About the painting BREAKAWAY, Part 4
~ by Janai-Ami
Copyright 2021 Janai-Ami. All Rights Reserved.
Donnegal Shamrock was leashed, and we were heading back down the road. Betty was several paces in front of me, and she turned her eyes briefly inward towards the bustle of activity in the inner courtyard. Her pace suddenly quickened and she signaled me and whispered for me to keep quiet and move quickly along towards home. So I did and never asked why. Betty told me years later what she had seen. I didn't believe her at first. I didn't want to believe her. But she was very clear about what she saw. Something very large was being moved on a forklift and placed into a hole in the inner courtyard. In the middle of the night. She saw it. It was a horse. It was our horse, the one that a little girl had loved. And that is why he was gone. The following day when I walked by with my dog, concrete had already been laid. The BIG SHOT DOC and his flat chested wife with the little boy haircut and stern face that never smiled now had a brand new inner courtyard, surrounded by the horses stalls. But just as Betty had said, one of the stalls now stood empty.
* * * * *
Years later Betty moved back to Fayetteville, but she talked often about what she had seen that night so many years ago. She still has a vivid recollection of it -- all of it - including the five year old chestnut with the white markings on his nose. She said the BIG SHOT DOC was involved with some very bad people. She said that the claim that his body was dumped under a pile of garbage in some landfill somewhere in New York was hogwash. (I've always believed that she said that just to make me feel a little bit better about his death. I could not think about him dumped like garbage into a landfill because it upset me so). Betty reassured me that he wasn't left in a landfill, and she knew this for a fact, because she saw him being killed and then laid in a hole dug in the courtyard of a $2-3 million estate right there off of Muttontown Road.
* * * * *
The venerable Los Angeles Times talked about how much good this man had done. He was a veterinarian. An esteemed one. (Unfortunately I know a thing or two about esteemed veterinarians, Dear Reader. The Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine has trained more than one of them. But more about the VETERINARIAN TO THE STARS later. . . ) The obit was all about his incredible generosity. He died a very wealthy man, just over a decade ago. But The Times devoted barely a paragraph to the real story, apparently they never interviewed Betty, or the DRUG STORE TYCOON or any others - for they glossed over the real story as if it were a mere footnote to this man's storied existence. The story New Yorkers talked about for years. The Times merely stated that there was a fixed race, an amazing long shot, huge winnings among a small group of people closely affiliated with the track, and investigators who were unable to figure out (at least at first) whether or not "the fix had been in." Betty always talked about the young man from South America who worked as a stable hand, raising and caring for horses -- including two nearly identical ones, from the time they were very young. Notably, two photos were sent to the States by a young flat chested woman - photos that showed how very alike they were. Why was she so interested in the similarity of their appearance? Why was the older one even purchased (she knew he wasn't a racer)? The stable hand could identify which horse actually ran and actually won the race. The News Media in South America confirmed what the young man suspected and was claiming. And it definitely was not the long shot who ran and won that race. The authorities at the race track were notified. Then came the arrests. There were many arrests. Those who placed bets on a long shot and won big went to jail. The flat chested lady was never a suspect. They said she went crazy. Unlikely. But the only real crime, the only meaningful one, nobody ever answered for that. And one mystery remained. To this day nobody ever did find out what really happened to the "other horse." The horse that was a real long shot but actually never did run at the racetrack; the one that never lived a charmed life at all - racking up win after win - for real. The one that in a pack of horses would be the least likely to breakaway. The one that a young man from South America had cared for and loved. He was not the only one that loved that horse. A young man somewhere in South America became an old man and never forgot Lebon. But others remembered him too. The little girl never forgot that horse that ran through the Muttontown neighborhood on a warm Spring morning and lost his lucky shoe. The shoe a little girl had returned to the stern-faced lady who did not love that horse. The horse that Betty told her had, one night in June, been killed. That horse, that eluded investigators and had seemingly just vanished, disappeared entirely. Disappeared into a dark night, lit up for a brief moment by floodlights. And in that moment, the fleeting light of a five year old living breathing thinking feeling sentient being - who couldn't run fast enough for a track - but who was loved nonetheless by a small child just off of Muttontown Road - that bright light - was extinguished.
* * * * *
FEDEX just arrived. It is a package for me. I hold it for a second, before I open it. And then I start to cry. It is a painting. But it is much more. I've been waiting for it for a very long time. For years really. Decades. And now it has finally arrived.
* * * * *
I've thought about him often. His memory has haunted me for what seems like forever. My memory has always been of him alone, in his stall, or in that courtyard, his head bowed, afraid and alone. Every time I've seen him in my mind my broken heart breaks a little bit more.
* * * * *
But then unexpectedly I saw him again all these years later, this time in a field. A beautiful pastel painting shows a horse. He is not alone. He is accompanied by friends. He is not on a racetrack. He is in a beautiful field that looks and feels a lot like Heaven. He is free and he is at peace. That painting now hangs in the home of a little girl. The little girl who loved him and lost him one June night so many years ago.
* * * * *
Copyright 2021 Janai-Ami. All Rights Reserved.
