The Hayride Grandma Asked For

The lines

We crossed the creek on the old plank bridge that the county put in when I was a girl.

Bud stopped the team on the other side to let them blow, and the creek was low and clear and full of leaves going around in circles.

That’s when Grandma tapped Bud’s arm. Two little taps. She didn’t say anything at first. Then she said, “Give me the lines, honey.”

Bud looked back at me over his shoulder. I could see him thinking.

Bud would never in his life hand the lines of his team to a stranger, and Grandma wasn’t a stranger, but she was ninety-one and couldn’t walk to the dining room without her walker.

But I had watched her hands all week, holding the rail on Rufus’s steps. And I had watched her face when she looked at the horses. I nodded.

Bud put the lines into her hands. He showed her how he held them, through her fingers the old way, and she said, “I know, I know,” a little impatient, and he laughed.

Then he put his own big hands right behind hers on the lines, not holding, just there.

Grandma spoke to the team. Their names. That little sound. And Ivo and Tolbert, who had never in their lives taken an order from anybody but Bud, leaned into their collars and walked on.

For one minute, maybe a little more, my grandmother drove a team of horses down a gravel road through the October woods.

She sat up straight. Her shoulders came back. Her hands didn’t shake once. Not once.

I couldn’t see the road for crying. Cordia was crying.

Behind me I heard the married couple whisper something to each other, and Tilden said, real low, “Look at that. Look at that girl drive.”

Then Grandma handed the lines back to Bud, and folded her hands in her lap on top of her own scrap quilt, and turned around to look at me. Her face was wet and shining.

“I wanted to feel it in my hands one more time,” she said. “Just once more. Thank you, sweetheart.”

I couldn’t answer her. I just put my hand back on her shoulder, and she reached up and laid her hand on top of mine, and we rode on like that.