Anxious to meet her, Fabian telephoned Stella at the nearby boarding school from which she had just graduated with honors; he had read that she would be staying on there throughout the summer to continue training her horse, at a stable in the vicinity, for the annual Walking Horse Show. He invited her to attend his lecture series as his guest. She was hesitant at first, but finally consented. At his opening lecture, Fabian saw her slip in, alone, and sit on a bench at the back of the hall, apart from the others.
Stella was fashioned in the classic American mold, the pearly oval of her face lighted by topaz eyes, spaced wide, her blonde hair sweeping easily about her neck and brushing her sensually protrusive jaws. The high arch of her cheekbones framed a small nose, its tip flattened, and lips, oddly thick, in which Fabian caught a flicker of insolence. Yet he noticed as well her shyness, a holding back.
It was only after Fabian had spent several brief interludes with her, having coffee, discussing horses, that Stella began to warm to him, to speak of herself, of her family. Her parents had been divorced when she was still a child, and each had remarried. Far removed, to New York and New England, happy with a new wife, a new husband, preoccupied with the children of these unions, they had scant time for Stella, their first daughter, now grown, on the brink of womanhood.
Several days later, Stella invited Fabian to visit her at the stable where she kept her horse, Ebony’s Ebony, her favorite possession.
Fabian found her dressed in a rough leather blouse, leather chaps sheathing her jeans, which stressed her well-defined, jutting buttocks. The tough, supple hide threw into sharp relief the fragile, lambent glow of her neck. She was trotting Ebony’s Ebony around the paddock, carefully guiding the horse, the heavy chains attached to its forelegs—the action-inducing devices used in training gaited horses—clanging harshly.
Ebony’s Ebony, a Tennessee Walking horse, was descended from the old plantation walking horse, which had carried planters and their overseers. Like most Southern owners of the breed, Stella kept the mare in constant training, refining and perfecting the horse’s three gaits: a flat-footed walk, a fluid canter and the high-breaking running walk of four even beats, each foot striking the ground separately, that was its hallmark.
Fabian watched as Stella monitored the time and intervals of each of the horse’s hoofs as it struck the ground, beating out a diagonal sequence. Intermittently, the horse lost rhythm, breaking into a mosaic of disjointed fragments—its heaving chest and front strained to the running walk, its haunches, buckling under Stella, still at a trot, the extravagant licking of the forelegs hesitant and askew.
Discouraged, Stella dismounted and took the horse to her workroom, at the rear of the stable. Jars of ointment, lubricants, a gallery of weights, hoof wedges, pads and chains of every size and thickness, crowded its shelves. Stella guided Ebony’s Ebony carefully to a space at the center of the room and, after tying the animal between two posts, she dismantled the armory of chains crusted around its forelegs. The horse, unyoked, pawed the ground in quickening anticipation, heaving slightly, eyes alert.
Just above the hoofs of Ebony’s Ebony, Fabian saw a mass of sores, some healing, others suppurating, striated, an inflamed cincture like a decoration around the horse’s pasterns. Stella took a jar and a pair of rubber gloves from one of the shelves; hunching down, she began patiently to smear the ulcerated beds on the mare’s forelegs with a viscous paste. She explained to Fabian that, like so many other owners of Tennessee Walkers, she was forming a “sore lick”—an open sore in the flesh that pressure from a chain or a weighted boot would keep raw and sensitive. To alleviate the pain, the horse was driven to distort its prance and spring, an alteration that permitted the animal to develop what its breeders claimed to be its predisposition for the running walk.
Stella went on explaining that most commercial preparations for such soring treatment did not satisfy her. Some were too potent and cauterizing, others too bland. Therefore, she had concocted her own blends of soring paste, ranging from one so volatile that it almost singed the flesh when crammed under the boots or chains just before or during a ride, to another so subtle that one could leave it on the horse’s foreleg overnight or even for a day, confident that it would slowly raise the sore one desired. She hoped that all her efforts would be rewarded at summer’s end, permitting her to qualify Ebony’s Ebony for the National Celebration in Shelbyville, the country’s most spectacular exhibition of Tennessee Walking horses, and thus to transform Ebony’s Ebony from a local blue-ribbon horse into a national prizewinner.
With each new layering of the paste, a quiver ran through Ebony’s Ebony. Tied between the posts, the mare seemed locked between warring impulses: rebelling against this distortion of its being yet willing to bend to a plan beyond questioning. The animal seemed to sense that the treatment meted out to its legs was part of a larger, more intricate and subtle design—one in which reward or fault had no part—than the random, fleeting flick of a whip on its rump, or a spur’s sudden nudge against its withers.
Stella entered upon a celebration of Ebony’s Ebony. There was a lover’s tenderness in her voice. “I used to watch Tennessee Walkers when I was a little girl. They have a harmony no other breed has.” Ebony’s Ebony shuddered slightly as Stella’s gloved fingers smoothed the paste. She flexed the horse’s foreleg for Fabian’s inspection. Ebony’s Ebony flinched, but Stella’s grasp was confident, secure. She looked up at Fabian for a moment, her eyes innocent and serene, her neck velvety. “I like to think of Ebony’s Ebony as my partner—all that power, yet without me the horse wouldn’t be able to show what it can do,” she said. She shifted around Ebony’s Ebony to begin her labors on the other leg.
“To get the horse to do that running walk, that nodding of its head in rhythm, that big lick, aren’t you crippling it?” Fabian asked.
She passed over his question with a smile. “Crippling? Its running walk is important—you can’t get a horse to do a smoother gait!”
Fabian was unconvinced. “I’ve ridden horses in Latin America, the Paso Finos, that perform their inborn gaits without any training, with no special boots. If your Tennessee Walker has natural gaits, why do you have to sore its legs and force it to wear those boots and chains?”
Stella shrugged. “The natural tendency to do its special gaits has to be brought out,” she explained patiently. “It has to be shaped, improved, enhanced by training, just as you have to train a Thoroughbred, to bring out its potential for racing or jumping.”
“To train, yes, but not by burning its flesh, by burdening it with weights and boots and chains!”
“It’s not that different from what trainers do to other breeds.” Stella’s voice grew sharp, but she was still gentle as she smoothed soring paste on the horse’s foreleg. “How much training does it take to get a Thoroughbred to strain beyond its limits on a race course? To leap over six-foot-high fences and seven-foot-wide triple bars at a jumping competition? Jumping isn’t natural to a horse; even when it’s hungry, it won’t jump over a fence or a ditch to reach food.” She glanced at Fabian with a look of mild irony.
“And what about that Morgan locked in your trailer? What did it have to endure to become fit for polo? And what does a polo pony go through during the game?”
“Leaping and chasing, the sheer spirit of running, are part of the horse’s nature,” Fabian said. “Sores and chains and boots aren’t.”
“Neither is the bridle or the whip, the spur or the saddle-even the rider,” she flared back. Then she shifted into a new, soberly impersonal key. “I don’t manipulate Ebony’s Ebony into any tricks or stunts that nature didn’t make possible in the first place. I merely guide the horse in discovering its essence. How can that possibly harm it?”
“Some time ago,” Fabian said gently, “I was one of the members of the American Horse Protection Association who testified in Congress on behalf of the Horse Protection Act.” Stella listened, her expression guarded, unchanging, as Fabian went on. “That act
outlawed soring as well as overbooting. It prohibits the use of any substance or device for the purpose of affecting a horse’s gaits. It also outlaws any practices that might cause the horse physical pain or distress or inflammation, or bring on lameness. What if Ebony’s Ebony should be disqualified before the National Celebration because of what you’ve done to it—and what if the inspectors should prosecute you?”
Unperturbed, Stella stood up. “Ebony’s Ebony is just one of thousands of Tennessee Walkers and American Saddle horses being trained. There are only about two dozen federal inspectors—they could hardly check the condition of every horse!”
“But do you want to break the law?”
“What law? That Horse Protection Act was put through by people who don’t know anything about the South, anything about our Tennessee Walker. They still can’t tell the difference between soring and lubricating, between padding and overbooting—so they want to ban it all!” Stella wiped paste from her gloved fingers as methodically as she had applied it to Ebony’s Ebony.
“What if all this talk about the horse’s essence is only a myth, just a convenient excuse to justify training practices that enable the animal to compete more strongly on the open market against other breeds, some of them better endowed by nature?” said Fabian, patting the horse on its muzzle. “What if what you do to these horses is just a derivative of what the Southern masters used to do to their slaves?”
Stella ripped off the gloves and tossed them into a corner. “That’s nonsense,” she said decisively. “Our horses are the result of careful breeding, and our training methods bring out inherited genetic characteristics that have been scientifically proven to exist. The Horse Protection Act threatens to make these Southern breeds extinct—to wipe out a whole industry. Hundreds of thousanda of people who love, breed, trade and exhibit these horses, our whole way of life down here—all that would go.”
She started to release Ebony’s Ebony from the bonds that had immobilized it. “In any case,” she said with a mischievous glance, “under that Horse Protection Act so dear to you, no incident of soring or overbooting has ever come to trial—and I kind of doubt that one ever will.” She smiled at him guilelessly.
Ebony’s Ebony champed and stretched in its new freedom. Fabian remained silent, and Stella, her tone casual, said that, after the National Celebration, she would attend a college in Kentucky. It was the only one in the country that allowed its students to major in horsemanship and stable management; she wanted to study new methods of training the Tennessee Walking horse.
There was a spirit and resolve in her manner that sharpened Fabian’s interest. Yet simultaneously, the disquieting awareness came to him that he had not been able to break her equanimity, that without bolder action on his part during what remained of summer, he would soon be forced to relinquish Stella to the demands of her new calling. She had declined all invitations to visit him in his VanHome, resisted or averted his other solicitations to intimacy. Her privacy challenged him, piqued his curiosity to know whether she was involved with another man. The gathering force of his fascination drew him increasingly to the stable at which she worked.
Fabian wondered what means he would have to use to seduce Stella. The slightest details of her manner, her demeanor, the texture of her daily life possessed him. He watched for any sign of weakness, a rent in the fabric. He found none. Her ability to reconcile her love of Ebony’s Ebony with the knowledge of the pain her training caused the animal only deepened her mystery for him.
He came to suspect that for Stella the simple act of sexual taking, the ruptured tissue, would mean less than her memory of the expectation of it. Before he could take her, she would have to imagine herself as his willing partner, she would have to prepare the path of her surrender to him. Once she had done this, she would be his whenever he wanted her.
And so, at a future time, if he wished to, he could return to her, the lover unannounced, and take her, a girl no longer, now a woman, perhaps engaged, perhaps married, perhaps bearing or having borne the children of another man. On that day, Fabian hoped to be paid in coinage that memory alone had minted, and only for him.
One morning at the stable, while Stella was fastening even more cumbersome chains to the horse’s forelegs, Fabian, on an impulse, leaned over to assist her. His head, bending in the apparition of an embrace, brushed her hair.
At that moment, an old black man, one of the stable’s hired hands, abruptly turned the corner of a stall and came upon them. The stable door slammed shut too late to announce his arrival. Startled, Fabian moved quickly away from Stella, disturbed at the invasion of their intimacy, reluctant to have his abortive embrace observed.
Wordless, unsmiling, the black man looked first at Fabian, then at Stella; his eyes rested on her a moment longer. Stella returned the black man’s stare, the balance between them poised, their gaze an equation. Fabian, at Stella’s side, felt a swift rush of instinct, like a horse vividly alert to a new reality. The space between Stella and the black man vibrated with her fright, glints of which showed in her eyes. The black man snapped the tension as abruptly as he had created it. Dropping his glance, pretending that he wanted something he could not find in the stable, he wandered about, then left. As the door closed behind him, Stella, her terror banished, turned calmly again to Ebony’s Ebony and the weights. But she did not look at Fabian.
Later that day, lying in the alcove of his VanHome, Fabian played over and over in his mind the scene of Stella and the black man. It brought into focus several odd aspects of Stella’s conduct. He remembered her discomfort before a group of black boys who watched from behind the stable fence when she rode Ebony’s Ebony, her expression of love for the South and her hate of the ghetto-ridden North, her exaggerated air of the Southern belle. And there was her reluctance to discuss her parents, her cryptic remark that they were too involved with their respective second families to visit her at school.
The next day, after Stella had finished at the stable and was about to board the school’s minibus, to go back to her dormitory, Fabian offered to drive her there. She smiled but said she could not go with him.
“Why not?” he asked, stepping down from the door of his VanHome.
“I told you,” she said, demurely polite. “You’re just not my type. Not yet, anyhow.” She turned away.
Fabian caught her arm. “Not your type?” he said. “Is it,” he hesitated, “is it because I’m white?”
An invisible hand arrested her at half-turn. Suddenly a figure in a pantomime, she wheeled to face him. A dusky flush mounted her neck, stained her face. Against her suddenly swarthy skin, her eyes stood out in ghostly relief.
“I don’t understand,” she stammered, her gaze fixing him. “Why would I mind your being white?”
“You know why,” Fabian said. He was convinced that he had arrived at the truth.
She swallowed rapidly, her throat pulsing. Adamant still, she held him off, a note of menace in her voice. “I don’t know why.”
“You do,” Fabian said. “You do because even though everyone takes you for white, under that snowy skin, all that blonde, blonde hair, you’re black, ebony black, just as black as Ebony’s Ebony, that mare you love so much. Some people might call you a white Negress; other places, you’d be a beautiful albino. But you’re a full-blooded black, Stella, as black as those parents of yours nobody’s ever seen, as black as I imagine the rest of your whole family is, as black as that old man down in the stable. He knows it, and I know it.”
She glanced around, panic in her movement and eyes at the danger of someone overhearing. Her teeth locked; for a moment she was beyond speech. Then she whispered, “Nobody knows it. Nobody. That old man just looks at me as if he knew something. He knows nothing. Nobody knows. Nobody.”
“Let’s go,” Fabian said. “I’ll walk you to the bus.”
Stella looked at him, her lips tremulous. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “Can I stay with you for a wh
ile?” The tears spilled over, streaking her cheeks.
“You can. But whether you stay or you don’t, what I know will stay with me. Only with me,” he said, putting an arm around her.
Inside his VanHome her sobs relented, but Fabian was still aware of her punished eyes streaked with tears. In the few moments that had elapsed since Stella’s acknowledgment, she had changed. Her aloof manner, the languid rise and fall of her speech, her gracious condescension had withered, dissolved. A wound had opened in their place; fear had yielded to sorrow, the newer vulnerability of her being.
“How did you find out?” she asked. Her question was a conspiracy. Slowly, uncertain, a wary child, she took his hand and clutched it in her lap. “Who told you?”
Fabian could feel the heat of her body through her skirt. “No one told me. I just sensed your fear. You were holding something back. Then I saw your face, what happened to you when that old black man looked at you.”
“But I’m white.” There was weariness in her voice. “My parents, all my kin are black. With my white skin, my hair and my eyes, there was no place for me in their world. I had to leave them, go somewhere where nobody could know who I was. No white person has ever guessed the truth before. How did you?”
“Maybe because as a child I too lived among people to whom I was an outcast,” Fabian said. “And here I am, foreign born, still an outsider.”
Stella continued to cling tightly to his hand. The flush had gone from her eyes; she looked down. “But until now, you didn’t know I was black. Yet you were after me.”
“I was drawn to you,” Fabian said. “Now I want to know you even more.”
Releasing his hand from her grip, he reached for her with both arms, his hands cradling her ribs, his thumbs deeply invading her breasts. Again a dusky blush suffused her face, spreading into her neck and shoulders. He released his grip on her and pulled her hair back from her face with one hand, exposing her forehead and ears, while gliding the rough skin of his other hand, in a mock threat, along her cheeks, then down, brushing her nipple more harshly than he intended. She recoiled, suddenly tense with alarm.
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