Part 2
Ruth held her hand still. Ruin touched the back of her wrist with his nose, warm and damp, then retreated to the corner. She had lost track of the sentence she was reading. She finished the page anyway before she rose from the chair.
There was no single morning when he became safe. Ruth could touch his shoulder by the end of the third week of reading, and even then his skin jumped beneath her hand. She spent days letting him inspect the leather halter before she buckled it. When she clipped on a cotton lead, she left it slack. The little brass click still made his whole body stiffen.
Some days she accomplished less than she had the day before. A dropped bucket sent him against the wall. A gust knocked the half-open door, and she spent the rest of the afternoon outside it. She kept writing the dates and small changes on the back of an old feed invoice: took hay while I stood here; let me touch the left shoulder; did not move when I lifted the halter. On the bad days the list reminded her that the past month had been more than a series of accidents narrowly avoided.
His stall needed cleaning, and Miller had been right about his feet. Ruth opened the door and stood beside Ruin without trying to drag him through it. He braced. She gave a little pressure, let it go, and waited. For ten minutes he stayed rooted in the bedding. Then his head came down beside her elbow. She stepped into the aisle and heard one hoof follow, then another.
On the concrete he stood as if he expected the walls to move. Ruth offered him a peppermint on an open palm. He sniffed her glove and took it with surprising care. She rested her forehead against the side of his neck. Beneath the dust and scar tissue he was warm, and she had forgotten how much she missed an ordinary living warmth in the barn.
She moved him into the vacant box stall across the aisle and cleaned his bedding. He shifted when the wheelbarrow rattled, but did not strike the wall. Ruth worked faster than usual, aware that the first calm walk through a door did not make the next one certain. On the way back he hesitated at the threshold. She waited, and this time the pause was shorter.
By early spring he could be led to the paddock and back. His ribs had filled out, but no amount of feed changed the bank’s letters. Ruth kept the newest notice on the tack-room board, above the record of what she spent on hay. The loan officer wanted a credible plan by summer if he was to keep the account from moving toward foreclosure. A promise about future foals would be worth little without confirmed pregnancies.
She tried to put numbers beside every possible outcome. If the mares were in foal, she might persuade the bank to wait for a sale. If even one failed to conceive, the margin would narrow. Ruth left the other figures blank. There was no honest price she could assign to an unborn horse, and no buyer willing to pay it yet. In the paddock outside, Ruin turned when he heard the tack-room door and walked to the fence.
She could not afford a crew to control a stallion for hand breeding, and she had seen what the sound of a chain did to Ruin. She asked Miller to check his health and discuss the risks before she made a decision. He did not withdraw his warning. When she told Wayne, who ran the feed store and kept cattle next door, that she intended to let Ruin into the pasture with her five mares, he called the plan reckless.
Wayne had known Jon long enough to be blunt with either of them. He studied the horse through the fence before he spoke. Ruin stood quietly beside Ruth, yet Wayne had seen the broken stall door in winter. He said that a horse could behave differently once he was in a herd, and Ruth did not argue. She needed Wayne there precisely because she could not predict what would happen at the gate.
“Bess will make the introduction for you,” Wayne said. “And you know how she introduces herself.” Bess, the broad red roan mare at the front of Ruth’s little herd, could send another horse backward with one well-placed kick. Wayne also worried about the perimeter fence. Ruth had checked it twice, though neither inspection could promise her an easy afternoon.
“Stand by the gate,” she said. “If they’re in trouble, we’ll separate them.” Wayne looked at her for a long moment, then went to his truck for a lunge whip. He held it down at his side while Ruth led Ruin along the barn. The stallion walked with his nose near her shoulder. When he saw the mares across the five-acre field, his neck rose and a shrill call broke from him. Bess lifted her head from the grass.
Ruth put her fingers on the clip. Ruin had waited through all the months she had asked him to wait. This time, when she opened the gate, she would have to let him decide how to cross it. She slipped off the lead, and Bess turned toward him with her ears pressed flat.
Wayne gave her one last chance to close the gate. Ruth looked from Bess to Ruin. A hard pull on the lead would put the stallion beside her again, at least for the moment. She opened the gate wider instead. The decision felt less like courage than the end of every other plan she could afford.
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