Part 2
A receipt was tucked under the clip. Harney Feed & Ranch Supply, dated the ninth: two bales of grass hay, one sack of senior feed, paid in cash. The store’s number was printed across the top.
Nora carried the clipboard up the hill behind the barn until her phone found one bar, and dialed.
The girl who answered didn’t know any Arlo. She set the phone down, and Nora listened to a register drawer and someone arguing about fence staples. Then a man picked up, older, breathing like he’d walked in from the back lot.
“Arlo Gentry,” he said. “Yeah. He went down in our parking lot, week ago Thursday, loading his truck. One of my boys found him by the tailgate. They flew him to Bend.” He paused. “You family?”
“I’m his mail carrier.”
The man was quiet, as if nobody had given him that answer before. “Well. Last I heard he couldn’t talk much. His truck’s still sitting out there. Nobody’s come for it.”
“Is there hay in it?”
“Two bales. Still there.”
Week ago Thursday was the tenth. He had loaded hay for the next trip and never made it out of the lot.
“I need to buy hay,” Nora said. “And whatever you’d feed a horse that hasn’t eaten right in two weeks.”
“You’d feed it slow,” the man said. “That’s what you’d feed it. Name’s Merle. I’m here till six.”
She tried the halter on Rook once more, mostly so she could say she had. He sidestepped it again and planted himself between the little dun and the open gate, so she hooked the chain behind him and left him in with them. Then she called Glenda, told her she’d be late, and hung up before Glenda could ask why. In twenty-two years on the route she had never once come in after four. She finished the north loop at a quarter past five, and on her way past the red barn box she pulled out the whole jammed wad of Arlo’s mail and set it on the seat beside her.
Merle was a wide man in a canvas vest. He wheeled three bales out to her wagon on a hand truck and set a sack of senior feed on the back floor. When she reached for her wallet, he walked her instead to a dusty flatbed at the edge of the lot. Arlo’s two bales were still roped in the back.
“Take his first,” Merle said. “He paid for them. He’d want them used where he meant them.”
She got back to the Pruitt place with the last of the light going purple behind the rim. All four horses were standing at the gate when her headlights swung across the pen.
She broke one flake into four piles and set them a long way apart, so nobody had to wait. The buckskin waited anyway. She stood over the dun while the little mare pulled at her pile, and she didn’t touch her own until the sorrel had cleaned up his. Rook ate a few mouthfuls and then went to stand beside the old mare. She laid her head along his neck for a moment, the way a tired person leans on a doorframe.
Nora sat on an overturned bucket outside the fence with the clipboard on her knees. She found a pen in her jacket and, under Arlo’s last line, wrote the date in her own small hand. Line cleared. Arlo’s hay, 1 flake, split 4 ways. Senior feed tomorrow, a little. It felt like writing in somebody else’s diary.
The vet’s answering service put her through to Dr. Kay Lindqvist on a cell phone, with wind behind it and a cow bawling close by.
“I’m in Crane with a heifer that’s going to take me half the night,” Dr. Lindqvist said. “Thursday morning’s the earliest I can be out there. Small meals, four or five times a day if you can manage it. Clean water. If any of them goes down and won’t get up, you call me back and I’ll figure something out. Don’t let a starved horse gorge. You’ll kill it with kindness.”
“Okay.”
“Whose horses are these?”
“I’m working on that.”
Nora got the hospital in Bend on her third try. The switchboard sent her to a nurses’ station, where a woman named Teresa listened to about two sentences.
“I’m sorry, hon. Family only. I can’t even tell you what floor he’s on.”
“I’m not asking how he is,” Nora said. “I just need somebody to tell him his horses have water. Somebody fixed the line on the trough, and they’ve got hay, and the old mare looks all right.”
The line went quiet long enough that she thought it had dropped.
“Which one’s the old mare?” Teresa asked.
“There’s a buckskin. I think her name is Hazel.”
Teresa let out a breath. When she spoke again her voice had dropped, as if someone might be listening. “He’s been trying to tell us about a Hazel for almost two weeks,” she said. “We thought she was his wife…”
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