Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ for several hours that day, on narrow roads that went up and down like a roller coaster over countless hills. The brown winter woods and the sluggish creeks had a sameness that depressed me; they were so unlike the twisting roads and sudden vistas of my familiar New England, but I was excited to be going back to dad’s home—not really his, but his cousin’s, where he had spent his happiest summers.

      Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:

      Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps. My memory fills in tattered children and a few pigs, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

      The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalled her father looking perplexed, then angry:

      Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—the office, he fumed. At the other were two smaller shacklike structures, but with definite architectural details, which were the smoke house and the old kitchen. The remnants of a classic revival cupola capped the well house. Below, in a wide loop of the river, there had once been rich fields. Slave labor had built a dike around them to keep the river out, but after the Civil War, it was breached by high water, and the cove, as it was called, was now covered by an immense tangle of brush, trees and brambles. It had been overgrown even when dad was a boy, and he had heard stories of a runaway slave who lived down in there. No one had ventured down in many years.

      Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it. He told his wife and daughter to remain in the car, warning them that the house might be full of lice. Chenery went inside, but he didn’t stay long. Moments later he walked back to the car. He said nothing as he slid inside and drove off to the house across the road. Penny wanted to ask him what The Meadow homestead was like inside, what it looked like, but she saw his expression and decided to say nothing at all. He bought The Meadow a year later.

      Thus Christopher T. Chenery had repossessed his childhood, reclaiming some old hills and remembrances and a place to raise horses. But if there was some of the Gatsby romantic in him—something of a man trying to recapture his past—his brothers hardly shared his enthusiasm. They were against his buying back The Meadow, Penny said:

      They thought Chris was crazy to buy it back—that was all behind them—and Virginia would never leave the shackles of its backward economy, especially rural Virginia. The Depression was easing, but the specter of poverty never left any of them.

      But Chenery had made his money by stringing utilities together, and he was on his way to being a millionaire several times over again. By 1936, he had already been the president of the Federal Water Service Corporation for ten years, and that year he also became chairman and director of Southern Natural Gas Company. Deep in the Depression, Chris Chenery was making money and incorporating his holdings and sharing his stock with the family, and with the gold he set about in earnest to rebuild The Meadow.

      He spent thousands of dollars making it a showplace, rebuilding and enlarging and refurnishing it:

      He built stables for one hundred horses, a mile training track, breeding sheds, hay barns, and an office—the old one had been beyond repair. The poor country boy eventually spent his winters in Palm Beach buying at auctions the things that were symbols of wealth in his childhood. He first acquired oriental rugs, then turned to nineteenth-century paintings, and finally to jade.

      He had earned what he was spending and what he owned. He had a contempt for idle people and for laziness, a disdain for dullness and the weak witted. Education was not what set men apart. What distinguished them was the intensity of the drive and the energy and imagination they possessed and used.

      Politically, he was conservative, a staunch anti-Communist—or, as he would prefer to say, an anti-Bolshevik. Financially, he was bold but careful, and when he invested in thoroughbreds in the late 1930s he made small and what appeared to be insignificant acquisitions of blooded horses. “The price does not always represent what a horse is worth,” Chenery once said. “It is only what some fool thinks he is worth.”

      Among his first purchases was a filly named Hildene, a daughter of the 1926 Kentucky Derby winner, Bubbling Over. He paid only $600 for her. “Hildene showed speed, but she tired badly eight times in eight races,” he said. So he retired her to the stud, and there she produced a family of some of the finest horses on the American turf.

      Sometime during the Depression, when he was getting started in racing, Chenery acquired a set of jockey silks. They were some old silks that had been abandoned, no doubt discarded by some owner who went haywire for a decade and then dropped off into the perpetual twilight that came in October of 1929. The silks were snappy: white and blue blocks on the shirt, and blue and white stripes down the sleeves. And a blue cap.

       CHAPTER 3

      In the end it was the land that made them all—the land that raised the horses and made room for the people and supported the empires of chance they built on it.

      It was blocked off in white and creosote fences and planted in clover and grass, a deep green shag rug that ran, as if unrolled, across a boundless countryside. The land is where the horses were born, on farms such as Hamburg Place in Kentucky, where still stands a single barn—a historic marker now—in which five Kentucky Derby winners were foaled: Old Rosebud (1914), Sir Barton (1919), Paul Jones (1920), Zev (1923), and Flying Ebony (1925). It is where the horses were raised and weaned, where they romped and grazed and grew to young horses on the racetrack. Some were returned to it as pensioners, many more to serve in studs and nurseries. A chosen few were buried on the land, the best beneath granite headstones chiseled in their names and, at times, in epitaphs rendered in the style of Boot Hill:

      HERE LIES THE FLEETEST RUNNER

      THE AMERICAN TURF HAS EVER KNOWN, AND ONE OF THE GAMEST AND MOST GENEROUS OF HORSES.

      That is the epitaph on the monument of Domino, the “Black Whirlwind,” who was buried in 1897 in a grave outside of Lexington. There was no faster horse than Domino in the sprints—he was the Jesse Owens of his species in the Gay Nineties—and when they retired him to stud, he whirled the wind again as a progenitor. Domino died at six, twenty years too soon for a sire of his prepotency, and he left only twenty offspring from his duty as a stud horse, eleven daughters and nine sons. But among the sons was Commando, a horse who would strike his and his sire’s names into the pedigree charts of champions for many years. Through Pink Domino, a daughter, his name would surface often in the family trees of numerous racehorses, appearing in the distant collateral reaches of the bloodlines of many modern horses, including the colt Gentry delivered that night at The Meadow.

      Domino was a phenomenon, a complete thoroughbred, sui generis. He remains today one of the few American racehorses in history who left the land and became one of the fastest horses of his era, then returned to it and made an even deeper imprint on the breed itself. Most thoroughbreds, in the days of Domino and since him, left the land and failed at the races—if they ever got to the races at all, which many did not—or they raced through careers of declining mediocrity. Many colts were gelded along the way, destroyed for a variety of reasons, sold for use as saddle horses or jumping or hunting horses, СКАЧАТЬ