Page 61 of The Reckless Rookie

“You earned it,” I whisper. “You can rest now.”

She goes between one breath and the next, not defeated and not abandoned. Finished. I hold her head in the straw and cry for the strongest thing on this ranch finally being allowed to sleep.

And then there’s no time for any of it, because the filly’s up.

She’s up before I’d have believed she could be, all legs and instinct, wet and swaying and brand new to the whole idea of standing, and she goes straight for her mother the way they’re built to, nose down along Bonita’s still side, hunting for milk that isn’t going to come. She noses the flank. She noses lower. She lifts her head and makes a sound I’ve never heard a foal make, high and lost, and makes it again, and starts to move faster, frantic, pacing the length of her dead mother for the milk that would keep her alive and finding a cooling body with no answer in it.

A newborn doesn’t have days. She has hours. Salinas says it fast, already moving. “She needs colostrum, and soon. The longer we wait the less of it does her any good. What she doesn’t get in these first hours, she never gets.”

Vicente moves before anyone has to name what comes next.

He gets up off the delivery and he kneels at the dead mare, at Bonita still warm, and he strips the colostrum out of her by hand, milking a horse that’s gone so her filly can live, those big scarred hands working slow and sure and gentle at a thing there is nothing gentle about. He doesn’t say a word. His face is wet, and I have known this man twenty years and never seen his face wet.

“Get a bottle,” he says, low. “Something to warm it. She’ll take it or she won’t, and if she won’t we tube her. But she’ll take it. Somebody has to be still enough that she trusts it.”

Somebody still enough that she trusts it.

I look at the filly wheeling and screaming in the straw, wild with a fear she’s too new to have a name for, and I understand that I am not the one. I’m shaking. I’ve got a dead mare’s blood to the elbow and my own heart coming apart in my chest, and a foal reads what comes off you the same way her mother did, and what’s coming off me right now is grief and the wound I tore myself. She can feel every ounce of it. It’s the exact wrong thing to bring near a terrified newborn.

There’s one person alive who walks into a scared animal’s storm and carries the calm in the door with him. I watched him do it in this barn. I cut him loose two days later for the trouble of it.

And he’s on a black road right now with his foot in it, coming north toward the worst thing, because I broke my own rule and reached for him.

So I do the part I can do. Not the calm. The calm was never going to be me tonight, not with a dead mare’s blood to my elbows and my own wound coming off me, and she reads every ounce of it. But calm isn’t what the clock measures. Colostrum is. So Vicente holds her and I get the tube down her, steady and careful and sick about it, because a newborn who won’t take a bottle still takes the colostrum or she doesn’t see morning, and steady is the one thing this ranch built into me that holds even when the rest of me is coming apart.

She fights us. We win it. It goes in. Whatever else tonight takes, she got the one thing there’s no second chance at, and she got it because three people who loved that mare wouldn’t let her lose her daughter in the same dark.

But the settling I can’t tube into her. She’s alive and she’s wild, wheeling and screaming the length of a cooling flank, wanting the one thing left that I am not: a body that walks into her fear without bringing more of it through the door.

Then Vicente’s head comes up. He hears it before I do.

Tires on the county road. A truck downshifting hard for the turn onto the drive, too fast, a man who’s driven an hour toward the worst news with his foot flat the whole way.

Headlights swing across the barn wall.

He came.

I get out of the way of the door.

For the first time in my life, on my own land, I get out of the way and let somebody else be the one who can.

Chapter thirty-five

Finn

Itake the turn onto the drive too fast and the last hundred yards with the truck already dying, and I’m out of it before it’s stopped rolling, boots on gravel, running for the one lit square in the whole dark ranch.

The barn. The last place you want a light at midnight when a mare is close.

I hear her before I see her. High and torn and lost, over and over, and my whole body knows the sound before my head does, because I’ve heard it before, once, out of her mother the night the foal first kicked her wild and Jason was cornered in the straw. That same high tearing thing, a horse making the sound a horse isn’t built to make. My legs go faster on their own and the gorge comes up the back of my throat, hot and sudden, and I swallow it down running, and my heart’s slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and I come through the door at a dead run and the picture stops me cold in the aisle.

Bonita’s down. Down and not getting up, and nobody has to tell me, because I’ve stood next to enough stillness to know the kind that doesn’t end. She’s stretched in the straw with the blood gone dark around her, and there’s a filly, brand new and wet and wild, wheeling and screaming the length of her dead mother, and Catt’s on her knees in it, a bottle in her hand the filly won’t have from her, and Vicente’s back against the boards, not moving, watching the door.

Watching for me.

Something goes out of me at the knees. The mare who read me at this rail when I came in carrying a fight and wouldn’t have me till I set it down. The one thing on this ranch that never let me lie to her. Every night for months I brought this animal the worst of me and she took it and handed it back clean, and she’s lying in the straw with all that fight finally out of her, and I wasn’t here.

I wasn’t here.