Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1959, pp. 185-186—Index of American Design (Public Domain)
Though by day the sky was a bright Kansas blue and the sun descended on the prairie like the stroke of a golden hammer, there was darkness and death at the Weaver place. Both Frank and his brother Forrest, who worked with him, had a certain hard attractiveness—“but their cruelty,” pronounced Lindsay in his diary, “was bottomless.”
On Sunday, July 7, he was in the sitting room writing letters when he heard a fearful row out beyond the barn. Frank and Forrest were exciting themselves by disciplining Dick, a frisky broncho colt, whom they had tied up and were beating over the head—one with a doubletree [a harnessing cross bar], the other with a pitchfork handle—while Forrest plied himself with swigs of whisky so that he could be as mean as Frank.
Lindsay heard the roars, oaths, thuds of the bar and stick, whinnies of pain and tattoo of hoofs all the long afternoon till at six o’clock Frank's fat and patient wife May ran over to the barn and protested, reminding the men it was Sunday and warning them they wouldn’t be blest and would lose a day’s harvest.
On Monday morning the little broncho Dick was hitched to the reaper along with three large mules. He went dancing out to the field, looking devilish, defiantly objecting to keeping his head on a line with the others and hauling the great load almost by himself. That night he came dancing home. On Tuesday he went out again dancing for battle, but returned at night dragging and panting.
On Wednesday, just past the hottest hour, Lindsay was working in the field with Forrest. About three o’clock the pony, who till then had been feebly dancing, went mad. He strained against his halter. His eyes were distended. Blood oozed from his mouth. His hide—a mass of wounds from Sunday’s torture—was clustered thick as fly paper with thirstily sucking flies.
Lindsay, who had never quite overcome his childhood terror of horses, put fear behind him and between them he and Forrest managed to pull the lunging animal away from the mules and restrain him by two halter ropes while Frank, the more savage brother, was sent for. Frank, cursing, tried to lead Dick back to the barn, but when they reached the pasture of long uncut prairie grass the pony sank down into it and kicked the air convulsively with all four feet. Then his heart broke and he died.
“If God gives me grace,” Lindsay pledged, alone with his diary, “some day I shall write his memorial—THE BRONCHO THAT WOULD NOT BE BROKEN.”
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NOTE In the decades following World War I, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was among the best-known poets in the US. His most popular poems include “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” and “The Congo.” He traveled across the country, by walking, surviving in part by “singing” his poems and working as a short-term farm worker. Overcome by financial difficulties and depression, he took his own life on December 5, 1931, by drinking a bottle of lye.
The aesthetic value of rhymes, alliteration, and other language patterns, not unlike those that Lindsay used, are discussed in a 30-minute video here (free, with online access).
