The Mare I Promised Never to Sell

Mr. Brandt

So that is why I did not simply say yes that Wednesday, when I came out on the back step and found my son and a stranger leaning on my fence.

I want to be fair to Owen Brandt, because he was fair to me.

He came across the yard and put out a big, dry, scarred hand before I could say a word. “Mrs. Schaffer, I owe you an apology. I told your boy we ought to call first, and he said you’d say no on the phone.”

“I would have,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am. I figured.” He turned his hat in his hands. “I’ll go. I just wanted to see her. I’ve been looking for a mare like that for five months. You’ve got a wonderful animal.”

“I know I do.”

“Whoever broke her did it right,” he said. “She stood for me as if I’d known her all her life. I didn’t have to ask twice.”

“My husband broke her.”

He nodded slowly. I could see him do the arithmetic, and I could see him arrive at the answer without my having to say the rest. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. Kevin told me.”

I looked at my son. Kevin had his hands in his pockets and was studying his shoes.

“I’ll tell you what I told him,” Mr. Brandt said. “I came to look at a horse. I didn’t come to take one from a widow. The number is nine-five and it stays nine-five until the twentieth of December, because after that I’ll have to find something else for the season. You don’t owe me an answer today, or ever.”

He put the hat on. “And if it’s no, I’ll say a prayer for the horse.”

I did not know what to do with a man like that. I had been ready for someone I could dislike.

He walked back to the truck. Then he stopped with his hand on the door. “Mrs. Schaffer, one more thing. She’s twelve, in her prime. A draft horse like that needs work. If she’s been standing since February she’s going to waste. I’m not saying it to sell you. I’m saying it because it’s true.”

“I know it is,” I said. And that was the worst of it, because I did.

What I said to my son

Kevin and I stood in the yard until the Ford was a dust cloud on the county road.

I said it very quietly. I said, “You gave a stranger my phone number and brought him to this farm without telling me.”

“I didn’t give him your number. I gave him my own.”

“You brought him to your father’s horse.”

“Mom.” He said it quietly. “I have two girls in college. I can’t write you a check for nine thousand dollars. I’ve been trying since July to find a way to do this that wouldn’t cost you the place. This was the only way I could find.”

“You could have asked me.”

“I did ask you!” He turned around and walked about six steps and turned back. “I asked you in March. I asked you in June. Janice and I both asked. We said let us help, and you said you would not take a dime from your children. You said it twice. You said you’d sooner sell the farm.”

I had said it. In March, at the kitchen table, over a pot of coffee going cold, and again in June. I did not want my children paying for their father’s funeral. Ray and I had raised two children on a hundred and sixty acres and never taken a cent from anyone in forty-one years. It was the one thing I had left that was mine.

“That’s different,” I said.

“How?” Kevin said. “How is it different? You’d take nine thousand dollars from a stranger for Dad’s horse before you’d take it from us.”

I had no answer to that. I stood in my own yard with no answer, and my son waited, and then he got into his truck and drove back to Omaha.