The Kill Pen Mare Who Won the County Rodeo

The Kill Buyer

The man who owned the pen was older than I expected, in a canvas coat and a feed store cap, with a clipboard and a cigarette he never lit.

He looked at Josie and then at me and then at the mare, and I think he’d seen that look on a girl’s face more times than he could count.

“Sorrel mare’s about nine,” he said. “Came through the ring with no papers and no story. She’s thin but she’s not sick. Vet looked at the whole pen this morning. She’s got a clean Coggins and she’ll get a health paper if she leaves with you.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Three fifty,” he said. “That’s what I’d get for her on the truck, plus a little for my trouble.”

I want you to know that I checked first. I did. I’d asked Dusty about kill pen prices before we left, and he said most of them go between three and nine hundred depending on size and shape, and a thin little mare would be on the bottom of that.

I looked at Josie. She didn’t ask me. She just looked at me, the way she had looked at Paige in the barn aisle, and I saw how much she was holding her breath.

I didn’t make her ask twice.

I counted out three hundred and fifty dollars on the hood of the pickup, and the man wrote out a bill of sale on his clipboard, and a boy who worked there helped us load her.

She walked right into that trailer like she’d done it a thousand times, which, it turned out, she probably had.

“Name her something good,” the old man said to Josie through the trailer slats. “A horse knows.”

Josie named her Ruby on the drive home, before we were even off the gravel.

She said it was for the color, and for the stones in the story her grandma used to read her about a woman worth more than rubies.

I didn’t tell her it was a funny thing to name a horse after a Bible verse. I thought it was perfect.

The First Morning

Dusty met us in the yard when we pulled in that afternoon, still in his feedlot coveralls.

He walked around the trailer twice before he let us unload her, looking hard at her through the slats.

“She’s rough,” he said. “But her eye is good.”

We put Ruby in the small pen behind the barn, away from Dusty’s old gelding, because Dusty said any horse that’s been through a kill pen has been nose to nose with every sickness in three states.

Thirty days by herself, he said. Take her temperature every morning. Don’t share buckets.

Josie wrote all of it down on a piece of notebook paper and taped it inside the barn door.

The next morning I got up at seven to make coffee, with the first gray light in the window, and saw her bedroom door standing open and her bed made.

I knew where she was before I even got my boots on.

I found her in the barn, just after sunup, with the light coming through the cracks in the boards in thin gold lines.

She had spread a horse blanket on the straw outside Ruby’s pen, and she was lying on it in her winter coat and her stocking cap, sound asleep.

One of her hands was through the boards, open, palm up.

And Ruby was standing right over it, eating hay from the corner, so close that her muzzle brushed Josie’s fingers every time she reached down for another bite. She wasn’t afraid of her. She was keeping her company.

I stood in the doorway with my coffee and cried a little, quietly, so I wouldn’t wake either one of them.

It was the first time since February that my daughter looked like a girl who wasn’t waiting to be told no.