POPES IN THE BREEDING SHED

The following unabridged Chapter from Kevin Conley's STUD
is provided through the courtesy and with the permission of the
author. Please visit the website at http://www.studslife.com.

For a .PDF file click here.

Continued from page 1:Pope Senior guides the conversation away from the hint of censure and back toward gentle anecdote. It seems that a friend
who wanted to get into the horse business was converting some
tobacco barns into stables. `I told him, ``Well, the most important
thing is to be sure they have slate roofs.'' And about six months later,
I bumped into him and he said, ``I thought you were serious about
that.'' ' It's an easy mistake to make. Pope Senior is tall, slim, silver-
haired, and literally upright. No pillar of the community looks more
like an actual pillar. He possesses one of the most lullingly beautiful
Kentucky accents - not the thick, folksy, lock-up-the-women kind
you'll sometimes hear from handsome actors showing their range,
but the real thing: easy, unhurried, judicious, and amused. `Of
course, the point being, a horse couldn't care less,' Pope Senior says.
`You know, a horse is not gonna say, ``Oh, I've got a slate roof over
my head, I'm gonna be a lot better.'' '

Pope Junior and Marc offer to take me around the farm. It's
January, when not a lot happens on a breeding farm, so they drive all
over, dropping by the old barns, walking me through a field of
yearlings (`See that?' Pope Junior says, nodding in amusement at a
colt about two feet away from me. `When they pin their ears like
that, that's not a good sign'), driving up to the crest of one hill or
another to point out the old houses on the place. They show me
Vinery and its brand-new fences and, to the not too distant south,
the big brick Xanadu of the federal prison.

As neighbors go, you could do a lot worse than a prison. The
grounds are impeccable, and except for the occasional burst of gunfire
from the officers' shooting range, the residents pretty much keep to
themselves. `We had a guy would come out to shoot groundhogs for
us,' Marc says, as we idle on the road by Pope Junior's house. `And he
was on that hill in front of Pope's house, shooting. And he fired at
one, and there came back this rally of gunfire - '
`It was the firing range,' Pope Junior says.
`This huge federal firing range over there, and he thought they
were shooting back at him. And he literally, like, crawled out.' For
the record, even if there aren't any horses in the fields, crawling
across a paddock is not a great idea. There are reasons why people in
Kentucky wear boots.

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