Chapter 7
Holt
The calf lived and the heifer mothered up, and Saturday I hauled three horses to Brush.
The sorrel went through the ring in about ninety seconds.
Nobody in that building knew what he was except me.
All they had to go on was his age and his teeth and the way he moved on a concrete floor with a hundred strangers yelling, which was no way to judge a horse.
He went for less than I'd figured on, and I hadn't thought that was possible.
A fat man in a clean hat signed for him and had him loaded inside ten minutes.
I didn't go over to the trailer. There wasn't anything I could have said to a horse that would have been for the horse.
Lane hadn't come. I hadn't asked him to.
I drove home with the check in my coat and the bank's number in my head, and the two of them not close to meeting.
Something between us had changed and neither of us had gone near it. We'd pulled a life into the world together at two in the morning and hadn't said one word about it since. It was the good kind of quiet, which was the part that worried me.
Morgan stopped at the empty pen on his way down to the barn Monday morning. He stood there a good while. Then he went and got a fork and didn't say one word about it, and that made twice he'd decided not to ask me something.
He had to learn to ride. The picture wanted it and the ranch wanted it worse, because a hand who couldn't sit a horse was a hand I had to drive everywhere, and I'd run out of patience for that around the same time I'd run out of excuses not to teach him. So Tuesday I put him up on Biscuit.
"This is Biscuit," I said.
He looked at the horse. Biscuit was twenty-two years old and shaped like a barrel that had given up, with a lower lip that hung loose and a look on him like he'd been let down by everybody he ever met.
He had taught half the children in the valley to ride and he had exactly one speed and it wasn't much of one, and a man could have set off a stick of dynamite under him and gotten a tail swish for the trouble.
"Biscuit," Morgan said.
"He won't kill you."
"I can see that. I'm not sure he's alive now.
" He walked a slow circle around Biscuit with his hands on his hips, looking him over like a man who had seen other people do this.
"I'll be honest, I had a slightly different picture in my head.
There was wind in it. The horse was black. There may have been a cape."
"You can buy a cape in town. Horse stays."
"Holt Thomas. Was that a joke?"
"Get on the horse."
It came out softer than I meant it to. He put his hand on Biscuit's neck the way I'd shown him, slow and from the front, and Biscuit heaved the enormous sigh of a put-upon saint, and Morgan looked at me like I'd handed him something.
I told myself to get on with it.
I put him up and he sat there clutching the horn like the horse was a building on fire, his shoulders to his ears, his heels jammed up and his toes pointed down, every line of him braced for a catastrophe that a twenty-two-year-old horse named Biscuit was never in his life going to provide.
"Should I have a helmet?"
"The only thing on this place that ever wore a helmet was a calf that got its head stuck in a panel."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
He laughed and a little of the brace went out of his shoulders, and Biscuit took two whole steps before Morgan seized the horn again, certain the earth had shifted under him.
I told him to drop his heels. He dropped his chin. I told him to sit up. He leaned back.
"Relax."
"Relax is a thing that happens to other people," he said.
I almost smiled and turned it into adjusting the cinch.
His stirrups ran too long. Fixing them meant standing in close at his knee with my hands on his boot and the hard line of his calf, and he went very still up there while I did it. I worked faster than the job called for and stepped back.
Then his hands. Lower, softer, the reins threaded through his fingers, and I had to reach up and take them in mine to do it, his all torn up and mine hard as a boot sole.
I held on about two seconds past the job. I knew I was doing it while I did it.
Biscuit sighed. Biscuit had seen all of this before and disapproved of every part of it.
"You're fighting him," I said. "He can feel every place you're scared in your seat. You want him soft, you go soft first. He's a mirror. They all are."
He listened with his whole body, his face turned to whatever I was saying like it was the only thing in the world worth knowing.
Thirty-six years I'd spent being the one who paid attention so nobody else had to, and here was a man looking at me like I was worth listening to, and I had to keep finding cinches to adjust.
By the end of the first hour he'd stopped riding like the horse was trying to buy his soul.
By the end of the second he could start Biscuit and stop him and turn him both ways, and somewhere in there he quit bracing for every step, his hips loosening into the walk, his hands going quiet, and I stood in the middle of the round pen turning him on the line and watched a soft city man find the first true thing his body had ever done.
"There," I said, when he came around easy for the third time, sitting down into the horse instead of perched on top of him praying. "That. Feel that?"
"I feel it. Holt, I feel it, this is—"
He didn't have the word. A man who got paid for words and he couldn't find one. He shook his head and patted Biscuit's neck like the horse had done something miraculous, which from where Biscuit was standing it had not.
"Nobody told me it felt like this."
"That's because most people who'd tell you have never been on anything but a carousel." It came out warmer than I'd meant it. "Bring him in. That's enough for today, you'll be walking like a sailor as it is."
He brought Biscuit in and got down wrong, his legs gone to rubber, and grabbed my arm to keep off the ground. His hand closed hard above my elbow.
For a second he was just there. Too close, laughing at his own buckling knees, his face an inch off my collar, smelling like horse and cold and clean sweat. I stood absolutely still. I didn't move him off and I didn't pull him in, and one of those took everything I had.
Then he straightened up and let go, and it was just a Tuesday again.
"Sorry," he said. He wasn't.
"Walk it off."
We walked Biscuit out on a long rein to cool him, one of us at either side of the old horse's head in the thin gold light, and Morgan was quiet for once, worn through and happy with it.
Not quiet for long. He wanted to know whether the calf would remember him. Whether cows remembered anything at all. Whether the mother knew what we'd done in there or just knew she'd hurt and then stopped hurting.
"She'll remember a gate that shocked her once," I said. "Not a lot else."
"That's the saddest thing I've heard all week."
Then he asked me four more questions about it.
"Are you going to tell Gus about the calf?"
"No."
"I'm going to tell Gus about the calf."
I let that lie where it fell, because there was nothing I could do about it and we both knew it. After a while he asked me how I'd learned.
Not for the picture. I'd gotten able to hear the difference. He wanted to know about me.
"Gus put me up my second week here. Mean little paint, about fourteen hands, hated everybody." I could still see the thing. "Pitched me into the same mud puddle eleven times before it got bored."
"Eleven."
"I counted."
Morgan laughed. He didn't say anything else, which I was grateful for and didn't know how to be.
"Gus stood at the rail the whole time," I said. "Laughed at every one of them. Then he fed me supper like nothing happened."
That was as far as I took it out loud. It was the first time in my life anybody had let me fail at a thing and not made me pay for it, and I'd been eleven years old, and I wasn't going to say that part to anybody.
I hadn't known I was going to say any of it until it was out of my mouth. He didn't ask me one thing about it. Anybody else would have.
We walked another quarter mile and neither of us filled it.
My arm was still holding the print of his hand. A grown man, keeping track of it.
Gus was on the porch when we came up, because Gus was always on the porch at the moment a thing was happening that he wanted to take credit for, and he watched Morgan come across the yard bowlegged and filthy and shining and he didn't even pretend to hide how pleased he was.
"He rode," Gus said to me.
"He sat on Biscuit while Biscuit walked. Let's not put it on a stamp."
"Ask him what he named the calf."
"I didn't name the calf."
"He named the calf." Morgan came up the steps behind me with the delight of a man who'd been saving it two days.
"Sunday. I was standing right there. He looked at it knock its own mother over getting to the feed and he said, and I quote, there you go, Trouble.
Then he looked at me like he'd kill me if I said anything, which I didn't, until right now. "
Gus's face was doing something I hadn't seen it do in a while, a slow climbing delight, and he looked at me with his eyebrows up and his mouth twitching and he said, "Trouble," in the exact deadpan he'd have used to read my own death certificate back to me, and Morgan lost it, head back, the rough laugh barking up into the cold, and Gus started in, wheezing, and the dog barked, and the whole porch came apart at the seams over a calf and a name I would deny to my grave.
"Trouble," Gus said once more, just to taste it, wiping his eyes.
"You soft old fool. You named a cow after how you feel about company.
" And he was not wrong, and he knew he was not wrong, and he looked from me to Morgan and back with the bright shameless arithmetic of a man moving furniture into a room, and on any other day I'd have shut that look down hard and fast.
And I laughed.
It got out before I could stop it, the laugh I kept locked up with everything else, and it surprised the three of them and it surprised me worst of all, a short rough bark of a thing I hadn't heard come out of my own chest in longer than I wanted to count, and Morgan turned and caught it, caught me laughing.
It was just wonder on his face, plain and undefended, like he'd struck water where there wasn't supposed to be any.
I shut it down. I told them I had work, which was true, and I went and did it, and the whole rest of the day I kept catching the ghost of that laugh in my chest like a cracked rib, and I couldn't decide whether it hurt because it was broken or because, after all this time, it still worked.