When Heather quit hugging Mack, he ambled over to Charlie’s stall and opened the door. He walked inside, leaving the door open but somehow knowing the horse wouldn’t try to walk away from him. As Mack slid his hands over Charlie’s hide, communing with the horse and intuiting his physical health, Mack’s truck door slammed outside, and his assistant, a young slip of a girl, came into the barn. Dressed in green scrubs scattered with cartoon images of dogs and cats, she carried a dented metal tackle box, which she set down in the center aisle with a resounding clank. She knelt by the box and swung her ratty brownish-purple braid over her shoulder. “What you want, boss?”
“Stethoscope would be nice,” Mack answered in a mild tone. “If you have time.”
“Sorry, boss.” She located the stethoscope. “I was on the phone for a minute.”
Mack lowered his brows and made a growling sound low in his throat, but he took the stethoscope without further comment and focused on listening to Charlie’s gut. It was clear that Mack’s bark was worse than his bite, and his bark wasn’t even all that scary.
After examining Charlie, Mack took the horse out into the field and ran him in circles on a lunge line, then brought him back in and fed him a flake of hay from a stack of bales in the back of his truck. As Charlie munched on the hay, Mack pronounced Charlie officially on the mend. But then he asked, in his quiet, understanding, nonthreatening way, for Heather to show him Charlie’s grain and the hay they’d been feeding him.
When Heather pulled the old quilt off the pile of hay, he shook his head and made a quiet tsking sound. “The bale on top is good, but everything under it is old and moldy.” She took the lid off the metal can that held the horse’s feed. He leaned down and took a sniff. “This grain’s okay, but it’s a full bin, and I’m not sure what’s on the bottom.”
Mack gave Heather a sympathetic look. “I know that Erin’s been helping out with Charlie. You need to be sure that she hasn’t been pouring new grain on top of old.” He stepped back and put his hands on his hips. “To be safe, I’d say you ought to toss all of this”—he waved his hands at the mess of hay and food bins in the barn—“on the burn pile, then run to the feed store today and start over with all new.”
He kindly didn’t mention the abhorrently dirty conditions of the rest of the barn. He was clearly used to dealing diplomatically with people who loved their animals but had no idea how to take care of them. “You still have the truck, right?”
Heather nodded. “It’s in the pole barn on the other side of the house.”
“It runs?”
She nodded again. “I crank it every week.”
“Okay, well.” Mack brushed his hands off on his jeans. “We’ll get out of your hair so y’all can make a feed store run.” He patted Heather on the shoulder and wished her luck, then took Adrian’s hand in a goodbye handshake. Adrian didn’t consider himself a lightweight, but Mack’s grip ground his knuckles together.
“It’s good that you’re here to help Heather get everything back on track,” Mack said in a quiet tone. “Her heart’s in the right place, but she can’t handle all this by herself. It’d be great if you could come a couple times a week and work with Charlie. It’s pretty clear that he’s depressed; he needs more interaction than he’s getting.”
Adrian’s heart fell like a stone to settle into the soles of his Lowa hiking boots. “I’ll do what I can to help.”
It wasn’t his place.
It was none of his business.
He didn’t even live near here.
He had a life of his own—a life he was quite happy with, thank you very much.
But he couldn’t turn his back on Charlie, and as it turned out, he couldn’t turn his back on Heather either.
His mind flashed back to a time when, as a teenager living on the Gulf Coast, he had been out partying with friends who had decided to drive onto a beautiful moonlit beach, only to find out too late that the car’s tires had spun down into deep sand. They struggled to get the car out, dragging up driftwood to put beneath the tires in a useless effort to gain traction. But none of it worked. They watched helplessly while the tide came in, and by the time the sun came up over the horizon, the car bobbed like a cork in the Gulf.
Like that car, he was stuck. And he had a sinking feeling that he’d soon be drifting out to sea.
***
Charlie watched all the commotion going on outside his stall. He’d been mostly ignored and forgotten for the last year, but now, he seemed to be the center of interest and activity. Heather and Adrian drove through the field in Dale’s truck, then backed it up to the barn’s field-facing entrance.
Then another truck arrived, and all the same people who’d been there the night before swarmed out of the vehicle, bringing rakes and push brooms and wheelbarrows and all manner of implements designed to stir up dust. After much coming and going, the dust began to settle on a cleaner barn. Still not satisfied, the women wiped down shelves and bins with wet cloths while Adrian brought in fresh bales of hay and new bags of feed to stack into pallets in the corners of the barn.
A fire blazed up in the center of the horse field, sending billowing streams of light-gray smoke into the air. Charlie wasn’t worried. It wasn’t close to the barn. But he kept an eye on it, just in case. Being locked into an enclosed space could be comforting (predators couldn’t get to him) but also horrifying (he wouldn’t be able to get out if he needed to).
Heather rinsed Charlie’s water bucket and refilled it with fresh water. Adrian—or was it Ade? Charlie had become confused because he’d been called by both names—dropped a fresh flake of hay into the hayrack, and a woman put a scoop of sweet feed in his food bin. Charlie half-closed his eyes and focused on enjoying the crisp, molasses-coated grains that always tasted best when they’d just been poured from a newly opened bag.
He nibbled up the last remaining grain in the food bin, then moved to the hayrack and started teasing out bits of fresh hay to munch. As with the grain, hay always tasted best when it had just been unloaded from the back of Dale’s truck. This hay was a clean, bright golden-green. The last stuff had been brittle and brown. While Charlie enjoyed this undeserved feast, he wondered why he had suddenly become such an item of interest to all these people.
Was something about to happen that he didn’t know about? Something good? Or maybe something terrible?
Was this his last good day?
He remembered when one of his dog friends was given a last good day before Mack came to the house and gave him the injection that relieved him of his body. The family had given Benji all the treats he loved best but wasn’t usually allowed to have, even ice cream.
While Charlie was wondering whether this was his last good day, one of the women came up to the stall’s closed door and started wiping down the metal rungs with a damp rag.
He wished with all his heart that Dale could still be here. Dale and Charlie had shared a deep bond, so deep that Charlie only had to think of a thing for Dale to show that he heard the thought and understood. Charlie wished that he could find someone to hear his thoughts. Someone to love him and be loved by him the way he and Dale had loved each other.
“Hello, Charlie,” the woman said. “I can hear your thoughts, if you want to share them with me.” He stopped chewing and swung his head toward her to see why he heard her voice in his head but not his ears.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said again. Strangely, she was able to send words into his mind without moving her mouth or making a sound at all. “I’m Reva. I don’t mean to invade your privacy, but I couldn’t help but notice that you’re wondering about a lot of things right now. I will be happy to answer your questions if I can.”
The strangest thing about all this wasn’t that Reva could talk into his head without speaking out loud. It was that he could understand every word in a way he usually couldn’t when people spoke to him with their mouths
moving and sounds coming out.
Then he could understand only some of what was said. This way, he knew exactly what she meant. He took another bite of hay and thought about this strange phenomenon. It was a bit like the way he and Jasper communicated.
“Yes, it is,” Reva replied in his head. “In fact, it’s exactly the same, except that people and dogs and horses sometimes have different ways of thinking and communicating. People use more words, while many animals prefer to communicate by sharing images. Everyone is different, though. Which way do you prefer to communicate?”
Charlie thought this over but couldn’t decide. He and Jasper spoke in images and emotions, sending pictures and feelings to each other about what they wanted and what they missed.
“We can communicate any way you like,” Reva’s silent voice said. “Whatever is easiest.”
He looked at her, then back at the delicious fresh hay. Mack had apparently been satisfied with Charlie’s appetite, and he drifted into the house along with everyone else. Everyone except Reva. She slowly wiped each of the metal bars along the top half of Charlie’s stall.
“You can keep eating, and I’ll keep cleaning while we chat.”
Charlie turned back to the hayrack but kept part of his attention on his conversation with Reva. He found that it didn’t diminish his enjoyment of the hay.
“It seemed to me earlier that you were wondering about what is happening?”
“Yes.” Charlie chewed a mouthful of hay. “Is this my last good day?” He shared with her the memory of talking to Benji about his last good day. Benji and Charlie had communicated before Benji left his body and then again afterward.
Benji had explained to Charlie what had happened inside the house and how it felt when Mack gave him the shot that made it easy for Benji’s spirit to rise above his body and leave it behind. He showed Charlie that all of Benji’s aches and limitations had stayed in the lifeless husk that had once belonged to him but was no longer necessary once it had outlived its usefulness to the spirit within.
“No, it’s not your last good day,” Reva responded. “But you got very sick, and Heather asked us to come and help you get better.”
“What next?” Charlie asked. That was the only part of his thoughts that felt like words; the rest was emotion: his grief and remorse and his fears of an uncertain future. But then out of those emotions, the questions that had been niggling at his consciousness rose up like ghosts to haunt him. Had he been punished enough for his role in Dale’s death, or would he go back to being shunned by his family?
“Oh, Charlie,” Reva said out loud, her voice full of concern. Then she went back to sending silent thoughts. “You didn’t kill Dale.”
He stopped eating and looked around at Reva. She had stopped polishing the bars of his stall and now just stood there, her hands gripping the bars, looking at him with an expression of love and understanding.
He didn’t believe her, even though he wanted to. “Then why was I being punished? Why did my family stop loving me?”
“They didn’t stop loving you.” Reva turned away to take something off the shelf, then opened Charlie’s stall door and went inside. She laid one hand on his shoulder, sending such love through her palm that he closed his eyes and let his head droop. Then she started brushing his coat with the soft brush that felt so good.
The currycomb felt good too, because its metal teeth gobbled up masses of shedding hair that kept Charlie from feeling the breeze on his skin. But this brush, with its stiffly soft bristles, stimulated his skin and scratched all the itchy fly bites he couldn’t reach with his teeth.
“You remember how much you grieved when Dale died?” Reva asked by sending the words from her mind to his. “Well, Heather and the kids were feeling that way too. They didn’t know what to do with those feelings, so they all had to…disappear…inside their own pain for a while.”
“Jasper didn’t disappear.”
“No, he didn’t. But he’s different, you know? He remembers what it was like to be here before, in his other body. He knows that the body is just a thing and that Dale’s spirit can still be here whenever it wants to.”
Reva continued to brush Charlie’s coat with long, soothing strokes while he thought about what she’d said. Benji had told Charlie that he would come back one day and inhabit another body. Charlie only just now realized that the body Benji had come back to inhabit was Jasper’s. The two dogs were the same in a lot of ways. But they were different in others. How could Benji come back to live in a different body and be the same dog but not the same dog?
“I don’t know,” Reva said. “It’s a mystery that maybe we’re not supposed to solve entirely.”
“Can Dale come back?”
“Yes, but I don’t know if he will. And I don’t know if he would come back in a body that you could recognize. Even his personality wouldn’t be exactly the same. After all, there’s no point in coming back to do exactly the same thing, be exactly the same person all over again, is there? Dale might want to try something different, slip into a new persona along with the new body. Like Benji did when he became Jasper.”
“The same but different.” Charlie understood. Next time, he might decide to come back as a blond horse, maybe one with white spots. He would definitely want to come back as a horse who wasn’t quite so afraid of snakes.
“Yes. And you don’t have to be a horse all the time either. You could be a dog or a person even.”
Charlie and Reva communicated for a while longer, then Reva left to join the other humans who were outside in the field, tending the burn pile. Charlie went back to eating his hay and thought about the idea that he could leave his body and come back as a different kind of animal. He couldn’t think of anything he’d want to be other than a horse. But he would rather be the kind of horse whose family loved him. He had been that kind of horse once. But he wasn’t sure he was that kind of horse anymore.
Chapter 7
Heather made sandwiches and filled a cooler with ice and canned drinks for her friends who were beginning to gather on the river dock behind her house. After the marathon cleaning session in Charlie’s barn, they deserved an afternoon picnic, and Heather intended to empty the cupboards to satisfy everyone’s appetite. While Abby and Reva carried food and drinks to the picnic table on the dock, the guys dragged the floats and inner tubes from the shed and gave them a few blasts of air from the air compressor in the garage.
Instead of going out there to join her friends, Heather strolled to the barn to visit with Charlie. She could hear the men whooping and yelling as they dove off the end of the dock and splashed around like kids. The women were probably popping the tops off wine coolers and floating in inner tubes with their feet up.
Heather would catch up in a minute, but for now, it felt important for her to stand outside Charlie’s stall and stroke his velvet-soft nose. She had been afraid of him for so long—afraid he would bite or step on her or knock her down or rear up and kick out at her.
She wished Dale could see her now, petting Charlie’s nose without fear. Or last night, when she had taken her turns holding his lead rope and walking him in circles.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Charlie for the hundredth time. “I didn’t know Erin wasn’t taking care of you. I should’ve checked. I should’ve made sure she was doing the work.”
Heather probably wouldn’t have been able to tell whether the horse food and hay were fresh enough. But the disreputable state of the barn—and especially of Charlie’s slimy feed buckets and uncleaned stall—was impossible not to notice.
Undeniable and unforgivable.
Charlie had forgiven her. But she would never forgive herself.
Mack had told her that the colic could have been caused by bad hay or bad food or from eating some weed in the field that disagreed with his digestive system. And some horses, he said, were just prone to colic for no d
iscernible reason.
But she knew that Charlie had almost died because of her negligence. She had to do better. She couldn’t just get over Dale’s death and get rid of Charlie, as Erin had insisted. But she could put on her big-girl panties and figure out a way to do what had to be done.
And part of that equation meant bowing out of some responsibilities that didn’t work so well any more. She needed to redefine her priorities and refocus her attention where it needed to be. She had been trying so hard to keep everything the same as it had been before Dale’s death that she had been unable to adapt and change in order to cope with her family’s current reality.
Tomorrow, she would ask Sara to take over as the president of the PTA.
She would talk with Erin, and together, they would come up with a plan to make sure that Charlie’s needs were taken care of. Heather knew that she had been depending on Erin too much, but giving the teenager less responsibility wasn’t an option either. They would have to have a long talk about working together, reallocating tasks, and ensuring that everything got done.
Because Mack had said that Charlie’s colic could have been caused by eating some weed or other in the field, mowing the field was another thing to add to Heather’s to-do list. But Quinn had tried to start the mower earlier, and it wouldn’t work. He and Adrian tinkered with it for a while, then used ramps to load it onto the back of Quinn’s truck to take it to the repair place down the road.
Heather knew it took hours to mow the yard and the horse field. Heather couldn’t see herself sitting on that mower wearing a straw hat and getting a farmer’s tan on the back of her pale-skinned, sun-sensitive neck. But once she started working full-time, she would be able to afford to hire someone to do that work.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said to Charlie, stroking his face through the stall’s bars. “Somehow, we’ll make it work. I promise.”
***
Reva found Heather in the barn, standing in front of Charlie’s stall and communing with the big horse. Fifteen or more hands tall by Reva’s reckoning, Charlie was on the high side of horse height, unless you were talking about heavy horses like Clydesdales, Percherons, or Shires. She touched Heather’s back. “How y’all doing?”
Magnolia Bay Memories Page 10