The fire investigator who called at dawn was a woman named Kowalski from the Sheridan County Sheriff, and she spoke with the careful kindness of someone delivering a hard thing. She said that a brand inspector in Nebraska had sent up a routine report the evening before, and that the report had landed on her desk with a note in red. “Mrs. Kuhlman,” she said, “the barn fire of 2006 was never solved. May I drive down to see you and the horse?” I said she could come at noon. I put the phone down and looked at the saddle of Arnie on the rack in the barn.
She came in a gray truck with a young deputy, and we stood in the yard of the nursing home, and Duke put his nose into her palm as if he had known her all his life. She asked me whether Arnie had ever talked about the horse. I said only that he had bought him at a sale in Torrington and that he had loved him better than most people. Then I remembered the gloves. For eighteen years they had been stuffed under the horn of the saddle, stiff as boards, and I had never once taken them out. I went to the barn and did it then.
Inside the left glove, folded very small, was a sheet of ruled paper in the square handwriting of my husband. I read it standing in the straw. In June of 2006, driving home late from a cattle sale, Arnie had seen a red glow on the sky near the Wyoming line. He had pulled off the road and run toward it. The barn was already roaring. A boy named Tomas Ibarra was hanging half out of the loft window, coughing, and Arnie had climbed a ladder in the dark and pulled him down. Then he had heard a horse screaming, and he had opened the stall, and Duke had run out of the fire with his tail smoking.
Some men do a brave thing in the dark and then spend the rest of their lives too humble to mention it, and a good horse keeps their secret for them.
The boy had told him the rest on the grass, wrapped in the coat of Arnie. Hollister had hired him that spring, and on that very night he had told the boy to sleep in the loft, and had locked the lower door from outside. The boy had heard the match. He was twenty years old and afraid of the police, and Hollister had told him that nobody would believe him. Arnie put the boy in his own truck and drove him to a friend in Torrington, and then he went back and caught the horse at dawn. In two days Hollister had filed for the insurance on a horse that was dead.
Why had he said nothing? The letter explained, in six honest lines. He had gone to the sheriff in Sheridan the following week, and a deputy who was a cousin of Hollister had told him the fire was an accident, and the boy had gone missing, which looked bad. Arnie was a sugar beet farmer with a farm to run, and a wife, and a mortgage. He bought the horse at the sale in Torrington, from a trader who had picked him up wandering, because he wanted the evidence to be alive. He thought some day somebody would ask. Nobody ever did.
The investigator took the letter with her bare hand, and read it, and then she took off her hat. She asked if she could keep it and promised to return it. She found Tomas Ibarra in four days, a grown man of forty living in Casper with a wife and two girls, who wept on the telephone when she said his name. He had spent eighteen years believing that the man who saved him had died without ever knowing how thankful he was. He drove down on a Saturday in November. He stood in front of Duke for a long moment, and then he laid his forehead against the neck of the horse and stayed there.
Hollister was arrested at his ranch outside Sheridan in December, an old man of eighty one in a canvas coat, and he did not put up any fight. The state charged him with arson, with fraud, and with attempted murder, and he pleaded guilty in the spring rather than let a jury look at the boy. The judge gave him fifteen years. Travis sat through the hearing in the back row with his hat in his lap, gray in the face. He had not known any of it. His own father had burned a barn with a boy inside, and he had been working at a feed store two hundred miles away that night, twenty seven years old.
He came to my porch the day after the sentencing and did not seem able to sit. He said he was sorry for his words about the horse. He said he was sorry for his father, and that he would pay Tomas anything the court allowed, and more. I told him to sit down and eat some pie. After a while he did, and he ate the whole piece, and wiped his eyes with a paper napkin. Then he said, quietly, that he had never heard of a man doing what Arnie did, and that he wished he had known him better.
Brody was the one who surprised me most. He had stood beside his mother at the hearing, white as milk, and the week after he drove to Gering by himself and asked the director of the nursing home for a job. He wanted to start with the barn, he said, the hay and the water and the cleaning. He has been clean for five months now. He gets up at five. Every morning I hear his truck in the yard, and then the squeak of the gate, and then Duke nickering, low, the way he does for people he trusts.
On the first Sunday of every month, the four of us lead Duke up to the patio. Brody holds the rope, Travis carries the bucket, my daughter pushes the chair of the old rancher, and I walk beside with a hand on the neck of the horse. The nurses bring out coffee. Tomas comes when he can, with his girls, who each take a turn on the old sorrel while someone holds the lead. The gloves of Arnie are on a nail in my kitchen now, with the letter in a frame beside them. I touch them every night and say good night.