Part 5
Hazel put a finger on the line she’d been adding. “You may want to, once we know what the county’s actually holding. I don’t.”
He looked up. She had spent a year making room in that ledger for something he had dragged home without asking her. She could have reminded him how often she’d been right. Instead she told him about 1939, when a county man came out claiming the barn sat too close to the road. Amos had gone into the back room and come out with a survey nobody else remembered existed. “He kept every scrap of paper that said he belonged on his own land,” she said. “If he kept the later ones, I mean to find them.”
They searched the back room until midnight, then the cedar chest, the attic, and the metal cabinet in Amos’s workshop. Between searches they still fed and watered. Wade couldn’t so much as lead a client horse to the round pen, and it bothered him to see the mare who was due home standing at the fence with her lead rope hanging untouched. Each night Hazel checked the ledger before she opened another drawer, counting how many days they could afford to wait.
On the fourth night Wade stopped halfway down the attic ladder and thought about where Amos had kept the things that were his. Not in the house. He took the flashlight out to the barn, climbed up in the tack room, and put his hand on the loose board. His envelope was still behind it, with what was left of the thirty-five dollars. The cigar box sat where it always had, filmed with dust. He had never opened it because it wasn’t his. He carried it down the ladder, set it on the kitchen table in front of Hazel, and let her open it.
Inside were tax receipts going back to 1938, the deed, the 1939 survey, and a Board of Health certificate dated April 17, 1952. It passed the barn as a public stable for the boarding, training, and sale of horses, and it was made out to Amos Tolliver. Hazel read the parcel number aloud and handed it to Wade to check against the county letter. It matched. She called the Board of Health first thing the next morning, but the order stood until an inspector came. They put the certificate back in the box so it would survive the week.
Odell Frye came the following Tuesday with a clipboard. He was fifty-one and patient with gates. He paced off the distance from the manure pile to the creek, looked down the well, and tried the fences and the fire extinguisher. At the kitchen table he read the certificate and said the barn had passed as a public stable once and he expected it would again. Then he turned the complaint face up.
“This other business,” he said. “I’d like to see the horse.”
Wade had been waiting for that question since the envelope came.
Hazel carried her chair out to the round pen and sat down. Wade brought the black mare in. For seven months she had stood for the saddle with no more than a twitch under the girth. Frye stood outside the rail on her off side, a little behind her, where she couldn’t quite see him, and the wind lifted the pages on his clipboard.
Wade settled the blanket and the saddle, and she took them. He drew the girth up one hole, then another. He felt it under his palm before he saw it: the long muscle along her side going hard, then a shiver starting in her near foreleg. The clipboard pages flapped again, and the mare’s knees began to knock.
One more hole, and she would probably stand. She had stood through worse all spring, and Frye would write down that the boy could saddle the horse the complaint called dangerous. Wade let the girth out instead. He unbuckled it, lifted the saddle off, and carried it to the rail. The mare blew out a long breath and dropped her head.
“That’s all for her today,” he said.
Frye looked at the saddle, then at him. “The complaint says she goes over backward.”
“She did. Once.” Wade kept his hand on the mare’s neck. “Last October. I saddled her because she was standing still, and I took that for yes. I was by myself. I’d promised my grandmother I wouldn’t be.” He nodded toward the clipboard without quite looking at Frye. “It was your pages just now. She can’t see you on that side.”
Frye tucked the clipboard under his arm. He was quiet long enough that Wade could hear the mare’s teeth working on nothing.
“Who stops a session out here?” Frye asked Hazel.
Hazel hadn’t moved from the chair the whole time. “Whichever of us sees it first,” she said. “Today it was him.”
Frye asked to see the notebook. Wade brought it from the barn and handed it over open to the bad pages: the sorrel’s split plank, the two weeks Boone stopped eating, the Saturday in October. Frye read for longer than Wade wanted him to. Then he explained, without hurry, that a boy could work in his family’s stable under a parent’s or guardian’s supervision but couldn’t hold the certificate, and that a certificate made out to a dead man didn’t hold anybody. They filled out the county form reissuing it in Hazel’s name, and she paid the three-dollar fee from her apron pocket. On the line for who did the work, Frye wrote Wade’s name and the word trainer, and beneath it, in smaller letters, under supervision of H. Tolliver. He lifted the order before he left.
He didn’t ask who might have wanted them gone, and nobody ever learned who had sent the complaint. Garland Pryor never claimed it. Wade put Frye’s form in the cigar box with the old certificate. The next morning he went to the mare who should already have gone home, told her owner what the delay had cost, and did only the work she was ready for.
In the spring of 1960 Hazel paid off the $304.18 and the interest that had grown on it, out of the tax account she’d been feeding a few dollars at a time since Tate’s mare went home. She taped the county receipt inside the kitchen cupboard, at her own eye level. That same April, Garland Pryor drove out Old Mill Road and stopped at the fence without getting out of the Cadillac. There were new boards on the south wall now, and three customers’ trailers were parked in the grass. Carol Pell stood in the lot holding a halter open while Boone lowered his head and waited for her to work out which side went over his ears. She took her time. Pryor watched for most of a minute before he started his engine, and by the time his car was gone down the road, she had buckled the halter herself.
Earl Dockery died in January of 1966. His daughter brought Nell back in a borrowed trailer, the shoulder scar gone white at the edges. The mare was twenty. Among Earl’s papers the daughter had found the canceled check for three hundred and fifty dollars, written in his square hand, and she brought that too. Wade put it in the cigar box, which now sat on the shelf above his desk in the barn beside the 1952 certificate, Frye’s form, and the sale receipt from September 23, 1958: eleven horses, $236. Lonnie Greer still telephoned before he chalked anything small or scarred or slow to turn. Some weeks Wade went, and some weeks the barn was already full.
Nell came down the ramp stiff from the ride. At the bottom she stopped and looked at the barn, at the narrow door into the aisle she hadn’t walked through in seven years. Wade moved out of her way and stood to one side so she could see the open yard beyond it. He waited with one hand on the rail. Behind him he heard the back door, and then the legs of a kitchen chair settling into the dirt by the gate.