Part 4
He took it because Earl stood there holding it out, and because the feed bill came due on Friday. Earl didn’t let go right away. “I’ll ride her where people can see her,” he said, as if that were part of the price.
Earl loaded Nell himself. She went up the ramp with her ears on Wade until the last step, then turned her head toward the ridge. After the truck had gone, Wade found her empty place at the fence before he remembered the check in his shirt pocket. He’d known she would make somebody a good horse. He hadn’t known he would miss the small, low sound she made when he opened the gate in the morning. Hazel laid the check on the stack of bills and asked whether he wanted to copy Earl’s address into the book. He did, in case Earl ever needed him to look at the mare again.
Earl rode Nell where people could see her: the church lot, the feed store, the Fourth of July parade. Hazel put part of his money against the winter hay. By June, Mr. Tate from the feed store called about a mare who wouldn’t load, and a dentist from Winston-Salem named Dr. Pell brought out a nervous gelding his daughter had quit riding. Dr. Pell wanted the horse ready in three weeks. Wade said three months and meant it. Dr. Pell drove off with his trailer rattling, and two days later he brought the gelding back.
By August Hazel kept a list of names and telephone numbers tacked up beside the flour tin. Whenever a strange horse arrived, she was out at the pen with her chair before Wade reached for a halter.
The first Saturday Tate came out for his mare’s lesson, he took up his old place at her hip with a buggy whip, from habit. Wade asked him to put it in the truck. Tate did, and then stood with his hands in his pockets while the mare set one foot on the ramp, took it off, and looked at the pasture.
“She’s thinking about it,” Wade said.
“She’s been thinking about it since Easter,” Tate said.
It took forty minutes. When she finally walked up and stood in the trailer eating out of the bucket, Tate let out a breath as if he’d been holding it since Easter too. The next Saturday it took twelve. The mare went home only after she could walk up to the trailer, back away, and try again without a man at her flank forcing it. Wade took the pay, put most of it toward hay, and handed the rest to Hazel for the tax account. She wrote the amount in the ledger while Tate’s trailer was still rattling out on the road.
Dr. Pell’s daughter, Carol, came with him the next week. She was twelve and thin, with her arms folded tight. She stayed outside the pen while Wade showed her how the gelding flinched from a quick hand. She kept her arms folded when the gelding blew, and kept checking whether her father had seen. Wade knew that look from the inside. But she could see the gelding settle when she spoke before touching the lead. Wade told her father that three months was a guess, not an appointment for a miracle. Carol asked if she could come back and watch. He said she could, if she wanted to work.
She came back every Saturday. On the third one she asked about Boone, who had drifted up to the rail to look at her. Wade let her stand at the fence and let the gelding look.
Garland Pryor’s stable was ten times their size, and Wade was no threat to his sales. Still, Pryor had expected Amos’s barn to stay empty.
In late August a man from Morganton came out to look at the sorrel. He had his checkbook open on the hood of his truck when the cream Cadillac came up Old Mill Road. Pryor didn’t get out. He leaned across the seat and said through the window that he had a finished gelding at his place, ten years old, sound on any ground you cared to name, and he’d take a hundred and twenty-five under whatever the boy was asking.
The man looked at Wade. Wade looked at the sorrel, who still went shorter on hard ground than soft and would for a while yet.
“That’s a fair offer,” Wade said. “You ought to take it.”
The checkbook went back into the man’s shirt pocket. Pryor touched two fingers to his hat brim toward Hazel on the porch and drove on. The next week another customer went elsewhere without saying why. Then, on September 3, 1959, two envelopes came from the Sayer County Board of Health.
The first said that the operation of a public boarding and training stable on the Tolliver parcel was under review following a complaint. The second enclosed the complaint, unsigned. A minor child, it said, was training dangerous horses for pay without an adult trainer, including a horse known to throw itself over backward with a rider aboard. Until an inspector could come, the stable was to take in no outside horses and do no training for hire. There were four client horses in the barn. The farrier was due Friday. One mare was supposed to go home in twelve days.
Wade read the second letter until the words stopped looking like English. There had been no rider. There had been a boy alone with a girth in his hand, on a Saturday when he’d promised not to be alone.
They called every owner that evening. Hazel gave them the county’s order straight and promised word after the inspection. She didn’t promise a date she no longer controlled. Wade heard one man ask whether his gelding was even safe out there. Wade had a good answer about the horse and nothing to say about the letter. When the last call was done, he set the farrier’s appointment card beside the envelopes on the kitchen table, next to Hazel’s green ledger.
Pryor’s offer had expired in March. But somebody would still buy twelve acres with road frontage. “Maybe we should sell,” he said…
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