One minute into the United States, the driver/navigator makes his first error. He misreads a highway sign (takes 190, not I-90). The one goes north, the other east. Imagine his surprise, only twenty minutes into his odyssey, as he joins the line of cars to cross the Canadian border at Niagara Falls. But he is most grateful for a small mercy—a last-chance duck-out lane on the left that spares him an embarrassing explanation at both customs checkpoints and sets him back on his wayward way.
An inauspicious start, and it gets worse before it gets better. I wake up in a Ramada Inn at Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, cast the curtains wide, and see almost a foot of snow on the ground and on my car—actually, my father’s car, which I have borrowed for the trip. I call his big Buick “Snowbird 1” and use that designation every time I call home to report on my progress, or lack of it. I am not used to Pop’s power windows and locks, and I inadvertently touch a button as I step outside at Clarks Summit to brush off one last bit of snow from the driver’s side window. When I go to reenter the car, I find every door locked. Snowbird 1 is idling, the heater blasting, the keys inside, and I am shouting a bad word in the hotel parking lot.
Dusk is close when I get to the Meadow, the farm near Doswell, Virginia, where Secretariat was born. I can hear what sounds like a distant waterfall and the insistent honk of geese overhead, heading back north (without the aid of either maps or lime green lines). Otherwise, it’s dead quiet here, which seems appropriate, because this is for me, and many others, hallowed ground.
I have, of course, read and reread Raymond Woolfe’s book on Secretariat and pored over the countless photographs he took of the Meadow and its most famous leggy foal. I know the horse farm’s story—how Christopher Chenery bought back the old family inheritance, filled the pastures with classy broodmares and foals, made it all grand. Woolfe’s photos paint a bucolic picture.
But my first hint that the Meadow is grand no more comes when I get close to the white posts and long lines of horse fencing: The paint is peeling, and some boards are broken and rotting. I know that Penny Chenery has sold the farm, that it has passed through several hands and suffered its share of bad luck, but I have also read in Woolfe’s book that someone has bought the Meadow, intent on restoring it. Yet there is no sign of life in the place—no cars parked, no staff milling about, not one horse in the pastures.
A flashy green pickup truck with horse art airbrushed everywhere emerges from the training barn, and I stop the driver, hoping to learn something of the Meadow’s current circumstances. Sandra Jones and her teenage daughter Whitney have Morgan horses at home, on nearby Peaceful Lane. The two women had kept foals at the Meadow in recent years.
The state of Virginia, they tell me, has bought the property for use as the future site of the state fair, but in the meantime the buildings are being dismantled. Scavengers, with the state’s blessing, have been ripping up useful lumber and poles from the track. Mother and daughter are on just such a mission: Meadow track poles lie in their truck bed.
“It’s a sad time here,” says Sandra Jones. She is the spitting image of a woman who works in my home stable: upbeat, apple-cheeked, horsey to the core. “When Secretariat was winning all those races, it made everybody happy here. This is an awesome place. If I had enough money, I’d buy this place in a heartbeat.” She would need, in a heartbeat, millions of dollars to outbid the state of Virginia. For all its decay, this farm is still the birthplace of Secretariat, and that fact has surely driven up the price. For years, I have read about plans to create a Secretariat museum on these grounds. I asked about the project in a state of Virginia welcome center the day before.
“They’re still talking about it,” the greeter replied, sounding a tad world-weary.
Sandra Jones remembers the Meadow in its glory, how the young Secretariat in his paddock would rush to the fences to greet any visitor. And for years, Whitney Jones says, pilgrims would come to the track and scoop up dirt in a bottle to take away as a souvenir.
Whitney—who was born in 1989, the year Secretariat died— knows the horse only in a secondhand way, through books and videos and the memories of her father, who saw him run. But you cannot live so close to the Meadow and not love its greatest foal. Whitney tells me that if you come to the Meadow track in the middle of the night, you can sometimes hear the sound of a horse galloping. She and her mother have heard it, and so have friends. Several years ago, the friends had a foal rejected by the mare, so they stayed at the Meadow training barn every night for months hand-feeding that baby. They heard the strange galloping many times, though there was clearly no horse out on the track. The sound of a lone horse breezing was always heard at the same time: three o’clock in the morning.
“Does that story frighten you or comfort you?” I ask the two women.
“Well … it’s kinda weird,” says Whitney, sounding a little worried, and then both women erupt into nervous laughter.
“It’s the spirit of Secretariat,” Whitney says with a teenager’s certainty. She is wearing heavy beige coveralls and looks the part of the tomboy farm girl. My bet is that she is unafraid of work or getting her hands dirty. “One morning,” she says as I listen at her rolled-down passenger-side window, “we came out and opened up the gate and you could feel something strong run through you, but we didn’t know what it was.”
Both women are curious to know why a Canadian writer has come all this way and what interest Secretariat holds for him. And I tell them about Eddie Sweat and his extraordinary bond with the horse, and I describe the photo Ray Woolfe took on the plane to Claiborne—Secretariat and Eddie nose-to-nose, the horse gripping his groom’s jacket with his teeth. And both women, in unison, offer that sound people make to convey how touched they are: “Awww .. .”
After the two women leave, I walk down to the training barn inside the oval track, or what remains of it. The stalls, including the one that was once home to the foal named Secretariat, are still intact. But any signs over doors, certainly any with the meadow or secretariat printed on them, have been lifted. Some outbuildings’ roofs have caved in, the screening in doors is torn, and everywhere is evidence that rust and mold and neglect have been winning the battle. Bring on the bulldozers.
I leave at dark, but not before scooping up a Styrofoam cup of light sandy red soil from the track. I know, because Sandra Jones has told me, that the track was resurfaced in recent years, so Secretariat never actually ran on this particular dirt. But I take my scoop anyway. It is what pilgrims do.
That night, it pours rain in Virginia, and the pelting keeps me awake. I have a notion of driving to the Meadow track to see if I can hear the sound of one horse galloping. But the notion fades—unlike the muffled roar from Interstate 95. There is no sound of a “distant waterfall” at Secretariat’s birthplace, just the dull and constant whine of passing engines—that other horsepower.
Next morning, I am back at the Meadow, intent on seeing the foaling shed where Somethingroyal gave birth to a Bold Ruler foal named Secretariat almost precisely thirty-five years ago.
The white shed, with its two twenty-foot-square stalls, lies across a busy road from the track and training barn. The previous night, the road was quiet, but by day it comes alive. Highway 30 east cuts the Meadow in two. The foaling shed is set off from any other barns and outbuildings, and a long fenced alleyway leading up to it lends a little grandeur. But the 17a sign over the side door, which I noticed in Ray Woolfe’s book, is gone.
And while the roof is intact and the framing still solid, the blue paint—blue and white were Meadow Stable’s colors—is chipping off the Dutch door. Inside, I see where the gophers have been making their passageways, the hornets their nests, the spiders their webs. The previous day’s visit should have prepared me, but despite the warm and welcome Virginia sun, I still feel an emptiness as I stand in front of the foaling shed. Even in present circumstances, I expected a little honor to the old boy’s memory.
Up past the sprawling Georgian house, built by someone in t
he post-Chenery period, are parked several heavy trucks with state FAIR—VIRGINIA painted on the side doors. Some wag has put on one truck’s roof the kind of small plastic markers that funeral home staff place on the hood of your car as you join the procession to the cemetery. This may be a workman’s prank, and nothing to do with the Meadow, but it seems to fit the mood of this once-splendid property falling into ruin.
I stop at the All-American Travel Plaza, a sprawling truck stop, to seek out Charlie Ross, one of Secretariat’s first grooms. These days, he cleans shower stalls, not horse stalls. But he seems harried, unsure of when he might get off later in the day, and not terribly keen on talking about the horse in any case. “Secretariat,” he tells me, “that was a long time ago.” I am disappointed, but I try to see things from his vantage point. I did notice, in Ray Woolfe’s book, pictures of Charlie Ross—a white rub rag dangling from his back pocket, grooming a young horse after a gallop, giving a rider a leg up. Thirty-three years younger, he was part of something then; he was a black man grooming good horses. Charlie Ross must have valued his work, must have been valued.
He would have watched over the years as the fortunes of the Meadow, his old workplace—not five minutes down the road from the truck stop—rose and fell, rose and fell in the Chenery wake. Now someone stands before him, a man in a white Secretariat ball cap looking eager and hopeful, tape recorder in hand. What does Charlie Ross see but a bone picker. Small wonder he would rather take a pass.
I get back on I-95 and drive south along the long green line. Next stop is Holly Hill, South Carolina, where Eddie Sweat was born and laid to rest.
The interstate’s temptations—”the world’s smallest church,” the Ava Gardner Museum, Pedro’s theme park (and the hundred or so billboards that herald it)—hold no sway with me. The cold meat and bagels, the apples and bananas, the mixed nuts and jujubes, the hefty juice and water bottles I had packed before crossing the border reduce my dependence on interstate food fare, and a good thing, too.
Every time I gas up the silver-gray Buick, the air feels warmer. The colors are changing. I left the snow back in Pennsylvania. Virginia was gray and brown. North Carolina offered the bloodred of the redbud tree and the lime green of new shoots and tender grass. A winter-addled Canuck is pleased to feel the sun on his face.
The shadows are long when I get to Holly Hill, South Carolina. The white librarian in town is helpful but does not know where Rock Hill Church is; a black patron does and gives me directions to the cemetery where Eddie Sweat is buried. The graveyard is north of Holly Hill, not far from Vance. And if you look in the telephone book for the Vance and Holly Hill area, you will find thirty-four Sweats listed.
I see, among others, Adolph and Lucile Sweat, Banetta Sweat and Blease Sweat, Lurene Sweat and Marquett Sweat, Marvin Sweat, Nettie Lou Sweat, Rajohn Sweat (there are two Rajohns, both on Hill Street, a few houses apart); there are Rhodell Sweat (Eddie’s sister-in-law) and Rufus Sweat, Tahesia Sweat, Tahersia Sweat and Tenika Sweat, Vanessa Sweat and Willie L. Sweat.
Rhodell Sweat told me on the phone that Eddie was “a nice guy, real nice guy. He was very helpful with my kids at Christmastime, stuff like that. Always trying to help. And he loved his horses.”
There is even, I will learn during my time around Holly Hill, a Sweat Street. A Mr. T. Sweat lives on Sweat Street, and I wonder if he moved there for a lark. I also wonder if an ancestor of Eddie’s did something noble, but the naming of the street—the local librarian will later inform me—has more mundane origins. When the 911 service was recently introduced, many streets, heretofore called by highway numbers, were given names. And since Mr. T. Sweat (no relation of Eddie’s) had lived on the street longest, county officials named it after him.
The Rock Hill Church cemetery, not ten minutes from Holly Hill, lies at the confluence of three dirt roads: Rock Hill Road, Chateau Lane, and Po Chance Drive. There is no sign to identify the cemetery, no wrought-iron gate or fencing, nor is there here the grim geometry of the dead that I am used to: neat rows of gray stone markers, the heads of the dead all perfectly aligned, lest anyone get a head start on heaven, or any other destination. In the graveyards I know, the dead are tightly spaced, elbow-to-elbow, everything rectangular or square.
The dead of Rock Hill Church seem more randomly situated, next to bushes or trees, the graves often festooned with wildly colorful arrangements of plastic flowers. These are not small, discreet bouquets at the base of granite markers, but bold and flashy circles and crosses, often tall and wide, and they are everywhere. It is my first, and strongest, impression: that wash of color, every color under the sun, color to nudge the dead. In this cemetery, shaped like a ragged triangle, some heart-shaped wreaths and bouquets have been dispensed with, tossed into the woods that flank one whole side. It’s as if the flowers were real, had lost their bloom, and had been left to compost on the forest floor.
Some graves lie close together, but there are many airy spaces, too, an invitation to the living, perhaps, to walk here. The longer I stay, the more I like this back-road cemetery, its quiet verve, the white-pine forest that surrounds it, the big old trees in the middle with their hanging moss, the dry crackle of curled oak leaves underfoot.
The light is fading as I make my rounds, head down, looking from grave to grave. Some, I see, have coins on them, a little pocket money for the afterlife. A full moon has already risen and baying hounds are calling to it, as are the frogs in the lowland meadows. There is a pleasant smell in the air, maybe from the white pine—”hard pine,” they call it here. Or maybe it is the sweet smell of spring.
When I do find what I am looking for, a grave right on the edge, just kissing the forest, I am surprised by the little jolt of emotion that courses through me. I did not know the man, never met him, never saw him or heard him speak. But I am moved to see the ground-level concrete bunker that houses his remains, the plain alloy and glass marker that names him—plain, as Secretariat’s stone was plain. Just name and dates: Edward Sweat, 1939–1998.
At the head of the grave, someone has placed three plastic Breyer horses, none more than six inches long. A black horse, a bay, and, no mistake, Secretariat. (Only later, when I got back home and more closely examined my photographs, did I realize that I was mistaken. The horse was only a rough facsimile of Secretariat: The chestnut color was right, but this horse had four white feet, not three, a blaze, not a stripe, on his head. What is unmistakable was the gesture. I would wonder for months who had put those horses at Eddie’s grave, and Geraldine Holman, Eddie’s sister, finally solved the mystery for me. She and Linda Sweat had been to the grave just days before I arrived. Geraldine had provided the black horse; Linda had set down the dark bay, the chestnut Secretariat look-alike, and the blue and white plastic flowers.)
This I have not planned, but I go to the car, get the white Styrofoam cup with the sandy soil from the track at the Meadow, sprinkle it at the plastic horse’s feet, as if the chestnut would like the smell of home and the feel of familiar turf, as if his old groom would appreciate the token in all its sentimentality.
“Oh Lord, there was so many people. The church was packed when my uncle died,” says Willie Perry. “And that’s a big church.” It is indeed a big church, Rock Hill Church, redbrick, with a white steeple and a white cross on top. The church is not far down the road from the cemetery; hymns sung in the church carry that distance. Down the other road that flanks the cemetery is Holly Hill Training Center, where Eddie learned his craft. Were it possible for a dead man to hear hymns or a horse’s hoof beat, he is close enough.
Eddie was born nearby on August 30, 1939. Home was a fifteen-acre farm where David and Mary Sweat raised nine children, Eddie the sixth among them. The bus he took to school as a boy went right past Holly Hill Farm. He would work after school on nearby farms, picking cotton, corn, soybeans, watermelon, potatoes. The wage was twenty-five cents a day. But he was also interested in horses and got a job working for Lucien Laurin at his training center, digging ho
les and building fences. By the age of seventeen, he was hot-walking and grooming, and he would walk the two and a half miles between home and work.
This was Eddie’s world: Lake Marion to the north, Lake Moultrie to the east, the nearby towns of Vance, Eutawville, Wells, Sand Ridge, Four Holes, Holly Hill. Eddie would become a racetrack gypsy, driving Lucien Laurin’s red van, but when it came time to put Eddie in the ground after he died in a New York City hospital, there was no question of where. They brought him home to South Carolina.
His sisters Birtha Lee Walker and Mary Lee Council told me that Eddie loved “country food,” and when he came home for visits, this is what he ate: corn bread and beans, collard greens, fried chicken, rutabagas, and sweet potato pie.
“The kids [his nephews and nieces] loved him to death,” said his oldest sister Birtha Lee, whom Eddie called “Sis.” “He used to tease them. He’d grab the food right off their plates with his hands, then hide it and claim to find it by accident. He was their favorite uncle. It was happy days when he came around.” Eddie would amuse the children with magic tricks, with quarters that appeared and disappeared in his hands and behind his ears. Some of the adults around Vance called Eddie “Big Bubba” (bubba is a word in the Geechee dialect that means “brother”), but the children found that a mouthful, so they called Eddie instead “Uncle Big Bull”—and that nickname stuck. The uncles, meanwhile, also loved to see Shorty coming, for he would have a little bottle of whiskey for each of them.
Willie Perry is sitting on his porch on Camphorwood Road, a dirt road a stone’s throw from the Holly Hill track. We sit on rough wooden furniture in front of his not-so-mobile home with its tin roof, and I riffle the pages of Raymond Woolfe’s book, hoping they will stir this man’s memories.
The Horse God Built Page 24
