Read Online Winter Run by Robert Ashcom - Free Book Online Page A

recognize. Some of the rib cages were still intact, but mostly the ribs had been strewn about by the creatures that had eaten the flesh from them, leaving sections of verte-brae in piles. The thick wall of cedars and pines kept out the breeze. It was still, the day cloudy and cool with the hint of winter. The pony looked at him. Charlie looked at the bones and then at the pony.
    Of course he’d heard of it, the boneyard. But he’d never known where it was exactly. This was the most remote place on the farm. No one came here except to drag a dead cow or horse or mule, and because the land was no longer farmed it had been years since this place had last been used. He’d had no previous interest in it. But it was different now. The boneyard was her hiding place. She had found it by crossing and re-crossing the hundred acres, grazing at night, her head never far from the ground, searching for the best grasses and the places humans seldom went, until she found the one place where people didn’t venture at all. And knew immediately that she had escaped, until, as horses will, she led Charlie to the very place where in the end she could have lost him.
    He didn’t know the names of all the bones, but he knew her name. He put out his hand with some of the corn kernels in it and spoke to her. She let him catch her. She ate the hard kernels of field corn from his hand while he snapped the lead onto her halter. He led her very carefully along the little path so they wouldn’t trip on the bones, across the clearing and out of the thicket.
    Later, when Charlie told it in his dramatic way, he said he was surprised the pony hadn’t been afraid in there with all those dead bones. But Robert Paine rolled his bloodshot eyes in his intensely black face and said in derision, “Charlie, you do make things more than what they is. That pony got better sense than that. She knows ain’t nothing living-dead in there. She knows they’s nothing to them bones. They’s all dried up just like in the Bible. Anyway, she don’t care nothing about dead things. You the one—not her.”
    It was a strange outburst. Robert had never paid much attention to Charlie. But by this time Charlie’s passions were becoming of interest to us. Not many eight-year-olds wonder what a pony knows about death. It was just strange. And Charlie’s ideas seemed to strike some deep resentment in Robert that never left him. Not until Charlie was gone from the place. Maybe not even then.
    Winter came and it snowed—not a lot, just enough to turn the roads to mud and the pony to her deepest reddish brown. The days grew too short for riding. Sometimes the only way Charlie knew she was still inthe field was that in the evenings, when he took her feed to the foot of the pear tree on the other side of the creek behind the barn, the previous day’s ration would be gone.
    One Saturday in December when it was clear, Charlie walked over the hill to the boneyard wondering if she would be there. She was. This time she looked completely out of place. There was a little snow on the ground, just enough to make the place look whiter than usual. The pony was standing beneath her tree, covered with clay from end to end—in complete contrast to her surroundings. Even so, she was like a harbinger, as if the red clay in her coat somehow brought an earnest of spring into that white, bone-laden place.
    Old Bat the mule spent the winter in the little field behind the house at Silver Hill where the milk cow lived. Bat liked to be near Matthew in bad weather because she knew he would slip her a coffee can of cow feed each evening. She loved the fine-ground feed and would snort and cough as she ate it. Charlie and Matthew thought it amazing that a twenty-five-year-old one-eyed mule would love dairy feed.
    Brown the mutt cruised through on a regular basis because he knew Gretchen would give him scraps. The Corn House was tight and the radiators were nice to touch on a cold morning. Charlie’s