The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

But he stayed. That is the thing. He mucked beside me the next morning without being asked a thing.

He fixed the bad latch on my trailer. He welded the wheelbarrow wheel that had wobbled all winter.

He helped me load Junebug over and over until she walked on quiet and sure, because he was good with a young horse. Better than me, if I am honest, and he put all of it in for free.

“She holds her frame on the back side,” he said one evening, watching her turn. “That’s not something you teach easy. You taught her that.”

I did not know what to say to a compliment from my brother. We had not traded many in our lives. I just kept coiling the lunge line.

“I mean it, Jo,” he said. “I had a made horse handed to me and I could not make my card. You built one out of nothing in a frozen pen.”

That sat in my chest a while. It did not fix anything. But I let it sit there instead of pushing it out, which for me was a kind of progress.

The night before the rodeo he said, “I’ll work your gate tomorrow. If you want me to.”

I wanted to tell him I did not need him. I had done the whole winter without him. Instead I heard myself say, “All right.”

And something in that house eased a half inch. The way a door that has swelled shut all season finally gives when the weather turns.

The County Rodeo

Rodeo day came up hot and bright with a wind out of the southwest. Any horseman on the grounds could tell it would push every horse wide on the third barrel.

I hauled in two hours early. I walked Junebug all over the grounds so the loudspeaker and the chutes and the smell of strange horses stopped being the end of her world.

She blew and jigged for the first while, head up, eye rolling. Then she settled, the way I had taught her all winter long. The way that had cost me every knuckle I owned.

I did not see Daddy drive in. I had half decided he would not come, and I had told myself that was fine, and it was mostly a lie.

Mama came. She sat up in the folding chairs in her good blouse, the pale blue one. She found my eye and lifted her hand to me, small and low, so Daddy would not see it if he was watching.

Then Cody came and told me quiet that Daddy was there too. Up in the back row, the top one, where he had always sat for Cody’s runs.