Bullet Work by Steve O'Brien Page A

The possibility that an event was beyond
the realm of the cogent or the logical was not to be tolerated.
Reality existed only in what man chose to believe. If it did not
match beliefs, it could not be true. It had to be evil. It had to
be destroyed.
    That’s why some were
labeled witches
and burned at the stake.
    That’s why gifts from
the obscure
were callously rejected and distrusted.
    That’s why bloodletting
was deemed
the highest evolution of the medical arts
for two thousand years.
    That’s why eugenics was
roundly
accepted as morally beneficent science.
Mankind had faith only in what it chose to believe, in what it
chose to see.
    It was logical. It
matched belief systems.
It didn’t challenge their fears. It was understandable. It didn’t
cause them to question.
    Yet the human spirit
wearily
cried out for a miracle.
    The miraculous was
scoffed at, ridiculed,
and rationalized as a quirk, a coincidence, a random act. The
miraculous was written off as a parlor game, hucksterism, or
infested vermin that had to be eliminated so that the ledger of
logic was again balanced and true.
    When the alchemist
practiced on metals,
people waited breathlessly. They wanted to believe. The alchemist
who toiled with the human soul was shunned, marginalized,
and justified out of existence.
    This was the lesson
taught generation
after generation. Who would dare to change it? Through this worldly
existence each would
bear a gift, even the boy.

Chapter 20
     
    There was a rhythm to mornings on
the backside. Before heading to the office, Dan grabbed a cup of
coffee at Crok’s and walked the four barns to Gilmore’s stable. He
didn’t have any particular business most days—just liked the
sounds, smells, activity, rumors, and, above all, the horses.
    They were beautiful and the center of this
universe. They were treated like princes and princesses and cared
for like a mother cares for her infant. It was a hard life for the
grooms, hotwalkers, and stable hands. Most made little to no money,
but the horses needed them, and, in the same way, they needed the
horses.
    He walked down the gravel road, stepping
quickly to the side to get out of the way of a veterinarian’s van
heading toward him. As Dan moved toward Gilmore’s barn, he stepped
into the grassy area just off the shedrow path. He pulled up a
crate and sat down, watching the grooms and hands care for their
charges.
    Beth was washing down a young horse. It
looked like Welling Green, a promising three-year-old in Gilmore’s
barn. Nino was walking a hot along the shedrow. Jorge was mucking
out a stall, which involved scooping out all the straw, including
parts left behind by the inhabitant.
    The straw was raked into a pile, hoisted onto
a hand cart, transferred to a larger cart, and eventually taken to
a larger pile, hopefully downwind from the backside. Once that was
completed, new, clean straw was laid down in the stall. Then the
process was repeated twenty or so times until every stall was
mucked.
    Everyone on the backside had mucked a stall.
Everyone on the backside hated mucking out stalls. If it was a
better job, it would have a better name. But mucking out stalls
happened every day, and the “new guy” at a stable, routinely became
the “chief mucker outer.”
    Jake occupied the trainer’s office, but Dan
was content to sit and take in the morning. He took the lid off his
cup, blew some steam off the coffee, and sipped. All around was
activity, all centered on a horse and making that horse confident
and strong.
    It was a place for dreamers. Could this young
horse be a champion? Will he fight down the stretch? Does she have
the will to win in a nose-to-nose duel? And there were smaller
dreams. Could this older claimer keep winning? Will this gelding
stay with us another year? The hands poured their hearts into these
horses, and the vast majority of the time their hearts were broken.
But they came back the next day, and the day after that, and the
day after that. They