Horses

Horses occupy two sharply different places in the narrative: they are the subject of routine gambling odds and, in a family memory of wartime deprivation, the remains on which starving people fight to survive. The contrast gives the animal a significance beyond either use, connecting ordinary human appetites to the extremity of hunger and to the lasting transmission of trauma.

Racing and Wagering

Horses enter the account of Marcy Lupino through the language of illegal betting. Although Lupino had a successful accounting practice and respectable civic standing, he continued to set odds on ball games and tote odds for the next day’s ponies. The reference places horse racing within a gambling operation that had become difficult to leave: when federal agents uncovered the betting room, Lupino faced prosecution, but feared what his criminal associates would do if he cooperated even more than the prospect of prison.

The ponies belong to the operation’s everyday calculations, a marked contrast with the later memory of a horse reduced to food. Lupino expected a federal camp with a salad bar and tennis courts; instead, he was convicted on state charges and sent to Rudyard in manacles. The horse-racing detail thus appears within a larger account of how gambling, prosecution, and the threat of incarceration shape the narrator’s understanding of prison and its consequences.

The Horse in the Camp Memory

A story told to Rusty Sabich by his cousin Ilya when Rusty was nine or ten centers on an old nag that died and froze in the snow. After the animal had lain there for three days, a guard allowed it to be dragged beyond the barbed-wire fence of the compound. The inmates rushed it. They tore away the hide with their bare hands and grabbed at the flesh; some meant to take meat away to cook, while others, driven by panic, began eating where they stood.

Rusty’s father had witnessed the scene during the years he spent in camps after the shooting of his parents and his flight. The horse is not described as an individual animal with a life beyond this episode: its importance in the recollection lies in what its body makes visible about starvation and the inmates’ desperation. For the child who hears the story, that image is vivid enough to inspire nightmares for most of a week.

Memory, Fear, and Inheritance

Years later, Rusty sees his father visibly frightened in a lawyer’s office. His disheveled appearance—unshaven, with a crooked tie and soiled collar—makes his fear palpable, while the remembered account of the camps gives it a history. Nearly three decades after his father came to America and survived, Rusty understands that his father can foresee a repetition of the deprivation he once endured. At twenty-five, Rusty recognizes that his father’s losses have become part of his own inheritance and is overcome by grief.

The horse’s two appearances therefore mark very different distances from bodily need. In the betting account, horses are part of a schedule of odds; in Ilya’s story, the dead animal becomes the focus of a struggle for food. The return of the image through family memory makes the horse a measure of how extreme deprivation persists: the animal’s fate is past, but the fear associated with it remains legible in the father’s later distress and in the son’s recognition of what that history has carried forward.