Born to Trot

by Marguerite Henry

  The days grew shorter, cooler. Days of shocking corn. Pulling onions. Heaping turnips. Digging potatoes. Sacking them. Hauling them. Shipping them to market.

  Then still and brittle days when icy branches snapped and spooked the horses. In the still days William Rysdyk chopped wood, repaired the plow irons, sharpened the harrow tines, mended harness.

  So the seasons went their rounds without stint, without haste. And it was spring again. Spring with white dogwood pricking down the mountainsides and green needles of wheat piercing the soil and mallards swimming in the high creeks. Just like that it came. Spring, and the Kent mare big with foal.

  One early morning of May, his dinner in a poke, William Rysdyk clicked the latch of his own gate and set out for the Seely farm. Thinking of the mare, he hastened his steps. Today he would make her stall ready. The good clean bed. The fresh straw. Today it might be. He was glad when a team and wagon pulled alongside and a family on their way to a camp meeting drove him to the Seely gate.

  Even before he jumped from the wagon he felt hurried by a strange uneasiness—as if things were somehow different. Yet everything looked just as it did on any other Monday morning. Smoke feathering from the chimney. Newly hung wash skewering and bellying on the line. Chickens picking and pecking in the dooryard. Wagons standing, waiting. Everything the same. Yet somehow different.

  He broke into a run, past the woodshed, the stackyard, the corncrib, past the spring house with the milk cans drying in the sun, past the chicken house, the root cellar, to the horse barn.

  He looked inside. Sir Luddy was nosing above his stall door, pawing and whinnying for his breakfast. The big-faced work horses, too, were snuffling and snorting to the morning.

  Of all the stalls only the mare’s was open. Only she was free to come and go. Now her stall was empty. The straw untrampled. Not even a hollowed-out nest to show she had slept in it.

  ‘Just like some other mornings,’ William Rysdyk told himself. ‘Yah, I know that. Often it is she sleeps in the grass.’

  Yet the uneasiness hung onto him. He studied the pasture.

  ‘Where to has she gone?’ he asked. ‘Not far with her bad leg,’ he answered himself. ‘Never does she go far.’

  He picked up some sacking and ran out into the pasture. Except for a broad shadow flung across the field by three oak trees, the sun lay smooth and yellow on the grass. He tried to see into the shadow, but there was only blackness. He thought he heard the mare. He went running toward the knoll where the trees grew, calling to her as he ran. ‘It comes me!’ he cried, stumbling over the hummocky ground, leaping across the ditch. Then he slowed. He saw her now, in a spot of sun that pierced the trees.

  A sigh of relief escaped him. ‘She likes to neighbor with the tree trunks,’ he reminded himself, ‘to scratch and itch herself on the bark. But why is it the sawhorse there in the pasture? Ach, the Seely boys is up to no good, always leaving around tools and such.’

  Then suddenly the four stiff legs of the sawhorse scissored.

  No. It couldn’t be a colt. It could be a deer? No, no.

  And yet—? Could it be the little one? It’s got to! Nothing else could so long-legged be. Not a dog. Not a sheep. It’s got to!

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, his voice trembling, ‘maybe if I sneak up by them very quiet.’ He began picking his way carefully on tiptoe, then changed his mind. ‘No,’ he smiled into his beard, ‘I’ll look like I wasn’t even looking.’ He took a roundabout route, talking in an undertone as he walked. ‘A quiet place is this for a foaling. No eyes prying. No noise. Only wind whispers.’

  And now he was under the crown of shade with them. Close enough to study the new-born creature. With curious eyes the colt turned his head, his mother’s milk beaded along the feelers of his muzzle like tiny seed pearls.

  ‘Ai yai yai!’ breathed William Rysdyk in awe. ‘The eating is ready for him. Look on his whiskers.’

  Seeing the colt, he saw more: saw in him Messenger charging down the gangplank, Silvertail trotting the highroad with a man and a boy on her back, Hambletonian with the look of eagles.

  A high baby whinny interrupted his dreams. He smiled at his foolishness, fondling the creature with his eyes.

  ‘How long you here already, little fellow?’

  The nostrils fluttered in answer.

  ‘And how pleases you our world?’

  The head tossed.

  ‘So, you high-nose our world, hmm? Or is it you have hunger?’

  The mare took up with the colt, licking him a little, then snuffing noses with him, letting out a high nicker of joy.

  ‘Hush up, mare-mom,’ William Rysdyk whispered. ‘Is better you quit out with that noise. Would you to have the Seely boys come out with their hollerings and jumpings and their sling-shots, maybe?’

  The Kent mare liked the talk. She did not plant herself between William Rysdyk and her colt. She knew he could be trusted even when his man-hands laid hold of her young one.

  ‘He looks bigger as any newborn, yah, mom? And he keeps his head up, no? And he looks pretty fiery.’

  Gently he began rubbing the colt with the sacking. ‘By golly,’ he laughed as the colt struggled to free himself. ‘You don’t like it being rubbed? Come,’ he coaxed. ‘Trusting is what a colt is got to learn. Don’t wiggle. What helps you that? Only a drying you get from me.’

  After the rubbing, William Rysdyk clapped his hands. And to his astonishment the colt bent his knobby little knees and broke into a trot toward his mother.

  ‘It don’t hardly seem possible!’ William Rysdyk sighed. ‘Yesterday is a big mare only. Today is a baby trotter by her. Is more eating ready, mare-mom?’

  He laughed as the colt began suckling, laughed to see the tiny tail flip-flap. ‘It tastes? Hmm?’ he asked.

  A cow bawling to be milked broke into his happiness. He sighed again, more deeply this time. ‘Who wants going to work when a colt is new borned?’

  He gathered up the sacks, turning to go. ‘I’ll make you ready a warm mash,’ he promised the mare, ‘but first I must to the house to say the news.’

  When William Rysdyk looked into his employer’s office, Mister Seely was scowling over his ledger.

  ‘Anything amiss?’ he asked, peering over his glasses.

  ‘Excuse, sir,’ William Rysdyk began, twirling his hat nervously, ‘never was anything like him.’

  ‘Like whom? Like what, Rysdyk?’

  ‘Like the colt, sir.’

  Mister Seely laid his quill aside. ‘Oh,’ he said with a smile, ‘so the Kent mare has foaled. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yah, shure, shure. Is all right. Herself she did it alone.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Just before the big boulder under the oak trees already.’

  ‘A fine foaling spot. Always better foaled in the open.’

  ‘Yah,’ sighed William Rysdyk. ‘With them everything is fine. The mare chawing off the grass and the colt sucking good!’

  ‘Rysdyk!’

  ‘Yah, sir?’

  ‘Our Seely custom is this. Whoever spies a colt first has the naming of him.’

  ‘How say you?’ William Rysdyk gasped as if the words and their meaning were too big for understanding.

  A silence came into the room. Somewhere in the house a clock bonged the hour of six. Mister Seely got up and circled the day on the wall calendar. May 5, 1849. Then he stood waiting.

  William Rysdyk took a great gulp of air. ‘I don’t even got to think, sir! Already he’s got him a name. Is Hambletonian!’

  Mister Seely tapped his lips, thinking.

  ‘Is too long a handle for a little feller?’ William Rysdyk hurried the question.

  ‘No, no, Rysdyk. Come to think of it, Hambletonian is just right. A name of dignity.’

  Fifteen

  WHAT a long handle of a name for a little foal!” Gibson chuckled, repeating the words. “Longer even than Rosalind!” He began counting the letters. H-A-M-B-L-E-T-O-N-I-A-N. Only twelve a
fter all. Four to spare! The foal could get in the Trotting Register, too.

  “Everything ties in,” he said in wonderment. “Rosalind foaled on May fifth, Hambletonian’s birthday, too.”

  He closed the book, turning the tiny gold key, thinking that with it locked it would tempt him less. Carefully he laid the little volume on the table beside his schoolbooks. How new and callow it made them look!

  Even with the cover closed, Gibson was a long time coming back to himself. He had lived with the man Rysdyk for so many hours. Smiling to himself, he fingered the rolled rim of his ears to see if they had gone leprechaun. He felt of his cheeks and chin, almost expecting a wiry, sprouted beard. He dangled his legs over the side of the bed. How chalky they were! Not brawny and hairy as he imagined William Rysdyk’s to be.

  Before he could swing back under the covers, the door opened and a nurse entered. “That’s right,” she said. “Dangle ’em a while. Then walk around, up and down the halls. Tomorrow we’re moving you into a cottage in a room with three other boys. You’re getting so much better,” she went on as she whisked off the pillow slips. “Besides, we must have this quiet room for someone who really needs it.”

  It took two men to move all Gibson’s belongings. They had to make a special trip for the bulletin board, covering it with a bedsheet to protect the pictures. They hung it in the cottage to the right of Gibson’s bed. This gave his roommates a better over-all view, but at least he was closest to it.

  Gibson felt shy as he stood inside the new room while a nurse introduced him. “Gib White,” she said, “I want you to meet Beaver Teeth. He occupies the bed on your left.” Then in the midst of her introductions she was called away.

  “His name’s really McCarthy,” explained the boy across from Gibson, “but we dubbed him Beaver Teeth for two very good reasons.”

  Beaver Teeth grinned obligingly, showing the reasons. “Let me introduce to you,” he said with a sweep of his hand toward the bed opposite, “Grubber Thompson. Last summer he worked in his dad’s grocery store in Norfolk. Grubbed up the boats that stopped there. Now he makes miniature trains for all the kids he knows, and for some he don’t.”

  Grubber, freckled and copper-haired, put down a pair of long-nosed pliers. “Hi, Gib,” he smiled.

  “To his left,” Beaver went on with his tour, “and directly opposite your bed, meet Pat Jones. He’s our paint dauber. We call him Mike, short for Michelangelo.”

  “Say, Gib,” asked Mike, looking at the bulletin board, “what do they call those racing rigs?”

  And with that question Gibson felt at home. “Sulkies is what they’re called,” he replied.

  “Sulkies? Why on earth call ’em that?”

  “It’s a legend,” Gibson explained. “Pop Geers told Dad that once there was a driver who wanted to be alone; so he made himself a one-man cart. His wife told him only a sulky man’d ride alone. The name stuck.”

  Later, sitting up in bed with his history book on his knees, Gibson found himself listening instead of studying. He had been alone so long he couldn’t concentrate. Yet Beaver, studying to be an architect, seemed able to write and design and still join in the banter that bounced from bed to bed.

  For a week Gibson did not unlock his book. It was a world so far away and yet so close he could only feel but never speak of it. What if the boys were to make fun of the padlock and key? Or of the long-bodied horse on the cover?

  How was he ever to finish the book? Sometimes he thought about writing Dr. Mills, asking for a single room again. And then he realized he would miss this new companionship. The questions about Rosalind. The games of checkers after supper. He would even miss the pleasant clutter of freight cars hooked together on the window sills, and Mike’s paintings drying all over the place, and Beaver’s blueprints and his talk about the kind of hospital he would design some day.

  Then one morning everything solved itself. The bookmobile lady came in with two mystery stories apiece for Beaver and Mike. With the stories on hand, quiet settled down over the cottage in the trees. The only sounds were made by the distant chatter of squirrels and by Grubber snipping a piece of wire with his shears.

  Nobody was paying any attention to Gibson. Quickly his fingers were feeling in the saddlebag, finding the book, unlocking the gold hasp. With a sigh of satisfaction he settled into the pillows.

  7: Son of Old Abdallah

  William Rysdyk heard the clatter of hoofs above the noise of his sledge hammer. He looked down from the upland pasture where he was repairing fence.

  A carriage drawn by two high-stepping blacks came whipping around the bend at full speed with a spotted coach dog running in attendance. As the horses turned into the Seely lane, William Rysdyk raced downhill, arriving just in time to catch the reins.

  Suddenly the dooryard came alive. Geese clacking at the coach dog. The coach dog barking at the Seely cats. The blacks neighing and bugling to the Kent mare, whose outline they saw in the distance.

  William Rysdyk studied the men as they climbed from the carriage. Two he recognized. Big John Doughty, the banker, and Israel Toothill, owner of the ironworks. Two he had never seen. One was a little snipe of a man with a slender bill nose pointing downward. The other was pranked out in a tight-waisted carriage coat with elegant buttons, big as twenty-dollar gold pieces. The coat was too warm for the day. The man within steamed like the horses, his waved forelock clinging damply to his face.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Mister Seely shouted above the din, ‘I am deeply honored. You find me in my house slippers, about to join Mistress Seely in the evening meal. You will sup with us, of course?’

  The man with the long bill of a nose squinted up at the sun. ‘Afraid not, Seely,’ he said, his voice full of high harsh notes. ‘We’ve one more stop to make before sundown.’

  William Rysdyk took a long time tying the lines to the hitching post. Ain’t only one man, he thought, it’s four. It wonders me. Maybe only they are going to build up a new schoolhouse. But maybe . . . it could be the colt!

  He felt a jerking at his farm frock. Turning, he saw the youngest Seely boy, his mouth full of green apple but talking anyway, spouting a volley of questions.

  ‘Sh!’ William Rysdyk raised his forefinger, pressing it against his pursed lips. He ran into the tool shed and came out with the grindstone and scythe, setting the stone as near the huddle of men as he dared.

  ‘Yourself you turn it,’ he whispered to the boy. ‘Watch how the sparks spritz when I make sharp the blade.’

  The boy turned the crank, fascinated by the flinty sparks. The noise was only a little noise. William Rysdyk could listen now.

  ‘We are a committee of four,’ the banker was saying as he centered the diamond pin in his neckcloth, ‘and it is our pleasurable duty to line up entries for the matinee trotting races in New York City this fall.’

  Mister Seely’s thumbs were in his trouser pockets, his eyes on Sugar Loaf Mountain, blue-humped in the distance. ‘Gentlemen, I’m afraid we have no entries this year. Sir Luddy is just a middling goer.’ He looked from one face to another. ‘Not since the days of Silvertail have we had a horse that could go the pace and stay the distance. But while you gentlemen are here, I’d be honored with your opinion on a colt by Old Abdallah out of the granddaughter of Silvertail. He’s rising four months now.’

  ‘Hmmm . . .’ the driver in the splendid coat unbuttoned his enormous gold buttons. He took his watch from his waistcoat and opened it. He showed it to Mister Doughty, the banker.

  Four watches came out, the minutes compared.

  The decision seemed to rest with Mister Toothill, the ironmonger, as all eyes fastened on him. William Rysdyk studied the man. He was built much like a kangaroo, stout of trunk and leg, with a head that pinched up into nothing as if all the strength had gone into the body. ‘We could spare ten minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Come along, Rysdyk!’ Mister Seely called, ‘and bring a measure of oats with you. Son, you may come, too.’

  The men wait
ed, talking about the rain needed, about the Erie Railroad to New York. ‘Why, she averages nigh twenty miles an hour!’ one was saying when William Rysdyk came up to them.

  ‘Rysdyk is my right hand,’ Mister Seely explained. ‘He’s the only one who can catch the colt.’

  The men looked at the patched homespun trousers, at the pointed ears, as they followed along, trying without success to keep up with the long strides of Mister Seely’s hired man.

  Under the oak trees the mare and the colt stood head to tail, switching flies for each other. But when they saw a drove of strangers coming at them, they trotted off like sparks of fire.

  William Rysdyk walked away from the fleeing pair, looking skyward as if seeking birds instead of horses to grain. Gradually the colt and the mare changed their course, coming now at a walk toward him. ‘I will lay out the way it is,’ he told them. ‘Now comes a bunch of men. They just stand and look and only make talk. Then they give each other the hand. I don’t care for it too, but soon is over. Yah?’

  The words were so low pitched the mare and the colt had to come near and nearer to catch the ups and downs in his voice. Step by step they came until he could lay hold on the colt’s halter. He offered each a palmful of oats for obedience. Then he led the colt to the men, the mare following.

  ‘Father!’ the Seely boy screamed. ‘I’m going to be sick!’

  Mister Seely excused himself and walked very swiftly toward the outhouse, towing the boy. ‘Too many green apples,’ he muttered under his breath.

  With Mister Seely gone, the men turned their attention on the colt. They spoke freely, as if the hired man were deaf and dumb. But their remarks hit him across the face, lightly at first, then in sharp whiplashes.

  ‘Too high on the legs,’ said the banker, pulling his plaid waistcoat over his paunch. ‘No elegance of form.’

  ‘Rough made, I should say,’ piped Henry Spingler, the little snipe of a man. ‘Note how ungraceful the neck, how large and coarse the head.’