The Old Mares on the Stone Boat

“Sixteen hundred dollars of dog food,” my father-in-law said, and he set his fork down so he could laugh properly.

It was a Sunday in October, the noon dinner after church, roast beef and noodles on mashed potatoes the way his wife has made them every Sunday for forty years. There were eleven of us around two tables pushed end to end.

Everybody laughed. Not because it was funny, but because Glen Rausch said it, and on that farm when Glen laughs you laugh with him or you sit there being the one who didn’t.

I sat there being the one who didn’t.

He was talking about Queenie and Belle. Two sorrel Belgian mares with flaxen manes, seventeen and fifteen years old, the team he had pulled with at the county fair for twelve summers.

He had sold them to me that morning before church. Eight hundred dollars apiece, sixteen hundred for the pair, counted out on the hood of his truck in twenties and fifties from the coffee can I keep above my kitchen sink.

“She bought herself a pair of pensioners,” Glen said down the table, to his brother-in-law. “They’re done. Too worn out to pull. Jenna’s going to feed them till they fall over.”

My husband, Eli, put his hand flat on the table. “Dad. That’s enough. It isn’t funny.”

“Son,” Glen said, still smiling, “your wife’s the one who bought it. I just sold it.”

Eli looked at me. I shook my head a little, which in our marriage means not here, not now. He picked his fork back up, but he didn’t eat another bite, and I loved him for that.

I am Jenna Rausch. I was thirty-four that year. I work the dairy on the farm Eli’s family has owned for three generations, ninety Holsteins in a tie-stall barn, milked at four thirty in the morning and four thirty in the afternoon.

Glen owns the farm. Glen signs my check. I want that understood before anything else, because it explains a lot of what I did and didn’t do.

I grew up on a little place east of here where my dad logged with horses in the winters. I could drive a team before I could ride a bike. When I married into the Rausch family eleven years ago, the first thing I did, before I learned where the milk filters went, was walk out to the horse barn to meet the Belgians.

Queenie put her big nose against my chest that day and blew warm air down the front of my coat. I have been hers ever since.

So when Glen came home from a sale in Indiana that fall with a pair of young geldings he had bought for forty thousand dollars, I knew what was coming for the mares before he said a word about it.

The geldings were beautiful. I will give him that. Six and seven years old, roans, over two thousand pounds apiece, with the deep chest and short back the pulling men all want. They had won in two states.