Page 14 of Holding On

Glancing out the kitchen window, I see Salty in the corral below. It’s finally growing dark—it’s eight or so—and his black coat flashes in the fading sun. The ocean is like glass—an opal blue—catching the last of the light and quivering with color and a depthless look that only comes in the evening.

“He’s about ready to ride, don’t you think?” I say.

She sighs and sets down the printed Excel sheet in her hand. “I don’t know. He was doing so well until the fire next door, and now he’s flighty again. Skittish. I don’t think he feels safe yet. It’s going to take a while.”

Salty is a survivor of a barn fire purposely set by an irate farmer who wanted to wring some insurance money. Salty escaped with several bad burns and evidence of terrible neglect. He bashed his way through the door, nearly breaking a leg. The other animals weren’t so lucky. Claire had to document the site, which was a brutal job, but the asshole paid for what he did—the charges stuck.

And Salty survived. At first, Claire wasn’t sure he’d make it. His hooves where overgrown, the burns were bad, and his teeth were a mess with infection. Claire wouldn’t even name him. It was finally Cory who came up with “Salty.”

Just as the gelding was beginning to trust people, beginning to settle and return to himself, Steven Barr set The Inn on fire, on the side facing the clinic and corral. When Claire told me about it over the phone, it broke my heart.

“Can I work with him?”

Claire looks at me, really looks at me with those big blue eyes. “You sure you want to do this?”

I shrug. “I can give it a shot.”

“But you haven’t worked with a horse since Calvin.”

Calvin was a colt that eventually died. He’s one of the reasons I decided to go to vet school. I watched my dad work on him, and I helped to try to bring the yearling’s fever down. “It’s fine. That was a long time ago.”

Plus, I fucking love horses

She waits a minute. “Well, Salty needs all the attention he can get. I trust him around Cory—you know, feedings and stuff—but he’s nowhere near ready to have someone on his back.”

“No horse is,” I say. “But I have to try. You know how it is.”

She nods. “Put your hand on your horse—

“—and your heart in your hand.”

She shivers. I know it’s because, between the two of us, we’ve pieced together what our father used to always say about equines. I come up behind her, rub her shoulders briskly for a moment, and head off to bed.

***

My clothes are caked with flakey shit and splattered with blood. I’ve thrown them in the washer down in the back room of the clinic and toyed with trying to scrub my fingernails in the utility sink, but I’m afraid I’ll drip all the way upstairs.

Instead, I just climb the stairs, run the hot water in the tiny shower, and pull the curtain. The tub is an old porcelain clawfoot, a little chipped in places but solid, and the hand wand detaches. For right now, though, I’m just standing underneath the showerhead in the dark, back brush in hand, scrubbing and going over what I could have done differently.

It was a breached calf, and turning it wasn’t easy. Claire and Dad used to read me All Creatures Great and Small, and I felt just like a Black James Herriot. I had been on the floor, on my back, arm up the vagina of a cow while I tried to hook the calf to turn it around.

There were obvious differences from that opening scene in his book, though. One, it was not the middle of winter. It was a hot summer night. Two, I had slightly better medical tools at my disposal. And three, instead of four farmers suspicious of the new vet, I faced suspicious farmers that were a bit sour about a Black vet. I mean, the old guy and his two grown sons were nice, but they kept asking me if Claire was coming and if I was in vet school.

I let the water run down my back. “Be smart, butdon’t assume the worst,” my mother always said. “Or you’ll end up hating everyone and walking around with a chip on your shoulder.”

But when I joined the Black Caucus on campus as an undergraduate student, the rule was, Assume the worst. If you don’t, it could kill you.

There seems to be no middle ground.

The focus had to be on the calf. My decision not to wake Claire and haul her out in the middle of the night proved the right one. The calf turned, and she got to sleep in bliss.

My shoulders had stiffened on the ride home, and the hot water feels good. I still can’t believe my tiny hundred-and-twenty-pound sister does this for a living. Finally clean, I turn the water off and grab a towel.

I like showering in the dark with a full moon. There’s something comforting about the darkness. I step into the kitchen and fill a glass with water. It’s two ten, and slivers of refracted light play over the small bay. The view is moonlit. Salty has decided to venture out from his stall and stands at the far edge of the corral looking out at the sea.

A silver-bathed ear flicks as something catches his attention.

Pulling on blue jeans and a white T-shirt, I trip down the stairs barefoot, careful not to wake Claire, and head out the side door. I find the rope lead and open the gate, a small wedge of apple in my hand to woo him. It’s not that he doesn’t trust us, his human friends. It’s that he doesn’t trust the universe.