New Moon Farm: Chapter 03

Chapter Three

 

We don’t believe in working on Sunday.

And isn’t that just too bad for us.  When you have twenty horses around the place, there’s just not going to be a day off, not even for holiness.  Then again, I’ve always felt like looking after other creatures is holy work.

The irony of this is that, believing as we do, we can’t ask Hart to come work on the Sabbath.  So there we are, doing twice as much work on Sunday as any other day.  But when I think about it, I doubt that God minds.  I know we don’t.  In fact, it’s my favorite day.  We go to church together, and then we all come home and serve the creatures together.  My dad, too.  And even Brinn, the three year old, and Ms. Charlotte the princess.  Everybody out there, all at one time.  That family time is pretty much treasure to me.

Five days in the week, I go to school, then come home and work for the horses.  Sunday, I go to church and then I work for the horses.  You’d think that would sum up to a dependable life.  But you’d be wrong.  You never know what you’re going to end up handling—always a horse who’s been bitten, or managed to gouge a mysterious hole in himself, or thrown a shoe.  Sometimes colic, and I’ll tell you, that’s tense; bad colic can mean a twisted bowel, which means we could lose an otherwise hale and hearty horse within hours.  Our days are anything but dependable.

When I talk to God some day, the first thing I’m going to ask him is why his horse design is so dang odd.  Horses have a weird digestive system, weird bowels, legs that you can’t heal when they’re broken—not unless you’ve got money and facilities and a mess of luck.  Feed a horse too much, he’ll die.  Feed him the wrong thing—which can mean the right thing at the wrong time—he’ll die.  Sometimes it seems like these animals are made out of glass.  And yet, from the beginning, people have used horses for every kind of work—travel, hauling, clearing land, plowing.  Not to mention racing, showing off, going to war.

Why would God make something so beautiful and strong—but so fragile at the same time?

I do have some theories about that.  I think it’s so people can’t easily take the horses for granted.  Like a lesson outside of scripture—you can’t use something up and park it and just walk away.  You have to take care of things, learn how they work, stretch yourself to think in new ways.  Or else you’ll lose what you have.  And just loving something is never enough.  Or keeping something around just because you think its going to love you for free.

But the Sunday before the therapy group started, I wasn’t enjoying anything.  I was so nervous about that group, I fretted the whole day away.  Couldn’t keep my mind on church.  Or on the work afterward.

“Honey doesn’t get chondroitin.”  My brother, Harris, was standing right behind me while I measured out Honey’s grain, just before supper.  Harris is younger than me by a couple years, and smaller, too.  So he doesn’t often take the chance of getting in my way.

“I know,” I snapped.

“So, why are you putting it in her grain?” he asked me.  Because I was.  I was holding Honey’s bucket—it had her name all over it—and I was adding chondroitin, which is for old horses’ joints.  Honey is not an old horse.  In fact, she’s a quarter pony, and I was giving her a horse’s dose.

“You want to do the grain?” I said, shoving the bucket into his chest.  “Go right ahead.”

“Humility,” he said, taking a step back.

“I’m going to hit you,” I told him.

“Go give that stuff you just made up to somebody who needs it,” he said, shoving it back.  And that was brass.  But what else could I do?  He was right.  I took it on down to Dustin Dragon, who is getting on and getting careful about his legs,  and then I came back up to Zion’s stall, one of the dogs trailing behind me.  Zion’s my own horse, a bright little sorrel with a big fat blaze down his face.  He’s a bad horse.  Funny, mischievous, argumentative and smart.  One of my best friends in the world.   And he loves me, as long as there’s hope I have a treat in one of my pockets.  The second I stepped into the stall, he started frisking me.  “Knock it off,” I said to him.

“A little testy today, aren’t we?” my father said.

I looked around.  My father was standing in the middle of the breezeway with the muck cart.  He was wearing Wellies, and his suit pants, and a white shirt and tie.

“You look ridiculous,” I said.  “Why are you out here dressed for church?  You’re going to get manure all over yourself.”

“I,” he said loftily, “am not as careless as some people around here.  As to why I am so dressed, I have an elders’ quorum meeting in half an hour.  And that was a nice little piece of deflection.”

I snorted and turned to open Zion’s stall door.  Living with a man who knows psychology, you can lose your patience.  “I fail to understand what you mean by deflection,” I said, turning back to my pushy little horse.  I can be just as lofty as my daddy can.

“I comment on your—mood,” Dad said, now mild, “and you counter by criticizing my ensemble?”

“I wasn’t criticizing.  No, Zion—back—get your nose out of there—I haven’t got anything for you.  ZION, get over—get over.  You’re going to step on me.”

“Your mom says you’re still nervous about tomorrow,” my dad said.  I could hear the muck rake scraping along the floor of the breezeway.

“I am,” I said, without looking around.  Harris leaned over the stall side and stuffed a flake of alfalfa into Zion’s feeder.  I was immediately forgotten.  I stood there, stroking Zion’s neck while he went after the hay.  “And I think I have every right to be.”

“You’ll do fine,” Dad told me, emptying his scrapings into the cart.

“Well, you would do fine.”  I slipped out of the stall and latched the gate behind me.  “You’re used to working with stuff like this.”

“No different than what you’re used to,” Dad said to me.

“Oh, please,” I said.  “I’ve got a wheelchair, a juvenile felony and a potential suicide.  Sounds just like garden variety dyslexia to me.”

“There’s a bunch more of that out there on the drive,” Mom called from the barn door, her gentle way of telling my dad to get a move-on.

“Okay,” Dad called back.  Then he smiled at me.  “They’re just people,” he said.  “You take one day at a time.  One session at a time.  And you may be surprised.  Honey, we’re not about to give you anything we don’t think you’re ready to handle.  We talked this through with Ms. Hyde and the other counselors.  And the judge.  They know you.  And they think you’re the one for the job.  And your mom’s there to back you up, always.  No need to fear.”

I had no answer to that.  I had not been reassured.  And everybody talking like that about me—now I had that pressure, too.  But Dad didn’t wait on an answer.  He just gave the cart a shove and started toward the barn door.  He had a streak of something on the side of one of his pant legs, which gave me some little satisfaction.

All I can say is, it’s a good thing the people at church know us so well.