Part 2
“No,” Deb said.
She said it before she’d thought it through. Then she thought it through and still meant it. The draw was a quarter mile of oak brush growing out of broken rock, steep enough that Dennis had climbed it with a walking stick. A twenty-seven-year-old mare who’d been starving could put a foot in a crack up there and break a leg where no vet could get a truck. And Deb was due at the post office in fifty minutes to case a hundred and twenty-six boxes.
“Your call,” Jace said, and put the pliers away. He’d been saying that since March about almost everything, in a voice that didn’t argue and didn’t agree, and she didn’t have time that morning to decide what she thought of it.
When she drove out at 6:20, the dun was still at the gate. At a quarter past one, on the county road, Deb slowed out of habit at box seventy-one and caught herself holding half an apple out the window at an empty lot.
The horses turned out to be Jace’s. Deb had expected to do the work herself at either end of her route, the way she’d done everything since the funeral. But the vet came on a Wednesday while she was gone, and by the time she got home Jace knew which horses needed their teeth rechecked in the fall, which one had a heart murmur nobody needed to worry about, and how many pounds of hay each should be eating.
He’d written it on the back of a feed receipt in his blocky shop capitals and taped it inside the barn door. By the second week he had stopped saying “your horses.”
He named them, too, since Brent’s paperwork only had numbers. He used the vocabulary he had. A pair of bay mares who went everywhere together became Flux and Slag. The brown gelding with the curled-up feet became Rivet. There was a Tig and a Bead, and a jumpy little sorrel he called Spatter because she shied at everything, including her own shadow on the trough. For a week he called the dun Three-Fourteen. Then one night at supper he heard himself say it and laughed.
“Like pi,” he said. “Mom, she’s Pi.”
Deb said that would do, considering the mare had eaten a year’s worth of apples out of her hand. When Jace chalked it on the barn door, it came out PIE.
Every morning at about 6:40, Pie walked to the upper gate. Not around six, not sometime after sunrise. Jace checked his phone the first week out of curiosity and then couldn’t stop checking. Six thirty-eight. Six forty-one. Six thirty-nine. She would stand with her chest on the rail until the sun cleared the rim of the mesa and lit the top of the draw. Then she’d turn, walk down to the others, and eat as if nothing had happened.
“She’s punching a clock,” Jace said.
“She’s old. Old animals get habits.”
“So do old mail carriers,” he said, and Deb let him have that one.
On the second Saturday in July she drove to Sage Hill with a grocery sack of Ardith’s mail. Brent had set up forwarding before he went back to Denver, and the post office had done what it does, which was send most of it somewhere useless. Deb had pulled what she could. Ardith sat in a vinyl chair by a window facing the parking lot, wearing a cardigan buttoned one hole off all the way down. She knew Deb right away as the mail lady, which the aide said made it a good day.
Deb showed her photographs on her phone. Ardith went past the sorrels and the bay mares without interest. At the dun she jabbed the screen so hard the picture skipped ahead, and Deb had to swipe it back.
“That’s Tansy,” Ardith said. “Amos Tolliver’s mare. Is she drinking?”
“She’s drinking fine, Ardith. She’s putting weight on.”
“She won’t drink right out of a tank you fill with a hose.” Ardith said it the way you correct a child who calls a cat a dog. “She wants her sunup water at the top tank. Amos ran every horse on that place up to the top tank at sunup before he’d sit down to coffee. Forty years he did that.”
“There’s no tank up there. It’s all oak brush.”
“There’s always been a top tank. That spring didn’t freeze the winter of seventy-eight, when the river froze to the bottom.” Ardith studied the phone a long while. When she looked up, her face had cleared. “How’s your Dennis? He still after those old trees of Amos’s?”
In Dennis’s last year, Ardith had asked her that at the mailbox four or five times. Deb had always answered. “Still after them,” she said.
“You tell him they’re worth it.”
Afterward Deb sat in the car with both hands on the wheel. Half the valley still called her sixty acres the old Tolliver place, though she and Dennis had bought it from a couple out of Grand Junction who’d bought it from Amos’s estate. Ardith was living in some year when Amos ran horses up the draw at dawn and Dennis was alive and fussing over apple trees, and the top tank was there with the rest of it. Deb hadn’t corrected her about Dennis. She saw no reason to correct her about the tank either. She set it on the same shelf as her husband, somewhere Ardith could keep things Deb couldn’t.
The ditch notice came two days later, in her own slot at the case: the river was on a senior call, and the Cutler Ditch would close its headgate on July 14. By the end of the month the pasture crackled underfoot, hay had gone to fourteen dollars a bale, and the well gave a gallon and a half a minute before it started sucking air. Deb ran the pump on a timer and set her phone for two in the morning.
On the last Monday in July she came out at two and found Jace already at the far trough, holding the hose in one hand and his lit phone in the other. He put the phone in his pocket too fast.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
“I know you’ve got it.” He handed her the hose. Walking back to the house, his pocket lit up through the denim, and she read the top of the message before it dimmed. Ty Brandt. Last call, Gillette. You in or not? Neither of them mentioned it at breakfast.
On the last Thursday in July she got home at 3:10 and saw from the driveway that the upper gate was standing open.
The baling wire had been cut and coiled in a neat loop over the post. There was no dun mare in the pasture. Deb went up the hill at something close to a run, and at the gate she found two sets of tracks leading into the scrub oak, a horse’s and the waffle print of Jace’s boots. The coiled wire sat as neat as one of his extension cords. She was filling her lungs with what she meant to say to him when a sound came down the draw that she had never heard on this place in ten years: the hollow clang of a hoof striking steel…
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