The Horse I Sold So She Could Hear

Rooster

Thirty-two hundred and our eighteen hundred came to five thousand. On paper, that was enough.

But paper doesn’t count the gas to Oklahoma City, and the hotel, and the extra batteries, and the days I’d miss at the feed store, and whatever the bills said that we hadn’t been told yet.

I had sat with enough people at that counter to know the first number is never the last number.

I had owned Rooster for fourteen years. He was a two-year-old when I bought him from an old man in Fairview who was getting out of horses.

He had been my best friend through a lot of things nobody else knew about.

He was also sound, gentle, and broke to death, the kind of ranch gelding people drive three hours to look at.

I knew what he was worth. Every horse person in the county would have told me the same.

I listed him on a Tuesday. I wrote the ad three times before I could get through it.

Sixteen years old, sorrel, white blaze, fifteen hands, safe for kids, will stand tied all day, loads, clips, good feet.

I left off the part where he would follow me around the pasture without a halter. That was nobody’s business.

Ed Harmon called on Wednesday. He ran cattle near Okeene and he wanted a horse for his granddaughter, who was ten and had outgrown her pony.

He drove over that evening, and we stood at the pasture gate and watched Rooster graze.

“He’s a nice one,” Ed said. “What are you letting him go for, if you don’t mind me asking.”

I told him it was medical. I didn’t say whose. He looked at me a while, the way older men in this country look at you when they already know more than you’ve told them.

“Forty-five hundred,” he said. “If that’s fair.”

It was more than fair. It was a good price for a sixteen-year-old horse, and we both knew it. I said yes before I could think about it long enough to say no.

The morning

Which brings me back to that gray morning at the gate, with my forehead against Rooster’s face and Ed Harmon waiting in his cab.

After the trailer pulled out, I stood in the drive until I couldn’t hear it anymore. The pasture looked bigger. It is a strange thing, how much room one horse takes up.

Then I went up to the house, and when Harper signed, “Where is Rooster?” at the window, I signed back, “He went to help a little girl.” Which was true, as far as it went, and was the first half-truth I ever told my daughter.

She thought about that. Then she signed, “Is she nice?” And I said I thought she probably was.

I went to work at ten. I sold sixty bags of cattle cubes and a roll of barbed wire and a mineral feeder that day, and I did not cry once at the counter.

I cried in the truck at lunch, with the windows up, the way women out here do.

Oklahoma City

The surgery was at the children’s hospital in Oklahoma City on the last Thursday of March. We left the house at four in the morning with Harper asleep in her car seat in her pajamas.

They put the implant in her right ear. The surgeon told us it went well, and he was a man who did not use extra words, so I believed him.

Harper came out of it with a big white bandage wrapped around her head like a turban, and the first thing she did when she woke up was sign that she wanted a grape popsicle.

We stayed one night. On the drive home she slept, and Matt drove, and I sat in the back with her and watched the wheat fields go by from Kingfisher north. Every one of them was green.

The implant is not turned on in the operating room. People don’t know that.

They have to let the inside heal first. It was three and a half weeks before the audiologist would turn it on.

We spent those weeks waiting. I fed Ed Harmon’s check into the hospital bills as they came, and they came the way I had said they would, one after another, each one a little bigger than the one we expected.