The Team That Pulled My Boy Through

It took me forty minutes. I fell twice. The second time I lay there for a few seconds in the snow and looked up at that sky, and I said one short prayer, the kind I say in the church office when the copier jams on a Saturday, and then I got up and kept walking.

Della had her kitchen door open before I got up the steps. She was in a robe and a barn coat over it, holding herself up on the doorframe.

She’d had her right knee replaced the week before Christmas and she still couldn’t put her full weight on it.

“Kristin Aaberg,” she said. “What on earth.”

“I need your team,” I said. I was out of breath and I didn’t waste any of it. “And Arne’s bobsled. Cody has to get to dialysis and the lane’s drifted shut, and Orvin won’t blow it.”

She looked at me for maybe two seconds. She didn’t ask why Orvin wouldn’t. She didn’t ask if I’d tried anything else. She knew Orvin, and she knew me, and I suppose that was enough.

“You remember how?” she said.

“My grandpa drove horses till I was twelve.”

“Then go get them,” Della said, and she reached for her cane. “They know more than you think. Bring me a chair out to the barn alley and I’ll talk you through it.”

Her barn smelled like every good barn I’ve ever been in, hay and horse and old wood and liniment. The two Belgians stood in their stalls at the far end, and when I came in they both swung their big heads around at once and looked at me.

I had forgotten how big they are. A grown Belgian stands taller at the shoulder than I am, and Della’s pair went close to nineteen hundred pounds apiece.

They were chestnut, that deep shining copper color, with blond manes and blond tails, and their feet were the size of dinner plates.

I set a folding chair in the alley for Della and she lowered herself into it with her bad leg stuck straight out, and she started talking.

She never raised her voice once. I don’t think she knows how.

“Collar first,” she said. “Turn it upside down to get it over his head, then flip it at the top of the neck. That’s it. He’ll drop his head for you. He’s a gentleman. Now the hames. Buckle them tight at the bottom first, then the top.”

The harness hung on wooden pegs on the wall, oiled and black and heavy as wet rope. I lifted the first set and nearly went over backward, and Della laughed, not unkindly.

“Arne used to say you don’t lift a harness, you throw it like you mean it,” she said. “Get it up on his back from the near side and let it fall.”

I threw it like I meant it. The big gelding stood like a stone and let me fumble with every buckle. The tugs, the belly band, the breeching that goes around behind.

My fingers got clumsy in the cold, and I had to take my mittens off, and after a while I couldn’t feel the tips of them at all.

“Who’s the gentleman?” I asked, starting on the second horse.

“That’s Merle,” Della said. “The one you’re harnessing is Patsy.”

I stopped with a strap in my hand and looked at her.

“Arne named every horse he ever had after somebody he liked on the radio,” she said. She was looking at the horses, not me.