The Stall I Cleaned on Saturdays

“No, ma’am. I’m not here to make any trouble. You bought him fair and I know it.” I had practiced this the whole seventy miles and it still came out thin. “I raised that horse. From a weanling. I didn’t know he was being sold, I was away at school. I’m not asking for him back, I haven’t got the money and that’s not your worry. I only wondered.” I had to stop and start over. “I wondered if you needed a stall cleaned on Saturdays.”

She looked at me for a long time. Behind her I could hear a radio giving the cattle markets.

“You drove out from Valentine to ask me that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And back to college tomorrow. Where?”

“Chadron.”

“That’s ninety miles from here.”

“Yes, ma’am, about that.”

“I can’t pay much,” Mrs. Aldous said slowly. “My hired man quit in September for a feedlot job, and Dale’s got a hip that needs replacing, so I won’t tell you I couldn’t use the help. But I can’t pay enough to make ninety miles of gasoline worth a girl’s while.”

“I’m not asking for pay.”

“Then what are you asking for?”

“To clean the stalls,” I said. “And maybe brush him, after. If that’s all right. I wouldn’t be in your way.”

She folded the dish towel in half and hung it on the doorknob. Then she took a canvas coat off the hook and stepped into a pair of rubber boots.

“Well,” she said. “Come on down and I’ll show you where the fork is.”

The Aldouses kept more horses up than most outfits in that country. Mrs. Aldous raised a few colts every year and started them herself, and in the cold months she brought the using horses and the young ones in at night. There were six box stalls down one side of that barn, with half doors that opened onto a wide dirt aisle, and the morning sun came in the east end and lit up the dust.

He was in the fourth stall.

He had his head down in the corner, picking at the last of his hay. Mrs. Aldous did not say anything. She did not have to. I had not made a sound, but he lifted his head, and his ears came forward, and he put his whole neck out over that half door and nickered at me. Low, in his chest, three or four times, the way he used to at the gate when he heard the school pickup come up the lane.

I walked over and laid my hand flat on his neck. He was warm. He had his winter coat coming in thick. He shoved his nose into the front of my chore coat, looking for the pocket where the cake cubes had always been, and I stood there and let him and could not see anything at all.

Mrs. Aldous gave me a minute. Then she cleared her throat.

“Fork’s on the wall. Wheelbarrow’s at the end. Pile’s out the west door, I’ll show you. I bed on straw, and I like it banked up the sides so they don’t get cast. Pick the wet out down to the dirt and put a little lime on it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“His halter’s on the peg there. It came with him.”

It was hanging right beside his door. The blue and white lead rope was looped under it, with my knot in the end.

I cleaned six stalls that morning. It took me three hours, because I did not know her barn yet and because I did every one of them like it was going to be inspected. When I had the last one bedded I led Chief out into the aisle and brushed him from his ears to his heels, and picked out his feet, and combed the cockleburs out of his tail.