The Kill Pen Mare Who Won the County Rodeo

The Sunday After

My name is Krista Vold. I am forty-one years old. I’m the secretary at the consolidated school in town, which means I know every child’s name and most of their troubles, and I live on twenty acres in western Nebraska with my husband and our daughter and a handful of cats nobody admits to feeding.

My husband is Dusty. He’s forty-four and he works at the feedlot east of town, six days a week, riding pens and doctoring sick calves.

He comes home smelling like cattle and silage, and he has never once complained about a day’s work in the eighteen years I’ve known him.

Paige is his older sister. She married a man named Hendry who left after six years, and she has raised her daughter Myrtle mostly alone and built her horse business mostly alone.

I have always respected that about her, even when I didn’t like her much.

Two weeks after the barn aisle, we went to church like always.

It’s a small Lutheran church with a white steeple and a basement that smells like coffee and egg salad. Paige sat two pews ahead of us with Myrtle beside her.

We sang “Abide With Me.” Josie sang it next to me in her clear thin voice, and I remember thinking she sounded fine, that maybe the whole thing had passed.

Downstairs afterward, Paige was standing by the coffee urn talking to a couple of women from the quilting circle. I heard her before I saw her.

“A fellow from over by Torrington,” she said. “Paid me five hundred cash and hauled him off on Thursday. I’ll take it. Feed’s not getting any cheaper.”

Josie was standing beside me with a paper cup of red punch. I watched her understand it. Smoke was gone.

Not to her, not to anybody she knew, but to a stranger from Wyoming who had never seen him run.

She set the punch down on the table very carefully and went out to the pickup and sat in it until we were ready to leave.

What Dusty Did

Dusty called his sister that Monday from the cab of his feed truck on his lunch break.

I know because he told me about it at supper, the way he tells me everything, in about six sentences.

“I asked her why she didn’t just let Josie have him,” he said.

“She said she’s seen kids get hurt bad on cheap old horses, and she’s seen families go broke chasing the rodeo. She said she wasn’t going to be the one who started it.”

“Do you believe her?” I asked.

He thought about it, chewing. “I believe she believes it. She also needed the five hundred. Her hay man raised his price again.” He set his fork down.

“I told her she could’ve just told Josie the reason. Kindly. She said she wasn’t running a charity and she wasn’t going to apologize for selling her own horse.”

Here is the thing I want to be honest about. Paige was right about one part of it. Smoke was her horse.

She had paid for him and fed him and trained him, and she could sell him to anybody she pleased, for any price she pleased, without asking us.

So I didn’t call her. I didn’t go over there and say my piece.

It was her horse to sell, and arguing would only have taught Josie that the answer to a closed door is to stand outside it yelling.

I decided to spend three hundred and fifty dollars and a summer instead.

Dusty didn’t say a word about it. After supper he pulled on his coat and went out to the machine shed, and when I looked out the kitchen window twenty minutes later, he was dragging round pen panels across the frozen yard in the last of the daylight, with the sky going pink in the west.

He’d borrowed them from our neighbor two miles over, who used to run cow horses and hadn’t touched them in a decade.

Twelve-foot panels, sixteen of them. By the time I brought him a cup of coffee, he had half the circle standing.

“What’s this for?” I asked him, though I knew.

“Horse is going to need somewhere to go,” he said. “Whatever horse it is.”