Born to Trot Page 3

  Morning came, and with it a gray drizzle that would grease the track. As Gibson pulled on his clothes he knew the horses couldn’t be worked. He was glad. If he had to go to the clinic, he would miss nothing important. By noon the sun would be out and he would be driving, and this time he would be in the brush down the stretch. During breakfast and even during his father’s telephone call to the clinic, Gibson’s mind was on the race.

  Trudging up the forbidding stone steps of the clinic, Gibson was seized with a sudden desire to run away. He thought about the time when he was a small boy riding his Shetland and they had come to a field where there was a big white object. At first it looked like a stone. Then the white thing began rolling and turned out to be a sow, and the pony had wheeled and bolted for home.

  “What would you do,” Gibson asked his father, smiling yet half serious, “if I turned tail and ran away?”

  “Hang onto you, of course—the way you hung on when your pony saw the sow.”

  It was like that often. His father, it seemed, knew Gibson’s very thoughts. Sometimes it worried him a little.

  They walked into the white-walled waiting room and took the two end seats nearest the door. A woman, pencil and pad in hand, bustled up to them like a pacer in hobbles.

  “Which of you is the patient?” she said in a voice that matched the starch of her uniform.

  Mr. White said, “It’s my son.”

  “Name and address?”

  “Gibson White, at Ben White Stable, Lexington, Kentucky.”

  “Father’s full name?”

  “Benjamin Franklin White.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Trainer of horses.”

  With a twitch of her nose as if she smelled something unpleasant, the woman turned on her heel and went back to her telephone and typewriter.

  Now for Gibson came the uneasy time—the time of waiting, looking at old magazines, trying to read, but thinking instead. Thinking of the barns. There, the rain would not be dismal at all. It would thrum pleasantly on the stall roofs and drip in a beady curtain off the eaves, and the hay would smell sweet and the horses would be grinding it, glad of the day of peace.

  Time strung itself out, as one after one the patients disappeared and new ones came to take their places. A fly drummed against the windowpane, getting nowhere. A child cried somewhere down the hall. At last the starched voice called out, “Dr. Mills will see you now, Mr. White.”

  Dr. Mills’ office was as friendly as the reception room had been bleak. All over the wall were pictures of harness horses. And the man himself was friendly and big, overgrown like a Saint Bernard dog. His browned face looked to be on good terms with the wind and sun and rain. He picked up the card on his desk.

  “The name Ben White is not new to me,” he said, trying to remember. “Sit down, do. Oh, I have it now! Weren’t you in the Hambletonian last year?”

  “Yes, I drove one of Mr. Oliver’s horses.”

  “Wasn’t it a black by the name of Sonny Boy?”

  “Laddy, it was,” Mr. White smiled in answer. Then he gestured toward the Currier and Ives prints on the walls. He began naming the horses. “Dexter. Goldsmith Maid. Rysdyk’s Hambletonian. Great names, those! You own a harness horse?”

  “No, but I was born and raised in Orange County, New York, the cradle of the trotter. My hobby is harness racing. When I’m tired, nothing relaxes me like watching good trotters eat up the mile. Now, let’s see.” He looked at the card again. “Gibson White, patient? Say! you’re not the cowboy that leaped aboard the runaway yesterday?”

  Gibson laughed. Dr. Mills was a great guy. He knew horses!

  “By Jove,” the doctor chuckled, “I wanted to break through the crowd yesterday and meet this father-son team, and here they are! Now then, what brings you to me?”

  He went back to his desk and picked up a pen that was tied by a long string to the holder. “Know why I do this?” he asked with a twinkle. “As a kid I had to have my mittens on a string so I wouldn’t lose ’em. Now it’s my pen.”

  He dipped it in an old-fashioned ink bottle and held the point poised over the card.

  Mr. White’s smile was gone. “It’s Gib. He’s been having too many colds.”

  Dr. Mills made an entry on the card. Then he sized up Gibson from head to foot. Growthy as any colt, he mused to himself. Turning to Mr. White, he asked, “Have you any work over at the stable on a rainy morning?”

  “A trainer’s work is like a woman’s, Doctor. Never done.”

  “All right, then. Suppose you come back at noon. Meanwhile we’ll go over this cowboy from forelock to boots.”

  They did go over Gibson, thoroughly. He champed and chafed under the ordeal. Why didn’t they just give him some cough medicine the way veterinarians did for the horses? But no, he had to be shunted from one office to another, dressing and undressing, answering questions about himself, his mother, his father, grandparents on both sides.

  Bald men, graying men, young men; brown eyes, blue eyes going over him as if he were a yearling for sale.

  The only bright spot in the morning was the poem on one of the many walls he had to face. While a young doctor kept listening through his stethoscope, asking him to say “Ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine,” Gibson read the poem, sometimes missing a “ninety-nine.”

  If the poor victim needs must be percussed,

  Don’t make an anvil of his aching bust;

  Doctors exist within a hundred miles

  Who thump a thorax as they’d hammer piles;

  So of your questions: don’t in mercy try

  To pump your patient absolutely dry;

  He’s not a mollusk squirming on a dish,

  You’re not Agassiz, and he’s not a fish.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  When the doctor caught him reading the poem, the man and the boy exchanged a wink as if they had an enormous joke together.

  The hands on the clock of the starched one’s desk pointed to twelve when Mr. White, hat dripping rain, returned. He was ushered at once into Dr. Mills’ office.

  Gibson was already there, leaning forward in his chair, talking eagerly. “Yes, sir! We’ve got a great basketball team at U High,” he was saying as Dr. Mills pulled a chair around for Mr. White.

  “Play center, Gib?”

  “Why, yes, I do!”

  “And with those long legs I wager you’re a track star, too.”

  “No,” Gibson said. “Carroll Fisher has got me beat.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He goes to U High with me.”

  “What’s his record?”

  “Eleven seconds in the hundred yard dash and twenty-three in the two hundred and twenty.”

  “What’s yours?

  “Mine’s eleven-three in the hundred, and twenty-four two in the two-twenty.”

  “I see. This Fisher chap is your competition.”

  Gibson leaned farther forward until he was on the very edge of his chair. “But I’m drilling hard,” he said, “and I expect to improve. I like to box, too,” he added.

  Dr. Mills’ sandy eyebrows went up. “Say, I used to be a pretty fair boxer in my day.”

  “When I was young,” Gibson admitted, “I wanted to be the heavyweight champion of the world, but I’ve had to give up the idea.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m too skinny.”

  “What about football, Gib?”

  “Last season our school tied for first place.”

  “On the team?”

  Gibson squirmed. “Just on the second team, sir.”

  “You play end?”

  Gibson nodded, wide-eyed. “How did you know, sir?”

  “Now what about your father’s horses during the school year? When do you have time for them?”

  “I had only a pony, but I used to jog him each morning before going to school.”

  “And after school there was either track or basketball or football?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And of all these sports which do you prefer?”

  Gibson did not hesitate. “Training and driving horses, sir. But I don’t want to jog them forever. I want to compete in a real race. This afternoon’s my first real one. We’ve got to be going, don’t we, Dad?”

  “I guess there’s no hurry, Son. It’s raining in earnest now.”

  Dr. Mills took off his glasses, folded the bows, and slid them into their case. He picked up his pen, then put it down again.

  “Gibson!” he said, looking very hard at him, “what would you say if I owned a promising yearling and I asked you and your dad to develop him into a runner, a trotter, and a hunter?”

  “You wouldn’t ask it, sir.”

  “But suppose I did.”

  Gibson winked at his father. “I guess we’d just say we were too busy to take on any more horses, wouldn’t we, Dad?”

  “I guess we would, Son.”

  Dr. Mills and Mr. White exchanged glances.

  “Why would you turn me down, Gib?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair to the horse.”

  The questions rained on. “Gib, what do you do when a horse has been over-trained?”

  “We let up on him. Rest him a while.”

  “And if a horse has a cough and is off his feed?”

  Gibson sat back in his chair. Fear spread suddenly over his face. “You’re baiting a trap for me,” he said with a hurt look, “and I’m . . .” his voice broke off, “I’m walking right into it.”

  There was a silence in the room. Gibson felt it around and about him, heavy and dense like fog. He was trying to grope his way out, trying to find a shaft of light. But there was none.

  A voice penetrated the fog. It was Dr. Mills’, and there was a tone of guilt in it as if he hated the words he had to say. “Gib, I once saw a colt worked until it began to weave with exhaustion. The trainer hadn’t meant to overwork it. He thought the colt was ready. That sometimes happens, doesn’t it, Ben?”

  “Sometimes.” Mr. White’s face was grim and set. “Sometimes it does.”

  “What does the trainer do about it?”

  Mr. White took a deep breath. He tried to make his voice sound matter of fact. “If it was a colt in my string, I’d see that he was sponged off and blanketed and bedded down in a good deep bed and then I’d let him sleep.”

  “Gib, between you and your dad you’ve written a good prescription. You’ve had a long workout. Now you’ve got to be unwound. Rest and the feed bag at regular intervals will do it.” He pushed his chair back. “You know better than anyone else that it takes more than pluck to win a race. It takes endurance. We’ll see that you get it.” The doctor stood up now.

  “And Gib,” he added, “I know a hospital nestled in the Cumberland Mountains that will do for you what a green pasture will do for a colt.”

  Gibson choked out his next words. “How long? How long will I have to let up?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe only six months. Maybe longer.”

  There was a noise in Gibson’s brain like the shattering of glass. It was louder than Dr. Mills’ voice, louder than his father’s. He couldn’t hear what the voices were saying for the crashing sound. What did it matter what they said? Six months! It might as well be six years. Or sixty! The Grand Circuit was on! He was ready to drive! Six months! And then suddenly the noise in his brain stopped and there was that awful stillness that follows a crash.

  He wanted to hide his head in his arm and sob like a kid. He might have done it, too, if only Dr. Mills had been there. But with his father he couldn’t. “Thoroughbreds don’t cry,” his father would say as he used to say when a colt pulled up lame after a race. “They fight to get the lead again. Then they keep it.”

  Gibson stood up. He could feel his father’s eyes on him. He took a hitch in his belt, trying to look as if nothing was happening to him.

  Dr. Mills put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Like to read, Gib?”

  “Yes, sir,” the voice was numbed and small.

  “I’d prescribe that. And you can keep up with your school work. You’ll probably get top grades now with all the time you’ll have.”

  Six

  WITH all the time you’ll have!” Time! From that hour in Dr. Mills’ office the days and nights stretched themselves out beyond all believing. The sun dawdled and lazied in the sky like some giddyhead actor not knowing when to get off stage. When finally it slid behind the curtain of night, the green-cheese moon came out. The moon was even more of a dawdler than the sun! There were nights when Gibson longed to bend a giant hook and snag it out of the sky to hurry the time along.

  Even his own clock had gone in league with the sun and the moon. At home in his room it had always been in a tearing hurry, hands flying. But here on the hospital dresser it piddled and pottered in maddening slowness—a tick, and a tock, and a tick, and a tock.

  Gibson occupied a neat white bed in a sunny room, but waking or sleeping he was back at the stable, his brown dog at his heels. He had only to close his eyes to make the whole scene come alive—horses flying around the track, the high shrill whinnies of the ones left behind. He felt left behind, too. He wanted to let out a great bellowing cry that would tear the stillness of the hospital into little shreds.

  Everywhere, in everything, were reminders of the place where he belonged. By day hummingbirds visited a row of hollyhocks outside his window, and in the blur of their wings he saw the whirring of sulky wheels. At night, with head pillowed in his arms, he couldn’t escape an incessant muffled beating—tap-tap, tap-tap, tap tap, tap-tap. Hoofbeats? Or was it the mocking of his heart?

  Dr. Mills paid fleeting visits, but they were disappointing. The talk balked and got nowhere. The doctor seemed more of a stranger than on that first day at the clinic. Not because he wasn’t jovial and friendly; it was just that his laughter had a hollow sound.

  Letters came but they, too, were sterilized of excitement. Never a word about things that mattered. About breeding and foaling and training and racing. No mention of the Big Apple. Or the Hambletonian. Or the Kentucky Futurity. No mention of horses or drivers. Not even of Bear. It was as if the whole world of stable and track had dropped into a sinkhole.

  We’re having Indian summer, the letters said. Miss Briggs is sending your history book with each day’s assignment marked. Our pear trees are loaded with fruit. We are shipping you a box of the Bartletts.

  The letters piled up. We had our first frost. Grandmother is knitting you some nice warm bedsocks. Your English teacher is mailing you Shakespeare’s play, “As You Like It.”

  Bedsocks and Shakespeare! Soon he’d be letting his hair grow. Soon he’d turn into a sniveling sissy. He’d probably be knitting, himself!

  And still more letters with all the marrow sucked out of them. Snow today. We’re proud of the marks you are getting this year. Even your father is noticing.

  Spring. The hills are wild with redbud and dogwood. Your marks showed straight A’s. We’re proud of you, Son.

  Who wanted to read letters about marks and the weather! Who wouldn’t get good marks when there was no football practice, no baseball, no basketball, no track, no horses to jog? Nothing to do but rest, rest, rest!

  He would have thrown the whole batch of letters into the waste basket, except . . . Except for what? He didn’t quite know. Maybe it was the handwriting. Maybe there was something in the writing that showed a holding back. Things unsaid. Maybe the hand wanted to write, Out at Walnut Hall Alma Lee dropped a foal. A little stud colt. Small, but all horse. It was about time, he knew. We have twenty-five colts in training now. We’re tuning-up three for the Hambletonian. We could have taken on more colts, but you see, Gib, Dad is shorthanded. He needs you. Hear that, Gib? He needs you.

  But the letters were not like that. Only weather reports! That’s all they were. Nothing but the weather. And in the boxes that came, only things to eat. Cookies. Apples. Pears. Food and more food, and no hunger to make you want it.

  Then one morning Dr. Mills stood in the doorway and Gibson saw in a flash that some of the big-dog happiness had come back. “Gib!” he said, his eyes smiling, “your dad is on his way to Longwood and he’s stopping off here. I’m going to meet him at the train. Now!”

  The car wound up and up the mountains from the little station in the valley. The two men in the front seat hemmed and hawed and then drew into themselves. Dr. Mills sat huddled over the wheel, looking dead ahead. He had rehearsed everything he wanted to say, but now he had lost the key word.

  “You’re not satisfied with the boy’s progress, are you?” Mr. White tried to make a beginning.

  “That’s it, Ben,” Dr. Mills answered, “and I think I’m at fault.”

  Mr. White had nothing to say. He fingered his tie, loosened his collar as if his worry were choking him.

  “The boy is like you, Ben. Like you and Tom Berry and all the others. There are only five letters in his alphabet. And they spell h - o - r - s - e.”

  The car labored up the mountain in low gear. “Hasn’t he been working with you, Doc? Trying to get well?”

  The doctor spoke as though to himself. “He’s been trying so hard I can’t look at him without . . .” He let the sentence peter out and started again. “A doctor begins to doubt himself when he has a patient like Gib.”

  “Is he eating. Doc?”

  “He’s trying to. But he chokes things down as if a lump in his throat left little room for food.”

  “I had a notion things weren’t right.” Mr. White ran the car window down to get all the air he could. “It’s his letters. They don’t sound like him. Never asks about how many horses are in training or who won the Kentucky Futurity or did Alma Lee have her colt. All he talks about is the weather. Who wants to know about the weather? With me, it’s the weather in his mind that counts.”

  Dr. Mills nervously tapped the flat of his hand on the steering wheel. “I was wrong in telling you not to write about your training problems. Gib’s there with you, anyway. He might as well know how it really is. The good and the bad.