The Old Mares on the Stone Boat

He had them in the front pasture by the road where everyone driving past could see them. He went out every evening and just stood at the fence looking at them with his arms crossed on the top board.

The mares were moved to the back lot by the manure pit.

I asked him on a Thursday, while we were washing down the parlor, what he planned to do with Queenie and Belle.

“Tuesday sale barn,” he said, and he didn’t even look up from the hose.

I knew what that meant. Everybody in Holmes County who has ever stood at a horse sale knows what it means. A seventeen-year-old draft mare does not go home with a family at a Tuesday sale. She goes home with the man who buys by the pound.

“Sell them to me,” I said.

He turned off the hose then. He looked at me for a long time with that half smile of his.

“What would you do with them?”

“Work them,” I said.

“Work them at what? We’ve got two tractors and a skid loader.”

“The woodlot. The manure. The garden ground. Whatever needs doing.”

He thought about it, or pretended to. “Eight hundred apiece,” he said. “That’s what they’d bring at the sale.”

That was true, near enough. Draft horses that age sell for something under fifty cents a pound at the killer end of the ring, and the mares weighed about eighteen hundred pounds each. He was not cheating me on the price. He was being exact, and that was its own kind of cruelty.

People have asked me since why I didn’t just tell him no. Why I paid a man for horses that had worked for his family most of their lives, or why I didn’t tell him off at dinner in front of everybody.

It was never about the money. If I didn’t pay him, those mares were on a trailer that Tuesday. I wanted them to finish their lives the way they had lived them, working, in harness, with somebody who knew their names.

And I needed my job. Eli and I were saving for our own place. You don’t burn down the barn you milk in over a joke at Sunday dinner.

So I paid. And Glen told the dog food joke at dinner, and at the feed mill, and at the hardware counter in town, and I heard it back from four different people before Thanksgiving.

I have thought a good deal about why he did it. I don’t think it was the money either.

Glen had finished fourth in the heavyweight class three years running behind those mares. He was sixty-three. The younger men with the big trucks and the matched teams had started kidding him about his grandmas. I think he couldn’t stand being seen in front of that grandstand behind an old team one more summer.

And selling them to his son’s wife, for the price of meat, and telling the county about it, was the joke on top. It let him laugh first.