The Horse That Came Home for the Ride

The front of the line

Deanna looked down at her good shoes in the gravel. She looked at Dad. She looked at Biscuit, who chose that moment to stretch out his neck and nose the front of her church coat, looking for a peppermint, the way he had done to her since he was a colt.

She put her hand on his face. It was the first time she had touched him since she sold him.

“I don’t have my boots,” she said.

“Selma’s got a pair in her trailer,” Elva said from somewhere behind me. “Selma’s got everything in her trailer.”

Selma did. Selma had boots and a spare jacket and a pair of gloves, and in about ten minutes my sister was standing at Vernon’s trailer in borrowed boots and a borrowed barn jacket, holding the reins of a borrowed sorrel mare with a white blaze, looking like she might turn around and go home.

Dad walked over to her. He did not use his cane. He held the mare’s head while she got on, the way he had held the head of every horse she had ever ridden, from the Shetland pony she had at six to the big palomino she showed in 4-H.

“You remember how,” he said.

“I remember,” she said, and she was crying again, but it was different crying.

Dad climbed the mounting block and swung up onto Biscuit. Slow. Careful. Sure. He settled into that saddle like a man sitting down in his own chair at his own table.

Lemuel raised his hand at the head of the lot, and Pastor Ignatius said a short prayer for the horses and the riders and the good weather, and everybody said amen. Then Dad touched his heels to Biscuit, and Biscuit walked to the front of the line, and twenty-two riders fell in behind him.

I rode right behind him on my bay, the way I had for nine years. The sun came through the orange and gold leaves and lit up the back of that gray felt hat, and the trail went down into the hardwoods along the creek.

Six miles

For the first mile, Deanna rode at the back, near Vernon. I looked over my shoulder a few times. She was sitting that old mare stiff as a fence post, holding the reins too tight, watching Dad like he might fall off any second.

He did not fall off. He did not wobble. He rode the way he had always ridden, loose in the saddle and easy in the hands, and every so often he leaned down to look at a deer track or pointed out a hawk to me without saying anything.

At the first creek crossing, the trail opens up wide for about a hundred yards along a gravel bar. I heard the mare coming up behind me, and I moved my bay over.

Deanna rode up past me. She did not look at me. She rode up alongside Dad and fell into step with Biscuit, and the two horses walked side by side down that gravel bar in the sun.

Dad looked over at her. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “Your mother rode that same spot right there. Right where you are.”

“I know,” Deanna said. “I remember.”

“She’d have liked this.”

“Yes,” Deanna said. “She would.” And she loosened up on those reins, just a little, and let the mare have her head.