The tall man had a daughter with black eyes. His senses were waking to the anger behind them, and it frightens him. Her mother gave her long, soft brown hair, but her father gave her almost nothing. I could see her eyes watching me from the cab of her father’s truck while he walked out to the horses' paddock. Palpable anger at the inconvenience of waiting on a hot day, and nobody to care.
Her father walked with a stride of a man who considers pain
to be a God-given challenge. Stiffly accommodating his solidifying spine, he
bends at knee and hip instead. Willful ignorance will bring him an x-ray nailing
his concrete joints in a coffin lid, but for now it’s his cross to bear. Sweat
stains hat brim and collar, and the leather of his boots has molded to his feet
in a way that’s no longer comfortable, but maintains his stance nonetheless.
The man’s watery eyes watch the movement of the bay gelding.
Seeing the flare on his far front hoof, he gathers the rope and sends the horse
away, away, away. He believes if you move their feet, you own them. He doesn’t know
that the women in his life are trees (not horses), and his attempts to move
them are futile, much like winds against the ancient pinon trees. They are
capable of warping the shape but never moving their feet.
His daughter continues to watch with her black eyes. He
tells me that he doesn’t like her sass much these days. He misses the days when
she was a baby, and he could plunk her in a bucket next to the corral while he
worked. She watched him with those eyes back then, too. He doesn’t see that
this ten-year-old girl will run away from home someday. She won't miss the
mustard brown single-wide trailer and the jug-headed horses he trains for
others.
She yearns for beautiful things that don’t exist in her
life. Things her mind knows are out there but have never yet set foot in her
little arena. He lectures her that she is saved by the grace of the blood of
Christ, and the words drift past her branches like empty wind. She knows her
heart is fierce and brave, and she needs little else. The analogies of thorns
and nails and blood are all real things in the mortal realm she wants to flee,
and his promise of Heaven falls on deaf ears.
He finishes the flare of hoof on the bay gelding and moves on
to the paint pony. His hands are hard, and he speaks of the Evils of Learning.
I feel my body curve away from his words. He tells me of the wife of the man
who gave him a job. She rides horses with so much grace, the smartest horseMAN he’s
ever witnessed. You can hear the awe in his words, as though he has found an
angel in the stock pens of the cattle sale barn. How does she come by such equine
knowledge that only men are graced with, he wonders? He doesn’t know that he
has his job because the boss’s wife saw his little black-eyed girl with holes
in her sneakers and jeans and told her husband to give that daddy a job before
he can't feed his girl tomorrow. He pushes cows down at the sale barn, his
spine creaking with each squeak of the saddle.
Her black eyes are closed now. Sweat beads on her brow, but
she never gave up her stance to sit angrily in the truck, to the point where exhaustion
took over, and she fell asleep. He sighs at her, feeling but not comprehending
the event where she breaks his heart and leaves town for good. He has a son
coming up in years, though, and he’ll place his hope in him and lose faith in
women altogether. His daughter will never forget the smell of hooves and sweat
staining her young years, and she’ll go somewhere with rain-washed flowers and
men who notice the fire behind her eyes, and respect her.