The Horse That Came Home for the Ride

The halter was still hanging on the gate post when I pulled into Dad’s place that Friday morning, and Dad was standing beside it with one hand on the top rail, looking at an empty pen.

I had a sack of feed in the back of the truck and a pecan pie on the seat beside me. I set the pie on the hood and walked over, and I knew before I got there. The water tank was full. The hay was untouched. There were no tracks in the soft dirt by the gate but his.

“Where’s Biscuit, Dad?”

He didn’t turn around. He was seventy-nine that summer, and he had stood at that gate every morning for fourteen years, since the day a buckskin colt with a white star on his forehead came off a trailer and walked straight up to him like they had already been introduced.

“Your sister sold him,” he said. “Yesterday. While Lafe had me in the city at the eye doctor.”

I heard the screen door behind me. Deanna had come out of the house with a cup of coffee in her hand, still wearing her work lanyard from the bank. She drove out every morning before her shift to check his pills. She had done it for a year.

“Don’t start, Lynette,” she said. “Vernon Pike came and got him yesterday afternoon. Fifteen hundred dollars. It’s already in Dad’s account. I did it with Dad’s papers, and I did it right.”

“You sold his horse,” I said.

“I sold a horse that was going to kill him.” She looked at Dad, not at me. “You’re seventy-nine, Dad. You are done with the fall trail ride. You are done with all of it. I’m not finding you in the flowerbed again.”

Dad took the halter off the post. He coiled the lead rope the way he always did, over and under, neat as a hymnal on a pew, and he hung it back up. Then he walked to the house and shut the screen door behind him without a word.

That was the worst part. Not what she said. The fact that he did not argue. My father had argued with cattle buyers, county road crews, and one preacher about the proper way to bury a dog, and he did not say one word to her.