The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

The call

The morning it happened was the coldest of the winter. It had rained the night before, a fine freezing drizzle, and then the sky cleared off and the temperature dropped to nine degrees.

By sunup every surface in Labette County wore a coat of glass.

My phone rang at 7:40. I was in the shop with the big doors shut, drinking coffee out of my dad’s old thermos lid and watching the sun come up pink over the frozen bean stubble across the road.

It was Earl Pruett, who lives a mile and a half south of me.

Earl is 68, a retired lineman, and he raised quarter horses for thirty years before his knees told him to quit. He does not call people for small things.

“Jess,” he said, “there’s a rig in the bar ditch on 59 just south of the Mound Valley road. Gooseneck with horses. She’s leaning bad. I’m standing here looking at it and I don’t like it.”

“Who is it?” I asked, because I already had my coat half on.

There was a little pause. Earl knows everybody’s business in a kind way, and he knew mine. “It’s Brandon’s wife,” he said.

He went on. “She already called the two shops in town. They told her $800 and three hours, maybe more, on account of all the slide-offs.”

I believed that. On an ice morning in a county our size, every wrecker is already busy with semis jackknifed in medians and pickups nose-down in culverts.

Three hours was an honest quote. It just wasn’t a quote horses could live with.

“Are they standing?” I asked.

“I can’t tell for sure,” Earl said. “I can hear ’em scrambling. One of ’em’s grunting every time the trailer creaks.”

“I’m twenty minutes out,” I said. “Talk to them.”

Why I went

People have asked me since why I didn’t let her wait. Some of them asked it kind and some of them asked it with a little grin, like they’d have enjoyed watching her stand out there in the cold for three hours.

My answer has always been the same, and it is the plainest thing I know.

You cannot hold a grudge against four horses standing sideways in a trailer on ice. They didn’t call me anything. They didn’t laugh at the concession stand.

A horse in a leaning trailer is in more danger than people think. The floor tips under them and they fight it.

They lean into the dividers, they scramble for footing, and they can go down. A horse that goes down in a slant load can break a leg or get cast under a divider.

My dad drove a wrecker in Chanute for twenty-six years, and he had one rule he said more than any other.

Never hurry a load that’s breathing. I heard him say it about cattle trucks, school buses and once about a camper with a family’s dog shut inside.

So I didn’t hurry. I drove twenty minutes on glass at forty miles an hour with my flashers going, and I thought about rigging the whole way, because that is what you do instead of being afraid.