The Horse That Came Home for the Ride

The trailhead

The third Saturday in October came up clear and cold, with the sun just topping the ridge when we pulled into the trailhead. The hardwoods were turning all at once, the way they do some years, and the whole hillside was orange and gold. The oaks, the hickories, the maples down by the creek. It looked like the woods had caught fire without any smoke.

There were twenty-two rigs in the gravel lot already. Stock trailers and goosenecks and one old bumper-pull with a hand-painted rail. People were saddling, kids were running between the trailers, and somebody had a big thermos of coffee going on a tailgate.

Dad wore his gray felt hat and his old denim jacket, the one Mom had patched twice at the elbow. He had shaved close and trimmed his white mustache. He looked like himself, and he had not looked like himself in a year.

I had on my red fleece and my ball cap, with my hair pulled back. Loren unloaded Biscuit and my bay and his own sorrel gelding, and Dad got Biscuit saddled by himself while I pretended not to watch.

Lemuel came walking over first. He is seventy-four and still runs that ride like a cattle drive. He stopped beside Dad and looked at Biscuit for a long minute.

“Virgil,” he said.

“Lemuel.”

“Front’s open,” Lemuel said. “Like always.” And he walked back to his own horse, and that was the whole conversation.

Then the others started coming. Not all at once. One at a time, the way men do. Lafe, who had driven Dad to the eye doctor that day and still felt sick about it. Hobart, who had ridden with Dad since they were boys. Berniece and Tobias and Urban, who have all three been riding that trail since the Eisenhower years.

None of them made a speech. They tipped their hats. They shook his hand. One of them checked his cinch without asking, and Dad let him. Elva came over with a paper cup of coffee and pressed it into his hands and went back to her tailgate.

It was the best thing I ever saw a church do. Nobody said one word about it.

Deanna at the trailhead

I saw her car come down the forest road at a quarter to nine.

She pulled into the gravel at the far end of the lot and sat there for a minute with the engine running. Then she turned it off and got out. She had on her church coat and her good shoes, which were all wrong for gravel, and she walked straight across that lot toward Dad with half the church watching her come.

I felt the whole trailhead get quiet. You could hear the horses blowing and the creek down below and somebody’s trailer gate creaking in the wind.

She stopped in front of Biscuit. Dad was at the mounting block with the reins in his hand.

“Dad,” she said. “Please. Please don’t.”

Her voice was small. She was not angry anymore, or not only angry. She was scared, standing there in front of everybody in her church coat, and everybody could see it.

Dad did not get on. He handed me the reins and turned to face her.

“Deanna,” he said.

“You could fall. You could fall six miles from anywhere, and nobody could get to you.” She was crying now, right there in the gravel in front of Lemuel and Elva and Lafe and the whole church. “I can’t do it again, Dad. I can’t find you again.”

That was her consequence, I think. Not anything I did. Just standing there, in daylight, in front of everyone who had known our family for fifty years, and having to say out loud what she had done and why.

Nobody looked away. But nobody looked at her hard, either. I want to say that for my church. Nobody looked at her hard.