Merry Christmas, Harriet Francis by Forest Arthur Ormes
Despite a troubled childhood, Harriet Francis fosters a fascination with horses that sees her becoming one of the first female jockeys, but she is plagued by misfortune and alcoholism.
I remember a woman on a gigantic bay horse galloping effortlessly to the top of a ridge. She brings the horse to a halt. From the throne of her saddle, she looks down at me and waves.
Then the soothing voice of my mother brings me back to the trees and grass surrounding us.
"Horse," my mother says to me.
"Horse," I repeat.
My mother didn't last long after my father returned home from Vietnam in a box. I can never forget the sight of her lying on the couch, a plastic bag tightly covering her head. Sometimes I wonder if I am still waiting for her gaping mouth to offer those sounds of reassurance that once drew me into her waiting arms where I squeezed her soft dark hair between my childhood fingers.
I liked it at my aunt's house where I got sent afterwards. I liked the soft rug and blue walls in the bedroom. I liked the quiet street with trees of hanging leaves greeting me each time I ran out into the yard to play. The trees were my friends. They could make beautiful sounds and listen silently when I was sad.
I was eight years old when, the day before Thanksgiving, I was taken from my aunt's and driven to a strange house in the country. When I stepped out of the pea-green car, I told the social worker who had driven me there that I had to use the toilet. Sitting on the commode inside the bathroom, I couldn't get my muscles to do their job I was so frightened.
The old woman who was now my foster mother sat me down the next day at a big table shaped like the oval of a racetrack. She had propped up her husband in his wheel chair and piled turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and dressing on his plate. She took hold of my plate and heaped it with the same assortment of food with a dish of pumpkin pie squeezed to the side.
Robert came to live at the Kransen's house when I was twelve years old. Mrs. Kransen had arranged for one of her adult nephews to build a small basketball court at the far end of her property bordering the neighbor's cornfield. The hoop and net were regulation height. A square slab of cement allowed for dribbling.
Robert and I were playing one on one. Whether it was a layup or jump, he used his height and weight to block my shots. After he ran four baskets in a row, I began to block his jump shots and lay ups. At first he seemed amused. After I made a second layup with a fake and break, Robert showed surprise. He came back with a perfect jump shot. He pushed me aside and stole the ball when I tried another fake and break. When he made a quick turn and went for the jump, I blocked his shot. He recovered the ball. As he tried to shoot, I pushed him the same way he had pushed me. Suddenly he grabbed me and threw me into the cornfield. I got up and came at him. He knocked me down. Before I could push myself to my feet, he shoved me over.
"You crazy thing," he sneered. "Get up again and I'll kick your ribs in."
I pushed myself to my feet. I glared back at him. He glared back at me. Finally, he said: "You tell her what happened and I'll kill you."
When Mrs. Kransen saw my scraped elbow while I was washing dishes after supper, she grabbed my arm and raised it as if holding up a piece of evidence.
"Playing basketball!" I blurted. She grunted, and dropped my arm. Grabbing the cup of coffee set in a saucer with a cookie on the side, she marched into the living room to serve her invalid husband. I continued running the dish rag over the soapy dishes, rinsing them in the second sink and handing them to Robert who was awkwardly drying each dish I handed him.
"Don't think I'm afraid of you," I said to him. "I didn't say anything because I don't rat on other kids. Even kids like you."
When he finally asked if I wanted to play Monopoly upstairs, I surprised myself by agreeing to accommodate this strange, blond-haired boy who, until now, had offered me nothing but anger and aggression.
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the Monopoly board. I had already thrown the dice twice, moved my piece up the board and was waiting for Robert to take his second throw. Instead, Robert got up, moved behind me and started touching my chest. He reached over my shoulder and started rubbing between my legs with his right hand. I wanted to push his hand away, but I sat there frozen. When he came around in front of me, I threw myself flat on my stomach. He grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to force me on my back. I jerked my elbow back as hard as I could into his ribs.
He tore at my sweater, ripping the right sleeve. I tried to elbow him in the crotch, but he pushed his knee into the small of my back. He grabbed both my elbows and pulled backwards. I pulled my elbows to my sides, breaking his grasp. As I flattened myself on my stomach again, I sneered: "Snake!" I felt a blow from his foot to my ribs. As I squeezed my right elbow to my side for protection, I gritted my teeth and braced myself for another kick to the ribs.
No kick came.
Cautiously, I looked up from my position. Mrs. Kransen stood in the doorway. She held a long wooden stick in her thick right hand. Three leather straps hung from a hole at the end of the stick.
Mrs. Kransen stepped into the middle of the room where I lay in my torn sweater.
"Get up, Harriet," she said.
I pushed myself upright. Robert was standing by the window, his eyes focused on the three leather straps. Mrs. Kransen gestured for me to leave. I tripped over a wooden chair set against the wall as I hurried from the room, down the stairs.
In the living room, Mr. Kransen sat asleep in his easy chair with two pillows propped against the chair's back. I turned the knob of the television to a program called Children's Time, and listened to a man-sized dog and a woman-sized hunter singing a duet while Robert's screams ricocheted between my sore ribs.
Eventually, the screams stopped. Mrs. Kransen came downstairs and told me that she had locked Robert inside his bedroom and that I was not to go anywhere upstairs until she gave her permission. The next morning Mrs. Kransen came down from upstairs.
Robert was gone. He had escaped from the upstairs window.
A week later, a few hours before Christmas Eve, a black police car pulled into the gravel driveway of Mrs. Kransen's house. From my bedroom window located beside the kitchen, I could see Robert as he moved forward to stare out the window from the back seat. A man wearing blue jeans and a gray sweat shirt got out from the car and climbed the cement stairs. As he knocked at the door of the house, I noticed a holstered pistol strapped to his waist. I stared at Robert until, eventually, he spotted me. When he raised both hands and waved, I noticed the handcuffs. In spite of what he had tried to do, I waved back. Robert smiled slightly, nodded and then lowered his head.
I caught a glimpse of the detective as he followed Mrs. Kransen through the kitchen. A short time later, he passed my room carrying a cardboard box and large black plastic bag. The detective opened the trunk of his car and placed the box and bag of clothes inside. He snapped the trunk closed with a finality which startled me. I stared at Robert's blond hair as the detective lowered himself into the car, started the engine, pulled out from the driveway and disappeared forever.
I made good grades all through high school. My senior year, I took advanced English literature with an emphasis on Charles Dickens. The teacher gave me an A-plus for a report I wrote on Nicholas Nickleby.
I never forgot that woman on the bay horse looking down at me and waving.
On the Monday following my eighteenth birthday, I managed to squeeze a week's supply of clothing into a green duffel bag. Mrs. Kransen was attending to her husband when I walked out the door and down the cement steps of the same porch used by the detective to haul away Robert's belongings six years earlier. As I set the duffel bag on my shoulder and headed down the gravel road, I told myself that I could have been setting off to join the army like my father did when he had turned eighteen.
I arrived at Hickory Downs Racecourse late in the afternoon. The head of security was a man over six feet who weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was good enough to set me up with a room over barn five.
"There's enough work here," he said. "I expect you to get on a trainer's badge list within a week, and then get your hot walker's license."
I got a job as a hot walker the next day.
By the following summer I was grooming horses. That fall, instead of going to Hickory Downs, I moved to the farm of Gregory Donald who broke and trained thoroughbred racehorses.
From the end of September to the middle of March, I fell off horses several times a week while learning to gallop. Once, when the horse turned and I went straight over the filly's head, I landed on my elbow and had to take a week off before I was sound enough to resume riding.
I lived in a trailer located a hundred yards from the farmhouse. I mucked stalls, fed and watered horses in the afternoons. I ate peanut butter sandwiches along with pretzels for lunch and supper. There were plenty of carrots and a few apples to supplement my diet. Toward the end of my stay, I was falling off horses less frequently.
I learned to drink wine when Mr. Donald entered the trailer on Thanksgiving Eve.
Mr. Donald's wife was an invalid who never left that farmhouse. Mr. Donald stood over six feet and carried the familiar pot belly which I saw on most men his age at the track. When he knocked on my door Thanksgiving Eve, and I opened it, Mr. Donald entered the trailer with a tray containing a plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and dressing. A familiar side plate of pumpkin pie was squeezed into the corner of the tray.
"I'll be right back. Don't go away," he said, as he set the tray on the small kitchen table.
He came back with a bottle of wine and two coffee mugs.
I sat on the cushioned seat behind the small kitchen table. Mr. Donald sat at a safe, reassuring distance upon a wooden chair set against the wall of the trailer. On his second mug of wine, Mr. Donald started telling me how a woman from town came to the house to cook, clean, bathe his wife and stay with her when Mr. Donald had to be at the track. Then an anxious look appeared on his face and he said:
"Excuse me. I've got to tend to my wife. The town woman leaves early on holidays."
He trudged out from the trailer, leaving the bottle of wine behind. I finished the Thanksgiving dinner, including the pumpkin pie. I drank all the wine left in the bottle.
At the start of March, Mr. Donald hired Rodolfo Espinoza to help break his horses in the afternoons. Two weeks later, I wrote a brief note which read:
Then I packed my clothes into my duffel bag and drove off with Rodolfo to Hickory Downs Racecourse.
At the security office where they assigned rooms, Rodolfo asked me to share a room with him. "I can't handle that, Rodolfo," I answered. Rodolfo wished me luck, accepted his room assignment and walked away. The same three-hundred-pound security chief assigned me a room in dorm Two B with the bathroom and shower twenty yards east at the end of the balcony. Then he said: "See Pickett, the outrider, for your test. Then go to the stewards' office. I don't want to see you exercising a horse without an exercise rider's license, understand?"
The next day, after warning me not to pitch forward and to keep my reins low, James Pickett approved me for my exercise rider's license.
"With your size, you could make it as a jockey," Pickett said to me. "You've got the talent. Trouble is... you don't have enough of the prima donna in you. You'll ride well, but you won't get any quality mounts."
James Pickett turned out to be an accurate prophet. I got my bug a year later. I became a full-fledged jockey a year after that. And I rarely got quality mounts. The mounts I did get had plenty of heart but not enough pedigree to put me in the winner's circle.
I had been racing cheap claimers all summer at Lincoln Meadows. Timothy Nolan had arrived for the weekend to ride in four of the ten one hundred-thousand-dollar races. I had read about him in the Racing Form. He was second leading rider in the nation - he had recently been divorced from a seven-year marriage.
I had been a jockey now for 18 years. I had been on the track for twenty. At age thirty-eight I was five years older than Timothy Nolan. I was no longer a novelty as a female jockey. When Timothy Nolan said hello to me that Friday before the Lincoln Meadows Million, I felt flattered that a nationally known jockey would pay attention to an aging, local rider with no agent, few mounts and fewer wins. Later he asked me when I had my last race. "I'm only riding in the fifth today," I answered.
"Five is a good number," he replied. "What if you meet me by my car in the parking lot after the seventh race? It's the baby-blue BMW."
"Seven is a lucky number," I answered. "Baby blue is a pretty color."
After the seventh, he was waiting for me beside his BMW.
He drove me downtown where he got an expensive hotel room. I drank five cans of German beer. Timothy Nolan drank one.
"I have three races tomorrow," he offered in explanation.
When he pulled out a bag of marijuana, I felt myself conforming to the expectations of fame and success against my own better judgment. I stared at Timothy Nolan's thinning blond hair and proceeded to smoke two joints.
Timothy Nolan smoked nothing.
"They might test me after I win," he said.
I brought a familiar detachment to our love making. He brought a mechanical monotony to his. When he finished, he began kissing me along my bare shoulders, working his way to my small breasts. Then he whispered: "I should take you out to dinner." "I think you have it backwards, Timothy. First dinner. Then the kissing. And then intercourse."
Timothy Nolan got up from our bed. I watched him slide his thin arms through the short sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt. He shoved his skinny legs into his tailored jeans. From the velvet chair, he pulled on his black leather boots, and pulled the seam of his jeans one inch from the tips. He turned and stared at me blankly.
"Thanks for the instructions," he said, and then closed the door behind him.
I got out of bed naked, ran to the door and opened it enough to stick my head out.
"Do you have to be overly sensitive and a prima donna both!" I hollered.
After watching his thinning blond head of hair disappear behind the elevator doors, I slammed my door and retreated to the double bed.
I stayed alone that night in the hotel room. I slept, but not very well.
When I entered the jockey's room the following Wednesday, the clerk of scales informed me that the stewards wanted to see me for a drug test. I hurried out of the jock's room, climbed into my old Nissan and drove to my apartment located five blocks from Hickory Downs on the southwest edge of the city.
An hour later, I walked out from my kitchen with a thirty-two-ounce pitcher of water mixed with eight fluid ounces of vinegar. From a chair set in front of my third-floor window, I poured the solution into a coffee cup stamped with a yellow silhouette of Van Gogh. Later, after I poured the last of the vinegar-water into the cup, I could feel myself starting to retch. I got up and returned to the kitchen. From in front of the sink, vinegar, water and bile sprayed from my mouth. I must have vomited up a pint of liquid mix. I had another eight cups of vinegar and water to drink before I had drunk enough to dilute my upcoming test.
I couldn't do it. Instead, I removed a bottle from the refrigerator and poured a few ounces of wine into a tan cup with the words Lincoln Meadows International Racetrack stamped across the side. I sipped the wine, felt my stomach become queasy. I tightened my stomach muscles and took another sip. The queasiness passed. A sense of well-being settled over me. I entered the living room and gazed at the Van Gogh print above the blue blanket-covered couch. With a sudden clarity, I realized everything in the print screamed: "Pairs!" Pillows. Chairs. Windows. And all of it mixed with reds, yellows and greens.
I awoke automatically at four o'clock the next morning. After brushing my teeth, I slipped into a green cotton shirt and pair of faded jeans. I tied a red handkerchief over my short-cropped hair. I made a noose from a yellow scarf and squeezed it around my neck.
As I started driving to the track, I thought of the drug test waiting for me.
"Timothy Nolan," I said to myself. "You get laid and I get fucked."
Not only did I test positive for marijuana, but I blew a .025 on the breathalyzer for alcohol. The stewards suspended my jockey's license for thirty days, followed by six months probation. They allowed me to gallop horses in the morning in order to make a living.
If I had known at the time that I was pregnant, I would have pursued Timothy Nolan across the country and strangled him in the driver's seat of his baby-blue BMW.
In the weeks ahead, the weight gain, nausea and fatigue tempted me to call for an appointment with the abortion clinic. How many times I grasped the phone with the intention of pushing those numbers. Then I reminded myself why I had stopped drinking. When reason attempted to dictate that a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried woman had no business having a child, I responded by taking myself off horses and hot walking for the rest of my pregnancy.
My son came into this world weighing six pounds, seven ounces. He was born the day before Mother's Day. I gave him the name Nolan Timothy Francis, reversing his father's name as a kind of charm against bad luck.
I had ballooned to one hundred and forty pounds during my pregnancy. I couldn't ride as a jockey. And no one wanted to use me as an exercise rider. I had to resort to mucking stalls for the new outrider, Chadwick Steward, in order to earn money to cover expenses. I kept Nolan Francis strapped to a carrier inside the tackroom. When the meet changed to Hickory Downs and November brought the usual cold weather, I placed a portable heater next to the carrier and kept the door to the tackroom closed. I opened the door every fifteen minutes to check that Nolan was all right.
It was in December when Nolan Francis was now crawling around in a used portable crib that I thought of scrounging up his father in order to get child-support payments. Then I thought of facing a court order mandating me to send my son to visit a prima-donna like Timothy Nolan. To hell with child support checks. I would raise Nolan Francis myself.
In the months ahead, I watched Nolan Francis make his first eye contact with me. I shrugged off strange feelings when he climbed up and grasped my short, dark hair. Under my scrutiny, I watched him clench the wooden blocks I had placed in the living room. I watched with delight as his crawling carried him to his wooden play box where he removed the plastic cowboys and horses I had bought for him, dropped them on the rug and made his first effort to place the rider in the saddle.
At the end of December, Chad Stewart laid me off. Desperate, I took a job as a groom with Siegfried the German who was a nice trainer but cheap. In early February, when Hickory Downs saw trainers shipping in to begin training for the spring meet, I got a better-paying job with a big outfit named Renko Stables.
I found a babysitter for Nolan Francis. Her name was Ignacia, a Mexican woman. Her husband was a groom on the track, but had returned to Mexico in order to renew his visa.
On the first day I was supposed to drop Nolan Francis off at Ignacia's, I got frightened and backed off before I even opened the door to her building. Carrying Nolan, I got back into my car and drove to my apartment where I phoned Ignacia and apologized for not showing up. I would bring Nolan Francis to her place at five thirty the next morning. I promised.
When I got off the phone, I cursed the lack of day care for mothers at the racetrack.
I cursed the seventeen degrees outside. I cursed the junk and litter scattered across Hickory Downs and the three inches of snow covering it. I cursed the mornings of my son playing in his crib inside a tackroom kept warm by a space heater fed by an out-of-date electrical system. I was tired of mucking stalls, pushing wheel barrows and pitching straw into dumpsters. I was racetrack sour and my aching back did nothing to sweeten it.
When I called the assistant trainer to tell him I would not be working that morning, I got a dial tone for a response. Nolan Francis was holding onto a side table and surveying our living room when I put the phone down. He held a plastic bay horse in his right hand. I went into the kitchen and began making an omelet. I dumped the morning coffee from the cup, and filled it with wine.
"Letting go. Even for a day. Why is that so painful?" I said, staring at Nolan who was still playing with his plastic horse.
By the time I got up from my easy chair that evening, I had finished six cups of wine. The lamp in the living room brightened just enough of the bedroom for me to see Nolan Francis's face as I set him down and snuggled into bed after him.
The next morning I took a few deep breaths and dropped Nolan Francis off at Ignacia's as planned. When I arrived at barn three, the assistant trainer said: "We don't tolerate no-shows. Pick your check up Saturday."
I immediately walked over to barn four where Chadwick Steward re-hired me to muck the stalls of his ponies and Irene Luzinski promised me at least two hots to walk every morning.
Chadwick Steward was tall and slim like James Pickett, the outrider he had replaced. When I found myself sitting next to him on a bar stool in the Green House on an afternoon when there was no racing, I had to admit that he wasn't bad looking.
He told me he was from a small town in Texas. I told him I was from a small town in Indiana. He told me about climbing into the saddle behind a pretty girl of twelve back in Texas when he was a boy. I told him about the woman who had galloped up a hill and waved at me when I was learning to speak my first words.
As we left the Green House together to head to my apartment, I said to him: "I'm glad you know the proper order of moves for making love. The last man I had got it backwards."
I watched Chad Steward hurry away in the opposite direction. Later, as I drove home with Nolan Francis strapped to his carrier in the back seat, I stared over at the empty passenger seat where I had expected Chadwick Steward to be sitting with his arm around me. I had been looking forward to his companionship. To a gentle conversation between a man and a woman and the horse or two in their early lives that had brought them to Hickory Downs Racecourse.
It was October. Six thirty in the morning. Still dark. I had gotten rid of those extra pounds and returned to racing. It was hard getting back into shape, using muscles that only got used when I was riding.
Hickory Downs had been running for two weeks. Nolan Francis was being watched by Ignacia. Her husband had returned from Mexico and was now a groom in the stable of Sydney Carlson. Sydney Carlson was a retired small-time lawyer. He told me he used to hit the bottle hard, but had not had a drink in ten years. Now he was a shoe-string trainer with six horses to his stable. I was breezing Paris Rendezvous in hopes that he would name me on the one decent horse in his stable, War Footing.
I entered the jock's room to the usual creak of the door followed by the smell of mold. The women's locker room was down the hall. A few minutes later, my back propped against the wall of the steam room, I felt my butt relax upon the wooden bench. I closed my eyes. I was awakened by the voice of the clerk of scales. He was talking to one of the young female jockeys named Zadie Thompson.
"You want the call for War Footing," I heard the clerk of scales voice. "McConnell came up sore from his fall the other morning."
"What about Harriet?"
"I don't care if that wacko ever gets a call," he answered.
I thought of stepping out from the steam room and confronting them, but the sudden absence of conversation triggered my sense of caution. I remained sitting on the hard wooden bench. Then I heard Zadie's voice.
"Thanks for the call, honey," she said.
When I came out from the sanctuary of the sauna, I could hear the jockeys and valets down the hall. I walked into the other room where the clerk of scales sat at his desk.
"Richard, you son-of-a-bitch! They didn't even have a locker room for me to change into colors when I got my bug. And now, cause I'm not one of your, 'Thanks-for-the-call-honeys,' you're stonewalling me! I could call the racing board right now, damn you!"
Richard turned his head in my direction, smiled and said: "Go ahead, call. Everyone downtown knows you're squirrelly... and a drunk to boot."
"You asshole!"
"Threatening language against a racing official can get you suspended. Now get out before I call security."
On Christmas Day, when there was no racing, I volunteered to work Sydney Carlson's barn so his groom - Ignacia's husband - could leave early to be with his family. I had placed Nolan Francis in the tackroom - a space heater next to his crib. I had asked Sydney Carlson's hot walker to feed and water that afternoon. I knew I would be drunk by then and did not want to risk driving to the track.
"War Footing. You handsome boy," I said, as I carried a bucket of water to his stall.
As I hung another bucket of water inside the stall of Paris Rendezvous, I said: "Even if you are a sore filly, I still love you."
I hugged the filly's neck, and began to cry. I continued to cry until I got too dried out to cry anymore. Eventually, I loaded Nolan Francis into the back seat of my car, put his crib into the trunk and drove home.
The toy drum I gave to Nolan Francis for Christmas was a big hit. He had half gotten the hang of it by the time I was reclining on the couch and watching him tap and pound and scrape the drum with his miniature wooden sticks.
"My Little Drummer Boy," I pronounced as I sipped my wine and re-read Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, one of two dozen books in my library.
We were into the summer meet at Lincoln Meadows. It wasn't until I picked Nolan Francis up at Ignacia's apartment that I became aware of his cough. When Nolan Francis developed a fever, and then began having seizures that night, I drove him to the nearest emergency room where the doctor diagnosed meningitis. He put Nolan Francis in intensive care immediately where they began intravenous antibiotics.
"Bacterial meningitis," he told me, "is very serious. We will do all we can."
Nolan Francis left this world weighing twenty-one and a half pounds and measuring thirty-three inches. He had gotten sick on July 31st. He died the following Sunday, two years, two months and twenty-seven days after he had been born.
"Bacterial meningitis is difficult to stop," one of the attending nurses told me. "Even when immediately treated."
I did not think about her words. Words could not resurrect my son.
I thought about the clothes I had purchased that were waiting for Nolan Francis to wear.
I left untouched the plastic cowboys and horses in Nolan Francis' blue play box. I squeezed his little blue baseball cap. I sipped a third cup of wine as I chewed my peanut butter sandwich. Along with pretzels, and an occasional red apple for nutrition, this had become the staple of my diet after Nolan Francis left this world with me in it.
As I stared at the bookshelf where the urn holding my son's ashes set, I recalled a passage from Nicholas Nickleby: "'To go with you. Anywhere. Everywhere. To the world's end. To the churchyard grave.'"
If I knew for sure I could have joined Nolan Francis, I would have driven into the city, parked in some lonely spot along the lake and thrown myself in.
A month passed. A second month. I had found a few trainers who would use me free-lance as an exercise rider. I was too heavy to ride in the afternoon as a jockey. I numbed my feelings in order to get up in the mornings. It was still dark when I began galloping horses under the bright lights of Hickory Downs. I avoided the green riders without cursing and slowed my gallop when the siren blew its warning of a loose horse whose rider had fallen. One morning I broke out crying when I reflexively began driving toward Ignacia's apartment.
The third month passed. By now, I was twenty-five pounds overweight.
On Thanksgiving, I decided to begin taking off weight so I could return to riding as a jockey. I got rid of the wine and junk food. I brought home four bags of groceries filled with vegetables, fruits and whole wheat bread.
Every day after work, I drove home, changed into my sweats and made the short trip to the nearby forest preserve to jog. The cold did not stop me.
My weight stabilized. Slowly, I began to reduce.
I volunteered to work Christmas Eve at Sydney Carlson's barn. I fed and watered his horses in the late afternoon so that the help could have the rest of the day free. I spent almost another hour talking to War Footing and Paris Rendezvous before I drove home.
I had not had a sip of alcohol since Thanksgiving.
On Christmas Day, when the track was not open for training, I put on my sweats and drove to the forest preserve to jog. A chain hung across the entrance to the parking lot. I parked my car in the small space between the chain and the road. I began jogging. A blanket of snow covered the path. The image of Nolan Francis pounding his drum followed me as I ran. I picked up the pace until I could hear a smooth, steady tapping.
Suddenly, I fell to the ground and began sobbing. Eventually, I pushed myself to my feet. I wiped the snow from my mouth and resumed jogging. By the time I got back to the parking lot, there was a patrol car parked in front of mine, its motor running. A tall, pot-bellied policeman, pistol strapped to his waist, climbed out and came over to my car.
"Closed," he said to me.
"I jog here. It's always open."
"Not on Christmas Day."
I pursed my lips, and kept silent.
"I ran a check on your car. It's clean. Can I please see your driver's license?"
"Harriet Francis," he pronounced, and then handed my license back to me. "Do you have an auto insurance card, Harriet Francis?"
"I'm afraid I'm short on an insurance card, officer. I have a three-year-old son. Money's tight," I answered.
"That has nothing to do with it." He paused. "Where is your son now?"
"Ignacia, my babysitter... She agreed to watch him."
"On Christmas Day!"
"It's just for an hour. I needed to jog."
"What are you... one of those fanatics?"
"Officer. I'm a jockey trying to make weight so I can start riding again."
"A lady jockey. How 'bout that."
"I've been a jockey for twenty-two years, officer."
Suddenly the radio in his patrol car began to crackle.
"I have to go." he said.
As he lowered himself into the driver's seat, he said loudly: "Let me know if you make weight. Maybe it'll motivate me to reduce."
"How will I do that?"
"I patrol this preserve. Officer Richard F. Gallagher."
"What's the F stand for?"
"Francis."
"Same as my last name."
"How 'bout that. By the way. Get an insurance card."
"Thanks, Richard Francis Gallagher," I answered. "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, Harriet Francis."
He sank into the driver's seat, backed up the patrol car, then pulled forward and drove up the long, narrow road leading to Concord Avenue.
I relax in my easy chair. Nolan Francis sits in front of me, arranging his plastic cowboys. He looks up from the oval-shaped rug and holds up a riderless bay.
Drawing out the name in a soothing tone, I pronounce: "Hooooorse."
Nolan Francis gives a laugh. He grabs a cowboy from the play box and attaches him to the bay.
"Horse," he pronounces.
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Then the soothing voice of my mother brings me back to the trees and grass surrounding us.
"Horse," my mother says to me.
"Horse," I repeat.
My mother didn't last long after my father returned home from Vietnam in a box. I can never forget the sight of her lying on the couch, a plastic bag tightly covering her head. Sometimes I wonder if I am still waiting for her gaping mouth to offer those sounds of reassurance that once drew me into her waiting arms where I squeezed her soft dark hair between my childhood fingers.
I liked it at my aunt's house where I got sent afterwards. I liked the soft rug and blue walls in the bedroom. I liked the quiet street with trees of hanging leaves greeting me each time I ran out into the yard to play. The trees were my friends. They could make beautiful sounds and listen silently when I was sad.
I was eight years old when, the day before Thanksgiving, I was taken from my aunt's and driven to a strange house in the country. When I stepped out of the pea-green car, I told the social worker who had driven me there that I had to use the toilet. Sitting on the commode inside the bathroom, I couldn't get my muscles to do their job I was so frightened.
The old woman who was now my foster mother sat me down the next day at a big table shaped like the oval of a racetrack. She had propped up her husband in his wheel chair and piled turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and dressing on his plate. She took hold of my plate and heaped it with the same assortment of food with a dish of pumpkin pie squeezed to the side.
Robert came to live at the Kransen's house when I was twelve years old. Mrs. Kransen had arranged for one of her adult nephews to build a small basketball court at the far end of her property bordering the neighbor's cornfield. The hoop and net were regulation height. A square slab of cement allowed for dribbling.
Robert and I were playing one on one. Whether it was a layup or jump, he used his height and weight to block my shots. After he ran four baskets in a row, I began to block his jump shots and lay ups. At first he seemed amused. After I made a second layup with a fake and break, Robert showed surprise. He came back with a perfect jump shot. He pushed me aside and stole the ball when I tried another fake and break. When he made a quick turn and went for the jump, I blocked his shot. He recovered the ball. As he tried to shoot, I pushed him the same way he had pushed me. Suddenly he grabbed me and threw me into the cornfield. I got up and came at him. He knocked me down. Before I could push myself to my feet, he shoved me over.
"You crazy thing," he sneered. "Get up again and I'll kick your ribs in."
I pushed myself to my feet. I glared back at him. He glared back at me. Finally, he said: "You tell her what happened and I'll kill you."
When Mrs. Kransen saw my scraped elbow while I was washing dishes after supper, she grabbed my arm and raised it as if holding up a piece of evidence.
"Playing basketball!" I blurted. She grunted, and dropped my arm. Grabbing the cup of coffee set in a saucer with a cookie on the side, she marched into the living room to serve her invalid husband. I continued running the dish rag over the soapy dishes, rinsing them in the second sink and handing them to Robert who was awkwardly drying each dish I handed him.
"Don't think I'm afraid of you," I said to him. "I didn't say anything because I don't rat on other kids. Even kids like you."
When he finally asked if I wanted to play Monopoly upstairs, I surprised myself by agreeing to accommodate this strange, blond-haired boy who, until now, had offered me nothing but anger and aggression.
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the Monopoly board. I had already thrown the dice twice, moved my piece up the board and was waiting for Robert to take his second throw. Instead, Robert got up, moved behind me and started touching my chest. He reached over my shoulder and started rubbing between my legs with his right hand. I wanted to push his hand away, but I sat there frozen. When he came around in front of me, I threw myself flat on my stomach. He grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to force me on my back. I jerked my elbow back as hard as I could into his ribs.
He tore at my sweater, ripping the right sleeve. I tried to elbow him in the crotch, but he pushed his knee into the small of my back. He grabbed both my elbows and pulled backwards. I pulled my elbows to my sides, breaking his grasp. As I flattened myself on my stomach again, I sneered: "Snake!" I felt a blow from his foot to my ribs. As I squeezed my right elbow to my side for protection, I gritted my teeth and braced myself for another kick to the ribs.
No kick came.
Cautiously, I looked up from my position. Mrs. Kransen stood in the doorway. She held a long wooden stick in her thick right hand. Three leather straps hung from a hole at the end of the stick.
Mrs. Kransen stepped into the middle of the room where I lay in my torn sweater.
"Get up, Harriet," she said.
I pushed myself upright. Robert was standing by the window, his eyes focused on the three leather straps. Mrs. Kransen gestured for me to leave. I tripped over a wooden chair set against the wall as I hurried from the room, down the stairs.
In the living room, Mr. Kransen sat asleep in his easy chair with two pillows propped against the chair's back. I turned the knob of the television to a program called Children's Time, and listened to a man-sized dog and a woman-sized hunter singing a duet while Robert's screams ricocheted between my sore ribs.
Eventually, the screams stopped. Mrs. Kransen came downstairs and told me that she had locked Robert inside his bedroom and that I was not to go anywhere upstairs until she gave her permission. The next morning Mrs. Kransen came down from upstairs.
Robert was gone. He had escaped from the upstairs window.
A week later, a few hours before Christmas Eve, a black police car pulled into the gravel driveway of Mrs. Kransen's house. From my bedroom window located beside the kitchen, I could see Robert as he moved forward to stare out the window from the back seat. A man wearing blue jeans and a gray sweat shirt got out from the car and climbed the cement stairs. As he knocked at the door of the house, I noticed a holstered pistol strapped to his waist. I stared at Robert until, eventually, he spotted me. When he raised both hands and waved, I noticed the handcuffs. In spite of what he had tried to do, I waved back. Robert smiled slightly, nodded and then lowered his head.
I caught a glimpse of the detective as he followed Mrs. Kransen through the kitchen. A short time later, he passed my room carrying a cardboard box and large black plastic bag. The detective opened the trunk of his car and placed the box and bag of clothes inside. He snapped the trunk closed with a finality which startled me. I stared at Robert's blond hair as the detective lowered himself into the car, started the engine, pulled out from the driveway and disappeared forever.
I made good grades all through high school. My senior year, I took advanced English literature with an emphasis on Charles Dickens. The teacher gave me an A-plus for a report I wrote on Nicholas Nickleby.
I never forgot that woman on the bay horse looking down at me and waving.
On the Monday following my eighteenth birthday, I managed to squeeze a week's supply of clothing into a green duffel bag. Mrs. Kransen was attending to her husband when I walked out the door and down the cement steps of the same porch used by the detective to haul away Robert's belongings six years earlier. As I set the duffel bag on my shoulder and headed down the gravel road, I told myself that I could have been setting off to join the army like my father did when he had turned eighteen.
I arrived at Hickory Downs Racecourse late in the afternoon. The head of security was a man over six feet who weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was good enough to set me up with a room over barn five.
"There's enough work here," he said. "I expect you to get on a trainer's badge list within a week, and then get your hot walker's license."
I got a job as a hot walker the next day.
By the following summer I was grooming horses. That fall, instead of going to Hickory Downs, I moved to the farm of Gregory Donald who broke and trained thoroughbred racehorses.
From the end of September to the middle of March, I fell off horses several times a week while learning to gallop. Once, when the horse turned and I went straight over the filly's head, I landed on my elbow and had to take a week off before I was sound enough to resume riding.
I lived in a trailer located a hundred yards from the farmhouse. I mucked stalls, fed and watered horses in the afternoons. I ate peanut butter sandwiches along with pretzels for lunch and supper. There were plenty of carrots and a few apples to supplement my diet. Toward the end of my stay, I was falling off horses less frequently.
I learned to drink wine when Mr. Donald entered the trailer on Thanksgiving Eve.
Mr. Donald's wife was an invalid who never left that farmhouse. Mr. Donald stood over six feet and carried the familiar pot belly which I saw on most men his age at the track. When he knocked on my door Thanksgiving Eve, and I opened it, Mr. Donald entered the trailer with a tray containing a plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and dressing. A familiar side plate of pumpkin pie was squeezed into the corner of the tray.
"I'll be right back. Don't go away," he said, as he set the tray on the small kitchen table.
He came back with a bottle of wine and two coffee mugs.
I sat on the cushioned seat behind the small kitchen table. Mr. Donald sat at a safe, reassuring distance upon a wooden chair set against the wall of the trailer. On his second mug of wine, Mr. Donald started telling me how a woman from town came to the house to cook, clean, bathe his wife and stay with her when Mr. Donald had to be at the track. Then an anxious look appeared on his face and he said:
"Excuse me. I've got to tend to my wife. The town woman leaves early on holidays."
He trudged out from the trailer, leaving the bottle of wine behind. I finished the Thanksgiving dinner, including the pumpkin pie. I drank all the wine left in the bottle.
At the start of March, Mr. Donald hired Rodolfo Espinoza to help break his horses in the afternoons. Two weeks later, I wrote a brief note which read:
Dear Mr. Donald: Thank you for giving me the chance to learn how to exercise horses. Thank you for the Thanksgiving dinner. I hope your wife gets well so that you can be happy. I'm leaving for Hickory Downs to find work. Harriet Francis.
Then I packed my clothes into my duffel bag and drove off with Rodolfo to Hickory Downs Racecourse.
At the security office where they assigned rooms, Rodolfo asked me to share a room with him. "I can't handle that, Rodolfo," I answered. Rodolfo wished me luck, accepted his room assignment and walked away. The same three-hundred-pound security chief assigned me a room in dorm Two B with the bathroom and shower twenty yards east at the end of the balcony. Then he said: "See Pickett, the outrider, for your test. Then go to the stewards' office. I don't want to see you exercising a horse without an exercise rider's license, understand?"
The next day, after warning me not to pitch forward and to keep my reins low, James Pickett approved me for my exercise rider's license.
"With your size, you could make it as a jockey," Pickett said to me. "You've got the talent. Trouble is... you don't have enough of the prima donna in you. You'll ride well, but you won't get any quality mounts."
James Pickett turned out to be an accurate prophet. I got my bug a year later. I became a full-fledged jockey a year after that. And I rarely got quality mounts. The mounts I did get had plenty of heart but not enough pedigree to put me in the winner's circle.
I had been racing cheap claimers all summer at Lincoln Meadows. Timothy Nolan had arrived for the weekend to ride in four of the ten one hundred-thousand-dollar races. I had read about him in the Racing Form. He was second leading rider in the nation - he had recently been divorced from a seven-year marriage.
I had been a jockey now for 18 years. I had been on the track for twenty. At age thirty-eight I was five years older than Timothy Nolan. I was no longer a novelty as a female jockey. When Timothy Nolan said hello to me that Friday before the Lincoln Meadows Million, I felt flattered that a nationally known jockey would pay attention to an aging, local rider with no agent, few mounts and fewer wins. Later he asked me when I had my last race. "I'm only riding in the fifth today," I answered.
"Five is a good number," he replied. "What if you meet me by my car in the parking lot after the seventh race? It's the baby-blue BMW."
"Seven is a lucky number," I answered. "Baby blue is a pretty color."
After the seventh, he was waiting for me beside his BMW.
He drove me downtown where he got an expensive hotel room. I drank five cans of German beer. Timothy Nolan drank one.
"I have three races tomorrow," he offered in explanation.
When he pulled out a bag of marijuana, I felt myself conforming to the expectations of fame and success against my own better judgment. I stared at Timothy Nolan's thinning blond hair and proceeded to smoke two joints.
Timothy Nolan smoked nothing.
"They might test me after I win," he said.
I brought a familiar detachment to our love making. He brought a mechanical monotony to his. When he finished, he began kissing me along my bare shoulders, working his way to my small breasts. Then he whispered: "I should take you out to dinner." "I think you have it backwards, Timothy. First dinner. Then the kissing. And then intercourse."
Timothy Nolan got up from our bed. I watched him slide his thin arms through the short sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt. He shoved his skinny legs into his tailored jeans. From the velvet chair, he pulled on his black leather boots, and pulled the seam of his jeans one inch from the tips. He turned and stared at me blankly.
"Thanks for the instructions," he said, and then closed the door behind him.
I got out of bed naked, ran to the door and opened it enough to stick my head out.
"Do you have to be overly sensitive and a prima donna both!" I hollered.
After watching his thinning blond head of hair disappear behind the elevator doors, I slammed my door and retreated to the double bed.
I stayed alone that night in the hotel room. I slept, but not very well.
When I entered the jockey's room the following Wednesday, the clerk of scales informed me that the stewards wanted to see me for a drug test. I hurried out of the jock's room, climbed into my old Nissan and drove to my apartment located five blocks from Hickory Downs on the southwest edge of the city.
An hour later, I walked out from my kitchen with a thirty-two-ounce pitcher of water mixed with eight fluid ounces of vinegar. From a chair set in front of my third-floor window, I poured the solution into a coffee cup stamped with a yellow silhouette of Van Gogh. Later, after I poured the last of the vinegar-water into the cup, I could feel myself starting to retch. I got up and returned to the kitchen. From in front of the sink, vinegar, water and bile sprayed from my mouth. I must have vomited up a pint of liquid mix. I had another eight cups of vinegar and water to drink before I had drunk enough to dilute my upcoming test.
I couldn't do it. Instead, I removed a bottle from the refrigerator and poured a few ounces of wine into a tan cup with the words Lincoln Meadows International Racetrack stamped across the side. I sipped the wine, felt my stomach become queasy. I tightened my stomach muscles and took another sip. The queasiness passed. A sense of well-being settled over me. I entered the living room and gazed at the Van Gogh print above the blue blanket-covered couch. With a sudden clarity, I realized everything in the print screamed: "Pairs!" Pillows. Chairs. Windows. And all of it mixed with reds, yellows and greens.
I awoke automatically at four o'clock the next morning. After brushing my teeth, I slipped into a green cotton shirt and pair of faded jeans. I tied a red handkerchief over my short-cropped hair. I made a noose from a yellow scarf and squeezed it around my neck.
As I started driving to the track, I thought of the drug test waiting for me.
"Timothy Nolan," I said to myself. "You get laid and I get fucked."
Not only did I test positive for marijuana, but I blew a .025 on the breathalyzer for alcohol. The stewards suspended my jockey's license for thirty days, followed by six months probation. They allowed me to gallop horses in the morning in order to make a living.
If I had known at the time that I was pregnant, I would have pursued Timothy Nolan across the country and strangled him in the driver's seat of his baby-blue BMW.
In the weeks ahead, the weight gain, nausea and fatigue tempted me to call for an appointment with the abortion clinic. How many times I grasped the phone with the intention of pushing those numbers. Then I reminded myself why I had stopped drinking. When reason attempted to dictate that a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried woman had no business having a child, I responded by taking myself off horses and hot walking for the rest of my pregnancy.
My son came into this world weighing six pounds, seven ounces. He was born the day before Mother's Day. I gave him the name Nolan Timothy Francis, reversing his father's name as a kind of charm against bad luck.
I had ballooned to one hundred and forty pounds during my pregnancy. I couldn't ride as a jockey. And no one wanted to use me as an exercise rider. I had to resort to mucking stalls for the new outrider, Chadwick Steward, in order to earn money to cover expenses. I kept Nolan Francis strapped to a carrier inside the tackroom. When the meet changed to Hickory Downs and November brought the usual cold weather, I placed a portable heater next to the carrier and kept the door to the tackroom closed. I opened the door every fifteen minutes to check that Nolan was all right.
It was in December when Nolan Francis was now crawling around in a used portable crib that I thought of scrounging up his father in order to get child-support payments. Then I thought of facing a court order mandating me to send my son to visit a prima-donna like Timothy Nolan. To hell with child support checks. I would raise Nolan Francis myself.
In the months ahead, I watched Nolan Francis make his first eye contact with me. I shrugged off strange feelings when he climbed up and grasped my short, dark hair. Under my scrutiny, I watched him clench the wooden blocks I had placed in the living room. I watched with delight as his crawling carried him to his wooden play box where he removed the plastic cowboys and horses I had bought for him, dropped them on the rug and made his first effort to place the rider in the saddle.
At the end of December, Chad Stewart laid me off. Desperate, I took a job as a groom with Siegfried the German who was a nice trainer but cheap. In early February, when Hickory Downs saw trainers shipping in to begin training for the spring meet, I got a better-paying job with a big outfit named Renko Stables.
I found a babysitter for Nolan Francis. Her name was Ignacia, a Mexican woman. Her husband was a groom on the track, but had returned to Mexico in order to renew his visa.
On the first day I was supposed to drop Nolan Francis off at Ignacia's, I got frightened and backed off before I even opened the door to her building. Carrying Nolan, I got back into my car and drove to my apartment where I phoned Ignacia and apologized for not showing up. I would bring Nolan Francis to her place at five thirty the next morning. I promised.
When I got off the phone, I cursed the lack of day care for mothers at the racetrack.
I cursed the seventeen degrees outside. I cursed the junk and litter scattered across Hickory Downs and the three inches of snow covering it. I cursed the mornings of my son playing in his crib inside a tackroom kept warm by a space heater fed by an out-of-date electrical system. I was tired of mucking stalls, pushing wheel barrows and pitching straw into dumpsters. I was racetrack sour and my aching back did nothing to sweeten it.
When I called the assistant trainer to tell him I would not be working that morning, I got a dial tone for a response. Nolan Francis was holding onto a side table and surveying our living room when I put the phone down. He held a plastic bay horse in his right hand. I went into the kitchen and began making an omelet. I dumped the morning coffee from the cup, and filled it with wine.
"Letting go. Even for a day. Why is that so painful?" I said, staring at Nolan who was still playing with his plastic horse.
By the time I got up from my easy chair that evening, I had finished six cups of wine. The lamp in the living room brightened just enough of the bedroom for me to see Nolan Francis's face as I set him down and snuggled into bed after him.
The next morning I took a few deep breaths and dropped Nolan Francis off at Ignacia's as planned. When I arrived at barn three, the assistant trainer said: "We don't tolerate no-shows. Pick your check up Saturday."
I immediately walked over to barn four where Chadwick Steward re-hired me to muck the stalls of his ponies and Irene Luzinski promised me at least two hots to walk every morning.
Chadwick Steward was tall and slim like James Pickett, the outrider he had replaced. When I found myself sitting next to him on a bar stool in the Green House on an afternoon when there was no racing, I had to admit that he wasn't bad looking.
He told me he was from a small town in Texas. I told him I was from a small town in Indiana. He told me about climbing into the saddle behind a pretty girl of twelve back in Texas when he was a boy. I told him about the woman who had galloped up a hill and waved at me when I was learning to speak my first words.
As we left the Green House together to head to my apartment, I said to him: "I'm glad you know the proper order of moves for making love. The last man I had got it backwards."
I watched Chad Steward hurry away in the opposite direction. Later, as I drove home with Nolan Francis strapped to his carrier in the back seat, I stared over at the empty passenger seat where I had expected Chadwick Steward to be sitting with his arm around me. I had been looking forward to his companionship. To a gentle conversation between a man and a woman and the horse or two in their early lives that had brought them to Hickory Downs Racecourse.
It was October. Six thirty in the morning. Still dark. I had gotten rid of those extra pounds and returned to racing. It was hard getting back into shape, using muscles that only got used when I was riding.
Hickory Downs had been running for two weeks. Nolan Francis was being watched by Ignacia. Her husband had returned from Mexico and was now a groom in the stable of Sydney Carlson. Sydney Carlson was a retired small-time lawyer. He told me he used to hit the bottle hard, but had not had a drink in ten years. Now he was a shoe-string trainer with six horses to his stable. I was breezing Paris Rendezvous in hopes that he would name me on the one decent horse in his stable, War Footing.
I entered the jock's room to the usual creak of the door followed by the smell of mold. The women's locker room was down the hall. A few minutes later, my back propped against the wall of the steam room, I felt my butt relax upon the wooden bench. I closed my eyes. I was awakened by the voice of the clerk of scales. He was talking to one of the young female jockeys named Zadie Thompson.
"You want the call for War Footing," I heard the clerk of scales voice. "McConnell came up sore from his fall the other morning."
"What about Harriet?"
"I don't care if that wacko ever gets a call," he answered.
I thought of stepping out from the steam room and confronting them, but the sudden absence of conversation triggered my sense of caution. I remained sitting on the hard wooden bench. Then I heard Zadie's voice.
"Thanks for the call, honey," she said.
When I came out from the sanctuary of the sauna, I could hear the jockeys and valets down the hall. I walked into the other room where the clerk of scales sat at his desk.
"Richard, you son-of-a-bitch! They didn't even have a locker room for me to change into colors when I got my bug. And now, cause I'm not one of your, 'Thanks-for-the-call-honeys,' you're stonewalling me! I could call the racing board right now, damn you!"
Richard turned his head in my direction, smiled and said: "Go ahead, call. Everyone downtown knows you're squirrelly... and a drunk to boot."
"You asshole!"
"Threatening language against a racing official can get you suspended. Now get out before I call security."
On Christmas Day, when there was no racing, I volunteered to work Sydney Carlson's barn so his groom - Ignacia's husband - could leave early to be with his family. I had placed Nolan Francis in the tackroom - a space heater next to his crib. I had asked Sydney Carlson's hot walker to feed and water that afternoon. I knew I would be drunk by then and did not want to risk driving to the track.
"War Footing. You handsome boy," I said, as I carried a bucket of water to his stall.
As I hung another bucket of water inside the stall of Paris Rendezvous, I said: "Even if you are a sore filly, I still love you."
I hugged the filly's neck, and began to cry. I continued to cry until I got too dried out to cry anymore. Eventually, I loaded Nolan Francis into the back seat of my car, put his crib into the trunk and drove home.
The toy drum I gave to Nolan Francis for Christmas was a big hit. He had half gotten the hang of it by the time I was reclining on the couch and watching him tap and pound and scrape the drum with his miniature wooden sticks.
"My Little Drummer Boy," I pronounced as I sipped my wine and re-read Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, one of two dozen books in my library.
We were into the summer meet at Lincoln Meadows. It wasn't until I picked Nolan Francis up at Ignacia's apartment that I became aware of his cough. When Nolan Francis developed a fever, and then began having seizures that night, I drove him to the nearest emergency room where the doctor diagnosed meningitis. He put Nolan Francis in intensive care immediately where they began intravenous antibiotics.
"Bacterial meningitis," he told me, "is very serious. We will do all we can."
Nolan Francis left this world weighing twenty-one and a half pounds and measuring thirty-three inches. He had gotten sick on July 31st. He died the following Sunday, two years, two months and twenty-seven days after he had been born.
"Bacterial meningitis is difficult to stop," one of the attending nurses told me. "Even when immediately treated."
I did not think about her words. Words could not resurrect my son.
I thought about the clothes I had purchased that were waiting for Nolan Francis to wear.
I left untouched the plastic cowboys and horses in Nolan Francis' blue play box. I squeezed his little blue baseball cap. I sipped a third cup of wine as I chewed my peanut butter sandwich. Along with pretzels, and an occasional red apple for nutrition, this had become the staple of my diet after Nolan Francis left this world with me in it.
As I stared at the bookshelf where the urn holding my son's ashes set, I recalled a passage from Nicholas Nickleby: "'To go with you. Anywhere. Everywhere. To the world's end. To the churchyard grave.'"
If I knew for sure I could have joined Nolan Francis, I would have driven into the city, parked in some lonely spot along the lake and thrown myself in.
A month passed. A second month. I had found a few trainers who would use me free-lance as an exercise rider. I was too heavy to ride in the afternoon as a jockey. I numbed my feelings in order to get up in the mornings. It was still dark when I began galloping horses under the bright lights of Hickory Downs. I avoided the green riders without cursing and slowed my gallop when the siren blew its warning of a loose horse whose rider had fallen. One morning I broke out crying when I reflexively began driving toward Ignacia's apartment.
The third month passed. By now, I was twenty-five pounds overweight.
On Thanksgiving, I decided to begin taking off weight so I could return to riding as a jockey. I got rid of the wine and junk food. I brought home four bags of groceries filled with vegetables, fruits and whole wheat bread.
Every day after work, I drove home, changed into my sweats and made the short trip to the nearby forest preserve to jog. The cold did not stop me.
My weight stabilized. Slowly, I began to reduce.
I volunteered to work Christmas Eve at Sydney Carlson's barn. I fed and watered his horses in the late afternoon so that the help could have the rest of the day free. I spent almost another hour talking to War Footing and Paris Rendezvous before I drove home.
I had not had a sip of alcohol since Thanksgiving.
On Christmas Day, when the track was not open for training, I put on my sweats and drove to the forest preserve to jog. A chain hung across the entrance to the parking lot. I parked my car in the small space between the chain and the road. I began jogging. A blanket of snow covered the path. The image of Nolan Francis pounding his drum followed me as I ran. I picked up the pace until I could hear a smooth, steady tapping.
Suddenly, I fell to the ground and began sobbing. Eventually, I pushed myself to my feet. I wiped the snow from my mouth and resumed jogging. By the time I got back to the parking lot, there was a patrol car parked in front of mine, its motor running. A tall, pot-bellied policeman, pistol strapped to his waist, climbed out and came over to my car.
"Closed," he said to me.
"I jog here. It's always open."
"Not on Christmas Day."
I pursed my lips, and kept silent.
"I ran a check on your car. It's clean. Can I please see your driver's license?"
"Harriet Francis," he pronounced, and then handed my license back to me. "Do you have an auto insurance card, Harriet Francis?"
"I'm afraid I'm short on an insurance card, officer. I have a three-year-old son. Money's tight," I answered.
"That has nothing to do with it." He paused. "Where is your son now?"
"Ignacia, my babysitter... She agreed to watch him."
"On Christmas Day!"
"It's just for an hour. I needed to jog."
"What are you... one of those fanatics?"
"Officer. I'm a jockey trying to make weight so I can start riding again."
"A lady jockey. How 'bout that."
"I've been a jockey for twenty-two years, officer."
Suddenly the radio in his patrol car began to crackle.
"I have to go." he said.
As he lowered himself into the driver's seat, he said loudly: "Let me know if you make weight. Maybe it'll motivate me to reduce."
"How will I do that?"
"I patrol this preserve. Officer Richard F. Gallagher."
"What's the F stand for?"
"Francis."
"Same as my last name."
"How 'bout that. By the way. Get an insurance card."
"Thanks, Richard Francis Gallagher," I answered. "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, Harriet Francis."
He sank into the driver's seat, backed up the patrol car, then pulled forward and drove up the long, narrow road leading to Concord Avenue.
I relax in my easy chair. Nolan Francis sits in front of me, arranging his plastic cowboys. He looks up from the oval-shaped rug and holds up a riderless bay.
Drawing out the name in a soothing tone, I pronounce: "Hooooorse."
Nolan Francis gives a laugh. He grabs a cowboy from the play box and attaches him to the bay.
"Horse," he pronounces.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/0PvSgxL
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