The Horse That Came Home for the Ride

The papers

I went in the house after him. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his reading glasses on, looking at nothing.

“Dad, I’ll talk to her.”

“Talk all you want,” he said. “She had the right. Those papers say she can do it, and she did it.”

“You didn’t want it.”

“Nobody asked what I wanted.” He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. They were still dilated from the doctor the day before, and the light from the window made him squint. “She’s scared, Lynnie. I know she is. I scared her half to death.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

I went back outside. Deanna was in her car with the window down, ready to leave for the bank. I walked up and put my hand on the door.

“You could have told him first,” I said. “You could have told me.”

“So you could talk me out of it? So he could look at me like that?” Her voice shook, and she gripped the wheel. “I’m the one who found him, Lynette. I sat in that emergency room until three in the morning. You weren’t there. You were forty minutes away doing whatever you do with those cows.”

“I know where I was.”

“Then you know why I did it.” She started the car. “It’s done. It was legal. Vernon paid fair. Don’t make this into something.”

She backed out and drove off, and I stood in the yard with the dust settling on my boots.

What I could and could not do

I am going to tell you what I thought about that morning, because I know some of you are already thinking it.

I thought about going to the lawyer. But the lawyer in town drew up those papers himself, and they said exactly what Deanna said they did. She could sell Dad’s property. A horse is property. There was nothing to undo.

I thought about calling the sheriff. For what? A woman with legal authority sold a horse to a neighbor for a fair price, and the neighbor paid by check.

I thought about yelling at her in front of the whole church. That one I thought about longer than I should have.

What it came down to was simple. The sale was legal, and the only way to bring Biscuit home was to buy him back. Vernon Pike owned that horse now, fair and square. If I wanted him, I had to go to Vernon.

Loren

I drove home and found Loren in the shop with the tractor’s front loader in pieces. He wiped his hands on a rag and listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which is the best thing about him.

“Fifteen hundred,” he said when I finished.

“Fifteen hundred.”

He looked out the open shop door toward the heifer trap, where we had our replacement heifers that year. Twelve bred Angus heifers, bred to a good bull, due in March. My grandmother’s line, on my side. Those were the ones I picked, the ones I had raised from my own cows.

We did not have fifteen hundred dollars lying around in September. Ranch people mostly don’t. We had a note at the bank for the hay, and the calf check would not come till the sale in November. What we had was cattle.

“Vernon’s a cattleman,” Loren said. “He’s not going to want a check from us anyhow. He’s going to want to be paid in something he can use.”

“I was thinking two of the heifers.”

Loren whistled low. “Two bred heifers is a lot more than he paid, Lynnie. More like five thousand and change at the sale barn, and climbing.”

“I know.”

“You could offer one and he’d probably take it.”

“Probably,” I said. “But I don’t want to stand in Vernon Pike’s yard and haggle over my daddy’s horse.”

Loren folded the rag and set it on the workbench. He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded.

“Your heifers,” he said. “Your call. I’ll hook up the trailer.”

That is the kind of man I married. He did not say it was too much. He did not say what we could have done with three thousand dollars. He just went and hooked up the trailer.