The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

What I Didn’t See

Here is the part I am not proud of. I drove past Burl’s place twice a day that summer, every day I had a run, and I never once went down to look at that pony.

I drive a school bus for the county, and in summer I drive the reading camp route and the church day camp kids. Every morning and every afternoon I went right past the end of Burl’s lane.

Through June I would see Opal out on the porch or in the yard, and she would wave at the bus with both arms, and I would honk once for her. Penny was kept in the back pasture behind the barn.

You can’t see that pasture from the road. I told myself that was why I never saw her. The truth is I never went and looked, because I trusted a man I had known my whole life.

In July Opal stopped waving. I found out later her mama had come and gotten her early, the third week of July, when the double shifts ended. Burl never said a word to us about it.

That left a ten-year-old’s pony alone in the back pasture of a man who had not set foot in his own barn since his wife died. The grass burned off in the heat. The water trough went green.

Burl did put hay out, he told me later. A few bales, thrown over the fence when he thought of it. A pony can’t live on when a man thinks of it.

The Tape Doesn’t Lie by Ninety Pounds

Junie came back from the barn with the weight tape. She held one end on Penny’s withers and I brought it around under the girth, and we both looked at it together.

Three hundred and twenty pounds.

“Is that bad?” Junie asked. She already knew it was bad. She had been there in May when it said 410, and she was good at subtraction. She just wanted somebody to say it out loud.

“It’s ninety pounds,” I said. “It’s a lot. But she’s standing up, and she’s eating, and she knows you. Those are three good things. We’re going to start with those.”

Penny stuck her nose into the grass by the gate and started tearing at it like she was afraid somebody would come take it away. Junie watched her eat and wiped her face with her shirt tail.

I picked up the left front foot. The crack ran from the ground almost halfway up the wall, and the toe had grown out so long it had started to curl. The hoof was dry and chalky.

The right front was worse. There were two cracks, and one of them was dark down inside, the way a crack looks when dirt has packed in and it has started to go bad.

“Can you fix her feet?” Junie asked.

“No, baby,” I said. “But I know who can.”