It was a note of genuine misery. Medicine Ed felt called on in some new way, for something he ain't never have to dip out the well before in his life. He want to come up with it, but he don't know where to look. He suddenly remembered Bernice, who worked in the kitchen at Whirligig Stables-her daughter Marie. Bernice had worked and worked for that girl. Not worked. Slaved. Marie was neat and quiet and never sassed and she had even started to college up at Coppins, but soon's she meet that Diamond Doug in some club she want to throw herself away after him. Then the more you talked to her, even though she know you right, the more she felt the pull. The more she want to give herself up to the hot melt of that Diamond Doug dragging his net in the deep water. What it was-something strong and washed in the blood like religion done got her. Some old romance story. Then nothing work on her, not sense, not money, not nature feelings, not her mother begging her, not even the twenty-dollar spell from some root woman, nothing.
It ain't him, Medicine Ed said. She caught in the net of romance. It's a deep thing. Horses is part of it, he say, but she don't have it like some. In my judgment it is a passing thing. I believe it pass off her afta while.
What is she like. He had never in his life been asked a bald-headed question like that by a white man. She frizzly like old rope, Medicine Ed told Two-Tie. She like a old knot. She tie herself to this and that. She strong and hard to hold. She stronger than he is. You soon see.
It was dead quiet in the phone save for that deep down green-bottle buzz, then Two-Tie say, Don't say nutting to her, you hear? She don't know me. Just lemme know if she needs any help, you understand?
Sho is.
Thank you, Edward.
Thank you, Edward. He felt pity for Two-Tie, and pity for the white man was rich and sweet. He hung up the phone and sat there, thinking of Bernice. Diamond Doug went to jail, a twenty-year bit, and the big romance story run out. Marie went to see him a few times, then sat around in her bathrobe, watching TV. She didn't have to get rid of the baby, Bernice wanted it, she had a sense it was a girl baby, but Marie say if she have to look at it she might want to harm it. Later she went to secretary school. Funny part was it wasn't even no love in it. It was the gray drain of love. It use up everybody's love, not only Marie's. When it was done, Bernice hadn't had no love left. Not for him, Medicine Ed; or either for any man.
He pictured Bernice's Marie in front of the TV with her angry scowl and pink robe and comb-fried hair every whichaway, and that frizzly gee-whizzing white girl who somebody else done raised-she could harden against a man too. Something had happened, he looked at the two of them in his mind and he saw the left-behind toughness and meanness that tied them together. It come to him how everything was tied to everything else by secret ties invisible or as thin as cobwebs. It amazed him that he could see such a thing. It give him such a sense of knowing the frizzly-haired girl that he almost liked her a little-after all she kin to Two-Tie.
Later that day he hear the young fool and her arguing on the other side of the tack room wall, and afterwards he had the nerve to say to her: You hagride that young man long enough, you lose your happy home.
And she don't even sass him back. She push her braids behind her ear and say: You're right, I know it. I should never have quit my job. I can't just take my whole brains and talent and everything I got and invest them in somebody else's work and then shovel shit and keep my mouth shut.
Why you can't do that? That's what working folks does. I done fifty-eight years of that. It didn't kill me.
She cut him an evil eye. How could you stand it?
He was a little affronted. Ma' fact, young lady, he said with dignity, the way I always see it, I ain't have too much choice in the matter.
No wonder you wanted to buy that horse.
And which was true. He faded off between the shedrows to study the thing.
WHEN HASLIPP, THE VET, finally showed up with his little bag in the afternoon, in the rain, looking mud-spattered and harassed, Deucey happened to have taken a ride into town to buy a pair of reading glasses at the dimestore. Tommy, who had been asked to help if this happened (Maggie winced-somehow she hadn't got around to telling him yet whose-all horse Little Spinoza actually was), paraded them all out to the grass patch at the end of the shedrow, where it was cleaner and they would have more room, and then they stood there in the cold drizzle, shifting from foot to foot while Tommy dragged away the ten-dollar goat that Deucey had bought for Grizzly. They had forgotten about the goat.
Maggie held the interested but unsuspecting Little Spinoza, who despite his notorious encounter with a racetrack dentist (everyone knew that story) seemed more drawn by the weird blue crucifix eyes of the goat than troubled by the brusque stranger with the black bag.
Little Spinoza was still looking over his shoulder into the empty stall (his own) where the small but smelly and baa-ing goat had disappeared, when a little commotion happened at his neck and suddenly the earth fell up to meet him, his blood turned to warm solder, his penis dropped limp out of his body and his knees melted. He sank to the grass. His elbows and stifles drained away. He rolled over on his side. His huge tongue wanted to fall out of his mouth. He was not sleepy but gravity had won a great victory and he wished never to get up again. He watched incuriously as the two men went around behind him and squatted, and one of them somehow picked up his leg and moved it a little and held the great black riverine tail out of the way. There was a pleasant tinkle of metal, a feeling of deep and strange but painless emptying, another not so agreeable snip snip, snip snip-two grayish-pink, wet, egg-like bodies, sparsely threaded with blood vessels, lay in the grass. That was it. Already his face looked less alien and goofy. They stood there waiting for his legs to come back under him.
The queerest thing was the long, thin, infinitely elastic tubes hanging down like spittle from the shiny balls before Haslipp snipped them away. Maggie saw Medicine Ed slide out of the tack room and pick up the testicles out of the grass in a silver can-it could have been a soup can, nicely washed out and with the label neatly removed. And then he faded away again, presumably around the corner. She blinked. She hadn't known he was there. In fact he hadn't been there, or Tommy would certainly have called him over and made him drag away the ten-dollar goat, instead of doing that ridiculous job himself.
These days when Maggie was alone with Little Spinoza, after he had walked or worked and had his bath, she rubbed him-she didn't exactly know the derivation of this ancient slang for what a groom is supposed to do to a horse, only that was what the old guys told people they did: Been rubbing horses nigh on thirty-five years now, or, Back when I rub horses for Happy Blount at Hot Springs, whatever it meant. But she sensed a thread had been dropped somewhere, the route to some secret heart of this business had been lost. She didn't know anyone who literally rubbed a horse, not even old Deucey.
She asked Medicine Ed. That come from way back, in England or Paris, France, or somewhere, when the thoroughbred racehorse run five miles over open ground, hills and stone walls and that, and come back half dead under a blanket to a barn with no running hose water, let alone hot. So they rubbed the horse dry and warm. Babies get rubbed, he added, if you work for a barn that got babies. Rich folks had babies. Tommy Hansel had the geezers of the trade.
Back in Charles Town she had hauled to the laundromat a bunch of old croker sacks she had found in Pichot's barn. They had been many times stained, washed and dried until they were the color of a healing bruise; long ago, someone had left the pile of them stiffening in a corner. But she figured that like the mysterious hand-tied leather netting hanging from a nail, and the old wooden names-lord knew what anybody had farmed on that flinty spread before racehorses-they must be there for a reason, and they washed out soft and sweet. And now she rubbed Little Spinoza up with them from his ankles to his ears.