Rodeo

 

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The Bar-A, in a necktie

 

The pale blue button-up shirt came out of the closet for the first time since Vann's, the one Cora had hung in the cart like it was made of glass and called good for church or court or a funeral, God forbid any of the three, and here it was court, so Brad put it on in the trailer and did the buttons with hands that wanted to shake and mostly didn't, and stood in front of the little mirror over the sink and did not know the boy in it, again, the same not-knowing he'd had in the Vann's fitting room, except this boy had a collar and a comb-through and a certain set to his jaw that Brad recognized after a second as the one Cora had been making him practice on a chair.

He did not own a tie and had said so, and Amos had said good, a fourteen-year-old in a necktie looks like a hostage, leave it, and had then appeared at the trailer door in a jacket Brad had never seen, a real one, gray, old, brushed, with a bolo at the throat and his good hat in his hand, an old man dressed for the most serious kind of day there was, and had looked Brad over head to foot the way Gus looked over a horse before a haul.

"There he is," Amos said. "You clean up like your mama's people, whatever else." He said it and then heard himself say it and something crossed his face, because your mama was a whole minefield and he'd stepped on the edge of it without meaning to, and he set it down gentle. "You ready?"

"No," said Brad, honestly.

"Good," said Amos. "Only fools are ready for a courtroom. Ready men have generally got something to hide. We'll go on scared and honest, it's the better way in." He put his hat on. "Wade's meeting us on the steps. Cora's driving the others in the van directly, so you'll have your people in the seats behind you, which the judge is going to notice, because judges notice who fills the benches, it's half their job. Come on. It's an hour to Dalton and I don't run late to the things that matter."

 

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The drive to Dalton

 

Cal had wanted to drive Brad himself, and there had been a small kind of negotiation about it that Brad had watched happen over his own head the way he watched a lot of things happen over his own head lately - the men in his life sorting out, quietly, who got to carry which part of him on which day - and it had come out that Amos would drive Brad, because Amos was the petitioner and it looked right, and Cal would come in his own truck with Sam, because Sam had flatly refused to go to school on a day this size and Cal had flatly refused to make him, and so the little convoy went down the state road toward Dalton, Amos's old truck in front and the sheriff's mud-colored pickup behind, and somewhere back of both of them the faded van with BAR-A RODEO on the side full of the rest of Brad's people in their good clothes.

"I'm going to tell you what's going to happen," Amos said, eyes on the road, "so none of it can jump out at you, because a thing you're expecting can't knock you down the way a thing you're not can. We go in. We sit up front with Wade. The judge comes in and everybody stands up - that's just manners, it doesn't mean anything's wrong. Wade does most of the talking. He'll ask me some questions and I'll answer them true. He might ask you a question or two. If he does, you look at the judge, not at him, and you tell her the truth in whatever words you've got, and you don't dress it up and you don't cut it down. There's no wrong words in there. There's only true and not, and you've never once been any good at not, which is the best thing about you."

Brad looked out the window and worked on his breathing, which he was getting better at, which Doc Hollis had taught him without ever calling it teaching, the low even count.

"Is he going to be there," Brad said. It was not quite a question. He had not said the word Dad since Vann's, since the aftershave going past him toward the roofing nails, and he did not say it now.

"No," Amos said. He said it plain and he said it right away, which Brad understood was a mercy, the not making him wait for it. "He signed a paper that says he don't contest it and don't care to appear. Wade's got it in the folder." A pause, the old man choosing. "I'll tell you the truth of that, because you're old enough for the truth and because you'll build a worse story if I don't. It's not that he thought about it and stayed away to spare you a scene. He just didn't want to spend the gas. Signing the paper was less trouble to him than the drive." He let that be what it was. "I'm sorry, son. I'd rather it were a kinder reason. But a kind reason would be a lie, and I don't tell you those, that's the whole deal between us. The plain fact is the man's letting you go the same way he'd let go a thing he'd quit using. And the only good in it, the only speck, is that a man like that don't fight, and so today's going to be easy, and you get to keep your whole life on account of the one true thing about your daddy being that he doesn't want it."

Brad sat with that. It was ugly and it was clean, both, the way the true things about Gerald always came out ugly and clean.

"What about -" he started, and couldn't finish it, and didn't have to, because Amos had been waiting for it, had known it was coming the way you know weather.

"I don't know about your mama," Amos said, gently. "I'm not going to tell you she'll be there and I'm not going to tell you she won't, because I don't know, and I'm done handing you things I don't know for sure like they're sure. She didn't sign anything. That's all I've got. She didn't sign the paper Gerald signed, and nobody's made her, and whether that means something or whether it's just one more thing she couldn't quite make herself do, I can't tell you, and I won't guess at your mother out loud in a truck. Some guesses aren't mine to make where you can hear them." He reached over, once, and gripped the back of Brad's neck for a second, warm, the way you'd steady a colt at a scary gate, and let go. "We'll go find out together. That's the most I can promise. We find out together and whatever it is, you get in this truck after and you come home to the Bar-A, and Dusty's going to be exactly the same menace he was this morning, and that part is not in any judge's hands. That part's already yours."

 

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The steps

 

Wade Corley was waiting on the courthouse steps, and he was not what Brad had pictured, which had been somebody like the lawyers on television - Wade was a heavyset man about Cal's age in a suit that fit him the way a suit fits a man who'd rather be fishing, with Cal's same broad build and a manila folder and a way of shaking Brad's hand that was firm and brief and did not make a thing of it.

"Bradley," he said. "Wade. I'm Ellen's brother - Ellen's Cal's wife - so that makes me some kind of shirttail nothing to you by about Thursday, and I intend to collect on it at Christmas." He said it easy, giving Brad a family to be a shirttail of, doing it on purpose the way all these people did things on purpose. "Here's where we are, and then I'll hush and let you breathe. Your father consented in writing - didn't contest, didn't appear, it's all in here. So this is not a fight. Nobody's going to stand up and say a hard word about you. What this is, is a formality with a heart in it - Judge Mercer's going to satisfy herself that Mr. Kettering here is fit and that this arrangement is in your best interest, which it is, plainly, and then she's going to make it permanent. Forty-five minutes. You'll be back in a horse stall by supper." He glanced up as the van came laboring into the square. "And it appears you brought a section."

They had. The Bar-A unloaded into the square in their good clothes, Cora in a dress and a hat with a bird on it that Brad had never in his life seen and would treasure forever, Gus in a bolo and a look of profound discomfort at being indoors and shod, Deena, Hutch out of his clown-red and into a sport coat, Doc Hollis with her braid brushed out, even the two chute men, standing close the way they stood, having driven over on their own day off to sit in a bench for a boy - and they came up the steps in a body, awkward and enormous and dressed up wrong and exactly right, and Brad stood at the top of the courthouse steps in Dalton, Georgia, and watched his whole found family climb toward him, and had to look at the folder in Wade's hands for a second until he could see straight.

And that was when he saw the car.

 

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Across the square

 

It was parked across the square, nosed in at an angle in front of the drugstore, half in the shade of the water oaks that grew around the old courthouse lawn, and it was his mother's car.

Brad knew it the way you know a thing you have ridden in ten thousand times, the particular blue of it, the dent in the front fender from the church parking lot, the little cross that hung from the mirror, and it was parked across the square with the windows up and the engine off and a person sitting in the driver's seat, not getting out, and even at that distance, even across a whole town square with the traffic going between, Brad knew the shape of his mother's head.

Everything stopped.

He did not decide to look at her. He was just looking, the way iron looks at a magnet, the way he'd looked up when Ms. Okafor said his name, some part of him older than his sense already turned all the way toward the one direction he'd spent three weeks and then a month teaching himself not to point, and across the square, through two panes of glass and forty yards of ordinary Tuesday, his mother looked back at him.

He knew she saw him. He would never be able to prove it and he never once doubted it. Across that whole square she went still in the particular way a person goes still when the thing they have been looking for and dreading walks out of a courthouse in a blue church shirt, and Brad stood at the top of the steps and looked at his mother and his mother looked at him and for one second, one whole second, the longest of his life, something happened in the shape of her - he saw her hand come up off the wheel, he saw the door move, he saw her lean the half-inch toward it that a body leans when it is about to get out of a car, he saw his mother, across a town square, begin.

And then not.

He watched it lose. He had watched it lose before, on a porch, over papers, secondhand, in Amos's careful telling; but he had never seen it happen, and now he saw it, the whole small war of it fought out in a woman's shoulders across forty yards - the lean forward and then the settling back, the hand coming up and then going back to the wheel, the door starting and then not, the thing in her that was his mother rising up one more time against the thing in her that had gotten quieter every year for fifteen of them, rising and cresting and breaking and running back out to sea, and leaving her sitting in a parked car across the square with both hands on the wheel and her son forty yards away in a shirt she had not bought him, unable, one more time, to cross.

"Brad." Sam was at his elbow. Sam had come up the steps and seen where Brad was looking and seen the car, and Sam's voice was very careful. "Hey. You want - do you want me to go over there? I could go. Or Amos could. Or nobody. You just tell me which."

Brad looked at his mother across the square. He was fourteen. He did not have the words for what he was looking at - he would spend years getting them, would still be getting them as a grown man - but he had the thing under the words, which is that he understood, standing there, that she was not going to come, and that it was not because she didn't want to, which would have been simpler, which he could have hated cleanly. It was worse than not wanting to. She wanted to. He had just watched her want to. And the wanting was not enough, had never been enough, was a flicker in a window that could not get a whole woman out of a car, and there was nothing forty yards away that a boy could do about the size of it.

"No," Brad said. His voice came out steadier than he was. "No, don't. She - " He stopped. Started over, the way Cora had taught him, plain and true and cut to size. "She came. That's - " He didn't finish it, because he didn't know how it finished, because he didn't know yet whether she came was a kindness or a cruelty or just a fact, whether a mother who drives an hour to a courthouse and cannot make herself cross the last forty yards has given her son something or taken something or only shown him, one final time, the exact shape of the hole. He would be a long time deciding. He was not going to decide it on the courthouse steps with his people waiting.

"She came," he said again, and left it there, unfinished, because some things you have to leave unfinished until you're big enough to finish them, and he wasn't, not yet, not that.

Amos had come up on his other side. He did not look at the car - he looked at Brad, only at Brad - and he said, low, "It's time to go in, son. She knows where we are. She can come in behind us if she's able. That door doesn't lock." He said it without any weight of promise on it, laying it down flat, a true thing that asked nothing: the door doesn't lock. "And if she's not able, then we go in without her, same as we'd have done, and we do the thing we came to do. You don't have to carry her across that square. That was never your weight to carry. You hear me? Not one pound of it is yours."

Brad took one more look at the blue car across the square, at the still shape of his mother's head, at the door that had started to open and hadn't.

Then he turned his back on it, which was the hardest thing he did all day, harder than the judge, harder than any of it, and he walked into the courthouse with an old man on one side of him and his best friend on the other and his whole strange family filing into the benches behind him, and he let the door swing shut, and he did not look back to see whether it opened again.

 

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All rise

 

"All rise," the bailiff said, and they did - the whole packed left side of the little courtroom stood up, Cora and Gus and Deena and Doc Hollis and Hutch and the chute men and Cal and Sam, the entire Bar-A on its feet for a boy, and Brad stood between Amos and Wade at the front and felt them at his back, all of them standing, and thought about the words Amos had used in the truck, everybody stands up, it's just manners, it doesn't mean anything's wrong. But it did mean something. Brad's blood family had signed him away sitting and standing both, had let him go like a package, standing up on a porch without reading past the first line. And here was a courtroom full of people who'd known him a month getting to their feet for him all at once because a woman in a robe had walked in, and Brad understood that standing up, it turned out, was a thing you could do two entirely different ways, and that he had spent his whole life on the wrong side of it and had somehow, by the grace of a water oak and a limping man, landed on the right.

Judge Ruth Ann Mercer was a small sharp-eyed woman with reading glasses and gray hair pinned up hard, and she sat down and told them all to sit, and she read the folder for a minute in a silence nobody dared fill, turning pages, her face giving away exactly nothing, and then she looked up over the glasses, first at Amos, a long look, and then at Brad, a longer one.

It went the way Wade had said it would, mostly. It was a formality with a heart in it. Wade laid it out in his easy fishing-suit voice, the finding of the boy, the temporary order, the doctor, the school, the consent of the father in writing, and the judge asked Amos to stand and be sworn, and Amos stood with his hat held over the rail in both hands and answered her questions in his slow deliberate way, yes ma'am and no ma'am and the plain unhurried truth, how old he was and what the Bar-A was and how many young people he'd taken in over the years and why, and when she asked him that last one, why, the courtroom got very still, and Amos was quiet a moment, choosing, the way he chose.

"Because somebody ought to have done it for me a long time back, Your Honor," he said, "and nobody did. And I got old waiting on the chance to do it for somebody else. And then this one turned up under a water oak on the back of my place, half starved and braced for me to run him off, and I have run out of chances to do it for the boy I was, so I'd purely like to do it for the boy he is." He turned his hat a quarter turn in his hands. "He's a good boy. He's gentle with everything weaker than him, which in my experience is the whole of what character even is. I'd be proud to have the keeping of him, if the court sees fit. And if the court doesn't, I'll keep him anyhow and just do more paperwork, so it'd save us all some trouble to make it official."

A sound went through the courtroom that was almost a laugh and was mostly something else, and Judge Mercer's mouth did a thing at one corner that she did not permit to become anything, and she thanked him and let him sit.

And then she looked at Brad, and Brad's stomach dropped, because he had half-hoped to get out of this without being looked at directly by a judge.

"Bradley," she said. Her voice was not unkind, but it was not soft either; it was level, the way you'd talk to somebody you'd decided to treat as capable of the truth. "I've got everything I need in this folder to make my decision, and I want you to hear that, so that nothing you say or don't say in the next minute changes the outcome one way or the other - you're not on the spot here, you understand me? This is already going your way. I only want to ask you one thing, and I want you to answer it however it's true for you, and there's no answer that'll disappoint me." She took her glasses off. "Do you want this? Do you want to live at the Bar-A with Mr. Kettering as your guardian? That's all I'm asking. It's your life. I like to hear from the person whose life it is."

Brad looked at her, the way Amos had said, at the judge and not at Wade, and he was aware of the whole room behind him holding still, aware of Amos beside him gone carefully neutral so as not to lean on the answer, aware, somewhere across a square, of a blue car and a door that hadn't opened, and he found that when he reached for the true thing it was right there, close to the surface, no digging, because it had been true for a while now and he'd just been afraid to say it somewhere it counted.

"Yes ma'am," Brad said. And then, because Cora had taught him that yes ma'am was manners but the truth was the rent, he made himself say the rest of it, out loud, in a courtroom, to a judge, with his whole found family listening: "I didn't have anywhere. And then I had somewhere. And it's - " his voice did a thing and he rode it out, the low even count, and kept going, "- it's the first place I ever lived where I wasn't waiting for it to be over. So yes ma'am. I want it. I want it a lot."

Judge Mercer looked at him a moment longer. Whatever she was checking for, she found it.

"So do I," she said, quietly, and put her glasses back on, and signed the order.

It didn't feel like anything, was the strange part - there was no thunder, no bell, just a pen moving on paper and a stamp coming down and a woman saying some words about the powers vested and the granting of the petition and the guardianship being made permanent, this date, by order of the court - and then it was done, it was just done, the way the biggest things are always just done, quietly, in a minute, on a Tuesday, and Amos let out a breath beside him and put one hand flat between Brad's shoulder blades and left it there, warm, heavy, and did not say anything, and behind them the whole Bar-A side of the courtroom made the low overflowing sound that a room full of people make when they have been holding something and are allowed, finally, to set it down.

"Congratulations, Mr. Kettering," said the judge. "Bradley. Welcome to the rest of it." And to the bailiff: "We're adjourned. And somebody get these people back to their horses before that gentleman in the front row - " she looked at Gus, indoors and shod and miserable " - files his own petition to be let outside."

 

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The square, after

 

They came out of the courthouse into the ordinary afternoon a family in a way they had not quite been going in, papered and permanent and legal, and there was hugging on the courthouse steps of a scale that embarrassed Gus into going to check the truck tires that did not need checking, and Cora cried into her bird hat and denied it, and Sam got Brad in a headlock that was ninety percent celebration and ten percent covering that his own eyes had gone, and Deena said "Congratulations, you're officially stuck with us, no takebacks" and meant every syllable of it.

And Brad, in the middle of it, looked across the square.

The blue car was gone.

He didn't know when it had gone. Sometime during the forty-five minutes, sometime while a judge was making him permanent, his mother had started the engine of the car she couldn't get out of and pulled out of the angle spot in front of the drugstore and driven back the hour she'd come, and the shade under the water oaks had nothing in it now but afternoon, and Brad stood on the steps and looked at the empty place where she'd been and waited to feel the floor tilt, the culvert, the cold.

It came - a little. He would not lie to himself that it didn't. There was a drop in him, looking at the empty spot, a old familiar give in the floor.

But it came smaller than it would have a month ago, and it came slower, and it stopped sooner, blocked partway down the way a thrown thing stops when a hand comes up - and the hand, this time, was the whole steps full of people at his back, the papered permanent fact of them, the old man with his hand still half-reaching to steady him and the best friend at his shoulder and the woman in the ridiculous hat and the whole benched-and-standing lot of them who had driven an hour in their good clothes to a courthouse in Dalton to watch a boy get kept.

His mother had come forty yards and could not cross them.

These people had crossed a county. Twice. In a van that used to be white.

"You okay?" said Sam, following his look to the empty spot, understanding it.

Brad thought about it, honestly, the way he was learning to. "She left," he said.

"Yeah," said Sam. "I saw."

"I think - " Brad started, and found the true thing, and it surprised him, and he said it anyway. "I think I'm okay that she came. Even though she left. I don't - I can't explain it. It's not okay. But I'm okay that she came." He shook his head. "That doesn't make sense."

"It makes sense," said Amos, who had come up beside them and heard it. "It's the least sensible true thing there is and it makes all the sense in the world. She gave you the one thing she had it in her to give, which is that she got in the car. It wasn't enough. It was never once going to be enough, and I'm sorry, and you're allowed to be more than sorry about it, for as long as you need to be." He settled his hat. "But she got in the car. Most of them don't even do that. And someday, a long way from today, you might find that matters to you, or you might find it doesn't, and either way's allowed, and you don't have to know which one today." He put his hand on the back of Brad's neck, the colt-steadying grip, warm and brief. "Today you just got kept. Let's let today be the thing today is. There'll be time for the rest of it. There's going to be a whole lot of time now. That's the whole point of the paper."

 

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Amos and Wade

 

While the kids loaded the van, Wade Corley walked Amos a little apart, under the water oaks, and handed him the file copy of the order and the number to call if the Ledfords ever made noise, which they wouldn't, and then he stood a second turning something over.

"One thing, not urgent, but you'll want to know it," Wade said. "I got a call last week from a woman with a nonprofit, up out of Chattanooga - child welfare, placement, that whole world. Somebody'd passed your name along. She wasn't unfriendly, Amos, I want to be clear - it was the opposite. She'd heard there was a rodeo down past Ringgold that had quietly taken in - her word - a remarkable number of hard-to-place kids over the years, with real good outcomes and no county money and no paperwork to speak of, and she wanted to know how you did it." He scratched his jaw. "I told her you did it by being an old man who couldn't stand to watch it happen to one more kid, and she got real quiet, and then she asked could she come see the place sometime. I told her I'd ask you."

Amos was quiet, looking off across the square at the empty spot under the drugstore oaks.

"Huh," he said, at last.

"I know," said Wade. "You've kept your head down forty years and now somebody's noticed. It's bound to be a mixed feeling." He put the folder under his arm. "Might be nothing. Might be somebody who wants to help. Might be somebody who wants to help in the way that turns into forms. I'd not lose sleep. But a place that soaks up every thrown-away child in a county doesn't stay a secret forever, Amos. You knew that when you started. World's got a way of finding the good quiet things eventually, for better and for worse."

"It does," Amos agreed, watching the last of the Bar-A kids climb up into the van, watching Brad get an arm around a little one who'd gotten tired and cranky, easy, natural, a boy who'd been kept turning right around and helping keep somebody smaller. "Tell her she can come. Front gate's never been locked. Never once in forty years." He put his file copy in the inside pocket of the gray jacket, the pocket over his heart, where he kept the paper that mattered. "But tell her to come at suppertime and to plan on eating, because Cora will not have it any other way, and tell her - " he almost smiled " - tell her to leave her forms in the truck the first time. First time you just come see the horses. The forms'll keep. Forms always keep."

 

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Home before dark

 

It was near dark when the convoy came up the drive, the old truck and the sheriff's pickup and the faded van, and the grounds came up gold and blue in the last of it, the barns and the crooked trailers and the arena, and Nell whickered at the engines, and down the row a dun colt banged the stall door with his impossible legs, wanting his supper and his person, and Brad got out of Amos's truck in his blue church-court-funeral shirt with a folded copy of a court order in Amos's breast pocket that made the two of them, for every purpose the world would ever have, each other's people, permanently, this date, by order of the court.

Sam had to go home - Cal was taking him, it was a school night, there was a limit even Cal wouldn't cross - and the two boys did the shove-and-grin at the truck door, and Sam said "See you at the bus stop," and it landed the way it was meant to, because there had been a whole month where there was no Brad at the bus stop and now there would be, every morning, for years, and they both knew what the ordinary little sentence was carrying and neither one said so.

Then Brad went down the row in the last light to the stall where Dusty was banging and complaining, and he let himself in, and the colt came at him sideways and ridiculous and shoved his dusty head into Brad's chest and blew and lipped at the buttons of the good blue shirt looking for something Brad didn't have, and Brad stood in the straw in his court clothes and got horse all over them, which Cora would fuss about and not mean, and put his arms around the neck of the first living thing he had ever named that got to keep the name, and stood there a while in the dark and the animal warmth while the day went all the way down.

"I got kept," Brad told the colt, quiet, into the dusty neck. "A judge and everything. It's on paper. Nobody can take it back."

Dusty, who did not care, who had never once in his short life waited for anything to be over, who had been told he was good by the boy who rubbed him breathing and had believed it instantly and completely the way only a thing that has never been thrown away can believe it, stamped one impossible foot and lipped Brad's collar and was, in his entire uncomplicated soul, exactly as glad as a colt can be, which is very, that his person had come home before dark.

Down at the cookhouse, the windows were yellow, and Cora was banging pots louder than the cooking strictly required, which was how Cora gave a boy the privacy to stand in a dark stall with his arms around a horse for as long as he needed to, and there was a plate keeping warm on the back of the stove with his name on it, and it would still be warm whenever he came in, because that was the whole arrangement, and it always would be now, on paper, permanently, this date, by order of the court.

 

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Author's Note

I told you to bring two hankies and I meant it, and I'll tell you the truth, the second one was for me and I used it at the car door that didn't open.

I want to talk to you about Diane for a minute, because I know some of you are going to write in, you always do, and you're going to be split down the middle - half of you furious that she didn't get out of the car, half of you undone that she got in it at all - and I want you to know that both of you are right, and that I don't know yet how it comes out, and that I would be lying if I pretended I did. She's the hardest person in this whole story and she's barely been on the page. A man who throws his son away is a kind of easy - you know what he is, you can set your compass by him. A woman who loves her son and cannot cross forty yards to say so is the actual heartbreak, because there's a person in there, and the person loses, and she gets in the car and drives home to the house where it happened, and I don't know what to do with her yet and I am not going to force it before it's ready. Some guns you fire in the chapter you hang them in. Some you leave on the wall a long time, because the story hasn't earned the shot, and firing it early would be a cheat, and these people have never once let me cheat.

So she got in the car. That's what I've got. She got in the car, and it wasn't enough, and Brad is going to spend a long time - years, I expect, right here in front of you if you'll keep coming out to the rodeo - figuring out what a thing like that is worth. I don't envy him the figuring. But he's not doing it in a ditch anymore. He's doing it with a plate keeping warm and a colt in the barn and a paper in an old man's pocket, and that's the difference, that was always the whole difference there is.

He got kept. That part's done. That part's on paper.

Somebody from Chattanooga wants to come see the horses. We'll get to that.

Now go on and eat something. Wash your hands first. Cora's watching, she's always watching, and she is so glad you came.

- Brynmor