She was talking the whole time. Low, nothing that carried past the second board. The men closest swore afterward it was not words at all, just a rhythm. Three or four sounds over and over, patient as a clock. It was one word.
It was his name. She had not said it out loud in 8 years. She lifted the hackamore and she did not lift it at his face. She held it out sideways and let him see it and let him smell the old hide and the black horse put his head down into it. The noise went all the way down that fence and came back.
She tied it on. Her hands did the knot without her eyes. One loop under, one through. The heel knot pulled snug up under the jaw. No bit, no metal anywhere in that horse's mouth.
Just braided hide and a lead of the same make. Theodore, Virgil Chandler said to nobody, and he sat down slowly on an upturned bucket. She tied a Theodore here in this year of our Lord. She led him once around the pen at a walk on a slack lead and never pulled, not one time. And the old saddler kept saying, "Watch the rope.
There is no weight on that rope at all." Halfway around, she stopped and put her hand flat on the black neck and her shoulders came up and went down hard once. Then she took him to the middle of the pen and she walked around to his off side, his right side, and she got up on him from there. Now understand what that meant because 199 people at that fence did not and one did. Every man in the west mounts from the left. You are taught it before you can read.
She went up his right side because she had known since 9 that morning what was on his left. Virgil Chandler came straight up off that bucket. He had just watched a barefoot woman diagnose a horse in front of him without saying one word. She had no saddle. She went up bareback off the ground with a hand in his mane and a swing, the way men got on horses back when a saddle was a thing you saved up for.
There was nothing pretty in it. It looked like a chore she had done 1,000 times. 200 People made one sound. It was not a cheer. It is what a crowd sounds like when every person in it works out at the same moment that nobody here is going to be able to stop this.
He went up. His front end left the ground and he twisted in the air and he came down and threw his hind quartarters at the sky before his feet were under him. And then he did it again. Sand came up in sheets. The rails shook.