Later, at the horse barn, a man from two counties over came by and offered me six thousand dollars for the pair. He was serious. I said no. A couple of teamsters I’d known only by sight came and shook my hand, and an old man who had pulled horses at that fair in the nineteen sixties stood at Queenie’s stall for twenty minutes just looking at her.
Glen loaded his geldings and left before we did. He didn’t come by our stalls.
Velma, my mother-in-law, came by instead. She had been in the grandstand the whole time. She stood at the stall door and hugged me hard, and she smelled like the sunscreen she puts on for the fair, and she said, “He’ll come around. He’s proud. He’s always been proud. But he’ll come around.”
“I know,” I said. And I did.
That’s the part people always want to know, so I’ll tell it. It was not a movie.
Glen did not apologize that day, or that week. But the next Sunday at dinner, nobody said a word about dog food. Glen said grace, and passed the noodles, and when his brother-in-law brought up the pull, Glen said, “Those mares were always the better team,” and went on eating. That was as close as he could get, and I took it.
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He sold the geldings that winter to a man in Pennsylvania. He got thirty-four thousand for them. Six thousand less than he paid. He never told me why he sold them, and I never asked.
On a Tuesday in January I came out to the horse barn after milking and found him sitting on an overturned bucket in Queenie’s stall, with his coffee, not saying anything, just sitting there. I backed out quiet and left him alone.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That day at the fair, we loaded up late in the afternoon, when the sun was going gold over the grandstand and the dust was finally settling.
The mares walked up the ramp the same way they walked into everything. Quiet. No fuss. Eli tied them in and threw a flake of hay in the manger in front of each of them.
I stood at the back of the trailer for a minute with my hand on the gate and watched them.
Seventeen and fifteen years old. Too worn out to pull, he’d said. Sixteen hundred dollars of dog food.
Eli came around and put his arm across my shoulders. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
We drove home slow on the county roads through the corn, past the buggies and the hay wagons and the white barns, with the windows down because the truck air hadn’t worked in two years.
I looked back through the little window at them a few times. Every time I looked, they were doing the same thing.
The mares rode home in the trailer side by side, eating hay like nothing happened.