The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

The Alley

The green mare shifted under me in the alley and I let her, because a horse that cannot stand still is a horse that is listening to you. I wanted her listening.

The announcer was running through the open class, reading off names I had heard my whole life. Sand hung in the arena lights like it had nowhere better to be.

Past the metal panels I could see the scoreboard and the rail. They had set out forty or fifty folding chairs, which is a crowd for a county rodeo in the Oklahoma panhandle.

I told myself I would not look for my father. I had told myself that all week. I was holding to it the way you hold to a cheap promise, white knuckled and ashamed.

“Easy, Junebug,” I said. More for me than for her.

She flicked one ear back at my voice. She was a plain sorrel mare, no chrome, no papers worth bragging on, twelve hundred dollars of other people’s leftovers.

I had bought her with money that smelled like a sale barn in February. We both knew it. There was no pretending otherwise between us.

My brother Cody stood at the gate in his ball cap with his hand on the latch. He had come home off the circuit to work a gate for a green horse.

That meant something. I was not ready yet to say what.

Three barrels sat out there in the cloverleaf, two across the front, one up the middle. Three hundred dollars of my winter, waiting to be run in under eighteen seconds.

I gathered my reins and felt her come up underneath me, soft and ready. Somewhere in those chairs was the man who had sold my good horse out from under me.

I made myself breathe. A horse feels everything that travels down the reins. I owed her hands that did not shake.