The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

Sixteen legs

I went to the slats and counted legs. That’s what you do.

You don’t trust your eyes on the whole horse, you count legs, because a horse can be standing on three and look fine from a distance.

Sixteen. Four horses, sixteen legs, every one of them planted on a level floor.

The gelding was blowing hard and his flanks were wet with sweat in nine degrees, but he was up. The mare was pawing.

The sorrel at the back had his head down, the way a young one does when it’s decided to stop fighting.

And the palomino turned his head in the front stall and looked at me through the window slats with those big dark eyes, and he pushed his nose through the bars and set it down on the back of my glove like he’d known me for years.

I stood there and let him. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.

He was warm through the leather, and his breath came out in two little clouds, and he just rested his nose there and sighed.

Earl looked over at me from the next window and his eyes were wet. He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t have to. We’d both seen enough trailers that didn’t come up right to know what a good one looked like.

The truck

The trailer was level, but the rig was still in the ditch.

I went back up and reset my lines to the truck’s front tow hooks and the trailer’s frame, and I winched the whole rig forward and up the slope at an angle, slow, the way it should have gone in.

Earl went to the truck cab and steered while I pulled. He had to stand on the running board with the door open because the bench was full of her tack bags.

He hollered when he needed me to stop, and I stopped, and we did it his way.

It took another fifteen minutes to bring it up the slope and onto the shoulder.

When the truck’s back wheels finally got onto the gravel, I set the brakes and chocked everything, and I let out a breath I think I’d been holding since 7:40.

The hitch had held. The trailer frame looked straight. There was a crease in the aluminum skin on the low side the length of my arm, and a fender light broken out, and that was all I could see.

For eleven thousand pounds in a bar ditch on ice, that is nothing.

By then a few other people had pulled over. It happens on every recovery. A farmer in a feed-stained pickup stopped behind Earl.

A woman on her way to work in Parsons stopped behind him. Two men in a county-line road-crew truck slowed down and then pulled off to watch.

And just as I was coiling my second line, a gray pickup with an empty two-horse trailer came up from the south and stopped on the far shoulder.

A woman got out in a brown barn coat and stared at the rig and put both hands on her head.

“Tiff,” she said, running across the road. “Oh my gosh, Tiff. Is he okay? Are they all okay?”

That was Marlys, who owned the big gelding, and who had been standing next to Tiffany at the concession stand at Fort Scott two months before, laughing when Tiffany said the tow girl was here and somebody was getting hooked.