The Stall I Cleaned on Saturdays

Mrs. Aldous came back down as I was finishing. She had a little camera in her hand.

“Stand there by him a second,” she said. “Dale’s at our daughter’s in Gordon until tonight, and he’ll want to see who cleaned his barn.”

So I stood in the aisle with the manure fork in one hand and my other hand on Chief’s neck, in my muddy boots, with my braid coming loose, and she took the picture. I was smiling in it. I had not expected to be.

“Same time next week?” I said.

“If the road’s open.”

I drove back to Chadron on Sunday, and the next Saturday I got up at five in the dark and drove the ninety miles east, and I did that for two years.

I want to be accurate about it, because people round these things off. I did not make every single Saturday. Highway 20 closed on me four times for ground blizzards. I missed one for finals and one when I had the flu so bad I could not stand up. But I made the rest of them, winter and summer, and there was no part of it that was noble. It was what I had instead of him. That was all.

I paid for the gasoline by working the dish room in the college dining hall, four nights a week, scraping trays. My pickup got fifteen miles to the gallon on a good day, and a hundred and eighty miles every Saturday was twelve gallons. The second summer, when gas went to four dollars, that was nearly fifty dollars a trip, and there were weeks I ate a great deal of peanut butter.

Brooke helped. I did not ask her to. About once a month a card would come to my campus mailbox with a twenty-dollar bill folded inside and a note that said only “for gas” in her round handwriting. She was making five-fifteen an hour sacking groceries. I never told our parents, and neither did she.

I stayed in Chadron both summers and waited tables. The truth is I had found it was easier to love my family from a hundred and thirty miles away, and I am not proud of that, but it is so.

In January I broke ice out of six water buckets with the heel of my hand and carried fresh from the hydrant. In July I hauled wheelbarrows with the sweat running into my eyes and the flies so thick I breathed them. I learned that Mrs. Aldous wanted the aisle raked in one direction when I was done, and I raked it that way.

I never asked her for one thing. Not pay. Not a ride on him. Not what she would take for him someday, though I lay awake nights doing sums that never came out.

I met Dale the second week. He was a big slow-talking man of seventy with a bad hip and the palest blue eyes I ever saw, and he had bought Chief because he needed a horse that would stand like a rock while an old man got on.

“That’s a good horse you made,” he told me. He was leaning on the stall door watching me bed it. “I’ve had him out on cows every day this week. He’ll watch a cow. He doesn’t get silly about a gate. Somebody put a lot of hours in him.”

“Thank you,” I said.