The Old Mares on the Stone Boat

I cried a little that night. I’m not ashamed of it. There was nobody out there but the mares and a couple of crows.

Eli started coming out with me in April. He was the one who said it out loud first.

“You’re going to enter them,” he said. We were standing in the horse barn and he was rubbing Queenie behind the ears where she likes it.

“I don’t know,” I said, which was a lie, and he knew it.

“You should,” he said. “Not for him. For them.”

In June, he built me an evener in his shop out of scrap steel and an old drawbar, heavy and balanced, the kind the pulling men buy for four hundred dollars. He made it in two evenings and wouldn’t let me pay him for the steel.

I paid the entry fee for the heavyweight class at the July sign-up, forty dollars. Teams over thirty-six hundred pounds combined pull heavyweight. I had the mares weighed on the grain scale at the elevator. Queenie went eighteen hundred and sixty. Belle went seventeen hundred and ninety. Thirty-six hundred and fifty together. Fifty pounds to spare.

The next morning, Glen saw my name on the list taped up in the fair office window. I heard about it before he got home. He had laughed out loud right there on the sidewalk.

That evening in the milk house he said, “You’ll embarrass those horses.”

I was rinsing the bulk tank. I kept rinsing it.

“Maybe,” I said.

“They’ll pull nine, maybe ninety-five hundred, and quit, and everybody in that grandstand will feel sorry for you. Is that what you want?”

“I want them to work,” I said. “That’s all I’ve wanted since October.”

He stood there a while. Then he said, “Well, it’s your forty dollars,” and left.

The pull was the third Thursday in August.

It was hot. Not just warm. The kind of August heat in Ohio where the air sits on the back of your neck like a wet towel, and the dust off the track hangs in it and doesn’t come down.

We loaded the mares at noon. I had braided my hair tight to keep it off my neck. Navy T-shirt, jeans, my good leather gloves that I had oiled the night before, my dad’s old pair. Eli drove.

At the fairgrounds the horse barns smelled like hot hay and liniment. Men were washing Belgians with hoses and the water steamed off their backs. Somebody’s radio was playing old country music too loud.

Glen’s geldings were two stalls down from my mares. He had them in new harness with brass that caught the light from the barn door. He had a kid named Ike to hook for him, a neighbor boy of nineteen who had hooked for some of the best teams in three counties.

Glen nodded to Eli. He didn’t nod to me.

I walked down to look at the track before the pull started. It was the half-mile oval in front of the grandstand, and the pulling area was a long strip of worked dirt, harrowed and watered, with the start line chalked across it. The stone boat sat at the line.