A Kit Barks in Fright. Turning Gelding up with Consequently Has Lost Tries To
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1 A TREATMENT FOR THE SCREENPLAY A TIME TO MOURN AND A TIME TO DANCE by Richard A. O'Driscoll SUMMER, 1929. THE CORN BELT, WESTERN IOWA. A small boy stands alone on a dirt road, holding half a broomstick with a piece of red cloth nailed to one end. A quarter mile up the road two men, mounted, wheel and jockey for position, vying for a slight advantage as they prepare to match their horses over this primitive race course. As they maneuver, the boy is startled to hear a small "yip" to his right and down the corn rows. Ordinarily a nocturnal denizen of the fields and hedgerows, a fox and her two kits move through the nearly full grown corn searching for field mice when they see the boy; a kit barks in fright. Turning to see the animals, the boy drops the flag in surprise. Up the road the horses leap forward and thirty seconds later thunder past the boy, nearly brushing him in a thick cloud of dust. Coming back to the finish line the elder of the two riders speaks to the boy. John Dew, farmhand, is chafing because his eight-year old son started the race before he could line his gelding up with neighbor Sam White's horse and consequently has lost the dollar they matched for. Small for his age, lithe, winsome Earl Dew tries to apologize for his failure to start the race the way Daddy wanted it. John pulls the boy up behind him and they ride for home. 2 Corn is king in this corner of the world, and summer is a time for growing. Dotted here and there across the verdant countryside are the white clapboard, two storied homes where farmers grow their families, and near each house is a huge red barn, white faced Herefords and Holstein dairy cattle grazing in pastures around the barn. The green fields now topped with golden tassels fraying from the stalks move upward toward the sun almost visibly, horizontally only at eventide when a gentle breeze whispers eastward from the low hills along the Missouri. Like many other families in this last year before the Great Depression, the Dews have no trouble finding work on local farms. John makes enough to feed and clothe his family, and usually some left over to feed a Quarter Horse and a pony for the kids. Feed is plentiful around the barns, and the small shed behind the little house on the edge of Sac City large enough for two stalls. In this setting Earl Dew finds a love for horses central to his life, and very little interest in school. THE DEW HOME. Mabel Dew, a small, frail woman whose face reflects a lifetime of doing without, sits knitting in the living room of the frame house on the road leading north out of town. John, lean, wiry, even-featured, enters with his "flag man" in tow, complaining that Earl has let him down. Mother Mabel sides with the boy and counters with a complaint that John shouldn't be racing for money they can ill afford, especially on the Sabbath, "when church is hardly over." Besides, all this racing will likely give their son notions about becoming a jockey as his dad was in his youth, "riding all over them county fairs in Tennessee and goodness knows where else." Mabel Dew warns she is "raising no jockeys in this home, and you remember that, John Dew!" SAC COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS. JULY 4, 1933. Contestants for the Pony Race are lined up in a row of seven, proudly parading before families and friends, six boys and one lone, pig-tailed girl rider bringing up the rear. Mounted on Daisy, a short- legged, nondescript Shetland of dubious heritage, Earl Dew's race horse is nevertheless shining from laborious hours of grooming. At the starting line the racing judge raises his blank-loaded pistol and fires. Seven ponies leap into action, pounded in the ribs by seven screaming jockeys determined to win the purple ribbon and two dollar prize money. Midway through the half-mile race Daisy moves closer to the rail and when a sorrel pony carries its rider wide on the turn, shoots through to gain ground on the field. Daisy gallops home a length to the good. Twenty feet past the finish disaster strikes the leading jockey when a dog darts across the track, causing Daisy to jump sideways, throwing her twelve-year old rider into the dirt. Adults run to his aid as he sits up, holding his right arm and grimacing. Daisy stops down the track and looks back, nickering. The Dews run from the stands, and kneel beside the fallen rider. Mabel's face is drawn, John's relieved, as they wait for the announcer to call "a doctor in the house?" Doc Spence examines an obviously broken wing, and advises an immediate trip to his office uptown for examination and setting of the broken arm. He tries to assure a distraught mother that it will "heal just fine, Mabel, don't worry yourself, hear?" 4 MARCH, 1934. Seated in the office of her pastor, Rev. Mr. Ira Crewdson, Mabel Dew isn't sure she likes the counseling she is receiving. Hoping he will concur with her desire to turn Earl away from a raceriding career to something less dangerous, she is almost sorry she has tried to enlist the one ally she thought she could count on. Knowing the pastor is opposed to gambling as a pastime, she feels confident he will see things her way. Instead he asks her to wait a moment while he turns to a passage in the Good Book, then reads to her, quietly, but with emotion: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment." Earl, the pastor tells the anxious mother, must be free to make his own choice of vocation, even one we prefer he reject, or something within him will die. Every person has a dream, and if we take that dream away from our child out of fear or selfish desire to live out vicariously some ambition unfulfilled in our own life, we are guilty of a form of homicide. The death of a young person's dream is a serious matter, and Mabel and John must be very careful to avoid doing this to their son. Mabel assures her pastor that Earl's dad is far from trying to dissuade their son from seeking a jockey's life! John's encouragement of Earl's ambition to ride race horses stems from both his own youthful adventures on the county fair circuits in the South, but also, she is sure, from his Indian heritage. Pastor Crewdson is surprised to learn that Grandma Dew is full-blood Cherokee, something John has not been open about sharing, in Sac City where only one family of color resides. Smiling, Pastor reminds Mabel the high school team is called the "Indians," and wonders if Earl wouldn't be a hero on campus if the other kids knew! Pastor urges her to bring the family to next week's Revival meetings, and allow God to speak to Earl through the evangelist's message. Maybe, he confides, she will find God is on her side in this raceriding business, and Earl will change his mind! She leaves, little solaced, but promises to bring the family to a service. FINAL NIGHT OF THE WEEK-LONG REVIVAL. The evangelist is preaching with fervor to a packed First Christian Church. Earl pays close attention to this interesting speaker, who frequently addresses his message to the young people present. He challenges them to surrender their life to God, in order to receive the greatest possible blessings from Him. He might even call some to the mission field. Earl whispers to sister Beth, "I might could race a camel over there!" His attention returns when he hears the speaker saying, "...so be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me." A few moments later when the evangelist gives the altar call, Earl sees his mother looking curiously at him, saying nothing, then rising to walk down the aisle, little Beth trailing. Earl struggles with his thoughts a few moments, then rises, his decision made. Minutes later Earl stands waist deep in the baptismal tank above the Communion Table, Pastor Crewdson intoning the familiar words as he plunges his young convert beneath the waters. In bedroom privacy later that night Mabel confesses to John she was praying mightily for God "to turn that boy's head away from them running horses to something safe!" Summer has come again, the corn still awkward in its pale green puerility, offering little hope of the verdant luxuriance that late summer will bring to these gentle fields. It is Saturday morning 6 and Ed Loomis arrives in his battered Ford pickup truck, towing an equally battered one-horse trailer. The Dew family gathers to bid Earl goodbye, for Ed and his aspiring jockey are off to South Dakota's wild west country, where they will try to win a race or two with Ed's thoroughbred mare. Mabel stifles tears, for this journey clearly marks her fifteen-year old son's "rite of passage," and she is not happy to see him depart, even for a week with a trusted friend. Neighbors gather at the fence on either side to shout well wishes to the frontier-bound duo, and they drive away, the mare nickering farewell to a mother endeavoring fortitude, and an obviously proud father.