Jaimy Gordon - Lord of Misrule

Praise for Jaimy Gordons

Both richly literary and red-blooded in its depictions of the sporting life.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

An exuberant, jazzy novel about rough charactersboth equine and two-footed.

The Plain Dealer

Gordons characters are complex and finely drawn. [Gordon] unspools a plot of corruption and intrigue.

The New Yorker

Moody, poetic, darkly funny prose.

Time

[A] magical tale about a dusty West Virginia town and its down-trodden racetrack.

NPR

Unlike any novel youll read this yearand maybe next.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

A tour de force of energy and esprit.

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Moving and lyrical [A] nearly word perfect novel.

Booklist

Gordons writing will grab and pull you in.

Bloomberg News

JAIMY GORDON

Jaimy Gordons third novel, Bogeywoman, was on the Los Angeles Times list of Best Books for 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, brought her an Academy Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gordons short story, A Nights Work, which shares a number of characters with Lord of Misrule, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1995. She is also the author of a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue

The Bend, The Lip, The Kid: Reallife Stories

She Drove Without Stopping

Shamp of the City-Solo

Bogeywoman

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2011

Copyright 2010 by Jaimy Gordon

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by McPherson & Company, New York, in 2010.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Parts of this novel originally appeared in slightly different form in Witness and Blue Mesa Review.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Simon and Schuster, Inc. for permission to reprint:
A brief quote from Ainslies Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing by Tom Ainslie.

The Cataloging-in-Publication data is available on file at the Library of Congress.

Cover design by John Gall

Cover photograph Henry Horenstein/Getty Images

eISBN: 978-0-307-94674-4

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

This book is for Margie Gordon,

for Bubbles Riley, still beating that devil,

and, of course, for Hilry.

W ithout claiming races there would be no racing at all. Owners would avoid the hazards of fair competition. Instead, they would enter their better animals in races against the sixth- and twelfth-raters that occupy most stalls at most tracks. This would leave little or no purse money for the owners of cheap horses. The game would perish.

The claiming race changes all that. When he enters his animal in a race for $5,000 claiming horses, the owner literally puts it up for sale at that price. Any other owner can file a claim before the race and lead the beast away after the running. The original owner collects the horses share of the purse, if it earned any, but he loses the horse at a fair price.

That is, he loses the horse at a fair price if it is a $5,000 horse. If it were a $10,000 horse, in a race for cheaper ones, the owner would get the purse and collect a large bet at odds of perhaps 1 to 10, but the horse would be bought by another barn at less than its true value.

Ainslies Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing

FIRST RACE

I NSIDE THE BACK GATE of Indian Mound Downs, a hot-walking machine creaked round and round. In the judgment of Medicine Ed, walking a horse himself on the shedrow of Barn Z, the going-nowhere contraption must be the lost soul of this cheap racetrack where he been ended up at. It was stuck there in the gate, so you couldnt get out. It filled up the whole road between a hill of horse manure against the backside fence, stubbled with pale dirty straw like a penitentiary haircut, and a long red puddle in the red dirt, a puddle that was almost a pond. Right down to the sore horses at each point of the silver star, it resembled some woebegone carnival ride, some skeleton of a two-bit ride dreamed up by a dreamer too tired to dream. Thered been no rain all August and by now the fresh worked horses were half lost in the pink cloud of their own shuffling. Red dust from those West Virginia hills rode in their wide open nostrils and stuck to their squeezebox lungs. Red dust, working its devilment, he observed to himself, but he shut his mouth. They were not his horses.

Medicine Ed led his own horse round the corner of the shedrow. What was the name of this animal? If he had heard it, Medicine Ed didnt recall. It was a big red three-year-old, dumb as dirt, that Zeno had vanned up for the fourth race, a maiden without a scratch on him. A van ride on race day did for many a horse, but this boy had rolled out the van as calm as that puddle yonder, for he felt good and didnt know nothing. True, he had no class. He was the throwaway kind, a heavy-head sprinter who looked like a quarter horse, with a chest like a car radiator. He must not know what was coming, for once he was sore, he might last to age five, with luck.

How long would Medicine Ed last? He had been on the racetrack since he was eight years old. After sixty-four years of this racetrack life he, too, was sore and tired, and like the boll weevil in the song, he was looking for a home. He knew he would always have work, long as he could work. But where was it wrote that he had to rub horses till the day he died? And as for the medicine he could do and which long ago gave him his name, best folks forgot about that, and in these parts so far they had.

Up ahead was Deucey Gifford walking Grizzly, her moneymaker. Grizzly was the opposite end of the Mound, a used-up stakes horse, a miler, nerved in his feet, who knew everything. Medicine Ed liked to devil her: Why you dont give that old boy his rest? How old Grizzly be by now? Fourteen? fiteen?

Hes twelve, Deucey said, like she always said, and he dont need no rest. Grizzly knows what comes next for him in this world, after me, I mean. He likes things the way they are.

I bet you done told him, you hard-nose old half-man.

Thats right. I told him. Hed rather run.

Medicine Ed laughed a little. I reckon that Grizzly nerved in all four feet, he said. I know he dont feel no pain.

Hell he is. Twos plenty, Deucey snapped. Her watery eyes looked shifty in their pouches, and whether she be lying or not, Medicine Ed couldnt tell. Anyhow Grizzly got heart. He could run without feet, she said.

And which he do, Medicine Ed thought, and he walked on with the red youngster.