The Filly Across the Road

Across the road, Wade’s boarders came and went in the evenings to feed and ride.

There were maybe a dozen of them left, folks we had known for years. Families with kids in 4-H. A couple of older women who trail rode on Sundays.

At first nobody said anything. People don’t, in a small place, when they aren’t sure of the story.

They’d lift a hand from the steering wheel. Somebody would nod. And then they’d drive on up to the barn.

At the middle of September, we drove back to Kansas City for Kenzie’s three-month checkup. I held my breath the whole way through the exam.

The surgeon bent her knee and twisted it and pushed on it and watched her face.

“Okay,” he said, sitting back on his stool. “I’ll be honest. I was worried about you after that infection. But this looks good. You’ve been doing your therapy.”

“Every day,” Kenzie said.

“Can she ride?” I asked. “Not run. I know not run. Just sit on a horse.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “What kind of horse?”

“A green two-year-old,” Kenzie said before I could answer, and I wanted to sink through the floor.

But the surgeon laughed. “Easy does it,” he said. “A walk, on a lead or a lunge line, with somebody on the ground who knows what they’re doing. No trotting until I see you in October. If that horse so much as looks at a jump, you get off.”

On the drive home, Kenzie didn’t say much. Somewhere around Joplin she said, “Mom? What if I’m scared?”

“Then you’ll be scared,” I said. “And you’ll sit there and be scared on a horse instead of on a bucket. And tomorrow you’ll be a little less scared.”

She chewed on that till the Oklahoma line. Then she said, “Okay.”

The first evening she got on, it was the last week of September and the light went gold early, the way it does in fall when the sun gets low over the pasture grass.

Dale came down off his porch for once and stood at the rail.

I put the filly through her paces on the lunge line until she was soft and quiet.

Then I brought her to the middle, and Dale held her head, and I helped Kenzie up from the off side so her good leg took the weight.

She sat there a minute without moving. Her long brown braid hung down her back, and her gray hooded sweatshirt hung loose, and both her hands were on the horn like she was holding onto the edge of something.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

I stepped back to the center with the lunge line in my hand and my straw hat pushed back, and I asked the filly to walk.

She walked. One slow lap. Then another. Kenzie’s hands came off the horn one at a time.

On the third lap she let her shoulders down. On the fourth she said, “She’s got a nice walk, Mom. She really reaches with her back end.”

It was the voice she used to have when she talked about Dash.

I happened to look up then, across the road. Two of Wade’s boarders were standing at the fence by his long red barn, just standing there, watching us.

Tammy and Rick. I had known them both for six years.