The Filly Across the Road

His pipe round pen sat right beside the road, maybe a hundred yards from the end of Wade’s long red barn. You could stand in the middle of it and read the brand on Wade’s mailbox.

“Forty dollars a month,” Dale said when I asked him. “And you let me holler advice at you from the porch. That’s the real price.”

I am going to be honest about this too. I did think about whose barn sat across the road. I thought about it more than once.

I told myself it was the only pen within ten miles, and that was true. It was also not the whole truth.

But I did not choose it to throw anything in Wade’s face. I want that understood.

If there had been another pen for forty dollars, I would have taken it. There wasn’t. And some part of me thought, let him see. Let him just see her.

I told Kenzie the night before I brought the filly over to Dale’s.

I said I’d bought a horse, and I needed somebody to help me start her, and I couldn’t think of anybody who knew more about it than she did.

“You bought a horse?” she said. “With what money?”

“With the money I had,” I said. “She’s green as grass. She doesn’t even know what a saddle is. I’m going to need you.”

“Mom, I can’t ride.”

“I know you can’t,” I said. “So you’ll have to tell me what to do. I haven’t started a colt since I was twenty years old, and you know how that went.”

She did know. I broke my wrist on a gray gelding the summer before I married her daddy, and it is family legend. She almost smiled. Not quite. But almost.

The next evening she rode over with me and sat on an overturned bucket outside the round pen with her bad leg stretched out straight in front of her and her crutches leaned against the pipe. She didn’t say anything for the first twenty minutes.

Then I let the filly turn her back to me while I was trying to get her to move off, and Kenzie said, “Mom. You’re standing too far up. Get behind her drive line. You’re blocking her.”

I stepped back and the filly moved off at a nice trot around the rail, and Kenzie said, “There. See? Like that,” and that was the beginning.

Every evening after the mill, all the rest of August and into September, we went over to Dale’s. I did the work in the pen.

Kenzie did the thinking from her bucket. Dale did the hollering from his porch, which mostly agreed with Kenzie.

I put the first rides on her in the second week of September.

I am thirty-nine years old with a bookkeeper’s back, and I want you to know I hit the dirt twice that week. Once on my seat and once on my shoulder.

The second time I lay there looking up at the sky, and over the pipe I heard the strangest sound.

My daughter was laughing. Laughing so hard she had to hold onto the rail to keep from falling off her bucket.

“Mom,” she said, gasping. “Mom, you went off like a sack of feed.”

I lay there in Dale’s dirt and laughed with her until my ribs hurt.

It was the first time I’d heard her laugh since the week before Kansas City. I would have hit the ground a hundred more times to hear it.