BOOK EXCERPT
HORSE: A NOVEL
By Geraldine Brooks IT WAS ONLY WHEN
Lexington walked right into a barrow that someone had carelessly left in the midst of the paddock that Jarret began to suspect the truth. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and flapped it. The horse leaped sideways and Jarret felt a rush of relief. But when he tried the same test on the other side, the horse made no response at all.
One eye was failing. There had been signs: a manner of tilting his head to favor the better eye, the way he dropped his muzzle to probe the ground, especially where surfaces changed suddenly from dark to light. The horse had been resourceful. In the familiar surrounds of Metairie, he’d made his own mental maps and compensated even as his world began to darken. A blind horse has other acute senses: smell and hearing and the delicate sense of touch in the fine hairs of his face. He can travel well through his known world using these. But away from his familiar home, there was fear.
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THE PLAID HORSE
February 2023
Harry had always told Jarret that Boston went blind because of a savage beating. He’d been sure that the blindness wouldn’t be passed down to his foals. But now Jarret wondered if his father had been mistaken. Perhaps Boston’s blindness was hereditary. He walked Lexington to his stall on the Saratoga farm and examined his eyes closely. There was no discharge, no clouding. But then his fingers found the lump of misshapen bone. He felt the other side—no lump. That, at least, was good. He knew of many horses who raced just fine with sight in only one eye. But what could have happened to deform
his bone in this way? Jarret had been with the horse his whole life, except for those hard weeks at Fatherland, and even there, he’d watched him from a distance and would have known if the horse had injured himself. Pryor had called on him for the colic; he would have done the same, surely, for any other crisis. He couldn’t think what, besides a bad injury, could misshape a bone and rob a horse of vision in that way. When they left Saratoga and transferred to the stables at the National Race Course in New York City, Jarret made various excuses as to why Lexington should not be turned out with other PHOTO: RANDI BAIRD
