Part 3
Wade kept his hands off the lead. On the first day Boone took twenty-seven minutes to walk through the barn. On the second he took eighteen, and on the third, eleven. Hazel timed him by the kitchen clock and called the numbers through the window as if she were reading off a race. On the sixth day the gelding passed from one yard to the other without stopping and without looking back for anyone to pull him.
The black mare took a different kind of time. Wade started her with a folded feed sack, then a blanket she could wear loose, then a surcingle Haskins had checked for fit. Over sixteen days he took it up a hole at a time and quit whenever she began to shake. On February 2, with Hazel in the chair, he set a saddle on her and fastened the girth. The mare’s legs trembled, but she stayed on her feet. Wade kept his palm flat on her neck until the shaking eased. When he looked over, Hazel was smiling at the mare and not at him, and he found he liked that better.
March 1 fell on a Sunday. Hazel spent the evening at the table with the ledger open and never took the offer out from under the flour tin. Wade did algebra across from her and watched the clock over the stove go past nine, then ten. At eleven she got up, rinsed her cup, and set it upside down on the drainboard.
She didn’t turn around right away. “I drove past that house in town on Thursday,” she said. “The one Garland had in mind. It’s got a furnace that comes on by itself, and a radiator under every window.” She dried her hands on the dish towel, one finger at a time. “I sat in the Ford across the street for twenty minutes and thought about being warm all the way to the corners.”
Wade put his pencil down. He hadn’t known she’d gone.
“I’m not telling you so you’ll feel bad,” she said. “I’m telling you because you ought to know what’s on the other side of the ledger.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.
“Your grandfather used to say a man who sold his land to pay the taxes on it had worked the problem backward,” she said. “I used to tell him a man who couldn’t pay the taxes didn’t have a problem. He had a sheriff.”
“Which one of you was right?”
“Go to bed, Wade.”
In the morning the offer was folded into the back of the ledger. She hadn’t torn it up. She had just let the date go by. That didn’t fix the roof or pay the county, and Wade still carried feed past stalls he could barely fill. By April five of the eleven were going quietly under saddle, and all of them still had work left. He stopped promising himself a date by which all eleven would be done.
He didn’t ride the sorrel until Haskins had watched the shoulder take weight without complaint. The brown gelding’s hoof took longer. Wade didn’t throw a saddle on a horse just to give the farm a number to brag about. He cleaned stalls before the school bus came, kept the book after supper, and learned to feel a lesson ending before a frightened horse had to say so twice.
The bay mare surprised him most. With slow work and Haskins’s advice, the tightness around her scar let go a little every week. At fourteen hands two she was shorter than anybody at the sale had wanted, but she was built close to the ground and strong, and she could pick her way along a narrow ridge for hours without wasting a step. Wade started calling her Nell. It was short enough to say at the gate, and by the second week she was coming before he’d finished saying it.
One damp morning he rode her up the path behind the pasture. She set her feet between the roots without scrambling or snatching at her head. At the top he got off to check the shoulder, and Nell turned and nosed his sleeve, impatient to go home. He had wanted her to prove Garland Pryor wrong. Alone up there with the fog lifting off the hollow, he was just glad she was comfortable.
In May Earl borrowed her to ride the six miles of ridge pasture where his cattle summered. He brought her back after dark, handed Wade the reins himself, and held the flashlight while Wade ran his hands over her shoulder. Then Earl asked what she would cost him.
Wade hadn’t thought he was selling her. He heard himself say three hundred and fifty, once she was ready.
Earl snorted. “Your whole load came to two thirty-something. Her share’s about twenty-one dollars.”
Wade named the months of feed, the vet bills, the mornings before school. He didn’t pretend the money was already in his pocket. Earl said three and a quarter and drove off. The next morning his truck was back in the yard. He climbed out with a check already written for the full three-fifty and held it out across the gate.
Wade’s hand didn’t come up to take it…
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