The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

Odell Hensley

Odell Hensley is eighty-one years old and he still trims ponies and a few saddle horses for people in our end of the county.

He quit shoeing big horses when he turned seventy-five, on account of his back.

I called him the next morning at first light. He answered on the second ring, the way old farmers do, because he had been up since four and was just sitting there waiting for the day to start.

“Bring me nothing,” he said. “I’ll come to you. A pony with bad feet doesn’t need to be hauled anywhere.”

He pulled into the yard about eight in an old pickup with the tailgate held up by baling wire.

He climbed out slow, one leg and then the other, and reached for the cane he keeps behind the seat.

He did not say hello. He walked straight to Penny, looked at her from the front, then from the side, then from behind.

He looked a long time from behind, at her hip bones, and he made a small sound in his throat.

Then he leaned his cane against the fence, put his hand on Penny’s shoulder, and ran it down her leg slow as honey until she lifted the foot for him.

He held it a long while without saying anything. Junie stood beside him with her hands clasped in front of her like she was in church. I don’t think she breathed.

“Who had her?” Odell asked.

“Burl Tackett,” I said. “Since May.”

Odell nodded once and set the foot down gently. He didn’t say a word against Burl. I’ve known Odell my whole life and I have never heard him say a word against anybody. He just nodded.

“Can you fix her?” Junie asked him.

Odell turned and looked at her. He has the bluest eyes I ever saw on a man, and they’re always wet at the corners now, not from crying, just from being eighty-one.

“I can’t fix her, sweetheart,” he said. “I can help her fix herself. That’s the most anybody can do for a foot. A foot grows itself back. All I do is keep it out of its own way.”

The Plan

Odell set up his hoof stand in the barn aisle and trimmed both front feet that morning.

He took the long toes back, rasped the flares off, and cleaned out the bad crack until it was clean and dry.

It took him almost two hours, because he had to stop and straighten his back between feet. Junie held Penny’s head the whole time and talked to her about school and her cousins and the barn cats.

When he was done Penny stood up square on all four feet for the first time since she’d come home. It was a small thing. Junie saw it and put both hands over her mouth.

Odell sat down on an overturned bucket and explained it to Junie, not to me. I loved him for that. He talked to her the way you’d talk to the person in charge.

“A hoof grows about a quarter inch a month,” he said. “Maybe a little more on a pony that’s eating right. These cracks have to grow all the way down and off the bottom. That takes most of a year.”

“A year,” Junie said.

“For a whole new foot, yes,” Odell said. “But you don’t need a whole new foot by October. You need a sound one. I’ll come every four weeks and keep the cracks from spreading. You do the rest.”

“What’s the rest?”

Odell held up one crooked finger at a time.

“Grass hay, all she wants. A pound of beet pulp twice a day, soaked till it’s soft, and a little more each week. No sweet feed. You pour grain into a starved pony and you’ll founder her. Slow and steady.”

He held up a second finger. “Clean water, every day, scrubbed bucket. You’d be surprised what that does.”

He held up a third finger. “And you walk her. Every morning. Walking pumps the blood down into her feet, and blood is what grows a hoof. A pony standing around in a stall grows nothing but mad.”

“How far?”

“A mile’s good,” Odell said. “Not fast. Just steady. Pick a place and walk her to it and walk her back.”

Junie looked out the barn door down the lane. Our lane runs from the house, past the hay field, down to the county road, and on to the creek bridge.

Clell had measured it once with his truck. It is half a mile exactly.

“To the creek bridge and back,” Junie said.

“That’ll do,” Odell said, and he picked up his cane and his rasp and climbed back into his pickup. I went to get my purse, and he waved it off before I got the clasp open.

“I trimmed for your granddaddy forty years,” he said. “I’ll see the pony in four weeks.”