“I think he ran,” Delores said, finally flopping down. “I think he was a horse for once in his life.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“They just swept him up. He didn’t have a choice.”
“You really think Speed ran?” I asked again, still having trouble getting my mind around it.
“Did you feel them go by?” she said, not quite answering. “I couldn’t believe what they felt like.”
“Weird that they were running at night, isn’t it?”
“Something could have scared them. You never know. Speedy boy went right with them. I’m telling you.”
“I want to see him.”
“We can find him tomorrow. Fry said he needed to bring some hay out, and we can ride along. He said they stay down by the stream mostly.”
“And Punch will be out.”
“And Punch will be out,” Delores said, “that’s right.”
The morning sun turned the top of the tent pale green. It wasn’t light as much as the promise of light. I closed my eyes, trying to feel the pounding of the horses again through my back. But they had moved away, and I didn’t feel anything except a good wind that blew up and over the hill.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, I think,” Delores said. “It’s time.”
“You mean today?”
“I guess it is today. After we see Speed.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You’re leaving, too, right?” she asked.
“I guess so. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Speed made it,” she said. “I mean, we won’t know for sure until we see him, but it looks like he made it.”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“It was because of you, Hattie,” Delores said. “You brought him here. I helped, but you brought him.”
“We both brought him.”
“Well, I don’t know, but here he is. He might surprise us. And I trust Fry to be good with the animals. He’ll look after him.”
“I trust him, too,” I said. “And he makes good chili.”
“Amazing chili!” Delores agreed, her voice going up with energy.
“And the corn bread.”
She grunted.
“Give me some corn bread,” she said, making her voice deep and commanding. “Give me some corn bread now.”
“I’ll remember those horses hitting my hand the rest of my life.”
“Me too,” Delores said.
“And the way the earth shook.”
“Blue earth.”
“Yes, blue earth.”
A little while later Delores said she loved me.
“I want you to know that,” she said. “Whatever happens in the rest of our lives, I want you to know you were my friend.”
I rolled closer and hugged her. A cricket landed on the tent wall and stayed there. It buzzed away in the morning light, summer going with it once and for all.
PUNCH AND I RODE IN THE BACK OF FRY’S HALF TON, OUR butts planted on a huge pile of hay bales, our backs against the truck cab. Delores sat in front with Fry, happy to be a supervisor and not a worker. Whenever Fry slowed down, Punch and I each shot onto our feet and threw a bale over the side. Fry paused a second to let us get our balance and sit back down, then the truck moved on. The hay smelled wonderful, like timothy and sage, but it grated the skin on my forearms. I rolled down the sleeves of my flannel shirt and tucked my fleece closer. After that, I didn’t have any problems.
The sun couldn’t beat back the cold air that pushed in with each passing hour, and by late morning I felt chilled. Fry’s radio claimed we might get a frost that night. The stream appeared now and then in our passage, and fallen leaves clogged any slower-moving water. Twice we spotted the horse herd, but we didn’t stop to watch them. I strained to see Speed each time, then the truck moved, and Fry tapped the top of the cap with his good hand, and we continued.
“Don’t you worry,” Punch said after the second time. “Fry wouldn’t be prolonging the tension if he didn’t think Speed was okay.”
“I just want to see him.”
“It’s quite a thing,” Punch said. “Him coming back to life like that.”
“We don’t know for sure.”
Before Punch answered, Fry stopped the truck.
We jerked to our feet and tossed a bale on either side of the truck. I heard Delores singing country-and-western music like a crazy woman. We sat down once we launched the bales. Fry drove on.
“Well, he’s around somewhere,” Punch said, his body at ease against the truck cab. “He can’t get out, and I don’t see any buzzards.”
“Buzzards?”
“A fact of life, is all, Hattie,” he said.
He took my hand as we went along.
By late morning we had nearly emptied the truck, leaving rectangles of hay scattered over most of the acreage. I couldn’t be sure, but it dawned on me that Fry had taken a long way around, checking to make sure no animal had gone down. Punch hadn’t been kidding about buzzards. Fry hadn’t wanted to drive right up to the herd first thing in case the run had been too much for Speed. He had circled around, letting us help him deliver hay, before he swept back and parked the truck above the herd. It was just noon, and the horses grazed in the sun.
Delores jumped out as soon as Fry stopped the truck, and she scrambled up beside us. We had a perfect view of the herd from the back of the truck. The herd stretched down to the stream and into the shade of the trees. I started to count the horses, but gave up after reaching a hundred. Three hundred, I guessed. Maybe less. Five minutes before I would have bet money that I could find Speed in any congregation of horses, seen him no matter what, but I couldn’t spot him for the longest time. Each instant I thought I saw him, he disappeared, or the horse under observation blended into the herd and obscured his outline.
“You see him anywhere?” Fry called up.
“Not yet,” Delores called back.
“Well, look a little longer, and then we’ll head back. He’s in there somewhere.”
Delores spotted him a few minutes later.
She screamed and pounded the top of the truck.
“Right there, right there.” She pointed to the lower left section of the horses. “Right beyond that white one.… See him? That’s him. There he is.”
And it was.
I saw him as he grazed near the back of the herd, his nose pushing grass. He looked different somehow, wilder, but he was still Speed. He ate quietly, his concentration on the food in front of him. He appeared entirely average, just one of the herd, but seeing him made my heart go up. Delores slipped her arm around my waist.
“He’s a horse, Hattie,” she whispered. “Speed is finally a horse.”
“He’s beautiful,” I said, my eyes filling.
“He’s free, and he’s part of a herd. That’s paradise for a horse,” Punch said.
“He ran, I think,” I said, and started to cry. “I think he ran with the other horses.”
“Sure he did,” Delores said.
“And now he’s just eating, and all around him he has other horses. And no kids to kick him or tell him to go faster. If he died tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind. Not like before,” I said.
“I know,” Delores said. “It was all worth it.”
Then the horses started to move. They didn’t sprint or run wildly as they had the night before, but something made them raise their heads and shove off a dozen steps. Speed went, too. He lifted his head and his ears went forward, and for just an instant he ran. His legs lifted and his body soared forward. Delores squeezed my waist. I watched as long as I could, watched until the horses moved on, Speed at the tail of the herd, but part of it, part of everything.
LEANING AGAINST HIS TRUCK, I KISSED PUNCH A LONG KISS at the gate to Fry’s land. Punch’s truck pointed west. Ours pointed east, into Blue Earth, where Delores would deliver me to the bus station. Punch kissed me and then whispered into my ear that he had enjoyed getting to know me, that he hope
d to see me in Boston, that not to worry, Fry knew his horses and he would send word if anything happened to Speed, but that all the signs looked promising, and Fry would do what he could, I could count on it. Then Punch kissed me one more time, said he didn’t believe in long goodbyes, couldn’t stand them, in fact, and he stepped into his pickup and started it. He waved to Delores, and she waved back. She yelled to say hello to Drew, who was meeting him at the next rodeo stop, but I couldn’t be sure he heard her.
“That is one handsome cowboy,” she said as I climbed inside the truck.
“He’s a great guy.”
“We better move it if you’re making the bus.”
We drove back the way we came, following a country road Punch had recommended. The trailer rattled behind us, less grounded now without Speed to anchor it.
“You got everything you need?” Delores asked me.
“Sure.”
“I wish you’d take more of the money. We were supposed to split it fifty-fifty.”
“You’re going to need some money out in Oregon, Delores. It will all wash out in the end. And if anything goes wrong with the truck on the way there, well, you should have it.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”
Delores hustled us along, and I watched out the window. I couldn’t quite believe it was over. At 3:47 I would climb on a bus and head back east, and in a day or two, not much longer, I would end up in White River Junction, Vermont, not far from where we started. My mom would pick me up, and she would be nice, interested, but she would let her concern about my future creep in, and pretty soon we’d start gnawing on each other again. Mostly, though, I felt like life had taken a turn, one I couldn’t quite understand yet, but that something was happening whether I wanted it to or not. And I thought of Speed, too, who had probably figured his life was over, if he thought at all, but in a week’s time he ended up on a ranch in Minnesota, a wild horse. You couldn’t know what might happen.
“I miss him,” I said.
“Who?” Delores asked, grabbing a plug of bubble gum and unwrapping it with her teeth. “Speed or Punch?”
“Speed.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s weird without him around.”
“You going to call your dad soon and say you’re on your way?”
She nodded. Her jaw flexed with her chewing. She crumpled up the wrapper and dropped it onto the seat.
“It will work,” I said.
“I hope so. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“You’ll just come back and live with me.”
“Oh, your mom would love that.”
“She loves you and you know it,” I said.
“Paulette’s going to love having you back.”
“She’ll hate me because I haven’t called.”
“She’ll get over it.”
Delores rolled down her window and spit out the bubble gum.
“I swear bubble gum is only good for about a minute,” she said. “But I love it anyway.”
“Can I ask you something serious?” I said.
“Shoot.”
“A while back Mrs. Ferguson talked to me about being a veterinary assistant. Not for dogs or cats but for large animals. You know. Horses and cattle. There’s a program at the University of New Hampshire. She thinks I could probably get in on a provisional basis. My grades suck, but I have the GED and she says they need people. What do you think?”
Delores looked at me.
“You could not do anything better in this world, Hattie Wyatt,” she said, her eyes on me. “You’d be perfectly suited. I mean it. And you might decide to be a vet yourself.”
“One thing at a time,” I said.
“No one loves animals like you, Hattie. You do that. You ask Mrs. Ferguson to help you get into the program. She can pull some strings. People like her have lots of strings.”
“I think it’ll be good, too.”
She reached over and grabbed my hand.
Fifteen minutes later we pulled up to the bus station. It wasn’t much—just a ticket window with a tiny waiting room. A bus idled, its exhaust blue-green in the late-afternoon light. Greyhound. Delores unloaded my stuff while I went to the window and bought a one-way ticket. A chubby guy told me to get a move on, the bus was about to leave. I grabbed the ticket and ran back outside.
“It’s my bus,” I said.
Delores carried my backpack. I carried my carry-on bag. The bus driver, a tall, thin broom of a man, threw the other passengers’ bags into the undercarriage. He slammed the doors down.
Delores took me in her arms. I squeezed her as hard as I could.
“You’re a woman going west,” I said. “No one can stop you.”
She nodded against me.
“Load it up,” the bus driver shouted.
I grabbed my backpack from Delores and lugged it step by step up the stairs. I dropped the bags onto the first empty seat I found and knelt to look out the window. The bus made a releasing sound, the brakes sighing, and I strained left and right to see Delores. I saw her as the bus pulled away. She had her hand up, waving, but I wasn’t sure she could see me through the tinted windows.
Chapter 10
IT COULD HAVE EASILY BEEN LOST.
The postcard arrived in a bunch of other mail, and somehow it had tucked down into the Pennysaver, a local shopper newspaper that called itself the North Country’s best flea market. The mail sat on the seat of my old Chevy pickup, a two-wheel-drive S-10, because I had grabbed the letters on my way out of the house. Most of the mail was addressed to my mother.
I probably wouldn’t have noticed the card except that I had gotten cold tending to the horses and had decided to eat my lunch in the truck with the heater going. It was April and rainy, the last of the snow peeling away under the large drops of moisture. The Fergusons had left me in charge of the horses while they played golf in Bermuda. Mud season held the barn in a soggy, wet cast. Whenever the horses moved, their hooves pulled up large sucks of mud that splattered their bellies. They looked like brown-spotted dalmatians.
I was more interested in the mail these days because I had been accepted into the veterinary assistant program, large animals, at the University of New Hampshire. The acceptance had come bundled with provisions. I had to maintain a 2.7 GPA. I had to complete a summer internship. If my grades slipped below thus and so, I would be bounced. I was part of a North Country statewide outreach program. Whatever it was called, once the University of New Hampshire had gotten the idea I was attending the following fall, mail came by the bucketfuls.
I didn’t check the mail for letters from Delores. She called or texted late at night to tell me about her dad, her job at Home Depot, the boy she had started dating.
When I lifted the Pennysaver to take a look at it, the postcard from Fry slipped out. My heart stopped. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had been eating turned to stones in my mouth. I swallowed as best I could.
I looked at the card. I saw my address and the address of the sender. The front side of the card had a chili recipe on it. I turned off the truck and stepped out into the wet mist. I tucked the card into my back pocket.
I made myself finish mucking out the stables. I raked out old hay and replenished three stalls with new bedding. The horses nodded and dozed. I worked for most of the afternoon. The card remained in my back pocket. A hundred times I reached my hand down to check it. Each time my hand fell away from it.
It was nearly sunset when I finished with the stables. I put away the rakes and brushes the way Mrs. Ferguson liked them to be stored. Then I sat on a small bench outside Fabio’s stall. He was a big horse, a palomino whose white forelock dangled almost to his eyes. He was a friendly, slightly silly horse. I pulled the card out of my back pocket and tucked it against my knee facedown. I took a deep breath and turned it over.
Dear Hattie,
Sorry to tell you, your horse stopped running today. We found him when we went out to deliver hay. I can’t tell yo
u much about how it happened. He was down when we found him, that’s all. He seemed like a good horse, and you should be happy he made it to spring. I would have had Punch write to you, but he’s down in Arizona, as you likely know. Most of the mares have foaled, and it’s some pretty to watch.
Hope you’re well.
Regards,
Fry
I stood and put my arms around Fabio’s neck. He made a good horse sound, a deep rumbling in his throat and chest, and I hugged him as hard as I could. He nodded his head a little. I whispered that I loved Speed, always would, that he was my boy, that of all the horses that ever were, ever would be, Speed was my one true horse. He was the one I thought of when I thought of all horses, and I could recall his face faster than I could any other creature I had ever met. “My one true horse,” I whispered. I hoped he had seen the grass turn as green as flame and had breathed the wind carrying the mares’ scents, and maybe he’d seen the foals, all candle-legged, their rock-a-horse trotting bringing warmth to his old heart. I buried my face in Fabio’s neck and I cried as I had never cried. I cried for everything sad in the world, and for Speed, and for all the things and people who got old and tired, for the good hearts that tried to go on but couldn’t. I cried for Delores and I cried for me, and Fabio took it all. He took it all and it went deep into his body, but he didn’t move or judge. He accepted my tears and he leaned into me, his great, quiet skin smelling of barns beyond counting, smelling of hay and summer and the knobby oats he loved so much.
And for just a second Fabio became Speed.
“Spring,” I whispered, when even old bones get up and walk. And I told him what my first riding instructor told me—that when a horse dies, he becomes Pegasus, the greatest of all horses, a horse with wings, a horse that eats air and canters on light. He soars above the land, free from this world, and I would meet him someday, I promised. We would ride in the sky, and we would perform great deeds, and anyone seeing us would marvel at the magnificence of the horse with wings.
I told him goodbye for Delores and for the Fergusons and even for the children who didn’t understand what they had asked of him, what their impatient heels had done to his heart. I explained that I would tell Delores and we would remember him.
Finding Somewhere Page 14
