Part 5
Red kept his head low while the girl worked out which side of the halter went over his ears. She took her time, and Daniel let her. By the time the Cadillac was gone she had fastened it herself. Daniel led neither of them toward the barn until she asked to walk.
In 1961 Clyde called from the auction about six small Morgans arriving from the mountains. He had put them aside, without yellow chalk, so Daniel could see them before the sale. Daniel drove over and found Clyde leaning on the rail. The horses were rough, and none had been promised to him. What mattered was that Clyde had waited to learn more before deciding what they were worth.
Daniel asked Clyde what he knew about their previous home. Clyde gave him the breeder’s name and what he had learned from the driver. Then he followed Daniel into the pen and stayed quiet while the six horses moved around them. No one was guaranteed a buyer, but they had been given time to be seen.
There were only twelve acres, the same old barn, and no covered ring when Daniel turned twenty in 1963. He handled fewer than twenty horses a year while Royce moved more than a hundred. Customers urged him to add stalls and assistants; their horses spent months on a waiting list. Daniel turned down the expansion. A schedule that allowed him to watch one horse properly was already full.
Margaret cut back to three mornings a week at the Blue Lantern in 1964 and left the job in 1965. She kept the green ledger on the kitchen table, filling its new pages with names and dates. Some owners waited four months, others eight. When a man from Charlotte offered double to have a gelding finished by Thanksgiving, Daniel told him when he could actually take the horse. The man waited.
Walter died in January 1966. His daughter brought June home to Mercer Farm, her shoulder scar white at the edges. She was twenty. Among Walter’s papers his daughter had found the canceled $375 check; she brought that too. Daniel gave June a place where she could choose her own pace and kept her through the six years she had left. Sometimes, when he walked the back fence, she came along part of the way without being asked.
Before he retired in 1968, Clyde visited Old Mill Road. Red had gray around his muzzle. A teenage boy was brushing the black mare’s belly while she stood loose, letting the brush travel over the place where a girth had once made her collapse. Clyde admitted that he had thought the boy with the envelope was throwing away two hundred and forty dollars. Margaret, on the porch, called over that she had thought so too.
Clyde rested his arms on the fence. He said the men at the auction did not reach for the yellow chalk as quickly now. They watched a horse a while, and sometimes called a person who knew more. Looking at Red, Clyde asked what had happened to make him behave that way at the old barn gate. Daniel told him what he had observed and what he still did not know. They stayed at the rail talking until Margaret called them in.
In October 1971 the family of a Blue Ridge breeder who had died at seventy-nine sent twenty-eight horses to the auction. Daniel, twenty-eight now, arrived before sunrise. Seven small Morgan types had their own pen, fresh hay, and no chalk. The new manager said Clyde had left instructions to call Daniel before judging horses that were scarred, nervous, small, or moving unevenly.
One dark chestnut mare tipped her left ear back whenever someone passed behind her. Daniel went inside and stopped five feet away. She checked the open gate, then studied him. He kept his hands at his sides and gave her room to take a step. The manager, standing by the rail, waited instead of calling for a bidder.
When the mare turned, Daniel could see the movement from both sides. He did not have an answer from one turn around a pen. He asked the manager to tell him what the family knew and listened without reaching for the mare’s halter. The manager had set out hay and left the gate clear; those were small decisions, but Daniel remembered how little room the eleven had been given to show themselves thirteen years before. He stayed with the chestnut a while longer before going to inspect the others.
By 1975 trailers came to Old Mill Road from Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia. Daniel had no national advertisement or grand sign; people found him through someone whose horse had been brought home and understood. Margaret, eighty-one, still answered the telephone when she felt like it, though six green ledgers now held most of the names. In the first ledger the overdue tax figure remained beside the record of Daniel’s $286. She had tucked the September 23, 1958, auction receipt into its back cover: eleven horses, $242.
One afternoon she took out that first book to check the name of an owner who had called again. The old tax entry caught her eye before she found the right page. Daniel was at his desk when she carried the ledger to the barn. He read the figure and handed the book back without making a joke about how frightened they had been. She left the auction receipt with him and returned to the phone.
Samuel’s stall doors still bore old teeth marks, and heavy rain still found a place in the south roof. Above Daniel’s desk the cigar box held the permit, Beck’s form, the complaint, Walter’s canceled $375 check, and the auction receipt. A horse moved against a gate outside, and Daniel went to see which one had arrived. He left the box on the shelf. From the fence he watched the horse look toward the narrow barn entrance, then stepped aside so it could see the open yard beyond. He waited there, one hand resting on the rail.