I turned the last page face up on the white tablecloth, beside the Derby pie, and slid it toward my son. It was a single sheet of yellow legal paper, folded in thirds and soft at the creases, written in a looping, confident hand that every person under that tent knew from the holiday cards. It was titled PLAN. Under the title ran a numbered list. “One, get Wesley to push for guardianship. Two, lame the stallion and sell him cheap to the brother of Mr. Prather. Three, move the proceeds to the account in Ocala, mine only. Four, when it all comes out, Wesley takes the fall.” Wesley read it twice, and his mouth went slack.
Luis, who had found it in the feed room, stood beside my chair with his arms folded and his eyes on the ground, and the whole tent held its breath. “That is not what it looks like,” she said. “It is a joke. Wesley and I were brainstorming.” I laid a second sheet beside the first. It was a handwriting analysis from a woman at the University of Kentucky, who had compared the plan to forty years of Christmas cards. “It is you, Courtney,” I said gently. “It is every loop of your capital C.”
Wesley turned slowly to face his wife. He is forty five, broad shouldered, with the weathered face of a man who has spent his life on horseback, and I watched that face come apart like a wet paper bag. “Account in Ocala,” he said. “Courtney, what account in Ocala?” She backed against the bourbon table, and the julep glasses rang. “Wes, I did it for us,” she said. “You were going to lose everything anyway. I was going to protect what was left.” “Number four,” he said, very quietly. “When it all comes out, Wesley takes the fall.” “You were going to let me go to prison.”
A folded sheet of yellow paper laid beside a Derby pie gave one father the weekend to bring his son back to the horse farm in Versailles.
I gave my terms in a low voice, with the horses already loading into the gate on the television. The commitment papers were torn in half, and I handed the pieces to my lawyer, who had been standing in the back all along in a straw hat. Blue Ellen would be bought back from the man in Florida by Monday. The stallion would be examined by an independent veterinarian, and Mr. Prather would answer to the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission. Wesley would enter a treatment program in Lexington within the week, and I would pay for it. And Courtney would hand her keys to the farm house to Luis before dark.
Courtney did not argue. She took the keys from her purse with a hand that trembled, and she set them on the table beside the pie. When she lifted her head, her face was a mask of mascara. “Clayton, I never wanted any of this,” she said. “I grew up with nothing. I watched you and Ellen with all those acres and all those champions, and I thought, there is so much, and nobody will ever miss a little.” I looked at the woman who had held my hand while my son stole from me. “Courtney, it was never a little,” I said. “It was my wife. It was her mare. It was a lifetime.” She turned and walked out of the tent into the sunlight.
Wesley stayed. He sat down in a folding chair beside me, and he put his face in his hands, and the whole tent of forty people let him cry. After a long time, he said into his palms, “Daddy, I thought I could beat them. Every day I thought, today is the day.” I put my hand on his gray head. “Son, I know,” I said. “Your mother knew. That is why she wanted you to stop.” He nodded and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his good seersucker jacket. “I want to stop,” he said. “I want to be the man that she thought I was.” The band began to play “My Old Kentucky Home,” and this time every person in the tent stood up and sang.
On Monday morning, I drove to a farm in Ocala with my lawyer and Luis. A tall man in boots met us at the gate with a halter in his hand, and behind him, in a green paddock, stood a dark bay mare with a white star on her forehead. She lifted her head when she heard my voice. Blue Ellen walked to the fence, slowly, with her ears pricked, and put her warm nose in my palm. “Mr. Rhodes, I paid forty thousand,” he said. “But I had a feeling about her. Take her home. I will not charge you a dime.”
The money consequences came by the book. Courtney was charged by the county attorney with forgery, theft by deception and conspiracy, and the account in Ocala was frozen. The betting company returned a portion of the losses once my lawyer showed them the signatures. The racing syndicate from Dubai, who had bought the farm, honored a clause that I had asked for in the contract, and Luis was named manager for life, with a house on the hill. I kept the cottage near the back gate, ten acres, a barn and the stallion, who made a full recovery.
In the name of my wife, Ellen, who passed in 2021 and who could read a pedigree like scripture, I started the Blue Ellen Fund. It pays for treatment, counseling and legal help for families in Woodford and Fayette counties who are hurt by gambling, and for the older horsemen and farm owners who find themselves pushed out of their own barns by relatives. In the first year, we helped twenty eight families. A trainer of seventy four, in worn boots, sat in the office with his hat on his knee and said, “I never told anyone my son was taking the feed money. I thought it was a shame to carry alone.”
The next spring, Wesley came home from treatment with a hundred and eighty days clean and a mark in his eyes I had not seen in twenty years. He walked up the lane to the cottage on foot. I was sitting on the porch in a rocker with a glass of iced tea. Blue Ellen had foaled that week, a leggy chestnut colt with a white blaze, and the little thing was wobbling around the paddock at the end of the yard. Wesley leaned on the fence and watched him. “Daddy, may I help you name him?” he asked. I thought it over a good while. Then I said, “Let us call him Second Chance.”