The grandstand made a sound like a long sigh. Then people clapped, because twenty-six feet at eleven eight is a lot of pulling, and it was a good effort, and everyone knew it.
Glen stood behind his team holding the lines for a long time. He didn’t look over at me. The hook boy unhooked and led them off.
Now it was mine.
The crew raked the dirt smooth. Eli picked up the hook and walked out to the mares. They were standing under that hot sky with their heads low and their eyes half shut, the way old horses rest when they know there’s work coming.
Then Eli came back to me instead of going to the boat. He leaned in close, so close I could smell the sweat and the dust on him.
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“I need to tell you something,” he said. “I should’ve told you a long time ago.”
“Eli, they’re waiting.”
“Grandpa bought Queenie as a colt,” he said. “A weanling. She was his. He paid for her out of the egg money the year before he got sick, and he told Dad he wanted her to be the last horse on this farm.”
He swallowed. “He used to sit on a bucket in her stall in the evenings. I was nineteen. I’d go out to get him for supper and he’d be sitting there talking to her.”
I couldn’t say anything. He said colt, the way the old men do for any baby horse, but I knew he meant a filly, and I knew he meant her.
“Dad knows that,” Eli said quietly. “That’s why he couldn’t stand to look at her, I think. That’s why he wanted her gone. Every time he saw her, he saw Grandpa.”
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, leaving a streak of dust. “So I figure Grandpa’d want her pulling today. And I figure he’d want you driving.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my glove. I didn’t care who in the grandstand saw it.
Then Eli walked out to the boat with the hook, and I gathered up my lines and set my feet in the dirt.
I am going to tell this part as plainly as I can, because I have told it a lot of times since, and I always want to get it right.
The mares walked up to the boat side by side. Queenie on the near side, Belle on the off. Their sorrel coats were dark with sweat and their flaxen manes were stuck to their necks. They stopped where they should stop. They did not dance. They did not throw their heads. They stood.
Eli dropped the hook on the first try and stepped back.
I leaned back on the lines and said, “Queenie. Belle. Get up.”
They put their heads down. Not up, the way a young team does, but down, low and level. They bunched their haunches and dug in with their back feet, and then they leaned into their collars together, at the same moment, the way they had leaned into a thousand logs in that woodlot all winter.