The Sunflowers on Grandpa’s Twenty Acres

A Few Weeks

Tiffany was Ben’s older sister by three years. She barrel raced, and she had for most of her life. She boarded her horses at a barn on a rented farm out past Syracuse, and she gave riding lessons there to make extra money.

That spring, the farm sold. The new owner wanted the barn for his own cattle. She had thirty days to get out. It was the same month her divorce was final, and her ex-husband had kept the truck, and she had nowhere to go.

She called Ben on a Tuesday night. I could hear her crying through the phone from across the kitchen.

“Just a few weeks,” she said. “Just until I find another barn. They won’t be any trouble. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll come out every day.”

Ben looked at me. I nodded. Of course I nodded. She was his sister, and she was in a bad spot, and we had twenty acres of grass doing nothing but growing.

She brought four horses the next Saturday. A tall gray mare named Smoke, two sorrel geldings she was training for barrels, and an old brown gelding named Biscuit who was Addie’s. She turned them out through the pipe gate, and they ran to the back fence and rolled.

“Thank you,” she said to me, at the gate, and she hugged me hard. “I mean it. I don’t know what I’d do.”

I believed her. I still believe she meant it, that day.

Two Years

A few weeks became the summer. The summer became fall. In the fall she said she had a lead on a place near Sedalia, but it fell through. By Christmas she had stopped mentioning other barns at all.

She came out every day, at first. Then three days a week. Then on weekends. She checked their water and their feet and rode the sorrels around the back fence line, and she was good with them. I will always give her that.

Those horses were never mistreated. Not once. They were fat and shiny and well shod. Tiffany would have gone hungry herself before she let them miss a meal.

But somebody had to keep the fence up. Horses are hard on fence, and every few weeks Ben was out there on a Saturday with a roll of wire and a fence stretcher, fixing a corner one of the geldings had leaned on.

Somebody had to mow the thistles and spray the ragweed. Somebody had to keep the pond from going low in August, which meant Ben hauling water in a tank in the back of his pickup the dry summer.

And in the winter, somebody had to buy hay. Tiffany bought some, when she could. But the second February, when the snow was deep and her money ran out, Ben bought eight round bales from a man in Florence and set them out himself with a borrowed tractor.

That was seven hundred dollars. We had been saving it for the house.

I added it up one night, at the kitchen table, after Sam was in bed. Fence wire, hay, the water, the spray, the vet who came out once when Smoke cut her leg and Tiffany could not pay him that month. It came to almost three thousand dollars in two years.

I did not show it to Ben. I knew he knew. He was the one out there in the snow.