The Old Mares on the Stone Boat

I understand that. I don’t excuse it.

The first week of November, I got their feet trimmed and had the farrier put new shoes on them with borium for the ice. That cost me another two hundred and forty dollars. Eli paid half without my asking.

Then we went to work.

I want to tell you about that winter, because nobody at the fair saw it, and it is the whole reason for what they did see.

Every morning after the cows were milked and the barn was scraped, I harnessed the mares in the dark of the horse barn with my breath hanging in the air. Queenie always dropped her head for the bridle. Belle always made me wait for it.

In December and January, I skidded logs out of the woodlot behind the hay field. Eli had been cutting firewood back there for two years, and there were downed oaks and ash all through it that the tractor couldn’t reach without tearing up the ground.

The mares would walk into the trees, quiet as a church, and stand while I set the log chain. Then I’d step to the side, take up the lines and say their names, and they would lean into it together like one animal.

There is a sound a log makes coming out of frozen leaves. A low hiss. I heard it maybe four hundred times that winter.

Queenie was the thinker. She would feel a log hang up on a root and stop herself before I said a word, and wait for me to roll it. Belle was the worker. She would have pulled the whole woodlot out by the roots if I let her.

In February, when the ground froze hard enough, I spread manure with Glen’s old ground-driven spreader, the one his father bought in the nineteen seventies and nobody had hooked to a horse in a decade. It took me two days with a wire brush and a can of grease to get the beaters turning.

Glen came out the day I first hooked it up. He watched from the barn door with his coffee.

“Those mares are going to drop dead in the traces,” he said, “and then you’ll need the skid loader anyway.”

I didn’t answer him. I clucked to the mares and we went out the lane, and the beaters threw manure in a long brown fan across the snow, and Glen went back inside.

Every evening after the second milking, I walked them a mile up the farm lane to the township road and a mile back, in harness, pulling nothing, just walking. Their old muscles needed long and easy more than they needed hard.

By March, I could see it. The soft places along their necks had firmed up. The hollows above their eyes filled in. Belle had always blown hard on the hill by the spring, and one evening near the end of March she walked up it breathing like she was standing in her stall.