Читать книгу Secretariat - William Nack - Страница 7

It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.

They swung out the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north. It was one of those hours when time is measured not by clocks but by contractions; the intervals between were getting shorter. In a small wooden barn set off at the edge of a nearby field, beneath a solitary light in an expanse of darkness, a mare was about to give birth. The men were rushing to the barn to help her.

The man behind the wheel was Howard M. Gentry, sixty-two years old, for almost twenty years a manager of the Meadow Stud in Doswell, one of the most successful breeding farms in America. Sitting with him in the front seat was Raymond W. Wood, a railroad conductor, fifty-four years old, Gentry’s long-time friend and neighbor, for years his steady companion at straight pool, and himself a modest breeder of thoroughbred horses.

It was the night of March 29, 1970, not the kind of night for anyone to leave the velvet green warmth of a pool table and rush outdoors. The weather had been bleak all day—the sky perpetually overcast, a drizzle falling through the morning and afternoon, and a fog that clung to the farm and the uplands and the bottomlands of Caroline County. A wind, mounting occasional gusts, blew out of the north from Washington. The temperature had been in the high forties during the day, but by evening it had dropped into the thirties, and sometime past eleven o’clock, when the call came, it was almost freezing.

Gentry instantly recognized the voice of Bob Southworth, the nightwatchman at the foaling barn. In a characteristic monotone Southworth told him what he had been waiting to hear. “Mistah Gentry! You better come on down here to the foalin’ barn in the field. That mare’s gettin’ ready to foal.”

That mare is what put an edge on the moment for Gentry. He had delivered hundreds of foals in the years he worked around thoroughbreds, but that mare was not just another broodmare carrying a foal by just another sire. Down in Barn 17A, the two-stall foaling barn near the western border of the farm, an eighteen-year-old broodmare named Somethingroyal, a daughter of the late Princequillo, was going into labor for the fourteenth time in her life. She was carrying a foal by Bold Ruler, the preeminent sire in America, year after year the nation’s leading stallion. It was a union of established aristocracy.

Somethingroyal was the kind of mare breeders seek to raise dynasties. She was the dam of the fleet Sir Gaylord, probably the most gifted racehorse of his generation, the colt favored to win the 1962 Kentucky Derby until he broke down the day before the race. She was the mother of First Family, a multiple stakes winner in the mid-1960s. In 1965 she bore her first Bold Ruler foal, a filly called Syrian Sea, winner of the rich Selima Stakes in 1967. Another Bold Ruler filly, The Bride, was a yearling, and tonight Somethingroyal was having her last Bold Ruler foal: the stallion was dying in Kentucky.

So Howard Gentry felt more anxious than usual to get the foal delivered. The foal would be virtually priceless, and Gentry hoped the delivery would be easy. Gentry had stopped to see Somethingroyal earlier that night, just before he went home for supper at six. She didn’t appear to be near labor then, but when he and Southworth made the rounds two hours later, as they often did together during breeding season, her condition had begun to change. Labor seemed imminent. The mare was “waxing heavily,” as Gentry called it, with milk congealing at the tips of her nipples like beads of candle wax, the tentative sign that labor is near—perhaps a few hours away, perhaps a day. It was then he decided to stay awake, instead of going to bed at nine, his regular time, and to call Wood and ask him to wait it out over a pool table.

Gentry edged his beige 1969 Chrysler across the highway dividing the farm, past the big house on the hill, past the towering stand of trees around the house, around the gravel driveway crunching underneath, down the gentle slope and past the fences and the pastures and through the gate where the broodmares walk to and from the fields during the day, and finally stopped about a hundred feet from where the lights were burning and where Bob Southworth, standing by the stall, was waiting.

Gentry and Wood cut across the wet grass on the field, walking briskly—hurrying—through the pasture toward the barn. Wood jogged to keep up, stumbling once in the dark, skimming through the pastureland to keep up with Gentry, midwife for Somethingroyal.

Gentry looked in the stall and walked quietly inside. Somethingroyal was breathing quickly now. Her nostrils were flared. She was walking the stall and seemed edgy, nervous. Gentry felt her neck and shoulder. She was warm and sweating lightly.

“She’s gettin’ ready,” Gentry said. A quick routine began. He checked for the iodine, the enema, the cup for the iodine, and the bowl for the water to wash the nipples for the suckling foal. Then he spotted his Unionalls, picked them off the hook, and slipped them on. The three men waited at the door, watching the old mare pace the stall, circling it as if caged, and they spoke idly in unremembered conversations.

At midnight, almost to the stroke, Gentry saw Somethingroyal stop pacing and lie down, collapsing her bulk on the bed of straw. She faced the rear of the stall, lying on her left side. Gentry slipped on his rubber gloves and dropped to his knees beside her. Her water bag broke, spilling fluid from her vagina. Any moment now, the foal.

Just past midnight, the tip of the left foot appeared, and Gentry waited for the other. In a normal birth, the front feet come out together, with the head between the legs, so Gentry watched and waited. When the foot failed to emerge, he decided to wait no longer. He feared the leg might be folded under or twisted, a position that could cause injury to the shoulder under the extreme pressures of birth. So, kneeling closer to the mare, he reached his arm inside the vagina and felt the head, which was in a good position, and then dropped his hand down to the right leg and felt for the hoof. As he suspected, he found it curled under, so he uncurled it gently, bringing the leg out of the vagina. “Won’t be long now,” he said to Wood.

Somethingroyal pushed, paused panting, and pushed again. Gentry guided but did not pull the legs—not yet. He always waited for the shoulder to emerge before pulling. The legs came out together. Then the head, with a splash of white down the face, slipped through the opening. A water bubble preceded it, and Gentry slit the bubble open. The neck slipped out, slowly, and finally the shoulders emerged. The mare paused, and Gentry took the front legs and waited for her to rest, always letting her lead: push and relax, push and relax.

Somethingroyal pushed, straining, and Gentry pulled on the legs, hard. It was a good-sized foal. Then he called Wood to his side, telling him to put on a pair of rubber gloves. Returning, Wood kneeled down next to Gentry and took one leg, Gentry the other.

“Take it easy now,” Gentry told him. “No hurry—and not too hard—take your time.” They pulled together for several moments. As the foal came out, and Gentry saw the size of the shoulders and the size of the bone, he feared the foal might hip lock—his hips were so wide—and have difficulty clearing the opening. When the rib cage cleared, Gentry guided the hips.

Moments later the foal was out and lying on the bed of straw, the mare was panting and sweating, and Gentry was asking South-worth for the cup of iodine. Southworth broke the umbilical by pulling the foal around to the mare’s head so she could lick him. Gentry cauterized the wound with iodine and gave the foal four milliliters of the combiotics—an antibiotic combination of streptomycin and penicillin—as a precautionary measure, and Southworth rubbed him down with a towel to dry him and circulate the blood.

Gentry looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after midnight, March 30, 1970, the moment the whole foal emerged. He was a chestnut, with three white feet—the right front and the two behind. The colt lay at his mother’s head when Gentry, looking at him, stepped back and shook his head and said to Wood, “There is a whopper.”