Part 2
Laurel didn’t have an answer, so she walked out to the mare instead.
By the time she reached the west fence, Maggie had stopped calling. She stood with her chest almost touching the top wire, her nostrils working, and her front hoof lifted and set down twice on the same spot of ground, the way a horse does at a gate it expects to open. Laurel ran a hand down the mare’s neck and felt the shiver under the skin. The hill above them was going lavender in the last of the light. The dead cottonwood stood up there alone with its bark peeling off in strips. Below the bench, in the draw that cut down toward the creek, a stand of willows had died back the summer after Laurel bought the place, and the gray stems still rattled when the wind came through.
“Old horses get strange in a new place,” she told Tess when she got back. She half believed it. “She’s probably calling for her friends.”
“Her friends are right there.”
Laurel had nothing to say to that either.
The work began the next morning and never stopped. Teeth came first, because a horse with sharp points on its molars can stand in hay up to its knees and still starve. Whitcomb floated six of them that first week, and the rest over the next two. Then feet. The farrier came out twice in three weeks, and she paid him half each time, and he didn’t make a face about it. She tacked a sheet of plywood to the barn wall and wrote eighteen names down the side in carpenter’s pencil, with a column for weights from the tape she wrapped around each barrel every Sunday. She rubbed out and rewrote numbers so often the plywood went gray.
She reset the south fence herself with the post driver and a new spool of high-tensile wire. She tore down the old loafing shed and used its boards to build two box stalls with half doors. All of it happened before eight in the morning or after six at night, because the middle of the day belonged to hauling water and rolling out bales, and two days a week it belonged to the fencing jobs that paid for the rest.
Kimball Feed and Ranch Supply opened at seven on Saturdays, and by seven-fifteen there were usually four men at the counter drinking the free coffee and one more pretending to read the corkboard. Laurel came in the third Saturday for a mineral block and a bag of beet pulp, and Garrett was there, buying fly spray he could have had delivered.
“How much is eighteen running you a week?” he asked her. He asked it like he wanted to know.
She set the beet pulp on the counter. Ray Kimball rang it up and didn’t look at either of them.
Garrett did the math himself, for the room. Hay at the going rate, grain, the vet, the farrier, diesel. He did it slowly and without any mistakes, and the figure he arrived at was high but not crazy, which made it worse. “Come November,” he said, “you’ll find out the co-op doesn’t take sympathy as payment.”
Somebody snorted into his coffee. Laurel carried the mineral block out herself.
The horses didn’t care about any of it. By the end of the third week the numbers on the plywood had started climbing. The gray gelding with the crooked blaze, whom Tess had named Banjo for reasons she refused to explain, came off the fence one evening and loped a whole circle of the east pasture, bucking at the end of it like a yearling. Laurel stood there with a bucket in each hand and laughed out loud for the first time since June. The paint mare, Dottie, let Tess brush her neck on a Tuesday and pinned her ears at her on Wednesday as if Tuesday had been a misunderstanding. Two sorrel geldings, Smoke and Biscuit, began playing at dusk, nipping at each other’s withers and wheeling off and circling back. At night the steady grinding of eighteen horses eating under the barn lights became the sound Laurel fell asleep to.
Maggie gained slower. She ate what Laurel gave her in the box stall where nobody could push her off it, and she put on a little, held it, and put on a little more. She didn’t play. She never fought for a spot at the round feeder; she took whatever side was left. And every afternoon, somewhere between five and six o’clock, she left the herd and walked out to the west fence and stood facing the hill.
Laurel timed it once without meaning to. She’d come out of the house at 5:10 to move a hose, and the mare was already walking. She came out the next day at 5:00 and watched her go at 5:12. It didn’t vary much. The old mare would stand at the wire for an hour, sometimes longer, and then come back in the near-dark to the barn.
“She’s waiting for something,” Tess said.
“She’s twenty-four,” Laurel said. “Old horses make rituals.” She let that be the whole of it, because by late July she had real problems.
They came in slowly, which was the trouble. No single bill was big enough to frighten her. It was the pile of them: the hay going down faster than she’d planned because some of the horses had been on the edge and needed more, the second farrier visit, the wormer, the bag balm, the replacement buckets. In the first week of August she sold the flatbed trailer she used for hauling fence panels. It brought eighteen hundred dollars, and it meant borrowing Ray’s every time she needed one. She took on two more fencing jobs for a hay outfit up the valley at forty dollars an hour, using her own tools. She put off replacing the well-house roof. She put off the new pump housing she’d budgeted for since spring.
The summer turned out drier than anyone had predicted. Southwest Idaho is dry in a good year, but by August the side creeks had gone to cracked mud even in the shade, and the extension office started mailing out notices about rotating pasture to save grass. Laurel’s well had been drilled in 1968, deep, and in the five years she’d owned the place it had never given her a reason to think about it.
In the last week of July it began to hesitate. The pressure tank in the well house ran longer before it kicked off. The tank in the east pasture filled slower than it used to, maybe two-thirds as fast. She timed it on her phone one evening and again the next morning, standing with her boots in the overflow. She wasn’t imagining it.
That night she sat at the kitchen table with a calculator and the ledger book she’d kept by hand since her husband had moved to Spokane and turned into a voice on the phone every other Sunday. Tess was asleep. She’d left the kitchen tap running into a stockpot so she’d have water for the morning coffee and the dog’s bowl without waiting on the pressure tank.
Halfway down the column of hay figures, the tap coughed. It spat air, ran a thin brown thread, spat again, and stopped. Out in the well house, the pump kept running, louder now, with a dry rattle in it like gravel in a can…
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