Horse Read online

  Your lab. Jess hadn’t thought of herself as ambitious, but she realized she badly wanted this responsibility. Inside, the lab gleamed: a necropsy suite with a hydraulic table, a two-ton hoist, double bay doors large enough to admit a whale carcass, and a wall of saws and knives worthy of a horror movie. It was the largest facility of its kind in the world, and a far cry from her makeshift lab in the laundry room on Burwood Road.

  She loved working there. Every day brought something new in a flow of specimens that never stopped. The latest arrival: a collection of passerines from Kandahar. The birds had been roughed out in the field, most of the feathers and flesh removed. Jess’s assistant, Maisy, was bent over the box of little bundles, carefully tied so none of the tiny bones would be lost.

  “I’m heading off tonight to pick up that whale skull,” Jess said. “You have everything you need while I’m in Woods Hole?”

  “Absolutely. After these passerines, I’ve got the deer mandibles for DNA sampling. They’re in a rush for those, so that’ll keep me busy.”

  When Jess left the lab for the day, she was aware that she might not smell so good. She’d given up taking the shuttle bus back to DC with the other employees. She’d noticed that the seat next to her tended to remain vacant, even on a crowded bus. She’d splurged on a good bike—a Trek CrossRip with dropped handlebars—and was grateful for the bike path that ran from the Support Center all the way back into the city. She twisted her long ponytail into a bun and crammed it under her helmet.

  The path was dilapidated; she swerved to dodge trash and broken pavement, ducking the profusion of new spring foliage. In Sydney, the shift in seasons had always been a subtle thing: a warming or cooling of the air, a small change in the length of day and quality of light. In Washington, the seasons slammed her—summer’s soup-pot heat; autumn’s extravagant arboreal fireworks; winter’s iciness; spring’s intoxicating explosion of bloom, birdsong, and fragrance. Even the neglected bike path erupted with lushness, and with the sun low in the west, the Anacostia River shone like polished silver.

  Jess swept to the right off South Capitol, into a quiet, long-established neighborhood of tall row houses set back from the street by deep front gardens. At this time of year, tulips and azaleas painted the flower beds in a palette of magentas, corals, and purples. Jess had been reluctant to look at something labeled a basement apartment, since her Australian heart craved light. But the row house had been renovated to provide an open-plan lower floor with two large windows facing the street and a generous clerestory in back, through which sun streamed all day. All summer, the interior light had a watery green tinge from the honeysuckle and trumpet vines that spilled in a mad profusion over the back wall.

  She locked her bike (double locks) and unlocked the door (triple locks). She would shower, change, pack an overnight bag, then nap for a couple of hours to let Washington’s gridlocked traffic clear. She planned to pick up a truck from the Smithsonian’s garage at about ten p.m. and drive through the night to the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole.

  She was headed to the shower when her phone rang. “Sorry to call you on your private number, but it’s Horace Wallis from Affiliates here. Your assistant said you were heading out for a couple of days, so I thought I’d just try to touch base before you left on a problem that I hoped you might help me with.” Jess vaguely recognized the speaker’s voice but couldn’t put a face to him.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “It’s a bit mortifying, to be honest. A researcher from the Royal Veterinary College in England is on her way here to look at a nineteenth-century skeleton of ours that she’s keen to study. Problem is, we can’t find it. It was at the Castle in 1878, then it went over to the American History Museum—why they wanted it isn’t exactly clear. Anyway, they say they certainly don’t have it now. Do you think there’s any chance it might’ve come to you at Osteo Prep? I’ve scoured the database. Nothing. Your place is about the last thing I could think of.”

  “Articulated skeleton, I’m assuming?”

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t have any articulated skeletons with us in the lab at the moment, but Support has ninety-eight percent of the specimens in storage, so that’s likely where you’ll find it. You’ve got the accession number, right?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s . . .”

  “Just a sec. I’ve got to find something to write on . . .” Jess rummaged through the papers on her desk. The margins of every document were crammed with her doodles of zygomatic arcs or cervical vertebrae. She finally found a crumpled boarding pass that she hadn’t scribbled all over.

  “I’ll double-check my own database. If it’s out at Support I’m sure I can track it down. What species?”

  “Equus caballus. A horse.”

  WARFIELD’S JARRET

  The Meadows, Lexington, Kentucky

  1850

  She was no one’s notion of an easy mare. Not mean, but nervous. Which could come to the same thing if you didn’t account for it.

  Jarret knew how to approach her. Steady and deliberate. You shouldn’t hesitate or show uncertainty, but if you were too high-handed she’d make you pay. She could snake around and have a piece of your arm or kick out and crack a shin. Dr. Elisha Warfield had bred her himself, and named her for his daughter-in-law, Alice Carneal. There were jokes around the barn about what he meant by that, and what he might’ve been trying to say to his son.

  But Alice Carneal never hurt Jarret. No horse ever had. “Look at him,” Dr. Warfield would say, lifting one of Jarret’s long, skinny arms. “He’s half colt himself.” Jarret took it as a compliment, for what would be the use in taking it otherwise? And it was true he had a feel for horses, deep in the grain. The first bed he could remember was in a horse stall. He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistress’s infant. Jarret barely saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants, their many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with them.

  Those two geldings in that carriage house had been more parent to him than his mother in the mansion could have been, or his father, Harry, who had lived across town, training racehorses for Robert Burbridge. Harry had visited Jarret and his mother one Sunday of every month. Jarret had loved those Sundays. He knew his father was special, because he arrived on a fine thoroughbred and he dressed just exactly like the marse, in a fitted frock coat and a silk cravat, and every hand in the carriage house deferred to him. He seemed old to Jarret, even then. His close-cropped hair was salt and pepper, but when he smiled at his boy all the lines and creases in his face seemed to vanish. Jarret tried to win that smile. When his father shortened the stirrups and set Jarret up on his stallion, Jarret learned quickly how to find his balance and show no hint of fear. And in truth, after that first sudden sense of being high up there, he wasn’t afraid. Even though the horse was large and powerful, he was kind, and Jarret could feel the way he moved considerately, adjusting to this new, slight weight on his broad back, keeping him steady. It was something to remember: a good horse will work with you, won’t mean you ill.

  He had been three years old then. Two years later, his mother had sickened and died. Fear was something he’d known about that year, vulnerable as a foal without a dam to protect him. His father, Harry Lewis, had spent all his savings to pay the price of his own liberty and didn’t have the money to secure his son’s freedom. So he’d implored Dr. Warfield to buy his boy so that he could have him close and raise him. At first, the doctor had protested that the last thing he needed was another child about the place. But when Harry’s skill led the Warfield horses to an exceptional season at the track, the doctor relented and bought Jarret from the Todds.

  Now, at thirteen, Jarret slept in his father’s cottage, but his waking hours were still spent entirely with horses. In the Warfield barns, he knew every horse’s nature, habits, history. Every vice, every virtue. Most of the horses nickered when they saw him, snuffling warm air through velvet nostrils. They’d reach out their gleaming necks, asking for his touch.

  He knew better than to expect that from Alice Corneal. Most times, she’d barely look up from her hay. But this night as he entered the barn to do the late check, she moved to the front of her stall along with the others, ears forward instead of laid flat back, gazing right at him with grave, unblinking eyes.

  As soon as he went up to her, she rested her head on his shoulder. Jarret stood still for a long moment, accepting the rare gesture. Then slowly—always slowly—he rolled back her stall door and went in. “Move like the air is molasses,” his father had instructed, and so he did, raising a languid hand and smoothing down her withers, fingering the fine coat that still carried some winter thickness. She leaned into him, accepting the caress, so he let his hand continue to the swell of her barrel, and when she nuzzled her damp lip into his neck, he eased down into a crouch to examine her.

  As he expected, she was waxing: the fine, white, tear-shaped cobweb already formed over the teat, preventing it from leaking milk. He stood again and slowly swept his two hands back toward her croup. There, between the hip and the hock, was the mares’ sweet spot. In the barn, friendly mares loved it when he curried that spot, dropping their heads and softening their gaze as if they were daydreaming. It wasn’t a liberty he usually took with Alice Carneal, who might spin and stamp at the unwanted intimacy. But now she let him run his fingers deep into her tail muscles as he felt for pliability. She le
aned against him even more heavily.

  This amiable mare was nothing like the dervish he’d struggled to lead into the neighbor’s breeding shed, rearing and bucking, just a year earlier. It was the first season Jarret had been allowed to help his father there—he’d not been strong enough before his thirteenth year. She’d fought right until the minute they finally got the twitch on her. And then, in the few minutes they waited for the stallion, you could smell the reek of fear-sweat on the men. Even the most experienced—even Jarret’s father Harry—wore the sheen of it on their skin.

  Violent. That’s what they said about Boston, all that stallion’s life; everyone from the boy who shoveled his shit to the gentleman-owner who pocketed his winnings. No one would mount him—only the enslaved boys, who had no say in it. After he bucked off one boy, and then stomped him, leaving him broken as kindling, the trainer told the owner he should get him gelded or have him shot, and that he, personally, would be happy to do the shooting. But they did neither, because when Boston chose to run, he was as fast as he was fierce. In seven years, he won forty of his forty-five starts, many over a crushing four-mile distance, and most of them without decent rest between. Plenty of men like Dr. Warfield were willing to pay the considerable fee to have him stand stud, even now that the stallion was stone blind and showing the signs of his hard usage. But his poor condition hadn’t quelled his temper. If anything, it made him even more touchy and dangerous.

  It was just a few minutes, there in the shed. A blur of men and ropes and a ton of lunging chestnut stallion. A thrust, a shudder. And after, as the old horse was led away, Harry mopped his brow with his sleeve and laid his hand on Jarret, who was still trembling. “What we just did in this shed is where you win or lose.”

  It was Harry who had proposed this particular mating. Of all the mares at the Meadows, he especially admired Alice Carneal, even though she’d won just a single race in her short career. At home at the Meadows, she was fast, but between her familiar stable and the track, she would fall completely out of condition. By race time she’d be sweating, purging, and all atremble, high strung with the crowds and the noise, almost unmanageable. Harry looked past that. He liked her combination of depth through the girth and length of hind leg that gave a horse room for powerful lungs and maximum thrust at the gallop. “Her problems are in her head end, not her hind end,” he said.

  He had to argue hard to justify the high stud fee in what had been a lean year. He convinced Dr. Warfield that time was short: that Boston had a bad look about him and might not make another breeding season. “Same could be true for you and me both, never mind the stallion,” said the doctor with a wry grin. In his seventies and suffering from several ailments, Dr. Warfield was slowing down, breeding fewer foals each year. But Harry persisted.

  They found Boston dead in his stall that winter. He’d gone down still raging at the world: the sides of his stall were painted in blood from the violence of his death throes. Alice’s foal would be one of the champion’s last offspring.

  And now that foal was on its way. Jarret took a pitchfork and thoroughly cleaned out the stall, throwing down a deep bed of new straw. Throughout, Alice watched him calmly. He gave her a last reassuring pat. He quickly looked over the other stalls—no one cast, plenty of water in the buckets—and then he stepped out of the barn and into the spring night.

  The sky was clear, the stars brittle as glass shards. No moon. If Alice were foaling in the wild, this inky sky would hide her in the quietest hours either side of midnight. Mares had the capability to slow birthing so that the foal would have the dark hours to find its feet and be ready to run from a predator by dawn. Dew lay fat and round on the new spring grass. Jarret felt the wet seeping through the hem of his overalls as he crossed the unmown field. He breathed the freshness of early violets amid the musty scent of last year’s rotting leaves. When he broke into a slow jog, the light from his lantern bounced across the grass like a yellow ball.

  All his best memories were here, at the Meadows. Dr. Warfield had bought this land north of the town after he’d been forced by ill health to retire from obstetrics, with its unpredictable hours. He did not regret his retirement. He raised a sixteen-room brick mansion and devoted himself to his many businesses and his first love, horses. He’d been a founder of the town’s Jockey Club and overseen the building of its first proper racetrack. Before that, folk had just used Lexington’s Main Street straightaway for quarter-horse racing, and sometimes you could still watch those dash races from the balcony of Dr. Warfield’s town apartment, atop his busy dry goods store on Main Street.

  Jarret had been glad to leave the town. He misliked the rattling metal wheels of the carriages, the hard-fronted, four-square brick buildings crowded up together, and all those people whose names he didn’t know. When an errand took him there, he couldn’t wait to be done and get back to the Meadows. There was a lot of call for messages and goods to go back and forth between the Meadows and the town. Because Jarret was the least inclined to dawdle there, he was the one most often sent, instead of the boys who loved to go to town to gawk and dally. Life did seem to him to work like that: contrariwise.

  Jarret could see the lights flickering through the trees. They were still dining in the big house. All those candles, and Mrs. Warfield insisting on fresh ones every day. The part-burned stubs came down to the quarters, and that was a boon to those who could find the wherewithal to do labor on their own account at the end of the day’s assigned tasks. Most of those were his father’s men, the stable hands and grooms. Harry was a good manager, setting a man to the tasks he was best apt to, working him to his capacity but not past it. He knew how folk yearned to buy themselves out, just as he had done, so he encouraged those who wanted to hire out their skills as harness menders or saddlemakers. Dr. Warfield never stood against it, so long as his own place was well kept.

  It was quiet in the lane, most folk already gone to their rest. But he could hear the thump of the loom from the dark cabin of Blind Jane as her skilled hands passed the shuttle and pounded the woof. Daylight didn’t mean anything to her; she would weave until weariness claimed her.

  Jarret’s father liked working for Dr. Warfield, because he’d been a free man the whole time of it, and Dr. Warfield always gave him his due on that account and was quick to credit Harry for more than doubling their track winnings. As the doctor grew frailer, he relied on Harry for the management of horses, and had increased his pay to five hundred dollars a year, which was higher than many a White trainer earned.

  Harry’s former position, trainer for Mr. Burbridge, had been much more precarious. In ten years’ service, Burbridge never let him forget he was “Burbridge’s Harry.” In the old man’s last days, he’d mistaken himself for a Pharaoh and pulled a Bowie knife, proclaiming that Harry must accompany him to the afterlife, to train his horses in the next world.

  Jarret didn’t remember any of that old business—he’d been in the Todd house then. But he’d seen his father turn ashen, recalling it. All manner of misfortune can come of a Black man and a White man in the same room with a knife, even if no drop of blood is spilled.

  * * *

  • • •

  Their cabin was set apart, with its own dooryard, a little beyond the lane. His father must have seen Jarret’s lantern, because the door opened even before he reached the gate. A column of warm yellow light rushed out toward him, followed by a rich, brown smell of fried onions and back fat.

  Jarret kicked his boots on the door stoop, shaking off the damp clods of earth that had adhered to them. “Alice’s foal’s coming,” he said. “She’s waxing and she’s uncommon friendly.”

  Harry nodded. “It takes her that way. Always has done. Well, go on ahead, wash up and eat something. She’s not a one to have trouble in foaling, but you never do know, and she’s an old mare now, gone fourteen years. Could be a long night.”

  Jarret poured the ewer of water over his hands and wrists, washing off the mellow scent of horse and replacing it with the crisp bite of lye. Then he went to the hearth. There was a pot of creamy beans on the crane and a fresh skillet of corn pone on the spider. Jarret ladled out a brimming bowl and ate ravenously, mopping the dish clean with a heel of pone.