Passion Play Read Online Free PDF Page B

poised and harmoniously composed stance, the taut slimness of its body, Big Lick, like Gaited Amble, was a triumph of the labor and persistence of its previous owner. As with most Tennessee Walkers, the three special gaits that were its trademark had been cultivated by a unique regimen. The horse had been shod with elevated pads and heavy wedges, unevenly angled, that strained its muscles and ligaments into an altered stride. Its forelimbs had been smeared just above the hoofs with a potent chemical lubricant, then cinched with chainsnear the joint and encased in weighted boots. The chemical, together with habitual movement of the chains and boots, had created sores so inflamed that they often ate two or three inches into the flesh. Precariously balanced in its altered gait, the horse, to relieve the burning lesions, would resort to the exaggerated prancing for which it was prized. Foremost among these was the running walk, a gait crowned by the “big lick,” in which the horse’s foreleg was raised to its peak. At the same time the hind leg would cleave the air, overstepping the track of the front leg by as much as fifty inches.
    To slim the line of its belly, Big Lick had been fed a special diet; to trim the neck and shoulders, it had been forced to sweat for months under a plastic hood. Even the exaggerated arch of the mare’s neck was the result of years of pressure from a gradually tightened checkrein.
    In the parking lot, Fabian put rubber boots on his horses’ hoofs for protection against the asphalt, then rode each horse around and across the lot, allowing it to sense the unfamiliar air, explore the unknown landscape.
    He began to feel the grip of that peculiar elation that came over him when he was about to challenge a horse’s might with the precision and command of his own performance. Fabian knew that the beauty, allure and menace of the horse rested solely in its anatomy and not in a complex intelligence: the union of rider and mount was, at base, a duel of human brain and animal physiology. He had a repertoire of images for this elusive and mysterious essence of the horse. Sometimes he thought of it as a self-propelled crane, with the animal’s back as the cab and its arching neck as the boom, now raising and lowering the bucket which was its head. Then a horse would seem to him a mobile suspension bridge, its legs the pylons, its muscles the cables; or as a kind of autonomous spring mechanism that would catapult itself up and forward through space, then return to earth unshaken, ready to rebound.
    But just as those sophisticated devices were vulnerable to misuse, so, too, any horse, however skillfully trained, might, when pushed beyond the limits of its physiology by a rider’s will, collapsewithout a flutter of warning; the most bitter penalty for any polo player was to have his pony violently give way under him during a game.
    Fabian had once heard, perhaps at one of those fire-and-brim-stone revival meetings he sometimes came upon in his travels, that if God wished truly to lay a man low, he would take from him the sacred flame. Fabian knew that his only fire was polo, his only art the power, mounted and in motion, to strike a moving ball, his only craft the guile to place that ball where he would within the field, undaunted by the presence of other players—he astride the horse at full gallop, his polo stick a lance at the ready, his brain a compressing present, past, future in a single act, matchless, without flaw. Within the compass of this briefest, most incandescent of life’s occasions, he was possessed by bliss, surprised by joy, a pioneer beyond the realm of known condition and circumstance, a god in a perfect moment of existence.
    After moving both horses at a brisk trot around the empty lot, Fabian picked up a mallet, threw a ball out into the darkening silence and mounted Gaited Amble. He used occasions such as this to practice what professional polo players called stick-and-ball—riding