Dolly

by Paulette Callen

It was an August when dust rose out of the swamps. There were many such Augusts on the prairie. I remember a few of them. So hot they made you long for the tear-freezing cold of January. So dry your lips cracked and your nose bled. And the dust. The surrounding marshlands dried to a powder and took to the air. Birds hunched, sullen, on crackling branches. Beings who crept and scurried lay low and still. The fish didn't bite. Only grasshoppers remained themselves in the torporific dryness. While all else withered and browned, out of sheer cussedness they stayed fat and green, jumping crazily like odd shapes of viridescent corn popped off the hot skillet of the land.

The Dust. You could feel the grit between your teeth. It coated your eyeballs and gathered in black glutinous masses at the corners of your eyes. It didn't matter if you had a well that wasn't dry so there was water for the few head of stock, water for the washing and for the big tub in the kitchen on Saturday night. Dust like that -- it gets into you. It makes your every breath a sigh and every sigh a prayer for rain. Dust like that can make you careless--make you lose your attention to the details of life so that you slog, stuporous, through days at a time, because the human soul needs greening and moisture.

On a farm, even that of a poor sod-buster like my great-grandfather, carelessness can be fatal. Through a failure of attention he almost lost a child, and I was almost not born as the person I am--almost, but for a horse named Dolly.

Dolly wasn't much of a horse. Well, she couldn't have been much in the way of looks or breeding if Baathor and Mattie Halverson had her because they were dirt poor. My grandmother described Dolly to me as darkish brown with a bush of a tail and a thick mane that was a pleasure to get your fingers into. A big horse. Dolly pulled the wagon and the plow--when she felt like it.

About half the time she didn't feel like it and then she would stop wherever she was for a quiet period of meditation. "You rotten horse," Baathor would utter with great feeling but between his teeth and under his breath, for he was by nature a quiet man. Soft curses would follow in Norwegian. He had no delicacy about swearing in English. He just never learned how.

Then he would enact the ritual of pulling at her harness, pushing her, prodding her and pleading with her before he stomped off, still cursing, to do something else for awhile. Or, he would go into the house boiling mad, sit down to an early lunch of bread and milk and a little coffee, and between bites, mixing his English and his Norwegian, mutter over that rotten horse.

And not because she cared a thing for Dolly--she didn't--but because she was weary, over-worked, never complained and couldn't stand the complaints of others, Mattie would say, "Pa, you know nothing moves Dolly, so just eat now. She'll go again later on." And then she, standing over her sink, and he, bent over his bowl of bread and milk, would continue murmuring their soft little duet, neither of them listening to the other. "Might as well complain there's no sun in the middle of the night," she'd go on. "There just isn't, so that's all. There's no sun at midnight and nothing moves that horse. So there, then. Eat now." Mattie would pour him a little more coffee and push the sugar bowl in his direction; he'd put a teaspoon of sugar in his mouth, drink down the rest of his coffee and head back to Dolly who would now be ready to go. When she worked, she worked.

That horse pulled a plough, my grandmother used to say, like nobody's business. And when she was hitched to the wagon, you never had to use the reins, and never the whip. When Grandma got to this part of the story, her face turned serious, and her eyes misted a little. "No matter how mad he got, Pa never whipped her. I never saw him whip any animal. No sir." Even at eighty she still adored her father, and I think, she still missed him. "No, we never had to tug a rein with Dolly. She knew where we were going and went there likity-split--if she went at all." Here she would chuckle again, and add, her cornflower blue eyes twinkling, "But one thing's for sure...she never made us late for church!" So Baathor never got rid of Dolly, mostly because he could not afford to replace her. A horse working half the time was better than no horse at all.

On this August evening the sun still burned hot and red, unrelenting in an endless sky. Baathor had only a few cows of his own. A couple of milkers and a dry one he was letting rest a while. But he had a good well. Either it was deep enough or in just the right spot, he didn't know which and he didn't care, he just thanked the Almighty for it, because he had plenty of water and the Molviks across the paper-dry swamp didn't. Neither did the Petersons to the north. They gave him their cows to keep during the dry spell along with a little something for the trouble he was put to looking out for them. Baathor's small weathered-wood barn opened on its south side into the corral. The corral gate opposite the barn opened out to the pasture. A big water trough stood next to the barn inside the corral. The cattle spent these hot nights in the corral. Only Dolly was put in the barn with her own water, and the upper halves of the barn doors left open so she could get what breeze there was.

Every evening Baathor filled the trough, opened the corral gate, and whistled. The cattle, knowing water awaited them, needed no rounding up or herding. All he had to do was fill the trough, make sure the gate was open, whistle, and get out of the way. Every night it was near to a stampede to get to the trough. There had been no ploughing and no place to go, so Dolly had been turned out in the pasture for the whole day.

This evening, in a dust-trance, Baathor entered the corral through the pasture gate instead of through the barn as he usually did. He left the gate open behind him. He went straight to the trough and began to pump. The water stubbornly refused to rise. He pumped hard, primed it, cursed it, pumped some more. Finally, the well begrudged him a trickle, than a small stream. He pumped steadily till the water gushed. The trough was not even half full so he had a lot of pumping to do. He worked with a will, facing the barn, his back to the corral and to the rest of the yard, so he did not see his little girl who was just starting to walk venture out of the house. She toddled rapidly with baby glee at her mysterious freedom. Ma's hands did not swoop down and take her off course. Pa didn't seem to notice her either. She was free. She toddled in a straight line across the barnyard to the corral, crawled under the fence to the middle and plopped down in her own small cloud of dust. The water finally level with the rim of the trough, Baathor stopped pumping.

Sweat ran into his eyes. In one motion he wiped the sweat away with his forearm as he squinted up into the redding sky, whistled and turned to make sure the cattle heard. He saw them coming, could hear their hooves and feel the vibrations in the ground of the heavy bodies moving toward him before he saw his girl, happy in the cloud of dust that her small hands splashed up all around her, directly in the path of the thirsty herd. The corral wasn't wide, but it was long. He could not get to her before they did and he knew it.

I have always imagined my great-grandfather's feelings at that moment. Everything in that precise moment must have been in slow motion: his baby sitting in a pool of dancing dust made golden by shafts of evening sunlight; her skin, hair, and diaper covered with golden dust so that only her laughing mouth shown pink and her eyes a blue that rivalled the sky, while the cattle, a mass of huge brown and white and russet shapes, horns on some, all with hooves hard and sharp, crashed into each other and surged inexorably forward; heavy, ponderous--how could they move so fast? he wondered.

Frozen in the deathly calm of the helpless and utterly despairing, Baathor saw it all. Dolly saw it too. With the speed that only a horse can muster--even the most ordinary of horses can call upon the blood and bones of the Thoroughbred when she needs to run, when she must run--Dolly ran. She galloped across the pasture, cut in front of the cattle and slipped through the gate just ahead of them to where the child giggled and played in the dust. Planting her four legs like cedars around the baby she stood her ground.

Grandma knew Dolly. She had sat on her back and played with her mane. While Baathor did chores in the barn, she played in Dolly's manger stroking her velvet nose and babbling baby language, while Dolly nodded her big head in perfect understanding. So she had no fear of the giant horse and stayed safe within the forest of Dolly's legs. The cows thundered around the horse, bumping her flanks as they went by, but nothing moved Dolly.

The clock began ticking again for Baathor. Jumping the fence in time to keep from being mashed against the barn, he ran crying around the corral and scrambled over the fence. He scooped up his baby and sobbed into her neck, then he sobbed into Dolly's neck. The cows, ignoring horse, man, and child, nuzzled and jostled each other for position around the trough, some of them already muzzle-deep in the water. All the while my little grandma had been having the time of her life, and still was, now she was high enough to get her fingers entwined in Dolly's mane.

Mattie, in her own trance, with three other children and supper to get on the table, had only now noticed that her youngest was missing and came outside to find her husband crying into Dolly's mane. Wide-eyed she reached over the fence. He disentangled the child's hands from Dolly's mane and handed her to her mother. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his muddy tear-streaked face and blew his nose. He could hardly tell Mattie what he'd done. He could hardly speak for what had almost happened.

The cows, sated now, were placid and looked about without interest as Baathor led Dolly to the water. "Come on ole girl. Get your water." His voice still quivered. Grandma said that nobody complained after that when Dolly took her rests. "Nothing moves Dolly" was now said with pride and awe to the neighbors. Even after she could no longer pull a plow or wagon, while other horses were being bought and sold, Dolly roamed the pasture, or munched sweet oats while a young girl sat on her back, braiding and unbraiding her mane, sometimes weaving colored yarns among the coarse hairs, and sharing secrets that only Dolly could understand.

Drawings of Dolly by Sue Wingate