Growing Up True by Craig S. Barnes

Author:Craig S. Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

13.

The Plow Horse Tries to Plow

THERE WAS A STRANGE MAN called Sam who drove around the dirt roads of the county in his horse and buggy, swearing and cursing at small boys playing in the fields. We might be racing wood chips down the feeder ditch, or chasing a lost calf, or standing out in the middle of the alfalfa haying, sweating in the hot summer sun. Along would come Sam in his buggy, cracking his whip, shouting obscenities, song, or the news about Communists, usually all in the same sentence. Sam was out of his head. He was not so lucky, probably, as all the rest of us who had hay fields and stock and friends. He seemed to have a good relationship with his horse, and he never caused me any grief except to scare me off the road. He was loud, though, and everybody gave him a wide berth. Everybody knew Sam.

“Hi, Sam!” my friend Darryl yelled whenever Sam came trotting around the bend, sitting up there in his buggy seat, flailing his whip in the wind. Sam would rattle off some very pointed but absolutely unintelligible reply that Darryl and I pretended to understand, but frankly I never got the gist of it.

Sam rode around the county roads for several years, waving his whip in the air, shouting at the cattle, or trees, or boys. He had black whiskers and a dirty face. He had a black horse and everything about him was smudged or black except for one shiny, red stripe that ran down both sides of his buggy, kind of pretty, really, just below the seat. Month after month, he trotted up and down the roads through wheat country.

“You know what I think?” said Darryl one day. “I think that old loon was talking about that red stripe!” I could not tell and I didn’t think much about it. Maybe so, maybe not; it was not my affair and I was a little afraid of Sam.

There were not many people around who still drove buggies. The idea of it caught Erik’s imagination. Erik could ride. He could win a horse race, he had shown that. He could fix fence and stack hay. He could do almost anything. But he had never tried hitching up a buggy. He thought about that for some months.

Then, as if by magic, that year at Christmas when we came into the living room singing the usual carols, there out the front window on the lawn was a buggy, big wooden wheels high in the grass. On the floor under the tree were all sorts of pieces of leather harness. “My, my,” my mother said, mystically, “Santa has done it again.”

When the snow melted and spring came, Erik decided it was time to hook up the buggy. He chose Captain as the pulling horse, because Captain was the biggest.

“This will be interesting,” said my mother.

“Well, Smoky’s too fat for the harness,” said Erik. “And Chita’s too small and spooks easy. Chita will spook at a fly.

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