Part 3
“Hazel’s a horse,” Nora said. “She’s twenty-something, she’s buckskin, and she won’t eat until everybody else has.”
Teresa laughed, and the laugh caught partway through. “Can you come up? I can’t promise what he’ll be able to say. But I think he’d want to hear it from somebody who’s seen her.”
It was a hundred and thirty miles to Bend. Nora said she’d be there by noon.
She called Glenda at home that night, which she had also never done. Glenda listened, sighed, and said she’d put the sub on the route, that this made two irregularities in one week, and that she hoped the horses were worth it. Nora said they were. Glenda said, “Huh,” in a tone Nora couldn’t read, and hung up.
That left the call she had been putting off since she’d climbed the hill for signal.
Bev picked up on the first ring, as if she’d been sitting by the phone. “Did you catch him?”
“Sort of.” Nora told her about the spur, the pen, the clipboard, Arlo, Merle’s parking lot. Bev didn’t interrupt once. When Nora ran out of story, she sat in her dark kitchen with the receiver against her ear and felt the next sentence sitting in her throat like something she’d swallowed wrong.
“I have to drive to Bend tomorrow,” she said. “Somebody needs to feed them around five. It’s not much. The hay’s in the barn, and there’s a coffee can for the senior feed, and you’d want to split it four ways and put the piles far apart, and watch the little dun, because—”
“Nora.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be up there at four-thirty,” Bev said. “I’ll bring Cody in case anything needs lifting.”
That was all she said. No finally, nothing about the Grange supper. Nora sat a long time after the call ended with the phone warm in her hand, more shaken by how easy it had been than she would have been by a no.
Arlo Gentry was smaller than she’d expected. She had pictured a big man from the handwriting. He lay propped in a hospital bed by the window, with the right side of his face slack and his right hand curled on the blanket like something set down and forgotten. His left hand was big, though. It was the hand of a man who had carried hay two bales at a time for sixty years, and it gripped the bed rail when Teresa told him who she was.
“Mail,” he said. The word came out thick and slow.
“I’m sorry about your box,” Nora said. “I put a notice on it. I should’ve known something was wrong.”
He moved his good hand an inch on the rail. Nora decided that meant never mind.
She told him everything. She described the trough line and the grasshopper in the float valve, the four piles of hay, Hazel standing over the dun while she ate. When she said the little mare’s name he closed his eyes, and his mouth worked, and a tear ran sideways into the pillow.
“Junie,” he said. “Eat?”
“She ate. Slowly. The vet’s coming Thursday.”
He nodded, or tried to. Nora took out her phone, and her thumb hovered over the picture for a second before she turned the screen toward him.
It was Rook at the pen fence that morning, ears up, nose over the rail.
Arlo stared at it. He let go of the rail, reached up with his good hand, and touched his own forehead, just above and between his eyes. He drew a small curl there with one finger, the shape of a backward C.
Nora’s thumb went still on the screen. Rook had a whorl of hair exactly there, one that grew the wrong way. She’d brushed across it ten thousand times.
“Hazel’s,” Arlo said. “Colt.”
It took nearly an hour to get the rest, and Teresa came in twice to check that it wasn’t too much for him. He gave it to her in pieces, three or four words at a time. When he got stuck, Nora asked yes-or-no questions and read the answers in his hand.
Ward Pruitt had died eight winters ago. A nephew in Sacramento inherited a share of the place and a lawyer to go with it. The nephew had a man coming with a stock trailer for the horses, and everybody knew which sale barn that trailer was headed for and what happened to old ranch horses there.
So the night before the trailer came, Arlo had gone up to the top pasture with a pair of fence pliers.
“Cut it,” he said. He held the good hand flat for a long moment. “Six went.”
Over that winter he had brought four of them back, one at a time, hungry, with hay and patience. The yearling never came. Arlo had seen him once in the spring, running with a band of wild horses out on the public ground, and he’d tried for two more years before he gave up. By then the estate was so snarled in lawyers and back taxes that nobody had ever bothered to count horses. Two of the old geldings had since died. Arlo kept the rest out there quietly, on his own dime, and told no one.
“And Junie?” Nora asked.
Something almost like a smile pulled at the good side of his mouth. “Stud. Off the… public.” He tipped his hand toward the window, toward the open country somewhere past it. “Came to the fence. One spring.”
“He was in a dry reservoir when I found him,” Nora said. “Rook. Seven years ago. Wire cuts all over his chest. He wouldn’t let me touch him for months.”
Arlo looked at the phone again. Nora made herself ask the question she’d been carrying since the parking lot.
“Do you want him back?”
He looked at her for a long time, the good eye and the drooping one both.
“Looked. Seven years,” he said. “He picked.”
She had to put the phone down on the blanket. Arlo’s hand found her wrist and held it, the grip still strong.
“Not mine,” he said. “Hazel. Tink. Junie. Estate’s.” His jaw worked. “They’ll send them. Sale.”
“Then I’ll talk to the estate.”
His grip tightened, almost hard enough to hurt. “No.”
“Arlo.” She waited until he was looking at her. “You can’t go back out there. I can’t keep sneaking hay up a road onto land that isn’t mine and hoping nobody notices. Sooner or later somebody does, and then it’s a deputy deciding what happens to them. I’d rather tell them myself.”
He held on a moment longer. Then he let go and pointed his chin at the closet. Teresa brought the plastic bag with his belongings. In his wallet, behind a photo of a gap-toothed girl in a softball uniform, was a business card from a law office in Salem, soft at the corners from years in a back pocket.
“Don’t tell them,” Arlo said, and lifted his good hand, two fingers working like pliers.
“That’s yours to tell,” Nora said. “Not mine.”
She left at four, with the card in her jacket and the sun sliding toward the mountains behind her. Outside Riley the country flattened out and went blue with dusk, and her phone, which had been quiet all afternoon, lit up on the seat.
“Nora.” Bev’s voice was thin, and it was fast. “The little one’s down. She went down right after she ate, and she won’t get up. We’ve been trying for twenty minutes. Honey, I don’t know what I’m doing…”
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