Breeding Ground (3 page)

“Is that how you knew him? Motorcycles?”

“No. We served together in the war.”

“So. You know about the O.S.S.?” She'd been watching him closely when she asked that, before she turned toward the kitchen and shoved her hands in her pants pockets. “How 'bout a cup of coffee?”

“Thanks.” He started adding logs to the fire, arranging them with a poker, making sparks fly up the flue.

“There's a letter from Tom on the table. He left me something to give you. Go ahead and read it.”

He'd picked it up before she'd finished talking, and was holding it up to the light from one of the tall front windows when she walked off to the kitchen.

He was sitting in front of the fire when she came back with the coffee, and he said, “That smells good, thanks. Have you listened to Tom's tape?” Alan Munro sipped his coffee and set his mug on the arm of the sofa, his long legs stretched toward the fire, his eyes still on the letter.

“The power's still off, and Tom's tape recorder's packed, and I probably won't get a chance till I get home to Lexington. I was planning to leave tomorrow.”

“It's supposed to melt overnight.”

“Good.”

“Who's ‘Mimi the miscreant?'”

“She was a four-year-old mare I bought after I had to put my old horse down, and we didn't get along. She tested me constantly, and was generally unpredictable, and I didn't have the patience for that then. Not with everything else that was going on. So what will you do with his book of names?”

“Keep it. We knew some people in common and I might want to get in touch.”

“Are you a mechanical engineer too?”

“No, I'm a chemical engineer. Is Sam okay?”

“I think he'll be fine. I'll start feeding him a little at a time, and watch him really closely. I checked on him while I made the coffee.”

“Tom used to say Sam was one in a million, but I never understood why.”

“Right now he's one more piece of Tommy's life that I've got to take care of.”

“I see.” He folded the letter and handed it back.

“Our Mom died in October, and I'm still sorting out her stuff.”

“And that's on top of missing her.”

Jo put her feet on the coffee table and crossed her arms across her middle. “She died of a brain tumor, and she wasn't herself for two years. She told me she hated me most days, till she got so she couldn't talk. Then she'd glare, or turn away. That was while she could see and move.”

“Ah.” Alan Munro looked away from Jo, and sat staring at the fire for a minute, rubbing the scar on his jaw. “So you're disgusted with Tom for doing it to you too? Making you clean up his mess?”

“No! I loved Tommy, but—”

“It's a lot of death too soon.”

“Yeah. You always put words in people's mouths?”

“No.” He laughed. “Sometimes, though.”

“You think Tommy killed himself?” Jo stared straight at the fire, her hands clenched in her lap.

“Absolutely not. Why would you ask that?”

“The letter. It was a strange thing to do. It could've been a suicide note. Like he'd planned his own death.”

“Nope. Not Tom. That was what he wanted to say to you. You. Josie. And he made sure he got it done in case he broke his neck over a jump, or got driven off the road. Right? Tom made plans.”

“That's what's got me worried.”

“He talked about you a lot, you know.”

“Did he.” Jo didn't ask it like a question. It came out cold and flat, and her face seemed to close down.

“He'd recently met a woman too, I think he was really interested in.”

“Tommy? Where? He never said a word.”

“One of his jobs. He'd been helping design storage facilities for an oil company based in Fairfax. She's one of their chemists.”

“So that's what he meant in the letter. That he still had hopes there might be a woman for him.”

“Sounds like it to me. I think he wondered if he was too set in his ways to marry anybody, though. After living alone for so long.”

“Why didn't he tell me anything about her?”

“Wouldn't he have, if he'd seen you? He only mentioned her to me once, when we'd spent two days on a road trip.”

“Maybe. You couldn't get much out of him on the phone. Unless he called you.”

“True.” Alan Munro laughed, and threw another log on the fire. “He hadn't even gone out with her when he saw you at Christmas.” Alan studied Jo for a second, as she played with the bottom of Tom's sweater, before he added, “A pickup truck hit Tom out of the blue. There wasn't anything he could do.”

“Why did he do things he knew were that dangerous? He rode Sam alone cross country all the time, trailering him all over, jumping walls and fences when he didn't have a clue what was on the other side. And skydiving, for heaven's sake! It seemed like after he got back from the—”

“War?”

“Yes.”

“That's how it took some of us. Others, it was safety first, once we got back. Keep your head down, and don't make—”

“It was hard, if you loved him. We worried about him, and prayed for him constantly, all those years he was fighting in Europe. Mom, and Uncle Toss and I. And then he comes back and leaves again. He travels all over, and does everything he can think of to test himself, or endanger his own life and limb, almost as though he wanted to—”

“He explained it some in the letter.”

“Still.”

“What if you tamed lions for a living, and then you were forced to sort mail in a post office?”

“It's not quite the same, is it? I can imagine myself liking the lions, but—”

“War brings out the best, and the worst, and triggers a lot of unexpected reactions. Though that was an unintended pun.”

“I don't want him to be gone.”

“No. I don't either. Tom was a great friend.”

They were both quiet for a minute. Watching the fire. Feeling the heat and the hurt in the air. Wondering where else to go with both.

“How old were you in '45, when he got back from the war?”

“Almost fifteen.”

“Ah.” Alan set his mug on the table and pushed himself up off the sofa. “I guess I ought to head back.”

“Aren't you going to tell me about the O.S.S.?”

“I don't know that there's that much to tell. You listen to the tape, and then maybe we could talk again. If you want to.” He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the table.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I work for a pharmaceutical firm, but I'm actually moving to Lexington. I've taken a job with an equine pharmaceutical company and I start in a couple of weeks.” He laughed at the look on her face, and picked up his coat.

Jo was holding the card, reading the address in Fairfax. “Why Lexington? Why equine drugs all of a sudden?”

“I'm tired of working for a big company, and my boss, whom I like a lot, is a long time friend of the guy who started Equine Pharmaceuticals in Lexington, and he put me in touch.”

“Bob Harrison. Sure. I don't know him well, but I know him.”

“Tom told me he respected him as a scientist. And I'm ready to live in a smaller town. I'm sick and tired of D.C., and I'm interested in horses. Tom did that for me. Tom and Sam. I don't know, I can't explain it all, but I'm ready for a big change.”

“Lexington'll be that.”

“Maybe I'll call you in a couple of weeks. When you've had a chance to listen to the tape. If you wouldn't mind. Once I get to town.”

“So you won't talk about the O.S.S. either? Just like Tom?”

“We'll see. If you give me your number and address.” Alan pulled a small spiral notebook from his coat pocket and handed it to Jo. “Is there anything you need help with? Loading Tom's books in the truck? Or—”

“Thanks. I'm just taking his personal stuff now. His landlord is shipping the books when he gets back this week. He'll sell Tom's truck and horse trailer for me too.”

“Let me know if I can help before you go. Tom would never forgive me if I didn't help Josie when she needed it.”

“Jo.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you're not.” She smiled for the first time, then stood up and picked up the mugs. “You're teasing me just like Tom. Thanks, anyway. Thanks for coming all the way out here.”

“The least I could do.” Alan Munro grinned at her then, and opened the door.

“Which kind are you?”

“What?”

“Do you take more and more risks, or keep your head down and not make waves?”

“That's a good question.” Alan turned away from her, and stuck his arms out to the side, then slid fast down the ice-covered walk, stopping himself with his hands, finally, on the hood of his navy blue Dodge.

Saturday, April 14, 1962

O
nce Jo Grant got Sam home from Tom's, she rode him four times a week, trying to keep him going so he'd be ready to sell as a dependable hunter, before or after she got back from studying eighteenth century architecture on the East coast.

Sometimes she hacked Sam around the farm through woods and fields she knew well. Sometimes she worked him on the flat, concentrating on gait changes and prompt responses to aids.

The day her life took its next unexpected turn, which came out of Tom's past, and got complicated by hers – that day she'd ridden Sam on the flat in the secondhand dressage saddle Tom had brought back from Europe.

She'd never even heard of dressage before Tom saw it in Switzerland. But she liked the way the saddle sat her up straight, and Sam had moved really well under it, even with the wind pounding into them making it hard to move at all.

Toss had taken the rest of the horses in long before Jo was done with Sam, and plenty of horses would've thrown a temper tantrum from having to stay out alone with a storm on its way in. But even though Sam had been worrying underneath her, he'd paid attention and done what she'd asked, and only leapt sideways once.

When she climbed off, Jo kissed him on the snoot, and told him he'd been a very good boy – and realized how much she meant it. He was using his hindquarters better at the trot. His canter was one of the most comfortable she'd ever sat. And she knew why Tom had liked Sam as much as he had.

She led him into the second broodmare barn, wind whipping them both hard, rattling doors and windows, which unsettles horses more than dogs or people, so that when they walked through the barn door, Maggie and two other mares trumpeted so loudly, saying something they had to say to Sam, it actually hurt Jo's ears.

Sam waited quietly in the aisle-way while she took off his tack and rubbed him down. And he was just as patient in his stall, not trying to rush to his feed tub, even though the others were eating and he knew his grain was waiting.

Sam stood, breathing softly, ruffling his lips against the side of Jo's neck as she talked to him and rubbed his chin, and pulled his halter off his head.

He was crunching loudly before she got to his stall door, snuffling his lips through the oats and corn. And Jo smiled to herself without even noticing as she slid the heavy barn door shut, and ran towards home.

It was almost a quarter of a mile from that barn to her house farther north on the same high ridge. And as Jo trotted home, she watched the clouds churn across the sky, white and grey and black now, with streams of sunlight still pouring between them, making the new spring green of the hills incandescent in the sun.

All her life she'd loved the hilltops she could watch from that ridge, as they rolled off behind each other as far as she could see, like wet sand ridges left behind by the sea.

Some hills were wooded, some plowed fields, some blue grass and alfalfa – a hundred shades of green together sprinkled with brown and grey, with wild redbuds turning pink in the woodlots that were laced with white dogwood too.

Jo stopped for a minute, the wind from the north lashing her face, making her lips part if she didn't fight it, letting herself give-in for once to how much she loved that land.

She knew she couldn't leave it forever. She'd see what she had to see and come back. But she needed time to let the past slide behind her. To breathe, without rushing, and think. To remember what she'd loved, and why, now that it was lost.

She was facing the world without Tom at her back. Tommy. Who'd lived harder and wider. Who'd had a way of seeing that had comforted her since birth.

She had work she wanted to do though. A calling worth taking up. And that was a gift that meant something.
If
she kept herself from getting snagged by the family business.

There were forty-some Thoroughbred mares on the farm right then, on twelve hundred acres; mares they boarded for other people after they'd been bred; mares they took to the stallions too and brought home from there. They cared for them for ten months or more, then delivered the foals, and kept them with their dams till they were weaned in the fall. Even till they were yearlings, sometimes, when they'd go on to their owners, or the yearling sales at Keeneland, or less prestigious auctions.

There were mares on the Grant farm who'd lived there since they were born, kept in foal by their owners, much more Grant horses, really, in every sense except legal.

Grants rarely raised the high stakes Thoroughbreds from the famous racing stables. No Grant had gotten rich at this. But it was work her dad had loved, and Toss, her mother's brother, still wanted to do, that let them keep their heads above water, and work for themselves.

It was hard work, and it kept you home, caring for horses round the clock. Hardly sleeping come springtime, staying up with the foaling. Raising feed crops. Repairing fence. If the Grants were going to make anything to speak of, they had to do the work themselves without a lot of hired help, except during foaling.