Art by Daniel Zalkus

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by John F. Dobbyn

Who says you can’t go home? I could feel those same ripples in my stomach. It was just like the first day I walked up to the gate to the backstretch at Boston’s then humming, now a bit back on its heels, Thoroughbred horse track, Suffolk Downs. Max Gatto was still the security guard at the gate. I remember his first words to me back then. “Where the hell you think you’re going, kid?”

Max peered into the window of my Corvette through eyes a bit dimmer now. “Yes, sir. Can I help you find something?”

I got out of the car and held out my hand. “Max, if there’s anything on this backstretch I couldn’t still find blindfolded, you could get me a guide dog. Good to see you.”

“Damn! Is it you, Mickey? I mean Mr. Donegan.”

“It’s Mickey. It’ll always be Mickey. You let me through that gate my first time eight years ago in those ratty sneakers and jeans.”

He broke a smile and took my hand. “I’ve followed you all the way, Mickey. I saw you on TV last week. You rode Ghost Walk in the Tiznow Stakes up at Saratoga Springs. Hell of a ride. Best jockeys in the country. You beat ’em all. I bet you heard me cheerin’ all the way up there.”

“Thanks, Max.”

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“I got a call from old Pete, his stable boss. I came as soon as I could. How is he?”

Max looked down and rubbed a wrinkled old hand across his mouth. “He’ll tell you he’s great. Top of the world.” He shook his head.

“What, Max?”

“He hit a bad patch about five months ago. Some of the horses he was training started losing races when they should’ve romped. You know what happens then. Some of the owners pull their horses, put ’em with other trainers.”

“How bad is it?”

His voice was down to a whisper. “Charlie won’t say it. He’s selling off some of the horses he owns just to pay the feed bills.”

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I left the Corvette at the gate. I walked the paths between the stall barns toward the shedrow of horses trained by Charlie. None of the mostly Latino stall-muckers and hot-walkers were familiar anymore. No surprise after three years. But the place itself swamped me in memories. I was back to the day I first pleaded with Charlie to let me muck out stalls. He didn’t know it, but back then I used to sleep in one of the stalls just to be close to the horses.

None of the exercise riders I passed taking horses out for the early morning gallops and breezes were familiar either, but I could see myself in every one of them, back when Charlie gave me a leg up for my first gallop. I was sixteen, scared to death, and I was the King of England. I took some mean tosses while I was learning as much about riding a Thoroughbred as I pretended to know. READ MORE

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It was a sign of Bernard de Vallenchin’s desperation that sitting upon a blanket alongside the Loire proved the best place to contemplate his situation. Unless seduction demanded the privacy of the riverbank, an educated man of sixteenth-century France belonged in a city or town, Bernard believed, and not here among the trees, insects, and farmers. He found the birdsong to be far more disruptive to his concentration than a marketplace full of shouted negotiations. He would have much preferred a rough-hewn table at the inn where he was staying, the boards liberally marked with the scratches and spills of revelries past, the din of clanging tankards and crockery, the thick smoke from the grease-dripped fireplace; these never hindered his work. Bernard thrived in the crowded and jostling environment of the inn. Even a narrow bench at a bailliage courthouse would better serve his efforts to ponder out a solution to his predicament. The mingling of avocats and procureurs, bits of professional gossip hanging in the air alongside legal arguments, these stimulated Bernard de Vallenchin’s thought processes. Outside, among the rustling trees, was where one went as a last resort. And that was precisely why Bernard de Vallenchin found himself alongside the gray waters of the Loire. He had been hounded from the surroundings of his choice. There, he found himself unwanted. Here, he felt like a peasant.

The predicament was not of his own making. As avocat appointed to represent those accused of criminal wrongdoings, Bernard did not personally commit the crimes on trial, nor had he advised any of his clients to engage in illegal behavior. He merely came along after the deed had been committed to help in the orderly disposition of justice, to clean up the mess that others had created. Yet, his client’s stain became his. Many within the communities along the circuit he rode treated counsel as synonymous with codefendant. As a crown attorney, commissioned by the roi, Henri II, to represent those accused, Bernard accepted his lot. The public frequently misunderstood the nature of his employment. The jurists, however, those men before whom he appeared, from these he expected better.

The case, Bernard conceded, filled his heart with despair. His client, a young mother, had attacked the child of her neighbor, the Gascons, a peasant farming family living across the road. Enflaming matters further, his client’s children had also participated in the assault, their bloodstained limbs proof of their culpability. The Gascons’s child had died following the attack, and the entire community demanded vengeance. The procureur d’office prosecuting the case seized on the mood and demanded the death penalty for the mother and all six children. Lex talionis, the doctrine of an eye for eye,
the prosecutor cried, required the family pay for the murderous assault. The entire city of Blois seemed to stand behind the procureur in his bloodlust.

The ire of the keeper at the inn where Bernard stayed offered ample evidence of the community’s passion. The service there proved execrable.  READ MORE