The Last Woman in the Forest by Diane Les Becquets

Author:Diane Les Becquets
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

VICTIM PORTRAIT #3

Lynn-Marie Pontante

I was eighteen when my father left my mother. I had already graduated from high school and had spent the summer at an equine training camp in Idaho. The day I returned my father was sitting in a chair across from the sofa, in a small room we referred to as the library. He’d called a family meeting with me and my mom and my two older brothers. The air was hot from the sun’s glare through the windows and my own apprehension and the other emotions and bodies in the room. The smell of the barn and horses from the camp where I had been was still on my skin and clothes. Horsehair stuck to my arms. I picked off a single short strand and pressed it between my fingers.

I didn’t go to college that fall, despite my parents’ and my original plans. I needed to look into the eyes of horses and a sweet old Lab that had always been mine. I needed to feel the mountains and the larch and the tall western pines.

I came upon the ad on a Sunday afternoon while I was reading the paper. Wanted: Caretaker of senior horses. Housing provided. I didn’t tell my family that I had applied, and they were surprised when I said I was going. I cried the first two hours of the drive from Spokane to Libby, with my dog, Tully, sitting beside me. I could still smell my mother’s perfume and sadness on my face.

I moved into a yurt on a large piece of tangled property with six fenced-in paddocks and a barn that housed eight horses. Most of the horses were lame, and though they could no longer be ridden, they seemed to enjoy themselves and came right up to me when I called them.

There was a picnic table outside the barn. Between chores, I would sit on top of it and play my guitar. I would write songs about love and Jesus and kindness. I would sing to the horses and to Tully stretched out on the picnic table beside me, the sun warming her black coat and the white hairs on her belly.

Jason pulled up to the barn one day when I was singing. He stepped out of his truck with his long, lanky legs. He wore jeans and cowboy boots, a long-sleeve shirt, and a cowboy hat. He carried a toolbox and said he was the farrier. The owner of Greener Pastures had told me the farrier would be stopping by. But I hadn’t expected someone like Jason, boyish and almost shy though he was in his midtwenties, with eyes as green as a meadow and wavy brown hair the color of the bark on an alder. Two of the horses had hoof rot, or thrush as Jason called it. He showed me how to apply the antiseptic and gave me boots to keep their feet dry. I liked the way he talked to the horses, and I liked

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