Wynne's War Read Online Free

horse.”
    The colonel’s eyes widened momentarily and then they narrowed. “Scare the horse.”
    â€œYessir,” Russell said.
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    Russell would say that his grandfather had taught him to ride, but his grandfather always said he hadn’t taught the boy a thing. At stock shows and county fairs, at rodeos and clinics, men would tell Leroy Crider how well he’d instructed his grandson.
    â€œI didn’t instruct nothing,” Crider would say. “Just the way he was born.”
    The men would nod and smile and sip from their Styrofoam cups of coffee, small cups, six ounces. They thought the old man was being modest, but Crider never numbered modesty among his sins. Stubbornness, yes. Ignorance. He’d admit, at times, to outright lunacy. But he was not a modest man, and he’d taught his grandson nothing about horses he didn’t already know.
    Elijah, for his part, had no sense of when he’d learned what he knew, and he couldn’t even recall the first time he sat a horse. They seemed to inhabit his memories in much the same way as sunlight or wind or his grandmother’s voice: they were inexplicably and undeniably there.
    His first word was the name of his Welsh Mountain pony, a palomino named Cream. He had the white face and stockings, and he was only thirteen hands—a very gentle little horse. His grandfather would saddle him and lead him around the corral with Elijah on his back and still in diapers, Elijah’s grandmother standing in one corner of the pen with her arms cradled against her and her elbows in her palms.
    â€œYou get that baby off him,” she’d say.
    â€œHe ain’t hurting nothing,” Crider would tell her, and she’d respond it wasn’t the pony she was worried about.
    â€œThat thing could buck,” she’d say. “You don’t know what it could do.”
    Crider ignored her. He led the pony very slowly by a leather halter, Elijah seated against the pommel with both hands on the horn, his toddler’s legs bouncing.
    By the age of five he could ride this animal unsupervised to the barbed-wire fence at the end of the south pasture. By seven, he could saddle and cinch and push the horse to a canter. He was performing in children’s rodeos before his tenth birthday, and when he was thirteen he was employed by Lee Brothers Horse and Cattle Auction outside Skiatook, riding show ponies through the cast-iron chute and then down a short concrete tunnel, emerging into the half-acre expanse of loose powdered dirt skirted on four sides by an eight-foot wall, atop which bleachers ascended toward the fluorescent lights hanging high above. From the arena’s floor he could only see the first few rows of horse and cattle buyers, their stone faces and cowboy hats, many in ball caps advertising feed stores, barbeque joints and rib shacks, farm-equipment suppliers, and Tinker Air Force Base, where more and more would commute as the farms went bankrupt and the ranches sold to oil companies. He’d walk the animals in a slow circle while the auctioneer’s voice boomed from the speakers in its sharp, staccato twang and men in the audience lifted a hand or gestured their bids with the touch of a hat brim.
    â€œGoing four, four, four. Who’ll give me four? Got four. Now four and a quarter, four and a quarter, now five, five, five. Got five. Five and a half, five and a half, five and a half. Thank you, sir. Now six, six, six.”
    He’d circle the arena floor at a slow trot, with the auctioneer singing in his ears and the smell of horse and dust and manure and the clean scent of straw still in his nostrils, turning the pony with a squeeze of his thighs and just the slightest pull of the reins, bringing the animal to a halt, turning it once more and then again at the auctioneer’s command—“Got seven, got seven, got seven, now eight, now eight, who’ll give me eight?”—gestures now