Chapter 2 - The Rust and the Bay Mare
Cedar Hollow was not a postcard ranch. It was forty-eight acres of stubborn caliche rock, prickly pear, and post oak that Daniel’s grandfather had purchased in 1954 with poker winnings and an honorable discharge check from the Navy.
The house was a single-story frame home painted the color of dried oatmeal, with a corrugated tin roof that made a deafening racket whenever an acorn dropped from the live oaks overhead. The barn was sixty yards behind it—a high-peaked timber structure with gray, unpainted cedar siding that had curled at the edges like dried tobacco leaves. Three of the six stalls were missing their lower slide-bolts, held shut with loops of frayed baling twine, and the gutter along the north eve had rusted through in the middle, pouring a steady stream of rainwater into a fifty-five-gallon drum that smelled of iron and stagnant leaves.
The morning after the storm, the sky was a hard, scrubbed blue, the kind that only comes behind a North Texas cold front. The air was forty-two degrees and smelled of damp limestone and wet horse manure.
I stood on the back porch with an enamel mug of Ruth’s chicory-laced coffee between my hands. Leo and Maya were asleep inside on Daniel’s old twin bed, surrounded by a fortress of rolled-up down comforters to keep them from rolling onto the floorboards. Ruth had spent an hour before dawn boiling sweet potatoes on the four-burner gas range, mashing them with butter and a pinch of brown sugar to feed the twins when they woke.
Down by the paddock fence, Walt was standing with his boots hooked into the lower wire, an unlit roll-your-own cigarette between his lips.
Beside him, tied to a peeled cedar post with an old lead rope, stood a horse that looked like an anatomical illustration of bad luck.
She was a four-year-old bay mare, sixteen hands high, with a coat the color of a wet copper penny and four black stockings that ran up past her knees and hocks. But her conformation was a catalog of things that made auction buyers look at their clipboards and keep walking. Her right foreleg was turned out at the fetlock—not severely, but enough that her hoof pointed outward like a ballet dancer’s fifth position. Her ribs were visible beneath her hide like the slats of a broken fruit crate, and her hip bones stuck up like dry rocks in an August creek.
Walt spat a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue as I walked down the slope, the damp grass soaking through the cuffs of a pair of Daniel’s old work pants I had found in the laundry basket.
"Cattle truck’s coming at ten," Walt said, not turning around. "Fellow from Seguin takes them down to the sale barn. Might get three hundred for her if the killer buyers are feeling generous."
I walked up to the fence and rested my forearms on the top rail.
The mare didn't move away. She didn't drop her head in submission, and she didn't pin her ears in fear. She simply turned her neck—long, surprisingly clean-throated for a backyard bred horse—and looked at me with an eye that was large, dark, and startlingly intelligent. The sclera around her eye was clear white, unmarred by the milky cloudiness of moon blindness, and her nostrils widened to catch the scent of the coffee in my mug.
"What's her breeding?" I asked.
Walt let out a dry, rattling chuckle that ended in a cough. "Breeding? She’s out of a grade mare some fellow traded Daniel for three tons of coastal hay two years back. Sire was supposed to be a grandson of Dash For Cash that stood over in Blanco County, but the papers were never signed because the old man died before he could mail the check to Amarillo. She’s nobody. Name’s Juniper, on account of she kept trying to eat the berries off the fence line when she was a filly."
"Why's she so light?"
"Can't keep weight on her. She moves like a three-legged dog when she’s trotting out in the rock pasture. Walt Coleman can’t afford to feed a pasture ornament, Bethany. Hay’s ninety dollars a round bale this winter, and the bank sent two notices on the equipment note last week. If I don't clear three stalls by Friday, we’re going to be buying feed with Ruth’s grocery money."
I set my coffee mug down on a cedar post and slipped between the middle and top wires of the fence.
"Beth, watch yourself," Walt muttered, though he didn't move to stop me. "She’s cold-backed. Pinches if you touch her flanks."
I didn't touch her flanks. I walked to her left shoulder, letting her smell my knuckles, watching the tilt of her ears. When her ears stayed pricked forward, I ran my palm down the crest of her neck. The muscle beneath the coarse winter hair was tight as a braided wire cable, carrying a tremendous amount of tension along the cervical vertebrae.
My degree from Texas A&M had been in Equine Science, with an emphasis on biomechanics and rehabilitation. My mother had referred to it as "a four-year degree in barn shoveling." She had never understood why I spent hundreds of hours in the anatomy lab with calipers, measuring the angles of scapular rotation and the insertion points of the suspensory ligaments.
I knelt in the dirt beside the mare’s crooked right foreleg.
The auctioneer had seen a cull. Walt had seen a feed bill.
I saw something else entirely.
Her right hoof was long in the toe and under-run in the heel—a classic neglect trim that forced the deep digital flexor tendon to pull at an unnatural angle, torquing the whole lower leg outward. But the knee joint itself was broad, flat, and cool to the touch. No heat. No windpuffs. No effusion in the joint capsule.
"Untie her, Walt," I said.
Walt took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Bethany—"
"Untie her. Lead her toward the barn at a walk. On a loose rein. Don't pull her head up."
Walt stared at me for five seconds, his jaw set in that stubborn German-Texan line, then shrugged. He reached over, slipped the slipknot from the cedar post, and started walking toward the barn door.
"Come on, you worthless piece of leather," he grunted.
Juniper followed him. Her first three strides were stiff, awkward, her head bobbing slightly as she dropped her weight onto the right shoulder. To an untrained eye, she looked lame.
"Now pick up a trot," I called out, standing thirty yards back, crouching slightly to see her underline.
Walt broke into an awkward, bowlegged jog, dragging the lead rope.
Juniper transitioned into the trot. And as she did, the stiffness didn't increase—it dissolved.
To compensate for the crooked lower limb, the mare didn't drag her shoulder; she swung her scapula back with an extraordinary, sweeping range of motion, lifting her forehand with the natural uphill balance of an Oldenburg or an Andalusian. Her hind legs tracked up two full hoof-prints past her front tracks, her hocks dropping deep beneath her mass with an elastic, coiled power that was completely hidden when she was standing still.
She wasn't lame. She was out of balance because her feet were deformed, yet her skeleton possessed the rare, freakish geometry of an elite jumper: an open shoulder angle of nearly sixty degrees, a short, powerful loin, and a croup that dropped at the precise angle required to convert horizontal momentum into vertical lift.
She was an athlete trapped inside a neglected box.
"Whoa," Walt panted, stopping near the wash rack. Juniper stopped beside him, her ears flickering back toward me, her breath misting white in the cold air.
I walked up to her, took the lead rope from Walt’s hand, and pressed my forehead against the mare’s cheek. The coarse hair was warm, smelling of cedar dust and sweet molasses from the sweet feed she’d eaten that morning.
"Give me thirty days, Walt," I said.
"Thirty days is two round bales and sixty pounds of sweet feed, Beth," he said, though his voice lacked the sharp edge it had carried five minutes earlier. "That’s money that isn't in the drawer."
"Then don't feed her sweet feed," I said, turning to face him. My eyes were burning, but not from tears. "I’ll pull Johnson grass from the ditch along the road. I’ll cut the mesquite pods out of the south pasture. I have eighty dollars worth of rasp and hoof nippers in the back of my truck. I’ll trim her myself. If she isn't sound and moving clean in four weeks, I’ll haul her to Seguin myself and give you the check."
Walt looked from me to the mare, then back to me. He looked at my bare hands, red from the wind, and the determined, angry set of my mouth. He had seen that same look on Daniel’s face when Daniel had rebuilt an old Oliver tractor out of scrap parts when he was sixteen.
"Your babies need you inside, Bethany," he said softly.
"My babies need a mother who can pay her own way," I replied. "I am not going to sit at your table and eat your roast beef while you sell off your stock to keep the power on. Either we work together, or I load Maya and Leo back into the truck right now."
Walt stared at me. Then, very slowly, a faint, dry grin cracked the corners of his mouth beneath his graying mustache.
"She’ll bite you if you don't keep an elbow in her ribs when you pick up that near hind," he said.
He turned and walked toward the barn, his boots crunching on the wet caliche.
"Rasp is hanging behind the harness bench," he called back over his shoulder. "If you dull it on the rocks, you're buying the file to sharpen it."
I stood in the paddock holding the bay mare’s lead rope.
For the first time in fourteen days, the suffocating, black pressure in my chest parted by a fraction of an inch. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a small piece of dried apple Ruth had given me for the twins, and laid it flat on my palm.
Juniper lowered her head, her soft, gray muzzle tickling my skin as she lifted the fruit with her lips.
"We have thirty days, girl," I whispered to her.
May you like
She chewed, her jaws moving with a steady, rhythmic crunch, her dark eyes looking past me toward the limestone ridge that rose above the creek bottom, where the morning sun was finally burning the last of the mist out of the cedars.
***
