The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

The 4-H Mothers

The first week of September, the 4-H club had its fall meeting in the extension office basement. Junie went like always. She came home with a look on her face I hadn’t seen since spring.

“They’re having a pony show,” she said. “At the fall festival. In October. There’s a halter class for Shetlands.”

A halter class is just what it sounds like. You don’t ride. You lead your pony in on a halter and stand her up, and the judge looks her over for condition, conformation and soundness. Sometimes they ask you to walk and trot her.

“I want to take Penny,” Junie said.

I looked out the window at Penny in the paddock. She’d gained back maybe thirty pounds by then.

You could still see her hips. Her feet were better, but you could still see the cracks plain as day.

“Baby, that’s six weeks,” I said.

“Odell said she doesn’t need a whole new foot,” Junie said. “She needs a sound one.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. She’d been listening better than I had.

The 4-H mothers took it from there. One of them came by on a Saturday with a leather show halter her own girls had outgrown.

Another brought a brush box with a curry comb, a soft brush and a mane comb.

A third came on a Sunday afternoon and sat with Junie on the barn floor for two hours teaching her how to braid a mane.

Not a pigtail. Real, tight, small braids, the kind they wear in the show ring.

“Practice on the barn cat’s patience first,” she told Junie, and Junie laughed so hard she got the hiccups.

None of those women said one word about Burl. Not one. They just showed up with what they had, the way women out here have always done when somebody’s hurting.

The Letter

The third week of September a letter came in the mailbox addressed to Miss Junie Brumfield in big careful handwriting. The return address was in Dayton, Ohio.

Junie opened it at the kitchen table. Inside was a sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper and a hair ribbon, folded flat, the kind you’d tie on a little girl’s braid for Easter Sunday.

Junie read it to herself and then read it to me out loud. I’ll put it here the way Opal wrote it, minus the spelling.

“Dear Junie. Thank you for letting me have Penny this summer. She was the best part of the whole summer. Grandpa said she went home because she missed you.”

“I put in a ribbon for her mane. It was my grandma’s. Grandpa gave me her sewing box because I’m the only girl. I want Penny to have it. I miss her. Love, Opal.”

Junie folded the letter back up and held the ribbon in her lap and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Mama, that ribbon was his wife’s.”

“I know, baby.”

“Does he know Opal sent it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Junie smoothed the ribbon flat on the table with both hands. “I’m going to braid it into Penny’s mane for the show,” she said. “Right in the front, so it shows.”