Black Gold Read online

  9. Tribal Rights

  DOWN IN New Orleans Jaydee had only one job now, and that was with the horses.

  “Why couldn’t Jaydee learn to be a postman, or a trolley car conductor, or maybe a bank messenger?” his mother asked of Grandma Mooney. “Each night, then, he could come home to some nice lamb stew with onions, and boiled potatoes, and hot soda bread with wild strawberry jam.”

  “The good Lord knows best,” Grandma Mooney chuckled as she sat perched like a bird on the edge of her rocker. “Yes, the good Lord knows, and all the leprechauns in Ireland. How else can the Irishman in little Jaydee live on? How else, indeed!” She picked up her sewing and tried threading her needle. “Mooneys and horses,” she said, “fit together snug as teaspoons.”

  “I just can’t figure you, Granny. Putting your ‘yes’ to Jaydee’s wanting to be a jockey.”

  The answering words spilled out in a rush, like a confession she had been wanting to make for a long time. “More’n likely ’tis my fault, daughter. ’Member the times him and me would hook up Nelly to the old buggy and race over to the Stumptown Track? Well, us Mooneys always was horse people, and we got it to be thankful for.” She bit off a piece of thread as if she were biting off an idea. “A man or boy who likes to muck out and do for a horse has got a streak o’ goodness in him so wide there ain’t no room for any little mean nigglin’ traits. Mooney men always give their horses a good ride. If they win, ’tis a fair win, and if they get beat, you can bet yer bottom dollar ’tis on the level.”

  Jaydee’s mother somehow found comfort in this, and the boy was let alone.

  Seven days a week he worked as a handy-boy at the Fair Grounds Park. He walked the horses cool. He rubbed their legs. He washed out their bandages. He cleaned their saddles and bridles. He watered them, fed them, bedded them down, and talked to them.

  And soon he was up on their backs, riding them—first, under the sheds to get them shed broke, and at long last, out on the track, jogging them, galloping them, teaching them how to break from the barrier.

  He lived in a world of good sounds and smells and sights. The creak of leather, the pound of hoofs, the hay-sweet smell, the golden straw smell, and the acrid barn smell; and early morning mist and the morning star and the moon still shining and boys whistling and birds singing and horses bugling.

  Here with the horses was time to dream and time to prepare for his dream. In practice races he learned that the good horses timed themselves—knew when to move and how to move. And day by day Jaydee was developing a stop watch in his head. In a workout if the trainer said, “Jaydee, start slow. I don’t want you to work this horse too fast,” the boy obeyed exactly. Then as the trainer signaled him to pull up, Jaydee would say, “I believe we went five-eighths in two:two and two-fifths, sir.”

  “How do you do it, boy?” the trainer would ask, looking again at his watch.

  “Shucks!” Jaydee would blush. “Lots of time I miss it by a second or two.”

  As an apprentice Jaydee was earning six dollars a week, and by careful management he gave half to his mother. By walking to the track, he saved the streetcar nickel. He took a shortcut through the cemeteries instead of around them, and through the park where he passed close to the dueling oaks, and then he loped down Mystery Street, making better time than the trolley car that went only by fits and starts.

  And he walked home at night. Right there he saved another nickel a day. That meant seventy cents a week. And, too, he learned how to eat savingly. He even learned to like the Poor Boy’s sandwich—the small loaf of crusty bread cut length-wise, with the stringy ham inside it. On some days, for variety, he bought a whole sackful of oysters for forty cents, prying them open with his pocketknife and letting the cool globs slither down his throat without chewing them. They were food and drink both!

  So it was that he needed only three dollars a week for himself. The rest went to his mother.

  “You mark my words, daughter,” Grandma Mooney would say as Jaydee handed over the money. “He’ll do all right, he will! And because of him some horse will become great. Mark my words!”

  • • •

  Seven hundred miles away, out in Oklahoma, Al Hoots and Hanley Webb were working, too—working hard to get enough money together for U-see-it’s trip to Kentucky. They were cattlemen now, fattening big white-faced Herefords for market. But at night they pulled off their boots, leaned back in their chairs, and enjoyed horse talk. They got to know the breeding of Black Toney so well they could recite together the names of his ancestors from Peter Pan, his sire, as far back as his twelfth grandsire, the English Eclipse. Always at this point their voices blended together, laughing, almost singing the phrase for which he was noted: Eclipse first; the rest nowhere. Then on the tips of his fingers Al Hoots would list the qualities he looked for. “Good bone, gameness, stride, and especially stamina—that’s what Black Toney will give U-see-it’s colt, as soon as we can afford to send her away.”

  Then all at once the money came in with a rush and a gush. Neither Al Hoots nor Hanley Webb had anything whatever to do with it.

  Oil was discovered on the reservation of the Osages. Almost overnight the landscape changed. What was once field and meadow, with grasses blowing and cattle grazing, became a forest of wooden derricks. The whole countryside teemed with activity. Giant trucks roared across the land, killing the grasses, churning deep ruts of mud. They brought in boilers and cable tools and generators and belts and pulleys. They brought drums and tanks. They brought engineers and laborers.

  Everywhere men were at work, drilling wells, erecting more and more derricks, unloading and laying pipe.

  And the oil came in a flood. It spouted and sprayed and ran down gulleys. Drums and barrels were not enough to catch it all. Reservoirs had to be dug and towers and tanks built to hold it.

  As dark came on, the scene had an eerie quality. Gas flames blazed up near the wells, lighting the weird landscape of skeleton towers. All night long the roaring, drilling, pounding, and clanking went on.

  Al Hoots and Hanley Webb laughed for joy. Oil was money! Oil was gold!

  But Rosa did not laugh. This thing that was happening was too big for laughter. It would affect the lives of many. It would affect her and all her people.

  One morning at breakfast time she stroked the smooth plank table with the flat of her hand. At first the two men paid no attention. But slowly they realized that Rosa had something to say. They waited quietly and respectfully and at last she spoke.

  “My father, Ogeese Captaine, was tribal counselor and interpreter for the white chiefs. He brought this table on that long trail of tears from his old home in Kansas to the new Indian reservation here. It was on this table—” Rosa stood up now as if she were the father, the counselor, the interpreter, bringing together the white chiefs and the red. “On this table,” she pronounced, “a treaty was signed under the elms, a treaty that said each headright Indian of the Osage Tribe shall share equally with his brothers all mineral rights to the land of the Osage Nation.

  “Money,” she concluded, her eyes beginning to shine, “is to make happiness. A good colt is happiness. Now, now we send U-see-it to the court of Black Toney.”

  10. To the Court of Black Toney

  AL HOOTS did not live to carry out his dream. “Rosa,” he said one chill November night as he lay in bed, coughing, body shaking under a mound of blankets, “if I die, you won’t ever sell U-see-it’s colt, will you?”

  Rosa was standing at the dresser, pouring a cup of steaming herb tea. She felt a sudden emptiness and a fear she would not betray. She came over to her husband, tucked the blankets more snugly about his shoulders, then held the tea to his lips.

  “You have my promise,” she said in a voice so strong and steadfast that she barely recognized it as her own. “I will never sell her colt.”

  In the months until his death, the dream for U-see-it’s colt stayed on in Al Hoots’ mind. Then Rosa and Hanley Webb took on the duty of the dream.


  When the time was right for U-see-it, Rosa wrote a letter in her best missionary-taught handwriting. And the letter read:

  Feb. 10, 1920

  To Colonel E. R. Bradley

  Idle Hour Farm

  Lexington, Kentucky

  Dear Sir:

  You remember when you and your horses were here in our West, my husband talked with you about our mare, U-see-it.

  So you know it was his wish to have her mated with your Black Toney. We can ship her to you next week. Mister Hoots would want her boarded in the Blue Grass country until she has her foal.

  The oil flows on the land of the Osage Nation. We can pay.

  Yours truly,

  Rosa Hoots

  On that blustering February day when U-see-it began her journey to Kentucky, Hanley Webb went right along into the boxcar with her. He was like a waddling duck beside the little mare—clumsy but full of tenderness.

  As for U-see-it, she was in ecstasy. She loved to get on a train. It was her second home, and always she made a ceremony of getting reacquainted. First she tested her bedding. If it was made of wood shavings, she rolled and rolled, enjoying the gentle roughness and the clean, pungent aroma. Next she found the water barrel and plunged her muzzle deep, taking a long draught. Then she was ready to try the hay, but not until she had nuzzled the old man with her wet lips did she begin to eat.

  “Sufferin’ snakes!” he exclaimed. “Why do you always got to be so snuggly when you been drinking?” He hunched his shoulders, trying to keep the cold water from trickling down his neck. “You’re a good shipper, though,” he chuckled, “even if’n you do slobber me some.”

  During the long trip to Kentucky he scarcely left her side. He sat on one end of the bale of hay, sat watching and thinking.

  U-see-it gazed down at him in contentment. All the while she munched the hay, she flicked her ears, enjoying each different sound—the roar of the train as it sped over trestles, the sudden clackety-clack of rail crossings, the sharp toot-toot of the whistle as her train waited for the green lights.

  At division points she even had a whinny of welcome for the inspectors when they poked their flashlight in the door. “I declare!” Old Man Webb would tell each. “She seems to know this trip is different. She ain’t slept hardly a wink this time.” Then pridefully he added, “Things ’bout to happen to us is awful important. She’s to be bred, y’ know.”

  At the journey’s end, in the grayness of dawn, the unloading chute looked strange to U-see-it. Bigger than those she had used at the race courses. Yet not so busy. Here were two handsome Negro grooms in starched white-and-green jackets to help unload her.

  This nettled Hanley Webb. “Mebbe you think I’m too old to handle her alone, but if’n you do, you got another think coming!”

  “Oh, no, sir!” one of the grooms said quickly. “We just come to lead you the way to Idle Hour Farm. Colonel Bradley, he’s expecting you, sir.”

  The other groom said, “Land sakes, she’s a lively little bundle, ain’t she? I likes ’em with spirit and spunk.” He unfolded a green-and-white blanket, threw it over U-see-it’s back, tied the string at her chest and under her belly, and slipped her tail through the tail loop.

  Then with the two grooms at her head and Old Man Webb bringing up the rear, the little procession footed its way down the old Frankfort Pike. Morning had come and the grooms were singing lustily to the hilltops now touched with sunlight:

  “Oh, it fell upon old master’s ear

  Like a strain of music sweet.

  Weren’t no music he could hear

  Like the tread of race hoss feet . . .

  Like the tread of race hoss feet . . .

  Like the tread of race hoss feet.”

  Colonel Bradley himself was on hand to greet U-see-it and Hanley Webb. He was a slender man, straight-backed as a poker. What over-awed Webb was that he wore a starched batwing collar with black tie, and a black bowler hat. “I admired Al Hoots,” he said quietly, “and I’m glad to have U-see-it here.”

  Hanley Webb could only nod. He felt out of place in the manicured beauty of the Lexington countryside and in the presence of the dignified Colonel.

  But if Hanley Webb felt strange, U-see-it did not. Right away she liked everything about Idle Hour Farm—the roominess of her box stall with its bedding banked up around the sides so she could roll without bumping her shoulders, and the juiciness of the luxuriant blue grass, and the fresh, cool water of Elkhorn Creek, rich in the lime and phosphorous that her colt would need.

  “She fits here like she belonged,” Hanley Webb had to admit. He even made bold to say so one day to Colonel Bradley. The two men were standing at the time in front of Black Toney’s paddock, admiring the sleek stallion as a groom exercised him on a lunge line. He seemed on springs, his action so bold that when he trotted his hoofs stayed in the air a split second longer than expected.

  “And why shouldn’t U-see-it belong here?” Colonel Bradley asked, his eyes following the grand movements of the proud stallion. “She has quality, too. Same as Black Toney.”

  “That’s right, sir! She was out of Effie M by Bonnie Joe,” Hanley Webb said loyally.

  “And her grandsire was none other than the great Bowling Green,” Colonel Bradley added. “It’s about as good a breeding as we ever had.”

  “I s’pose, sir, you heard . . .”

  “Heard what, Webb?”

  “Why . . . sir . . . Black Toney and she were mated yesterday, sir.”

  The Colonel pursed his thin lips, calculating the dates. “Hmmmm. That means she should have her foal close to the first of February if all goes well, eh, Webb?”

  “Yessir! The closer the better.”

  11. Boarded Out

  MARCH. EARLY March to June. The days melting one into another. Cold, rainy, raw days. Warm, gentle days. Everywhere the swells of the earth changing color, from the steel-blue of the bluegrass blossoms to the pale green of the grass itself. Grazing was at its best.

  In June U-see-it was boarded out at the neighboring Horace Davis Farm. Here from the pasture that she shared with other broodmares she could see over the white fence to Idle Hour Farm, could watch Black Toney trotting around and around in his paddock.

  At first she romped and frolicked like any colt. There was a kind of glory in this new freedom. No work at all. Just eat. Sleep. Roll in the sun. Kick up at the moon and stars. Challenge the other broodmares to a race.

  Still light-waisted and trim, she could far outrun the heavier broodmares. Their slowness puzzled her. In every contest she was always ahead, not by a length or two but by a dozen or more. Where was the fun in that? Sometimes she would wheel about and come racing back to the slow one, her whole being asking: “Why are you so slow? Can’t you run at all?”

  Summer. Time of bumblebees and clover. Time of katydids chirping. Time of bluebottle flies. And now U-see-it’s body changing, beginning to round out. Her interests changing, too. Racing was a pastime belonging to her younger days. Now she was satisfied just to sidle up to one of the big broodmares, and if the two stood head to tail, just so, they could switch flies for each other. And so the days flowed quietly by, and the foal grew big within her.

  Hanley Webb had long since gone back to Oklahoma to help Rosa with the cattle. But the people at Horace Davis’s were good to U-see-it. Horsemen came, and some wanted to buy her, but of course she was not for sale. As they studied her, they rummaged in their memories and came up with flashes out of the past.

  “I saw that mare win at Juarez.”

  “I saw her when she won at Tia Juana.”

  “I saw her romp home at the Old Woodbine in Toronto.”

  “The only horse she couldn’t beat was that big-going mare named Pan Zaretta, Queen of Texas.”

  The visitors came and went. And the seasons. Autumn in the bluegrass country. Days growing shorter. Wind blowing. Hoofs making crackly noises on dry leaves. Gray squirrels chattering on fence rails.

  At the very time that U-see
-it moved to the broodmare farm, Jaydee left New Orleans for a race meeting quite near her at Churchill Downs. Already the beginning of his dream was being fulfilled. He was a jockey now, a free-lance rider, wearing different-colored silks every day—the pink and black of Greentree Stables, the brown with gold dots of Mr. Littleleir, the half-and-half jacket of Doc Holmes, half blue, half white, with the bright red cap.

  He was in his teens now—only a few inches taller, but much harder, stronger, wiser. His teachers had been many. There was H. T. Griffin, a good man with young horses.

  “Patience is the trick, Jaydee,” Griffin would explain. “Time is like a rubber band. It stretches some, but if you pull it to the breaking point, it snaps back and hits you in the face. Never rush a colt. Long, slow workouts are the ticket. Colts are just like youngsters, Jaydee. Rush ’em and they get so excited they’re too tired to rest at night; they want to bite and kick and play until they’re clean tuckered out. You try it slow and patient, my boy, and you’ll get results.”

  Jaydee rode four races at Churchill Downs before he had a winner. And on the day he won he felt so good inside that he gave himself a holiday. Almost before he knew it, he was on a train for Lexington and there, for the first time in his life, he hired a taxicab! He spent half of his earnings visiting first one breeding farm and then another and wound up at Idle Hour Farm because he had always admired Black Toney. Any horse who could set a track record that still stood six years later was a horse to meet.

  Colonel Bradley was showing other visitors around. He beckoned Jaydee into the group, saying, “As this jockey knows, we breed the best to the best and hope for the best.” All the while he talked it was plain to see that he was trying hard to place Jaydee.

  “Oh! Now I know,” he said, thinking aloud. “You’re the boy who rode Speedster this afternoon. It was a good win, Mooney. The owner was sitting in my box with me, and he tells me that when you school a horse you bring him back in better condition than when he went out.”