Hotspur

CHAPTER 16

A thin wisp of ground fog snaked over the pasture where Lafayette, Rickyroo, Keepsake, and Aztec munched and a family of raccoons crossed toward the garbage cans in the barn. Occasionally if Sister forgot to close the tack room door the raccoons would open the desk drawer and pull out bags of bite-sized Hershey’s bars. They loved sweets, as did the possums who followed them at a discreet distance.

Lafayette lorded it over the Rickyroo and Aztec, both young horses at six and five respectively. He relayed the day’s hunting, from the first moment the bit was in his mouth to his wash down with warm water in the wash stall, in colorful detail.

Keepsake, eight years old and a thoroughbred/quarter horse cross, thought Lafayette was laying it on a little thick. He nibbled twenty feet away from the three thoroughbreds. He liked them well enough but he felt he was more intelligent, or at least less gullible.

He noticed the downstairs lights in the house going off, the upstairs bedroom light switching on. The blue light of the television shone from Shaker’s window. He noticed Showboat, Gunpowder, and Hojo, three former steeplechasers, dozing in the adjoining pasture. Each of them had been donated to the hunt for the huntsmen’s use. Sometimes that meant the horses were orangutans; no one else could handle them, so this was the last stop unless the owner shipped them off to the killers. Few foxhunters wanted to put a horse in the knacker’s trailer no matter how badly the animal behaved. But the Jefferson Hunt membership had a wide sweep of contacts. Gunpowder had even spent time competing on the flat track. Having run over timber in steeplechase meets, these three disdained the jumps in the hunt field and thought any equine who even glanced sideways at such a puny obstacle, the largest being three feet six inches, was a wimp.

Keepsake could and would jump anything, so he shrugged off their air of superiority.

The night was thankfully cool and pleasant, the breeze still easterly. Sister turned off the air-conditioning and opened the bedroom windows.

The horses and hounds could faintly hear Mozart’s A Little Night Music floating from her bedroom. Then her phone rang.

She groaned, wondering what the problem was. A night call usually meant a problem. A master’s work is endless, whether physical or political, putting out the brush fires flaring up within the hunt club, any hunt club. Some fool left a gate open, another printed up the trail riding schedule and one date was wrong. Someone else hated that cubbing started so early in the morning and they were sure this was a conspiracy to keep them home.

Any group of humans swirls about in a fog of gossip, misunderstanding, and good intentions. Political maneuvering makes for strange bedfellows—and in many an instance the bedfellows really are in bed together. Foxhunting seems to foster even more of that than other activities. The people, by nature, are hot-blooded just like their horses.

By the end of any given day, Sister’s reserves of emotional restraint ebbed.

Not all humans depleted her. The ones she loved energized her: Betty Franklin, Shaker Crown, Tedi and Edward Bancroft, and she thought she could learn to love Dr. Walter Lungrun. Maybe it was because he rented Peter Wheeler’s old place and she’d loved Peter, had even been his lover for years. In some ways, Walter reminded her of her husband, a curious resemblance, although socially Walter was more reserved than Raymond. Raymond had come to life in a group, his natural element.

Because of that, Raymond had made a fantastic field master. He’d understood the hounds, but he’d loved the people.

Sister felt her husband had been a better field master than she. She would occasionally forget about the people, so intense was her focus on the hounds. But she put her field in the right place time after time, which they greatly appreciated.

Ray Junior had taken after his father. She’d assumed he’d follow her as field master and then master someday.

She often thought of her husband and son at nighttime. The house, quiet, yielded up memories. Even Golly, a naturally mouthy cat, rested her voice at night.

Melancholy and Sister were never on good terms. She wasn’t one to dwell on her losses, on the sorrows that come to us all if we live long enough. They were part of life. If anything, she had learned to thank God for them. Her losses taught her about grace and true love. Her victories taught her to be generous and ultimately thankful.

Tonight as she listened to that most delicious of Mozart compositions, it occurred to her that the structure of music and literature were one and the same thing.

Then the damn phone rang just as this insight was unfolding.

“This better be good!” she growled into the receiver.

A muffled but queerly familiar voice said, “Master, look off the Norwood Bridge—the deep end.”

“I beg your pardon.” She sat bolt upright.

Both Raleigh and Rooster lifted their heads. Golly, on the pillow next to Sister, pricked forward her ears to better hear the voice on the other end of the line.

“A fifty-five-gallon drum.”

“Who is this?”

“Hotspur.” With a click, the call ended.

Her hand shaking, she called the sheriff. He’d once given her his cell phone and his home numbers, which she’d prudently placed by the kennel, stable, kitchen, and bedroom phones.

She reached Ben and related her bizarre phone call. Then she hung up, slipped on her moccasins, her white terry cloth robe with her initials, JOA, stitched on the left breast pocket, and hurried down the back stairs into the kitchen. She charged out the back door, running toward Shaker’s.

All the horses trotted along with her in their paddocks.

Trident, gazing at the stars, still thrilled from his first hunt, saw her dash to the huntsman’s cottage. “What’s Sister doing?”

Asa, also outside for a walkabout, said, “Go to sleep, son. You’ve had a big day.” But he knew something was coming down.

Sister knocked on Shaker’s door knocker, a brass crown. “Shaker, Shaker, forgive me for disturbing you.”

He opened the door, bare-chested, toothbrush in hand. “What’s happened?”

“Oh, Shaker, I heard a voice from the dead.”