The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

Clell

My husband, Clell, cuts timber for a logging outfit over in Menifee County, six days a week, every week there isn’t snow on the ridges.

He came up the lane a little before six with sawdust in his collar.

He saw Penny standing at the gate before he even got out. He didn’t say anything. He walked over, ran his hand down her side the same way I had, and his jaw set like a vise.

“I’m going up there,” he said.

“I know you want to,” I said. “Sit down a minute first.”

He did not sit down. Clell is not a hothead, but he is a big man who works with a chainsaw all day, and he has a soft spot for that pony he won’t admit to anybody at the sawmill.

“Lacey,” he said. “That man starved our girl’s pony.”

“He did,” I said. “And there’s no paper on it. It was a handshake on his porch and a glass of sweet tea. You go up there tonight, and you’ll say something and he’ll say something, and Penny is still ninety pounds light tomorrow.”

People have asked me since why we didn’t call somebody, or take Burl to court, or at least go raise a ruckus on his porch. That was my answer then and it is my answer now.

A pony doesn’t get any fatter while grown-ups argue.

Clell stood there a long minute. Then he got back in his truck without a word, and I thought for a second he was going up the road anyway. He turned the other way, toward town.

He came back an hour later with twelve square bales of good grass hay stacked in the bed, a fifty-pound sack of beet pulp, and a tube of dewormer paste from the feed store.

“That’s what I can do tonight,” he said, and started carrying bales into the barn. He didn’t stop until every one of them was stacked, and then he went and scrubbed the water trough.

That’s Clell. He was not going to argue with Burl Tackett. He was going to fill that barn so full there wasn’t room to argue in it.