Part 2
“I asked her to stand still,” Wade said. “She did.”
Hazel came through the gate and took the end of the girth out of his hand. Her fingers were colder than the afternoon. “Then she said yes to standing still.” She unbuckled the other side, lifted the saddle off the mare’s back, and handed it to him to carry out of the pen. It was the first thing he had ever seen her do around a horse that she didn’t do slowly.
They watched the black mare take a few steps on her own and looked for fresh blood or a new hitch in her gait. Hazel called Haskins from the kitchen about the fall, and Wade agreed there would be no saddle on that mare until the vet had gone over her back. Then Hazel went out and moved the kitchen chair. She didn’t bring it inside. She set it square in front of the round-pen gate, where nobody could come through without stepping around it.
“I said two o’clock,” she said.
“I know.”
“You’re not sorry you did it. You’re sorry it went wrong.” She wasn’t angry the way he had braced for. She sounded tired, the way she did when a column wouldn’t add up. “Your grandfather was sorry that way for forty years.”
For eight days Wade left the black mare alone except for feed and water. His failures didn’t stay at the barn. He fell asleep twice in American history, missed four algebra assignments, and brought home a note for Hazel to sign. A boy named Tommy Ricks started calling him Glue Factory in the freshman hall. Wade let him have it.
Hazel signed the note on the line for a parent. “School doesn’t turn optional because the barn’s full,” she said, and she took over the evening water round so he could do his algebra. He hated how she came in afterward, still in her café shoes, but he took the trade. On those nights he sat at the table with his book open and listened for her boots on the back step.
The back field gave one last cutting, and it wasn’t close to enough for eleven horses. Hazel set up monthly payments with the feed dealer. Earl let them take hay against fence work Wade would do for him in the spring. By November the ledger showed $41.20 between them and an empty account, and a second tax notice came from the county. Earl stopped by one Sunday and watched Wade lug water to the back field. A cheap horse, he said, could eat a man right off his land. Wade kept his grip on the pail until Earl added, more quietly, that Amos had known when to quit.
“I keep thinking I’m asking them the wrong thing,” Wade said.
Earl looked across at Boone, standing at the fence. “Wrong questions eat hay same as right ones.”
Three days before Thanksgiving, Garland Pryor drove up alone. He sat at Hazel’s kitchen table with his hat on his knee and laid a typed offer beside the ledger: $7,200 for the twelve acres, open until March 1, 1959. Pryor Stables needed a second entrance off the county road, and the Tolliver land was the only way to get one. The money would clear the taxes and put Hazel in a house in town with a furnace that worked.
“I’m not trying to run you off, Hazel,” he said. “Amos had the best eye in this county. He also died owing the feed store and Doc Haskins both, and you’ve been paying him off ever since.” He didn’t look at Wade. “I’d hate to see you do it twice.”
Hazel read the offer through and didn’t answer. Her hand stayed on the paper after Pryor stopped talking.
When the Cadillac was gone, Wade went out to do the evening feed and found Boone watching him. When Wade stepped toward the barn gate, the gelding backed three paces. Wade stopped. He walked around through the open field and came at him from there, and Boone stayed at the fence. Back at the gate, Boone gave the same three steps. Wade was trying it a third time from the open side when Hazel came out, her coat on over her apron, to ask what he was doing.
“I thought it was the halter,” he said. “Watch him when I stand here.”
For almost two hours they traded places and watched Boone trade his. The next morning Wade turned the gelding into a lot with no gate narrower than a wagon, and Boone took the halter and kept eating. Wade never learned what had happened to him in some doorway before the sale. Whatever it was, Boone had carried it out with him, and all he could do was show Wade where it still lived.
He went back over the first sessions in his head. Every time, Boone had stood in the stall until Wade stepped between him and the light. Every time, Wade had shortened the rope just as the horse tried to leave. Amos had taught him to let go when a horse made the right move, and Wade had been so sure which move was right that he’d missed what Boone was trying to get away from.
For three weeks after that, he gave none of the eleven a lesson. He took down one of Amos’s old account books, blank past his grandfather’s last entry, and started writing instead. He watched from the fence while the horses thought nobody wanted anything from them. He changed where he stood, where he set a bucket, how much room he left at a gate. The book filled up, including the pages that proved he had read them wrong the first time.
On December 4 the black mare stood easy under a loose blanket until a fold slid down against her lower ribs. Wade wrote down where she moved, not just that she had moved. On the seventh he noted that the sorrel went sounder on soft ground, and on the tenth, which doors Boone needed open. On the fourteenth, ten minutes into turnout, the bay’s stride suddenly lengthened, as if something had come unlocked. He brought the book to breakfast with straw caught in its spine, and Hazel cleared a place for it beside her ledger.
Haskins came back when Wade asked him, and this time Wade showed him the notes before asking for anything. The brown gelding’s hoof needed work. The sorrel had an old shoulder injury, and picking up his opposite foot had forced his weight onto the bad side. The bay’s scar had left the muscle around it guarded and short. On the black mare Haskins found nothing he could put his hand on, and he wouldn’t swear that fear was the whole story. “Keep watching,” he said. “If anything looks like pain, you stop.”
Haskins let them add the visit to what they already owed. Hazel wrote it in green ink and asked what this new way of doing things was going to cost. “Time, mostly,” Wade said. Then he saw her face and corrected himself. “Time and whatever Doc says they need.” She went out with him the next morning. When Boone backed, she stopped too, without being told, and later she moved her chair so it didn’t block the far end of the shed.
Every night she slid Pryor’s offer under the flour tin to keep the grease off it. Some mornings Wade came down and found it out again, lying beside the ledger.
In January he unlatched both ends of the barn. He stood well clear of the aisle and let Boone decide how close to come. The gelding walked up to the threshold, set one forefoot into the shade, and stopped, with the far door standing open in front of him…
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