Eight months on foot across a continent that had stopped having a government.
Moscow, the winter of 1914 into 1915, is the winter of lists. The casualty columns go up on the corner kiosks in long gray sheets, new pasted over old until the kiosks fatten like winter horses, and the quietest crowds the city has ever produced read down them with gloved fingers. The American reads too, twice a week, and the entry he keeps is always the same three words: lists, not ours. In 1917 the head lad reads the abdication aloud in the feed room, and when he stops there is no sound except the horses eating.
In March 1920 a column goes out of Odessa at first light: two hundred and eleven horses, three hundred and four people, forty-one carts in two files, an order of march, and a log kept nightly at whatever fire the day ends on. A ferryman asks who they are. The chairman tells him, the turf of Russia, going to work, and the man takes off his cap. On the fortieth day they come down to the Dniester at dawn, four hundred meters of spring melt, with the guns behind them inside a single day's march.
Typhus finds them in Bessarabia, and it starts in the children's cart, and the hand in the log never wavers once: boil everything twice, walk shorter days, and walk. They reach Poland. They reach France. In 1921 the household comes up a lane at Maisons-Laffitte with one gray mare and a legend attached, and a man of forty begins again in a third country and a fourth language. In the June of 1940 the paper is gray again, the army is new again, and the horses stay.
He spends that war on the wrong shore, doing stable work at Aiken, South Carolina, in complete obscurity, his record standing in two hemispheres and an ocean of censored mail between him and everyone he loves. He goes back. He trains again. And in January 1961 a heavy envelope with American stamps comes up the aisle at morning stables, and an old man reads it twice, hands it to his daughter-in-law, and says nothing until the feed. Then: sixty years, rider. We will go and see what the front door looks like.
Sixty years earlier that city had a side entrance for men like him. He came back at eighty-one in the good gray suit, walked in the front, and the room stood up.
THE WINKFIELD TRILOGY follows Jimmy Winkfield across three volumes and ninety-two years, from a settlement of seventeen children in Kentucky to the winner's circles of two empires and back to a Louisville front door. The wins are all real.