It
was sickening the way fat George treated those fine saddle horses. There was not a mean horse in the bunch but
he mistreated them all the time—jerking their heads with the reins of those
Spanish-style riding bits and kicking them when they did not move when they
should.
George’s
precocious four-year-old son, Kit, put the snapper on one day and convinced me
that I should have a chat with Charlie Barnett about George. One noontime I was eating my sack lunch in
the tack room when Kit wandered in. I
asked him if he had had his lunch. “oh,
yes,” he said airily, “I ate but Mama wants me to go outside when Daddy diddles
her unless it’s raining—then sometimes I watch if they don’t shut the door
tight.”
“When
he does what?!”
“When
he diddles her—you know, he takes down his overalls and she gets on the bed and
spreads out her legs. He sticks his
peter into her hole—that’s diddling, dummy!”
At
the next opportunity when no one else was around, I had a long chat with
Charlie. I told him exactly how I felt
about George, how lazy he was, how he mistreated the horses. When I first came to work, it was obvious that
some of the box stalls had not been cleaned and fresh straw put in for more
than a week. By that time both Charlies
and Art Farr had a great deal of respect for the way I worked and handled the horses
so Charlies listened. A week later George,
his wife, and Kit had packed up and gone.
George’s
replacement as barn boss did not turn out to be much of an improvement. I gorget his last name, if I ever knew it, but
his first name was Gus. Art Farr hired
him and I always suspected that Art found him on skid row. When he was hired, Gus talked them into an
advance so he could buy some proper clothes.
Hel did not get overalls or coveralls (which I wore in preference to bib
overalls) or other proper work clothes.
Instead, he went to town and came back dressed in a pair of green riding
breeches, a green checkered shirt, and an Army campaign hat. I had to stifle a belly laugh when I saw him
because, not being able to afford a pair of riding boots, he had bought a pair
of leather puttees (his excuse was that boots hurt his feet).
It
was quickly obvious that Gus had no intention of forking horse manure and straw
out of the stalls very often so the burden of the work continued to fall on
me. Gus usually puttered around in the
tack room, presumably cleaning saddles.
More often than not I saw him swigging a drink of fortified wine out of
a bottle he always had stashed in there behind a pile of saddle blankets. Evidently Gus had no home as he brought a tent
and set it up out on the river side of the stables and that is where he slept.
I
quit the Columbia Riding Academy two weeks before school was to start. Farr wanted me to stay on through a horse
show the following week, but I had enough of him and that goldbrick wino,
Gus. I wanted some free time before
school started. The family was glad
because I would no longer come breezing in right at suppertime smelling to high
heaven of the stables. I was not allowed
to come to the table until I had cleaned up and changed clothes. I paid no attention to the smell of the horse
manure and sweat, but Dick and Rex would hold their noses when I came in and little
Sandra (obviously coached by Dick) would giggle and shout, “Stinky Connie!”
It
was not quite the last of the Columbia Riding Academy, however. The horse show was to be the following
Thursday evening after I quit. On that Thursday,
around noon, Charlie Barnett telephoned.
He wanted help.
“Frieze,”
he said plaintively, “you gotta help me out.
That show is this evening and that samn wino Gus is so drunk he doesn’t
even know which saddle goes on which horse! He’s got everyting all mixed up! I really need you!”
Well,
I dunno. I sort of had plans for this
evening.
Charlie
was desperate. “Look, I’ve got a couple
of hands to help with putting up the jumps and such, but they don’t know diddly
about the horses and tack. I’ll pay you
five bucks out of my own pocket and you can be the barn boss for the evening.”
“Well,
okay, Mr. Barnett. I’ll do it but you
know Gus won’t like it. He likes to be
the big man when the lady riders are around.”
Charlie
breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Don’t
worry about Gus. I’ll keep him out of
the way. I will give him a bottle of
whiskey and tell him to stay in his tent all evening or I’ll kick his butt out. May do that anyway as soon as I can find
someone else. He is so drunk right now
on that cheap wine that I don’t think he knows what day it is! Come as soon as you can.”
It
is a good thing that I got to the academy a couple of hours before the horse
show. Charlie was right. Everything was a mess. Horses were not groomed, saddles were on the
wrong racks, and the bridles were all mixed up.
The sawdust area was freshly harrowed, but only because Charlie had done
it himself in the afternoon. He was as
good as his work, too. I peeked into Gus’
tent out back and he was snoring away on his rumpled cot, a nearly empty whisky
bottle beside him.
After
a fast scramble, the show went off just fine.
Charlie had rounded up three men to help and had them dressed in white
overalls. They helped handle the horses
and the equipment in the arena. Every
horse and rider went through the door right on schedule except there was a
minor holdup when we got the drill team ready to take the arena for the finale
which I don’t think anhyone but Art Farr noticed.
It
took quite a while to bed down all the horse and get the gear put away
properly. It was about eleven o’clock
when I came out of the tack room and found both Charlie and Art Farr waiting on
the platform for me. Charlie handed me
the promised five dollars.
I
waited for Farr to jump me about the delay with the Lancers but he didn’t. He took the igar out of his mouth, twisted
his face into what pass for a friendly grin, and said, “We wanted to talk to
you about next year, boy.”
Charlie
looked at Farr with a frown for that “boy” and spoke up, “Frieze, I know you
are graduating from high school next year and we would like you back. You would probably be the yojngest barn boss
in history, but the job is yours if you want it. Pay would be fifty—no, sixty dollars a
month. You think it over and let us
know. “
I
ducked my head and scratched it, then with a wry grin looked them in the eye
and said, “I’m much obliged to you Mister Barnett—and Mister Farr—but I don’t think
so. I love those horses and will miss
them, but to be honest with you, I’m going to join the Navy as soon as school
is out net year. Thank you just the same.”
Charlie
shrugged and they both said goodbye and good luck. I put on my brown leather jacket, zipped it
up, tucked my white overalls under my arm, and started the long walk home across
the bride through the darkness.
(There
was an unhappy footnote to my time with the Columbia Riding Academy. Two years later when I came home on boot
leave, I was informed that the riding academy had burned and most of the horses
had died in the fire. I stopped by to
look at the blackened ruins of the arena and stables and was glad I had not been
there. I preferred to remember Don Dee,
Clown, Joker and the little balck mare, and the other as I had last seen them.)
