The Stall I Cleaned on Saturdays

Halter and lead go with the horse. That is just how it is done.

I sat down on a bale and put my face in my hands.

The barn door slid back. It was Brooke. She was sixteen then, small and blond like our mother, wearing her grocery store smock under her coat. Her face was red and swollen.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Erin, I swear to you I didn’t know until it was done. I came home from work and there was a car in the yard and Dad said it was mine and I was so happy I cried. And then I went out to show Chief.” She could not go on for a second. “I never asked them to.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I haven’t hardly been able to drive it. I feel sick every time.”

She dug in her coat pocket and held something out to me. It was the keys. A Ford key and a little plastic tag from the dealer in Ainsworth.

“Take it,” she said. “Sell it. Go get him back.”

I looked at those keys for a long time. I will be honest and say that I wanted to take them.

But she was sixteen years old. She had not sold anything. And she did have to get to school.

“Keep your car,” I said. “It isn’t your fault, and it wouldn’t bring what they paid for it anyhow.” I wiped my face on my sleeve. “Just tell me one thing. Did you see the check?”

She nodded. “It was on the counter for two days.”

“What was the name on it?”

“Aldous,” Brooke said. “Dale and Jean Aldous. It had a brand printed up in the corner.”

I found them in the phone book that night. Aldous, Dale, with a rural route number south of Cody. I did not call. Whatever I was going to say, I owed it to those people to say it to their faces.

I got through Thanksgiving dinner. I passed the rolls. Nobody at that table said the word horse.

On Saturday morning I was on Highway 20 before daylight.

It was seventy miles from our place to theirs, the last six on sand road with an autogate at every fence line. Their place sat down in a valley behind a windbreak of cedars: a white house, a machine shed, a set of pipe corrals, and a big old red barn with a hay door in the gable, the kind nobody builds anymore.

I walked up and knocked on the back door, because out there nobody uses the front.

The woman who answered was about sixty. She was tall and spare, with gray hair cut short and a dish towel in her hands, and she had the kind of face that has spent a lot of years looking into the wind.

“Morning,” she said. “You lost?”

“No, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Aldous?”

“I am.”

“My name’s Erin. I’m Ron’s girl. You bought a sorrel gelding from him in October.”

Her face did not change exactly, but it went careful.

“I did,” she said. “Is there some trouble about it?”