Book Review by Norman Fine
The Key to the Quarter Pole, Robin Traywick Williams, Dementi Milestone Publishing, VA, 2019, Soft Cover, 278 pages, $16.00A person who writes about horses and people has first to really know both subjects, then bring to the project a compelling way with words. Robin Traywick Williams delivers it all in The Key to the Quarter Pole. She’s a horsewoman and a foxhunter, and for six years was chairman of the Racing Commission for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Plus, she’s been a feature writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch and a statewide finalist for UPI’s Journalist of the Year. She has several books to her credit, and this one is terrific—a page-turning novel filled with a variety of characters who inhabit that most exclusive inner sanctum of the horse world—the backstretch of the racetrack.
Louisa Ferncliff is one. She’s been beat up by a life with horses, but though her body is failing, she motors on with a will of steel. She knows very well that if she doesn’t take over the care and welfare of deserving racehorses, they will be raced and ruined. It happens all around the backstretch, but there are certain horses that she can’t let that happen to—especially the ones that give so much and expect so little. The principal object of her ministrations is Alice’s Restaurant, a horse with a fragile knee and a dubious future, who you’ll be rooting for every step of his tortuous way.
She spares some of her time caring for people, too. There’s Jimmy, the exercise boy, who is too green or too shy to fix himself. And there is Shannon, a girl with all the confidence in the world to make all of her hair-brain schemes work out for her, but, realistically, it couldn’t possibly happen that way. Or could it?
All the while, everyone lives their own peculiar life on the backside trying to break in or break out—the wanna-bes and the about-to-bes, the desperate and the hopeful—all dancing to the rhythm of the training schedule that begins every morning in the dark and ends…whenever. Robin’s characters, all capably crafted in three dimensions, play out against each other in an engrossing storyline that will keep you turning pages.
Jimmy, the quiet exercise boy, is no self promoter, but the trainer has noticed his calming effect on horses and his natural feel for pace. In fact he’s the only exercise rider who’s been able to get the Rondo filly into a starting gate. In the following excerpt, Jimmy can’t believe that he’s actually riding his first race, something he never dared to imagine. And he finishes in the money! Here’s an excerpt:
The pace picked up as the horses swept into the turn and the Rondo filly started slipping to the outside. He was shocked at the power of the centrifugal force. Even though he was folded up on the horse’s back with irons no more than fourteen inches long, he felt as though his right foot was hanging down the filly’s side and and he was slipping off. He jammed his foot in the iron and pushed himself to the inside, leaning with the filly as she accelerated around the curve. The stewards had impressed upon him the importance of maintaining a straight line, keeping to his own path during a race, but in the melee of shifting positions coming out of the turn into the stretch, it was impossible to tell where his path was. A horse dropped over in front of him and accelerated. He could feel a horse behind him looking to come by.
When they straightened out in the stretch, he popped the filly with his stick and she switched leads. He began scrubbing his hands up her neck and was rewarded with a perceptible surge of speed. With the horses spread out, Jimmy’s sense of pace became stronger. He could see the rail where stanchions flashed past like ticks on a stopwatch. All around him jocks were shouting and swatting their mounts. Some, like his filly, were going forward. Others were falling back. Adrenalin surged through his body like the shock from a cattle prod. He was riding in rhythm with his horse, driving her forward with hands and legs and voice. They overtook a filly on the inside and Jimmy rode as hard as he could, trying to reach the pair in front. The jocks in front suddenly stood up, letting their horses coast. As the Rondo filly blazed past, Jimmy heard the jocks calling out.
“Hey, bug boy, beep beep, game over.”
They laughed.
He slacked the reins and let the filly coast, at once pumped, embarrassed, amazed, and out of breath.
During the gallop out, Louisa focused on the horse’s legs. The filly’s soundness gave Louisa more than her usual feeling of relief. The filly was okay. The filly had gone in the gate and was okay. She had run a race and was okay. Her new jock had handled her well. Together, they were positioned to win next time.
“Look at that boy grin. You’d think he won the lottery.”
[Jimmy] waved his stick at the stewards atop the grandstand and dismounted. A groom held the horse as he pulled the postage stamp saddle off. After he weighed in, Mike shook his hand. “Nice ride, jock.”
“Oh man. Oh, man,” Jimmy said.
“Lose those last three pounds and you win the next time.”
“Oh man. Oh man,” Jimmy said.
Louisa savored Jimmy’s euphoria. These were the highs racetrackers lived for, that otherworldly feeling of coiling up like a copper spring and exploding in a shower of red and yellow sparks. Only jockeys knew the feeling of being one with the wind, but other horsemen could appreciate the tension of a race and feel, beating deep in their own chest, the heart of a good horse. When it was your horse, the elation went beyond human happiness, as if God had invented a new emotion just for horsemen. Louisa knew Jimmy would be back, three pounds lighter, ready to ride the next race. If he didn’t have racetrack fever before, he had it now.
She watched the boy walk away with Mike, his sweaty silks clinging to his poker-thin arms and ribby body. He was barely touching the earth, she knew, like a ballerina soaring on bruised toes. She didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.
Posted July 10, 2019