Part 3
They hauled that night from the coin-op water station by the fairgrounds, where a quarter bought twenty-five gallons and the machine took only exact change. Cody had borrowed a three-hundred-gallon poly tank from a buddy and strapped it in the pickup bed. They made four trips, the last one after one in the morning, with Marcy feeding quarters into the slot from a coffee can while moths knocked against the light.
The town water smelled of chlorine. Six of the herd drank it at the barn. The old mare drank it from a bucket in the dead roses and from nowhere else.
On Monday Del Sorensen pulled the pump with a winch truck and laid it in the grass like something he’d caught. The motor had burned up running dry. The water in her well had dropped almost thirty feet since he’d set the pump in 2016, and it had dropped in every well on the bench. Setting a new pump forty feet deeper would come to about seventy-nine hundred dollars. He’d carry her in payments, but the parts were three weeks out, and she was ninth on his list.
Marcy had thirty-four hundred dollars left.
On Saturday morning a water truck came up her lane. It was an old flatbed with a two-thousand-gallon steel tank, the kind every big outfit kept for fighting grass fires and filling troughs in dry pastures. Russ Aldine was driving. Cody stood in the yard with his hands in his back pockets, looking like he’d half expected it and wasn’t sure whether he was in trouble.
“Cody said you were hauling quarters,” Russ said, and backed up to the barn.
He filled both tanks and three barrels by the house. Then he coiled the hose and stood in the shade of the barn with his arms crossed. The old mare came down from the north corner.
She came the whole way down the slope at a walk, unhurried, and put her muzzle in the barn tank for the first time since she’d come to the place. She drank a long time. Marcy watched it with her mouth open. Russ watched it with a face she couldn’t read, his jaw working on his cinnamon gum and then going still.
“She’s drinking good,” he said.
“She hasn’t touched that tank in eight weeks.”
“Maybe she was waiting for decent water.” He climbed into the cab. When Marcy came at him with her checkbook, he shook his head. “Neighbors,” he said, and drove off.
He came back Tuesday, and Saturday, and every Tuesday and Saturday after that. Del set the new pump the second week of August, and it gave her enough for the house, but the well came back so slowly that a single afternoon of seven head in ninety-degree heat drained it to sucking air. So Russ kept coming. The old mare drank at the barn with the others now and quit going up the hill in the mornings. Marcy missed the walk more than she expected to.
She didn’t like owing him. She brought him a coffee cake, and a sack of the tomatoes that survived the heat. He took them and thanked her and left the truck idling.
“He’s a good guy, Mom,” Cody said one night. “You’re always waiting for the catch.”
“I’m not waiting for anything.”
“You’re standing at the window right now.”
She was.
The Aldine box got two thick envelopes from a law office in Casper in August, Brandt and Coyle, Attorneys at Law, and one of them came certified, so she honked at the lane and Russ walked down and signed the green card against her steering wheel. Her mail car was set up with the wheel on the right, so she could reach the boxes, and he had to lean in her passenger window to write. Neither of them said anything about it. In nineteen years Marcy had never opened a piece of anyone’s mail or let herself wonder for longer than it took to file it. She wasn’t going to start with a man who was keeping her horses alive.
In the middle of August he asked about the mare. The hose was running into her barn tank, and the old girl was standing at the far end of it, drinking with her eyes half closed.
“Twenty-five hundred,” he said. “I’d come get her the last week of September, before the weather turns.”
Twenty-five hundred was the hay bill through November. Marcy felt the number land in her stomach. She thought about saying yes. She actually opened her mouth to do it.
“Why her?” she asked instead.
“Ava likes gray horses.”
“She’s not gray. She’s grulla.”
“Close enough for seven.” He smiled at her, and then he looked at the mare again, and the smile stayed on his face longer than the rest of him did.
“Why September?”
“No reason. I’d like her settled before winter, is all.”
“No,” Marcy said.
On the last Saturday of August, Russ texted Cody at six in the morning. He was hauling bulls to a sale in Billings and couldn’t make it until Tuesday. Cody borrowed the poly tank again and spent the morning at the coin-op station.
The old mare walked up to the barn tank, put her nose to the fresh town water, and blew at it hard. Then she turned and walked up the hill.
Marcy found her at first light on Sunday, standing in the dead roses, striking at the ground with a front hoof. It was slow and heavy, and each blow cost her something. Her hoof came down on that buried curve of concrete, and it gave back a dull ring, like a stone dropped on a sidewalk.
Marcy went for a shovel. She scraped away dead leaves, rose litter, a crust of dried silt, and found that the concrete didn’t stop. It curved away in both directions, a rim, rounded on top, worn smooth. On one stretch the concrete was paler and newer, as if somebody had patched it. Pressed into that patch, by a finger, a long time ago, were letters.
A.A. And under that, PENNY 5-01.
Beside the letters was a hoofprint no bigger than a teacup, small and perfect.
“Penny,” Marcy said out loud. The old mare stopped pawing, swung her white face around, and looked straight at her…
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