Martinsville’s Last Race

A preview from the upcoming Revised Edition of A Country Squire’s Notebook, by Paul Fahrenheidt

“There was a time before the Randolph holdings united, when the Old Dominion was just a memory kept lit in the college halls of Richmond and Williamsburg. In that time long forgotten, cobbled over by the roads Billy Iron-Horse built, they still raced at Martinsville.

“Steeds, chariots, even mechanisms beyond contemplating by any mortal soul — in this history at least — would fill the angled embankments of this ancient and venerable track with the roars of machines and crowds alike…” A long-removed voice spoke in a longer-removed hall, and the silence that followed slammed shutters on the memory before it could continue.

The laughing, the snide-eyed scorn, his manuscript torn to pieces and thrown into the fire before him — it was too much for him to remember at once. So the Scholar, with wheat-colored hair and a face cast in bronze, covered by a mud-colored cloak, plodded on the trail atop his horse, turning his mind’s memories to other things, things that calmed him.

He remembered the great heroes of whom he’d penned whole biographies: the Intimidator, the Red Thunderbird, Old Hickory, the Silver Fox, even the King himself. He remembered their livery and crests, their famous numbering in the Circi Maximi that once stretched across every land from New England to long-lost Florida, their exploits and stories and personas and feats that all amalgamated into this Scholar’s sole focus for being since he’d found that book in the library at Commonwealth College.

“This obsession has destroyed your once-great capacity for study,” another voice from the blackness of silent halls spoke despite being three years removed.

“A scholar of this Commonwealth and in service to the House of Randolph must be built upon proper foundations! This manuscript is pitiful! Useless! It says nothing of building waterways, or the strategic lessons of Marshall Fairfax, or the culture and practices of the Gallics in Manakin, only about races and legends and myths and a dead way of being with no use in this world.” A tooth-filled smile shot forth from the blackness.

“Do you know what this manuscript deserves?” The sound of tearing paper and roaring fire and screams of protest and pain… like daggers in the heart filled the mind beneath the wheat-colored hair beneath the mud-colored hood atop the chestnut stallion plodding along the King’s Highway from the Randolph Capital to Martinsville. But his mind’s eye still saw the sheet that was his life’s work consumed by the fire, never to see the eyes and light of day, the cracking and snapping of the wood pressing into his mind only soothed by the louder roar of imagined engines in an enclosed stadium drowning out the scene of silent dark halls in deafening noise.

“You have two days to gather your belongings, settle your affairs, and leave this campus. We care not what you do, only that you must leave here and never come back. Never. You are a disgrace to this institution and everything for which it was established, and may the many give you the wisdom to see what we could not teach you.” A panel of three pairs of hands folded on a table were the only things that peered out from the darkness. The Scholar with wheat-colored hair was sat in a chair beneath them, his head hung low as the words pressed upon his neck.

“Have you anything to say for yourself?” said a voice in the darkness behind the folded pairs of hands. He shook his head. He stood up as the hallway to the door stretched out before him like a straightaway at the legendary Talladega, and he ran.

The books he stole from the library still sat in the pack tied to the saddle of the chestnut stallion. He’d read them all near a dozen times, the words impressed in his mind like borrowed memories. Statistics, quotes, places, people, all readable and requitable as though he had the page open in front of him.

“You say you’re from the college?” spoke another voice, its face covered by the shadow beneath a brimmed hat. He nodded emphatically like a lying child, and pointed to the plot of farmland he was interested in.

“And you wanna dig around there?” The Scholar nodded at the voice. He dug into his pocket and produced a pouch of coins which he’d also stolen from the library, though this pouch no longer remained in the saddlebags of the chestnut stallion. He produced three pence and a Silver Spotswood and handed it to the shadowy face.

“Well, I guess it’s fallow anyhow. You can dig ’til the frosts come.” The Scholar shot like a rocket to the plot without so much as a thank-you. This was the Richmond Raceway he’d read of, lost to the soil and sediments of the new history, but pieces still sat beneath the Henrico farmland waiting for him to find. He took his tools, his pick and shovel, his stakes and twine to set about marking the site.

“There he is!” shouted a voice from behind a faceplate on a mounted suit of armor. Snow pelted the Scholar’s face as he sprinted from the field to the stable as three armored men chased him down. The hooves of their horses struck the frozen earth like thunder, and the Scholar barely made it behind the stable door. He grabbed the first saddle he saw and tied it quick as lightning to the chestnut stallion.

The armored men were slow off their horses; they couldn’t keep up. Pathetic. Nothing like the speed and dexterity of the Silver Fox. The Scholar had what he needed. Richmond yielded no more secrets to him. He spurred on the horse through the other side of the stable and rode down every backroad he’d memorized.

“Which way to Martinsville?” he asked the first guard he saw once he’d put distance between himself and Henrico. The armored man lifted a gauntleted hand and pointed down the King’s Highway. The Scholar nodded thanks and plodded down the highway, and like exhaling a breath, he was in time again, atop a hill with the hazy blue wall of mountains standing cyan over the horizon.

Beneath him was the tiny hamlet they called Martinsville. His terminus.