Winter Money

Sophia Winslow's House

Sophia Winslow's House From the ages of twenty-one through twenty-seven, I worked on a horse farm in Midlands, Kentucky, called Burroway. I started off there as an ordinary hand, then became a yearling groom, then assistant to the yearling manager. I had four men working under me, and the owner of Burroway, Harry Linderman, would phone the barn every so often to check on things. He was a nice old guy and I was polite with my answers. I had a tenant house to live in, free of rent, and the last year I worked there I was paid to watch over the farm's young horses and teach new grooms how to handle them. Ijudged our stock for racing potential or how much they might bring at a sale. It was a good setup. Then the horse business in Kentucky went bust. This is the mideighties I'm talking about. For years, there'd been over-investing, calculated profits, and this ridiculous go-getter mood. It took a while for all these greenhorn investors to understand racehorses weren't reliable for earning quarterly interest; most animals couldn't win back their inflated purchase price. These new investors were driven out of the game and, subsequently, sales prices plummeted. Horse breeders had borrowed money on projected earnings and the banks were nervous. They began calling in loans. Being attached to the horse business was now considered to be poisonous. The value of land dropped. I could go on. The result was that a lot of farms got wiped out. Mr. Linderman didn't lose his place. It had been in his family for generations and that type of old money Armageddon can't loosen. But when the farm stopped showing a profit from its horses, he put them all up for sale. A couple of Texans came to look over our yearling crop. Somebody from Canada visited us. An English bloodstock agent representing the Arabs bought nine of our horses during a forty-fiveminute tour ofBurroway. Mr. Linderman was generous enough about letting the help go. He gave each employee a month's salary and told me I could stay in my tenant house until I found something else. This was a fine offer, but I didn't want tojust linger there waiting for some wonderful newjob to come my way. Waiting can be a bad thing; you can get too used to doing it. The problem was, no other farms were hiring. Horsemen were being laid off everywhere and even regularjobs around Midlands were hard to find. I decided to move to Lexington, about forty miles south. It was twice as large as Midlands. I thought there'd be better opportunities. I found a duplex on McGinney Street, the other half of which was rented by this fairly old lady. I began looking for ajob. The economy was bad around Lexington, too. The whole town had been tied to the horse business in one way or another: nice restaurants for celebrating the profitable sale of a yearling; clothing stores that offered designer labels; new car dealerships—anything that meant a better lifestyle— and these places had begun suffering, too. Now, if there was an employment listing in the Herald-Leader, it had a dozen applicants by noon. I got lucky and got on with a real estate company, Shively and Furman . They'd downsized, combining amaintenancejob with a groundskeeper 's. Neither man who'd held these positions previously was willing to have double workload at the same pay. Maybe they'd wised up 100 ^ WINTER MONEY and headed the hell out of Lexington. At any rate, I was hired the day I applied. Myjob at Shively and Furman consisted of general fix-it work and looking after different apartment buildings, houses and vacant lots. If there was something I didn't know how to do, I'd call a plumber or an electrician. Lee Shively would scream about paying somebody extra , but I figured he'd rather have the bills than a house with an exploding toilet or ashes for walls. I was still a cost-saver for him—we both knew it. I'd been at Shively and Furman about a month when they brought Joe aboard. Joe Albertello was his long name, but everybody at the office called him Spaghetti Joe orJoe Martini. When Shively first introduced Joe to me, he called...