Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

We stayed until the sun was getting low and the smoke over the ridge had gone thin and white.

The volunteer fire department called it contained a little before five. The sheriff opened the road again at six.

Mom wanted to take her horses home that night. I told her no.

The fence on the west pasture was gone, the ground was still hot in places, and the horses were tired. One night at the fairgrounds would not hurt them.

“Elroy will be here in the morning,” I said. “So will I.”

Before we left, Mom walked down the row of stalls one more time. She stopped at each one and said each horse’s name and touched each nose.

Dolly, Duke, Biscuit, Ginger, Shorty, Red. The same roll call as before, but slow this time.

At the end of the row, she stopped in front of Lyndon’s horses, too. She reached up and touched Dandy on the nose. “You’re a good one,” she told him. “It’s not your fault.”

I got to the fairgrounds at seven the next morning with my coffee and my trailer. The air was clear for the first time in a day.

You could see the burn from the highway, a long black scar running east across the prairie, stopping dead at the green line of the creek.

Lyndon’s truck was already there. His four-horse trailer was backed up to the barn door, and the gate was open.

He was leading Dolly out of her stall.

“I’ll take them home,” he said when he saw me. He did not look at me straight. “Mom’s first. All six. I can do four at a time, two trips. Then I’ll come back for mine.”

I stood there with my coffee and did not say anything.

“I already called Bernie,” he said. “She said all right.”

My mother has said all right maybe five times in her life now. I guess that was one of them.

So I helped him load. Dolly and Duke and Biscuit and Ginger went in the first trip, quiet as anything. They were tired and they wanted their own barn.

Shorty and Red went in the second trip, with a solid divider between them so Shorty could not kick anybody. His own three went last.

It was Lyndon’s idea to do it that way. He had thought about it. I could tell he had been up most of the night thinking about it.

When we pulled into Mom’s yard, she was on the porch in her denim jacket.

The barn stood behind her, red paint and all, not a mark on it. The pasture past it was black right down to the creek.

Lyndon backed his trailer to the barn door and unloaded each horse and led each one to its own stall. He did it slow and careful. He did not let Mom lift a single rope.