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The Barn
The man put the frame in the barn that day. It seemed the right place. The boy had learned so much there - how to ride a horse from a lead, then holding the bridle, then bareback. They'd had a basketball hoop off a rafter when the kid wanted to be an NBA star in junior high. He figured the dream went away because the boy only reached six feet tall. Should have known better though, when the boy took the hoop down October of 2001. By May of the next year the boy had turned eighteen and was ready to graduate high school.
His wife never understood. Not when the boy shaved off all of his brown hair. Not when he started practicing those damned push-ups and sit-ups. Not even when she packed up the boy's few clothes he was allowed to have so he could leave for places east of their home and their old barn with its old horses.
The boy came home once. Took some fifteen-hour flight from wherever the hell they sent him and showed up without notice. He probably wasn't a boy anymore by then, but the man would always think of him that way.
There was fancy perfume with indecipherable writing on the label sitting on his wife's vanity. She hated the smell of the stuff, but loved the memory of the gift. Something exotic but useless.
When the boy came home that time, he had a sorrow in his eyes that hadn't been there on the day he went away in that Greyhound bus. The boy had the first frame then. Three-sided thing filled up with the stars and stripes, filled up with the soul of a best friend gone. The boy handed the frame to the man.
"He got raised in foster care," the boy said that day. "Don't have no family except us guys."
The frame got hung in the barn next to the stall of the boy's favorite chestnut mare.
Even the horses wanted little to do with the thing, the oldest gelding being the only one to snuffle up at it and try to knock it to the ground. Didn't fall. The man made sure the frame would stay put out of respect.
And now the boy had made his second trip home. As the man walked into the dusty air of the barn, it occurred to him that second trips home were bad things. The evening sun caught the edge of the frame on the wall, the dust that had settled onto the glass had dimmed the colors, making the red look orange and the blue look gray.
He stepped up to the stall, the boy's mare in a solemn mood. Maybe she caught that off the man, him in his good church slacks and button down white shirt. That poor chestnut wouldn't even look up from her stall floor as the man pulled out his hammer and a good sturdy nail from the tools sitting to the side of the end stall.
The smell of clean hay filtered through the wood braces above his head while the man hammered the nail above the first frame.
Beneath the man's left arm, held close like you would a training lead on an unbroken horse, was another three sided frame.
The man hung the new frame there, next to the boy's horse. He reached up to correct it from hanging crooked, then sighed. Ran a white sleeve across his forehead and eyes.
The chestnut mare reached over the stall door and blew her breath out at the man. He rubbed her soft nose a couple times, until she felt the weight of the day and pulled her head back again.
(C)2025 Sally K Lehman, All Rights Reserved