The Draft Horses My Brother Sold

Nobody had thought to buy her a funeral dress, and this had come up too fast for anybody to think of much of anything.

Pastor Lindqvist talked about Oscar Haugen the way you talk about a man who farmed the same quarter section for fifty-one years.

As far as anyone in that church could recall, he never once raised his voice to another living soul, man or beast.

He talked about the Belgians. He said it, right there in the eulogy, because it was part of who Dad was.

“Oscar kept that team long after it made any economic sense, because he loved them, and because his granddaughter loved them, and I don’t think any of us begrudge a man that kind of foolishness.”

Katie turned around in her pew right then and looked at me and smiled, this small damp smile. She whispered, “I’m going to drive them in the parade next summer. Grandpa promised.”

And I smiled back at her and I nodded and I said nothing. That was the hardest thing I did that whole day, harder than the casket, harder than the dirt.

I had just watched those horses get loaded onto a stranger’s trailer three hours before. I could not tell a fifteen-year-old girl that at her grandfather’s funeral.

Dale sat two rows back with his wife Carrie. He sang the hymns.

He shook hands at the fellowship hall afterward over the ham sandwiches and the bars the church ladies had laid out.

More than one person told him what a fine service it was. He said thank you, thank you, Dad would have liked that.

I stood by the coffee urn and watched my own brother receive condolences with $3,780 of a dead man’s horses sitting in his checking account.

I happened to know the sale barn took ten percent. I’d grown up around that barn same as he had.

I did not know it yet, standing there with my coffee going cold in my hand. But my brother had his own private arithmetic running underneath all of it, the kind I would not learn about for another two weeks.

I want to tell you why I didn’t go straight to a lawyer, because somebody’s going to ask, and it’s a fair question.

Dad died without a will that named those horses specifically.

He and Dale had been co-signers on the farm checking account for years, ever since Dad’s hands got too arthritic to write checks comfortably. That account was still legally half in Dale’s name even with Dad gone.

Dale hadn’t stolen anything in the eyes of the law. He’d sold livestock he had a legal right to sell, at a public auction, to a buyer who had no idea there was a family fight attached to those lead ropes.

A lawyer would have told me exactly what Merle told me later that week, when I finally worked up the nerve to ask him straight out.