Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

The roof was going on the day I was born, he always said. I wondered if I would ever see it again.

Then I stopped wondering, because wondering was not going to help anybody, and I drove.

I pulled into the fairgrounds at 1:52 by the clock on my dash. I remember because I looked.

I backed the trailer around and set the brake and went around to the back and swung the gate.

The afternoon was hazy and bright, the sun coming through the smoke in a yellow way that made everything look like an old photograph.

Ranchers were still carrying hay to the pens. Horses were tied all down the pipe rails, other people’s horses, from all up and down our road.

Away off over the prairie ridge, the smoke stood up tall and gray against the sky.

I led Red down off the trailer at 1:55. Mom saw him before his feet hit the dirt.

She said his name in a voice I had not heard her use since the day we buried Dad.

“There’s my Red.”

She stood up off that bench.

The woman with the braid tried to help her and Mom waved her off, and she walked over to us slow, one hand on her back, and she put her other hand flat on Red’s neck and left it there.

She did not cry. My mother does not cry in front of people.

She just stood there with her hand on that old horse and her eyes closed, and her lips moved again, and I knew what she was saying.

“Thank you, Lord,” she said when she opened her eyes. Then she looked at me. “And thank you, honey.”

I could not say anything back. I just nodded and handed Red’s rope to Elroy.

By two o’clock all six of Mom’s horses stood in a row in the barn. Dolly, Duke, Biscuit, Ginger, Shorty and Red. And right beside them, at the end of that same row, stood Lyndon’s three.

We waited on the bench, Mom and me and the woman with the braid.

The church ladies brought us sandwiches and coffee in foam cups. Nobody talked much. Every few minutes somebody would look west at the smoke.

At about twenty after two, Elroy came over with his phone in his hand. His son is on the volunteer fire department, and his son had called.

“It turned at the creek,” he said. “Wind laid down a little and swung north, and the creek bottom is still green from those September rains. It burned right up to the far bank and quit.”

Mom’s barn sits about a quarter mile east of that creek.

“Is the barn standing?” I asked.

“Standing,” Elroy said. “Fence along the west pasture’s gone, and they lost some of the hay field. But the barn’s fine. House is fine.”

Mom put her face in her hands for just a second. Then she took them away and folded them in her lap again. “Well,” she said. “Well. Your daddy built that barn to last.”