Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

“No,” Mom said. “It doesn’t.”

She did not raise her voice. My mother has never raised her voice in her life. She just stood there in her denim jacket with her hand on the door frame and looked at him.

“You had an empty stall, Lyndon,” she said. “That’s all. You had an empty stall and you went right by my barn.”

That was the whole of it. She did not say one more word about it, that day or any day since. She did not have to. Every person in that barn heard it.

Lyndon’s face crumpled up a little. He nodded once. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I did.”

I could have said plenty. I had four trips and seven miles each way of things I could have said.

I did not say any of them. Mom had said it better than I could, and in fewer words.

What I remember next is Elroy. He set his pitchfork against the wall and walked over to Lyndon and stood next to him.

He did not put a hand on his shoulder or anything like that. He just stood there.

“We all panic, son,” Elroy said. “Question is what a man does the next morning.”

Then he went back to his pitchfork, and the other men went back to their hay, and the boy went back to his hose.

And Lyndon stood in that barn aisle alone with his cap in his hands and looked at my mother’s six old horses.

I left him there. I took Mom back out to the bench.

She sat down slow and closed her eyes, and I sat next to her, and after a while she put her head on my shoulder. She has not done that since I was a girl.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

“I know, Mom.”

“Those horses are all I’ve got left of your daddy, Kendra. You know that.”

“I know, Mom. I know they are.”

She patted my knee. “You were always his girl,” she said. “Every bit.”

Corliss got there a little after four, still in her scrubs. She had driven straight from the hospital. She came across the fairgrounds at a run and hugged Mom so hard Mom said ouch.

Then she went in the barn and found her husband.

I did not follow her that time. I do not know what she said to him in there.

I know they were in there almost half an hour, and I know that when they came out, Lyndon’s eyes were red and Corliss’s jaw was set.

Corliss came and sat down with us. She did not say anything about Lyndon.

She just held Mom’s hand and asked about her back, and asked about each of the horses by name, and listened to Mom tell her.

My sister and I have not always been close. But I loved her that afternoon. She did not make excuses for him. She did not pretend it had not happened. She just sat with her mother.