Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

Mom called me at 11:40 on a Wednesday in October, and the first thing I heard was not her voice. It was her horses, all six of them, calling from the barn behind her.

“Kendra,” she said. “It’s across the highway.” Then she said the thing I have heard in my head every day since. “Lyndon just went by with his trailer.”

I was standing in my own round pen with a client’s colt on a line.

I remember the colt was a bay with one white sock, and I remember I dropped the line in the dirt and did not pick it up.

“Did he stop, Mom?”

“He didn’t even slow down.” She was quiet a second. “He had his three in the back. I saw Dandy’s head in the window. He went right on by toward town.”

Lyndon Fahey is my sister Corliss’s husband. He is 49 years old.

He lives one mile down the same gravel road as my mother, close enough that on a still evening you can hear his dogs from her porch.

He hauls a four-horse slant trailer behind a three-quarter-ton pickup. He owns three horses.

That afternoon there were three horses in that trailer and one empty stall, and he drove it right past a barn with six old horses penned inside.

I am a horse trainer. I have been starting colts and fixing bad habits in older horses around Meade County for twenty-two years.

I know what a horse does in a barn when it smells smoke, and I know what a barn does in a grass fire.

“Mom, listen to me. Put your boots on and get the lead ropes off the hooks. All six. Then wait on the porch for me. Do not go into those stalls.”

“I can catch them, honey.”

“You can catch them when I get there. Not before. Please.”

She said all right. My mother has said all right to me maybe four times in my life, so I knew she was scared.

I want to say here, early, what everybody asks me. Why didn’t I call Lyndon and tell him to turn around? There was no time to call him back.

The wind was carrying the smoke over the ridge, and every minute I spent on the phone was a minute that trailer was not hitched.

I had already done the math in my head before I hung up. Four miles from my place to Mom’s. Seven more miles from Mom’s place to the fairgrounds in town. A two-horse trailer. Six horses.

My trailer is a little white two-horse trailer, bumper pull, with a window in the side and a center gate. It is twenty years old, and I pulled the center divider out of it years ago to haul calves, so it is one open box.

I have hauled more scared horses in it than I could count. I had it hitched in about four minutes, which might be a record for me.