Behind the Bonehouse

by Sally Wright

  “Well, I got in touch with him about maybe workin’ for him as an assistant trainer, or somethin’. ’Course, he got an anonymous letter from D’Amato like the rest, but he called Mercer Tate and asked him about me, and Mr. Tate explained about me telling him the illegal stuff D’Amato done two years ago, and Mr. Miller’s offered me a job!”

  Jo said, “Great! When do you start?”

  “Well … that’s kinda what I wanted to talk to you folks about. Engelhard’s horses get shipped all over. They’re here in the fall, but Mack moves ’em to South Carolina after Christmas, and stays there till March. They’re back here till June, then Saratoga for the summer.”

  “Ah.” Alan finished the last of his beets before he said, “So that’s a lot of moving.”

  “It is. His family goes with him, even in and outta schools and all, and his wife, she’s real good about it, makin’ it go as smooth as can be. But they got them a house here they can come back to. Mr. Engelhard puts ’em up in places north and south, but I haven’t asked how that’d work for me, only bein’ an assistant and all. Once I leave Mr. Tate, I won’t have me a house here, and Becky, she’s never lived nowhere but Woodford County, so it’d be a real big change.”

  “You’ve talked to Mr. Tate? You’re ready to leave him?” Jo was cutting her chicken, watching Buddy out the edges of her eyes.

  “Yeah. I’d need to give him a couple months’ notice, but he’s a real kind man, and he wants me to do what I want. You’d lose your babysitter and all, and I don’t know, I … It’s a real big decision.”

  “It’s a good one to have to make.” Jo smiled and patted his knee and handed him a strawberry.

  “It is.”

  “But I guess you need to find out what the house situation would be.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You been bellyachin’ ’bout wanting to be a trainer since I first set eyes on ya, and now you’re askin’ advice of other folks? You go home and make up your mind, boy, and don’t come back till you do!” Toss was walking up behind Buddy, grinning at him while he lit a smoke.

  When Buddy got done looking startled, he stared at Toss and laughed.

  “Mack Miller is a real good trainer. He’s honest as the day is long, and he’s got him a real good instinct for what every one of his horses needs. That’s all I’ll say on the matter, till you decide for yerself.”

  Buddy stood up, and grinned at Toss. And said, “I’ll talk to Becky again, and I’ll be lettin’ y’all know.”

  Jo and Alan and Toss watched him go. Then Toss picked up his half-smoked cigarette butt and twisted the tobacco onto the lawn before he looked at Jo. “I’m fixin’ to take a couple days off, pro’bly this comin’ week. Haven’t seen my daddy’s cousin Ruby in a good long while.”

  “She the one in Tennessee?”

  “Yep. Franklin. She’s gettin’ up in years, and her son wrote to tell me he reckons she’d like a visit, and now might be the time. That okay with you? Ya figure you can run the farm without getting’ kidnapped, or thrown in jail, or anything else drastic befallin’ ya?”

  Jo said, “I don’t know, Toss. I certainly hope so. All we can do is try.”

  They all smiled, till a serious sort of silence settled in, and Alan said, “God willing and the—”

  “Creek don’t rise.” Toss grinned and walked over to Ross, who’d turned himself over on his back and was looking up at Toss as he hunkered down beside him. “Hey there, Mr. Ross. Talk to your Uncle Toss.” He tickled Ross’s stomach, which made him laugh, then he picked him up, and set him on his knee and kissed him on the cheek. “You folks ever have another one, I want him named after me.”

  “Toss, or your real name? The one you never admit to.”

  Toss laughed, and started coughing, and it took him a long time to stop.

  “Toss—”

  “Don’t you start in on me, missy. I know what you’re gonna say.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody oughtta say something about it sometime. Smoking didn’t do Carl a whole lotta good.”

  Toss started to bristle, but then he and Jo smiled at each other, and it looked to Alan like it wasn’t simple. Like there was sadness in it somewhere, in the ingrained habit of Toss Watkins’s family. Of minding your own business and not sticking your nose in, in a lifetime of caring without words getting used.

  Jo looked at Alan, as Toss set Ross on his blanket and lit another cigarette, and she shrugged slightly and nodded silently as though she’d read Alan’s mind.

  THE WIRE

  It’s been thirty-three years. And I can look back now on Carl, and the panic I felt because of Butch, and understand why it happened. I’ve learned by living. Everybody does if they want to. Most times even when they don’t.

  When somebody’s getting talked about in town, I cut off the gossip more deliberately than I used to. And when we find somebody strung up in a straightjacket of their own private suffering, I can sympathize better than I could before, and see more ways to help. I’m not as affected by what other people think, and I’m better at sniffing out bias and carefully glossed-over facts. But trusting in your own understanding’s still a perilous path. Solomon’s life didn’t end well, and he had advantages I don’t.

  I’ve seen a lot of choices getting made since 1964 by all kinds of people (including our other two sons, who appeared with their own ways of carving out their lives), and some of those choices are worth writing down.

  Alan and I have watched genes and character and upbringing navigate the rocks and rapids in two family businesses that whole time, in ways that can still make me feel for my own pulse, and inflict the details on strangers, when I ought to slip them in a book.

  Spencer and Jack and Toss, Bob Harrison and Equine, Charlie Smalls at Claiborne, where he cared for Secretariat when he first went there to stud – I’d like to tell what happened to them all.

  I’d like to write about the home places too that get passed on, or sold, or crumble into dust, that teach, or taint, or turn us toward the past in ways that can heal and harm, depending on the ingrown pride in the folks they belong to over time.

  The work we do around here with the horses on our land lets us see a little way inside a complicated alien species in a way that’s very rare, and there’s more I’d like to say about the horses I’ve raised and lost too soon.

  I’d like to write about an unusually gifted equine painter who was injured riding cross country. And what I found in a wall I tore down in an old pioneer house that was home to a very strange horse connected family I’ve pondered before and since.

  But the year it took to write Behind The Bonehouse was a gift from God, the way I see it, after more than one doc said I’d be dead two years before. I can’t count on another (any more than anyone else), but I’ll start the next book anyway. Because contemplating interesting lives in an earlier time keeps me from losing the gift of today in what might happen tomorrow.

  We all die alone, we all know that, even with someone we love standing next to us. It’s worrying about the pain that’ll lead there that wakes me up in the night and makes me ask for the worry to be taken and peace to be put in its place. It has been, always, every time I’ve asked. And that’s changed more than my mood.

  Yet I’ve learned the most from sickness and trouble. They make me grateful for the small and simple. The taste of a peach. Redbuds in the woods. Alan’s smile in the bathroom mirror. A two-year-old grandchild holding my hand while we talk about the sky.

  The way Alan and I are with each other gets deeper and wider and stronger all the time. And as we’ve loved our sons, and learned from them, and seen their babies born, as we’ve done the work we’ve loved, even when it’s exhausting, we’ve seen the gifts and grace more clearly than we could before.

  There’re so many stories I hope I can tell. And maybe that’s part of why I’m still here. But with what I’ve seen in our lives and others’, whether or not I write the next book, it’ll happen the way it should.

  Jo Gra
nt Munro

  December 25th 1997

  Rolling Ridge Farm

  McGowan’s Ferry Road

  Versailles, Kentucky

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Frank Mellon is a chemical engineer and innovation-process consultant who’s worked with my husband over the years, and become a very good friend in the process. He helped me to conceptualize the formulation and scale-up processes in Behind The Bonehouse, as well as what making a paste at Equine would’ve entailed in the early ’60s.

  Dr. Rick Martin was the vet who cared for my favorite horse, Max, through the loss of his eye (which is part of the plot in Watches of The Night). Rick’s gotten used to my peculiar questions, and when I asked, “What kind of equine pharmaceutical would’ve been an interesting way of killing someone in the early ’60s?”, he came up with several options, but leaned toward the organophosphates, Dylox in particular. I did too. Which led to more questions, which he answered patiently, before and after he found me a Merck Veterinary Manual from 1961 on e-bay that’s filled with detailed information on vet medicine at that time.

  Jeff Nelson, our long time family attorney, very kindly helped me with the employment contract noncompete issues and the options Bob would’ve had in dealing with Carl, as well as various procedures related to Alan’s arrest.

  Jim Rouse is a well-known Woodford County attorney (whose farm I’ve commandeered and given to Jo and Alan) who helped me with Woodford County history and legal procedures as well. He also arranged for me to interview Loren “Squirrel” Carl, a former Woodford County Sheriff.

  Squirrel, who’s now a U.S. Marshal (and yes, I couldn’t keep myself from asking about the nickname), described how the investigation of the crime scene would’ve been conducted, as well as what the court proceedings would’ve been like in Woodford County at that time. He also told me that the pay phones in Versailles were privately owned in 1964, and that that’s where records of calls would have been found, which smoothed a wrinkle in the storyline.

  Betsy Pratt Kelly (who once owned the house I describe as Jo and Alan’s, which is actually on McCracken Pike and is now a part of the Irish stud farm where American Pharoah is standing at stud) knows so much of the history and social context of Versailles and Woodford County that there aren’t too many questions she can’t answer. She’s also introduced me to all kinds of people who’ve told me things I’ve needed to know, and given me ideas for characters as well. When I told her I wanted Esther Wilkes to live in an African American community somewhere in the country, she took me to Frog Town (where there were no signs of a town, much less frogs, and the origin of the name has been lost in time). I saw a house Esther could live in and drew a quick sketch before we drove around a curve – where we saw an old gentleman working in his garden. Betsy thought he looked vaguely familiar, and she stopped the car and got out. As soon as they started talking, they discovered that they’d known each other when she was a child, for Betsy had lived on a farm nearby where his parents and older relations had helped from time to time. It was good to watch them reminisce about folks remembered but long gone and what their families are like today.

  Betsy’s husband, Bob Kelly (who’s lived and worked all over the world, first in the Air Force, later in academia), did research on aspects of Keeneland I hadn’t thought to investigate when I was there. In the course of various visits, he also helped me develop a better sense of what it was like to be raised in Woodford County and watch it change since the ’40s.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  Mack (MacKenzie) Miller was a real life Thoroughbred trainer of admirable character and substantial accomplishment. See the Acknowledgements and Historical Notes in Breeding Ground for more information about him and the time I spent with him and his wife, who have both passed away since. I found the book MacKenzie Miller: The Gentleman Trainer from Morgan Street by Jonelle Fisher to be well worth reading.

  Jack Freeman’s experience with the OSS and the French Resistance in the Loire Valley during WWII grew out of a wide range of reading on both underground groups. The Resistance leader in Tours was not set-up by a traitor in his organization, but others in France were. The depictions of the factions within the Resistance are accurate, and the tensions between them did compromise the functioning of the underground, and complicated politics all across France after the war.

  For those interested in reading more about the OSS and the French Resistance see the Historical Notes at the end of Breeding Ground.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edgar Alan Poe Award Finalist Sally Wright’s most recent novel, Breeding Ground, is the first in her new Jo Grant mystery series, which has to do with the horse industry in Lexington, Kentucky. Behind The Bonehouse is the second in the series.

  Sally has studied rare books, falconry, early explorers, painting restoration, WWII Tech-Teams, the Venona Code, and much more, to write her university-archivist-ex-WWII-Ranger books about Ben Reese, who’s based on a real person.

  Sally and her husband have two children, three young grandchildren, and a highly entertaining boxer dog, and live in the country in northwestern Ohio.