Nobody's Angel

2

THE YARD LIGHT ERECT UPON ITS WOOD STANCHION THREW down a yellow faltering glow infinitely chromatic falling through the China willow to the ground pounded up against the house by the unrepentantly useless horses. Patrick Fitzpatrick glided under the low branches on his mare as the band circled into the corral for salt and grain and water and the morning’s inspection for cracked hooves, lameness, splints, bowed tendons, lice, warbles, wire cuts, ulcerated eyes, wolf teeth, spavin, gravel, founder and worms.

Near the light’s edge the dogs watched him pass: Cole Younger, yellow, on his back, all four legs dangling, let his eyelids fall open upside down; Alba, black, in the sub-shadow of mountain ash, ready to run; Zip T. Crow, brindle, jaw alight on parallel front legs, considered starting a stampede with his hyena voice. Thinking finally of the consequences, he fell to dreaming as the last horse, a yearling running at an angle, jog-trotted into the corral to drink in the creek alongside the other shadowy horses deployed as regularly as a picket line. Zip T. Crow slunk over behind some relic of a walking cultivator and dropped into its confused shadows like a shy insurrectionist. This was the day to ride up to the airplane.