Pony Dreams Read Free

pitcher from
at the pump on the sink, dunked a wooden dowel with a cone-shaped
end into it, and snapped out the sheets.
    As soon as she wiped the table, I laid a
sheet flat, tested the iron, sprinkled on water, and set to work.
The most awful stench of hot cotton hit me hard. I wrinkled my nose
but nothing improved the horrific smell.
    “Grace!” Trapper Andy gasped.
    “Don't you dare!” Ma screeched. “Get outside
right this minute, Andy.”
    She shooed him out the door. I kept ironing
but listened hard to figure out what had just happened.
    “She looks like my Grace,” he said in a
broken voice.
    “You can't talk about that with Abigail,” she
said. “Don't break your word, Andy, or I'll have to tell you to
stay away.”
    “I miss them so much,” he moaned.
    “Hush!” She peeked through the window.
    I pretended to be very busy.
    “She doesn't remember,” she said. “Don't
remind Abigail about that time. It's hard enough on her, being a
girl on the frontier. Don't make her life more difficult by making
her remember she was the only one to survive that day.”
    I couldn’t help eavesdropping but stilled at
my mother’s words. What? Who does she mean?
    A mystery had just appeared in the middle of
my boring life. My mind whirled with how to solve this mystery,
which apparently had a lot to do with me remembering something that
happened a very long time ago.
    There was no time to worry about mysteries
now. Ma would come inside soon, and I needed to have at least four
sheets ironed and folded before she did.
    * * * *
    The next three days, I wondered about the
mysterious conversation between Ma and Trapper Andy. Why did he
call me Grace? That was my middle name, but my family avoided
calling me by it no matter how bad I messed up.
    A hint pushed through the murky memories of
my childhood, I must have been about five. At some time, there were
two other children in the house. I remembered laughing with them,
and running around the corral after Pa brought home a large group
of mustangs with Adam, Charles, and Bart. Some of the horses had
screamed with what sounded like terror. Pa, Ma, and a couple of
other adults had shouted. Flying hooves had descended toward my
face and then there was nothing but blackness and incredible pain.
Without thought, I rubbed the side of my neck, where I had a scar
no one had ever explained.
    “How did I get this?” I whispered. “What
happened?”
    The scar was shaped like a horse's hoof,
actually more like the shoes all horses wore. The impression of the
steel shoe was only half there, as if only part of the foot had hit
me. A horse had never hurt me, as far as I remembered.
    Lost in thought, I stared out the kitchen
window and tried to drag those memories out of my brain.
    “Best get moving,” Ma snapped as she trotted
past with a load of men's underwear. “I don't want to have to
remind you about putting up those beans and peas Peter and Paul
brought in from the garden.” She paused at the door. “Don't step
outside until I have these unmentionables decently hung.”
    She never called underwear anything but
unmentionables. Ma even went so far as to forbid me from touching
any of them but the bloomers she and I wore. According to her, I
had time enough for handling men's unmentionables as soon as I had
my own home and children. It was one of the many things I couldn't
know about—as if it didn't exist until after I had a husband.
    I went into the pantry and found the canning
things. After lugging crate after crate of glass Mason jars into
the kitchen, I pumped water into a large pot and set it to boil,
and then used a knife to scrape lye soap into the dishpan. On the
counter beside me, a mountain of beans awaited my attention. All of
them needing their ends snapped and then I'd have to break them up
into mouth-sized bites. An even bigger pile of peas filled half a
dozen buckets beside the door. I had to shell those before putting
them in jars. My fingers ached thinking about