The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,7
horse on the front bone of his face, where it would hurt. When the smack didn’t work, I punched him.
He released me.
Helen yanked me out of the tiny space.
I fell to the wet gravel in a ball. Helen and the sheriff crouched beside me. I curled up, trying to wrap myself around the pain. It pulsed through my arm in hot white waves that stung my nose and burned involuntary tears down my face. I clutched the arm to my sternum, my fist tight.
“Let me see,” Helen insisted, but I was convinced it would hurt less if I held it to myself.
The kicker was now calm. Even through the rain, we heard his teeth grind the hay.
When Helen got me to release my arm, I was amazed to see no skin was broken. I expected to see spurting arteries. Instead, hard, bright red welts outlined a perfect set of tooth indentations. Purple swelling rushed into the indentations as we watched.
“You need ice,” the sheriff said. “Your arm could be broken.”
No. No. I had to get back to Bobby. I couldn’t go to the ER.
I stood up, holding my arm to my chest as if it were in a sling. I wiggled all five of my fingers. “Not broken,” I said. “What about that dog out there? Tied to the car? We taking him?”
The sheriff blinked and shook his head at me. “No. They brought him with them today.”
I wondered if that meant the dog was more or less lucky than the other animals. “Okay, then, we’re done. Let’s go.”
The sheriff looked skeptical. “You can drive?”
There was still time for breakfast. I still believed there was time.
AS I PULLED INTO OUR DRIVEWAY, I WAS GLAD HELEN HAD agreed to follow me, in case anything disastrous happened on the drive. The kicker (or was he now the biter?)—who had been an easy ride, content to eat his hay—turned himself around the moment the truck stopped and half-jumped, half-climbed out of the trailer. He raced at a gallop around the house.
I’m not sure if I looked up toward our bedroom window or just headed off with Helen as she leaped from her truck to grab a rake from our back porch. I snatched up a broom. Walking together and waving our utensils—me still clutching my injured arm to my chest—we herded the kicker toward the barn. I heard Max barking inside the house. That’s when I remember wondering why the hell Bobby didn’t come out to help us.
The horse put on an admirable rodeo show and tore up clumps of the yard. He wheeled and struck my St. Francis statue with his back hooves, sending the figure flying.
He ran straight for the barn and, once he found himself trapped inside, fled into the only open stall door. Helen shut the door behind him. Of course he immediately exited his stall’s back door into his private paddock, but the paddock’s gate was latched. I rushed to switch on the electric tape that ran along the top of the paddock fences—something I’d installed to prevent the goat from climbing out of her enclosure (it hadn’t worked). Bobby and I had grown so used to her escape routine that a monotone, unruffled “goat’s out” became a sort of joke between us.
Helen and I stood, panting, looking at the kicker. “He’s gonna be a handful,” she said, in that same no-crisis-here tone.
I burst into laughter. “More like a truckload.”
At least the fillies in Helen’s van still stood peacefully. The rain had lightened, but the sky remained that dark green of something about to happen. Helen still had to drive on to my parents’ farm, about thirty minutes away. I felt I should go with her, but Helen shook her head. “I called Hank; he’s going to meet me there. No worries. You go get ice on that arm.”
I nodded, grateful, but the mention of Helen’s husband, Hank—they were teased about sounding like a country-western duo—also caused me a flash of irritation. Was Bobby so pissed at my being called away, or at an additional animal being brought home, that he refused to help us? I hated how much I dreaded walking into the tension in the house.
“You kicked ass today,” Helen said.
I waved good-bye to her and walked across the yard, flexing my fingers, wincing at the deep ache this action pulsed through my arm.
As the lightning flashed, I looked at that sickly sky and remembered running out into the hail. How could I have been so