Mercy Road

by Ann Howard Creel

  No one would see her shed a tear, but I had chosen to face the day open and exposed. For the first time in my life, my father would go somewhere important without me. He went back to the ground and to his maker, alone.

  Many townspeople attended, as my father had treated everyone from our stable workers and hired help to the equestrian elite with the same kindness and goodwill. His intuitive way of choosing stallions to stand at stud had become legend; he had produced many race-winning legacies. We opted to breed our own mares from time to time and occasionally raced a horse simply for the joy of it. But Papa had focused on stud service; stallions provided our bread and butter.

  As I struggled through the tarlike mud on our way out of the cemetery, my mind seized on a single heart-wrenching question, one that now haunted me and had turned my peaceful slumber into a nightly war: Why had Papa run back into a burning house?

  Two days later, wearing our borrowed black attire, Maman, Luc, and I drove into town. Since the fire we had stayed with the Edwards family, who owned a large Victorian house and bred racehorses on their farm only a mile or so away from ours. They assigned us a separate wing of their home, sent servants to attend to our needs, and began gathering clothing, shoes, hats, and other essentials so we could still go about our days and pretend to be living.

  Every meal a feast and every one of our physical needs met, still we could find no help for this. I could hear Maman weeping in her room across the hall every night. But the silence coming from behind Luc’s closed door proved even more traumatizing. Luc, like most young men, chose to suffer alone.

  Today we had an appointment to meet with Papa’s attorney in town. At least for a few hours, I would have to abandon my helpless search for something logical and comforting in the midst of so much misery. So far I’d found nothing, no semblance of reason, no answer to help me even begin to comprehend what had happened to us.

  In town, posters urging men to sign up and notices about war bond drives hung everywhere. Knowing his homeland was now a brutal battlefield had tortured Papa. Although we’d never discussed it specifically, I was sure he had donated generously to the cause.

  At our appointed meeting time, we waited outside the door of Mr. Gary Patterson’s office in a wood-paneled reception area under a shining, punched-tin ceiling in the heart of Paris, a city famous for its lovely courthouse and charming Main Street. It seemed an interminable wait; however, we knew what to expect. Papa would have left everything to Maman with some extra dispensations to Luc and me. Only the day before had I begun to think of rebuilding. It was almost unbearable to imagine a home without Papa, but I told myself we needed our own roof over our heads again.

  Mr. Patterson emerged and ushered us into his office, where he had set three upholstered armchairs to face his desk. A stout man with cherubic cheeks and a mustache that curled into almost perfect circles on both ends, Mr. Patterson had always made me smile.

  Today he wore a solemn expression, and the sadness in his eyes looked real. We barely spoke and simply sat before him while he read the will laid on the desk. As I’d expected, my father had left the bulk of his estate to Maman but had requested money set aside for Luc’s education, and he left matters concerning our sire service and business to my control.

  “Your father wished for you to attend university,” Patterson said to Luc.

  I glanced at my brother. He didn’t have to flinch for me to feel his discomfort. As of late, this topic had been a bone of contention between my father and Luc. Although well aware of Luc’s particular gifts with the horses, Papa had wanted him to receive a more formal education.

  Luc caught my eye, and I blinked a signal he was sure to receive. We did not need to take this up with Patterson. Now the three of us would make decisions, and this one could wait. Besides, Luc still had one more year of high school to complete.

  Patterson, who should have left well enough alone, said to Luc, “Your father and I discussed this once.” A small, sad smile curled his lips. “As nature might have it, you’re too big to become a jockey, and riding is much too dangerous anyway. Your father knew you hoped to train and race your own horses in the future—”

  “Yes, sir,” said Luc.

  “But he wanted you to have a broad base of knowledge. Mathematics, art, music, fine literature. So that later in your life when you travel—”

  “My life is here,” Luc said.

  He hadn’t meant to sound disrespectful, but still I sent my brother an admonishing stare. All of us exhausted from lack of sleep and the ravages of grief, we would wither in the face of more tension, especially Maman.

  “We understand,” I said to Patterson.

  Patterson put a finger between his neck and collar, loosening its grip. I sensed a shift in his posture and affect. “I need to let that wish of his be passed on; however . . .”

  I straightened.

  “Now,” he said and looked down as though hesitant to speak. Then he brought his gaze up and focused on me, not Maman or Luc. He wove his hands together on top of the desk. “If I may be so bold, I must tell you that I’ve spoken with your father’s banker, and . . .”

  A blur, like tears, bloomed in his eyes, and a dark sense of knowing ran across my brain. I sat up even straighter but remained unruffled and said, “And what?”

  Muscling his words together, he said, “I’m sorry to say . . .” A long pause and then his face filled with compassion. “That your father’s bank account is almost empty.”

  Maman gasped, but I did not. It had to be a mistake. “I’m sorry?”

  Patterson composed himself. “Yes, I’m afraid you’ve heard me correctly. The bank account . . . well, apparently your father . . .”

  “My father . . . what?”

  “This is a delicate matter, but I must relay the truth.” His voice lowered, but in the strained silence of his office, each word fell like a bomb. “I’m sorry to say that perhaps some recent decisions, er . . . it appears as if your father’s finances have suffered as of late.”

  I made myself pull in air and breathe, guardedly, as a strong sense of foreboding transformed into a painful dawning. Ever since Tornado’s sudden death, our stud service had been less lucrative. But we had endured some slower business times before, and never had it affected our lives. A careful man, Papa would have planned ahead and never left us in peril. This I knew on some instinctual level, but my training to take over had not yet extended to handling the business’s bank account.

  “Most assuredly not,” I said calmly. “There must be other accounts.”

  Patterson darted a glance aside, then focused on me again. “My first thought, too, but I’ve worked on this solidly for the past week. I hate to tell you that I’ve not been able to uncover anything else other than a small life insurance policy.”

  “Life insurance?”

  “Yes,” he said and paused. “At one time, Mr. Favier had a fire policy on the house, but he canceled it a few months ago. According to Mr. Cross at the bank, Mr. Favier had been engaged . . . in a struggle . . .”

  “Impossible,” Maman whispered in a way that sounded like a hiss, although she hadn’t intended to aim any anger at Mr. Patterson. My mother walked about now as though a cruel plot had been hatched against her, and it took every ounce of her willpower to push through each hour of each day. She turned to me. “Your father would’ve told you. Hasn’t he trained you in the financial matters? Haven’t you seen the accounts?”

  “No, Maman,” I said in a whisper, all I could muster at the moment. Since finishing high school five years ago, I’d studied and worked with Papa and had learned most of what it took to run our business, although I’d failed to glean his inexplicable way of knowing stallions. Many times Papa chose neither the biggest of the sires nor those that had won the most races. Instead he watched the horses in their paddocks, the way they moved, how they held their heads, and how they snorted and whinnied, and he could see things others couldn’t.

  Once, at a horse auction, he crouch
ed down next to me and turned me to face a stallion he was considering buying, then said, “Just watch and wait for something inside you to respond. Ask yourself if this stallion has a spark, something which you feel . . .” He put his fist gently on my chest, and continued, “In here, in the heart.”

  Papa and I were so alike and loved horses so intensely, of course I wanted only to follow in his footsteps. But though I’d been given more and more authority to make decisions over the years, I still had not, as of then, chosen a stallion on my own or made any major financial moves.

  I answered Maman, “I’ve taken over many duties, but I’ve not made a deposit or withdrawal. Papa wanted me to know the day-to-day operations like the back of my hand . . . first.” The words died in my throat. Perhaps Papa had not given me access to the money for a different reason. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted me to see a bank balance going down and down. But my mind yelled Impossible! in almost the exact tone as Maman’s.

  “If you please, surely, there are things he hadn’t shown you yet,” said Maman with a bit of desperation. Of course by things she meant more money, more accounts, more assets.

  Patterson clenched his hands together. “Your father made a large withdrawal on the day he died, almost everything left. According to Mr. Cross, to purchase a stallion . . .”

  Of course. Papa and I had made it our mission to replace Tornado, although he’d never truly be replaced. We owned several fine stallions, but Tornado had been our biggest success story, siring many fine racehorses. We not only respected what he had done for us; we loved him. And so when one morning six months earlier, Luc discovered him dead in his stall for no apparent reason, it shook us to the core. Horses are unpredictable animals, and sometimes even during their prime years, a sudden ailment or call from the heaven of horses takes them. But Tornado had seemed invincible. Luc, despite his instincts and attunement to our animals’ every need, had intuited nothing, and his devastation became unending. Even Maman, who normally kept her life separate from the horses and only indirectly understood what we did, felt the painful loss.

  But we owned other profitable animals. I still couldn’t fit my thoughts around what Patterson had said. It couldn’t be . . . but yes, as I considered this news, I realized that it was true; we hadn’t acquired as many stud service contracts lately. Chicory hadn’t had a good year, producing for our customers fewer mares in foal and fewer live births. Another of our stallions had developed a visual ailment, and we’d had to put him down. But the result couldn’t be an almost empty bank account.

  Pieces began to click together. Papa and I had chosen a gray stallion to replace Tornado. The young Thoroughbred, named Cotton Coat, was costly because of his rarity; he had lineage to Pink Star, a Bourbon County racehorse that won the Derby in 1907. Pink Star had developed a fever later in his career and never went to stud. Cotton Coat, his much younger cousin, seemed like an excellent choice. But more importantly Papa had seen that special quality he always looked for in a sire of champions. He’d planned to pick up CC, as we’d affectionately dubbed him, on the day following the fire.

  Now it came back to me. Papa had planned to take me along when he picked up the stallion. By then everyone knew I was immune to the call of a traditional woman’s life. When given my first doll, I had liked her, but she didn’t move or breathe or whinny or bark like my other friends, and soon I cut her hair short and stripped her down to her pantalets so she could ride atop Tornado like a boy.

  Papa had laughed out loud when he saw her, but Maman had wrung her hands, turned on her heels, and stomped away from the stables, where I played every evening until forced inside by one or both of my parents. Although considered attractive (my papa had said “bu-tee-fool”) and already twenty-three, I’d never taken to courting. Maman had eventually come around; she saw that my destiny lay in breeding. Papa had been preparing me for life as a horse breeder, as the head of a family business that meant more than just business; it was our dream.

  As I sat in Patterson’s office, the truth came to me fully formed as another scream I would not let escape me. My father had raced back into a burning house for the cash, for money he would never have told anyone, not even me, meant so much. All to no avail, and all causing us to instead suffer the biggest loss of our lives.

  Luc would not continue his education at a university after high school, because we had no money for it. I would not purchase Cotton Coat and revive our stud service, because the cash had burned in the fire. And Maman would not rebuild the house she’d so lovingly decorated and managed, because we had no insurance to pay for its replacement. And none of us would ever again know the inexplicable joy that came from my father’s very pores, the peace and pleasure he brought everywhere and to everyone, especially the three of us.

  If only he had left the money to burn!

  But that was not Papa. A gentleman with a quiet and calm demeanor, he also possessed the will of a fighter. One did not cross the Atlantic to bring back a painting for his fiancée, one did not leave a farm he might have inherited to make his own name, and one did not discover stallion kings using only his gut instincts without a fighter’s way and will. He had protected us from the truth; instead, he’d planned to take a leap of faith with CC. I’d had no idea; the purchase of the new stallion had struck me as nothing less than a joyous event.

  Yes, Papa had tried to save us. But as it turned out, nothing could do that.

  Chapter Three

  The next day, Luc drove the two of us to the farm in our 1914 Chevrolet Baby Grand, one of Papa’s prized possessions. Parked by the barn, both the Chevrolet and our old converted Model T had survived the fire and had suffered nothing more than soot on their hoods. Neither of us spoke during the short drive, and once we arrived, Luc headed to the stables, whereas I faced the house and took my first hard look at the remains.

  The smell of charred wood emanated, even though the air held still. Other than the remains of two stone chimneys, nothing stood but pieces of beams and the twisted limbs of the staircase, and among them, blackened piles of stinking rubbish that would someday turn to dust. Now that I knew we would not rebuild anything, the sight of it nearly blinded me with disbelief.

  I’d always believed that like the horses, I would sense a change in the wind, that I would feel something ominous on the horizon coming our way. So many times, I’d witnessed the way a horse perks up and flicks its ears forward a second or so before any sign of danger. Horses intuit impending storms, approaching animals, even the birth of a foal nearby. Inexplicably they go on alert. I’d thought something of that horse sense dwelled inside me, too. Now, I knew better.

  A faint haze of ash still floated in the air, or maybe I imagined it. I brushed my shoulders anyway. I had to take special care of my borrowed attire. Olive Taylor, a friend from school of similar tall and lean build with small hands and feet, had loaned me two everyday calf-length dresses, one suitable for church and business and a more practical one for wear at home. Today I wore the casual one, sunny yellow with a cinched empire waist and puffed sleeves. I stood grayly within it.

  After the fire investigation, friends of ours had searched the wreckage and found nothing save one small brass statue of a jockey from the upstairs fireplace mantel in Maman and Papa’s bedroom. It must have fallen far enough away from the inferno to survive in a blackened but intact shape. Maman kept it, her only remaining memento of Papa, at her bedside. I grasped the small gold baby locket I wore on a delicate chain around my neck—the one thing I had from the house other than the nightdress I wore on that night. It held a tiny photo of me as an infant that my father had placed there.

  So far, I’d made no arrangements for cleanup. On the night of the fire, Papa had said, “We may never know . . .” A prophetic statement. No one, not even the fire investigator, could determine the exact source of the fire.

  Turning away for a moment, I gazed over our rich land gently rolling in all directions, so in contrast to the pile of what was left of our home. When I looked
toward the remains again, my chest tore open. I closed my eyes and wished for the cauterized rubbish to fly away on some errant wind. I never wanted to see it again.

  Then a split second of desperation took me two steps closer to the rubble. Could Papa have placed the money in a safe or fireproof box I might still uncover? But that amounted to foolishness, and I stopped still. Papa had hidden everything about his troubles from us. He’d always promised to take me to France, and about a year or so before the fire, I’d asked him about going over. He, of course, reminded me that a war raged in his home country, but now I wondered if money had worried him even then.

  A flock of sparrows took flight from a nearby tree and scattered to the heavens as though they, too, had given up on finding something below.

  I returned to the stables, where the scents of horses and hay gathered and Luc stood grooming Chicory. Our stable boy was around but out of earshot. Maybe now Luc and I could have the conversation we needed to have. Luc waited for me to start, while Chicory gave off one of those snuffle-snort sounds only horses make.

  “What now?” I asked.

  People outside our family rarely asked Luc for his opinion. He continued to brush Chicory but glanced in my direction. “We’ll begin again.”

  I held my tongue. I hated to shatter his remaining dreams. That day, Luc wore loaned work pants and suspenders, no hat, and even with the wrinkled light that came through tiny cracks in the grooming stall, his clothing and blondish hair appeared dull, as if the ash outside had made its way here. He had pomaded his hair and slicked it back this morning, but his normally straight part on the side ran a bit crooked. Papa would’ve laughed, play-punched him, and sent him back inside the house to fix it. I opened my mouth to speak, but something swelled my throat and stole my breath.