The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

Teaching Her The Pattern

Spring came out there the way it always does, all at once and mean. Wind that could skin a fence post, then a sudden week of green.

I walked her the cloverleaf before I ever once trotted it. People watch barrel racing and think it is only speed. Underneath the speed it is a shape.

Three barrels in a pattern. A horse has to know that shape in her body long before you ask her to run it with her heart.

I got three fifty-gallon drums from the co-op for nothing because they had held something that was empty now. I set them out in the pasture in a cloverleaf.

Then I walked Junebug around them. A hundred times. Two hundred. Until the pattern was not something I steered anymore but something she simply knew.

She was not Ruby. I made myself say that out loud in the pasture so it would stop being an open wound.

Ruby was made and finished and gone to Texas. Junebug was raw as a cut. But she had a thing Ruby never carried, and that was a want.

When she finally understood the first turn, when she dropped her hip and came around that drum clean, she came out the far side like she had just found out what she was for.

A horse that finds what she is for will run her heart clean out for you. I read that in a magazine once and thought it was only pretty talk.

Out there in that windblown pasture I learned it was just plainly true. She started meeting me at the gate. She started nickering when she heard my truck.

There were bad days in there too. I will not paint it like it all went smooth. One April morning she spooked at a tarp and dumped me flat in the mud and ran the fence line for ten minutes.

I lay in that cold mud and laughed until I nearly cried, because what else was there to do. Then I got up, caught her, and climbed back on with mud down my whole back.

That is the part my father never saw. He saw the twenty seconds in the arena. He never once saw the five hundred mornings it took to buy those twenty seconds.

By May she could lope the whole pattern without a bobble. By June she could run it. Not fast, not finished, but honest. Every barrel, no ducking, no bowing out wide.

I clocked her on my own watch against nobody at all, and the number did not matter even a little. She was mine.

Every mistake left in her was mine to fix. Every good thing coming up in her was mine too. I had put it there with cracked hands.

I entered us in the county rodeo the week sign-ups opened. Twenty five dollars, which by June I counted careful.

I wrote Jolene Teague and Junebug on the entry line in my own hand. I did not tell my father a single word about it.