Part Eight: The Road Home
Eli and the horse went east.
The road that ran along the eastern edge of the property was the road he had come in on, and it was the road he went back on. The horse walked beside him without being led — it walked at the pace Eli walked, slightly behind and to his left, in the specific position of an animal that has chosen a location relative to another person and is maintaining it.
He did not know yet where he was going to take the horse.
He had not planned this part because he had not been certain of the part before it. He had been certain that he was going to go to the arena. He had been certain that he was going to step forward. He had been certain that the horse would know him, because the horse had always known him, because some things do not go away with absence — some things persist across distance and time and the specific difficulty of two years without seeing each other, and the connection between Eli and this horse was one of those things.
He had not been certain of what Harrison Calloway would do.
He had prepared for several possibilities. He had prepared for the possibility that the man would call security, which had not happened. He had prepared for the possibility that the man would be angry, which had happened but had not produced the consequences Eli had been prepared for. He had prepared for the possibility that forgiveness would be required, which it had been, and which he had known it would be, because his father had told him many things and one of them was that forgiveness is not something you give to the person who wronged you. It is something you give to yourself, so that you can walk away from what they did without carrying it.
He had not been certain he could do it.
He had done it.
The road was quiet in the late afternoon. The heat had begun its slow retreat from the peak of the day, and the air had a quality that it would not have had two hours ago — slightly less white, slightly more habitable. A bird was doing something in the scrub at the road’s edge. The horse’s footsteps on the dirt road had the specific rhythm of unhurried movement.
He thought about his father.
He thought about the question the voice had raised at the edge of the arena — the question that everyone had heard and that no one had answered. He had lived with a version of that question for two years. He had not answered it either, in the sense that he did not have answers — he had only the things that he knew, which were: his father had gone back to the ranch, and his father had not come home, and the horse had disappeared on the same night.
He had his own theories.
He had thought about them across two years with the specific, patient attention of a child who is also managing grief and who has learned that thinking about the thing and grieving the thing are not the same process and can happen at the same time.
He did not know if the investigation would find what had happened.
He knew that he had done what he came to do. He had reclaimed the horse. He had said the truth in the right room to the right person. He had forgiven, which his father had taught him was the hardest and the most important thing.
He would bring the horse home.
His mother would see it.
She would understand what it meant that it was here — that Eli had gone and had come back, and that the horse had come back with him. She would not ask all the questions immediately, because she had learned across two years of managing impossible things to receive things in stages, to take what was offered and hold it before asking for more.
He would tell her, when the time was right, everything.
