Part 2
Sunday was three days ago. Marcy was already reaching for her boots.
The after-hours line at the vet clinic rang through to Dr. Paula Beckstead’s cell, and Paula answered on the second ring with a television going in the background. She asked how old, how thin, whether the mare’s gums were tacky, and whether she was passing manure. Marcy didn’t know any of it. Paula told her to find out, try electrolytes, and call back. “If she hasn’t drunk by daylight, I’ll come tube her,” she said. “But an old mare who’s already dry doesn’t have a lot of daylight to spare.”
There was half a tube of electrolyte paste in the tack room, left over from Doc’s last winter. Cody carried the lantern. They tried the barn bucket first, out of habit, though the mare was nowhere near the barn. Then Marcy filled a fresh bucket at the hydrant and carried it up the hill herself, switching hands every twenty steps, her shoulder burning.
The mare hadn’t moved from the dead roses. Marcy pushed through the canes, which caught at her sleeves, and set the bucket down at the mare’s front feet. It tipped. She grabbed for it and righted it on something hard and curved under the litter of dead leaves, something cold under her knee. An old foundation, she thought. Somebody’s hog house from sixty years ago.
The mare lowered her head and drank.
She drank in long, pulling swallows, loud in the dark, her throat working, the bucket going down an inch at a time. Cody stood at the edge of the thicket with the lantern and said nothing at all. When the bucket was empty, he went down for another without being asked, and then a third. Marcy knelt in the canes with one hand on the mare’s neck and the other on that cold curve of concrete and felt each swallow travel under her palm.
Paula came out at seven anyway, because she’d said she would. She was thirty-four, with a ponytail through the back of a feed-store cap, and she spent forty minutes on the old mare without hurrying. Gums better. Gut sounds fair. Teeth bad on one side but workable. She ran her thumb over a patch of white hairs on the mare’s left shoulder.
“Old freeze brand,” she said. “Too faded to read under this coat. Might come up clearer once she sheds out.” She stood back and watched the mare walk. “Some horses get particular about water in a new place. Taste, smell, the bucket, the spot. Usually they get over it in a few days. If the corner’s where she’ll drink, then for now the corner is where her water goes.”
So that was the arrangement. Every morning at five-forty, before she left for the post office, Marcy carried two buckets up the hill in the half dark. The mare would be waiting among the gray canes, and she’d drink both, slowly, then follow Marcy partway down before turning back. In the evenings Cody did it. He complained the first three nights about hauling water uphill for a horse who had a perfectly good tank, and on the fourth night he quit complaining and went up without being reminded.
He called her Grandma. Marcy called her the old girl. Neither name stuck.
The rest of the herd sorted itself out faster than Marcy expected. The mules stopped panicking once they understood the old mare would come back down the hill every morning. Cody named them Hazel and Pearl after two great-aunts in Casper who had never, he said, been apart for more than an hour in their lives. The sorrel, Rooster, bit everyone once and then settled into being merely rude. The black mare with the clubbed foot, whom nobody named for a while because she didn’t seem to want one, took to standing beside Marcy whenever she was in the barn, close enough to lean.
Hay went up forty dollars a ton between May and July. Marcy ran the numbers every Sunday night on the back of an old route schedule, and every Sunday they came out a little worse.
On Fridays Gus Lindqvist waited at his mailbox, because he was eighty-one and the mail was the best part of his day. He’d been the water commissioner for the district for thirty-five years, the man who rode the ditches and told ranchers when to shut their headgates, and he still read the stream gauge numbers in the paper the way other men read box scores. In the third week of June he asked about her new horses. She told him about the old mare and the north corner.
Gus looked off toward her bench, though he couldn’t see it from his place. “That corner of yours used to sing,” he said.
She knew what he meant the moment he said it. Her first few springs on the place, every April evening, chorus frogs had started up at the low end of that corner, a sound like somebody dragging a thumb down the teeth of a comb over and over. She would sit on the porch steps and listen. She tried to remember the last spring she’d heard them, and she couldn’t.
“A wet spot like that doesn’t dry up all at once,” Gus said. Then he took his electric bill and his seed catalog and went back up to his porch, and she drove on, because there were two hundred boxes left and she was already late.
Russ Aldine’s box stood at the foot of his lane, a big steel thing his father had welded together forty years ago. On top of it, cut from quarter-inch plate and rusted dark, sat the ranch brand: a capital A riding on a rocker, like the curved runner of a rocking chair. Marcy had opened that box six days a week for nineteen years.
In early July Russ was waiting at it, which he rarely did. “Cody says you’re carrying buckets up the hill.”
“Every morning.”
“She won’t drink at the barn?”
“Not a drop.”
He rested one hand flat on top of the box, near the cut-steel A, and didn’t say anything for a while. Then he took his mail and walked back up the lane.
The heat came in the second week of July and stayed. On Thursday the seventeenth she pulled into the yard at four-thirty and the barn tank was dry, the house tap gave a cough of air and nothing, and seven animals stood along the empty tank watching her truck. In the well house the breaker had tripped. She reset it. The pump groaned somewhere far down in the ground, and then she smelled it, hot wiring and scorched rubber, and the groaning stopped.
Cody got home half an hour later and found her sitting on an overturned bucket in the well house doorway with her phone in her hand. The driller’s wife had been sympathetic. Everyone’s well on the bench was acting up this summer, and the earliest Del could pull a pump was Monday.
It was Thursday, and the forecast said ninety-eight. Up in the north corner, the old mare was already standing in the dead roses, waiting for her buckets…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇