No, he couldn’t.
Something behind him, a rope under his rump, pulled him forward across the ground until he got his back legs under him. Shaky, he tried to stand, but only pitched forward onto his chest, plowing his nose in the dirt.
Hands pulled at his head and tugged at the straps of his halter. Charlie lifted his head, but that was all he could manage. “Come on, buddy. That’s it.”
Another rope came around him, this time from the front, lifting his chest. “Good boy!” Firm hands patted his shoulder. “Good boy, Charlie.”
Dale? Was Dale here now? Charlie opened his eyes, turned his head to look at who was speaking to him so kindly, but his head weighed too much. He dropped his chin, but the hands holding his halter kept his head up, even though his legs wanted to collapse under him. “No, no. Don’t lie down.”
The slithering snakes came back, flickering at his feet. Forcing Charlie to move.
He took a staggering step, then another. The man with the kind voice walked beside him, urging, encouraging, patting him, and calling him Charlie Horse in a low voice. Someone pulled at the lead rope attached to Charlie’s halter, forcing him to keep moving, even though the ground dragged at his hooves, causing him to stumble.
The man who reminded him of Dale took the rope and urged Charlie to a slow trot. “That’s it.” He made clicking sounds in time to the beat of Charlie’s hooves against the hard ground. “Good boy, Charlie Horse.”
The man trotted beside Charlie inside the ring of lights made by the cars parked in the field. People came and went, going to the house and coming back again. Different hands took the lead rope, keeping Charlie moving, making him go even faster when his legs tried to fold beneath him.
The man came back. Coiling the lead rope up under Charlie’s chin, he let Charlie walk instead of making him trot. Then, finally, the man stopped walking. “You want to try the trailer?” he asked one of the other people. They were all gathered around, a concerned knot of humanity.
“If he falls in the trailer, we’ll have an even bigger problem.”
Words swirled around Charlie, and he swayed on his feet. “Watch out, Adrian,” someone yelled. “He’s going down!”
Adrian must be the man holding him because he quickly tugged the lead rope and made a clicking sound.
Trotting again. Charlie’s breath rasped out of his lungs in ragged gasps. Every step jarred his belly.
Adrian slowed to a walk, gasping for breath. “Come on, buddy.” He led Charlie to a two-stall horse trailer that smelled of other horses, donkeys, and goats. “Let’s load up.” Someone came with the whip, flickering the tassels at Charlie’s feet. Primal fear rose up in Charlie’s chest, and escape was the only thing he could think of. With the snakes behind him, his only option was to leap forward into the trailer.
He stood, shivering, waiting to be tied to the crossbar, expecting to be hauled somewhere behind the truck.
Trailer rides were frightening, though, even when they were worth it in the end, and anyway, Charlie didn’t feel like going anywhere.
“It’s not working,” somebody yelled. Someone whose voice Charlie recognized. “Bring him on out. We’ll have to tube him.”
Adrian pushed against Charlie’s chest, forcing him to back out of the trailer, step by anxious step, never knowing when he’d take that last step back only to find there was nothing beneath him but air. But Charlie’s new friend moved with him, one arm around his chest while he held the lead rope coiled at his chin and whispered encouraging words in his ear.
Then he was out. Adrian tugged at the lead rope and let it play out to the end, trotting beside him once again. Someone whistled, and Adrian slowed, turning back toward the sound.
Mack was there.
Charlie remembered Mack.
Mack came to see Charlie once a year to do very bad things to him. Mack was a nice man with a gentle touch, but his kind energy and gentle hands didn’t make it any better when Mack poked Charlie with needles in his neck. Or when he shoved a tube down—
Oh, no. Not the tube…
Adrian wrapped the lead rope in his fist and walked Charlie toward a metal bucket that glinted in the car lights. Mack held a long, clear tube coiled up in his hand, looping over his shoulder. Charlie tried to back up.
“Adrian.” Mack grabbed Charlie’s halter. “Can you hold the twitch?”
Adrian took the twitch: a short stick with a narrow loop of chain on the end. Murmuring apologies, he put the chain around Charlie’s soft nose and twisted it tight to keep him from moving. Then Mack proceeded to feed the end of the long tube down Charlie’s throat.
Would they never stop torturing him?
It seemed like hours later—and maybe it was—that Mack coiled up his tube and stuck it into the metal bucket, along with the twitch that had hurt Charlie’s nose. Charlie swallowed, tasting the residue of the thick oil that Mack had forced into his empty stomach.
Then the walking started up again. Different people took turns holding the lead rope, walking or trotting in the same unending circle made by all the cars’ headlights. Whenever one person got tired, another took over.
Charlie didn’t get to stop, and his beloved friend Jasper kept pace beside him.
Adrian held the lead rope and tugged to get Charlie moving, while Jasper trotted alongside. Round and round they went, beating down a circular path in the field grass. Mack got into his truck and drove away. The other truck drove away too, leaving the trailer behind.
Heather stayed.
Adrian stayed.
Jasper stayed, Charlie’s constant companion no matter who held the lead rope.
Only one car remained, its motor purring softly, its lights cutting through the darkness of the lonely field. Heather took the lead rope from Adrian, who leaned on the hood of the car while she pulled Charlie around in more circles.
Charlie knew that Heather had always been afraid of him, but now, her concern outweighed her fear. To let her know that he wouldn’t hurt her, Charlie chuffed softly as they plodded along. She patted his shoulder, her touch light and soft. “Good boy.”
Slowly, the griping pain in Charlie’s gut began to ease. He could hear it gurgling, feel his tense insides relaxing as the tight knot inside him began to loosen and release. “Adrian,” Heather called. “I think I can hear his stomach growling.”
“Yeah?” Adrian walked toward them. He leaned close and put his head against Charlie’s belly, listening. “This could be it. Let’s get him back in the trailer.”
Charlie wanted to lean on Adrian, to let the man’s gentle hands soothe his aching belly, but Adrian took the lead rope and pulled him forward, forcing him to step up into the metal box. When they got there, Adrian wrapped his arms around Charlie’s chest and held on, even took some of Charlie’s weight and let him rest his neck over the man’s shoulder.
“Come on, buddy,” Adrian said, his voice deep and soothing while his wide palms and long fingers stroked Charlie’s belly on both sides. “Just relax. I’ve got you.”
Heather came into the trailer too. She smoothed gentle fingers over Charlie’s face, murmuring sounds of comfort and assurance. “Sweet boy, sweet boy, sweet boy.”
Could he trust? Could he believe? Did he even want to?
Heather whispered into his ear, her breath warm and full of life. “Please, Charlie. I know that Dale isn’t here, and he was your person. But I’m here now, and I want to be your person, if you’ll let me.”
Charlie twitched his ear away from Heather’s warm breath and felt a shudder go through his body. He wanted to believe, but believing could be so much harder than holding onto despair.
“I’m here now,” Heather whispered into his ear. “I’m here. And I want you to live.”
Charlie hadn’t quite decided yet whether he could trust Heather. But Adrian’s energy felt so loving, and Charlie knew t
hat he had to take a chance. He had to risk the pain that could come from loving someone new, even if it meant losing everything all over again.
Chapter 5
When the poor horse’s bowels finally released, Adrian gave a whoop of joy, then glanced at his watch. Just after 2:00 a.m. He patted the horse’s sweat-coated hide. “About damn time, buddy.”
He guided Charlie out of the trailer, handed the lead rope to Heather, and closed the trailer door. “I hope you don’t mind cleaning that trailer out tomorrow,” he said. “I’m too tired to do it right now.”
“Thanks for everything you’ve done tonight.” Heather held Charlie while Adrian went to his car, turned off the engine, and pocketed the keys. “We couldn’t have gotten him up without your help.”
“I don’t know about all that.” Actually, she was probably correct. Not because he did anything special, but because it took a team of people working together.
They walked together across the dark field toward the barn, Jasper leading the way and Charlie trailing behind. The weak light of a crescent moon tipped the tall grasses in silver. “Do you think it’s safe to put him up in his stall now?”
Adrian glanced back at the horse. “I think so. He clearly feels a lot better. And since he pooped, we know that his intestines are moving again. But we’ll stay in the barn and keep an eye on him for a while, just to be sure.”
“I can’t thank you enough for staying. Charlie seemed to respond to you better than to anyone else.”
“I like him too.”
Just outside the barn, Heather handed the lead rope back to Adrian and went in search of the light switch. After a minute of feeling along the wall—and one shriek of terror when she touched something—she found the switch and flooded the barn with light. The corners of the place were laced with dust-covered cobwebs, explaining Heather’s shriek.
The barn held a total of four stalls, two on each side of the central aisle, which appeared to be made of packed red dirt. The stalls were well made if not well maintained. The dust-covered walls and sliding doors were made of sturdy two-by-six boards in metal frames to a height of about four feet. Above that, every wall contained rows of metal bars. Each stall had an exterior window opening covered with bars.
Open spaces for storage flanked the stalls on both sides, and all of them were filled with a hodgepodge of junk. A dusty lawn mower half-covered by a dirty canvas tarp. Dirt-caked buckets. Metal trash cans with dented lids, one of which had a brown-stained feed scoop turned upside down on top of it. Several bales of old-looking hay stacked in a corner.
Jasper hopped up onto the top bale and curled up, rested his nose on his paws, and watched Adrian with a worried expression.
Heather was looking around the barn too, her expression one of dismay.
“Which stall is his?”
“It’s this one.” Heather slid open one of the stall doors.
Adrian led Charlie Horse to the stall but stopped just outside it. The bedding that remained was scattered with piles of horse droppings and saturated with urine. “We can’t put him in there.”
“I didn’t know it was this bad.” Heather flushed, her cheeks turning crimson with embarrassment. “Erin takes care of Charlie.”
“Or not,” he said with a snort of disgust. He refrained from making a comment about the irony of Heather being hired to care for shelter animals when she clearly didn’t take care of her own.
“I’m sorry,” Heather said. “I thought Erin was taking care of Charlie. I feel bad that I didn’t know she wasn’t doing her chores.”
“Isn’t it your job to make sure your kid does her chores?” Maybe he was being unfair—he wasn’t a parent, so who was he to judge her parenting? But this horse deserved to be more than a teenager’s chore. A lot of people—including him—would love to have a horse but couldn’t afford one because of money, time, or space constraints. It chapped his ass to see Charlie so neglected.
Adrian knew Heather was busy, but this was completely unacceptable. And why was she planning to take a full-time job at the shelter—taking care of animals, no less—when she couldn’t cope as it was?
He took a breath and told himself to simmer down. He’d seen the results of extreme equine neglect before, so he had to admit, this situation triggered him just a little. He tied Charlie’s lead rope to one of the stainless-steel bars and looked into the other stalls. They were piled high with junk. He tried to soften his tone. “See if you can find a bag of pine shavings somewhere. And bring a shovel.”
He went into the barn’s darkest crevices in search of a wheelbarrow.
***
Heather found a dozen bags of shavings stacked in a corner of the barn and covered by a musty, mold-spotted quilt. She pulled the quilt off the stack, and a dog-eared copy of a teen magazine fell to the ground.
Heather rolled up the magazine and tossed it into a cluttered corner of the barn. She had been buying a bag of shavings every week, intending for each bag to be used up before her next trip to the feed store. And instead of doing the work of cleaning Charlie’s stall, Erin had been hiding out in the barn reading magazines.
Heather remembered when, at the beginning of the summer, Erin had offered to start unloading the truck and driving it back to the pole barn each week. To Heather, that offer had signified that Erin was showing a renewed interest in life, in the future, after Dale’s death. Dale had been allowing Erin to drive from the field to the barn—which wasn’t illegal because even though Erin was only thirteen, she wouldn’t be driving the truck off their property.
Heather had been proud of what she saw as Erin’s effort to help out even more.
But now it was glaringly obvious that Erin had made the offer to cover her increasing laziness. Instead of cleaning up properly after Charlie, Erin had been spreading layer after layer of clean bedding on top of dirty shavings. Shameful.
Shameful that Erin, the seemingly helpful child Heather was so proud of, would treat Dale’s horse this way. Even more shameful that Heather, the adult, had neglected to check behind her teenage daughter to ensure that everything was getting done. A responsible parent gave instructions and then followed up. Without Heather’s inattention, Erin couldn’t have neglected Charlie as she had. Erin had dropped the ball, but it was Heather’s job as a parent to pick it up, and she had failed. Adrian was absolutely correct; it was Heather’s job to make sure Erin did her chores.
If it wasn’t the middle of the night and if Adrian wasn’t here, Heather would march into Erin’s bedroom and drag her out to the barn. They’d clean Charlie’s stall together while Heather pelted her eldest daughter with a few choice words.
But it was the middle of the night, and Adrian was here.
So Heather would deal with the situation in front of her now. And tomorrow, she would handle the situation that was upstairs sleeping blissfully unaware of the wrath that awaited.
Adrian tossed two rubber buckets out of the stall. “These need a good scrubbing.”
He didn’t look out at her, but she heard the steady scrape, thunk sound of the shovel as he dug out the sludge in the bottom of the stall and dumped it into the wheelbarrow.
How could Heather be trusted—how could she trust herself—to be in charge of caring for a shelter full of animals when she had allowed this to happen to her own horse? Because Charlie was hers now.
Ignoring the buckets for now, Heather eased closer to Charlie, the horse she had always feared too much to get close to.
Charlie didn’t seem so scary now, as he stood with his head low, exhausted and dispirited, tied to the bars of his stall. Just as he hadn’t seemed scary when Heather had taken her turn walking him in circles around the field. She hadn’t been worried then that he would step on her or rear up or run her down. Her biggest fear then was that he would stop plodding along and try to lie down again.
Heather reached out to touch Ch
arlie’s nose. It was soft as velvet, with long whiskers that tickled her palm. He blew a warm gust of air into her hand. Startled, she drew back, then forced herself to try again. This time, she stepped a bit closer to touch his chest. He raised his head and then lowered it, leaning his face into her belly.
A powerful wave of remorse and contrition rose up inside her, making her heart feel heavy and full, pushing against the back of her throat.
She had allowed this horrible situation to happen.
Heather’s kids couldn’t be ignored.
Even Jasper, always underfoot and ever in the way, couldn’t be ignored.
But Charlie could be ignored. Charlie could disappear into the distance, a brown blob of misery on the distant horizon. His grief had been so visible, so inescapable, that it had seemed to equal Heather’s own inconsolable grief. Her fear of horses hadn’t entered into it, she realized now.
Her fear of being consumed by Charlie’s grief on top of her own had.
She stepped closer to Charlie until the two of them stood chest to chest, heart to heart. She wasn’t overwhelmed by the massive bulk of the big animal. She was, instead, comforted by it. Wrapping her arms around Charlie’s sturdy neck, she held on and let her grief pour into his heart. Then, with a shuddering sigh of release, she allowed his grief to pour into hers. And to her surprise, the sharing didn’t make her grief more unbearable. Instead, her sorrow eased. And she thought that maybe she felt Charlie’s sorrow ease just a little bit as well.
“I won’t let you disappear again,” she promised, a whisper against Charlie’s warm neck. “I won’t let you disappear.” She would do better from now on. She would spend time with Charlie, at least a few minutes every day. She would make sure he was well taken care of.
Adrian wheeled the shit-filled wheelbarrow out of the stall backward, bumping the flat tire against the metal threshold. “Where can I dump this?”
She let Charlie’s comforting bulk insulate her from Adrian’s judgmental tone. “There’s a mulch pile just outside the barn door.”
Magnolia Bay Memories Page 7