The Horse That Came Home for the Ride

The ladder

To be fair to my sister, and I have tried hard to be fair to her, I have to tell you about the ladder.

The October before, Dad climbed up to clean the gutters on the north side of his house. He was seventy-eight. He had cleaned those gutters every fall since 1971. The ladder slid on the wet leaves, and he came down on the edge of Mom’s flowerbed.

Deanna found him. She stopped by after work with his groceries, and she heard him calling from the side of the house. He had been lying in the leaves for close to two hours. Broken collarbone, three cracked ribs, and a bruise down his left side the color of a thunderhead.

After that, she took over. She had the durable power of attorney, the one Mom and Dad signed with the lawyer in town after Mom got sick. Deanna paid his bills, sorted his pills into the little plastic box, talked to his doctors, and called him every day on her lunch break.

I live forty minutes out, on the ranch with my husband Loren. We run about ninety head of mother cows on rough Ozark ground, and there are weeks I do not get to town at all. Deanna lives twelve minutes from Dad. I know what that difference cost her that year. I have never once pretended it did not.

But Dad healed. He healed slow, the way old men do, but he healed. By spring he was feeding his own few calves again. By summer he was riding Biscuit down the creek road two or three mornings a week, slow and easy, with his cane tied to the saddle horn like a fly rod.

His doctor cleared him in August. I know because I drove him to that appointment. The doctor said his balance was better than mine, and Dad laughed so hard he had to sit down.

Deanna did not believe it. Deanna had found him in the flowerbed. I think a part of her never left that side of the house.

Thirty-one Octobers

The church fall trail ride had been going since before I was born. Every third Saturday in October, the church families haul their horses out to a trailhead on the forest road, ride six miles through the hardwoods to a bend in the creek, eat a sack lunch, sing a hymn or two, and ride back.

Dad had ridden at the front of it for thirty-one years. Nobody voted on it. It was just where he was. Lemuel, who runs the ride now, told me once that the year Dad had pneumonia, half the riders kept looking around at the trailhead like they had forgotten their keys.

Mom used to ride right behind him on a little gray mare. After she passed, I took her spot. That was nine years ago now. I would ride behind Dad on my bay gelding and look at the back of that gray felt hat for six miles, and it was the best Saturday of my whole year.

The ride was three weeks away the morning I found the empty pen.