The Filly Across the Road

“He never asked her,” I said finally. “He never once asked her if she was done.”

“No,” Jeff said. “He didn’t.”

I want to be fair to Wade, even now. He was a man drowning, and drowning men grab whatever floats.

I believe he had talked himself into it. That doesn’t make it right. But I have known what it is to be behind on everything.

Jeff went back to North Dakota five days later. Before he left, he stood in Kenzie’s doorway and said, “Bug, you’re going to ride again. You hear me? I don’t care what anybody says.”

She nodded at him without looking up from her phone.

Her room had Dash all over it. Ribbons on a string across the window. A buckle from a youth rodeo in Okmulgee.

A photo of her at ten years old asleep on his back in the pasture while he grazed, which I took and which still makes me catch my breath.

One night in early August I found her at the kitchen table with her old run notebook open.

She wasn’t reading it. She was just running her thumb along the edge of the pages, over and over.

“You want to talk about it?” I asked.

“Mr. Coffman said I wouldn’t ride again,” she said. “Daddy told me. I asked him to.”

“Mr. Coffman doesn’t know you,” I said.

“What if he’s right, though?” She looked up at me, and her eyes were dry, which scared me more than tears would have.

“What if I get back on and I’m scared? What if I’m just done and I don’t know it yet?”

I sat down across from her. I didn’t have an answer that would fit in a sentence, so I didn’t try to give her one.

I just held her hand on the table and let the refrigerator hum.

That was the night I started looking for a horse.

Not another Dash. You don’t buy another Dash for nine hundred dollars, and nine hundred was what I had after the August mill check and the hospital payment plan. You buy a project. You buy a maybe.

I found her through a woman at church whose brother ranched over in Haskell County.

He and his wife were in their seventies and selling down their mares and young stock. They had a two-year-old sorrel filly they’d never had time to start.

“She’s halter broke and that’s about it,” the old man told me on the phone.

“Good feet. Good mind, I think. Out of a mare that ran barrels in the eighties. I’ll take nine hundred if she goes somewhere she’ll get used.”

She was a plain sorrel with a little star, long legs, and an ear that tipped in toward you when you talked.

When I walked into the pen, she came over and put her nose against my shirt pocket like she was looking for something I owed her. I paid the man nine hundred in cash that afternoon.

The problem was we had nowhere to work her. Mama’s old place has a barn and a pasture, but no round pen, and you do not start a two-year-old in an open pasture unless you want to spend the evening chasing her across two counties.

The only round pen close enough belonged to Dale Pruitt. Dale is a widower in his late seventies who lives across the county road from Wade’s place.

He used to start colts for half the county before his hips gave out.