Part 4
“Is she rolling? Kicking at her belly?”
“No. She’s just lying flat out. She lifts her head and puts it back down.”
“Keep her head up if you can. Get something under it. I’m calling the vet.” Nora had the gas pedal halfway to the floor before she finished the sentence. “I’m an hour and a half out.”
Dr. Lindqvist answered from somewhere with a heater running. She listened, asked how long the mare had been down, how her gums looked, whether she was sweating. Nora relayed what Bev could tell her.
“Weak, not colicking, sounds like,” the vet said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is a horse that thin can’t stay down long. Her lungs fill and her muscles quit. I’m leaving now. I’m probably an hour behind you.”
Bev had pulled her pickup into the pen and left the headlights on the barn door, so the whole place glowed like a stage. Her son Cody, a tall boy of about twenty in a seed cap, knelt in the straw with the dun mare’s head in his lap. Bev had brought two horse blankets from her own barn and an old flowered quilt, and all three were spread over Junie. The other horses stood in the barn aisle. Rook had his head over the stall door, and Hazel was pressed right behind him, as if she were trying to see past his shoulder.
“She keeps trying to look at them,” Cody said. “Every time they move off, she gets worked up.”
“Then don’t let them move off,” Nora said. She knelt and put her hand flat on the mare’s neck. The skin was cool, and the pulse under it was quick and shallow. Junie rolled one eye up at her, then past her toward the door, toward Rook.
“She’s lying on her side, so we need to get her up on her chest,” Nora said. “Cody, take her tail. Bev, help me with her front legs.”
They rolled her onto her chest on the count of three. Junie groaned, folded her legs under, and stayed up with her chin propped on Cody’s knee. Bev stuffed two hay bales against her side to hold her there. Then they waited for the vet.
Dr. Lindqvist turned out to be a small, tired woman in her fifties with a gray braid down her back, and she was all business. She listened to the mare’s chest, hung a bag of fluids from a rafter with baling twine, and found a vein while Nora held the light. She said almost nothing until the bag was half empty.
“I’ll be straight with you,” she said at last. “She’s got nothing in reserve. If she gets up tonight, she’s got a decent chance. If she’s still down at daylight, I’m going to need you to make a decision you won’t like, and I’ll need you to make it fast.”
“She’s not mine to decide about,” Nora said.
The vet looked at her across the mare. “Well. You’re the one here.”
Nora sat down in the straw by the mare’s head. Bev went out to the truck and came back with a thermos of coffee and a sleeve of crackers, then lowered herself into the straw beside Nora. She was sixty-four and had a bad hip, and she sat on the floor of a stranger’s barn anyway, holding a flashlight steady on the bag for the vet.
Around one o’clock Bev said, “I sat with your dad once. That February you had pneumonia and didn’t tell anybody. Walt Foster called me.”
Nora turned to look at her. “I didn’t know that.”
“He thought I was your mother. I let him.” Bev tugged the quilt higher on the mare’s shoulder. “You’d have sent me home if you’d been awake.”
Nora didn’t answer. After a while she leaned over, just slightly, until her shoulder was resting against Bev’s, and Bev let it stay there.
Just before three, Junie began to shift.
It started in her hindquarters, a tremor, and then she was gathering her front legs and throwing her head, trying to get her weight forward. Dr. Lindqvist was up in an instant. “Tail,” she snapped. “Cody, tail. Two of you under her chest with the quilt. Lift when she pushes. Don’t lift before.”
They threaded the quilt under her belly. Nora took one end and Bev the other, and Cody wrapped the long dun tail twice around his fist and set his boots. Junie pushed and fell back. She pushed again, got one foreleg straight, and slid. Her eye rolled toward the door. Rook stood there with his chest against the boards. He didn’t call, and he didn’t move.
“Again,” the vet said. “Lift on three.”
On three, Junie pushed, and the three of them heaved, Bev’s breath whistling through her teeth. The mare came up all at once, legs splayed, swaying like a sawhorse with one short leg. Cody hung back on the tail to steady her hindquarters, and Nora braced a shoulder under the mare’s chest and felt every bone through the hide.
She stood.
She stood for ten seconds, then thirty, then a full minute, trembling, while Dr. Lindqvist murmured to her and kept one hand flat on her neck. Then Junie stretched her nose toward the stall door, and Rook lowered his head over it, and they touched.
Nobody in the barn said anything. Bev was crying. She did it practically, wiping her face on her sleeve without letting go of the quilt.
At seven-thirty, with the mare still on her feet and pulling at a handful of soaked feed, Nora climbed the hill behind the barn with the card from Arlo’s wallet. She waited until eight o’clock exactly. The receptionist in Salem sounded like she’d just put her coat down.
“My name is Nora Haskell,” Nora said, and spelled it. She gave her address and phone number. “I’m calling about the Ward Pruitt estate. There are three horses on the property that belong to it. They were starving. I’ve been feeding them since Tuesday, and today I’m moving them to my place, where I can take care of them.”
The receptionist asked her to hold. The music cut off partway through a song, and a man came on, brisk, with a cup clinking somewhere near his phone. “Dennis Lyle. Ms. Haskell, I’m going to stop you right there. Those animals are the property of the estate. If you remove them from that land, my client would be within his rights to call it theft…”
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