The Dream Horse and the Dining-Room Table

Making the promise to God was easy.

Keeping it was another matter.

Condensed from “diddy waw diddy”

Billy porterfield

S

ince he was a kid on the Oklahoma prairie, Daddy loved the sweet nutty smell of horses and mules. He had grown up working them in the fields. On Saturday afternoons, he had raced horses in country fairs. He liked being in the saddle so much that he used his for a pillow in bed. It took some doing for Mother to get used to that.

                If horses were Daddy’s passion, working on oil rigs was his job. He was an experienced roughneck on a drilling crew. The money was good while the rig was running. But when a well was finished, the drilling crew had to move on. So our family drifted from job to job through the oil fields of Oklahoma and East Texas.

                Daddy staggered drilling work with roustabouting: looking after existing wells and tank farms. The hourly wage was lower than on a rig, but the work was steady, the check came every week, and the company provided a house. These were never fancy, but our family made them home, however short our stay.

                It was at one of these lease houses in Texas that Daddy bought War Cloud—a white-eyed, dapple-gray stallion. War Cloud was Daddy’s dream horse. Every dawn before work, he spent an hour in the stable, feeding the stallion crimped oats and brushing his coat. Evenings, he rode until sunset.

                He outfitted War Cloud’s stall with every amenity: running water, a salt block, a tack box, blankets for every kind of weather, and a cabinet with all the ointments and pills an ailing horse could need. There was even a fan to keep the flies off.

                Mother claimed the stable was furnished better than our company house. She tried to pretty things up for us, making oval throw rugs for the living room and bedrooms. Our floors were so clean you could eat off them. But she still wasn’t satisfied. We ate at a table a neighbor gave us. It was rough and unpainted and she kept it hidden under oilcloth. Mother wanted a real dining-room suite.

                One day she spotted a varnished walnut table and six chairs in the nearby town of Benavides. She could see it at home, covered with a lacy white tablecloth. But the set cost $100. At that price Daddy wouldn’t even look at it. Had the woman lost her mind?

                So out tiny mother put her dream aside and went on with her days—kneeling down, scrubbing the linoleum, standing out back at the roller washing machine, or bending over the ironing board, pressing jeans with a heavy steam iron. She smelled of soap and scorched cotton. We used to say Daddy wore the only starched, ironed underwear in the oil patch.

                Mother had such a passion for spit and polish and the rightness of work that she was in perpetual motion. But all along, we sensed she was strangely fragile. In the fall of the year Daddy bought War Cloud, she finally pushed her body beyond endurance and came down sick. She ran a fever, had chills and vomited all over the place.

                An old Mexican doctor came out from Benavides, bent over the bed and realized that Mother, already run-down and anemic, had eaten something spoiled. “She has ptomaine poisoning,” he said. “It’ll be touch and go because her fever is so high and she’s terribly dehydrated.”

                Mother lapsed into a coma. We thought she was going to die. She came out of it, but then she kissed us all and settled into a strange calm.

                Fay Talbot, a neighbor, moved in to keep Mother full of aspirin and liquids. Every morning she bathed her in bed and changed her gown and sheets. Each day, the doc drove the 15 miles from Benavides. He said there was nothing to do but wait and pray.

                Daddy slept on the living-room divan. One morning, he went out to the stable, where he thought we couldn’t see him, and bawled. This rough man babbled to God, promising anything if his wife would get well. “I’ll sell War Cloud, I’ll buy that new dining-room suite, if only you’ll bring her around.”

                We were never quite sure if it was Daddy’s prayer, the old doctor’s medicine, Fay Talbot’s nursing, or her own drive, but Mother did recover. The day she thought she’d get out of bed and try her legs, Daddy slipped out and hauled War Cloud to the stock auctioneer in Benavides. He sold his pride to the highest bidder for $150.

                Why he then went out and got drunk has always been a matter of family debate. I lean to the side that has him drowning in self-pity for losing his head and making such a promise to God. When it came down to death’s door, he chose his wife over his horse. But now death had been set back, and his wife was on the mend. He might have figured he could have got by without losing either.

                Anyway, after stupefying himself, my father staggered to the furniture store and bought the dining-room suite and a lacy white tablecloth. When he got back to the house, we kids—laughing and whispering—helped him set it up. Then we helped Mother out of bed and walked her to the dining room for the surprise.

                “Well,” Daddy asked, “what do you think?”

                Mother’s heart rose. Daddy had done a wonderful thing.

                Then her heart fell: It was the wrong suite. This tacky furniture was not walnut, it was plain oak, painted blond.

                She looked at her husband. She looked at her children. Tears came into her eyes.

                “Why, Daddy—my darlings,” she said, leaning on her husband, “it’s perfectly beautiful. I love it.”

                Mother used that suite for 37 years, moving it wherever we went. One day, she stripped the paint finish and discovered a lovely natural grain in the wood. Then she stained it the deep walnut she’d always wanted. After Mother died, my sister took the table for her dining room.

                We knew Mother was right. Painted or not, Daddy’s table was perfectly beautiful.