Part 4
“You’re staying down,” Caleb said.
Douglas lowered the block to the dirt. Julia kept her hand where it was while he turned toward Caleb.
“I brought her here because you thought she could be riding this summer.”
“I let you keep that date after I knew I couldn’t support it. I should’ve called you.”
Douglas looked back at the gelding. “Are you saying he’s dangerous?”
“I can’t tell you what happens when her weight goes into that stirrup. She doesn’t have to test it for us.”
Julia’s father was quiet for a moment. Then he asked her, “Don’t you still miss riding?”
“Yes.” She drew a loose strand of mane through her fingers. “But carrying the steps out here doesn’t mean we have to use them.”
Douglas picked up the block by its handle. He’d brought his daughter through spring rain and the worst summer heat, paid each bill, and waited for a different Saturday. Julia stood beside the horse until he looked at her again.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll take him home.”
He wanted the unused advance refunded. Caleb went inside, got the checkbook, and wrote the amount without rounding anything off. Before returning to the pen, he marked the pages describing what Julia and Otis had done together and where each had begun to struggle.
He handed those over with the check.
Julia asked for a few minutes to brush Otis before loading. Her father agreed. He and Caleb waited outside the fence while she worked down the gray neck, stopping once to pick a bit of hay from the mane.
Otis followed Douglas into the trailer. The block rode home in the truck bed.
Caleb carried the farm’s own block to the shed. Then he went to the kitchen and set the refund receipt beside Ruth’s book.
“That puts the roof off again.”
“We can have the worst section done.” She turned back to Otis’s spring intake page. “Next time you give somebody a date, put it here. And when it changes, they hear it.”
“I’ll do that.”
Ruth found the roofer’s number and laid it beside the telephone.
On Monday she arranged the smaller job. Caleb accepted fewer horses that fall, leaving enough space in the paddocks and enough hours for the ones already there. When somebody wanted a gelding prepared for visiting relatives over a holiday, he described the work he could start. He gave the caller room to decline.
An envelope from Julia arrived in February. On the folded paper she had drawn Otis reaching over their fence, his forelock falling between his eyes.
She brushed him after school, she wrote. Sometimes they walked past a mounting block without approaching the saddle. She hadn’t ridden. Her father was helping her look for someone close to home who could continue working with them.
Caleb slipped the letter into his notebook beside the pages he had kept about Otis. He left the drawing facing outward.
By the following spring, Ruth could open a tax envelope without finding an overdue balance. She still worked three mornings a week at the diner. New boards and roofing covered the stalls they used at the south end, although a heavy rain could still fill a bucket in the empty stall beyond them.
Warren brought Briar over for a short stay while he repaired a fence. Her shoulder scar showed pale through the changing coat. Caleb turned her out, and she walked straight to the hay net, moving Jasper aside with a pinned ear.
Ruth watched from the gate while Caleb fetched another net.
One Saturday, a woman came with a small gelding that wouldn’t enter her barn. Someone had told her Caleb could get him inside. Ruth directed her trailer into the yard and brought her over to the fence.
Caleb asked to see them walk together before doing anything else.
The woman led the horse easily across the yard. Near the barn his steps shortened. He lifted his head and studied the dark aisle.
Caleb stopped beside them. He could still remember the heat of rope sliding through his palm when Jasper had tried to get away from a doorway.
“Tell me what happens at your place,” he said.
As she began, he walked around the building and released the latch on the far door. He pushed it wide, secured it, and came back without picking up the gelding’s lead.
The horse remained beside his owner. Behind them lay the open yard. Ahead, a patch of daylight reached through the length of the barn.