The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls
That nearly undid me, worse than if he had stayed home at the house. I put it away hard. A horse feels your hands shake clean through the reins.
They ran twelve girls ahead of us. I watched two good ones tip a barrel apiece in that southwest wind. Five second penalty each, and their day was done.
I filed it away cold. Ride her deep on the third barrel. Do not let that wind reach in and steal it off us at the end.
Then the announcer read my name out over the grounds. Jolene Teague, on a mare called Junebug.
Cody’s hand went to the gate latch. I felt Junebug gather up underneath me, all that green want in her pointed for the first time at something real and loud and bright.
“Okay, girl,” I said low, just to her. “Let’s go find out what you are.”
And I turned her loose at the first barrel. My father up in the back row. My brother on the gate. Four hundred miles of Texas between me and the horse I used to have.
She Has A Motor
She came around that first barrel so hard and so clean that I heard a man in the chairs say well now, and we were already gone to the second.
She did not duck it. She did not bow out wide. She ran the exact shape I had walked into her all winter, drum by drum in a frozen pasture with cracked hands.
We came to the third and the wind grabbed at us just like I knew it would. I rode her deep into it the way I had promised myself in the alley.
She dug in with her hind end and came around that barrel standing up straight and true, and the drum never so much as rocked on its base.
Then it was just the run home. That long straight sprint for the gate. Junebug flattened out and found a gear I did not know she had hidden in her.
She gave me every last thing she had. A plain sorrel mare that nobody in the sale ring would bid on, running her whole heart out for a girl who cleaned stalls to buy her.
The clock does not matter to this story and I will not pretend it does. We did not win the county rodeo that day.
We placed. A green four year old’s honest first run. Good enough to turn a few heads on the rail. Nowhere near good enough to brag on, and I knew the difference.
That was never the thing anyway. The thing came after, when I pulled her up past the gate, both of us blowing and shaking with it.