The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

Burl Tackett handed me Penny’s lead rope at our gate on a Tuesday afternoon in August, said, “She’s all yours,” and turned around before I had even gotten a good look at her.

I looked then. I ran my hand down her left side the way you check a sack of feed for a soft spot, and I could count every rib under that chestnut coat without pressing.

Her hip bones stood up like a coat hanger under a dish towel. Her mane was matted solid with burrs, and her tail had grown into one big knot of cockleburs and dried creek mud.

Then I looked down at her feet, and my stomach went cold. Both front hooves were split up from the ground like old fence posts left out too many winters, and she stood rocked back on her heels.

“Burl,” I said. He was already halfway back up the lane. He lifted one hand without turning around, the way men wave at the end of a church parking lot, and kept going.

Junie was sitting on the porch steps. She was ten years old, and she had been crossing off days on the feed store calendar since the Fourth of July, waiting on this exact afternoon.

She came down those steps at a run and stopped dead about three feet from her pony.

Her face didn’t change at first. I think she was waiting for what she was seeing to turn into something else.

She didn’t say a word. She just put her hand flat on Penny’s neck and stood there, and Penny dropped her head against Junie’s stomach the way she had since Junie was six years old.

“Mama,” Junie said finally, very quiet. “Is she sick?”

“She’s hungry, baby,” I said. “She’s been hungry a long while. Go get me the weight tape out of the tack box, and the hoof pick, and don’t run.”

She didn’t run. I watched her walk to the barn with her shoulders squared and her chin up, and I knew she was walking slow so she wouldn’t cry where anybody up the road could see.

How We Came to Lend Her Out

I need to tell you how Penny ended up at Burl’s in the first place, because I agreed to it, and I have had to carry that part myself.

Burl Tackett lives a mile and a half up our road outside Morehead, in the white farmhouse with the long porch and the tobacco barn he hasn’t hung a crop in for ten years.

He was a good neighbor for most of my life. He plowed my mama’s garden every spring after Daddy died, and he wouldn’t take gas money for it. He pulled Clell’s truck out of the creek ford one January.

His wife was the one who kept animals. She had laying hens and two old saddle horses and a barn cat for every stall, and she knew every one of them by its walk.

She passed two winters ago. After the funeral Burl sold the horses to a family over in Elliott County, and the hens went to the church auction, and the barn went quiet.

In May he came down our lane in the middle of a weekday afternoon, which was not like him.

I was hanging sheets on the line. He stood by the clothes pole with his hands in his back pockets.

“My granddaughter’s coming for the summer,” he said. “Opal. She’s eight. Her mama works double shifts up in Dayton, and I told her I’d keep the girl till school.”

He looked out at our little paddock where Penny was grazing, fat as a tick on spring grass, and he cleared his throat the way a man does when he is about to ask for something.

“That child has never been on a pony,” he said. “I wondered if Junie would lend hers out. Just for the summer. I’d feed her and keep her feet done and bring her back before school starts.”

Junie heard him from the porch. Before I could say a word she was standing beside me, and she was the one who said yes.

She said Opal ought to have a pony for one summer of her life.

So we shook on it, the three of us, on his porch over a glass of sweet tea. No paper.

People out our way have been lending each other animals and equipment on a handshake since before I was born.

Before Penny left, I wrapped the weight tape around her girth like the 4-H leader taught Junie. It read 410 pounds. Odell Hensley had told us that spring she could stand to lose twenty.

She lost ninety.