The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

What A Horse Is Worth

I did the thing you do. I went to the house and I got loud, then quiet, then loud again. None of it put a horse back in the lot.

That night I called the man from Shattuck off the number on Daddy’s desk. I offered to buy her back at exactly what he had paid, every dollar.

He was kind about it. That almost made it worse. He had already sold her on to a family down in Texas, for their daughter.

Ruby was four hundred miles gone by supper. Somebody else’s girl was learning her buttons, and Ruby would teach them, because that is the kind of mare she was.

Here is the stone I had to swallow. Ruby’s papers said Buck Teague on the owner line. They had always said Buck Teague.

My father had bought her as a weanling eight years back, when I was a kid who begged for a whole summer. He had written that first check.

Every board bill since then had come out of my pocket. Every entry fee, every set of shoes, every tube of wormer. But the registration and the bill of sale were his, in his name, in his drawer.

I drove into town and found a man at the feed store who had sat on a jury once. I thought he might know something I did not.

He heard me all the way out, kind and slow, turning his coffee cup. Then he shook his head.

A grown daughter and her own daddy. A horse in his name. No paper of mine anywhere in it. There was no sheriff for that, he said, and no judge either.

There was just the fact of it. A man can sell what the paper says is his, and the paper said it was his.

My mother made coffee the next morning and did not drink it. “He is wrong,” she said. “I told him to his face he is wrong.”

But she had been telling him he was wrong about one thing or another for thirty years. The barn still smelled of a horse that was not in it.

I went out to Ruby’s stall that night out of habit I could not break. I had carried a flake of hay halfway to the door before I remembered there was nothing in there to feed.

I stood in the empty stall a while with the hay in my arms. There was a worn spot on the boards where she used to rub her tail. I put my hand on it.

A horse leaves a shape in a place. You do not see it until the horse is gone. Then the shape is the only thing left, and it is worse than nothing.

Cody called that week from somewhere in Nevada. I saw the number and let it ring out.

He left a message. He said he had not known, that Daddy told him after it was done, that he would pay me back when he had it.

People always say they will pay you back when they have it. In my experience they never quite have it.

So that was where I stood. No horse, no paper, no law. A father who believed he had done a responsible thing. A mother who could not fix it. A brother four states away.

What I had was a winter. A long one, coming on cold. I decided to spend it.