The Old Mares on the Stone Boat

The stone boat didn’t jump. It started to slide.

Slowly. Steel scraping dirt. The concrete blocks knocking together.

I leaned back on the lines with my whole weight, heels dug in, and I talked to them. I don’t remember what I said. Eli told me later I just kept saying their names, over and over, quietly, like you’d talk to someone in a hospital bed.

Herb Stolzfus had the microphone, and he quit talking. Forty years of calling pulls and he didn’t say a word. I could hear steel on dirt and the blocks and my own breathing and the mares breathing, deep and slow, like bellows.

Ten feet. They didn’t hurry. Fifteen feet. Dust flew off their feathers and hung in the air around us in the sun.

At twenty feet I felt Belle start to waver and I said her name, just once, and Queenie leaned a little harder, the way she always did when Belle needed her.

Twenty-four feet. That was where Glen’s team had come apart. My mares didn’t seem to know it. They kept leaning, heads down, haunches bunched, putting one big shod foot in front of the other.

At twenty-six feet the grandstand started making noise, a low sound I could feel through my boots. Then it got louder.

And then the mares stopped. Not quit. Stopped. They had given me everything they had, and they told me so the way old horses do. Their heads came up a little, and their weight came off the collars, and they stood.

I said, “Whoa,” and let the lines go slack.

The tape man walked out with his steel tape. I couldn’t look. I watched Queenie’s ears instead. One forward, one back toward me.

Then Herb Stolzfus came back on the microphone. His voice was not as steady as it usually was.

“Folks,” he said. “Twenty-seven feet. Twenty-seven feet even at eleven thousand eight hundred pounds. That’s Queenie and Belle by one foot.”

And the grandstand stood up.

I have seen a lot of people stand up for a lot of things. I had never seen a whole grandstand get to its feet for two old mares. Farm wives with babies on their hips. Old men in seed caps who had pulled horses themselves fifty years ago. Kids standing on the bleachers. Everybody on their feet, clapping, in the dust and the heat of that August afternoon.

Herb kept talking over them. “Now some of you folks know these mares pulled here twelve years for Glen Rausch. And some of you old-timers will remember Glen’s daddy had Queenie when she was a long-legged yearling. And I’ll tell you what, I’ve been calling these pulls for forty years, and I never once saw a team pull that steady. That is how it’s done, folks. That right there.”

I didn’t go up and wave. I didn’t look at the grandstand at all. I walked up to the mares’ heads and put my hand on Queenie’s wet neck, and then on Belle’s, and they both pushed their big noses against me, and that was the only thing I wanted.