Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My family has been involved in horse racing for decades: trainer, hotwalker, exercise rider, groom, jockey, and social worker serving the backstretch, and I’m a lifelong horsewoman in a different discipline. I’m always leery of racetrack stories, as so many of them get so much wrong (Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule was thrown across the room as a travesty). This one gets it right.
It’s a small book, a series of short chapters in which a veteran racetracker named Sonia simply talks about episodes in her life with horses and in horse racing. Terse, often brutal, sad, yet also filled with wonder and acceptance, perseverance and bravery, violence, and kindness. From bush tracks in Iowa to Churchill Downs, Sonia does whatever she must to stay in the business, doing all the work herself. She feeds, she cleans, she scrubs, mucks, grooms, medicates, rides, trains; she sleeps in her car or a spare stall or a cheap motel, hugs and loves her charges, all with the clear-eyed sense that horses will always come and go, some win, most don’t, they die and break down; the lucky ones may end up as riding horses in fancy barns – where they’re drugged and bought and sold just the same. The people are treated worse. And yet, after a terrible crash on the track leaving Sonia with multiple injuries, the very people who demeaned and harassed her take her in and nurse her till she’s back on her feet again. What Sonia reveals is how the track is all-consuming: it is not just a job. It is literally your entire life, an exclusive community that only other racetrackers understand. Although this is a work of fiction, it all rings vividly true. With the possible exception of the issues of race and immigration that shadow the racetrack backstretches: most of the workers are Latino, and a large proportion of them are undocumented. Sonia and/or Scanlan simply don’t go there, and I have to wonder why.
Thank you, Kathryn Scanlan, for letting Sonia tell us her story. I know those people. There are more like them in Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete, Forest Ormes’s The Far Side of Redemption stories, and the ones I tried to honor in my own Scratched. Honest, authentic. She gets it right.
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