Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

The first thing I saw that Friday was my grandmother carrying a white kitchen pail across her yard with both hands, stopping every ten steps to set it down.

She was eighty-six years old. She had a hip that clicked when it rained and a heart doctor in Bozeman who wanted her to stop lifting anything heavier than a cat.

I pulled my work van onto the grass by her porch and got out before the engine finished ticking. She saw me and lifted her chin, the way she does when she knows she is about to be scolded.

“Rowdy,” she said. “You’re early.”

“Grandma, what are you doing?”

“Watering my horses,” she said, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. “What does it look like?”

It looked like a woman with a white braid down her back hauling water from her kitchen sink to a barn a hundred and forty feet away. The pail was half full. I could see where she had spilled some on her shoes.

I took it from her. It was lighter than I expected, which told me she had learned to carry it half full because a full one was too much. That made my throat close up more than anything else.

“Where’s the hydrant water?” I asked.

She did not answer right away. She looked past me, up the slope toward the double-wide on the north corner of the place, where my stepbrother Corbin lived.

“He shut it off,” she said. “Thursday morning. There’s a lock on it now.”

I walked her out to the barn. The three horses were standing at the old wooden trough with their heads low. There was maybe two inches of water in the bottom, and a skin of dust on top of that.

Bess was the bay, twenty-six years old, gone swaybacked and patient. Smoke was the gray, who had been my grandpa’s horse and still looked down the road every evening like he was waiting for a truck. Penny was the sorrel mare, the youngest at twenty-two, and the bossiest.

None of them were worth a dime to anybody but my grandmother. That was the whole point of them. They had been retired for years, and she kept them because Grandpa had loved them, and because she said a farm without a horse on it was just a lot.

The barn hydrant stood beside the trough where it had stood for forty years, a green frost-free yard hydrant with a long handle. Somebody had run a padlock through the hole in the handle and the hole in the bracket so the handle could not be lifted.

It was a good padlock. Brass, the kind you buy at the farm store for about fourteen dollars. Corbin had not cheaped out.

I poured the pail into the trough. The horses crowded in. Penny pinned her ears at Smoke and Smoke let her drink first, the way he always did.

“How many trips a day?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t count,” Grandma said.

“Grandma.”

“Eleven, yesterday,” she said quietly. “Maybe twelve. They drink more when it’s warm.”