The gate to the pasture stood wide open, swinging a little in the August wind, and the grass inside was empty and silver in the moonlight. I stood there in my nightgown with a flashlight that had died and my granddaughter beside me in her pajamas, and neither of us said a word. Biscuit had never once gone through a gate he was not asked to. Somebody had opened it for him, and somebody else was going to answer for it.
I put Kinlee in the truck and drove the farm lane with the windows down, calling his name into the dark. A dozen cows lifted their heads. A barn owl watched us go by. We were nearly to the county road when a pair of headlights came wobbling across the hay field toward us, bouncing hard, and I slammed on the brakes. It was a four wheeler, and driving it, covered to the eyebrows in mud and with a cut over one eye, was my son.
Wade killed the engine and slid off the seat. He looked like a man who had been dragged behind a tractor. “Mama,” he said, out of breath, “I know where he is. I know who took him. I have been chasing that truck for five miles.” I got out and stood in front of him in my nightgown, with my arms crossed, and asked him to start from the beginning. He did, and I am proud to say he did not leave out a single part that made him look bad.
After the argument at the fairgrounds he had not gone home. He had sat in his truck on the hill above the pasture, with the hat of Russell on the seat beside him, thinking about what the old trader had said, and about how little he had known his own father. Around midnight a stock trailer had come creeping up the farm lane with its lights off. Wade watched a man he knew, the man from Front Royal, walk right into the pasture, open the gate, and put a rope on Biscuit.
Sometimes a man needs to lose everything he thought he owned before he can finally see what he was meant to protect.
Wade did not call anyone. He went after the trailer on the four wheeler, across the fields, through the creek, and over a barbed wire fence that left a long gash in his sleeve. He caught up to it at the bottom of Hone Quarry Road, where the man from Front Royal had taken the turn too fast and slid the trailer into a ditch. Biscuit was standing perfectly calm on the shoulder of the road, with a rope hanging off his halter, nibbling grass. When Wade walked up and held out a hand, the horse put his nose in it.
By the time the sheriff pulled up, the man from Front Royal was sitting on the bumper of his truck with his head in his hands. His name was Dunn, and he did not even try to deny it. He had falsified papers for a living for years, he said, shuffling bloodlines on horses he sold to people who did not know better. He had done it on Biscuit too. Then last month, a trader from Winchester told him what Biscuit really was, and he realized he had sold a very valuable young horse for twenty five hundred dollars. He had wanted him back.
Biscuit came home at dawn in the back of the truck of Wade, because it was the only trailer left on the farm. Kinlee ran down the lane in bare feet. She did not say a word to anyone. She went straight to the horse, put her face in his neck, and stayed there for a full ten minutes. Wade stood a respectful distance away with the rope in his hand, and when she finally looked up and saw her father, the two of them did not need to say anything at all.
We drove to Kentucky that week, the three of us, in my old Buick, with the registration on the seat. The farm in Versailles belonged to Marjorie Hollis, an eighty one year old woman in a straw hat who met us at the fence and looked at Biscuit in the trailer for a long moment before she said anything. “Well,” she said, “there he is. Russell Pride all over again.” She took us up to her porch and poured iced tea, and in a very quiet voice told us about the year 1999.
In 1999 the bank nearly took our farm. I kept the books, but Russell had hidden a loan from me, thirty thousand dollars, borrowed from his old friend Marjorie. He was ashamed. When she offered to take the stallion in payment, Russell could not bear to say it out loud, so he told everyone the horse had died. She kept him in her pasture until the day he really did pass, and she had a few foals bred from him with frozen semen. Biscuit was the last, born to a mare she sold at auction. Dunn bought that mare and changed the papers, and that is how a prize foal came to be sold at a sale barn for twenty nine hundred dollars.
Marjorie told Wade she had no interest in taking the horse back. She said that Russell had paid her in full a long time ago, in Christmas cards and apologies, and she only wanted the foal to have a good home. Then she looked at Kinlee, who had not left the side of Biscuit for a minute, and asked her one question. What was the horse afraid of? Kinlee thought and said, thunder, mostly, and the sound of a gate. Marjorie smiled and said, “Then he is exactly where he belongs.”
Wade sold the red boat in September. He used part of the money to put a new roof on the barn and the rest to buy a good saddle for his daughter. On the first cold morning of October I found him in the tack room, hanging the old felt hat of Russell back on its nail. I am sixty six years old, and the farm is still in his name, as it should be. But I have my little house, my granddaughter beside me at the fence, and a young horse who nickers when he hears my truck.
