studied the other runners Wilder seemed to be eying too, comparing conformation and discussing who was riding whom, till a gate was opened and the horses were led into the walking ring outside the jockeys’ room.
The trainers and jockeys conferred, while the horses were led around the oval, completely surrounded outside the fence by race goers watching their every move. When the “jockeys up” call came, the trainers tightened girths and gave their riders a leg up, then walked their horses around the ring one more time in postposition order before leading them across to the tunnel that led out to the track.
Jo and Alan and Toss walked through the north entrance under the grandstand, and out toward the track, having decided to stand by the rail and watch the horses warm up with their lead ponies, before they were called to the gate.
When Jo and Alan were halfway across the sloping concrete apron, heading toward the rail, Carl Seeger stepped in front of Alan, staring directly at him with a lopsided smirk.
“I hear you’re in trouble with the IRS.” He was grinning under his narrow mustache, squinting up at Alan, sunglasses perched on top of his head.
Alan stopped and stared at him, letting go of Jo’s hand, his eyes furious, his jaw a ridge of knotted muscles, his wide soft gentle-looking mouth clamped in a fierce line. He stepped straight toward Carl with his arms clamped at his sides.
“Get away from me!” Carl stepped back as he said it, bumping into an elderly woman who was reading the race program behind him. “Don’t come any closer!”
“Why? You’re not afraid, are you Carl? You haven’t done something to me that’s making you nervous?”
“No, of course not! I haven’t done anything to you!”
“Stealing my formulas? How ’bout that? Siccing the IRS on Bob, and me, and my wife, and her uncle? You think that might tick somebody off?”
Carl looked around him with a half-amused, condescending expression at the bystanders who were listening now, even when they pretended they weren’t. “You are a liar, and this attack’s unprovoked.”
“I’m a liar! That’s interesting! If you’d fought in the war with the rest of us you wouldn’t have gotten away with the kind of crap you pull. Maybe it’s time somebody taught you how to act like a man!”
“Is that a threat?” Carl stepped off to the side this time, and the watchers cleared him a space.
“You and your IRS buddy don’t have a principle between y
ou.”
“Alan?” Alan didn’t look at Jo, but she still said, “Why don’t we go watch Wilder? The race is about to start.”
Toss was staring at Carl, his hands on his hips, his old tan sport jacket tucked behind them, his face hard, his mouth pinched under his Sunday Stetson, when he said, “Your mama’d be ashamed. ’Least mine wouldda been, if I’d carried on like you.”
“You! Who do you think you are?”
They turned away from the rail, Alan walking fast enough Jo had to trot to keep up. Toss walked backwards for a minute, straightening his tie as he stared at Carl, then he turned and followed Jo and Alan on their way to the grandstand stairs.
Toss got waylaid by Virgee’s owner, and the trainer who worked for him.
But Jo and Alan climbed the stairs together, her hand tucked under Alan’s elbow. She could feel the anger in the iron in his arm as he took the stairs fast. “Alan?”
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t seen Carl since November, but I think he looks different. Did you? Thinner, maybe, or—”
“I was trying to keep myself from picking him up by the neck and crushing his windpipe with my thumbs.”
“I think you did rather well.”
“No. I should’ve ignored him. He wanted to get me going, and he did. I stood there and insulted him in public when I should’ve walked away.”
“Still—”
“What do you think of Wilder’s chances?” Alan was telling her he was done talking about Carl.
And Jo squeezed his elbow, as she said, “Hey,” to a farmer who lived up the road. “He’s alert without being nervous, which is good. He’s fit, and he’s fast. But I never have an opinion. There’re too many other factors. Heart. Guts. Getting out of the gate without getting mugged. Luck, as much as anything.”
As it turned out, Wilder Son came in second. Though neither Jo nor Alan could’ve told you if you’d asked them two weeks later. Their world cracked in two in between. An avalanche swept in from the outside and drove everything before it.
Monday, April 6th, 1964
Alan woke up at two. His left leg ached the way it always did, the scarred tendons and sliced muscles more usually than the bone grafts. He stretched it and kept it moving for a minute—and used it to remind himself that he was alive when too many others weren’t.
Tens of thousands of vets were in much worse shape still. He’d seen them from his hospital bed after he got back from France. He’d watched, and worried for them, and tried to help whatever way he could for more than a year in the hospital, and what he’d seen still woke him up in the darkest part of the night and made him pray for the faces that floated across his brain.
He turned over on his right side away from Jo, trying not to wake her, and listened to Emmy dreaming on her bed on the floor next to Jo. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, so he slid out of bed in his boxer shorts, and grabbed a T-shirt from the chair by the door.
He walked through the living room, then passed the front stairs and went on into the dining room, where he turned right, along the length of the table, and limped down two ten-foot-wide steps into the farm office/ studio/study, and on through to the kitchen. He drank a glass of water, staring out into the silvery dark, then opened the back door and walked out under the arbor toward the big oval pond.
He heard the screen door slap behind him and looked around, disgusted with himself for having waked Jo, and saw Emmy trotting toward him across the wet grass, a shadow moving in dappled moonlight under the lace of the locust.
He’d sat down in an old Adirondack chair just past the willow by the pond, and she came and lay down beside him, and he stroked her smooth head and rubbed her warm ears, telling himself that he’d been wrong, even though he’d been justifying himself ever since it’d happened.
Why did I do what Carl wanted? He set out to goad me, and I fell for it like a fool.
It’s not that I don’t have good reason to be outraged, but yelling at him in public played right into his hands. It was nothing but anger and pride on my side. And I ended up looking like a petulant child.
The fact that that bothers me more than what he said is pride too. Which is not the way I want to live.
There’s nothing I can say that’ll change Carl. It’s spittin’ in the wind, as Dad would say, which doesn’t end well.
So what am I supposed to do?
Go on.
Make yourself say it.
Forgive him for what he’s done. And whatever he does next.
Yeah? How? God’s gonna have to make a move here, ’cause that’s the last thing I want to do.
I s’pose I could apologize. Sometime. Just for yelling at him in public. And tell him we need to get over this and learn to act like adults.
’Course I’d rather eat a worm sandwich and wash it down with lye.
“Right, Emmy? You don’t ever have to apologize. You can just wag your tail and look ashamed and everyone tells you how cute you are.”
Alan pulled into Carl’s drive at six-twenty that night. Carl’s Chevy was there, parked in front of the unattached garage. And Alan sat with his hands on the wheel, talking himself out of shoving the gearshift into reverse and heading home fast.
He climbed out, finally, and walked to the front door, where he rang the doorbell, after another conversation with himself.
He waited. But no one answered.
And he went back to the car and took his legal pad out of his briefcase and wrote Carl a note of apology, then clamped it into the edge of the screen door right at eye level.
He backed out, and drove off, nodding to the elderly woman who was watching him, as she watered her gardenias, across the street from Carl’s.
Wednesday, April 15th, 1964
Jo pulled into Jack Freeman’s driveway on Pisgah Pike at a little before two, and drove through the deep ruts, climbing the long hill, then left past the creosoted tobacco barns and the smaller barn full of tractors that belonged to the man who rented the land. She parked under the cluster of hardwoods up the hill from Jack’s house, then stood for a minute and watched the wind fluttering paths through the leaves.
It was the house Alan had rented before they’d married, the stone and clapboard Cotswold cottage halfway down the slope from a fenced in cattle pasture that ran west across the top of the hill.
Jo started down toward the back of the house, but Jack came out before she’d gotten fifty feet, carrying his army pack and a small canvas suitcase.
He was grinning, the way he never had when she’d first met him, and though he was probably forty now, or maybe forty-two, he looked ten years younger than he had two years before.
Jo waited for Jack to lock the kitchen door and walk up to her, watching the tall grass swirl in the breeze that came sweeping down toward Pisgah Pike, looking at the gardens too that Jack had planted—the vegetable patch beyond the rope hammock by the screened-in porch, the new boxwoods flanking the stone path Jack had laid to the tiny flagstone entry outside the kitchen door, the peony bushes where there’d only been raw red clay.
Jo said, “You’re the kind of tenant I want.”
Which made Jack laugh, as he set his bags in the truck. “It’s fun for me. Experimenting on my own gardens makes me relax. How long will it take to get to the Cincinnati airport?”
“We’ve got to count on three hours, though it probably won’t take that long. What time does your plane leave?”
“Seven-forty-five.”
“Good. We’ve got time to spare for construction.”
“Thanks for driving me up.”
“It’ll be good to talk. I’ve got Ross over with Buddy’s wife, and I feel like a free woman.”
They talked about Jo’s newest client, and the work they were both doing at White Hall (her renovation and his landscaping), and the difficulties he was having making his landscaping business profitable. They discussed Alan’s job, and the troubles with Carl, and moved on to her Uncle Toss and their broodmare business.
His thin face seemed pulled in on itself, the hazel eyes searching the distance, the sharp nose and the chiseled cheekbones, tanned now, when they had been pasty, making him seem strong and reliable in ways Jo couldn’t have explained.
“What’re you thinking about? Not that it’s any of my business.” Jo laughed as she glanced at him.
And he looked back and crossed his arms across his sport coat, then sighed before he spoke. “I’ve been brooding about this trip since 1945.”
“I would’ve, I know that.”
“And yet actually going and doing it isn’t without risk.”
“If someone had set me up to look like a traitor, I’d feel downright nervous, going back to find out who.”
“That would be an understatement.” Jack rubbed his hands on his thighs, and turned toward Jo. “Being made to look like I’d turned the Resistance into the Gestapo? It made me insane for years. You saw that yourself.”
“Well—”
“It’s not that I don’t want to go track down whoever it was. I want it more than anything else I’ve ever wanted. But I know it’s a nearly impossible task, the way it always has been. That’s what used to paralyze me. I absolutely have to try. But that doesn’t keep it from being daunting, especially with limited time.”
“How will you go about it?”
“My number one suspect is Henri Reynard. He was a Resistance member who worked as a photographer for the Tours paper and the Vichy police. He photographed crime scenes, and any dead that turned up, so he knew what the police and Gestapo were up to from one day to the next. That information helped the Resistance, but gave him a network on their side too. I have no concrete evidence. And there’s research I need to do first, but I think my best bet is to find his ex-wife.”
“She was a painter?”
“Who taught during the war in what we call a high school. She’d been trained as an art restorer, and that was her real love.”
Jack was silent then for quite awhile before he smiled at Jo. “Actually, and I’ve never said this to anyone else, I admired her a great deal. I could talk to her about all sorts of topics. Literature. Art. Legal practices in our disparate cultures. She made me smile at the oddest times, and I found her quite attractive.”