The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

They talked about me. Dumas is not a big place, and Corey had told his version at the plant, at the Allsup’s, at the Friday night ball game.

In his version, he paid every penny and I wouldn’t help.

I heard one mother say it, a woman named Kim whose daughter Emma rode the bay mare in the lesson before Addison’s.

She didn’t know I was on the other side of the barn wall with a load of manure.

“Must be nice to have that much time to volunteer,” Kim said, and somebody laughed. “Corey said she wouldn’t put in a dime. I guess she’d rather shovel than pay.”

I stood very still with my hands on the wheelbarrow handles. Then I picked them up and walked it out to the pile, dumped it, and walked back.

That was all I did. I want to be honest: it was not because I am a saint. It was because I was too tired to do anything else.

But there was one morning that fall I will keep my whole life.

It was the middle of October, bright and clear, the kind of fall morning the Panhandle gives you maybe ten times a year, when the wind lies down and the sky goes on forever.

I had my blonde hair in a braid shoved up under a ball cap, my faded denim jacket buttoned up, and my muck boots caked to the ankle.

I was pushing a wheelbarrow with a straw bale across the yard toward the barn, heading for stall nineteen.

Past the red barn and the rail fence there was nothing but flat land all the way to the sky.

Addison was on Biscuit by the fence, brown braids sticking out under her helmet.

She was walking him along the rail, sitting tall the way Mae had taught her, and as she came near she looked up and saw me in the yard.

And she lifted one hand off the reins and waved.

Not at Mae. At me.

Mae was leaning on the arena fence in her tan barn coat, gray hair blowing a little, and she saw it too.

She turned her head and looked at me across that whole distance, and she nodded once, slow, like she was signing something.

I waved back with a fistful of straw. Then I went into stall nineteen and stood there in the half dark for a minute with my forehead against the boards, because I didn’t want anybody to see my face.

November came in hard. A blue norther blew through the week before Thanksgiving and dropped the temperature forty degrees in an afternoon.

That Saturday the water buckets had an inch of ice on top, and I broke them with the butt end of the pitchfork, one after another, twenty-two times.

My hands started to crack around then. Between the cold and the wet and the hand washing at work, the skin across my knuckles split open in little red lines.

Thanksgiving was mine this year. Addison and I drove to my mother’s in Stratford, and while I was rolling out the pie crust Addison sat at the counter watching my hands.

My mother had noticed them too and had said nothing, which is how my mother loves people.

“Why are your hands like that?” Addison finally asked. “They’re bleeding a little.”

“Cold weather,” I said. “And hard work. They’ll heal.”

She looked at them for a long time. Then she said, “Daddy’s hands don’t look like that.”