The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

Every Morning

Junie set her alarm clock that night for first light. She got up the next morning before I did.

I came out on the porch with my coffee and she was already leading Penny out of the barn.

She had her boots on over her pajama pants and her hair in two pigtails she’d done herself, crooked. The sun wasn’t fully over the ridge yet, but there was light enough to see the lane.

I walked with her that first morning. Penny was slow and careful on the gravel, ears forward, picking her way like an old woman on ice.

We didn’t talk much. Just the gravel and the birds and the pony breathing.

At the creek bridge Junie stopped and let Penny put her nose down toward the water.

A heron lifted off the bank and flew low up the creek, and Junie watched it all the way out of sight.

“Mama,” she said. “Do you think Opal knows?”

“I don’t know, baby,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“I hope she doesn’t,” Junie said. “She loved Penny. She’d feel awful.”

That is the kind of child I have. Her pony was standing there with her ribs showing and her feet cracked, and Junie was worried about how the other little girl would feel.

School started the second week of August. From then on Junie walked Penny every morning before school, as soon as it was light enough to see the gravel, and Clell walked out with her on the days he didn’t leave early.

On the days he did, I stood on the porch and watched her the whole half mile down and the whole half mile back.

I could see her pink shirt or her red jacket all the way down to the bridge.

She never missed a morning. Not when it rained, not the morning she had a sore throat, not the morning she had a spelling test she was scared of. She walked it in a slicker and a ball cap when it poured.

The Hay at the End of the Lane

About a week after Penny came home, I came back from my morning route and there were four square bales of hay stacked at the end of our lane by the mailbox. No note.

Three days later there were four more. And a bucket with a lid on it full of soaked beet pulp, still warm, like somebody had made it at their kitchen sink that morning and drove it over.

Out our way, word gets around without anybody saying it out loud. Somebody had seen Penny the afternoon Burl brought her back. Somebody had told somebody at the feed store, and somebody else at church.

Nobody came to the door. Nobody wanted thanks. They just left hay. By the end of August we had more hay in the barn than one Shetland pony could eat in two winters.

Clell started carrying the extra over to a widow down the road who keeps a few goats, because he said it wasn’t right to sit on hay other people needed when we had plenty.

One Sunday after church a woman I barely know, who sits on the other side of the sanctuary, stopped me in the parking lot and pressed a folded piece of paper into my hand.

It was a recipe for a hoof supplement her granddaddy used to mix up. Biotin and flax and something from the feed store. At the bottom she had written, “For the little girl’s pony.”