The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

Cleaning Stalls

The sale barn outside town ran cattle every Wednesday and horses once a month. In between, the stalls filled up with manure like they were competing at it.

I went to Dale, who ran the back pens, and asked him for work. He had known my daddy forty years.

He looked at me a good while before he answered. “Hard work, mucking,” he said. “Cold in winter. Don’t pay much.”

“How much,” I said.

He told me. It was not much. I took it on the spot.

So that was my winter. Up before light, out at the barn by six, a thermos of coffee going cold on a rail by seven.

I cleaned stalls and alleys and holding pens with a manure fork and a wheelbarrow with a bad wheel. My hands cracked open at the knuckle in December and did not heal until April.

The work is honest in a way that leaves you alone with yourself. That is not always a mercy.

I thought about Ruby down in Texas, learning a new girl. I hoped they were good to her. I made myself hope that, which took some doing.

I thought about the word quit. How my father had already filed me under it. A daughter who would marry and quit, like I was a chore he had finished early.

I stacked the money in a coffee can, and then in the bank when the can got foolish. Forty dollars a day became four hundred. Four hundred became eight.

I did not buy a Coke all winter. I did not buy new gloves until the old ones had no palms left and I was fork handling cold steel with bare skin.

Betty at the diner started slipping an extra biscuit onto my plate and waving off the nickel for it. Word gets around a small town fast.

Buck Teague sold his girl’s horse to put her brother on the road. Nobody said it to my face. Everybody said it to me with biscuits and refilled coffee.

An old man named Hollis, who had team roped into his seventies, caught me at the register one morning. He put a rough hand on my shoulder.

“A man ought not sell what he did not feed,” he said. Then he paid for my breakfast and left before I could argue it.

I sat in the truck in the diner lot afterward and cried for about two minutes. Then I wiped my face and drove back to the stalls. There was work, and the work did not care how I felt about it.

Dale watched me work and said little, but he started leaving the good horses in my aisle, the quiet broke ones, like a man handing a dog a bone he will not admit to.

“You’ve got a way,” he said once, which from Dale was a speech. “Your daddy had it too, before he got hard about things.”

I did not answer that. I did not want to hear one kind word about my father just then. I forked the next stall and let it go by me.

One horse Wednesday I was standing in the cold aisle with my fork when they ran a plain sorrel mare through the ring. Nobody in the seats sat up for her.