CHAPTER SIX

GRAMP AND MOM go to work, and the house gets very quiet. Gran washes dishes. Lily dries them. Then she puts on her coat again and goes down to the barn.

Beware stands where Lily left her. She isn’t asleep, but she isn’t wide awake either. She seems to be listening to something deep inside herself, and she hardly notices Lily.

“Beware,” Lily says, “look.” She holds up a bright orange carrot and breaks it in half. The broken carrot smells fresh and sweet. Lily holds out a piece for Beware.

Beware looks at the carrot. She takes a piece in her mouth and crunches, very slowly. Shreds of carrot drop into the shavings. Beware does not try to pick them up. When Lily offers her the rest of the carrot, she turns her head away.

“Oh, Beware,” Lily says.

She folds back the blanket on Beware’s right side and listens. She hears the whining, pinging sound. On the left side she hears nothing. It is like opening your eyes in the dark. Beware’s stomach is pulled in tight. Her muscles make long ridges down her sides.

It will take more time, Lily tells herself. Dr. Brand is a good vet, but the medicine does take time. Time, and walking. Lily snaps a rope onto Beware’s halter. “Come on, let’s go!”

Lily doesn’t have a watch. She leads Beware in a big circle in front of the barn, and she counts to herself. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three,” all the way to sixty. In one minute she can go almost twice around the circle. So they have to make almost forty circles before Beware can rest.

Beware’s step is heavy and slow. It gets even slower. Finally Lily has to go get her riding whip and show it to Beware. Beware isn’t afraid of the whip, but when she sees it, she knows she must do what Lily says.

When Beware is back in the stall, Lily listens to her sides. They sound just the same.

Lily walks around behind the barn. The other horses are eating hay out of the big rack. Lily listens to the rustle as each horse gathers a mouthful of hay and the hard, grinding sound as they chew. She looks at the horse manure on the ground. Dr. Brand is right. In its place even horse manure is beautiful. If Lily could see some in Beware’s stall, she would be very happy.

Gran thinks Lily should read a schoolbook since she is staying home today. Lily looks at her math for a while, but it doesn’t make sense. The math she is doing today is clock math—a half hour walking, two hours of rest. It is walking math. Twenty slow circles in one direction, and twenty in the other.

When Lily goes back to the barn, there is no manure in Beware’s stall. She hasn’t drunk her water. The sounds inside her are just the same.

All day long Lily walks Beware, and rests her, and listens. The day gets grayer and colder, and the wind starts to blow. The circle in front of the barn gets dark and trampled. Lily’s legs ache. She feels cold all the time, even when she’s in beside the stove.

And Beware gets no better. Sometimes Lily can hear a tiny, faraway grumble in her left side, and sometimes she can’t. But the pinging sound on her right side doesn’t change. Whatever is blocking Beware’s bowel doesn’t move.

Lily is walking Beware again when the school bus goes by. When she gets back to the house, Gran says, “Mandy wants you to call.”

“Lily!” Mandy says. “What’s the matter?”

“Beware has colic.” Now Lily starts to cry. Up to now she hasn’t cried at all.

On the phone Mandy is quiet. Then she asks, “Lily … Lily, how sick is she?”

Lily can’t answer. It doesn’t seem possible that Beware’s life is in danger. She isn’t rolling. She isn’t groaning. In some ways she seems almost normal. But she might die. She really might.

“Oh, Lily,” Mandy says, “I wish I could come over.”

“She won’t eat anything!” Lily says. She has almost stopped crying. “Not even a carrot.”

“If I could come, I’d bring her cough drops,” Mandy says. “Remember how she loved those herbal cough drops?”

Mandy sounds as if Beware is already dead. Lily sniffs and wipes her eyes. “I might still have some,” she says. “Mandy, I have to go. I have to call the vet again.”

Dr. Brand is at another farm, miles away. She has two more calls to make after that, and then, the lady at the clinic says, she will come see Beware.

Lily goes to the pantry, where Gran is mixing a cake. She finds the cough drop bag. There are four left.

“Dr. Brand coming again?” Gran asks. Lily nods.

“Your gramp has a lot of faith in her. If anybody can help your horse, she can.”

But maybe no one can help Beware. For a minute Lily doesn’t even want to go to the barn. On the way down she will start to hope. But when she opens the stall door, Beware will just be standing there, no better than before.

“Gran,” Lily asks, “what was it like when you had your gallbladder? I mean, when you were sick, before they took it out?”

“I don’t think it was much like a horse with colic,” Gran says. But Lily doesn’t know. From the outside it seems the same. Gran was hurting, and she seemed to look inside herself, not out at the world, just the way Beware is doing. And there was nothing Lily could do to help.

But when Gran was sick it was different, too. The ambulance came, and she was carried away to a hospital. Lily remembers a bed that adjusted up and down. She remembers the nose tube, and she remembers the IV—water with medicine in it that dripped down from a bag, through a tube and a needle into Gran’s arm. Nurses kept coming into the room to look at Gran, to see if she was okay.

Beware has only the old barn, full of cobwebs, and a blanket that is too big for her. She has only a vet who is miles away and Lily.

“I’ll come down with you,” Gran says. She puts on Gramp’s old coat and tall rubber boots, and they step out the front door together.

“Rain,” Gran says, holding out her hand to catch some. Lily holds her hand out, too.

“Ice,” she says.

They walk down to the barn together. How will she walk Beware now? Lily wonders. The old horse blanket isn’t waterproof. It will get wet, and Beware will get cold.

Beware is just standing there, the way Lily knew she would be. She points her ears at them for a moment, and then her ears droop back again.

“She’s no worse anyway,” Gran says. But Beware should be better by now. Gran is just trying to make Lily feel better.

Lily takes a cough drop out of her pocket. She holds it close, so Beware can see. She opens the tiny wrapper.

Beware points her ears again. “She remembers!” Lily says. “She remembers the wrapper sound!” Lily crinkles the wrapper as much as she can, and Beware’s ears stay forward. Gently she nudges Lily’s hand. Her soft upper lip pokes into Lily’s palm and fumbles up the cough drop. Crunch! Crunch!

“Oh, Gran!” Lily says. She hunts in her pocket for another cough drop. Beware watches. Are her eyes a little brighter? Lily finds a cough drop. She crunches and crinkles the wrapper, and Beware nudges her hand, harder, this time. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

“I wouldn’t give her any more,” Gran says. “Wait and see what Dr. Brand thinks.”

A cough drop is so small, Lily doesn’t see how one more would hurt Beware. But maybe Gran is right. Beware nudges Lily’s arm, and Lily says, “No more.” And that is the first time things have been normal since this time yesterday.