Breeding Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

to her house farther north on the same high ridge. And as Jo trotted home, she watched the clouds churn across the sky, white and grey and black now, with streams of sunlight still pouring between them, making the new spring green of the hills incandescent in the sun.
    All her life she’d loved the hilltops she could watch from that ridge, as they rolled off behind each other as far as she could see, like wet sand ridges left behind by the sea.
    Some hills were wooded, some plowed fields, some blue grass and alfalfa – a hundred shades of green together sprinkled with brown and grey, with wild redbuds turning pink in the woodlots that were laced with white dogwood too.
    Jo stopped for a minute, the wind from the north lashing her face, making her lips part if she didn’t fight it, letting herself give-in for once to how much she loved that land.
    She knew she couldn’t leave it forever. She’d see what she had to see and come back. But she needed time to let the past slide behind her. To breathe, without rushing, and think. To remember what she’d loved, and why, now that it was lost.
    She was facing the world without Tom at her back. Tommy. Who’d lived harder and wider. Who’d had a way of seeing that had comforted her since birth.
    She had work she wanted to do though. A calling worth taking up. And that was a gift that meant something.
If
she kept herself from getting snagged by the family business.
    There were forty-some Thoroughbred mares on the farm right then, on twelve hundred acres; mares they boarded for other people after they’d been bred; mares they took to the stallions too and brought home from there. They cared for them for ten months or more, then delivered the foals, and kept them with their dams till they were weaned in the fall. Even till they were yearlings, sometimes, when they’d go on to their owners, or the yearling sales at Keeneland, or less prestigious auctions.
    There were mares on the Grant farm who’d lived there since they were born, kept in foal by their owners, much more Grant horses, really, in every sense except legal.
    Grants rarely raised the high stakes Thoroughbreds from the famous racing stables. No Grant had gotten rich at this. But it was work her dad had loved, and Toss, her mother’s brother, still wanted to do, that let them keep their heads above water, and work for themselves.
    It was hard work, and it kept you home, caring for horses round the clock. Hardly sleeping come springtime, staying up with the foaling. Raising feed crops. Repairing fence. If the Grants were going to make anything to speak of, they had to do the work themselves without a lot of hired help, except during foaling.
    Jo’s house needed work done too; the house they called the “big house,” to distinguish it from the tenant house, and the remains of the first pioneer cabin built on the same ridge. It still wasn’t more than a modest farm house, Georgian-bred and handmade, built in 1801 by the colonel one of her distant great-granddaddies had fought under through the Revolution.
    Jo thought about the kitchen fireplace she’d have to rebuild before winter, and how to re-arrange her Mom’s room so Toss could move in while she was gone. Then, as she started walking home again, watching the wind twist tree branches together, she decided she’d go to Virginia first, before it got too hot.
    She’d see the houses lived in by Jefferson, by the Lees, the Randolphs, and Washington, and the rest. And drive north to Maryland and Massachusetts to see historic houses there, then home through Pennsylvania. She’d stop at Wright’s Falling Water too, to let the twentieth century blow through and sweep away older assumptions.
    Once she got home, she’d get herself to Europe to see the architecture she’d loved there in books. And she’d never again design a drive-in beverage center, or a fake colonial tract home. She’d