Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

Elroy looked at the bench where Mom was sitting, and then he looked at me. “No,” he said. “He didn’t.”

I got back in my truck. I did not say anything else about it.

There was no time to be angry, and I have never been much good at being angry anyway. I am better at doing the next thing.

The smoke was lower on the road going back. It lay across the gravel in a brown haze, and the sun through it looked like an orange plate.

I drove with my lights on in the middle of the day and kept my window cracked so I could hear.

At Mom’s place the horses had worked themselves into a lather. Biscuit, a little buckskin mare, had sweat dark on her neck. Ginger, a chestnut, was still kicking her door.

Biscuit loaded fine. Ginger did not want any part of it. She planted her feet at the ramp and threw her head, and I could see the white of her eye.

I have been loading horses for twenty-two years, and the one thing I know for certain is that you cannot hurry a scared horse by being scared yourself.

So I stopped. I stood next to her and breathed slow and rubbed her neck and waited.

It took about ninety seconds, which felt like ninety minutes. Then she sighed, the way horses do, and dropped her head and walked on.

When I looked up toward the highway, I could see actual flame for the first time. Not much of it.

A thin orange line at the bottom of the smoke, maybe two miles west, crawling along the edge of a hay field.

I did not look at it again. I got in the truck and drove.

When I pulled into the fairgrounds the second time, there were two more ranch families there.

I had met one of the men at a branding years ago. The other family I had never seen in my life.

The men were carrying hay bales to the pens, two at a time, one in each hand.

A boy of maybe twelve was dragging a hose from stall to stall, topping off buckets. Nobody was giving orders. Everybody just knew.

Somebody had brought a cooler of sandwiches from the church in town. The church ladies had heard about the fairgrounds and done what church ladies do, which is make egg salad and show up.

Mom was still on the bench where I had left her. When I backed Biscuit off the trailer, Mom said, “That’s Biscuit,” loud enough that I heard it over everything else. When Ginger came off, she said, “There’s my Ginger girl.”

She did that for every horse. She named each one as it came down off the trailer, like she was taking roll call at school. Like she needed to say it out loud to believe it.

Elroy put Biscuit and Ginger in stalls beside Dolly and Duke. Then I saw what he was doing.