Horses, A Second Look
Part II
So, it did not disappoint.
Of all the conversationalists I’d known, LT was the best. Especially when it came to horses, and writings about horses, and British humor.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly why, but it had to do with depth of knowledge, understanding life with that dash of impish humor, and being thoroughly amused by the same things.
And people.
Every friendship was a conspiracy of sharing what others might avoid.
I still overthought the demarcation where conversations ended and gossip began, but if bringing in other lives and foibles and political incorrectness led to amusement and greater understanding, why not?
We both found the same mutual friends hilarious.
It seemed I could have drawn a linear extension from Surtees’s Handley Cross through one of Sassoon’s George Sherston trilogies (his hunt stories, not the gruesome scenes from the Somme battles of 1916), forward to today, not in general but to this particular afternoon in June.
The Hunt. School. Women we both knew and liked but need not say how much. Wives. Sports. The Civil War. Jockeys and other short athletes. Dick Francis. The history of the neighborhoods where the Hunt ran, and who ran with them. Horses. Real estate. Wine.
We had both known and liked a former Leesburg newspaperman from an old family who became a Rector. He was notable for having married, in a second pairing, a substantial heiress who was likewise, a Master of the Hunt. It was now a decade after his passing but there was yet more, much more, to discuss.
For my part, I had been fascinated by the Rector for one specific reason: his grandfather had crossed sabers with my own great-grandfather during the Civil War. This was not imaginary: the events were chronicled in letters home written from Virginia to Upstate New York between 1861 and 1865, and in Mosby’s own autobiography.
The amusing part was, I had grown up with photographs of that late kinsman with a long, white beard and had imagined, when I was a boy, such a graybeard charging down the farm lanes holding his saber aloft, hair and beard wild in the wind.
It came as a shock that that same cavalryman in the framed, grainy old photograph had been nineteen, and barely old enough to shave.
***
The discussion had turned to equine psychology and physiology when LT began to belt out the stanzas from memory by Sir Walter Scott about the wounding of a horse that yet carried his master before expiring.
This interested me greatly, the capability of a wounded animal with such fierce loyalty he would carry his master to the greatest extremes of his strength. That anyone in this age would have committed so much classic poetry to memory, was singular.
LT had the advantage of a long life riding, whereas I mostly had read. Where he was expert and master in equine lore, I was a mere novitiate and delighted he would take time to explain the more arcane points of the sport.
***
Horses, then…
I was delighted to have had a great uncle named Rattlesnake Ed.
It may have referred to his time out West in 1905, but knowing others in the family, more than likely it may refer to personality.
Like many sons of Civil War veterans, their horsey proclivities led them West where there were jobs in Miles City, Montana, along the Yellowstone River. In fact, two then-unrelated great uncles had spent their youth mounted, on a very similar track, one returning to Essex County to run the family farm, the other to a Field Hospital just after the Battle of Argonne Forest in 1918where he had been in tanks under the the command of a rising star named Patton.
There were the family stories, some of which I had witnessed personally and some vague family lore, but the point was not to bore LT (or you), just yet.
Consider this a draft, a note to self for later elaboration.
These were part of the tapestry of conversation over beers that Friday at Magnolia’s. Perhaps the conversation will return in enough detail to write it directly.
Perhaps not.