Black Gold, Page 2

  “Why, yes, we did!” Al Hoots caught himself laughing, and the little filly dropped the timothy and gave out a high, thin whinny.

  “Hey, she’s laughing with you, Hoots. What did you say?”

  “Oh, I was just repeating my offer.”

  Halcomb’s voice boomed. “That whinny does it! Shows she’s taken to you!” he said as if he needed some excuse to change his mind. “Al, for eighty acres she’s yours!” and he held out his hand to seal the bargain.

  4. Jaydee

  WHILE AL HOOTS was buying a little untried filly in Oklahoma, John David Mooney, an Irish lad down in New Orleans, was helping his grandma hitch up Nelly to the old buggy and drive her to the Stumptown Track. With the boy holding the lines and Grandma holding her hat, they went whipping around corners as if Nelly were an entry in the next race.

  The grandmother had one free pass to the grandstand given her by a Mr. Muldoon from County Cork in Ireland, the self same county from which she herself had come. But the boy, known as Jaydee, had to scramble up the high board fence that curved around the track, and there he perched to watch the Thoroughbreds run.

  Jaydee had an odd, almost peculiar way of enjoying a race. The colors the jockeys wore seemed as exciting to him as the race itself. Perhaps if he had owned more bright toys as a child—balloons and blocks or a red wagon—he would not have been so fascinated by the bright shine of silks in the sun. But the Mooney family was big, and there were many hungry mouths to feed. The father’s pay check had to go for bread and meat and fish. Not toys and trifles. What the Mooneys lacked in money, however, they made up in fun.

  Especially Jaydee. He lived in a world of horses. Even before he was six, he knew that horses had knees on their forelegs and hocks on their hind. This was important to him, for he mounted the horses he knew by putting his toes on the side of a knee or above a hock, and with a quick leap, he was up! Riding bareback!

  He had a whole corral full of horses to choose from—anywhere from eight to a dozen. His father, you see, was a deputy and sexton of the Fireman’s Cemetery. He cut marble . . . he painted benches . . . he buried the dead. But best of all, he looked after the coach horses that pulled the hearse at a funeral. These were heavily muscled animals, glossy and elegant, with fine silky coats and docked tails. In spite of their robust build they were high-going steppers, lifting their knees and hocks to incredible heights.

  Mr. Mooney liked to have Jaydee ride them. “The lad takes the vinegar out of ’em afore a funeral; makes ’em go more stately in the procession,” he told the churchwarden.

  The horses taught Jaydee a lot, too. In mounting, if they broke and tried to run away, he ofttimes lost his toehold. This taught him to reach up, catch the mane, and pull himself up like a monkey. The chief thing, he discovered, was to be one with the horse, to be part of him, motion for motion.

  Once aboard, his fun began. He made believe he was in the circus, standing up on the stout rump, first with both feet planted solidly, then balancing precariously on one foot. None of the horses seemed to mind. They cantered smoothly around and around until they had had enough. Then they swerved under a low-hanging branch and whisked the boy off.

  Undaunted, Jaydee would leap up on another of the handsome creatures. This time he was a famous jockey, flying down the stretch with no reins at all; nothing but a tiny cypress twig to guide with.

  Although the coach horses seldom galloped, they showed great speed at the trot. In fact, at first Jaydee’s father tied the boy’s feet to a rope under the horse’s belly in order to keep him on. But in no time at all Mr. Mooney saw that this embarrassed the boy and was entirely unnecessary—perhaps even dangerous.

  As a special treat—if Jaydee had helped to shine the fancy harness—his father would let him ride, harness and all. Then he had lines to guide his mount, and he pretended he was the head coachman in a funeral procession. He winked at his father as he took off, sitting erect, clucking to the horse, feeling all-powerful.

  In the midst of all this joy, Jaydee’s father died very suddenly. The boy had to grow up overnight. Barely seven, he had to become serious-minded and manly—a wage earner. There was a cow dairy nearby that boasted a real western paint pony to round up the cows. So after Jaydee had said good-by to the beautiful coach horses, he asked the owner of the cow dairy if he couldn’t be their roundup boy, helping each night and morning to drive the cows into the barns.

  The owner was pleased with the idea. He had been doing this work himself and was glad of a boy to help. Of course, Jaydee had other chores, too—he raked and swept around the milking barn. And he polished with twisted wads of newspaper the chimney lamps that hung on the milk wagons.

  But when he was not working, he and Grandma Mooney were off to the races. Always he drew in a great breath of happiness as he sat on the fence, and always he felt that mystic power of the colors. Pink and purple, orange and indigo—they flowed and furled around the track like a fast-moving rainbow. It was almost as if they brought the horses in! Some day he, Jaydee Mooney, would wear bright silks and fly his horse over the finish line.

  As often as he could leave the cow dairy, he was there at Stumptown, rooting the colors on. Sometimes, with eyes closed, his mind burst ahead to the time when he would be putting on a bright jacket to match the red lining of his horse’s nostrils, and away they would go to win as the horse pleased! More than once he fell forward off the fence in his excitement. Then the dream—strong, clear, always persisting—was cut short.

  “Hey, you little fence-jockey!” a burly policeman would shout. “Git back up there, boy, or go buy yourself a ticket!”

  5. The Parallel Dream

  JAYDEE’S DREAM, like the dream of Al Hoots, was only in its beginning stage. Yet their dreams ran parallel to each other like the hard, shining tracks of a railroad. Perhaps, in the distance of time, they would converge, as tracks do.

  While the boy worked the sun up and down at the cow dairy in New Orleans, the man watched over his farm at Skiatook and trained his small string of horses. Never before had his hopes centered so in one horse. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he used to say to other horsemen. Now he had all but forgotten his motto. U-see-it was his youngest, his favorite, and he found himself planning for her the way a parent plans for the child who is handicapped by littleness or plainness. He would have to get a trainer for her, a good one—a trainer who would recognize and be so excited by her possibilities that he would be willing to work the clock around—a man who would love her for her eagerness as Hoots himself did.

  For a few months he decided to baby her with no work at all, so he turned her out to roll and romp with the other horses. She seemed as pleased as a child let out of school—playing all day in sun and rain, and in snow, too. There was, of course, a big roomy shelter where she could come and go as she liked. But she seldom used it! She liked weather, all kinds. With her tail to the slanting snow, she let it pile up on her back until she looked like a race horse under a white blanket.

  As for her diet, there was delicious bluestem grass in summer and corn and hay in winter. And there was the clear-flowing Hominy Creek to drink from.

  Life at Skiatook was good! On twilit evenings Rosa came out on the porch and cranked her music box. The tinkly notes made U-see-it and all the other horses come flying across the meadow. Once at the gate, U-see-it remained very still, her head resting on the top rail, her delicate ears pricked sharply to pull in all the melody.

  Rosa’s eyes laughed. “When they come galloping in,” she told her husband, “the other horses, they lumber alongside her.”

  It pleased Al the way Rosa loved U-see-it. As for him, he was building the filly’s whole future on the look in her eye. The eagle look will make up for littleness, he thought.

  “Yes!” he told U-see-it. “You may have to take two strides to the other horses’ one, but I know you can do it.”

  One sleepless night, as Al Hoots lay listening to the wind in the cottonwood tree, a happy idea cam
e to him. The very man to train U-see-it was none other than old Hanley Webb. Good old bald-headed, bow-legged Hanley Webb, who had lost two fingers in a ’coon hunt. He had neither chick nor child to care for. Why, Webb had complained as recently as the last race meeting: “Al, sometimes I get mighty tired being County Sheriff and coming home to no one but me. Yuh, I get mighty tired of it. Sometimes I think I’d like to turn in my silver star and quit the constabulary for good.”

  “But what would you do?” Hoots had asked him.

  The answer had come without hesitation. “What I’d like,” he had said, “what I’d really like is to be nursemaid to a good smart horse—to walk him cool, to groom him, and to train him up until he’d be my handiwork to take a pride in!”

  And so, in less than a month Hanley Webb arrived, bag and baggage, eager to begin. The first thing he did was to grade a track in the field behind the shed. Then he hired an old wizened Indian, named Chief Johnson, to be U-see-it’s exercise boy. Now each day, rain or shine, she was put to work. First she had to run clockwise of the track, then counterclockwise, until she began to sense that running was her business in life. Even in winter there was scarcely any let-up. Hanley Webb threw straw on the frozen track to cushion it, and schooling went on just the same.

  The combination of work and freedom after work and friends, both four- and two-legged, agreed with the little mare. By the time she was three years old her whole appearance had changed. The wispy look was gone! Now she had developed into a well-formed mare, round and solid as an apple. And her eyes, always beautiful, became so full of health and liquid light that one was stopped by their brilliance. Even the brownness of her coat had taken on a nice shine, like a plain brown boulder made glossy by the water that flows over it.

  But most remarkable of all was her spirit. She wanted to race! First she won on little straightaway tracks hewn out of the wilderness. Then on half-mile tracks at county fairs. Then she was entered at the big race meetings—at Tulsey Town, at Enid, at Oklahoma City. And at last she was too fast for Oklahoma! She was shipped to New Orleans and Chicago and to far-away places, like Juarez down in Mexico, and Calgary up in Canada.

  With each race she earned a new nickname—Twinkle Toes, Hummingbird, Comet, Sandpiper.

  On and on she went, winning from quarter horses and from Thoroughbreds. Al Hoots was in an ecstasy of pride over his mare that looked so little and raced so big. He beamed at the gentle joshing about her. “How’s the light o’ your life?” he was asked. “How’s the apple o’ yer eye? Ain’t Rosa jealous?”

  There was only one racing mare that spelled defeat for her. She was Pan Zaretta, known as the Queen of Texas, and of pretty nearly everywhere else. She was big-going as the state itself, with no less than a twenty-foot stride.

  Old Man Webb took a sharp dislike to her. “I wouldn’t trade our Twinkle Toes,” he said loyally, “for all the Pan Zarettas in Texas!”

  • • •

  The years of racing and travel went by. Good years for everyone at Skiatook. One night when Webb and U-see-it had gone on ahead to Juarez, Al Hoots was trying to figure up the number of times his mare had finished first. He and Rosa were sitting at the supper table, just the two of them, and he was jotting down the names of cities on the back of an old calendar. Rosa was spooning up second helpings of boiled hominy with pork, while Buster, their bob-tailed pup, looked on hopefully.

  “Rosa!” Al pronounced between mouthfuls. “Think on it! As near as I can figure, U-see-it has won thirty-four races for us! That’s meant enough money to mend fences and buy feed for our whole string of laggards.”

  Rosa stopped in the midst of stirring her coffee. She laid down her spoon quietly in the saucer. Slowly, thoughtfully, she said, “Now, Al, now would be the time to bring her back to the Home Place. Now—while she is the winner.”

  The house suddenly went quiet. Outside in the cottonwood tree a bluejay whistled, “G’night! G’night!” And the red puppy spoke for a piece of meat.

  Al looked at Rosa beseechingly, thinking of her Indian wisdom. Was it a foreboding she had? “I wish somehow you hadn’t said that, Rosa.”

  “I think not only of my love for U-see-it.”

  “No?”

  “I think you need to come home, too, Al.”

  “I need to come home?”

  She named the reasons slowly, with a pause after each. “Yes. The long grind of the circuit . . . the traveling . . . the dust worsening your cough . . . the long hours . . . the cold food served to you warm and the hot food served cold. No squash and hominy. None of the good things the Osage eats. And”—after a long pause—“I miss you . . . both.”

  Al Hoots looked at his wife and nodded. Everything she had said was true. But his plans were made. U-see-it and Hanley Webb were already on their way to Juarez, and he had committed himself to go, too. It was the last race meeting of the season and he was leaving in the morning.

  He could not answer her. He took a marrowbone from his plate, licked the hominy from it and made a peace offering to the pup.

  The bluejay called his “G’night” again, and somewhere afar off a coyote cried.

  After a long while he managed to explain. “It’s the last race meeting, Rosa. I promised to enter her. I have to leave in the morning.”

  He went tiredly up the stairs to pack his bag. When this was done, he strapped his deer rifle to it. Next best to chicken and pork Hanley Webb liked deer steak, and there might be time for hunting.

  6. Bring on the Mash!

  JAYDEE, AT HOME in New Orleans, was too busy to notice a short news item in the Times Picayune. The story was about a race at Juarez involving a mare called U-see-it, whom he had seen once or twice.

  By now Jaydee had graduated from his work at the cow dairy and was handy-boy at the big Fair Grounds racing park. He was employed by a Mr. Kelly who owned a stable of four horses. This job Jaydee considered no work at all, even though it routed him out of his warm bed before dawn.

  Each day began the very same way. With a rolled newspaper full of carrots or turnips under his arm, he caught the trolley car, paid his nickel, and went bumping along Canal Street—past the Fireman’s Cemetery where his father had worked, up City Park Lane, past the big oaks where the French duelists had fought for their honor. And at last the trolley went rumbling onto a little wooden bridge. Here he always pushed the bell for the motorman to stop, then hopped out on the far side of the bridge and walked into the Fair Grounds, whistling his arrival.

  Snorting and pawing in expectancy, four sleek race horses awaited him. It was the nicest time of day for them, and for Jaydee, too. First, he watered them and gave them a big measure of oats. As they ate, he picked up their feet and cleaned out their hoofs. Then he brushed their coats, combed their tails, and turned them out into the grassy centerfield.

  While they played, he made up their beds—fluffing up the straw, tossing out the soiled, spreading fresh straw to a comfortable depth. This done, he searched behind the barns for old fence boards and pieces of cypress and pine. These he chopped into kindling and firewood and laid a fire at a safe distance from the barn. But he did not light it.

  Next, into a big iron kettle he poured whole flaxseed, adding crushed oats, corn kernels, bran, and a handful of salt. Lastly he topped the mixture with the sliced carrots or turnips he had brought from home. Since he used the whole flaxseed instead of the meal, it meant that the mash would have to bubble and brew for two or three hours to be ready.

  Often, as Jaydee sprinkled in the salt or sank his fingers deep into the mash to mix it thoroughly, he thought like a horse. “Tonight’ll be kind of cold, and I will come loping in for my supper. The mash will be warm and delicious, first as I slobber it up, then as it warms my throat and stummick.” In his thoughts he always said “stummick.” Only at school he said “stomach.” But there he was not a horse.

  At school he had a friend who, for a dime, would go out to Fair Grounds Park at four o’clock in the afternoon and light the well-laid f
ire to cook the mash. Meanwhile, Jaydee went to work at his second job as a Western Union messenger. He earned two cents on each telegram, and all the time he went criss-crossing over the city a feeling of hurry, even of desperation, raced through his being. If he pedaled hard and fast, if he ran up the steps with pencil and telegram outthrust, if he raced back for more messages, he would not only earn more, but he might make the time pass more quickly.

  Instead it always dragged out endlessly, until by five-thirty, when he turned in his Western Union cap and blouse, he was all thumbs. In his hurry to get out of his uniform, the string in the waist of the blouse often pulled out and he would have to bundle it up and take it home to Grandma Mooney to fix.

  But once he was headed back to the Fair Grounds in the cool twilit evenings, he gave a great deep sigh of joy. The good smell of cypress smoke and bubbling mash drifted toward him as he hurried to the track, whistling loudly, “Pony Boy, Pony Boy, won’t you be my Pony Boy?”

  The horses knew the tune and the sound of his footsteps. “Bring on the mash! Bring it on, boy!” they bugled through their noses as they galloped to the fence rail and stomped in impatience.

  And so for Jaydee the days passed in such busyness that the shocking news article about the claiming race at Juarez went unnoticed—even though he used the very same paper as a scoop in which to carry the sliced carrots to his horses.

  7. The Claiming Race

  THE NEWSPAPER article itself ran only two short paragraphs and covered only the afternoon of the race. But it might well have begun in the early morning of that special day.