The Draft Horses My Brother Sold

Behind him, out past the gate, I could see the man in the canvas coat leading Dolly toward a waiting trailer. He had one hand steady on her halter, talking low to her the way you talk to a horse you don’t want spooked.

June came behind him on a second rope, led by a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

“Somebody had to be practical about this, Lorene. You weren’t going to do it. Nobody was going to do it.

“Those two animals eat better than half this county and they haven’t pulled a plow in fifteen years. I got four thousand two hundred dollars for them.

“You want to tell me what Dad’s estate does with two draft horses and no money to feed them through a Minnesota winter?”

“Katie was supposed to have them.”

That was the only thing I said that cracked, and I heard it crack, and I hated that it did.

It cracked right there in front of the auction crowd and the order buyers and old men in feed caps who had known our father for sixty years.

Dale’s jaw moved like he was going to say something and then changed his mind.

“Dad told everybody. He told the whole county. He told the leader at the fairgrounds.

“Katie’s going to show that team next summer, he said it at the Fourth of July, he said it with his own mouth, and you knew it, Dale, you were standing right there.”

“Dad’s been dead two days, Lorene. Dad doesn’t get a vote anymore.” He checked his watch, an ugly little gesture, like I was making him late for something.

“I’ve got to get to the church. You should probably go change.”

I did go change. That part I’m not proud of, how ordinary it was.

I drove back to the home place and peeled off my stockings that had sawdust ground into the knees. I put on the black dress I’d actually bought for this, and brushed my hair, and did not scream.

I want you to understand that. I wanted to scream the way you want water when you’re thirsty, a want with teeth in it.

But Dad was being buried at two o’clock out at Trinity Lutheran, in the plot next to Mom. It was under the oak tree he used to say he wanted to lie under, because it dropped shade on that whole corner of the cemetery in August.

Screaming at my brother in a parking lot full of neighbors was not going to be the last thing anybody remembered about that day. I was not going to let it be.

So I went to the funeral. I sat in the front pew between my husband Russ, who held my hand so hard his wedding ring left a mark, and my daughter Beth, who did not yet know.

In front of us, in the second pew with her mother, sat Katie, fifteen years old. She was wearing a navy dress she’d bought for her own middle school graduation two years before.