Rodeo

 

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The barn, about a week in

 

By the end of the first week Brad had stopped flinching every time a door banged, which Gus noticed and did not mention, which was Gus's whole way of saying a thing.

He had learned the barn the way you learn a song you have heard your whole life without meaning to. He knew which stalls the morning sun came into and which stayed cool. He knew that the gray gelding kicked the wall for attention and that you did not reward it. He knew that Biscuit would in fact sell him out for a peppermint and had done so twice. And he knew, because Gus had walked him down to her stall on the second day and stood there a while without saying much, that the old heavy bay mare at the end of the row was named Nell and was due to foal any day, and that Brad was to come get somebody the very minute she started acting peculiar, day or night, and not try to be a hero about it.

So when Nell started walking her stall in tight circles that afternoon, and pawing the shavings, and swinging her head around to look at her own side like it had said something to her, Brad put down his rake and went and got somebody.

The somebody turned out to be the vet, because Gus had already called that morning on account of not liking the way Nell was carrying, and the truck was pulling up the drive as Brad came out of the barn.

It was a mud-splashed dually with a steel vet box built into the bed, and the woman who climbed down out of it was maybe forty-five, sunburned, with a gray-streaked braid and her sleeves already shoved up past the elbow like she had rolled them in the truck on the way.

"You the one hollering for me, or is that the horse," she said, not unkindly, hauling a bucket and a coil of clean rope out of the box.

"The horse, ma'am," said Brad. "Nell. She's - she keeps looking at her side and walking circles and she pawed all her bedding to one end."

The vet stopped and looked at him properly for the first time, and something in her face shifted from busy to interested.

"That's a real good report," she said. "Most folks just say the horse is acting funny and leave me to do the rest. You been watching her close."

"I'm always in there," said Brad, and then went red, like he had confessed to something.

"Well, then you're hired." She stuck out a hand that had delivered a thousand things into the world. "Doc Hollis. You're the new one Amos took in, the timid one, Gus said." She said timid the way you'd say left-handed, a fact about a person and not a strike against them. "Come on. If she's circling and pawing this hard she's not going to give us much of a wait, and I'd sooner have four hands than two."

 

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That night

 

It was full dark and cold outside and warm and close in Nell's big foaling stall, and Brad was on his knees in clean straw with his heart going like a rabbit's, and Doc Hollis was talking the whole time in a low even voice that Brad slowly understood was not for him and not for Nell but was just the sound a calm person makes to keep a room calm.

"There's the water. Good girl. Now we wait and we do not help her yet, no matter what your hands want to do. She's built for this. Watch the feet - see? One, and two, and the two ought to be staggered like that, one a little ahead, that's the front legs coming right. If they come even, or you see the bottoms of the hooves pointing up, you holler for me twice as loud, but they're not, so we're all right."

"They're pointing down," said Brad. "The hooves. Down and forward."

"Down and forward is exactly right. You've got a good eye, you know that?"

Brad did not know that. Nobody had ever told him he had a good anything.

Nell groaned and strained and the two little feet came further, and then the nose was there, laid along the front legs the way Doc Hollis said to hope for, still inside the pale sac, and Brad forgot to be scared because there was too much else to be.

"Now," said Doc Hollis. "Now we can help, because she's tired and this is the hard part. When she pushes, you take that leg - just above the ankle, there, cup your hand, don't grip like you're mad at it - and you pull down, toward her hocks, slow, with her, only when she pushes. Not straight out. Down, like you're drawing a curtain. With me. Ready. And - now."

Brad pulled. It was slippery and warm and alive and the most frightening wonderful thing he had ever had his hands on, and he pulled down and with her the way she said, and Doc Hollis had the other leg, and between one push and the next the whole of the foal came free into the straw in a rush, and Nell's tail dropped, and it was over, and it had happened, and there was a horse in the world that had not been in the world a minute before.

It lay steaming in the cold air and did not move.

"It's not - " Brad's whole chest seized. "Doc, it's not breathing, it's not - "

"Clear the sac off his face, quick, that's it, off his nose - now take that straw, a good handful, and you rub him. Hard. Harder than feels kind. Right along the ribs. You're being his mama till she gets her feet. Rub him and talk at him, don't matter what you say, just be loud about it."

Brad rubbed the wet dark shape hard with both fists full of straw and heard himself saying come on, come on, please, come on, you have to, in a cracked voice that did not sound like him, and for a long second that stretched out into something unbearable there was nothing.

And then the foal coughed. A wet rattling little cough, and a snort, and its ribs heaved and pulled in a whole huge shuddering breath, and its ears flicked, and one impossible long leg kicked out and caught Brad square in the shin, and Brad laughed - out loud, wet-faced, astonished - because getting kicked had never once in his life felt like the best thing that could happen.

"There he is," said Doc Hollis, sitting back on her heels, grinning at the boy more than the horse. "Colt. Big healthy colt. And he's breathing because you made him, so don't you let anybody tell you different." She wiped her hands. "First one you ever caught?"

Brad nodded. He couldn't talk.

"You'll remember it your whole life," she said. "First one's yours forever, that way. Nobody can take a thing like that back off you once it's happened."

Behind them, leaning in the stall door where he had been standing quiet the last quarter hour, Amos took his hat off and didn't say anything at all.

 

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Morning

 

The colt was up by morning, which Brad would not have believed if he had not seen the legs the night before, all that folded-up impossible length sorting itself out into standing.

He stood splay-legged and suspicious in the light from the door, still damp-looking at the edges, and he had spent the early hours doing what new colts do, which is fall down a great deal, so that his coat - which was going to be a pretty dun, a soft tan with a dark stripe down the spine - was so thoroughly coated in shavings and barn dust that he looked less like a horse than like something a barn had made out of its own floor.

Brad stood at the door with Gus and Doc Hollis and Amos and could not stop looking at him.

"He needs a name," said Amos.

"Nell's papers'll want something fancy for the registry," said Gus, "but round the barn he'll go by whatever sticks."

"So it ought to be the boy that names him," said Amos, easy, like it was the plainest thing in the world and not a gift. "Man pulls a colt into the world with his own two hands has got naming rights. That's older than any registry." He looked at Brad. "What do you want to call him, son?"

Brad looked at the dusty tan colt, who chose that exact moment to sneeze and sit down.

"Dusty," said Brad.

It came out with no thinking behind it at all, and the second it was out he braced, the old reflex, waiting for somebody to tell him it was stupid, it was too plain, he'd gotten it wrong.

"Dusty," said Doc Hollis, trying it. "Well, look at him. Man can't argue with the evidence."

"Dusty it is," said Amos.

And that was that. Brad had named a living thing, and the name had held, and now there was a horse in the world called Dusty because Brad had said so. He turned it over in himself, careful, like a stone he'd found that might be worth something, and could not remember the last time he had made a mark on anything that anybody let stay.

Amos waited until the others had drifted off to their mornings before he said the other thing. He said it gentle, the way he said everything, with his eyes out on the paddock and not on Brad.

"I'm driving into town today," he said. "Out past Ringgold. Going to see your folks about that paper."

Brad went still in the old way.

"I'd not lie to you about it or slip off while you weren't looking," Amos said. "That's not how I mean to do a single thing with you. So I'm telling you plain, to your face, where I'm going and why. It don't change one thing about here, whatever comes of it. You've got a colt to raise now. That's a two-year job at the least. You're not going anywhere."

"Okay," said Brad, in a small voice.

"Okay," said Amos. He put his hat on. "Mind Doc's the one gives Dusty his first looking-over, not you playing doctor. And eat something. Cora'll have my hide if you don't."

 

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The Cedar Grove road, out past Ringgold

 

The house was smaller than Amos had pictured and better kept, which told him more than a big run-down place would have. These were people who mowed. People who painted the porch rail on a Saturday and went to church on a Sunday and had, somewhere in between, put a fourteen-year-old boy out on the road with a jar of peanut butter, and would tell you, if you asked, that they were good people, and would half believe it.

A man came to the door before Amos was up the steps. Late forties, ironed shirt, reading glasses pushed up on his head. He had Brad's build and none of Brad's face, or maybe it was that Brad's face had something in it this man's had gone smooth over.

"Help you?"

"Gerald Ledford?"

"That's right."

"Name's Amos Kettering. I run the rodeo grounds the other side of Ringgold." Amos kept his hat in his hands, kept his voice level and country and unhurried. "Your boy Brad's been staying on with me about a week. He's well. He's working, eating, sleeping under a roof. I came to tell you that to your face, and to ask you to sign a paper."

Something crossed Gerald Ledford's face at the word Brad, quick, and it was not relief and it was not grief. It was wariness. It was a man waiting to find out if this was going to cost him.

"What kind of paper."

"Temporary guardianship. My lawyer drew it. It don't sign away a thing that's permanent - that'd take a judge, and I'm not here to fight you in front of one." Amos held it out, folded. "All it does is let me get him to a doctor if he's hurt, and put him in a school this fall, without a clerk somewhere holding it up asking who I am to him. That's the whole of it. It protects the boy. It costs you nothing."

A woman had come up behind Gerald in the hall. Diane. She had a dish towel in her hands and she was twisting it, and she looked at the folded paper in Amos's hand like it might go off.

"Is he - " she started.

"He's all right, ma'am," Amos said, and he said it kindly, because she was the one who had put the peanut butter in the bag and he had worked that out somewhere on the drive over. "He's a good hand with the horses. He helped bring a colt into the world last night. You'd have been proud."

For just a second Diane Ledford's face came apart at the edges, and Amos saw the whole of it - the love that was in there, real, buried under something she had decided mattered more - and he thought, for that second, that she might set the dish towel down and come out onto the porch and ask him a hundred questions and mean every one.

Then Gerald said, "We'll sign it," and put his hand out for the pen, and the second closed over like water.

He signed it on the porch rail, standing up, without reading past the first line. He signed it the way you sign for a package. Diane signed under him because he handed it to her and she took it, and her signature was shakier than his, which was the only argument she made.

"That everything?" Gerald said, handing it back.

Amos looked at him a long moment. There were things he could have said. He had said versions of them before, on other porches, and they had never once landed anywhere, because a man who can do this cannot hear them, that is the whole mechanism of how he is able to do it.

"That's everything," Amos said. He folded the paper away into his shirt pocket, careful, the same pocket, over the same heart. "I'll see he's looked after. You've got my name if you ever want to know how he is."

"We know where he is," Gerald said, which was not the same thing, and shut the door.

Amos stood on the neat porch a moment in the thin fall sunlight. Then he went down the painted steps and got in his truck and sat there without starting it, and he was not a young man and he had done this a good many times and it did not get one inch easier, and he let himself feel it for exactly as long as it took to feel it, and then he started the truck and drove back to the boy, who was, whatever this piece of paper said or didn't, his now in every way that had ever actually counted.

 

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Back at the grounds, evening

 

Brad knew the second he saw Amos's face across the lot that it was done, and that they had signed, and that it had been easy.

He knew because Amos came straight to him, which Amos did when a thing was hard, and told him the truth in few words, which Amos also did.

"They signed it. Both of 'em. You're covered now - doctor, school, all of it. Nobody can question me looking after you." Amos put a hand on his shoulder, brief, warm, and Brad felt the weight of the thing Amos was not saying underneath the thing he was. "It's a good outcome, son. It's the one we wanted. I know it don't only feel good. Both those things get to be true."

"Was it - " Brad's voice came out steady, which cost him. "Did they ask anything. About me."

Amos did not lie to him. Brad would think about that for a long time too - that Amos could have made up a kindness right there and handed it to him and Brad would never have known, and Amos didn't.

"Your mama started to," Amos said. "Your daddy didn't."

"Okay," said Brad. "Thanks for going."

And he turned and walked into the barn like he had a reason to, steady as anything, all the way down the aisle past Biscuit and past Nell and Dusty, and around the back corner where the feed room was and nobody had a reason to be at this hour, and he put his back against the cool boards and slid down them the way he had slid down the trailer door that first night, and he pressed both hands over his mouth so it wouldn't carry, and he came apart.

It was not about Amos and it was not about the rodeo and it was not even, quite, about the paper. It was the one small stupid hope he had not known he was carrying until it was gone - that they would say no. That his father would read past the first line. That somewhere in the signing there would be a hitch, a hesitation, a hand that shook for the right reason, some sign that putting him out had cost them something, that he had been worth even the trouble of keeping. And there hadn't been. They had signed him over standing up, like a package, and gone back inside to their mowed yard, and the whole of him for fourteen years had come to a signature on a porch rail and a door shutting.

He didn't hear Deena come down the aisle. He heard her stop.

He got his hands down and scrubbed at his face fast and started to say he was fine, he was just - but Deena was already sitting down.

That was the thing he noticed even through it. She sat down. Right there in the dirt of the aisle with her back against the other wall, boots out in front of her, close enough to talk and far enough not to crowd, and she didn't reach for him and she didn't tell him it was all right and she didn't do the thing everybody had done so carefully all week, which was give him room.

"Everybody around here's real good at leaving a person be," Deena said, looking at her own boots. "Amos taught 'em. It's a kindness and it's the right first thing and I've watched it work on about a dozen of us." She picked a piece of straw off her jeans. "But somebody let me be about four days too long once, when I first come here, because they thought that's what I wanted. And it isn't always. Sometimes leaving a body be is just the easy version of helping." She finally looked over at him. "So I'm done leaving you be. You can tell me to go to hell, that's allowed, but I'm going to sit right here first and you can say the thing or not say it."

Brad looked at her.

And then, because she had sat down in the dirt, because she was seventeen and had the fastest hands in the arena and had chosen to spend them holding still, he said the thing. Not all of it. But some. His father's smooth face. The first line of the paper. The one small stupid hope. It came out crooked and half of it didn't make sense and Deena didn't try to fix any of it or tell him his folks were wrong, which he already knew and which wouldn't have helped. She just took it, the way Doc Hollis had told him to take the colt's weight - slow, cupped, without gripping.

When he wound down she was quiet a minute.

"You want to know what fixed it for me?" she said. "It wasn't a talk. Talks are all right, but they run out." She stood up and put a hand down to him, the way Amos had up on the hill, an offer with no pull in it. "It was going fast enough that there wasn't room in my head for anything else. Come on. Get up. You've been on this place a week and you haven't sat a horse yet and I've about had it about that."

"I don't know how," said Brad.

"I know you don't. That's the good part. You get to not-know a thing on purpose for once instead of because somebody wrecked it for you." She wiggled the offered hand. "Biscuit's the safest horse in Georgia and the roundpen's got a rail the whole way around and I will be standing in the middle of it the entire time holding a line. You are not going to fall and you are not going to look stupid, and if you do the only person here is me, and I've looked stupider. Up."

Brad took her hand.

 

---

 

She put him up on Biscuit in the last gray light with the barn lights coming on gold behind them, and she showed him where his hands went and where his heels went and told him to quit gripping with his knees, he wasn't going to fall off, the falling-off feeling was a lie his body told him and he could just decline it.

And then she clucked to the mare and walked her out to the end of the line, and Biscuit went around the rail at a slow flat-footed walk with the timid boy sitting careful and terrified and upright on her back, and somewhere on the second lap Brad felt the thing Deena had promised - not happiness, it wasn't that, it was too soon and too raw for that - but the specific mercy of a body doing something that took up all the room, so that for the length of a lap around a roundpen there was no porch, no first line, no shutting door. Just the swing of a good mare's walk and the cold air and the gold lights and Deena's voice saying there you go, there you go, feel that, that's all it is.

From the barn door, Dusty watched the whole thing from between his mother's legs with the frank astonishment of the very new.

And Brad, going around and around on a horse in the dark with his face still stiff from crying, found that he was, without any permission from the part of him that had decided it wasn't allowed, starting to feel just barely, just at the very edges, like a person who lived somewhere.