I held the entry form up to the lamp in the announcer stand, with the microphone switched off under my hand and the whole grandstand waiting in the dusk below, and I read the name of the horse again, out loud, in a whisper. Paloma. A paint mare with one blue eye and a white stocking on the near hind. In 1974 she had belonged to a girl of twenty two named Consuelo Baca, who had never in her life been on a horse faster than a trot. Ramón Tafoya had put the girl up on her at the county fair, and the girl had fallen off, and he had fallen in love.
“Mamá,” Yvette said, “the name of the rider is Consuelo Baca. Your maiden name. And the age on the form is seventy one. Lorraine found it in the safe of the fair board this afternoon when she went to count the cash.” She wiped a streak of dust from her cheek. “It was put there last August. The check for the entry fee was written by Papá. It is dated the fifteenth of August, and it is signed in his own hand. Number 1974.” She took a breath that shook. “He entered you in the barrel race, Mamá. For this year. Before he died.”
I could not speak. The stand seemed to tilt. I sat down on the stool with the entry form in my lap and the stopwatch swinging from my neck, and my mind went back to the last summer of Ramón, when he sat on the porch with a glass of lemonade and a pen and said that he was working on his accounts. I had thought it was the taxes. A man who has ridden bareback for forty years has a way of keeping a secret from his own wife, because he does not use his mouth.
“He wrote a note,” Yvette said, and held out a small card, stapled to the form. I took it with a hand that I could not keep still. The handwriting was that of Ramón, in the square capitals he used on the entries for the farm sales. For my Consuelo, it said. She has called every race in this valley for forty years and never ridden in one. I have asked the fair board to hold her place. The mare is in the north pasture. Her name is Paloma Second, and she is ready. Number 33 is hers. Ride, mi vida.
The deepest gift a husband can leave is not the belt or the buckle, but permission for his wife to be bold.
Below us the crowd had begun to murmur. The last rider of the championship round had finished, and the announcer stand had gone silent. A voice on the radio of the fair said, a little desperately, that there was a delay. I looked at my daughter. Her eyes were full. “Mamá,” she said, “I came to tell you that I was wrong. I was ashamed because I was afraid. Afraid that you would fall, and that people would laugh. And then I thought, what if they laugh, and what if you fall, and what if you do it anyway? That is who you are.”
I put my hand on her cheek. I said that I had been afraid too, for forty years, and that fear is only the noise that excitement makes before it learns to speak. I pulled the straw hat down over my gray hair. I took the buckle of Ramón in my hand, the heavy silver one from 1974, and I felt its weight. “Help me down the ladder,” I said. “And find a pair of boots that fit.” Yvette burst out laughing, and wiped her face on her sleeve, and said, “I already brought them.”
The north pasture was a mile away. By the time Lorraine had driven us in the truck of the fair board, the sun was a red coin on the Manzanos. Paloma Second stood at the fence, a young paint mare with one blue eye, as if she had been waiting there all her life. I put my hand on her neck. She blew into my palm. Behind me, the old men of the valley who had come out to see what the fuss was about stood in a ring with their hats in their hands, and one of them took off his scarf and tied it to the fence in silence.
I rode into the arena at the fairgrounds at a quarter to nine, in the electric lights, with number 33 pinned to my back. The grandstand stood up. I do not know who started it. It began with a few, and rose until the whole place rang with applause. Yvette had taken the microphone in the stand, and her voice came out clear and young into the night air. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “the senior division. Consuelo Tafoya of Estancia. Seventy two years young. Riding for her husband.”
I did not run the pattern fast. I did not need to. The mare took the first barrel as if she had been born to it, a smooth and graceful turn, and the second and the third. I leaned into the wind. I felt for a moment as if the arms of Ramón were around me, and the hands of Ramón were on the reins, and the whole of the long white sky was tilting and pouring beneath us. When we crossed the line, the stopwatch in the stand read twenty two point four. It was the worst time of the night, and the loudest cheer.
At the fence afterward, Lorraine hugged me, and half the county after her. A little girl from Moriarty with a paint pony called Biscuit gave me a ribbon from her own saddle, and I pinned it to the hat. Yvette came down from the stand and held me without a word for a long time. When I opened my eyes, I saw her boss, the man who had done the impression, standing at the rail with his hat over his heart. He nodded to me. I tipped the brim of mine.
I still call the races at the fair, from the stand, at seventy five dollars a night. In the senior division, on Saturday evenings, I ride in the first position, on Paloma Second, with the number 33 on my back. The silver buckle of Ramón rests on a belt that I punched with new holes myself. When I come around the third barrel, I hear him in the grandstand, as he always did, shouting for no reason at all. Yvette tells me it is only the wind. I tell her to be quiet and listen.