Breeding Ground (35 page)

Jo slipped her arms around Alan's waist and leaned her head on his chest. “Do you ever have the feeling that Tommy's done this to us? Put us together somehow, before he was killed?”

“He did talk about you even more after I told him I was considering taking a job here. He was careful. And clever. And I never felt pushed. But looking back, he got me interested long before I met you.”

“It was him talking about you on the tape that made me start to pay attention and see how much there is to you. And when you lectured me, it made me furious. Because I knew you were right.”

“You mean my obvious charms didn't do the trick?” Alan slid his forefinger down the scar along his jaw and rubbed the leg that made him limp.

“That doesn't matter. You've got great shoulders.”

They both laughed, and he kissed her again. And then the front door opened and Emmy flew out, leaping up and down around them. Toss was standing there staring at them in faded red pajamas with his hair sticking straight up on top of his head. He tapped one of his crutches on the floor, as though it were an impatient foot, and said, “If you two don't want to get some sleep, I do! Some of us have work to do first thing in the morning!”

He smiled then, and winked at Alan, before he clumped across the dining room toward the bedroom that had been Jo's mom's.

Jo said, “He claims he'll be moving back to his house early next week.”

“You think he should?”

“I don't know. I guess whenever he can drive.”

Alan wrapped his arms around Jo again and kissed her on the forehead. “He's making me feel like a teenager.”

“I expect that's what he intended.”

“May I come and ride this week?”

“Sure. You can ride Sam instead of Flicker too. You know, when I think about how I almost sold him, it makes me sick to my stomach. What was I thinking?”

“You weren't you right then. You'd lost Jed and your mom and Tom. You couldn't face getting close or taking care of anyone. I've been there. And stayed there too many years.”

“Maybe that's what Tommy saw. We were both walking around wounded in our own ways. Not unlike him.”

“I suspect he saw more than that.”

“True. Tommy was very perceptive. My whole life, I think he was consciously helping me grow up. Talking to me. Explaining what went on. Setting me obstacles too, and watching how I got over.”

“I wish you'd seen him one more time, knowing he'd be gone.”

“I do too, let me tell you.”

“Anyway. I guess I better go.”

Jo kissed him one more time, and started to step away.

“Josie…” Alan was looking at her with shyness and determination and an anxious sort of seriousness, but he didn't finish the sentence.

“What?” Jo was close up against him again, leaning back to study his face.

“I want to get to know you better, and have it happen fast.” His face had been sliced into shadow and light by the carriage lamp beside him. And he looked sadder and more uncertain than Jo had ever expected to see him, when he swallowed and said, “I just turned forty. You're thirty-two. I don't want to waste any more time. If that makes sense to you.”

Jo kissed the side of his neck, and nodded her head against his chest.

Emmy jumped up and put a paw on both their knees, and Jo looked down and shook her head. “No jumping up. You have to get down.”

Jo and Alan both leaned over and patted her when all four feet were on the floor. And Jo whispered, “You're a very good girl,” and kissed her on the forehead.

“She is, isn't she? She's going to be a great dog. Anyway, I better go. You've got to work on the toe space.”

Jo laughed, and said, “Family business! It brings out the best and the worst.”

“Like war. Don't you think? The War of the Roses? More than a few similarities there with family business. Sibling jealousy. Political maneuvering. Family members taking the easy way out, when—”

“'Course the stakes are smaller in a family business. Other than with the Rothschilds. And there aren't as many assassinations.”

Alan smiled and said, “Maybe kings and entrepreneurs don't make the best dads.”

“Maybe. What kind of dad would you make?”

“I don't know.” Alan didn't look at Jo. He kissed her forehead and stepped off the porch, heading down the path toward his car. “That remains to be seen.”

T
here's a lot more I'd like to tell about. Because things have changed in the last thirty-four years that ought to be pondered. What happened with Toss and Buddy and Jack, and Spencer's family too. With Alan and his boss, and Charlie Smalls, the stallion groom. With Mercer Tate, and his farm. With Secretariat, revolutionizing racing, and standing at stud at Claiborne, and the fire at Blue Grass Horse Vans. But it won't get written here. Now. It'll take another book, or two. Or maybe even three.

I'd like to explain about Alan and me, and what's grown up between us. Which changed our lives forever, and several more besides – including our three sons'. Meeting Jack's mom was an unnerving experience I can promise you I won't forget. And who Jack met again, and how it was between them, when he went back to France deserves contemplation.

I did get to go East (and South and West and North), and to Europe more times than I expected, for work and pleasure both.

I've been involved in two family businesses now. Intimately, if not objectively. And the pressures and stresses, and the satisfactions too – the unpredictable ramifications of genes and upbringing and changing generations – have been wide and deep, and wake me up in the night, alternately smiling and gnashing my teeth.

It can be a hard ride, working in the horse business. Which makes my part of Kentucky as small as a wren's nest, and as wide as the world that comes to buy our horses. Who break our hearts like our own kids. And make us want to get up in the morning to see what the day brings.

I hope I can write again about the families here that keep the horses going; the people you know now and the ones who matter you haven't met; the home-places that shape us all; and the worries too that drive us on; the hatreds that fester, and the ones that fuel the flames of violence and despair.

And I will write that and something more if I'm given time to do it. And I don't say that without meaning it. I've been told I'd be dead in six months or less. And it “concentrates the mind wonderfully” – to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.

But that pronouncement came a year ago. And what's kept me here is a whole 'nother story I'll tell if God gives me time.

It changes things. Death breathing down your neck. In lots of ways for the better. Alan and I had a whole year we knew we couldn't count on. (Which is the only kind any of us have, though we normally just ignore that.) I don't complain about the weather anymore. And it feels like a gift to be strong enough to scrub my own floors and do dishes. And now we've got grandkids coming, and I ask pretty much everyday for a chance to watch them grow up.

Writing this book helped while I was in the worst of it – the worst that's happened so far. It made me concentrate outside myself on work I thought was worth doing. And I hope it's a book you think about sometimes, when you're driving your car or drifting off to sleep, that made you smile, and worry some, and glance at where you've been, too, and how you want to end up.

Jo Grant Munro

October 15, 1996

Rolling Ridge Farm

McGowan's Ferry Road

Versailles, Kentucky

Jim and Carlee Miller ran a broodmare business like Jo and Toss' next door to us in Ohio before they moved their business to Versailles, Kentucky. I missed being able to look out my windows and see mares and babies flying around, but when we visited them in Versailles, they drove us to the races at Keeneland, introduced us to friends in the Thoroughbred business, and took us to watch mares being bred at a famous barn. When I got ready to write
Breeding Ground
, they answered countless questions about the ins-and-outs of their broodmare operation, and discussed their experiences working in Lexington's horse community.

Pat Salomon, a long-time friend, taught me most of what I know about horses while she boarded my first two, and taught my kids how to ride the real-life Bert. She helped me learn dressage on a modest level on my own “Sam” (a quarter-horse-Thoroughbred-cross named Max, who appears as himself in two of my Ben Reese novels).

In the early 1980s, one of Pat's friends worked at Claiborne Farm and arranged for our family to meet Secretariat – who waited at the hilltop corner of his paddock till his groom had stationed us at the opposite corner. He charged straight down the hill, reared up inches away from us, whipped his head from side to side, stamped a front hoof a time or two, then stood quietly, graciously looking each one of us in the eye with an obvious sense of noblesse oblige, before accepting our carrots.

Seeing him (and Riva Ridge and Spectacular Bid) at the Claiborne operation was partly responsible for making me want to write about Lexington's horse world.

Peggy Brown, a good friend, and well known Centered Riding instructor who's taught professional riders (as well as amateurs like me) all over the world, helped me with my last horse. She and Sue Harris (another very well known instructor with whom Peggy works and writes) also let me question them closely about horse behavior and training techniques during, and after, the sixties.

Interviewing MacKenzie Miller, the much revered trainer who won every important Thoroughbred race when he trained for Paul Mellon, Charles Engelhard and others, was an inspiring experience for me. His integrity, and love of horses, and his perceptions about competing well in a business that sometimes attracts the crooked and the cruel, framed the way I approached the book. He and his wife, Martha, couldn't have been kinder, when they didn't know me from Adam.

It was my friend Betsy Pratt Kelly in Midway who put me in touch with the Millers. She and my other friends in Versailles and Midway – Sharon and Jim Rouse, Peggy and Joe Graddy, Jonelle Fisher, and Kaye Bell (who was once an exercise rider for Mack Miller, who told me “she
did
have a clock in her head”) – answered a whole lot of questions, and introduced me to more of their friends, which gave me an appreciation, and some small level of understanding of the history and community they've been born and raised in.

Dr. Rick Henninger, my horses' vet for many years, answered my equine medical questions, even researching the techniques and pharmaceuticals used in the early sixties in ways I wouldn't have been able to. Talking to him has always been a pleasure and I couldn't have written the book without him.

I was helped in the Loire region of France by Jean-Jacques DeGail, who's spent much of his life studying WWII. He and his wife live near Esvres-sur-Indre in a very beautiful old mill – and there he helped shape my understanding of France during and after the war, as well as the character and accomplishments of the local and national Resistance. The story of the anti-Nazi priest being betrayed and sent to a concentration camp in Germany, and the local villagers denying today that there
were
collaborators in their village –
and
that he was sent to his death – is an accurate depiction.

For those interested in the horse business in Kentucky, I would recommend three biographies by Jonelle Fisher, a long time resident of Midway:

For All Times: The Story of Lucas Brodhead

MacKenzie Miller: The Gentleman Trainer from Morgan Street

A Soul Remembering: A Collection of Vignettes

These books too helped me understand the Thoroughbred world, and the horses who work there:

Equine ER: Stories From A Year In The Life Of An Equine Veterinary Hospital
by Leslie Guttman

Secretariat: The Making Of A Champion
by William Nack

The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat, The World's Greatest Race Horse
by Lawrence Scanlan

The references in
Breeding Ground
to the OSS are based on fact. William Fairbairn, “the Shanghai Buster” was, indeed, OSS's legendary hand-to-hand combat instructor, and among his many other contributions, he did teach a method for folding a newspaper into a lethal weapon.

The Aunt Jemima and Casey Jones explosive devices
were
invented by OSS's R&D team, and were used to destroy trains and other transport behind-the-lines in enemy occupied territories during WWII. There were many other gadgets invented in the OSS labs – several less practical; a few quite amusing.

The depictions of the factions within the French Resistance are based on fact, and the tensions between them did substantially compromise the functioning of the underground, and complicate politics all across France after the war.

For those interested in reading more about the OSS and the French Resistance, I can recommend:

Operatives, Spies And Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII's OSS
by Patrick K. O'Donnell

Is Paris Burning?
by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created The OSS and Modern American Espionage
by Douglas Waller

France: The Dark Years 1940-1944
by Julian Jackson

An American Heroine In The French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia D'Albert-Lake,
edited with an introduction by Judy Barrett Litoff

Carve Her Name With Pride: The Story of Violette Szabo
by R.J. Minney

There are many other excellent books that examine the OSS and the French Resistance. The ones I've mentioned barely suggest a place to start.