When I was a teen, our nouveau riche tavern-owner Dad, who also raced thoroughbreds, won a huge bet on his Anniversary with our Step-Mother. He used the gelt for a downpayment on a horse farm and my brother and I, kicking and screaming, were spirited away from our safe, friend-filled neighborhood to isolation on that Farm.
Apart from our friends, out seclusion was somewhat relieved by several farm hands, mostly Black men, called by the nicknames our Father gave them—No Talk and Buck, the ones I remember most. But Dad also employed an old, Czechoslovakian man who we called Old Pete, because he was old and because we never asked for his last name.
He spoke with a thick accent and always called us Wern and Wic because he could not pronounce the V in our names. He lived in a broken down trailer on the property that was as filthy as he was. To our knowledge, Old Pete never took a bath in the three or so years he lived and worked there. The trailer did not have a shower and I don’t think our Step-Mother would ever have allowed his fetid self into the farm house and, shy as they come, Pete would never dare to ask.
His job was to clean the stalls, his age and clumsiness barring him from working with high strung thoroughbreds, that work left to Buck and No Talk. My brother and I cleaned stalls too and did some of the feeding, a job we shared with Pete, a friendly and lonely character, who also, in my memory, never changed his clothes, always wearing stained overalls.
Pete would try to talk to us in his broken English, neither of us much able to understand what he said. Hard to talk to and smelly, with the tobacco he constantly chewed staining the corners of his mouth in a disgusting way, we avoided him as much as possible. But, because of our extreme isolation, especially in the summers when we weren’t in school, we would deign to sit at a distance outside ( I think we braved the interior of the trailer once for a reason I can’t remember and left as soon as we could) to listen to him. It has been over fifty years for me now, but I recall he did come from Czechoslovakia when a child and mentioned that he had been married, but had no children.
Our Father, who employed a number of people with down and out circumstances because they were cheap and it was hard, disgusting work,—(one of them a Viennese horse trainer, who was not that at all and lied to get the job and lasted two weeks, dismissed when he was kicked and almost killed by a stallion; another a poor, late teen Mexican boy, who took such advantage of our house that our Step-Mother let him go after he asked her to pull his muddy boots off, but was like a happy, lost child when we let him watch horror movies and eat popcorn with us late on Friday night TV) tolerated Old Pete, despite his physical appearance and odor, and, partly because he felt sorry for him. I do remember Pete saying a lot: “Keep me, Mr. F. Don’t let me go; I have no place else.” And, indeed, we could not imagine anyone else hiring him. He worked on, slow and sporadic, realized in hindsight that he was in a lot of pain from arthritis, which he complained about but could not name.
But, sadly, Pete was his own worst enemy. Besides the filth, smell, poor working habits, often sleeping in, Old Pete had a drinking problem, which was not discovered for some time. He was able to buy his own food because the grocery store was a short walking distance away and he was adamant about doing it himself, despite my Step-Mother’s offer to shop for him. Later, we found out why.
When the verdict was all in, it appears that Pete drank about two six-packs a day. He drank openly at first, must have been drunk all of the time. Probably it was his antidote for the arthritis and the loneliness. But since he always did his work, methodically mucking the stalls, there were no complaints at first.
But after a time, it began to affect him and his work. You cannot drink such a prodigious amount and not be negatively affected. Eventually he began to oversleep more and finally, totally drunk, he had a serious fall, cut his head badly and had to be hospitalized for a few days.
That was it for my Dad, who regularly fired his help in both his taverns and the Farm when they screwed up. It was the way it was back then in the post-Depression world. If you did not do your job, you were gone. We had not yet begun to understand that alcoholism was a sickness or that mental heath issues were real or that sometimes humans had bad circumstances they could not overcome.
I was there for the firing. When our Dad brought Old Pete back from the hospital, he told Pete that he had to move out in two weeks because of his drinking ( a warning he had been given over and over for some time) and that he would give him a month’s pay. Pete wept. He wept and begged: “Please Mr. F. I haf no place ta go. Don’t know what to do!”
It touched our Father. He wilted before this pathetic man and gave him another chance, with one stipulation—no more drinking. Pete vowed over and over and wept in gratefulness at the reprieve.
But you might was well tell Jimmy the Greek to stop gambling. The grace did not work although Pete managed to hide his addiction for some time. But Pete continued to buy six-packs and hide them and, for a good period of time, hid his malady well and things went on, as Pete stayed on his feet mostly and turtled his way thorough his work.
But all things are eventually revealed—for good or ill—my own life has taught me. One day Pete did not come out of the trailer for a whole day. This had happened before on occasion so we would knock on the door, he would groan he was sick, but he’d be up the next day.
One day in the Spring he did not emerge on the second day. My Father pounded on the door, part out of anger, part out of worry. No answer and the door was locked.
More pounding. Our Father shouted he would call the police or an ambulance, threats bouncing off the door like his fists.
Finally, Pete opened the door. He was clearly very sick and very drunk, everything about him reeked. But, sensing his danger, when our Dad accused him of drinking, Pete began to cry and protested he was not drunk, just sick and our Father, partly because he did not know what to do and because he did not want to fire Pete, relented again.
For some time, Pete seemed to recover, do his work reasonably, and not appear to be drinking, but, in the end, it was a horse that did him in.
Our thoroughbred horse farm had stalls for about 25 head, mostly full of horses from the local race track that needed to rest and heal. Also, it had a torpedo sand training track, the kind of footing the real race tracks had, replete with a starting gate for getting horses back up to speed. Coming when needed were a variety of what were known as “bug boys,” young riders who were too inexperienced to ride in regular races, but eager to apprentice and earn some cash. They would come down for a day and work out the horses that needed it.
Therefore, on that fatal day, two significant events happened—cataclysmic for Old Pete. It was a bright, sunny day and the current bug boy was out in the track area with my Father and some other horse owners to watch several horses work out to see if they were ready to return to the races. The bug boy mounted the first one, guided him into the starting gate, which even had a real bell, and took off around the sandy oval when that bell pierced the summer air. Because of the short distance, the horses would traverse that oval several times and this particular horse was flying. I well remember watching him with the same awe I always had when these magnificent creatures displayed their unique beauty and power.
And then it happened. Old Pete’s world came crashing down as the horse, with no warning, stopped suddenly, reared up, and threw the rider over his head. Fortunately, the bug boy was shaken, but not hurt seriously.
“What happened?” our Father called out as he and his cronies sprinted to the jockey, helping him up and dusting him off as the horse continued to run wildly around the track before he came to a natural stop.
The bug boy spoke in a breathless, halting way: “Something spooked the horse, Mr. F. A flash of light hit us both in the eyes. A glint. It caused the horse to rear. I couldn’t hold him,.”
“ A glint?” Everyone just looked at each other.
“ It came from the infield,” the jockey said, pointing to the interior of the track, which was covered with high weeds as it always was in the summer. “That flash came from over there.” He pointed toward the center.
It did not take long to find Pete’s folly. Our Dad and the other men ducked under the fence and walked toward where the bug boy pointed, kicking the tall weeds aside as they scoured the area.
Nor too far in, the mystery was solved. Covered by the weeds were scads of empty beer cans, which Old Pete had stashed to cover his addiction. Evidently the sun had glinted off one of them and struck the horse in the eye, causing it to buck the rider off.
It was a long, sad walk back to the barn. And Pete cooperated in the way he did not want to. He did not respond when our Dad called out his name. He was passed out dead drunk near a far stall when Buck found him.
Despite my clear ability to remember all of this so many years later in graphic detail, I confess I do not remember Old Pete’s dismissal. Our minds allow us to block some memories.
Now, I am just sitting here at my computer, penning this, with no memory of a good-bye. All I can see is the old trailer, that, for some reason I can’t recall, burned down during the next winter, no human able to live in it even though I am sure our Father hired a replacement for Old Pete.
Not every story has to have a moral. Sometimes they are just sad.
Originally published in Phenomenal Literature Magazine