The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

The Twelve Hundred Dollar Mare

She was four years old and green as spring grass. Barely broke. The kind of young horse that goes through a sale barn because somebody started her and then life happened to them.

The auctioneer could not pull a bid loose to save himself. She was not pretty. Her head was a touch long and she had no white on her anywhere.

But she stood in that ring with her neck up and her eye going everywhere, scared and honest at the same time. Something in how she carried herself put a hook in me.

I bid twelve hundred. My own money, cold off the fork, counted out in my head a hundred times already.

Nobody raised me. The auctioneer looked almost relieved. Dale filled out the ticket and did not say one word.

But he gave me a look I chose to read as approval, because I needed one from somebody and he was handy.

I named her Junebug. She came home in the ugliest part of the year, and I wanted to promise her something better was coming.

She did not know how to tie. She pulled back and sat down the first time and nearly broke a lead rope and her own poll both.

She did not know how to load without a fight that left us both lathered. She did not know her leads, or her leg, or what a person’s weight wanted from her.

The first time I sat on her in the round pen she humped up and crow hopped and like to have thrown me into the rail. I stayed on by the grace of God and a fistful of mane.

I did not have a trainer. I did not have an indoor arena, or a mechanical walker, or a round pen with a floor that was not frozen half the morning.

What I had was an hour of light after the sale barn let me go, a cheap saddle, and a horse who thought the whole wide world was lined up to eat her.

So I started at the very bottom. I taught her to stand tied without panicking. I taught her to give her face to soft hands.

I taught her that my hands were not a trap. That one took the longest, because somebody before me had plainly taught her the opposite, and a horse remembers.

Some nights I stood in the dark aisle and cried into her neck where nobody could see me. She stood for it every time.

Her standing for it was the first kind thing that had happened to me since the trailer pulled out of our drive. I have not forgotten that I owed her first.