Habeas Equus

a short story

I used to think dead weight meant lazy, because Dad had hung the words on Fossie when he forgot to trim the weeds around the elm stump out by the road. I learned better that day in the barn when the three of us couldn’t budge the dead mare from the stall floor — right where she had fallen like a one-ton bag of cement sometime the night before. The palomino hadn’t been much to look at when she was living, with bones poking against her skin like she was a sack of walnuts on four legs. But death had changed the old girl, made her seem bigger, too big for the three of us to yank her from her resting place.

“At this rate, we’ll be here all day and into tomorrow,” Dad said. Those were the first words he’d spoken since the horse had turned up dead. Dad never cared much for shooting the breeze, and he was extra quiet that day. Out of breath from tugging at the horse, my father looked like he might keel over, leaving me and Fossie to deal with both him and the horse. Dad wasn’t exactly light as a feather, so I doubted we could budge him either.

Dad leaned against the barn wall, pulled a wadded handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped sweat dribbles from his brow. His shoulders drooped like they were being forced down by the weight of his jowly head. He had added a few pounds in middle age, which wouldn’t help us to get the dead horse any closer to the barn door.

I kept up my pouting, more or less on general principle, and had nothing to say on the matter of the horse or anything else. I just wanted to get the thing over with so I could retreat from the lung-sucking heat of the barn. I couldn’t see how chattering away would get that done. But Fossie, older than me by three years, hardly ever shut up. He leaned against the wall next to Dad with his arms folded. “How much you think she weighs?” he asked.

Dad grunted. “At least a pound more’n we can handle, it appears.”

“I bet we’d get her out quick if we had another set of hands,” Fossie said. 

“You keep an extra pair in your pocket?” The Old Man was well-past frustrated with the status of his equine property, a problem he hadn’t counted on the day he was supposed to be off the place he rented.

“I bet Cloyd’d help out if we asked,” Fossie said. I could have choked him right then if my hands had been big enough to wrap around his thick neck. Only someone as stupid as my brother would bring up Cloyd Farris the day before Dad headed to prison.

Dad and Cloyd had played high school football together and had been friends ever since. People used to think they were brothers, because they looked so much alike. That was before Dad’s muscle turned to fat. Even if they used to be as close as twins, I couldn’t see how they could be anymore. Cloyd Farris was nothing but a lowlife traitor. If he knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t set foot anywhere near us on Dad’s last day. 

Dad wiped his forehead one more time before stuffing the handkerchief back in his jeans pocket. “I doubt Cloyd’s sitting on his couch and eating bon-bons on a nice Sunday afternoon,” he said. Dad grabbed the halter rope. “Let’s give her another pull.”

He took hold closest to the mare’s head. Fossie grabbed the rope right behind him, with me at the end, like we were one tug-of-war team and the dead mare was the other. At fourteen, I was smaller than most of my classmates. Fossie was just the opposite. He never tired of bragging that he would be as big as our father someday. “Probably bigger,” he would say. 

“You mean fat as a walrus and twice as slow,” I’d smart back.

Fossie would tell me to shush my sassing and punctuate it with a hard slap to the back of my head. He learned that technique from our father.

I had our mother’s frame, which was a nice way of putting it. I was still a little on the small side at that age and borderline worthless at helping pull that horse. I figured I’d better at least fake it, so I joined the others in puffing and grunting in a hopeless attempt to gain more strength. After nearly a half hour of tugs, mixed in with a rest break or two to cuss the carcass, we had managed to pull the mare no more than a few inches. 

We straightened again, catching our breaths and staring at the mare. She had always been a pain. It was Dad’s idea to buy her soon after he rented the acreage. He had no other use for the barn, except to put an animal in it, and I suppose he figured his sons would get a kick out of having a horse to ride. Maybe we thought so, too, at first. But either you were a horse person or you weren’t. We rode the palomino a few times when she was new. After that, feeding her was just another chore on Dad’s list when we came to stay with him.

Dad’s hail-pocked Chevy pickup was parked just outside, ready to haul the horse to the ditch. That assumed we could get the horse close enough to attach it to the log chain, which was snaking toward the door from the truck’s rear bumper. The horse and the pickup were the only things Dad had left — the old mare because nobody bid the minimum at the auction, and the pickup because Dad refused to sell it. Cloyd offered to store it for Dad until he got back. He had also volunteered to take the mare to the sale barn, where a renderer might pay a few bucks to turn her into Purina dog food. But Cloyd was a fool to even talk to Dad after what happened. It really chewed at my gut that Dad would still give him the time of day, especially when Dad wanted Cloyd to keep the horse money in exchange for storing his truck.

Panting even more heavily now, Dad squinted out the barn window on the far wall like there was something out there just beyond his sight. “You boys might scribble me a note every once in a while,” he said. “But don’t come down to see me. It’s a long haul.”

It was the first time he’d talked about going to prison. I looked at Fossie, who always had something to say. But all he did was stare down at his gloved hands and rub them like the halter rope had burned through the leather. He looked like he was close to crying.

“Grandpa and Grandma will take us down there,” I said. “I bet they’ll want to come a lot.”

 “Grandpa’s back’d seize up from being in the car that long,” Dad said. “Eighteen months isn’t that long anyway. I’ll be back up here before you know it.” He paused, still looking out the far window.

Up until his arrest, Dad had been a minor celebrity around our town. He had played a little college football and hadn’t embarrassed himself at it. When he graduated and came back home, he had plenty of job offers. He settled in with an auto parts supplier that set him up with a regional sales route, figuring his popularity would help put a lot more taillight bulbs on store shelves. At each parts store he visited, Dad’s customers wanted to hear about some big game from his playing days. As much as he hated small talk, Dad went along and must have told the same stories a thousand times. It helped him make a good living for us.

He kept that sales job all the years he and my mom were together. As far as I knew, we had a happy home, no better or worse than anyone else’s. Then my parents split when I was twelve, and that’s when Dad rented the acreage. Cloyd lived just up the road and gave him the tip that it was available. After Dad moved in, we came to stay with him most weekends. He didn’t have much furniture after the divorce, so we made little pallets of blankets in the living room at bedtime. We loved it because it was like camping out. Dad slept right next to us on a ratty roll-out couch that he’d gotten from Cloyd. It reeked of cigarette butts and spilt beer.

I still liked Cloyd back then, because he was so different from my father. Cloyd never took anything seriously, especially work. One week he’d be a roofer, and the next thing you knew he’d started a landscaping business. He gave up on that one before the first dandelions popped up in the spring.

Cloyd never saw a pregnant pause he didn’t need to fill. It might be the end of the day on a Saturday, and Fossie and I’d be finishing whatever project Dad had lined up for us that day. Cloyd would pull up in his truck, dressed like he was on his way out for a big night on the town. He tried to get Dad to go with him, but Dad always refused.

“Nah,” he’d tell Cloyd, “that’s for young fellas like you.” 

Before he left, Cloyd always told some wild story from Dad and his running-around days. Fossie and I heard just about everything they did together at least twice and sometimes more. Each time, Dad smiled while Cloyd prattled on about some wild adventure that sounded more made-up than real. Dad never chimed in on the stories, so I never knew how much truth there was to them. He seemed to find his buddy’s load of bull as entertaining as Fossie and I did. 

That was before a backhoe turned up missing from a road construction project. The sheriff figured Cloyd took it, because he had a reputation for that sort of thing. The only question was what he’d done with it. You couldn’t hide a backhoe just anywhere. After a fair amount of badgering and threatening, the authorities promised they’d cut Cloyd a break if he would just tell what he’d done with it. He finally did, and they came to get it in the barn where we now stood over the dead mare. Cloyd got probation and Dad got hit with receiving stolen property.

Dad must have seen the equipment the first time he fed the horse, but he never admitted if he knew about it beforehand. There was plenty of speculation around town that he was in on the whole thing with Cloyd, because Dad had serious money problems caused by the divorce. I was convinced my father was as innocent as an angel.

As popular as Dad was, he could have paid a fine and stayed out of prison. But he didn’t have money for that either. His useless defense lawyer advised the smartest thing he could do was plead guilty and hope for leniency. The judge sentenced Dad to eighteen months and gave him one month to get his affairs in order. The Sunday we discovered the dead horse was the last of the thirty days. 

 “I bet you didn’t know it was stolen,” Fossie said as we caught our breaths. He had been thinking the same thing I was. “You was just doing a favor for a buddy.”

Dad acted like he hadn’t heard.

“Maybe she knew she was on her way to auction and just decided to call it quits,” he said.

It took me a beat to realize he was talking about the horse.

“She wasn’t such a bad old mare,” Dad said.

“Heck,” said Fossie, “she was the god-awful ugliest horse I ever seen. Too bony to ride, that’s for sure.”

Dad laughed for the first time in a long while. Fossie and I took it as permission to laugh, too. 

“I tell you one thing for sure,” Dad said. “I’d have put her on a diet if I’d known we’d have to do this.” 

All three of us were staring at the mare again, ready to continue the tug of war when Cloyd walked in. I hadn’t heard his diesel truck pull up outside.

“Damned if it isn’t all three Lockwood men,” he said. Then he saw the mare. “She’s looked better.”

Fossie and I looked for our father to kick Cloyd out of the barn, but he nodded at his old friend like nothing had happened between them. “How you doing, Cloyd?” 

“Can’t complain, I don’t guess.”

Without another word, Dad grabbed the halter rope and began to pull. Cloyd took hold right behind, and Fossie and I each took our positions. The strength of an extra man was enough. Five minutes later, we had the carcass pulled from its pen and close enough to wrap the truck chain around the horse’s shoulders. She was ready to be hauled to the ditch and, after a good dousing of kerosene, set afire. 

We all stood there for a moment, glad to be back in the fresh air and sunlight. I was grateful Cloyd had showed up so we wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day standing over a horse corpse. Now that the job had been accomplished, I wanted him to hop in his truck and leave us be. Or if he had something to say, he could apologize for getting Dad into trouble.

Cloyd removed his cap and smacked it against his leg to free it of the straw and manure dust it had collected in the barn. He rested one boot atop the mare’s rump, like a conquering hero standing over his dead enemy. He seemed in no hurry to leave. “I ever tell you boys about the time…”

“We’ve heard all your damn stories a hundred times,” I blurted.

Dad looked like he wanted to throttle the daylights out of me.

“Charm,” he growled.

I felt like a pressure cooker about to blow its lid. I couldn’t see why Dad would want to stand around shooting the breeze with the scum who got him sent to prison. It made even less sense why he’d expect Fossie and me to put up with it, too.

“I’m going to the house,” I said, taking off in that direction in a near run.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Dad said. “We still need to get this animal to the ditch.”

I slowly turned around with my arms folded and my lower lip drooping so much it nearly touched the ground.

Cloyd took the hint he wasn’t welcome. “We’ll have a cold one when you get back, Buddy,” he said to Dad, as he got in his truck.

Dad gave a slight nod. “Reckon so,” he said.

Dad got out of prison about a year later, with time lopped off for good behavior. Cloyd was between wives again and had plenty of space, so Dad stayed with him until he could get a place of his own. But he never quite got back on his feet, not the way he was before prison. He had gained even more weight, and it seemed like the old Dad, the one that cared about hard work and other things, hadn’t come back. His character, the best thing he had going for him on the job front, was shot to pieces as far as everyone around here was concerned. Cloyd still ran through ill-planned business ventures faster than he changed socks. But each time, he made sure Dad knew he had a job waiting for him if he wanted it.

I had plenty of chances to ask Dad how much he really knew about the backhoe, but I had matured enough to figure it out for myself. There was no sense making him tell me if he didn’t want to. 

Right before my high school graduation, Dad died when his heart gave out for good. Fossie had graduated when Dad was still behind bars, so he never got to see either of us go through a commencement. And to think my brother went through a bunch of them. I’ll be the first to admit I never thought Fossie had the brains to accomplish much of anything academically, so I was as amazed as anyone when he got a fancy doctorate at a pretty good school. I drove halfway across the country to witness the graduation ceremony with my own eyes. 

When the college dean asked all parents of graduates to stand to be recognized, I coaxed Cloyd to stand in Dad’s place.