Part 2
“If that’s what happens, yes. Somebody will be there with him.” Caleb looked up as Helen touched a gloved finger to the colt’s tongue. This time the throat moved around a small, definite swallow. She asked the technician to warm another bottle, then told Caleb that one returning reflex gave them something to work with; it did not settle the night.
They stayed. Abby eventually slept against Nora’s shoulder, and Owen jerked awake whenever the pump sounded. Caleb sat beside the padding with his hand within reach of the muzzle. When the colt rested, he kept still.
At dawn Helen asked what name she should put on the chart. Under the blankets, the black coat had begun to settle, with rusty hair drying around the mouth.
“Flint,” Owen said.
Abby rubbed her face. “You want to name him after a rock?”
“Look at him.”
Caleb moved his foot, and the little head began searching for it. “Put down Flint,” he told Helen.
Two days later, he brought the colt home. Helen’s instructions rode in a plastic sleeve, which Nora hung where nobody could claim they hadn’t seen it. Formula and medicine occupied the mudroom sink. Abby’s notebook recorded temperatures, feedings, manure, urine, and each unsuccessful attempt to rise.
Owen washed the tubing without bargaining over whose turn it was. Caleb slept in a folding canvas chair inside the stall and woke with its frame impressed across his back. Occasionally he went into the house and stood in the kitchen, unable to remember which thing he had come to fetch.
Flint would finish a feeding and refuse the next two. The right eye began to clear, while the left clouded again after seeming better. Caleb found himself studying Abby’s notes for a pattern she had somehow missed. There wasn’t one yet.
On the sixth night, Flint gathered his front legs under him and lurched into Caleb’s knees. Caleb caught the narrow chest. Beneath his arm, the heart was running too fast, and the hind legs shook against the bedding.
He began to lift again.
“Let him down,” Nora said.
“He nearly had it.”
“Look at his legs.”
Caleb looked. He loosened his hold and lowered the colt carefully, though his own arms wanted to keep trying. Nora stayed at the gate until Flint’s breathing eased, then brought Caleb a clean blanket for the chair.
The next morning, before they could position the sling, Flint rose by himself. One pastern sank nearly flat and straightened. He took a step toward Caleb’s voice and planted his forehead against the zipper of Caleb’s coat.
Caleb stood afraid to move while Abby called Helen. Owen came running, saw the colt upright, and stopped so hard his shoes slid in the straw.
As the months passed, the infection cleared and the murmur grew quieter without disappearing. Helen listened at every visit and declined Caleb’s invitations to predict the future. Flint saw better with his right eye. With the left still limited, he learned the edges of the pasture by whiskers, fence lines, and the sounds of the herd.
A sudden noise made him stop and turn his head. Once he located Caleb, he could usually move on. Caleb taught him to lead, load into the trailer, stand for the farrier, and tolerate hands around his feet and ears. There were no plans for shows or competitions. The growing horse needed manners; he did not need to earn back the clinic bill.
Abby made a crooked carrot wreath for his first birthday. By his second, he was outrunning the young geldings in the north pasture. His chest broadened in his third year, and in his fourth the sunlight brought a blue shine out of the black coat. At five he sailed over a drainage swale while Helen watched from the fence.
“That’s quite a performance for somebody I didn’t expect to grow up,” she said.
“He likes an audience.” Caleb opened the gate for her. “You got him through that first week.”
“I didn’t do your night shifts.”
Flint returned at a canter, nearly sixteen hands now, with sounder hind legs and a white forehead mark like a crooked thumbprint. He still turned his head to compensate for the weak eye. When Caleb shut the gate, he gave it an offended shove.
Rafael Ortiz and Ben, the two full-time ranch hands, made a running joke of Flint’s inspections. He followed Caleb from the equipment shed to the calf pen and waited while he finished each job. At the porch he stopped as though the workday could not continue without him.
“He has you listed as his mother,” Ben told Caleb.
Abby, home from college, disputed this on biological grounds. Rafael said the evidence seemed fairly convincing. Caleb rubbed Flint’s jaw and told them neither of them was volunteering to take over the early feedings.
When Flint was eight, Caleb began waking short of breath. The doctors found early heart disease and a rhythm that needed watching. Medication let him return to work, and for years he treated the prescription as a nuisance in an otherwise unchanged life. Nora kept the empty first bottle after he would have thrown it away.
Abby came home to run the breeding records and accounts. Owen took construction work in town and spent weekends repairing things his father had meant to get around to. Caleb sometimes left the near-paddock gate open so Flint could come to the house. Nora could see the gate from her herbs beside the vegetable garden, but seldom mentioned it.
Flint recognized the truck before it cleared the cottonwoods. Caleb’s low whistle brought him to the porch; Owen’s imitation, which fooled everyone in the kitchen, did not. By the horse’s fifteenth year, Caleb had stopped reciting the age he was never supposed to reach.
Then one March morning, carrying two flakes of hay into the shelter, Caleb missed the rail with his left hand. He set the hay down and found it on the second try. The heartbeat rose into his throat, irregular and hard, and he leaned his forehead against the wood until the aisle stopped darkening.
When he turned, Abby was watching from the entrance. Her ledger was tucked under one arm.
“Dad. Your mouth. It’s gone gray.”
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