The directions inked on the letters jogged a thought loose in his head. He recalled William Johnson and his journal, written closely in his elegant hand.

  “You know that barber in Natchez, Mr. Johnson?”

  “Sure enough. Everyone know him.”

  “Ben, could you go by him—seems like he is friendly with my marse and he’ll surely know how to get a word to him—can you see if he can write a line to say that they sent me away from Darley, that I ain’t allowed to work with him, or even be near him. Do you think he would do that?”

  Ben shrugged. “I can ax him.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do if something bad happen to my horse.”

  “Well it ain’t your fault if old man Pryor too swelled headed to take you on. No one gone blame you for it.”

  “I’m gone blame me,” Jarret said, his voice breaking. “That horse about the only one thing I care for.”

  “All right, I’ll go by the barber on my way. I’ll tell him you is just wanting your marse to know what’s what. No one can make any mind about that. Now you best get along to Gossin. Ax at the quarters, they’ll tell you where he’s at.” He flung his bone away, wiped his chin, and went off to retrieve his mount.

  Jarret found Samuel Gossin after a long trudge out to the fields, where he was conferring with one of his drivers as a gang of women and children wielded hoes on a harvested cornfield. As Jarret drew closer, he saw that the picturesque nature of this rich place did not extend to the people who worked it. The women were grim-faced and exhausted, their worn skirts reefed up at the hips, their legs wrapped in rags to protect them from the dry cornstalks. Jarret felt conspicuous in his good clothes. Gossin regarded him with bemusement when he introduced himself. “So Pryor didn’t want Richard Ten Broeck’s handpicked Kentucky groom looking over his shoulder?” He chuckled. “Typical. But I don’t think Ten Broeck will be too happy with me turning his boy into a field hand.” He eyed Jarret’s lean, slight build. “You sure don’t look like one. Show me your hands.” Jarret turned his palms over. Gossin snorted. “Little use to me, a soft stable boy. Try the forge. The smith might be glad of help with the farrier work.”

  So Jarret went to work for Gem, a stocky, muscular young man, coal black and shiny from sweat. Most of the work at the smithy was maintaining farm tools—wagon wheels, hoes, plows, ginning saws, and metal strapping for the cotton bales. “Pryor got his own farrier for the thoroughbreds, but I do all the farm horses,” Gem said. Jarret carried in the charcoal to feed the forge and worked the bellows; he fetched water from the stream to cool the iron, and he filed and finished the hooves after Gem hammered the new shoes in place. Between the roar of the furnace and the ringing of the mallets on iron, there was no space for small talk, and that suited Jarret. Gem was glad of the help; less happy to have to fit another body into his crowded cabin.

  That first day, as Gem walked him from the forge to the quarters, Jarret tried to count the people, but he soon lost track. The double row of cabins housed more than two hundred souls, Gem told him. “More folk up in the ’pendencies by the big house and over by the stables where you was s’posed to be.” Hands returning from their day’s tasks began their second workday, tending their plots of beans and sweet potatoes, making and mending clothes, repairing a fence, slaughtering a fowl for the pot.

  Gem lived in single man’s quarters with three others; two of them, Cato and Ira, were youths without kinfolk, who hadn’t yet received permission to take up with a woman. Cato worked in the gin house and Ira at the mill. The third was Gem’s father, Old Gem, a widower with palsied hands and an addled mind. He had been a smith but had grown too frail and forgetful for forge work, so he did light chores in the big house gardens, and no one bothered him too much when he forgot what he was supposed to be at. They shared a small cypress-floored room with cotton-filled hessian shakedowns for bedding. There was barely room for Jarret to set out his bedroll.

  Old Gem kept a catfish line in the pond. Jarret helped scale, gut, and fillet the queer-looking fish while Young Gem set a trivet over the hearth and melted some lard in a cast-iron pan. He dipped the fillets in cornmeal and fried them golden. They carried stools outside and sat in the dooryard. Jarret had no appetite, but the fish was good, and he managed to eat his share. He was wiping the grease from his hands when Pryor’s headman, Henry, walked up the lane.

  “There you are. I said I’d come find you. Now don’t you mind how Pryor spoke wit you today. It’s just the way he is. Rough edge to his tongue. The minute I see you had a strong connection with that horse I knew Pryor wouldn’t abide it. He like to be the only one man a horse look to.”

  “How’s Dar— How’s Lexington?”

  “Restless,” said Henry, scuffing the dirt with his foot. “He ain’t settled down. Pacing and weaving in his stall.”

  Jarret dragged a hand across his head. He needed to be down there in that stall, to reassure the horse that everything would be all right in this strange new place.

  “Is he eating?”

  “A little grain is all. No hay to speak of.”

  “If you can heat some water, pour it on the hay, I do that for a special treat sometime. He likes it that way.”

  Henry nodded. “I can do that.”

  “What’s the morning routine?”

  Henry shrugged. “Generally we just turn a new horse out to graze by itself, let him take a look, let the others look at him.”

  Jarret nodded. That sounded right.

  “That a fine horse you got there, any fool can see it, and Pryor ain’t a fool. I know he seem harsh, but he ain’t so harsh as he seem. And he sure ain’t stupid. You think the colonel would trust him with all that”—he waved a hand toward the racing complex—“if the man didn’t know his work?”

  Jarret nodded, but he didn’t feel comforted. He thanked Henry for taking the trouble to find him. He sat and fretted as the light waned, listening to the hectic complaints of the birds as they jostled for roosts and the crescendo of frogs thrumming from the creek. As the dusk gathered, fireflies began to wink on and off, low in the grass at first then slowly ascending. He waited, as he had as a child, till the first ones reached the tree boughs, then he went inside and found his place beside the others, who were settling in to sleep. Cato commenced a wet, hacking cough that seemed to have no end to it. Old Gem sat up on his shakedown, grumbling.

  “Now then, Pa, he can’t help it,” Young Gem remonstrated quietly. “It’s the cotton dust, get inside you in the gin house,” he whispered to Jarret. “Every soul who works there winds up with the coughing.” Cato hacked intermittently throughout the night. Jarret tossed on his thin pallet, just as, over the rise, Darley paced his stall.

  He was jolted from fitful sleep by a strident clanging. It was still dark. Beside him, the men turned and groaned. Gem shuffled to the hearth and breathed the coals of the cook fire back to life. The others ladled water from the barrel and splashed their faces. Gem handed Jarret a cup of bitter chicory and a heel of pone. As the first glow kindled the veil of mist in the bottomlands, roosters commenced their loud hosannas. From the corrals, a mule complained in his half bray, half whinny as the driver hitched him to the scraper. A line of brightness lit the horizon as the first work gangs trudged to the fields.

  Inside the blackened walls of the smithy, the air reeked of doused coals and iron dust. Jarret was glad to take two buckets and walk down to the brook. An iridescent-headed mallard broke cover and flew off with his mate, quacking indignantly. Jarret let the first bucket down, feeling the pull on his muscles as the water poured in and strained the rope. The grass was lush on these alluvial soils. He picked a few blades and tasted them: soft and fine, different from the sturdy, lime-enriched bluegrass of home.

  Home. A place he would never see again. A heaviness settled on him that didn’t lift as the long, dull days stretched on, spent in toil that offered neither mental challenge nor reward. Because it had been his whole life, Jarret had never realized what it meant to be skilled at something that was highly valued. Now, he was merely a pair of hands, the same as any other. He yearned for Darley—the scent of him, the silky feel of his mane. It was torment to know he was just over the rise, but out of reach. Whenever he could, he made his way to the hilltop and gazed down at the pastures to catch a glimpse of the horse when they let him out to graze. He’d creep as close as he dared and watch as long as he could before anyone noticed he wasn’t at his tasks.

  As the spring advanced, the air became dense and wet, like the breath of a horse after hard exercise. The infirmary saw more souls laid out with the saddleback fever and other ailments of the hot weather. The cotton blossoms fell and then the fields began to froth in a white so dazzling that Jarret sometimes had to shade his eyes from the brightness.

  The plantation began to gear up for picking, tell-tales set up at the end of rows, the big wooden balers hauled out, the gin house cleaned ready to receive the crop. Jarret wondered whether his message to Ten Broeck had ever reached the barber Johnson, and if it had been passed on. Every day, he awoke hoping that this would be the day word would come, reversing his fortunes, bringing him back to the side of his horse.

  But no word came, day following day. And as picking began, Jarret was called to the fields. Everyone, other than the key horsemen and the most senior housekeepers, was required to set aside usual tasks. Even the youngest were put to work, darting under the plants, gathering the lowest-growing staple into the foaming clouds bulging from hessian sacks.

  Jarret soon missed the dull chores of the smithy. This new labor was relentless; the pressure from the overseers constant and cruel, pushing exhausted people to work ever faster. Jarret, slow from inexperience, and later from the ache of strained muscles and the dozens of small, oozing cuts on his hands, became a particular target. The first time he felt the switch sear his back, he turned in disbelief and rage. He lunged for the man who had struck him, but the girl working beside him grasped his arm tight, hissed at him, and shook her head. “You gone make it worse.”

  If he did not run to the tell-tale when his sack was full, he would hear the switch crack the air just before the blow landed. By the end of the week, his good shirt hung in shreds and red weals bloomed across his shoulders. From before first light till full dark, the days were a blur of throbbing pain, agonized spirits. He had never known life could be so bitter.

  The only respite came on Sunday. He hadn’t cared for the obligatory church services at the Meadows, where the Warfields favored a stern Calvinist style of worship. There, Black worshippers were segregated up in the rear gallery, out of sight, and no one was the wiser if you just closed your eyes and drifted off during the service. Usually, Jarret would sit in the hard pew and let his mind run on barn matters.

  The Fatherland chapel was a different thing entirely, built for the slaves. Somehow, the exhausted congregation found the strength for singing and witnessing, a joyful noise only briefly interrupted by the White preacher’s dull sermon about the duty of obedience and the promise of reward in the next life for the hardships of this one. “This preacher say the exact same thing, just about, every Sabbath,” Gem whispered. “When Uncle Jack preach, the way he tell the stories, make it seem like the Bible happened just a week or so since, right here in Mississippi. You could swear he know Abraham and Isaac and all them folk personal.”

  When Uncle Jack replaced the White preacher the second Sunday of the picking, Jarret understood what Gem meant. He preached out of the book of Job, and all through the following week, words from that lesson rang in Jarret’s mind as he toiled. Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? It was some comfort to know that another man, in a far-off time and a distant place, had given voice to the same despair. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. And yet that man had endured, according to Jack’s account of how the story went. Jarret tried to hold that thought as he suffered.

  He conceived, in those hard days, a renewed gratitude toward his father, who had endured hardship to rise to a measure of dignity that had extended its protective cloak over Jarret’s childhood. He learned, in those fields, what he had been spared. He felt a new understanding for the folk who bore it, and an admiration for those brave enough to risk everything to run away from such a life. An empathy grew in him. He began to watch people with the sensitive attention he’d only ever accorded his horses. He observed the mother at the end of the day, no matter how tired and broken, still tender to her child; the brothers finding cause to laugh one with the other. The girl, sliding her eyes at a youth, the two of them slipping away in the dark. He would like a girl to look at him with such inviting eyes.

  He hadn’t had thoughts like that before. Even as his world contracted and pressed in upon him, in equal measure his heart expanded. One day, bending to the picking, he saw a snakeskin, dry and twisted, blown against the stem of the cotton plant. He wondered if the snake had to struggle to shed that constricting encasement and if it suffered before it could break free.

  The translucent skin rattled softly in the hot wind. Maybe this season was his shedding. He closed his sore hand around another bole and stuffed it in his sack. He resolved that he would make it so. He would leave the boy behind, discarded in the dust of this damnable field. He didn’t know how, but he had to find a way.

  He would go on in the world as a man.

  JESS

  East End, Washington, DC

  2019

  Jess waited for Theo on the terrace of Art and Soul, a restaurant he’d suggested as a place to grab lunch before they went to inspect the horse painting.

  She recognized him blocks away by his graceful walk. He had a dog with him—a kelpie, of all breeds. The first one she’d seen since leaving Australia. She felt a pang of longing for her own dog, aging with her parents in Tasmania. She’d never considered having an American dog, because she still saw her Washington life as provisional. Eventually, she’d go home, and she didn’t want to subject a dog, maybe old by then, to a long journey and the required quarantine. As Theo drew closer, she could see that he was conducting a one-sided conversation with the canine as they ambled along. She liked people who talked to their dogs.

  She realized why Theo had chosen this particular restaurant. Most of the tables on the outdoor terrace were occupied by people with their dogs, and the menu included tasty items for them: frozen beef bone, sliced sirloin.

  “Clancy!” said Jess, delighted, when Theo introduced them. “What a perfect name for an Aussie dog. You really are nostalgic for your childhood, aren’t you?”

  Theo smiled. “Every Saturday I’d watch the kelpies working at the sheep station where I rode horses with my dad. They were amazing dogs, moving a couple of hundred merinos with just the power of their stare. I couldn’t get over it. I always wanted to have one of my own one day.”

  “But they’re not common here. Yours is the first one I’ve seen.”

  “I know. I found him at the pound in New Haven when I was in college there. They had no idea what he was—had him down as a mixed breed. Who knows how he ended up in the pound, poor guy. But as soon as I got him, he made me into his job. Came with me to all my classes, waited outside the Beinecke, sat on my feet in the lecture halls. He’s a very well-educated dog.”

  “My George did that too,” Jess said. She handed Theo her phone. The lock-screen image was of a black mutt with a graying muzzle. “That’s George. My parents spoil him rotten. I miss him like mad.”

  They ordered lunch—shrimp and grits for them, a bone for Clancy. Theo surprised her by ordering wine for both of them.

  “I finished that magazine piece,” he said, lifting his glass. “I think that’s worth a toast.”

  Jess raised her drink and clinked glasses with Theo.

  As he ran an index finger around the rim of his wineglass, Jess imagined the bones: the extended metacarpals and phalanges, the nubbly carpals of the wrist. His fingers were long, tapered. She pictured each bone: proximal, intermediate, distal. A bump on the back of his hand betrayed a poorly healed metatarsal.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Break your hand.” She reached across the table and touched her own index finger to the bulge below his knuckle. He made a fist and regarded the protruding bone.

  “Oh, that. I was up at Oxford, polo match, came off in the first chukka, torqued my hand when I landed. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, so I never even got it seen to. It turned purple but no one could see that under the glove, so I just kept playing.”

  “It must’ve hurt?”

  “Everything hurts, most of the time, when you’re playing at that level. You’re one big bruise after most matches.” He lifted the long ringlets falling beside his ear to expose a scar from a neat row of stitches. “Ball hit me. That’s why I wear my hair like this, even though it takes a shelf of product to keep it up. No fade for this vain guy.”

  “Does everyone in England play polo? I mean, you’re the second one I’ve met this month. The vet I’m working with, she used to play too. But she said she was rubbish at it.”

  He took a long sip from his wineglass and said nothing.

  “I’m betting you weren’t. Rubbish. I bet you were bloody good at it.”

  He scratched his head absently. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Do you still play?”

  He looked down. “No.”

  “Is that why you stopped, the injuries?”

  “No one cared about injuries. Not when you’re flying down the field, you and the horse—” He was suddenly animated. “You’re one being, like a centaur. The best ponies are total athletes. They find the line of the ball without you doing anything. One time I came off—my fault, not the pony’s—and she went on, tearing down the field, and blocked my opponent’s shot as if I were still riding her.”