The Kill Pen Mare Who Won the County Rodeo

Ruby ran hard and knocked over the second barrel, which is a five-second penalty.

Their time with the penalty was twenty-three and change. Josie came out of the arena with her face red and her chin up.

“She was fast, though,” Josie said. “Did you see? She was fast.”

“I saw,” I said.

Paige was there that day with Myrtle and two of her training clients. She was standing by her trailer when we walked past to ours.

She looked at Ruby for a long moment, at the scars on her legs and the white blaze, and then she looked at me.

“That mare’s going to put her in the hospital,” she said. “You know that, right? A kill pen horse with no history. You have no idea what’s in her.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t raise my voice. I just told her the truth.

“Then come watch her ride, Paige,” I said. “Any morning. You know where we live.”

She didn’t come. But I know she heard about it after that, because in a town our size, you hear about everything.

You hear who bought a horse and who sold one and who is riding a kill pen mare in her neighbor’s arena at six in the morning.

The County Fair

The county fair runs the second week of August, and the rodeo is Saturday afternoon.

The youth barrels go off at one o’clock, in the hottest part of the day, when the sun sits right on top of you and the arena dirt has been dragged so many times it’s almost powder.

Josie had entered three weeks before, with twenty-five dollars of her own money.

The prize for the youth barrels was a buckle and a check for a hundred and twenty dollars, which is about what county fair barrels pay, and which my daughter talked about like it was a thousand.

There were eleven girls entered. Myrtle Hendry was one of them.

Myrtle was fifteen. She rode a bay mare her mother had trained herself, a horse I’d heard Paige tell people was worth nine thousand dollars.

Myrtle had won the youth barrels at the county fair the year before. Everybody expected her to win it again.

Josie wore her white straw cowboy hat, the one we’d bought at the farm store for her birthday, and a turquoise button shirt she had ironed herself that morning, and her good jeans.

Her long brown hair was in a braid down her back, because I’d braided it for her at the kitchen table at seven o’clock, the way I used to when she was small.

Dusty had to work. The feedlot doesn’t care about the county fair.

He said he’d get off as soon as his pens were done and come straight over, and I knew he meant it, and I knew he might not make it.

I stood at the white pipe fence of the arena in my ball cap and an old gray T-shirt, sweating straight through it.

The small grandstand behind me was full, families with coolers and old men in seed caps and little kids with sno-cones dripping down their wrists.

It was so hot the air shook above the dirt.

I looked down the fence line and saw Ferris, the farrier, leaning on it about thirty feet from me.

He lifted two fingers off the rail at me, which is about as much greeting as Ferris gives anybody.

And past him, at the end of the fence near the alley, I saw Paige.