Part 2
“He won’t be alone.”
Daniel stayed crouched as Miriam checked the colt’s mouth again. This time, when her gloved finger touched the tongue, the throat worked.
She waited, tested once more, then asked for a small warmed feeding.
“That helps,” she said. “It doesn’t tell us what the next twelve hours will do.”
The family spent those hours at the clinic. Judith made Lydia take off her coat and use it as a pillow. Seth fell asleep sitting up, then startled awake at every change in the equipment’s beeping. Daniel remained beside the colt, shifting only when his knees forced him to.
Near dawn, Miriam came in carrying a chart.
“I can’t keep calling him ‘black colt.’ What am I writing here?”
“Onyx,” Seth said from his chair.
Lydia lifted her head. “You picked something that sits in the dirt?”
“It’s black. It lasts.”
Daniel glanced toward Judith. Her mouth softened, though she didn’t quite smile.
“Onyx,” he said.
The name went at the top of the chart.
When they brought him home two days later, Judith turned a corner of the mudroom into a supply station. Clean feeding equipment dried on towels. Medication had its own tray. Miriam’s instructions hung above it in a clear cover, high enough to stay out of splashed water and low enough for everyone to read.
Lydia took charge of the notebook. She wrote down what went in, what came out, temperatures, doses, and every attempt to stand. Seth learned to wash the tubing properly and did it without reminding anyone that he had school in the morning.
Daniel put a folding chair inside the stall.
By the third night his back hurt wherever the chair’s bars pressed against it. He went into the kitchen for something, found Judith rinsing a cup, and stood beside the table trying to remember why he’d come.
“Clean towels,” she said, handing him a stack.
“Was that it?”
“That was what you called through the window.”
There were good feedings and bad ones. One eye cleared enough to follow movement, while the other improved and then became cloudy again. Daniel read Lydia’s careful columns under the stall light, his thumb moving from one entry to the next. Sometimes she came out and found him doing it.
“I wrote everything down, Dad.”
“I know you did.”
She left the notebook open for him anyway.
On the sixth night, Onyx pulled his forelegs beneath his chest and heaved upward. Daniel caught him before he fell against the boards. For an instant the colt stood braced between Daniel’s knees, heart fluttering beneath the hand supporting his chest.
Daniel shifted his grip to help him higher.
“Don’t,” Judith said from the gate.
“He got this far.”
“And he’s shaking.”
Daniel looked down. The hind legs were quivering so hard that one hoof rattled against the stall wall.
He lowered him, slowly, though the colt’s chest had barely left his hands before Daniel wanted to try again. Judith stayed until the breathing settled. Then she spread a fresh blanket over the back of his chair.
At first light, Daniel was laying out the sling when straw rustled behind him.
Onyx was up.
A hind ankle gave, recovered, and held. The colt stood with his legs far apart, swaying. Daniel spoke softly without moving toward him.
Onyx took one uncertain step. Then another brought his forehead against the front of Daniel’s coat.
Lydia was at the telephone before Daniel could call her. Seth came through the doorway too fast, caught himself against a post, and stared.
Daniel kept his hands loose at his sides until the colt’s trembling eased.
Miriam came often through that first spring. The infection went away. The heart murmur grew fainter but remained, and she refused to give Daniel a calendar for the rest of the horse’s life.
The right eye became useful. The left never did catch up. In the small pasture, Onyx learned where the corners were, how the water tank sounded when another horse drank, and which way to turn his head to bring something into view.
Daniel didn’t hurry him. He taught him to yield to a halter, walk into a trailer, and stand while the farrier worked. When a sudden noise startled him, Daniel waited for the searching head to find him before asking for the next step.
No one entered him in anything. No one sat at the kitchen table calculating what his care would have to earn.
Lydia made him an untidy birthday garland from carrots and twine. He ate part of it before she could get it over his ears.
The next spring he began beating the other young geldings across the pasture. By three, the narrow foal’s chest had filled out. At four, he could plant himself in a gateway with enough confidence to inconvenience everybody.
When he was five, Miriam watched him clear a shallow runoff ditch without shortening his stride.
She leaned her elbows on the fence.
“I should’ve brought the first chart. He could autograph it.”
Daniel opened the gate for her. “You did a fair bit of the work on that chart.”
“You weren’t charging yourself for nights.”
Onyx came back to inspect them. He was almost sixteen hands, with a broad forehead and a small uneven white mark. His hind legs had strengthened. He still angled his head to use the better eye, and he still disliked a shut gate between himself and Daniel.
Tomas Delgado and Kirk, the ranch’s two full-time hands, learned to work around the horse’s interest in Daniel’s schedule. Onyx followed him from repairs to stock checks and waited outside the porch as though the next job had simply been delayed.
“You know he thinks you foaled him,” Kirk said one morning.
Lydia, home from college, offered several reasons that couldn’t be true.
Tomas considered her argument. “Doesn’t look like he’s persuaded.”
Daniel scratched under Onyx’s jaw. “Either of you can volunteer for the midnight bottle if you’re feeling left out.”
Neither did.
The horse was eight when Daniel began waking with the feeling that he couldn’t get enough air. Doctors found early coronary disease and a heart rhythm they wanted watched. Medication helped, and he returned to work with a bottle he resented having to carry.
When the first one was empty, Judith took it from the trash and put it in a drawer.
Lydia came home to handle breeding records and the accounts. Seth found construction work in town and spent weekends replacing boards or fixing equipment his father had set aside for later.
Sometimes the near gate remained open long after Daniel walked through it. Onyx would wander up toward the house. From her herb bed, Judith could see both gate and horse. Usually she kept pulling weeds.
The horse knew the sound of Daniel’s truck before it reached the yard. He knew his whistle, too. Seth could reproduce it closely enough to bring Judith to the window, but Onyx only flicked an ear and went back to grazing.
By fifteen, the horse had outlived so many predictions that Daniel seldom mentioned them.
That March, Daniel carried hay into a shelter and reached for a rail that seemed to move away from his hand. He caught it on the second try. His heartbeat knocked unevenly high in his chest, and the light at the edges of the aisle faded.
He put down the hay and leaned against the rail.
Lydia appeared at the entrance with the accounts tucked beneath her elbow. She stopped before asking whatever she’d come to ask.
“Dad, your lips are gray…”
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