‘Easy, boy,’ David Strong said as the horse flinched. His stable manager, Cyrus Kendall, stuck out his lips ruefully. Clarion was one of their finest stallions. A whole strain of hunters sold to buyers all over Virginia and even as far south as Charleston, testified to his value. But right now Clarion was a very sick animal. He stood in a crouching position, his fore-feet extended in front of his body, the hind legs brought forward beneath his belly to sustain the weight of which the fore-legs had been relieved. When they tried to move him, his action was jerky and obviously painful. His feet were hot.
‘What do you think, Mr. David?’ Kendall asked, his face betraying his concern. The condition of the horses on Washington Farm was Kendall’s responsibility and he took it very seriously. If Clarion’s sickness had come about because of his oversight, he would consider it his employer’s right to dismiss him on the spot. The horse was worth considerably more money than Cyrus Kendall would earn in a decade and he was not a poorly paid man.
David Strong shook his head and continued his check-up of the big horse. Clarion’s expression was anxious, his breathing hurried. He was restless and nervy. The membranes of his nose and eyes were deep red and his mouth was clammy and hot.
‘Temperature?’ he asked Kendall.
‘Aye,’ Kendall said. ‘He’s constipated, too.’
David took a rubber hammer with a thin wooden handle from the vet bag and tapped Clarion’s hoof with it, very gently. The horse winced visibly.
‘Laminitis,’ David said.
‘That’s my thinkin’, Mr. David,’ Kendall said. ‘It come on real fast.’
‘It can do that,’ David said.
Laminitis was an inflammation of the layer of skin between the horse’s hoof and foot bone. It was a disease fairly prevalent among heavier breeds of horse, particularly stallions during the early part of the season when their services were first called for.
‘Any idea what might have brought it on?’
‘He’s got wide feet, Mr. David,’ Kendall said. ‘You’ve not fed him new wheat?’
‘Heavens, no, sir!’ Kendall said. ‘Nor barley nor beans, not at this time of the season.’
‘He hasn’t been ridden hard?’
‘No harder than any of the others.’
‘Just poor luck, then?’
‘That’s my thinkin’, Mr. David,’ Kendall nodded, it can come on for no more reason than that a horse has had a dose of physic.’
‘Well, that’s what he’s going to get now, Cyrus,’ David Strong said. ‘And a full dose! I want his bowels unloaded. We might even bleed him a little. Anyway, get a bed made up for him, peat moss with straw on top. Plenty of straw, so he won’t hurt his head if he struggles. Get the smith over here to take his shoes off, right away. And make up some hot bran poultices for those feet as soon as he’s done it.’
‘Aye, Mr. David,’ Kendall said.
‘I want someone in here with him around the clock, Cyrus. Those poultices must be changed the moment they start to cool.’ David rubbed his chin. ‘I wonder whether we ought to give him some morphia?’
‘Let’s try the natural remedies first, sir,’ Kendall suggested. ‘Seems to me like the disturbance isn’t too great.’
David nodded, He was a great believer in natural remedies. His father had taught him, and he himself had found again and again, that the same disease can result from a variety of causes, and that there was no such thing as a cure-all panacea such as travelling quacks often offered. David had come to believe in the medical law of vis medicatrix naturae, the body’s built-in ability to resist and recover from disease. He realized, of course, that in horses as in men some diseases were incurable.
‘All right,’ he said to Kendall. ‘Let’s get at it.’
‘Very good, Mr. David,’ Kendall said with considerable relief. Whatever had made the horse sick, it was clear that he was not being held responsible for it.
‘I’ll make the physic ball,’ David said. ‘What would you say – four drams?’
‘Aye,’ Kendall nodded. ‘That should do it.’
David went out of the box and across to the pharmacy. Into a water bath he poured eight ounces of Barbados aloes, two of powdered ginger and an ounce of rape oil. He worked steadily and carefully, thinking ahead to the other things which would need to be done. With luck, the deformation would be minimal: they had been fortunate and caught the disease early. Many a fine horse had died of laminitis, and nobody yet knew for sure what caused it.
That and a lot of other things, he thought. He had once asked his father a question that Big Jed could not answer. His father had ruffled his hair and smiled at his surprise.
‘You’ll find there’s considerable more questions than answers in this life, David, lad,’ he said. ‘The trick is not to let it annoy you any more than it has to.’
David had learned the truth of what his father said that day many times over, even drawn sustenance from it in some of the darkest hours of his life. When Joanna died he had wanted to strike God in the face. I love her so much, he wanted to scream, why do You have to do this to her? Why torture her like a cruel child tearing the wings off a butterfly? Why, when the world is full of so many evil things, do You destroy someone so good? But he knew that there were no answers to these questions.
Questions.
Why did a man have two sons so alike, yet so different? Jedediah, the dark, sturdy one with the typical physique of the Strongs. Open, intelligent, quick-witted, good at everything he turned his hand to, everything that Andrew was not. Andrew was mild where Jed was decisive, gentle when Jed was wild. Andrew was ever the first to duck praise, even when he had earned it, to assure others that they need take no special trouble over him. Puppy-shy, diffident, yet assured in a way totally different from his older brother. Do they perfectly represent the dichotomy inside me? David wondered.
David had been the first member of the Strong family to attend West Point. He neither liked nor disliked it. The martial spirit did not kindle in him, the call to arms did not sound. Unlike fellow cadets who found their plebe year torture, David found it merely wearying. He was not a big boy, and excelled only at riding, in which he did as well as the very best. As a yearling he was tenth in a class of forty-seven. He found the courses dreary: French taught by rote, the better to understand treatises written in that language about the Napoleonic wars. He was not friendless, but he was not a ‘ Joiner’, either. He took no part in the student protests of 1826, although he believed that resentment of Lieutenant-Colonel Thayer’s rigid disciplinarianism was justified. He graduated from the Academy in 1827 and resigned his commission almost immediately. He knew exactly, what he wanted to do with his life, and the army had no place in his plans.
He wanted to breed horses. He wanted to make the Washington Farm line as famous again as it had been in Grandpa Davy Strong’s day. It meant starting almost from scratch, but he did not mind that. It meant years of back breaking work, trial and error, much failure for little success, and no guarantee that any of it would bear the fruit for which he hoped. He did not mind that, either.
The first Washington Farm line had been developed from horses imported by British officers during the Revolution and abandoned when their masters returned to England. Grandpa Davy had taken the best of them that he could find and mated them with Spanish bloodstock, with Morgans, even with Cleveland Bays, trying for the strength and stature which he hoped to achieve. He had many, many failures. He had no scientific knowledge and in those days, the veterinarians he sent for often knew less about the animals they were treating than he did. But gradually, over the years, the line emerged. The Washington Farm stud became well known, celebrated, and finally, renowned. Its thoroughbreds were sought after by soldiers, huntsmen and breeders alike.
It took a long, long time. Horses were prey to as many, if not more ailments than humans. Wind galls, sinew sprains, canker, thrush, corn, ulcers, fistula, glanders. Then there was tetanus, tuberculosis, strangles – the list was endless. Grandpa Davy fought every one of them successfully except one: hoof and mouth disease. Nobody Could fight that and win. And in that terrible spring of 1825, he lost every animal he owned. Four hundred and twenty-eight fine horses, every one carefully nurtured, lovingly reared.
Grim-faced and empty-eyed Grandpa Davy did what had to be done. The horses were taken out of their stalls in batches of a dozen. One by one, Grandpa Davy shot them, reloading carefully after every second horse fell thrashing at his feet. A vast pit was dug out in the meadow and one by one the carcasses were piled into it. The sleek bodies flattened the fresh spring grass and churned the field into a morass of mud. The bodies were covered with quicklime and earth by men who had come from all over the county to help.
Grandpa Davy, who had come all the way from England as a lad in the time of America’s rebellion against the British Crown, died the following January, as if he felt there was nothing worth staying alive for. They buried him on the hill alongside his beloved Martha and his friend Andy Brennan. The fine horses for which Washington Farm had been famous were no more than names in yellowed breeding records until Young David, as they called him then, made it his life’s work to re-establish the bloodline.
His plan was to breed two kinds of horses. One would be a line of fine bloodstock animals which could be shown or put to stud, a line from which champion racehorses and trotters would hopefully emerge. The other would be a sturdy family of hunters, the kind of horses for which Washington Farm had once been famous. There was a timeworn verse to describe the ideal towards which Young David was striving:
A head like a snake and a skin like a mouse,
An eye like a woman’s, bright, gentle, and brown.
With loins and a back that could carry a house,
And quarters to lift him right over the town.
Now the stud was famous once more, its hunters as eagerly sought-after as they had been in Grandpa Davy’s day. There was a contract to supply horses annually to the United States Army and plenty of men willing to wait as long as necessary for a fine personal mount.
David Strong, no longer called ‘Young David’, loved every one of the horses that he bred at Washington Farm. He loved them most of all when they were colts, unspoiled, full of hope and life. Like your own children: you didn’t want to see them hurt, wounded, beaten by life. He left the task of breaking his horses to others. It was sentimentality, he knew. He didn’t mind being sentimental once in a while. Do a lot of people good if they tried it, he used to say. The only horses David had ever broken to saddle and bit were his own personal mounts.
He looked out across the rolling land. It was not going to be a hard winter, by the look of it. Just the same, he wished spring were here. There would be visitors again, buyers from the army, dealers. Maybe Jed would come home on furlough from Texas; he must be due some leave. He looked up towards the house, remembering his father sitting on the porch. “Made my peace with God and the Devil,” Big Jed used to say. “Nothing left to do now but wait for whichever one of them has a lien on me to give me the word my time is up”. David smiled. It seemed a long time since they had buried the old man up on the hill. A year, he thought, only a year. A year of upheaval, of dissension, of anger. Last month, Abraham Lincoln had become President, but his election seemed to David only to have accentuated the enmity between North and South. Folks were saying that any moment now, South Carolina would secede from the Union and that the other slave states would follow her. That would make a fine Christmas, David thought.
Would there be war? he wondered. And if there is, what will happen to all this? There will be no one here to carry on after I am gone, and I would like to leave it in good hands. Jed? Andrew?
Jed was a career soldier now, doing what he had always wanted to do. He had heard the call to arms and answered it gladly. David was proud of him, but it still nagged away at his peace of mind that all this talk of war was leading to the real thing. Secession would mean war and if there was civil war then Jed would fight. But on which side? Would he stay loyal to the army in which he had already spent six years, or fight for the South, his homeland, where, all his other loyalties lay? And what would Andrew do? A partner now in the Washington firm of civil engineers he’d joined when he quit the army and got engaged to his partner Jacob Chalfont’s daughter, Andrew was prospering and successful. David still harbored the long-held hope that one day, Andrew would ‘come home’ and take over the running of Washington Farm. It was a hope that seemed to recede further year by year.
But someone had to continue the work, David pondered. Washington Farm is famous again and someone has to take over. I’m past fifty. Nearer to Death now than life. I’ll be sixty before I have grandchildren, and I’ll never see them grown to adulthood. He looked up at the knoll beyond the house, to where the cemetery lay. I’ll be up there with Jo, he thought, not caring any more. It was difficult to imagine this big old house he knew so well and loved so much being lived in by strangers, but that was what would be. There would be people here he would never know in some future time he could not envisage. Who will come after us? he wondered. What strangers? What will they know of me except my name, the fact that I lived and then I died, stories handed down from generation to generation, a face in an ambrotype.
‘Oh, come one, Gloomy Gus!’ he chided himself, using a name Joanna had teased him with when he got the downs. He wasn’t a wool-gatherer as a rule. He sighed. What was it Dan Holmes had said? “If this is the way the new decade is shaping up, David, damme if I wouldn’t as soon have the old one back!” David believed he knew what his neighbor meant. Dan was a staunch advocate of abolition but he didn’t want war to achieve it. Another neighbor, Edward Maxwell, would gladly take arms at the first bugle call, were he young enough. Maxwell would send his sons to fight gladly for The Cause. David wished he could be so sure of what was right. He did not want war and he did not believe any sensible man could. He looked towards the big house again. The sight of it never failed to please him. A man had the right to be proud of something he had helped to build, he thought, a place where there had been so much love and happiness, where sons and daughters had grown, where grandsons and great-grandsons would flourish in years to come.
Let there not be war, he thought. War was the thing a man with sons had cause to fear the most. You gave them life, you taught them to walk, you tried to show them how to be honorable. You did not want them to be wasted, torn meat on some nameless field.
He sighed again. Got to stop this he told himself. The future was the future and there wasn’t a Hell of a lot you could do about it. The future belonged to his sons. All a man could do, he had tried to do: give them a good start, let them learn how to make their own decisions, give them the best information he had. It would be nice to live long enough to see how it all came out, he thought, to know their children as well as he had once known them when they were children. Somehow or other, David Strong did not believe he was going to. It wasn’t fatalism. It wasn’t even pessimism. He just knew. A man kind of always knew, deep down inside someplace, when he had turned the big corner in life. Well, enough of that. He looked up at the sky. Heavy clouds the color of writing-ink hung over the valley. Rays of sunlight broke through them, wide swathes of light that looked like lamplight spilling through an open door.
‘Don’t let there be war,’ he said aloud. It might even have been a prayer.