The Horse I Sold So She Could Hear

The aluminum stock trailer came up our drive at seven in the morning, backing slow toward the pasture gate with its ramp already let down, the way a man does when he has hauled a lot of horses.

It was an overcast spring morning in Garfield County. The pasture had just gone green, and the red dirt of the drive was dark from the rain we’d had two nights before.

Rooster saw me coming with the halter and walked out to meet me. He always did.

Sixteen years old, a sorrel gelding with a white blaze, and he still came to the gate like I had a coffee can of sweet feed behind my back.

I didn’t have sweet feed. I had a rope halter and a lead rope and a check for forty-five hundred dollars folded in the pocket of my denim jacket, and I had told myself I would not cry in front of the buyer.

I put the halter on him myself. Nobody else was going to do that part.

I had bought him with my first feed store paychecks when I was nineteen, and I was going to be the one who handed him over.

I stood by the pasture gate holding the lead rope and pressed my forehead against his face, right up by his eye.

He smelled like dust and new grass and the fly spray I’d put on him the evening before, out of habit, for nobody.

Behind me the buyer’s truck idled. He was a kind man named Ed Harmon from over by Okeene, and he had the decency to sit in his cab with the window up and let me take my time.

My husband, Matt, was in the house with our daughter. We had agreed on that the night before.

Harper did not need to watch her mama’s horse go up into a trailer, and I did not need her to watch me.

“All right, buddy,” I said into Rooster’s mane. “You be good for that little girl.”

Then I led him up the ramp, and he went in without a fuss, the way he went everywhere. He always made the hard things easy.

That was the whole trouble with that horse. He was too good to sell, and too good not to sell.

The ears

Harper was five that spring. She was born with profound hearing loss in both ears, which the nurse at the hospital in Enid caught on the newborn screening before we ever took her home.

Her hearing aids, from the time she was a baby, gave her loud things.

A slammed door. A truck downshifting on the highway. The dog when he barked right beside her. They never gave her words.

So we learned to sign. Matt and I took a class two nights a week at the vo-tech, and my sister Mandy came along for most of it, which I will always count in her favor, no matter what came after.

Harper signed before she walked. By four she could tell you in sign that the barn cat was hers, that she wanted the red cup and not the blue one, and that her daddy smelled like burnt metal. Which he did. He was a welder.

The doctors in Oklahoma City had talked to us about a cochlear implant since she was a year old.

For four years the answer from Matt’s old insurance had been no, then maybe, then a stack of forms, then no again.

When the shop in Enid offered Matt a job running their fabrication floor, he took it. The pay was a little better.

The insurance was a lot better. He told me he’d have welded on the moon for that insurance.

It was a high-deductible plan. That’s what they all are now.

After the deductible and the out-of-pocket maximum and the travel and the nights at the hotel by the children’s hospital, our share came to right about five thousand dollars.

Five thousand dollars is not a fortune to some people.

To a feed store clerk and a welder with a mortgage on eleven acres, it is the whole savings account and then some. We had about eighteen hundred put back.

The surgery was scheduled for the last week of March. We had a few short weeks to find the rest.