The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart by Michael Phillips Page B

fidgety and restless, and though I was no expert about horses, I knew that when they got nervous they also got dangerous. Dangerous to themselves and to everyone else. And now with water seeping into the barn and turning the hard-packed dirt floor into a mass of mud, there was hardly a dry place for the horses to stand, and sometimes their hooves were two or three inches deep in mud and water because they didn’t have the sense to stand in the few dry places left.
    It was Aleta who surprised us with how much she knew about horses by alerting us to the danger they were in.
    She had bundled up in hat, raincoat, and galoshes to go out one morning and help me feed the animals. As we were feeding the horses in the barn, she spoke up.
    “The horses’ feet are wet,” she said.
    “I reckon everything’s wet,” I laughed, thinking nothing of it.
    “It’s not good for them to be wet,” she said.
    “Why not?” I asked.
    “Their hooves can rot and get infected.”
    “How do you know?”
    “My daddy shoes horses. He knows all about them and I listen to what he says when he’s talking to people. He says there’s nothing worse than a horse with foot rot.”
    “What happens?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Aleta answered. “But I’ve heard him say that horses aren’t like other animals, and that they need special care.”
    I knew that too. Whatever made horses so beautiful and majestic also made them delicate. ‘
    ‘What should we do?” I asked.
    “I don’t know, get them someplace where it’s dry.”
    “But there is no place that’s dry,” I said.
    “There’s the front of the house. It’s grassy there and isn’t so muddy.”
    “But it’s raining. They’d get soaking wet and would still be standing in the wet. And the water’s only a stone’s throw from the house.”
    “They could go up on the big front porch.”
    “On the porch!” I said.
    “It’s dry and their feet wouldn’t get wet.”
    It sounded like a crazy notion to me. But if she was right about their feet, then I reckoned it was something that was worth thinking about. Later that same day I told Katie what Aleta had said and we went out through the parlor onto the front porch that looked out through the trees across the expanse of brown water.
    The porch was huge and went the whole width of the front of the house and even around both sides between the big white columns and walls of the house.
    “I think we could do it, Mayme,” said Katie. “There’s plenty of room for them here. They’d have more dry space than they do in the barn.”
    “But how would we keep them here?” I asked.
    “Where else would they go? Everywhere else is wet.
    They wouldn’t go out in the rain or where the water is over there, would they? Wouldn’t they just stay on the porch to keep dry?”
    “I don’t know. Sometimes animals have minds of their own. They can be ornery. I don’t know … maybe it’s worth a try.”
    “How would we get them up on the porch?” asked Katie. “What if they don’t want to go up on the boards?”
    “You put oats there,” said Aleta, who had been following us and listening to every word we said. “I heard my papa say that a horse will always follow feed if it gets hungry enough.”
    Katie and I looked at each other.
    “I reckon it’s worth a try,” I said.
    So we set off to start making preparations. In an hour we had lugged a small feed trough around to the front of the house and put a bucket filled with water beside it. Then we dumped a bucketful of oats in the trough.
    “Shall we bring the horses from the barn?” said Katie excitedly. I guess we were all excited just to have something to do after all the dreary days of endless rain.
    “Probably not all at once,” I said. “We better let them get used to it a little at a time. Horses can get mighty jumpy when they get nervous.”
    “Let’s bring one or two, then,” she said as we walked back around to the barn still wearing our rain clothes. “Red