Passion Play (24 page)

His eyes returned to her face, which had been wrenched by the drag of the rope to one side, tilted upward, her mouth open,
the tongue frozen upon a lip as if to cover a scar. A butterfly, a shimmer of amber, flickering, tremulous, hovered in descent on a glassy eye that could not blink it away, defenseless before the assaulting sun. He saw the marks and bruises his mauling hands had left on her cheeks, the scratches on her breasts, the reddish patch on her thigh.

A hand on his shoulder scalded him. He turned to face one of the policemen.

“We’re told she came here to see you,” the policeman said in a matter-of-fact voice as he gestured toward the body with an open notebook in his hand.

“That’s what she told me,” Fabian replied. He tried to measure his tone against the other man’s.

“And what did you tell her?” the policeman asked.

“I told her,” Fabian began to stammer, “I told her to go home.”

The policeman looked up from his notebook. “What else did you tell her?”

“I told her—to leave me alone.”

The policeman scribbled something in his notebook. “What else?”

“To leave me alone. Not to bother me anymore,” Fabian said.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Fabian stood silent.

The policeman snapped shut his notebook. “I guess she took your advice,” he said.

For a long time, Fabian had been in the habit of leafing through
The Saddle Bride,
a trade journal of the horse world that also chronicled the social milieus of tournament, turf, stable and show. Each month, he would examine the feature “Ladies of Horse: Who’s Who Under Seventeen,” columns between advertisements for riding apparel and gear, notices of forthcoming meets, trivia of the track. The glossy pages would slide through his fingers: photographs of young horsewomen-jumping, at the paddock, in full show regalia, in ball gowns or riding breeches—accompanied by brief accounts of their rich and usually prominent families, the medals and competitive standings
the girls had received, their parties, their aspirations and engagements, their homes, the stables they frequented, their favorite mounts. Fabian would thoughtfully sift through an issue of
The Saddle Bride,
selecting young women, his intention to approach each subtly and to engage in an intimate partnership.

One summer, at the onset of school vacation, Fabian arrived in Shelbyville with a solitary polo pony in his VanHome’s stall, a Morgan acquired for a third of its value because the brown stallion had no proof of ancestry. Fabian had been hired by a group of prominent Tennessee horse breeders to conduct a series of lectures for young teachers of horsemanship, in which he would explore developments and revivals in riding and jumping. He had accepted the job because, some months earlier, he had been drawn to a photograph of Stella, in
The Saddle Bride,
receiving her award as champion of the Plantation Pleasure competition; the caption went on to cite her accomplishments in numerous other amateur shows of the Walking Horse Breeders Association, as well as in the Breeder’s Futurity event for young riders.

Anxious to meet her, Fabian telephoned Stella at the nearby boarding school from which she had just graduated with honors; he had read that she would be staying on there throughout the summer to continue training her horse, at a stable in the vicinity, for the annual Walking Horse Show. He invited her to attend his lecture series as his guest. She was hesitant at first, but finally consented. At his opening lecture, Fabian saw her slip in, alone, and sit on a bench at the back of the hall, apart from the others.

Stella was fashioned in the classic American mold, the pearly oval of her face lighted by topaz eyes, spaced wide, her blonde hair sweeping easily about her neck and brushing her sensually protrusive jaws. The high arch of her cheekbones framed a small nose, its tip flattened, and lips, oddly thick, in which Fabian caught a flicker of insolence. Yet he noticed as well her shyness, a holding back.

It was only after Fabian had spent several brief interludes with her, having coffee, discussing horses, that Stella began to warm to him, to speak of herself, of her family. Her parents had been divorced when she was still a child, and each had remarried. Far removed, to New York and New England, happy with a new wife, a new husband, preoccupied with the children of these
unions, they had scant time for Stella, their first daughter, now grown, on the brink of womanhood.

Several days later, Stella invited Fabian to visit her at the stable where she kept her horse, Ebony’s Ebony, her favorite possession.

Fabian found her dressed in a rough leather blouse, leather chaps sheathing her jeans, which stressed her well-defined, jutting buttocks. The tough, supple hide threw into sharp relief the fragile, lambent glow of her neck. She was trotting Ebony’s Ebony around the paddock, carefully guiding the horse, the heavy chains attached to its forelegs—the action-inducing devices used in training gaited horses—clanging harshly.

Ebony’s Ebony, a Tennessee Walking horse, was descended from the old plantation walking horse, which had carried planters and their overseers. Like most Southern owners of the breed, Stella kept the mare in constant training, refining and perfecting the horse’s three gaits: a flat-footed walk, a fluid canter and the high-breaking running walk of four even beats, each foot striking the ground separately, that was its hallmark.

Fabian watched as Stella monitored the time and intervals of each of the horse’s hoofs as it struck the ground, beating out a diagonal sequence. Intermittently, the horse lost rhythm, breaking into a mosaic of disjointed fragments—its heaving chest and front strained to the running walk, its haunches, buckling under Stella, still at a trot, the extravagant licking of the forelegs hesitant and askew.

Discouraged, Stella dismounted and took the horse to her workroom, at the rear of the stable. Jars of ointment, lubricants, a gallery of weights, hoof wedges, pads and chains of every size and thickness, crowded its shelves. Stella guided Ebony’s Ebony carefully to a space at the center of the room and, after tying the animal between two posts, she dismantled the armory of chains crusted around its forelegs. The horse, unyoked, pawed the ground in quickening anticipation, heaving slightly, eyes alert.

Just above the hoofs of Ebony’s Ebony, Fabian saw a mass of sores, some healing, others suppurating, striated, an inflamed cincture like a decoration around the horse’s pasterns. Stella took a jar and a pair of rubber gloves from one of the shelves; hunching
down, she began patiently to smear the ulcerated beds on the mare’s forelegs with a viscous paste. She explained to Fabian that, like so many other owners of Tennessee Walkers, she was forming a “sore lick”—an open sore in the flesh that pressure from a chain or a weighted boot would keep raw and sensitive. To alleviate the pain, the horse was driven to distort its prance and spring, an alteration that permitted the animal to develop what its breeders claimed to be its predisposition for the running walk.

Stella went on explaining that most commercial preparations for such soring treatment did not satisfy her. Some were too potent and cauterizing, others too bland. Therefore, she had concocted her own blends of soring paste, ranging from one so volatile that it almost singed the flesh when crammed under the boots or chains just before or during a ride, to another so subtle that one could leave it on the horse’s foreleg overnight or even for a day, confident that it would slowly raise the sore one desired. She hoped that all her efforts would be rewarded at summer’s end, permitting her to qualify Ebony’s Ebony for the National Celebration in Shelbyville, the country’s most spectacular exhibition of Tennessee Walking horses, and thus to transform Ebony’s Ebony from a local blue-ribbon horse into a national prizewinner.

With each new layering of the paste, a quiver ran through Ebony’s Ebony. Tied between the posts, the mare seemed locked between warring impulses: rebelling against this distortion of its being yet willing to bend to a plan beyond questioning. The animal seemed to sense that the treatment meted out to its legs was part of a larger, more intricate and subtle design—one in which reward or fault had no part—than the random, fleeting flick of a whip on its rump, or a spur’s sudden nudge against its withers.

Stella entered upon a celebration of Ebony’s Ebony. There was a lover’s tenderness in her voice. “I used to watch Tennessee Walkers when I was a little girl. They have a harmony no other breed has.” Ebony’s Ebony shuddered slightly as Stella’s gloved fingers smoothed the paste. She flexed the horse’s foreleg for Fabian’s inspection. Ebony’s Ebony flinched, but Stella’s grasp was confident, secure. She looked up at Fabian for a moment, her eyes innocent and serene, her neck velvety. “I like to think of Ebony’s Ebony as my partner—all that power, yet without me
the horse wouldn’t be able to show what it can do,” she said. She shifted around Ebony’s Ebony to begin her labors on the other leg.

“To get the horse to do that running walk, that nodding of its head in rhythm, that big lick, aren’t you crippling it?” Fabian asked.

She passed over his question with a smile. “Crippling? Its running walk is important—you can’t get a horse to do a smoother gait!”

Fabian was unconvinced. “I’ve ridden horses in Latin America, the Paso Finos, that perform their inborn gaits without any training, with no special boots. If your Tennessee Walker has natural gaits, why do you have to sore its legs and force it to wear those boots and chains?”

Stella shrugged. “The natural tendency to do its special gaits has to be brought out,” she explained patiently. “It has to be shaped, improved, enhanced by training, just as you have to train a Thoroughbred, to bring out its potential for racing or jumping.”

“To train, yes, but not by burning its flesh, by burdening it with weights and boots and chains!”

“It’s not that different from what trainers do to other breeds.” Stella’s voice grew sharp, but she was still gentle as she smoothed soring paste on the horse’s foreleg. “How much training does it take to get a Thoroughbred to strain beyond its limits on a race course? To leap over six-foot-high fences and seven-foot-wide triple bars at a jumping competition? Jumping isn’t natural to a horse; even when it’s hungry, it won’t jump over a fence or a ditch to reach food.” She glanced at Fabian with a look of mild irony.

“And what about that Morgan locked in your trailer? What did it have to endure to become fit for polo? And what does a polo pony go through during the game?”

“Leaping and chasing, the sheer spirit of running, are part of the horse’s nature,” Fabian said. “Sores and chains and boots aren’t.”

“Neither is the bridle or the whip, the spur or the saddle-even the rider,” she flared back. Then she shifted into a new, soberly impersonal key. “I don’t manipulate Ebony’s Ebony into
any tricks or stunts that nature didn’t make possible in the first place. I merely guide the horse in discovering its essence. How can that possibly harm it?”

“Some time ago,” Fabian said gently, “I was one of the members of the American Horse Protection Association who testified in Congress on behalf of the Horse Protection Act.” Stella listened, her expression guarded, unchanging, as Fabian went on. “That act outlawed soring as well as overbooting. It prohibits the use of any substance or device for the purpose of affecting a horse’s gaits. It also outlaws any practices that might cause the horse physical pain or distress or inflammation, or bring on lameness. What if Ebony’s Ebony should be disqualified before the National Celebration because of what you’ve done to it—and what if the inspectors should prosecute you?”

Unperturbed, Stella stood up. “Ebony’s Ebony is just one of thousands of Tennessee Walkers and American Saddle horses being trained. There are only about two dozen federal inspectors—they could hardly check the condition of every horse!”

“But do you want to break the law?”

“What law? That Horse Protection Act was put through by people who don’t know anything about the South, anything about our Tennessee Walker. They still can’t tell the difference between soring and lubricating, between padding and overbooting—so they want to ban it all!” Stella wiped paste from her gloved fingers as methodically as she had applied it to Ebony’s Ebony.

“What if all this talk about the horse’s essence is only a myth, just a convenient excuse to justify training practices that enable the animal to compete more strongly on the open market against other breeds, some of them better endowed by nature?” said Fabian, patting the horse on its muzzle. “What if what you do to these horses is just a derivative of what the Southern masters used to do to their slaves?”

Stella ripped off the gloves and tossed them into a corner. “That’s nonsense,” she said decisively. “Our horses are the result of careful breeding, and our training methods bring out inherited genetic characteristics that have been scientifically proven to exist. The Horse Protection Act threatens to make these Southern breeds extinct—to wipe out a whole industry. Hundreds of thousanda
of people who love, breed, trade and exhibit these horses, our whole way of life down here—all that would go.”

She started to release Ebony’s Ebony from the bonds that had immobilized it. “In any case,” she said with a mischievous glance, “under that Horse Protection Act so dear to you, no incident of soring or overbooting has ever come to trial—and I kind of doubt that one ever will.” She smiled at him guilelessly.

Ebony’s Ebony champed and stretched in its new freedom. Fabian remained silent, and Stella, her tone casual, said that, after the National Celebration, she would attend a college in Kentucky. It was the only one in the country that allowed its students to major in horsemanship and stable management; she wanted to study new methods of training the Tennessee Walking horse.

There was a spirit and resolve in her manner that sharpened Fabian’s interest. Yet simultaneously, the disquieting awareness came to him that he had not been able to break her equanimity, that without bolder action on his part during what remained of summer, he would soon be forced to relinquish Stella to the demands of her new calling. She had declined all invitations to visit him in his VanHome, resisted or averted his other solicitations to intimacy. Her privacy challenged him, piqued his curiosity to know whether she was involved with another man. The gathering force of his fascination drew him increasingly to the stable at which she worked.