One Good Horse

Preface WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE.-- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,The Tempest In trots the colt. Look at him. Beautiful and nameless. A coming two-year-old. His black mane traps the sunlight, his coat still shaggy from winter. Eyes bright, mischievous, like a little boy waiting to pull a trick. Like me, he is full of wonder and a little scared. He trots around the small round corral, showing off a bit, kicking at a cloud. And then he stops and turns toward me, breathing me in. Waiting. Waiting for the heavy spring clouds to lift and reveal the heights of the Mission Mountains. Waiting for the shadows of returning birds to paint the land gray. I remember how the lake, now like poured lead, turns summer chrome. I remember it all, sometimes, just before I go to bed. Memory is a narcotic. The outstretched arms of a souvenir as it beckons you to remember, to dream. In this life, you are promised nothing, and everything. I look back sometimes, and though I recall vague outlines, I cannot remember the specific shape of things that were once so important in my life. A boss's face, the sound of a cast-iron triangle calling wranglers and sleepy-eyed dudes to breakfast in an aspen-gold Colorado meadow, the way the bottom of a horse's hoof looks like a charcoal heart. In my twenties, I fell in love. Everything happened so fast, I'm not sure what I fell in love with first: the horse, the girl, or the land. I know for certain I loved the girl the most and that everything good flowed from that love. After we graduated from college, Jennifer and I moved west together, searching for a life to call our own. Two years later, we were married. Another five years found us on a ranch in southeastern Montana, fifteen square miles of shortgrass and sagebrush and space that I never could contain, no matter how much fence I built. The ranch failed me, and I failed the ranch. Running the place was more than I could manage, like some anxiety nightmare, a test I couldn't pass. And I thought that having to sell out and leave those dreams behind was the break in my heart that I would nurse the rest of my life. We were just beginning to talk about having kids, about starting our family. Carter was born on New Year's Eve, six years ago. It seems only a hoofbeat ago, a lifetime. New Year's Eve. It's a good time to look forward and back and try to see how far you've come. I write Carter letters to try to capture time, to hold it for a while, with words. There is so much I want to tell him, so many things I want to say. Balancing between this year and last, I can't remember what I've written in the past. I imagine, read back to back, the letters pin me down as a repetitive old man, a bore spouting the same stale stories about the state of the world and our little place in it. What I'm really trying to do is to tell Carter how much I love him and his mother, to make up for all of the times I've forgotten to say it out loud. Now, I can't imagine there is anything left to say. Or, maybe, there is too much. I know it won't fit on a page or two, won't wait for the day when my son opens the wrinkled envelopes and smoothes each page, the years unfolding. When Carter tries to tell a story and it all comes out at once and he gulps air like he is drowning in words, Jennifer tells him, "Do your best. Use your words. Go slow." I am not too proud to take advice meant for a little boy. Use words. Go slow. Slower still. Copyright 2006 by Tom Groneberg Chapter One INVENTING A STORY WITH GRASS,I FIND A YOUNG HORSE DEEP INSIDE IT.-- JAMES DICKEY,"A Birth" The autumn moon rises full and blue and marbled over the Mission Valley. In a barn, at the end of a lane, the mare grunts, lies on her side, stands, lies back down. The man is there, wGroneberg, Tom is the author of 'One Good Horse ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743265171 and ISBN 0743265173.