“Kaylee, read me the plate again,” I said, with the phone against my ear and Wade staring at me across the tack room. She read it. Kentucky, six letters and numbers, and a decal on the rear window that said Bluegrass Stables. “Bless you,” I said. I hung up and looked at Wade, who was still holding the yellow folder. “Wade Tucker, you have sold my husband horse to a stranger, and I mean to have her back by suppertime.” He laughed. “Willa Dean, you cannot tell a Kentucky trailer to turn around. It is over.” I said that was what Clint always said before he won.
I did not go to the sheriff first. I went to the telephone book in the kitchen, because Clint had kept it in the drawer by the stove for forty years, and I found the number for Bluegrass Stables in Paris, Kentucky. A man named Mr. Hargrove answered in a drawl as thick as molasses. I told him who I was. I told him I held the registration papers on the gray mare he had just paid four hundred thousand dollars to my son in law for, and that the papers were in my name, and that he had been sold a stolen horse. There was a long silence. “Mrs. Farris,” he said, “I believe I need to speak to my lawyer.”
His lawyer called me back in twenty minutes. By then Kaylee and her grandfather had come to my farm in a rattling Dodge, because the girl would not leave me alone and I was glad. By six o clock the Kentucky trailer had been stopped by the Tennessee Highway Patrol in Pulaski, a half hour north of the state line, with the mare standing calm in her stall and a puzzled driver shaking his head. The trooper called to say he had a gray Walker with a heart shaped mark on her neck, and a driver with a bill of sale signed Wade Tucker. “Mrs. Farris,” he said, “do you want her back?”
A mare disappeared into a white trailer, a sixteen year old girl memorized a license plate, and an old widow went to bring her horse home.
I drove up with Kaylee in the Dodge, sitting in the middle of the bench seat with my pocketbook in my lap. When we pulled up beside the trailer in the gravel lot of a Shell station, Dixie put her head out of the window and whinnied. It was the oldest, plainest, happiest sound I have ever heard. She was shaking. Her coat was damp. I put my hand on her neck, on the heart shaped mark, and she leaned into me the way she once leaned into Clint, and I stood there in the lights of that gas station, an eighty one year old woman holding a horse, and I did not care who saw me.
Hargrove arrived in person at nine o clock in a black truck, an enormous man with a silver belt buckle, hat in hand. He apologized three times. He said he had been misled by the papers, and that he had paid the money in good faith, and that he would see to it that the court returned it. He asked if he might look at the mare one more time. I let him. He walked around her slowly, ran his hand down her legs, lifted her upper lip. “Mrs. Farris,” he said. “She is the finest Gold Dust daughter I have ever seen. I would give anything for a foal.” I told him she was twenty two years old, and he nodded and put his hat back on.
Back at the farm, I found the rest of Clint papers in the folder Wade had dropped on the floor of the tack room. At the bottom was a sheet of yellow lined paper in Clint careful pencil. “Willa Dean, if somebody wants to breed Dixie, or sell her, or do anything but let her stand at the gate, tell them no. She is not a bloodline. She is my friend. If the farm ever needs money, sell the trailer, sell the saddles, sell my boots. Do not sell Dixie. She will wait for me every night at six, and I will be there one day, I promise, in my old blue truck.” I read it in the lamplight, and I cried so hard I had to sit on the tack room floor.
Clint had passed in the barn on a Tuesday morning in March, with the curry comb in his hand and Dixie nuzzling his shoulder. The vet said his heart simply stopped. Sitting on the tack room floor with his penciled note on my knee, I heard the mare outside in the paddock, calling in the dusk. I got up on my old legs and went out and stood with her until the stars came, and she did not leave my side.
Wade was charged with fraud and forgery, and with filing a false lien. Rhonda moved back to the farm with a suitcase and a face so white I thought she might break. She did not defend him. She sat on my porch the first night with a cup of tea in both hands and said, “Mama, I should have seen it.” I told her love makes a person blind in a very particular way, and that I knew, because I had been married to Clint, who was sometimes a stubborn fool. She laughed through her tears. We watched the fireflies for a long time.
I could not turn Dixie into a breeding mare. But I could do something Clint would have understood. That spring I signed over ten of my sixty acres to a nonprofit, the Clint Farris Memorial Horse Rescue, and Kaylee, who is sixteen, became its youngest board member. The first week we took in four old walking horses from the Shelbyville sale barn, scrawny and nervous, with numbers glued to their hips. Kaylee scraped the numbers off with a putty knife, one at a time, gently, and she named each of them after a champion. Dixie supervised from the fence.
Every evening at six, Dixie still stands at the gate. She cocks her ears at the sound of an engine on the road. Some nights it is the feed man, and some nights it is Kaylee on her bike, and some nights it is only the wind. But the other night a blue pickup came up my lane, an old one, rattling and rust colored, with a girl at the wheel. It was Kaylee grandfather Dodge, painted over, and it was only a coincidence. Even so, I watched Dixie lift her head and whicker, long and soft, and I stood on the porch with my hand on the rail and let myself believe.