Terrified of Horses, She Trembled — Until a Cowboy Promised, “I’ll Teach You Gently”

…

She’d learned that Preston took his coffee black and his supper early and his sleep seriously and that he was not a man who talked for the sake of talking, which she’d initially found respectful and had come to find something close to lonesome.

She had not learned to go near the horses.

It was Hattie Drummond, the woman from the neighboring spread, who came twice a week to help with the washing, who finally said it plain.

She was a broad woman in her 50s with forearms like ham hocks and a directness that Sarah had come to appreciate even when it landed wrong.

“You know,” Hattie said, feeding a sheet through the ringer, “in 3 weeks, I ain’t seen you so much as walk past that corral without crossing to the far side of the yard.

” “I’ve been busy getting the house in order,” Sarah said.

“House is in order.

” Hattie looked at her sideways.

“Came in order 3 days after you arrived.

” Sarah kept her eyes on the washboard.

“I’m not much for animals.

” “You’re on a horse ranch, honey.

” “I’m aware.

” Hattie didn’t push it, but Sarah felt the words settle on her like wet wool, heavy and uncomfortable, and she was still feeling them that afternoon when she went out to fill the feed pail and the mare turned her head and Sarah went to pieces against the barn wall.

She was still there when Preston came around the corner.

He stopped.

He looked at her at the spilled grain, at her white knuckled hands braced against the planking, at the way she was breathing in short pulls like a woman who’d run a mile.

He didn’t say anything right away.

That was something she’d noticed about him.

He thought before he spoke, which had the effect of making every word he said feel considered, which sometimes felt like a gift and sometimes felt like a verdict.

“You all right?” he said.

“I’m fine.

” “You don’t look fine.

” “I dropped the pail.

” He looked at the pail.

He looked at Rosie, placid and indifferent on the other side of the fence.

He looked back at Sarah.

“She won’t hurt you,” he said.

“I know that.

” Sarah pushed off the wall and brushed her skirt with hands that were still not quite steady.

“I know she won’t hurt me.

” “But you’re afraid of her.

” She opened her mouth to deny it and then closed it again.

There was something in his voice, not pity, not mockery, just the flat acknowledgement of a thing that was true that made the denial feel small and pointless.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m afraid of her.

” Preston picked up the pail.

He crouched down, scooped the scattered grain back in with his bare hand, stood up, and held the pail out to her.

“How long?” he said.

“How long what?” “How long have you been afraid of horses?” Sarah looked at the pail.

She looked at Rosie.

She took the pail from his hand.

“17 years,” she said.

He didn’t react the way she expected.

He didn’t ask why or look at her with that particular brand of careful sympathy that made her want to put a wall up.

He just nodded slow the way he nodded when he was turning something over in his mind.

“All right,” he said.

“Come on then.

” “Come on where?” “Over to the fence.

” She looked at him.

“Preston.

” “Not inside the corral, just to the fence.

” He was already walking easy and unhurried as though the matter were already settled.

“Come on.

” She stood there for a moment, the pail heavy in her hand, and then she followed him because she didn’t know what else to do.

They stopped at the fence rail.

Rosie had gone back to pulling at the hay in the corner, her tail switching once, twice.

Up close, Sarah could see the individual hairs of her mane, the way her sides moved in and out with each breath, the massive fact of her 7 or 800 pounds of animal operating on its own logic, its own instincts indifferent to what any human being needed or feared.

“I can feel my heartbeat in my teeth,” Sarah said.

“I know,” Preston said.

“Keep standing there.

” “That’s the advice, keep standing here?” “For today, yes.

” She exhaled.

The cold air turned it to vapor.

Rosie lifted her head and looked at them with one dark liquid eye, then went back to the hay.

“Her name,” Sarah said, because talking was easier than silence when her chest was doing what her chest was doing, “is Rosie.

” “Named her after my mother,” Preston said.

She glanced at him.

“Your mother was called Rosie?” “Rose.

She’d have hated Rosie, but I liked the sound of it on the ranch.

” Something moved briefly in his face, not quite a smile, not quite grief.

“She died 6 years ago, fever.

” “I’m sorry.

” “She was a good woman, taught me horses before she taught me reading.

” He rested his forearms on the fence rail, relaxed as a man could be.

“Said there wasn’t a horse alive that was truly mean.

Said some were just hurt enough to act like it.

” Sarah absorbed that.

Rosie had turned toward them now, not approaching, just orienting.

Sarah’s hands tightened on the pail.

“Keep breathing,” Preston said quietly.

“She can smell fear, but she can also smell that you’re not running.

That matters to her.

” “I want to run,” Sarah said.

“I know.

” “But I’m not.

” “No,” he said.

“You’re not.

” They stood there for another 5 minutes.

Preston didn’t speak again and didn’t leave.

Sarah’s heartbeat came down degree by degree from the edge of panic to something that merely ached.

When she finally stepped back from the fence, her legs felt thin and unreliable.

“Same time tomorrow,” Preston said.

“You’re serious?” “Every day,” he said.

“Just the fence until the fence isn’t the hard part anymore.

” She looked at him.

This man she’d married out of letters and necessity and a Boston apartment that felt like it was shrinking around her each year she got older.

This man who said things like, “Your mother’s horse can smell that you’re not running,” as if it were the most natural comfort in the world.

“All right,” she said.

She went back to the house and sat down at the kitchen table and didn’t move for a long time.

That night at supper, venison stew, cornbread, the same coffee he always took.

“Black,” Preston said without looking up from his bowl.

“You want to tell me about the 17 years?” Sarah put her spoon down.

“No,” she said.

He nodded.

“All right.

” 3 minutes passed.

The fire popped.

Wind moved against the window glass.

Outside somewhere in the dark, one of the horses shifted in the barn and the sound of it carried clear and close in the cold night air.

“I was 15,” Sarah said.

Preston put his own spoon down.

“My brother was nine.

” “Thomas.

” She had not said his name aloud to another person in she could not remember how long.

It felt strange in her mouth like a word in a language she’d stopped speaking.

“We were in Boston, Newbury Street coming back from my aunt’s house.

There was a delivery wagon.

The horse was young, they said later, barely broken.

Something spooked it, a dog, I think.

Maybe just the noise.

She stopped.

She looked at her hands.

Thomas was standing between the wagon and the curb.

I was on the other side of him.

I grabbed for him.

I got his sleeve.

She stopped again.

I didn’t get enough.

The kitchen was very quiet.

“It wasn’t fast,” she said.

“People always say it was fast.

It wasn’t fast.

” Preston didn’t say he was sorry.

He didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then he said, “How old were you?” “15.

” “And you’ve been carrying that since?” “My mother never blamed me outright,” Sarah said.

“But I could see it in her face every time she looked at me after.

I was there.

I was older.

I should have” She stopped herself.

“I moved to my aunt’s at 17, worked at the dry goods store, answered your advertisement at 32.

” She picked up her spoon.

“There’s the 17 years.

” Sarah.

He said her name plainly with no extra weight on it, and that alone was somehow harder to bear than if he’d loaded it with feeling.

“You were 15 years old.

” “I know what I was.

” “Do you?” He wasn’t being unkind.

He was asking a real question.

“Because it sounds to me like you’ve been telling yourself for 17 years that you should have been something other than 15.

” She had no answer to that.

She ate the rest of her supper in silence, and so did he.

And when she cleared the table, he stood up to dry the dishes without being asked.

And she thought, not for the first time, that this man who said so little had a habit of saying the one true thing.

The next morning she was at the fence when he came out of the barn.

He looked at her.

She looked at Rosie.

“Well,” he said.

“Don’t make it into something,” she said.

He didn’t smile, but his voice came out warm.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.

” She stood at the fence for 20 minutes that day.

She stood for 25 the day after.

On the fourth day, Rosie walked over to investigate, slow and incurious, the way horses do.

And Sarah felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, and gripped the top fence rail so hard her knuckles went white.

But she did not move.

She stood there while Rosie lowered that great head over the rail and breathed horse breath, warm and grassy, against her forearm.

And Sarah stood there and let it happen.

“Good,” Preston said softly from somewhere beside her.

“That’s good?” “I might be sick,” Sarah said.

“You’re not going to be sick.

” “I think I might.

” “You’re still standing.

” She was.

She was still standing.

Rosie pulled back after a moment, apparently having satisfied whatever curiosity she’d had, and returned to the middle of the corral.

Sarah let out a breath that had apparently been waiting in her chest since Tuesday.

“I didn’t die,” she said.

“No.

” “That’s a low bar.

” “It’s where we start,” Preston said.

On the sixth day, Hattie came to do the washing and found Sarah at the fence alone.

No Preston in sight, talking to Rosie in a low, steady murmur, while Rosie stood on the other side of the rail with her eyes half closed.

Hattie set down her basket and watched for a long moment.

“Well, I’ll be,” she said.

“Don’t,” Sarah said, not turning around.

“I didn’t say a word.

” “You were about to say several.

” Hattie picked up her basket and went to the washhouse, and Sarah could hear her chuckling all the way across the yard.

That afternoon, the new horse arrived.

He came in on the back of a trader’s wagon, a bay stallion 2 years old and wild-eyed as a storm.

And the trader was a red-faced man named Gerber, who kept one boot on the wagon gate and one hand on a lead rope that the horse was making every effort to render irrelevant.

Preston stood in the yard with his arms crossed, watching his jaw set in a way Sarah had already come to read as concentrated concern.

“Said he was broke,” Preston said.

“He’s broke,” Gerber said.

“He’s just” The horse lunged and the rope burned through Gerber’s hands, and he swore loud enough to clear the yard.

“Spirited.

” “That ain’t spirit,” Preston said.

“That’s terror.

” Sarah watched from the porch.

The horse, someone had apparently named him Phoenix, which she would have thought ridiculous if she hadn’t been able to see the animal clearly enough to understand why was a beautiful, ruined thing.

Every line of him said, “Run.

” Said, “Danger.

” Said, “I do not trust a single thing in this yard, and I never will.

” His eyes showed white around the rims.

His whole body was vibrating.

“Preston,” she said.

“Go inside, Sarah.

” “I’m just saying” “I know what you’re saying.

Go inside.

” She went inside.

She stood at the kitchen window and watched Preston take the lead rope from Gerber with the same careful hands he used for everything on this ranch, deliberate, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world, and the horse was worth every minute of it.

He didn’t try to calm Phoenix down right away.

He just held the rope and let the horse rage against it and waited.

And waited.

And slowly, by inches, Phoenix’s spinning slowed.

His head dropped 6 inches.

Then another six.

Preston said something to him, Sarah couldn’t hear what, and Phoenix’s ears swiveled toward the sound.

Gerber said something to Preston.

Preston handed over some bills.

The wagon drove away.

It was just Preston and Phoenix in the yard now, and the afternoon light coming flat and gold across the frost on the ground.

And Sarah watching from behind the glass with her hand pressed flat against her own chest.

She was still watching when Phoenix caught her scent from the window, or heard something, or was startled by something she couldn’t see, and shied hard to the left.

Preston moved with him, quick and balanced, keeping the rope from going taut.

But the shift was enough.

The fence post at the corner of the yard caught him across the back of the shoulder, and he went down.

He went down hard.

Sarah was already running.

She burst through the back door and across the yard with no plan and no thought except that Preston was on the ground, and Phoenix was still moving, and the rope had gone loose.

She hit the gate latch, got it open, didn’t stop to think about whether this was the corral or the yard, or what a loose, terrified stallion would do to a woman who’d spent 17 years unable to approach a roan mare.

She crossed the yard and dropped to her knees beside her husband in the dirt.

“Preston.

” She got her hands on his face, turned it toward her.

His eyes were open.

“Preston, talk to me.

” “I’m” He drew a breath that caught somewhere in the middle of it.

“I’m all right.

” “You went down.

” “Shoulder,” he said.

“Hit the post.

I’m all right.

” He started to push himself up, and she pressed her hand against his chest and stopped him.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t move yet.

” “Tell me where it hurts.

” “Sarah.

” “Tell me.

” He looked at her for a moment with those dark eyes.

Then he said, “Shoulder.

” “Maybe cracked something.

” “I can’t tell yet.

” Phoenix had backed himself against the far fence and stood there trembling, wild-eyed, the loose rope dragging in the dirt.

Sarah looked at him.

She looked at Preston.

She looked at the road that led into Laramie, 4 hours away.

The only road with the late afternoon light already going amber, and the temperature already dropping.

“We need the doctor,” she said.

“I’ll ride in tomorrow.

” “You can’t ride with a cracked shoulder.

” “I’ve ridden with worse.

” “Preston.

” She said his name the way he’d said hers, plain and direct, with no extra weight and no argument in it.

Just truth.

“I need to go get the doctor.

” He went quiet.

He understood what she was saying.

“Duke is in the south pasture,” he said carefully.

“He’s the steadiest horse on this ranch, 16 years old.

He’ll do whatever you ask him.

” “I know,” she said.

“Sarah.

” “Tell me how to saddle him.

” He looked at her for a long time.

His shoulder was clearly causing him pain.

He wasn’t advertising the lines around his mouth gone deep and tight.

The cold was coming in fast off the mountains.

“I’ll talk you through it,” he said.

“Step by step.

” She stood up.

Her hands were shaking, but they’d been shaking since she hit the gate latch, and she’d gotten through the gate anyway.

“All right,” Sarah Calloway Hale said.

“Talk.

” Preston talked her through the saddle the way a man talks someone through something he knows will be harder than it sounds, steady, specific.

Leaving no room between the steps for fear to rush in and fill the gaps.

“South pasture gate is the one with the red latch,” he said.

“Duke’s the gray.

He’ll come to you.

He always comes.

” “What if he doesn’t?” “He will.

” “Hold your hand out flat and just stand there.

He’ll come.

” Sarah walked to the south pasture with the bridle over her arm and the saddle blanket draped across both shoulders, and the late afternoon light making long shadows out of everything.

She could hear Preston behind her moving slow toward the barn, refusing to stay down the way she’d told him to.

She didn’t turn around.

If she turned around, she would go back to argue with him, and she couldn’t afford to lose the time or the nerve.

The grey horse was at the far end of the pasture.

She climbed through the rails, not the gate.

She couldn’t get the latch.

Her hands weren’t reliable enough for latches right now, and she stood in the frost stiffened grass and held her hand out flat the way Preston had said.

Duke lifted his head.

“Come on.

” she said.

Her voice came out smaller than she’d intended.

She cleared her throat.

“Come on, then.

I know you don’t know me.

I barely know me right now, but I need you to come here.

” The horse looked at her with the profound assessing calm of an animal that has seen considerable human foolishness and has developed patience around it.

Then he walked toward her slow and even his breath coming out in grey puffs in the cold air, and he put his nose against her outstretched palm, and she felt the warmth of it and something in her chest cracked open like ice in March.

“All right.

” she whispered.

“All right.

Good.

” “That’s that’s good.

” She got the bridle on.

It took three tries and one moment where she had to press her forehead against Duke’s neck and breathe deliberately until the shaking in her hands was manageable, but she got it on.

She got the blanket across his back.

She went back for the saddle, which was hanging on the fence where Preston had dragged it before she could stop him.

His face gone grey with the effort and the pain, and she lugged it to Duke, and she got it up on his back on the second try.

She could not get the cinch tight enough.

She tried twice.

The buckle kept slipping.

Her fingers were cold and clumsy, and she was working on a horse.

A living horse that she had to climb up onto and ask to carry her 4 hours into Laramie and 4 hours back, and the buckle kept slipping.

“Tuck your elbow.

” Preston said.

She spun around.

He was leaning against the fence rail, his left arm held against his chest in a way that told her everything about where the pain was and how bad it had gotten in the last 10 minutes.

He was pale under the tan.

His jaw was doing that thing again.

“Tuck your elbow into the strap and use your body weight.

” he said.

“Not just your hands.

You’re supposed to be inside.

And you’re supposed to be afraid of horses.

” He said it without any particular emphasis.

“Tuck your elbow.

” She turned back to Duke and tucked her elbow and used her weight, and the cinch tightened the way it was supposed to.

The buckle seating itself cleanly, and she stood there for a moment with both hands braced against the saddle and her eyes closed.

“Sarah.

” Preston’s voice had changed, gone quieter.

“You don’t have to do this.

We’ve been through this.

I can make it to the Drummonds on foot.

It’s only 2 miles.

” “With a cracked shoulder and dropping temperatures.

” She turned around and looked at him.

“No.

” “Then we wait until morning.

And if it’s not cracked, if something’s broken clean through and you sleep wrong and it shifts.

” She had worked in a dry goods store in Boston for 15 years, and in that time she had seen two men come in broken from riding accidents, had heard the conversations that happened after, had watched one of them go back to work, and watched the other one not go anywhere anymore at all.

“No.

” she said again.

“Tell me how to mount.

” He looked at her for a long moment.

His eyes moved over her face the way they sometimes did, reading something she didn’t know she was writing.

“Left foot in the stirrup.

” he said.

“Push up and swing your right leg over.

Don’t think about it.

Just do it in one movement.

” “Don’t think about it.

” she repeated.

“That’s the one.

” She put her left foot in the stirrup.

Duke stood perfectly still.

She gripped the saddle horn with both hands, which Preston had told her not to do, and pushed up, and her right leg swung over, and then she was up.

She was in the saddle.

Duke shifted his weight slightly, adjusting to her, and she made a sound that was not a word, and gripped the reins and the saddle horn both.

“You’re up.

” Preston said.

“I know I’m up.

” “You’re doing fine.

” “I am not doing fine.

” she said quite distinctly.

“I am doing it anyway, which is a different thing.

” Something moved in his face that she thought later might have been the beginning of something larger.

But right then he just nodded and gave her the directions to the doctor’s house in Laramie Drive.

August Farley on the corner of Second and Main, grey house with a blue door, and told her to keep Duke at an easy lope and not to push him faster than that because the footing got uncertain past the first creek crossing, and Duke was 16 and didn’t need the strain.

“And if it gets dark before you get there.

” she said.

“Duke knows the road.

Let him find it.

” “And if he Sarah.

” He put one hand on her boot briefly, just the weight of it on the toe of her shoe.

“You can do this.

” She looked down at him from the height of the saddle.

This man who’d met her off a stage 3 weeks ago and shaken her hand and driven her 4 hours in silence, this man who’d picked up a spilled pail and handed it back and stood beside her at a fence rail until her heartbeat came down.

She thought of what Hattie had said.

“You’re on a horse ranch, honey.

” She thought of Thomas’s sleeve in her hand on Newbury Street and the one terrible moment when she’d understood it wasn’t going to be enough.

She thought about what Preston had said at supper.

“You’ve been telling yourself you should have been something other than 15.

” She picked up the reins the way he’d shown her.

“Behave yourself while I’m gone.

” she said, and she rode out of the south pasture gate and onto the Laramie Road as the sun touched the top of the mountains and the temperature dropped another 5 degrees, and Duke’s hooves found their rhythm on the cold hard ground.

The first mile was the worst.

Every movement Duke made translated directly into Sarah’s body as pure animal panic, the shift of his weight through a turn, the small stumble over a rock and recovery that took less than a second, the way his ears moved forward and back, tracking sounds she couldn’t hear.

Her hands were too tight on the reins.

She knew they were too tight.

Preston had told her about tight hands, told her it communicated fear down through the leather to the bit to the horse’s mouth, and she could feel Duke responding to it, his stride shortening slightly, his own attention sharpening in a way that wasn’t quite alarm, but wasn’t quite comfortable either.

She made herself loosen her grip.

It was one of the hardest physical things she’d ever done, opening her fingers when everything in her was demanding she hold on tighter, and she did it degree by degree, finger by finger, until the reins rested in her palms instead of being strangled by them.

Duke’s stride evened out.

His ears relaxed.

He blew out a long breath through his nose and settled into a road lope that was smooth enough that Sarah’s own breathing began after another quarter mile to follow it.

In and out.

In and out.

Duke’s rhythm.

The cold air moving against her face.

The mountains going purple in the last of the light.

She thought about Preston getting himself to the barn because she knew that’s where he’d go, not inside like she’d told him not to sit down and rest his shoulder, but to the barn to check on Phoenix because that was the kind of man he was.

She thought about Phoenix in the barn trembling against the wall as wild-eyed and undone as Sarah herself had been that morning at the corral gate.

Something his mother had said, relayed through Preston, there wasn’t a horse alive that was truly mean.

Some were just hurt enough to act like it.

She wondered what had happened to Phoenix before the trader’s wagon.

She wondered, and then she stopped wondering because wondering led to imagining, and imagining led places she couldn’t afford to go on the back of a horse at dusk in Wyoming with 4 hours between her and help.

She rode.

She crossed the first creek.

Duke took it without hesitating, dropping down the bank and up the other side in four smooth strides, and she let out a sound she would not have described as a laugh, but that had something laughing in it somewhere.

She rode through the section of road that ran between two bluffs where the wind came down off the rock faces and hit her sideways, and she leaned into it and stayed in the saddle.

She rode through the dark that came on fully an hour out of the ranch, and she watched Duke’s ears and let him navigate the footing the way Preston had told her to, and she held the reins in her loosened hands and breathed.

She thought about Thomas.

She hadn’t let herself think about Thomas on horseback before because she’d never been on a horse before, not since not since Newbury Street, not since the delivery wagon and the dog and the sound that the street had made afterward, a sound she’d spent 17 years keeping at the edge of her hearing, never quite letting it come all the way in.

She let it come in now.

She didn’t know why.

Maybe it was the dark or the cold or the fact that her body had been through so much in the last 2 hours that it had run out of energy to keep certain doors locked.

Maybe it was Duke’s steadiness under her, the simple animal fact of a creature she’d been terrified of carrying her through the dark without asking anything from her but a light hand and a little patience.

But she thought about Thomas, not just the moment on Newbury Street, not just the worst part, but Thomas himself.

Thomas at 9 years old, who had been afraid of lightning until he wasn’t, who had talked Sarah out of throwing away a baby bird she’d found hurt in the yard and had nursed it back to health in a box beside his bed.

Thomas, who had been nine and fearless in the way of children who haven’t yet learned what fear costs.

She hadn’t let herself miss him in a long time.

Missing him had always come attached to the guilt, the two of them tangled together so completely she hadn’t been able to find one without the other.

But riding through the Wyoming dark with her hands loose on the reins, she found a pocket of something that was just grief, just loss, clean and undefended.

She let herself cry for about a mile.

Then she wiped her face on her sleeve and rode on.

Laramie appeared as a smear of lamplight on the horizon and then resolved itself by degrees into buildings and streets and the noise of a town that was still working at 9:00 at night.

Duke slowed to a walk without being asked when they hit the first street, his hooves loud on the frozen mud, and Sarah found Second and Main and the gray house with the blue door and pulled up outside it and sat there for a moment in the saddle.

She had ridden to Laramie.

She was sitting on a horse in Laramie, Wyoming at 9:00 at night having left the ranch alone at dusk and she had not fallen and she had not turned back.

And she had not quite come apart.

She got down off the horse the way Preston had described getting up in reverse.

Left foot out of the stirrup, right leg swinging back, drop and land.

She landed harder than she meant to and her knees buckled and she caught herself on the stirrup leather and stood there breathing against Duke’s side.

“Good boy,” she said into his neck.

Her voice had gone thick.

“Good, good boy.

” She tied him to the post and knocked on the blue door.

Dr.

August Farley was a short, precise man in his late 50s who had clearly been asleep but who handled being woken with the practiced equanimity of a man who had been woken at 9:00 at night many times before.

He took one look at Sarah Winburn’s red-eyed dirt on her skirt from the corral hands still slightly unsteady and said, “How far?” “4 hours,” she said.

“My husband, shoulder.

” “He hit a fence post hard and went down.

Possible fracture.

” “I think so.

He said maybe cracked.

He” She stopped.

“He downplayed it.

He does that.

” Farley was already getting his coat.

“They all do,” he said.

“Give me 2 minutes.

” He came back in 90 seconds with his bag and his horse saddled, which meant he had a boy in the back who handled the horse, which meant Sarah had 2 minutes standing in the cold outside a stranger’s door in Laramie with nothing to do but feel everything she’d been holding off for the last 4 hours come rolling through her at once.

She stood straight.

She breathed.

She felt it come through and she let it and she was still standing when Farley came back out.

“You rode in alone,” he said looking at Duke.

“Yes.

” He looked at her a moment with the appraising eye of a man who has been a doctor on the frontier long enough to know what it costs some people to do ordinary things.

“Good,” he said.

“Lead on.

” She got back on Duke.

It was easier the second time.

Not easy, nothing about being on a horse was easy for Sarah Calloway Hale and she doubted it would be easy for a good while yet, but easier.

Her hands found the right pressure faster.

Her body moved with Duke’s more naturally like a conversation she was just beginning to learn the grammar of.

Dr.

Farley rode beside her and talked about nothing in particular.

The weather, the state of the Laramie road, a bull elk he’d seen near the creek crossing 2 weeks back, and Sarah answered in short sentences and was grateful for it because the talking kept her from retreating too far inside herself.

They were 3 miles from the ranch when Farley said without particular preamble, “First time on a horse in a while?” Sarah glanced at him.

“Yes,” she said.

“Thought so.

” He wasn’t unkind about it.

“You’ve got good instincts.

A lot of people tighten up when they’re frightened and fight the horse the whole way.

You were working with him.

” “Eventually,” she said.

“Eventually counts,” he said.

She thought about that for the rest of the ride in.

When they came up the road to the ranch, there was a lantern burning in the barn window.

Of course there was.

Sarah handed Duke’s reins to Farley and pushed the barn door open and there was Preston sitting against the wall of the nearest stall with Phoenix’s lead rope loose in his good hand talking to the horse in that low steady murmur she’d watched through the kitchen window.

Phoenix was still against the opposite wall, still trembling, but his ears were tilted toward the sound of Preston’s voice like they were the most important thing in the barn.

Preston looked up when she came in.

His face did something complicated and brief and then it went back to the steady expression she’d come to read as his version of relief.

“You made it,” he said.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?” “No,” he said.

“I didn’t think that.

” “Doctor.

” Farley came in behind her and crouched down beside Preston and started his examination and Sarah stood in the barn doorway with the cold at her back and the lantern light in front of her and Phoenix’s eye found her across the stall, white-rimmed and wary, and she held his gaze and did not look away.

Dr.

Farley called it a fracture.

“Not clean through,” he said, “but enough of a crack in the clavicle that would need 6 weeks of careful handling and a sling that Preston accepted with the expression of a man being handed something he found deeply personally offensive.

“6 weeks,” Preston said.

“Minimum,” Farley said.

“I’ve got a ranch to run.

” “You’ve got a ranch to not run for 6 weeks.

” Farley wrapped the bandaging with the efficiency of a man who had delivered identical news to identical men many times before and had long since stopped expecting gratitude for it.

“You can supervise.

You can give directions.

You can sit on a fence rail and tell other people what needs doing.

What you cannot do is use that arm.

“I can use my right arm.

” “Your right arm isn’t the problem.

Your right arm’s welcome to work itself half to death like it always has.

” Farley tied off the bandage and stood up and looked at Preston with the flat professional patience of his trade.

“The left arm rests.

6 weeks.

You want to argue with me, argue with your bones.

” Preston said nothing, which was his version of accepting a thing he didn’t like.

Sarah walked Farley out to his horse and paid him from the household money she’d been managing since her second week on the ranch, the ledger book Preston had handed her without fanfare or explanation, simply setting it on the kitchen table one morning with the words, “You’ll make more sense of this than I do.

” She hadn’t known what to make of that then.

She thought she understood it a little better now.

“He’ll mend,” Farley said settling into the saddle.

“They always do, the ones who go down hard and get back up before you can tell them to stay down.

” He looked at her with that same appraising steadiness he’d turned on her in Laramie.

“You did a good thing tonight, Mr.s.

Hale, a hard thing.

Same difference sometimes.

” She watched him ride out and stood in the yard until the sound of his horse faded and then she went back to the barn.

Preston had not gone to the house.

She hadn’t expected him to.

He was exactly where she’d left him, against the stall wall, the sling already irritating him by the set of his jaw, watching Phoenix across the barn with the patient attention of a man in no particular hurry.

Phoenix had not moved far, but his ears were different, tilted forward now instead of pinned flat, his breathing slower, his feet still but not braced.

Sarah sat down on the other side of the barn door, close enough to talk and far enough to give the horse no reason to recalculate.

“You should sleep,” she said.

“So should you.

I’m not the one with a fractured clavicle.

” “No,” Preston said.

“You’re the one who rode 4 hours alone in the dark on a horse you’ve been afraid of since you were 15.

” He glanced at her sideways.

“I think you’re allowed to be tired.

” She was tired.

She was tired in a way that went past the muscles and down into something deeper, the particular exhaustion of a person who has held a great deal of tension for a long time and released it all at once.

She leaned her head back against the barn wall and looked at the lantern light moving on the ceiling.

“What happened to him?” she said.

“Before the trader.

” Preston was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know the full of it.

Gerber wasn’t offering details and I wasn’t paying for a story.

I was paying for a horse.

” He shifted his position carefully accommodating the sling.

“But he’s got old scarring on his left flank, behind the shoulder.

Something put it there.

” “Rope,” she said.

“Wrong shape for rope.

” He said it simply, not dramatically, just one more piece of the observable world.

“Wrong shape for most things I’d want to put a name to.

” Sarah looked at Phoenix.

Phoenix looked back at her, that one white-rimmed eye finding her across the distance between them.

She thought about what it was to be an animal with no language for what had happened to you.

Nothing to do with the fear except carry it in your body and act from it and be called difficult.

Be called spirited.

Be called a problem horse when what you were was a creature with a very good memory and excellent reasons for every response you had.

She understood that better than she wanted to.

“Go to the house, Preston.

” She said.

“I’ll sit with him a while.

” He looked at her.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid.

” She said.

“I’m just going to sit here like you were doing.

” “He’s unpredictable.

” Preston said carefully.

“He doesn’t know you yet.

” “I know.

” She met his eyes.

“I know he doesn’t.

” “I’m just going to sit here.

” Preston studied her for another moment.

And then slowly he got himself up off the floor.

A process that cost him something he didn’t advertise.

And he handed her the loose end of the lead rope that was clipped to Phoenix’s halter running through the slats of the stall.

“If he goes sideways.

” Preston said.

“Drop the rope.

” “Don’t hold it.

” “Just drop it and get to the door.

” “All right.

” “Sarah.

” “I heard you.

” “Drop the rope.

” “Get to the door.

” He held her gaze for one more second.

And then he left his footsteps crossing the yard.

And then the porch and the house door opening and closing.

And the night going quiet again.

Except for the horses breathing.

And the wind at the barn eaves.

And the small sounds of the lantern.

Phoenix watched the door where Preston had been.

“He’ll be back in the morning.

” Sarah said.

“He’s not going far.

” Phoenix’s ear moved toward her voice.

Not toward her.

Toward the sound of her.

That was enough.

She sat with him for an hour.

She did not approach him.

She did not try to calm him with anything except her voice which she used the way Preston used his low steady not asking for anything just present.

She talked about Boston which she’d never intended to do.

She talked about the dry goods store.

And the smell of the bolts of fabric.

And the way the winter light came through the front window in January flat and thin and blue.

She talked about the apartment she’d shared with her aunt on Beacon Street.

The radiator that clanged.

And the neighbor’s cat that sat on the landing.

She talked about Thomas briefly his name.

What he’d looked like the baby bird in the box beside his bed.

And her voice only caught once.

And she steadied it and kept going.

Phoenix moved 6 in closer to her side of the barn.

By the time she finally got up.

6 in.

She would take it.

The weeks that followed were the strangest of Sarah’s life.

And Sarah had had some strange weeks.

Preston ran the ranch from the kitchen table.

And the fence rails.

And on his worst days from a chair.

He had Hattie drag out to the yard.

So he could see what was happening.

Without actually being foolish enough.

To walk out there and do it himself.

He gave directions to the two ranch hands Clem who was 22.

And eager in the way of young men who haven’t yet been thoroughly disappointed by the world.

And an older man.

Everyone called simply Wick.

Who communicated primarily through the angle of his hat brim.

And he managed the accounts that Sarah brought to him in the evenings.

And they went through together her reading numbers aloud.

And him making decisions.

And her writing them down.

“You’re faster at the additions than I am.

” He said one evening watching her work.

“I’ve been doing figures since I was 12.

” She said.

“My aunt kept the household accounts.

” “And she taught me because she said a woman who can’t read a ledger is a woman who can be robbed.

” “Smart woman.

” “Very.

” Sarah made a notation in the margin.

“She also said a woman who moves to Wyoming on the strength of six letters and a photograph deserves whatever she gets.

” Preston was quiet for a moment.

“And what does she think you got?” Sarah looked up from the ledger.

Preston was watching her with the direct unhurried attention she’d gotten used to.

Without realizing she was getting used to it.

“She hasn’t asked yet.

” Sarah said.

“She’s waiting for me to write first.

” She looked back down at the numbers.

“I haven’t written yet.

” She went to Phoenix every day.

She didn’t push it.

She sat on the same side of the barn on the same upturned bucket.

And she talked.

Or she didn’t talk.

And she let him figure out the distance between them on his own schedule.

On the fourth day.

He came close enough that she could see the texture of his coat in the lantern light.

On the sixth day.

He put his nose toward her hand.

The same thing Rosie had done over the fence rail.

What felt like a different lifetime ago.

And she held her hand out flat.

And let him sniff at it and did not move.

“There you are.

” She said quietly.

“There you are.

” On the ninth day.

She touched him.

Just her palm flat against his nose for about 4 seconds before he pulled back.

She did not make anything of it.

Did not go looking for Preston to report.

It did not treat it as a milestone to be celebrated.

Because she understood instinctively.

That making a great deal of Phoenix’s progress would somehow diminish it.

The way explaining a joke in too much detail kills the thing that made it live.

She told Hattie though.

She told Hattie one morning over the washing quietly as though she were reporting something minor.

Hattie stopped the ringer.

“You touched Phoenix.

” She said.

“Briefly.

” “Sarah Hale.

” Hattie looked at her with an expression that had several things in it at once.

“Three weeks ago.

” “You were turning white at the sight of Rosie through a fence.

” “I know.

” “That horse put your husband on the ground.

” “I know that too.

” Hattie shook her head.

And went back to the ringer.

But Sarah could hear something in the older woman’s she was not unaffected by it.

Clem who had been watching all of this from a respectful distance because Clem was 22.

And perceptive enough to know when adults were managing things that weren’t his business.

Came to Sarah one afternoon in the barn.

With his hat in his hands.

Said.

“Begging your pardon Mr.s.

Hale.

” “But Wick and me was wondering if maybe you’d want to start learning the feeding routine proper.

” “Since Mr. Hale’s in the sling and all.

” Sarah looked at him.

He was a young man with an honest face and the permanently sunburned neck of someone who worked outdoors.

And he was offering her something with that question.

Not a task.

But a place.

“Show me.

” She said.

Clem showed her.

Wick showed her in his way.

Which involved doing something in front of her once.

And then tilting his hat a certain direction when she did it right.

Which she came to understand was high praise.

She learned to measure the grain.

And to check the water troughs for ice in the mornings.

And to read the small signals.

That each horse gave about its mood.

And its needs.

She was not good at it.

Not yet.

But she got better each day.

Which was what mattered.

Preston watched her from the fence when he could.

And said nothing.

Which was his version of everything.

It was on a Wednesday the third week of his recovery.

That the incident with Phoenix happened.

Sarah had gone out to the barn in the early morning before Clem and Wick arrived.

Because she’d gotten into the habit of giving Phoenix the first quiet hour of the day before the yard got busy.

She had the grain bucket.

She knew his feeding routine.

Now knew the way he held himself when he was calm.

Versus when something in the air or the light had set him off.

He was set off that morning.

She could see it from the barn door.

The tight circle he was making in the stall.

His tail switching his ears back in a way that was different.

From his usual guarded alertness.

She should have gone to get Clem.

She knew that.

She had been told more than once by more than one person.

That a horse in that kind of state.

Was not a horse for a woman 10 weeks into her relationship with horses to handle alone.

She stood in the barn doorway and watched him and thought about what she knew.

She knew he had scarring on his left flank.

She knew that the mornings were harder for him than the evenings.

That something about the quality of early light in Wyoming.

Triggered something in him.

That later in the day.

Settled down.

She knew that her voice steadied him more reliably.

Than anything except Preston’s voice.

Because she had sat with him enough mornings.

To have built incrementally.

Something that was not yet trust.

But was pointing in that direction.

She went in.

She didn’t go into the stall.

She stood outside it.

And set the grain bucket down.

And started talking the same low steady murmur.

She’d been building for 3 weeks.

And Phoenix made two more tight circles.

And then pulled up short.

And looked at her.

“I know.

” She said.

“I know.

” “Whatever’s got you.

I know it feels like it isn’t going to stop.

” She kept her voice even.

Not soothing.

Not placating.

Just present.

Just there.

The way she’d learned presence was different from placation.

“But it’s just the morning.

” “The morning’s always the worst part.

” “And then it gets easier.

” Phoenix stopped circling.

“It gets easier.

” She said again.

“I’m not telling you it stops.

” “I’m telling you it gets easier.

” He stood with his sides heaving.

His breathing ragged.

His eye on her.

And then by inches.

By degrees.

The way a thing under pressure releases.

When the right place is found.

He came down.

His head dropped.

His tail stopped switching.

He let out a long breath that shook through his whole body.

Sarah reached through the stall slats and picked up the grain bucket and set it inside.

He ate.

She was still standing there, hands slightly unsteady, when Preston’s voice came from behind her.

“How long was he like that?” She turned.

He was in the barn doorway in the gray morning light, the sling making him look lopsided in a way that she’d stopped noticing weeks ago, except in moments like this, when she saw him from a new angle.

“Maybe 10 minutes before I came in,” she said.

“Less than five after.

” He looked at Phoenix eating quietly now, and then he looked at her.

“You should have gotten Clem,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“But you didn’t.

” “No.

” He looked at her for a long time.

Not the way he’d looked at her when she’d arrived off the stage in Laramie, assessing and cautious.

Something else.

Something she didn’t have a word for yet, but felt along her sternum like the first warmth after a long cold.

“Rosie did that in her first year,” he said.

“The morning spinning.

I used to sit outside her stall for an hour before I’d go in.

” He crossed the barn and stood beside Sarah at the stall rail, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him in the cold morning air.

“Took three months before she stopped.

” “Did you ever figure out what caused it?” “No.

Some things you just learn to be present for.

” He was looking at Phoenix.

“Some things you don’t get to understand.

You just get to show up.

” Sarah looked at the side of his face, the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth, the way he was watching his horse with something that was closer to what she now recognized as love than anything she’d seen him show toward most things he owned.

“Preston,” she said.

He turned his head.

“I’m going to write to my aunt,” she said.

“This week.

I’m going to write and tell her what I got.

” Something shifted in his expression, slow and careful, like an animal moving toward something it doesn’t quite trust yet, but is willing to approach.

“What are you going to tell her?” he said.

Sarah looked back at Phoenix standing quiet in his stall, his sides moving in and out in the slow rhythm of a creature that has, for this moment, found something close to peace.

“The truth,” she said.

“I’m going to tell her the truth.

” She wrote the letter that Thursday evening at the kitchen table, while Preston sat across from her going through the month’s accounts with his good hand and a stub of pencil.

The fire was doing what it did in November, running too hot, then not hot enough, requiring adjustment every 20 minutes, and the wind was up outside working at the windows with the persistence of something that had all night and knew it.

Her aunt’s name was Clara.

Clara Whitmore, née Calloway.

61 years old.

A woman who had raised two daughters alone after her husband died of a bad winter in 1869, and had not once in Sarah’s memory described this as difficult.

She simply described it as what had happened, and then described what she’d done about it, and those were the only two categories Clara Whitmore recognized: what happened and what you did about it.

Sarah wrote, “Dear Aunt Clara, I am writing to tell you what I got.

” She stopped.

Looked at that sentence for a moment.

Continue reading….
Next »