Part 2
The horse looked back over his shoulder, one ear turned toward her, waiting for what came next.
Elaine took off a glove so she could separate the paperback’s swollen pages. She found the bent corner and began reading aloud.
The detective in the book was searching a warehouse for a missing account ledger. He was having little luck. Elaine gave him the same matter-of-fact voice she used when reciting feed orders over the telephone.
Havoc resumed pacing.
She read through the scrape of his shoes and the sudden thump of a hoof against the wall. When he blew dust across her lap, she brushed it from the page. Her knees grew cold first, then her feet. She finished the chapter and started another.
After an hour, her throat began to rasp. She closed the book, stood carefully, and carried the chair out.
The next afternoon, she brought it back.
On the fourth day, she had been reading for perhaps twenty minutes when she realized she no longer needed to raise her voice over his footsteps. He was standing near the far wall, watching her mouth.
She kept reading.
On the seventh day, he came one step nearer. She turned a page with fingers stiff from cold and left him the space he had chosen.
The work filled the small hours left between everything else. She broke ice, fed the mares, checked the house pipes, and answered the bank’s calls. Then she took her chair into the barn. Sometimes she read the same page twice because her mind had wandered to the tractor repair estimate or the empty side of the bed.
Havoc heard it all in the same level voice.
Three weeks after she began, he let her reach his shoulder.
She touched him with the back of her glove. The skin jumped beneath it, and his whole body tightened. Elaine held her hand still, barely resting against the hair.
His breath came out in a rough rush. He stayed where he was.
She took her hand away before asking for more.
By the fifth week, she could work a leather halter over his nose and buckle it behind his ears. For a while, that was all she did. Later she fastened a lead and let its slack rest against her coat while she scratched the place below his mane.
She had kept him dry by adding bedding and removing what she could reach without crowding him. Now the stall needed stripping, and his feet needed more attention than she could give them with him loose in the corner.
Elaine opened the door wide and attached the lead.
At the sound of the snap, Havoc’s neck hardened under her hand.
She didn’t face him and pull. She stood beside his shoulder, looking into the aisle, and took up only enough slack for him to feel a request.
“We’ll go as far as that post,” she said. “No farther today.”
He lifted his head, front legs set rigidly beneath him.
Elaine waited. Her thumb began to ache around the rope. Somewhere beyond the barn, a truck changed gears on the road, and Havoc’s ears flicked toward it.
She loosened her fingers, then closed them again without increasing the pressure.
For ten minutes neither of them advanced.
At last his nose lowered. A warm breath touched the cuff of her sleeve.
Elaine shifted one foot ahead.
He followed.
She made herself walk normally rather than hurry through the doorway. In the aisle he stopped beside her, trembling, his eyes moving from the hanging bridles to the wheelbarrow and back again.
“That’s far enough.”
From her pocket she took a peppermint, unwrapped it, and offered it on her open palm. He examined it suspiciously before gathering it with his lips.
While he crunched, she rested her forehead against his neck. He stood through the touch. Beneath the hair, his skin was warm enough to hurt her chilled forehead.
“All right,” she murmured. “We’ve still got bills.”
The thaw came in a rush. Water poured through the ditch beside the lane, and the lower ground became soft enough to take a boot and keep it. Elaine spent an afternoon repairing the pasture fence where winter had loosened posts.
Inside the tack room, a pink notice hung under a bent thumbtack. She had four months to give the lender a credible income projection. Another promise about what the farm might earn wouldn’t do. She needed the mares in foal.
Havoc was gaining flesh. The hollow places beside his spine had filled, and beneath the shedding winter hair his coat showed clean and black. He walked out with her now. He let her brush him, lift a foot, untangle a knot. Some days a careless movement still sent him away from her, but he came back when she waited.
She couldn’t put a chain over his nose, bring in strangers to hold him, and expect him to understand that none of it meant what it once had.
She also couldn’t manage a controlled breeding by herself.
The lower pasture offered another way. The mares knew one another. The fence was sound enough now, the ground was drying, and there was room for a horse to get clear of a disagreement.
Elaine called Lester from the feed store.
He arrived with a cigarette pinched between two fingers and a sack of sunflower seeds on the seat beside him. His cattle grazed the adjoining property, so he had been watching her winter project from closer than most people.
He listened without interrupting. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth.
“No.”
“I’m asking you to watch the gate.”
“I heard you. Five mares and that stud turned loose together? You’ll be picking up fence before lunch. If you’re lucky, that’s all you’ll pick up.”
“I can’t restrain him for hand breeding. Not after what it took to get a halter on him.”
“Then sell him to the slaughter buyer and take that opening at the diner.” Lester spat a seed hull into the mud. “Daniel wouldn’t ask you to get yourself killed keeping this place.”
Elaine looked directly at him.
“You can come help me, or you can go back to the store. But you don’t get to use my husband for the argument.”
Lester rubbed his mouth. For a moment she thought he might leave.
Instead, he reached into the pickup bed for a long training whip.
“I’ll stand by the gate,” he said. “I’m not promising to enjoy it.”
“Give them ten minutes. If there’s trouble, we get him out.”
He muttered something she chose not to hear.
In the barn, Havoc put his nose between the bars when she approached. His spring coat came off on her sleeve in loose black tufts.
She clipped on the lead and rubbed his cheek.
“Let’s find out what you know.”
He followed her along the aisle, shoes clicking evenly. At the open barn door he stopped, lifted his head, and saw the mares.
The call he gave made Lester straighten beside the gate.
Across the field, five heads came up. Dottie, the red roan who led the group, flattened her ears. She was a broad, powerful quarter horse with little patience for disorder. Elaine had seen her move a younger mare away from a feed tub with one look.
Lester shifted his grip on the whip.
“Elaine. Last chance to reconsider.”
She opened the gate, stepped safely aside, and freed Havoc’s lead.
He went past her in a rush that tugged at her coat.
For a terrible second she thought he was headed straight for Dottie. Then he bent away and took the long side of the field, flinging damp clods behind him.
Elaine caught the top bar of the gate.
The horse she had brought home in November had scarcely known where to put his feet. This one covered the ground in long, reaching strides, his neck stretched forward, the strength that had returned to him carrying him around the pasture as though the slope scarcely existed.
Dottie watched one circuit. Then she lowered her head to graze.
He ran until his breathing carried to the gate. When he finally slowed, it was to an elevated trot along the fence, then a walk toward the herd.
Lester moved closer.
Havoc stopped well short of Dottie. His head came down. He waited while she studied him, then stretched his nose toward hers.
Their muzzles touched.
Dottie squealed, wheeled, and sent both hind feet toward his chest. Lester lifted the whip…
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