The Draft Horses My Brother Sold

The gavel wasn’t a gavel at all. It was Merle’s voice, cracking up into that auctioneer’s holler and then dropping flat on one word, and the word was sold.

I was standing at the rail in my funeral dress with my good black pumps sinking into sawdust, and I was three hours too late.

Dolly and June stood in the ring with their heads up, ears swiveling at the crowd noise. They were two Belgian mares the color of a new penny, with manes and tails like corn silk.

A man in a canvas coat up near the gate was already nodding at the ring man, already being handed a yellow slip.

I had driven forty minutes over gravel in my funeral stockings with the heater blasting. I hadn’t had time to change out of them.

Tubby Iverson had called my kitchen phone at twenty past eight that morning. He said, Lorene, honey, is your brother supposed to be hauling your dad’s team someplace?

Because I just watched him pull out of the home place with the stock trailer and Dolly’s tail sticking out the back gap. I did not wait to find out why.

I grabbed my purse and my keys and I did not even find my good coat.

Dad bought that team the spring he turned sixty, from an Amish farm down near Harmony. They were a matched pair of three-year-old Belgian fillies.

He said he wanted them so he’d have something besides the tractor to keep him humble.

He broke them to harness himself over two winters, standing in the snow in the lot behind the barn with long lines in his hands. He talked to them low the whole time, the way he talked to everything that depended on him.

By the time Katie was old enough to walk, Dolly and June were already pulling the manure spreader and giving rides on the stone boat at Christmas.

By the time she was six, Dad had her up on the wagon seat beside him with her own small hands over his on the lines. He was teaching her to feel the mouths of two half-ton animals through four feet of leather.

He used to say those two horses had more sense than most men he’d done business with. He was not, in my experience, often wrong about people.

Dale was standing by the gate when I came through the crowd. He saw me coming.

He did not look surprised, and he did not look sorry. He looked like a man who had already decided what he was going to say to me before I ever opened my mouth, which told me he had known I would come.

“Lorene.”

“You sold them.”

“I sold them.” He said it the way you’d say you sold a hay rake.

Flat. Done. “Barn takes them Thursdays, you know that. I wasn’t going to let them sit out there eating hay all winter for nothing.”

“Dad hasn’t been in the ground twelve hours, Dale.”

“Dad’s not going to know, is he.” He had his hands in his jacket pockets.