Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

When he brought Red in last, he stopped at the porch steps and took his cap off again.

“I’ll have that west fence back up by Saturday,” he said. “I’ve already got the posts ordered. Corliss’s cousin Clyde is going to help me string wire.”

Mom looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded. “Thank you, Lyndon. Come in and have some coffee before you go back for yours.”

He looked surprised. Then he went in.

I think about that afternoon a lot. I think about the four trips and the smoke, and Ginger planted at the ramp, and Shorty walking in like a parade horse.

I think about the thin orange line at the bottom of the smoke, two miles off.

Mostly, though, I think about the fairgrounds.

I think about Elroy with his pitchfork, and the woman with the braid on the bench, and the boy with the hose, and the church ladies with their egg salad, and the men carrying hay two bales at a time.

Nobody called those people. Nobody told them where to stand.

They just heard there were horses that needed somewhere to go, and they came, and they bedded stalls for animals that were not theirs, owned by people some of them had never met.

That is the part of this country I would not trade for anything. That is the part I want to remember, more than what Lyndon did or did not do.

Lyndon fixed the fence that Saturday, just like he said. The two of them had it done by noon.

He comes by Mom’s twice a week now to help with the feeding, on the days I am not there. Mom says he is getting better at it.

We do not talk about the fire much. He did a wrong thing in a scared moment, and then he stood in a barn full of people and owned it, and then he got up the next morning and did the right thing.

I have known men who never did the second part.

Red is thirty now. He is slower than he was, and his back is getting low, and the vet says he probably has a year, maybe two. Mom feeds him first every morning, before the others.

Some mornings when I come out to trim feet, I find her in the barn sitting on an overturned bucket by his stall, her blue denim jacket buttoned up against the cold, just talking to him.

I never interrupt.

Last week I asked her what she tells him.

“I tell him about your daddy,” she said. “And about you. And about that day.”

“What about that day?”

She reached up and put her hand flat on Red’s neck, the way she did at the fairgrounds.

“I tell him nobody got left,” she said. “Not one.”

I tell myself the rest of it. A man can drive past in the worst hour of his life and still come back the next day. Lyndon hauled all nine home the next morning, Mom’s first.