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.”
The Virginia of Caroline County—acres of porous soil and roughly tree-mantled countryside—is not the Old South of cotton farms and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting among the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. This is not the Virginia where buses stop at overlooks on any of the approved tours, lying outside the limits of the Tidewater and far to the southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, with its pungent orchards and its own haunting song.
Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster—a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country—watermelons and muskmelons—and it has fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for growing corn and soybeans, but it was not always so prosperous or so peaceful there.
The Meadow is part of a neck of land almost midway between Richmond and Washington. For four years, two armies crawled around it feeling for each other’s jugular. The fighting began just seventy miles to the north, at Bull Run, and it ended not far to the southwest, at Appomattox Court House. The Morris family, living on The Meadow at the time, hid the family silver in the well. Some of the largest set-piece battles of the war, with their cavalry sweeps and scouting parties, took place nearby. The land, and whatever civilization had been built on it, came out of the war years badly gored.
The war radically altered the course of the lives of the people who somehow survived it and left James Hollis Chenery the sole male support of three families, including the Morrises of The Meadow. The war had left the Morrises and other families nearly destitute, though it did not destroy them. Chenery ended up as a clerk in a dry goods store in Richmond.
The war also picked up Richard Johnson Hancock in the Deep South, marched him into Virginia, and then left him nearly dead outside a city in the Shenandoah Valley. Hancock was born in Alabama, the son of a farmer, but he was raised and ultimately orphaned in Louisiana, where he joined the Bossier Volunteers when the war broke out. Hancock’s unit was ordered to Virginia and eventually came under the command of Stonewall Jackson. Hancock was wounded three times in the next two years, the first time superficially at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 30, 1862.
The second wound gave him a limp, but it also remade him into a Virginian and in time led him to found what would become one of the largest and most important thoroughbred breeding establishments in the world. In July of 1863, Hancock was jumping a fence in an assault on Cemetery Ridge during the Battle of Gettysburg when a Union soldier turned on him and fired. The ball struck Hancock in the hip. He was dispatched to a Confederate hospital in Charlottesville. While convalescing, Hancock often attended Sunday services at the Christian Church, and one morning he met Thomasia Overton Harris. She was the daughter of John Harris, a prominent landowner on whose 1450-acre farm, called Ellerslie, about one hundred slaves bred and raised livestock and planted corn and tobacco.
The courtship that developed was interrupted when Hancock, recovered from the hip wound, rejoined the Bossier Volunteers. The fighting in the months that followed carried him to the mountains, to the Shenandoah Valley beyond the mountains, and finally to the city of Winchester in the valley. There, on September 19, 1864, a Union soldier shot him in the stomach as he and other members of the unit retreated south from the city. He was a prisoner of war and badly wounded, though he was not either very long. Hancock, with some help, contrived to escape, slipping away unseen and skirting Sheridan’s right flank at Cedar Creek, making his way to the Confederate lines and then on to Ellerslie. There, in November of 1864, he and Miss Harris were married. Richard Hancock had always liked thoroughbreds, and when he returned to the farm after the war, one of the things he wanted to do was raise them at Ellerslie.
James