Farewell Summer
The last weeks of the summer were like my best dreams come true. Evvie and Jinnae and I rode our shining steeds everywhere. We even rode them swimming in the Willett pond in spite of the snapping turtle. Sam would do anything we wanted, he was perfect—except for one thing. Ever since that day of my long short ride when I had yarned his mouth, he would toss his head if I asked him to go left or stop. I was deathly afraid that I had hurt his mouth permanently, so I started riding him with just a halter, and sometimes with nothing at all except his mane.
Ed’s heifers escaped from the pasture, and Sam and I chased them up Argue and herded them home. Ed was real pleased that I had rescued his “gals” and real shocked to see me riding my horse with nothing but a halter and a lead rope, but Mom got scared so I had to use the bridle again, and Sam went back to tossing his head.
We went berry-picking on top of the big hill in Byron’s back pasture and got zillions of berries and made jam and pies for us and for Byron too, because they were his berries. He was real grateful too, because She didn’t bake no more.
We loved Byron’s hill, not just because of the berries, but because we could see for fifty miles from its flat top when we galloped across it. Evvie named it “Amon Hen,” the Seat of Seeing, a name she got from “The Fellowship of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien.
One night in August, when Dad told us that there would be meteor showers, we three girls rode up Amon Hen to sleep out and watch the shooting stars. We turned the horses loose to graze with the sheep; we lay back on our bedrolls, smelling the grass and the wild thyme and Oswego Tea, and looking for planets and meteors. On top of the hill the stars were almost at eye level, and what with the meteors streaking down we felt like we were floating upwards right into heaven.
After school started back in Marlborough, we still went up to The Farm weekends. Ed and Dad hired Byron to check on Sam and the heifers every day till hunting began. Before Opening Day of deer season Wayne would trailer the cattle home, and Evvie and I would ride Sam to Colby Valley to board for the winter. We had to ride over there before hunting season because hundreds of flatlanders came Upstate deer hunting. Farmers locked their stock up during deer season, because the stupid flatlanders couldn’t tell a cow or a horse from a deer and blasted away at anything that moved, including each other.
“They spoil it for the rest of us,” Ed said. “Two guys shot up a woman hanging out her laundry a few years back. She lived to tell about it, but them Gol-durn hmf hmf hmf fools shoulda been locked up and throw away the key.” Ed never cussed like Byron. He was a pillar of the Church and so was Bea.
And it came to pass on the second Sunday in October that Evvie and I took our last ride of the year, over to Ed’s by way of Trace. The day was hazy and dead quiet, with every sugar maple in the county looking as if it was on fire. The hayfields were still deep green and the cornfields were sere and stubbly; the crickets trilled their long sad note. The smell of turning aspen leaves and wood-smoke from people’s stoves hung over the hollows. We rode slow and kept silence with the woods, soaking it all up for winter.
When we had slid off Sam’s back at Pilchers and turned him out into the yard, he stuck around near us as if he knew we were going away. We pulled his ears and hugged his head and he gently itched his cheek bones on our shoulders. We heard a chuckle. Ed was leaning on the swing gate, his blue eyes twinkling.
“By Gum, you girls,” he said, “that hoss really does seem to like you!”
“Nah, I guess he’s just used to us now,” I said. Then Ed said come have a bite, so we went into Bea’s warm kitchen to drown our sorrows in tumblers of new milk and fresh-baked brownies. Then we went home. No, not home. Just Downstate.