The Stall I Cleaned on Saturdays

He did not mention my father. Neither of them ever did, not once in two years. I have come to think that was a kind of manners.

It was Dale who put me back on him. That was in March. I had finished the stalls and was brushing Chief in the aisle when Dale came through with his saddle over his arm and set it down on the rack.

“Hip’s bad today,” he said. “And that horse hasn’t been rode since Wednesday. He’ll be fresh Monday if somebody doesn’t take the edge off him.” He did not look at me. “There’s forty pairs in the meadow south of the windmill that could stand to be looked through, if a person had the time.”

I had the time.

After that I rode most Saturdays when the stalls were done. I checked his cows for him. I learned his pastures. When Mrs. Aldous started her two-year-olds that summer, I rode the ones she said were ready, and she corrected my hands about six words at a time and never once told me I had done well. I could tell by what she let me get on next.

My mother called me the second winter. It was a Sunday night and I was studying.

“Brooke says you go out to that Aldous place every week,” she said.

I did not know Brooke had told her. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Every week? All that way?”

“Yes.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear the television going in the front room, and I knew my father was sitting in front of it.

“Does he know you?” my mother said. “The horse?”

“He knows me, Mom.”

She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, “I should not have let him do it without calling you. I told myself you’d take it all right because you always take things all right.” Her voice was not steady. “That wasn’t fair to you. I’ve known it since Thanksgiving.”

“Does Dad know where I go?”

“He’s never asked me,” my mother said. “And I haven’t had the nerve to tell him.”

So that was where my father was, those two years. He was seventy miles away, grading county roads and feeding forty cows, and not asking. I do not think it was that he did not care. I think he had done a thing he could not undo, and the only way he could live with it was to never look straight at it.

There was a calendar by the barn door at the Aldous place, a feed store calendar with a picture of a Hereford bull on it. I noticed sometime that first spring that there was a small pencil tick in the corner of every Saturday. I thought she was keeping track of the farrier, or when the mares were due.

I did not know what she was counting.

The first Saturday of November 2008 was shipping day.

It is the one day a year a cow outfit gets paid, and in that country nobody does it alone. The neighbors come, the same as you go to theirs. There were about twenty of them at the Aldous place that morning: men and women and a few big kids, horses tied along the fence, pickups parked every which way, the cattle trucks backed down the lane with their engines running.

Dale’s hip had been replaced that spring, and he was horseback again, but he rode his old bay that day and handed me Chief’s reins without a word.