Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link Read Free Book Online

but unhurt.
    Another deputy arrives in his cruiser, leaves the lights flashing but shuts the siren off the way they do when speed is no longer necessary. The two men confer. One gets back on the radio and I see his lips move, see him recite my address, and I am tied right here to the present but I want to go back to that trip out west.
    I want to go back to the time when the only thing real about a horse was my dream of having one. A horse that existed only in my longing for him, and not the horse who is here, who is beloved, whom I recite poetry to, and who, even though I know I get every word of that poem right, is still dying by the side of the road.
    I look across his body, across the road, and see no lights on at the Wonderful residence.
    Please, God. Please don’t let the boys wake up and see this. Please
.
    I cup Major’s soft ear in my palm and choke out that line: “I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.”
    His breath leaves him in a sigh, I feel him relax, and I think—no, I know—that all the horse dreams of my girlhood are dead now. My marriage is dead, my dreams are dead, and my real horse is dead, too. And no one comes outside from the Wonderful house, because that is an easy prayer to answer.
    Then the deputy fills out some paperwork for me to sign, and soon everyone is gone. The two deputies, the people staring straight ahead, their smashed-up truck, the tow truck, and my horse, too. Gone.
    When I went to sleep last night, I had a horse named Major. Then I woke up. And all that’s left of him is a destroyed spot in the grass shaped exactly like a horse in mid-gallop. Yesterday morning, I thought I was lonely. Not just lonely, but six different kinds of lonely. I stare at the awful wound in the dirt and know that until this second, I didn’t even know what that word meant.
    Something else, though, is absolutely clear: this is the limitless space of the human heart.
    I walk away from the road, up the front steps, and into my empty farmhouse like a sleepwalker. I’m sticky with horsehair and dried blood, and my dogs smell it on me and must feel afraid, even lionhearted Super, because they crawl toward me on their bellies. I put my hands on their warm heads, stand in my dark kitchen, and hug that dumb and hopeful girl goodbye.
    My memory delivers the next couple of lines from that poem then, and I just let them come.
    The road I am on is a long road and I can go hungry again like I have gone hungry before
.
    What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?
    ·  ·  ·
    The sun actually comes up the next morning, and the one after that, too. Two days without Major and I can tell that Pepper already knows from lonely. She has pawed and stamped a deep hole in her stall, I went to Tractor Supply and bought a bag of her favorite treats, but she still won’t eat. Horses are herd animals, a holdover from days when they were more likely to meet their end by a wolf’s fang or a cougar’s claw and not the front end of a dual-axle pickup truck. They get anxious and lonely if kept all by themselves, I am in no position to buy another horse, and so I sell Pepper and most of my horse tack to a tourist ranch down the road.
    The boys ask me if we can go and visit her, and three times I make arrangements to, but when the time comes I am still too broken and can’t bring myself to see her again, and I make up excuses. After a few weeks, my sons don’t ask me about her anymore.
    And even though she is getting good care, I hear from a friend of a friend that Pepper is not adjusting well to her new home. She is allowed to leave the barn and accompany groups of trail riders, but since she is new to this ranch, and untried, she isn’t saddled up and assigned a rider. Instead, she is just patronized, and clipped behind one of the wranglers’ horses by her halter.
    One day, these trail riders head out as usual, but Pepper is left behind in a pasture.