The Pony That Walked Back to the Ring

What Burl Heard

I don’t remember what I did. Clell says I didn’t make a sound. He says I just put my head down on my hands on the rail for a minute.

What I remember is the sound from the hay bales. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t whooping.

It was just a lot of people clapping, steady, the way you clap at the end of a hymn when something has been sung right.

Odell didn’t clap. He set his cane down by his chair, put both his hands on his knees, and pushed himself up to standing. He stood the whole time Junie was getting her ribbon.

The judge pinned the blue ribbon on Penny’s halter. Junie took Penny around the ring one more time on the victory lap, slow, and when she came past where we were standing she looked over.

She saw Burl.

I watched her face. I’ve wondered since what I would have done if she’d looked hurt, or scared, or angry. She didn’t look any of those ways. She just looked right at him and kept walking.

Burl stood there with his hands on the rail. His knuckles had gone white.

People were filing out of the chairs and past him and around him, and nobody said anything to him, but everybody saw him there.

That was the consequence, if you want to call it that. Nobody shouted. Nobody made a scene.

He just had to stand at that rail in front of the whole community while they clapped for the pony he’d starved and the child who brought her back.

He knew it. Everybody knew it. Some of the folks walking past him were the same people who’d left hay at the end of our lane.

At the Rail

After the class Junie led Penny out of the ring and over to where we were standing. Clell went to hold Penny’s lead rope. Junie came up to the rail.

Burl was still there.

“Mr. Tackett,” Junie said.

He looked down at her. His face did something I didn’t expect. It just kind of came apart, very quietly, around the eyes.

“Junie,” he said. His voice was rough as a hay hook. “That’s a mighty fine pony.”

“Opal sent me a ribbon,” Junie said. She reached up over the rail and touched the ribbon in Penny’s front braid. “She said it was her grandma’s. I braided it in so Penny could wear it.”

Burl looked at that ribbon a long time. I watched his throat work. He knew that ribbon. I could see that he knew it.

“That’s from her sewing box,” he said. “My wife wore that to church, Easter Sunday, the last year she was able to go.”

Nobody said anything. The announcer was calling the next class. Somewhere behind us a child was crying for a corn dog.

Then Burl turned to me. He took his hands off the rail and put them in his back pockets, the way he’d stood in my yard in May.

“Lacey,” he said. “I don’t have a good answer.”

“I’d take a true one,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “She always did the animals. Forty-one years. I never so much as filled a water bucket.

“When Opal was here it was all right, because she went down to that barn every day and I’d follow her.

“After her mama came and got her, I just couldn’t go down there. Every bucket in that barn’s got my wife’s hand on it. I’d throw hay over the fence and go back in the house. I told myself the pony was fine.”

“That’s a reason, Burl,” I said. “I believe you. But it isn’t one Penny could eat.”

He took that. He nodded and didn’t argue.

“I know it,” he said. “I knew it in August when I brought her down. That’s why I didn’t stay to look at your face.”