Part 2
“Take the front team loose,” Nell said as the wagon tilted. “Then bring every rope we have.”
Eli Boone swore that removing the horses would surrender their only pulling power. Jesse was already moving. He understood the new fact before Eli did: if the frightened team lunged again, it would pull the wagon sideways and finish what the washed bank had begun.
Nell stayed inside with the mules while the men chocked the uphill wheels with stones and a split fence rail. The wagon leaned far enough that all seven animals pressed against the downhill boards. The black molly kicked once, found no footing, and began to tremble.
“Open the rear gate,” Jesse said.
“They’ll come over us.”
“Not if Lantern turns.”
Nell looked at the gray. He faced the front slats, braced against the slope. To unload the others, they needed him to turn in a space too tight for panic.
Jesse climbed halfway through the rear opening and made a soft clicking sound against his teeth. Lantern’s near ear moved. Jesse clicked again, paused, then dragged his boot once across the wagon floor.
The gray shifted his hind feet.
“Cal used that sound at a dead end,” Jesse said. “It means there’s room behind him.”
Nell did not ask how many dead ends the boy still heard in his sleep. She moved against the high sideboard, giving Lantern every inch she could. He turned one careful step at a time. When he faced the open gate, Jesse backed down the ramp made from two fence rails and a wagon board.
Lantern followed him into the rain.
The sorrel with the torn ear came next. Then a bay, then two brown mollies. Each animal that left changed the balance of the wagon. The black mule remained pressed into the corner, staring at the open gate as if it were another trick.
Below them, the creek struck rock with a force Nell could feel through her boots. The chock rail sank deeper into the mud.
“Leave her,” Eli said. “Get yourself out.”
Nell knelt six feet from the molly. She did not reach for the trailing rope tied around the animal’s neck. “Move the lanterns uphill,” she told Jesse. “All of them.”
Darkness took the drop away. The only light now stood beyond the open gate, showing wet road and the bodies of the other mules waiting under the trees.
The molly’s breathing slowed enough for one forefoot to move. Then another. She crossed the wagon in a rush but stopped at the threshold. Nell turned sideways, the way Samuel had taught her when a direct gaze felt like a closed gate.
The mule stepped down.
Nell followed. Seconds later, the rear wheel dropped and the empty wagon rolled onto its side. One shaft splintered against the bank, but the ropes held it above the creek.
No one spoke for a while. Eli sat in the mud with both hands on his knees. Jesse stood beside Lantern, not touching him. Sleet clicked against leaves and melted along the mule’s spine.
They abandoned the wagon. Eli and his son took the two freight teams ahead while Nell and Jesse walked the seven unloaded mules between the wagons, using the vehicles as moving fences. At sunrise, the Mercer place appeared below the ridge: gray roof, bare orchard, smoke-dark chimney, and the lower pasture fence running uphill until brush swallowed it.
Nell opened both gates. The mules entered in broken groups. Some rushed past her; others planted their feet outside as if grass and distance were another kind of trap. Lantern crossed last. He took three steps into the pasture, raised his face to the thin morning sun, and closed his eyes.
Only for a moment.
Jesse saw it too. His mouth tightened, and he turned away before Nell could mistake grief for something that needed comfort from her.
“Come back tomorrow,” she said. “I can pay four dollars a week through January. After that, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know now.”
“No.” Nell looked at the borrowed wagons, twenty-seven hungry animals, and the debt notice in her pocket. “I don’t.”
He nodded as if the answer mattered. “I’ll come at six.”
Dr. Amos Venn arrived on the fourth day. He was sixty, narrow as a fence rail, and known in the county as a horse doctor, though bad roads often made his patients human. He spent two hours moving through the herd while Nell and Jesse wrote down what he found.
Five mules had lungs he did not trust. Four had shoulder damage that ruled out heavy collars. Two saw poorly in one eye. The black molly carried old burns along her flank, likely from a steam pipe or spilled lamp oil. Lantern’s body was sound, but when Venn approached with a halter, the mule placed himself where he could see both barn doors.
“Dangerous?” Nell asked.
“Careful,” Venn said. “He may become dangerous if you grow tired of the distinction.”
He left powders for the coughing animals and a bill for nine dollars. One of the five, an old bay with a white muzzle, worsened in spite of them. Nell kept calling him Number Fourteen because she had not yet found names for twenty-seven animals and because some foolish part of her believed a name should wait until she knew he would live.
On the eighth night, Venn came through freezing rain and listened to the mule’s chest. He tried what little could be tried. Near midnight, Number Fourteen laid his head against the straw and did not lift it again.
Jesse removed his cap. “His mine name was Abel.”
Nell stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
The words were not an accusation. That made them worse.
They buried Abel above the orchard, where the ground was soft enough to open. Jesse found the brass number plate from his mine harness in a tack box and scrubbed it with sand until 14 showed through the tarnish. Nell nailed it above the barn’s front door.
That afternoon she opened Samuel’s ledger to a clean page. Jesse stood at the table while she made columns for breathing, feet, shoulders, gates, touch, halter, collar, and work. He added another column without asking.
“What’s that one?” Nell said.
“What makes them leave.”
“Leave a pen?”
“Leave themselves.” He pointed toward the pasture. “Chain noise. A shut door. Somebody on the left. You keep writing what they’ll do. Write what stops them doing it.”
Nell handed him the pencil.
They named every mule before supper.
The work settled into increments too small for anyone beyond the fence to respect. Nell divided the herd by what each animal could bear: open-field handling, fence work, hand distance, halter, collar. Jesse corrected her whenever a category turned into a verdict. A mule that accepted a hand on Tuesday might refuse it Wednesday because wind rattled the roof or a man stood in the wrong doorway.
Coal, the black molly, slept outside through the first hard frost. Nell built a three-sided shelter in the pasture, then saw Coal stop thirty feet from it. Jesse walked around the structure and knocked out the rear boards.
“You’re letting the snow through,” Nell said.
“I’m letting her see out.”
The shelter stayed open at both ends. On the seventh snowy night, Coal stood beneath its roof. Neither Nell nor Jesse went out to look more closely.
By Christmas, Coal slept under a roof and Lantern accepted grain from Nell’s hand. Nell had twenty-eight dollars in cash and a bank notice marked FINAL PAYMENT: JANUARY 31. The timber hauling contract she had expected was already at Ezra Rusk’s mill because no Mercer team had been ready in November.
Ezra came to the farm two days after the notice. He stopped beneath the brass plate over the barn door, read the number, and removed his hat. Samuel had hauled for his mill for fifteen years. Ezra had paid on time, sent men to raise the barn after a windstorm, and never mistaken generosity for a reason to pay less. That history was why Nell could not dismiss him as an enemy when he looked over the herd and found her arithmetic wanting.
“I can clear the note,” he said. “You keep the house and lower field. I take the upper cedar and twelve acres along the ridge.”
“The land is worth more than three hundred forty dollars.”
“The land, yes. Your time isn’t. Not with the bank counting it.”
Across the pasture, Lantern watched them from beside the open shelter.
Ezra followed her gaze. “You had money for two horses. When that failed, you bought twenty-seven animals you hadn’t examined. Maybe you saw what the dealers missed. Maybe you couldn’t bear to drive home with nothing.”
She wanted him to be completely wrong. He was not, and that made his offer more dangerous than theft.
“Put it in writing,” she said.
His shoulders eased. “Hollis will bring the papers tomorrow.”
“Bring them yourself.”
After he left, Jesse stood in the barn aisle staring at the brass 14. “Are you selling?” he asked. Nell closed Samuel’s ledger. “Tomorrow I decide what I’m willing to lose…”
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