The Horse That Came Home for the Ride

The creek

We ate lunch at the bend in the creek, the same spot as every year, on the flat rocks under a big sycamore. Elva had packed enough ham sandwiches for twice as many people, the way she always does.

Deanna sat beside Dad on a rock with her borrowed boots stretched out in front of her. She peeled his orange for him. He let her. I sat a little ways off with Loren, and I watched my sister peel my father’s orange, and I did not say a single thing.

After lunch, we sang. Somebody always starts it. That year it was Lafe, in a voice like a rusty gate, and the whole creek bank took it up. “Shall We Gather at the River.” Dad sang the low part. Deanna sang beside him, and I had not heard her sing in church since Mom’s funeral.

On the ride back, I heard her ask him about the ladder. Not about the fall. About what he had been thinking, lying there in the leaves those two hours.

“I was thinking about your mother’s tulips,” he said. “I was thinking I’d crushed about half of them, and she’d skin me.”

Deanna laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh in a year.

Afterward

Loren went and got the second heifer from Vernon’s on Monday morning. Vernon helped him load her and would not take a dime for the hay she had eaten.

Deanna came out that same afternoon and sat down with Dad at the kitchen table. I was there, putting up apple butter. She had his checkbook and a pad of paper.

“The fifteen hundred is still in your account,” she said. “From Vernon. I want to give it to Lynette.”

“Give it to the church,” Dad said. “For the ride. Lemuel’s been wanting new signs at the trailhead for ten years.”

Deanna wrote the check. Then she set the pen down and looked at him.

“I’m still going to check your pills every morning,” she said. “I’m still going to call every day at noon. And you are going to get somebody else to clean those gutters, or I am selling the ladder.”

“That’s fair,” Dad said.

“And I want to ride with you,” she said. “On Saturdays. If that’s all right.”

Dad looked at her for a long minute. Then he got up, slow, with his hand on the table, and walked to the back door and took the halter off the hook where he had moved it, and handed it to her.

“Go catch him,” he said. “He likes you better than he lets on.”

She went out the back door. I stood at the window with a ladle of apple butter in my hand and watched her walk out to the pen. Biscuit came up to the gate and nickered at her, low and soft.

I have said a lot of prayers in my life. I said one more right then, standing at Dad’s kitchen window with apple butter running down my wrist.

The next fall

We rode the trail ride again the following October. Dad was eighty by then. He rode at the front, same as always, on Biscuit.

I rode right behind him on my bay, in my red fleece, looking at the back of that gray felt hat.

And riding beside him, wherever the trail was wide enough, on a borrowed sorrel mare that Vernon Pike still will not let her buy, was my sister Deanna.