“He churns up the earth,” cried Jarret, “rejoicing in his power.”

  Lexington flicked his ears around, trying to catch the meaning of this new game. Then he gathered his hind end and released into a gallop. The soil fanned up, speckling the air.

  “Seem like reading do make you go faster,” Jarret laughed, lifting his weight up out of the saddle and letting Lexington have his head.

  * * *

  • • •

  The first use Jarret made of his new letters was a short note addressed to Richard Ten Broeck. He went to Jack, to ask if he had some paper to spare.

  Jack looked at him quizzically. “You sure you want your marse to know you writing? Most of them take a vast exception.” Jarret hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t seem to him the kind of thing Ten Broeck would care about. So Jack found him a scrap of paper from an old receipt book and showed him how to pencil out each word.

  I am back with Lexington. All well out here. Jarret

  He gave the note to a carter who was heading into Natchez with a load of cypress for the mill and asked him to give it to the barber to forward on to New Orleans.

  He was surprised, when the carter returned, to be handed a letter addressed to himself. He could not make out the flowing script, but Jack read it to him:

  “ ‘I will be sure your master gets your favor of the 4th inst’—he mean there your note—‘favor’ is a fancy way to say that—and ‘instant’ mean the date of the month. ‘Mr. Ten Broeck will be glad, I am sure, of your news. I am, &c,

  Wm Johnson, Natchez.’ ”

  Jarret took the note back and gazed at the handsome blue script. What a thing it was, to be able to send and receive a letter from a person. He thought it must be worth some struggle to master this skill. He applied himself even more intently to his word lists. Soon enough, Jack said he was to join the Sunday class, “since you getting on now just about as well as my youngest.”

  Every day, Jarret checked Lexington’s hooves for any rippling in the new-grown horn that would signal founder, and every day he was relieved when none became evident. He did not press the horse but kept to a routine of light work in the early morning. Later, they would find a place by the creek or in a coppice and Jarret would let Lexington graze in the shade while he studied his letters and scraped words on his slate. They would head back to the stables in the late afternoon, their shadow long in front of them as the egg-yolk sun at their back dropped into the hazy horizon. As fall advanced, the air lost its furry breath and freshened. Jarret wondered how long they would have before Pryor put an end to this idyll and deemed the horse fit enough to train.

  Until then, Jarret avoided the kind of endurance work that would come with racing preparation. Instead, he devised playful pursuits that allowed the horse to use his mind. In the round pen, with the horse at liberty, he perfected voice commands, asking Lexington to perform a leg yield or a turn on the haunches. The horse enjoyed these sessions and was quick to divine what Jarret wanted. When he did the right thing and received praise, he would curve his neck and look down his long nose at Jarret, as if to say, “Of course I can do it. What’s next?”

  Jarret soon could get the horse to rear simply by saying, “Up!” or raising his palm. He set about teaching him to drop to his knees when he said, “Kneel!” Jarret then mounted him bareback. He had just asked the horse to “rise!” when, from behind him, a voice called angrily: “Is that a racehorse or a circus pony?”

  Lexington shied at the unfriendly shout and spun, ears pinned, to face Pryor. Jarret moved fluidly with his horse. He felt a flare of anger—you don’t come up behind a horse and yell like that, as any horseman should know. But he quickly suppressed the feeling so as not to alarm the horse further. He rubbed Lexington’s neck reassuringly and said nothing.

  Pryor held a letter crumpled in his hand. “Ten Broeck has sent for you. You’re to go right away to New Orleans on tomorrow’s night boat. Pack your things. They’ll be sent on.”

  Jarret looked down at him, stunned. How could he leave Lexington?

  “But . . . how . . . why . . .”

  “Here’s your darky pass,” he said, throwing a paper onto the ground. “And here’s the money he advanced you for the journey. I never took that man for feckless, but I guess I was mistaken. He’s agreed to run the nag in a grudge match December second. Good luck getting it in shape—a horse coming off a colic who hasn’t been trained, against a filly a full year older who has raced all season. He’s a fool.”

  Jarret dismounted and snatched up the dusty paper and the bills before they could blow away. He stared at the pass. He could just make out his own name and the name “Lexington,” but nothing else. He felt his heart unclench. They would go together. They would leave this place.

  “But . . . I don’t know the way . . .”

  Pryor’s back was already turned. Jarret unlatched the gate, remounted the horse, and rode to find Jack. He was overhauling the balers, oiling the pressing screws. Jarret showed him the pass. “You’re to go on the boat from Under-the-Hill tomorrow. Just go back on the same road you come here on. It don’t take too long to get down the river. Your marse say here he gone send someone name of—well, I can’t make out the name—J-A-C-Q-U-E-S—Jake-kweez—however you say that—to meet you at the dock and bring you on out to someplace call Metairie.” Jack looked up from the note. “We sure will miss you. My wife and my boys are fond of you, and I’m proud of all you learned in so little time.” Jack leaned down and rummaged in the tied cloth bundle that contained his lunch fixings and his tin water cup. He pulled out the worn Bible. “You take this, and you keep on striving to learn how to read what’s in it, you hear?”

  “But I can’t take this . . .”

  “The White preacher got plenty. He gone get me another one. You take it, son. You gonna need it in New Orleans, fo sure. That is a sinful town. A regular Babylon, what I heard tell.”

  The next day, as Jarret rode out of the gate, he turned in the saddle and looked back at the plantation. He felt regret that Pryor hadn’t proved to be a different kind of man. He sensed he and the horse could have accomplished a great deal if things had gone differently. Still, he wasn’t sorry to have seen what he’d seen, and learned what he’d learned. Not just the book learning. He felt larger in spirit. There was a space in his soul for the suffering of people. He resolved to take account of their lives, the heavy burdens they carried.

  He allowed the horse to pick up a gentle canter on the narrow way back to Natchez. He puzzled on whether there was any possible way to bring Lexington to racing fitness without overtaxing him and risking injury. He was glad the horse seemed no worse for the colic, but how to get him in form in less than a week, Jarret had no notion. He ran training plans through his head, trying to square what the horse needed to do with the number of days left in which to do it.

  He couldn’t see it. He would have to tell Mr. Ten Broeck so. He was fretting on that and not paying close mind to his surroundings, which is why he didn’t perceive the two men and their mule cart until he rounded the bend and was upon them, still at a canter.

  He breathed out, the horse slowed, and Jarret lifted the reins to signal a stop. But not before one of the men, alarmed, had dived into the bushes and landed hard on his hind end.

  “Just hold up there!” ordered the other man, raising a hand to halt Jarret and reaching the other hand down to his companion, who scrambled out of the shallow ditch, cursing. “Who you think you are? Who in hell’s name are you, anyhow, to be riding that horse, just as you like, without no by-you-leave?”

  Jarret looked into the man’s pinched, rodent face. Soiled, threadbare clothing. A mule so thin you could count his ribs. Men with no one to look down upon except the enslaved. Men with nothing to lose. Men to fear.

  “I—I didn’t see you, round that there bend in the road. I didn’t mean nothing, sorry.”

  “Sorry? I’ll make you sorry. You not from around here, boy. Can hear that from the funny way you talkin.” The man took a menacing step forward. Lexington pinned his ears back and snaked his head sideways, butting the man hard in the shoulder.

  The other one reached into the wagon and pulled out a pistol. “Git down.”

  Jarret hesitated. He could ask Lexington for a gallop and they could outrun the men, no doubt. But they couldn’t outrun a bullet, if the man was any kind of shot. It wasn’t worth the risk. He slid down, keeping the reins firmly in his hand. He could feel the horse quivering.

  “I axed you a question, boy. Who’s are you?”

  “I’m Mr. Ten Broeck’s Jarret.”

  “Ten Broeck? What kind of furriner name is that?”

  “I—I—I’m coming from Fatherland, Colonel Bingaman’s place. I’m hired out to Marse Pryor.”

  It was a necessary lie. He could see that they knew those names. And they weren’t about to mess with property belonging to powerful men.

  “You got a darky pass, boy?”

  Jarret drew out the paper and held it out. The man with the pistol signaled for his friend to take it. He made a show of reading it, then turned and spat on the ground. “Seems to be in order.” When he handed it back, Jarret saw that he was holding it upside down.

  “You right lucky, boy. You just make sure next time we see you, you showin a deal more respect. Now get on out a here.”

  Jarret threw a foot in the stirrup and said nothing. He asked Lexington for a trot. And soon as he judged they were out of pistol range, he urged him up to a hand gallop and let the power of the stride hurl the tension from his body and the anger from his soul.

  THEO

  American Art Museum, Washington, DC

  2019

  “He’s an absolute beauty,” said Theo, gazing at the painting of the glossy horse with four white feet.

  Jess glanced up at Theo. It would be something, she thought, to be looked at with such close, admiring attention. Perhaps that was a thought she shouldn’t be having. She turned her scrutiny back to the painting.

  “Does he remind you of your pony?”

  Theo turned to Jess with a puzzled expression. “My pony?”

  “Your polo pony. The one you used to ride.”

  Theo smiled tolerantly. “I didn’t have a pony. In polo you ride a string of them. At least six, in the course of a typical match. Sometimes maybe even eight or nine.”

  “Nine? No wonder it’s such a rich man’s game. I grew up in a working-class backwater when it comes to stuff like that. Girls like me didn’t get to fantasize about Pony Club.” Or handsome polo players, for that matter. “I really don’t know anything about horses—at least, not living ones with flesh on their bones,” mused Jess. “Just about the only time I saw a horse was when the mounted police rode by our place. My mum had this mortifying habit of running out into the middle of our busy road to scoop up the manure for her rose beds.” Theo tried to imagine Abiona doing something like that. The image was so comical he grinned. Jess returned the smile. Was it the wine, or was she becoming infatuated with this man? In either case, she couldn’t afford any more stupid remarks. There was a limit, and she was sure she’d reached it, even for someone as polite as he was.

  They stood together, scrutinizing Thomas Scott’s gorgeous nineteenth-century oil portrait of Lexington. A curator had located the picture at Jess’s request and set it up on a small easel in a study room, along with the folder containing the museum’s documentation of the piece. It was a 2 x 3-foot canvas, a bit larger than Theo’s salvaged painting. The artist had depicted the horse alone by a wooden water trough, his aristocratic head turned, ears alert, as if interrupted by a sudden sound. And while Theo’s painting captured a young colt, this work showed the mature horse—a magnificent stallion at the height of his powers, his early promise fulfilled.

  “Amazing anatomical detail,” Jess said. “The musculature, the way the painter’s captured the flexion in the neck.”

  “And the expression in the eye,” said Theo. “It’s haunting. This is a beautifully unified studio portrait. I don’t know why that conservator was so swift to rank this man Scott as a second-tier painter. This is a polished piece of work.”

  “Well, Raines is only one opinion,” said Jess, picking up the file. “Scott must’ve been well regarded in his own time to get the commission in the first place, since the horse was already quite a celebrity when this was painted. It says circa 1860 and that Scott was born sometime between 1830 and 1832. So he’s almost thirty when he painted this. He’d had some time to hone his technique.”

  “Does it tell you anything you can use in your work?”

  “Oh sure. I’m convinced, looking at this, that the bloke who mounted the skeleton had never seen this horse alive. He just threw it together as if it were any generic horse. But this horse had an exceptional anatomy. The bones have a lot more mass than most equines, for one thing. They’re superdense, none of the bone loss you’d expect in a horse of that age. And then specific details—the withers, here”—she pointed to the picture—“see how level they are? In the skeleton, they’re set way too high. And another glaring thing: the painter has the hocks much less angular—here—and the pasterns shouldn’t be so vertical. There’s a ton of useful information in this picture.”

  “Does it say how it got to the Smithsonian? Did it come here along with the skeleton?”

  “No, I thought that, too, but I already checked, and it came much later. Let me look and see if there’s any more about it.” She rifled through the forms in the folder. The usual museum bureaucracy: transport manifests, conservation notes. Finally, she plucked out a copy of the deed of gift.

  “Here it is. Seems like it came as part of a large bequest in 1980.” Jess skimmed the record.

  “That’s odd—”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’d know better than me.” She handed the file to Theo, pointing to the list of gifted works. “Am I right? Every other work in that particular bequest is, like, famous contemporary art, no?”

  Theo scanned the document. “Oh yes, you’re quite right. It’s pretty much a who’s who of postwar modernists—Jim Dine, Diebenkorn, Oldenburg, Gorky, Hartigan. Abstract expressionists, op artists—‘Martha Jackson Memorial Collection,’ ” he read. “I’ve heard of her. She owned a gallery in Manhattan in the 1950s, when the art business was still very much a man’s world. Along with Peggy Guggenheim, she really influenced the direction of the art market in New York in those key years. She was quite radical in her tastes—showed avant-garde artists from Europe and Japan—and was one of Jackson Pollock’s first supporters, very deep in his circle. She was friends with his wife, Lee Krasner. I think I read somewhere that she was with her when he killed himself.”

  “Gah. I didn’t know he killed himself.”

  “Well, it’s not entirely clear, but it seems like it. He hadn’t been painting for months. Drunk, speeding, car crash. Passenger died, too.” Theo trailed off.

  He was thinking of another crash. A dusty road in Helmand Province. His father, visiting a girls’ school that USAID had funded. The Taliban hated the idea of girls going to school, and the delegation got warning that there might be an attack. The convoy was speeding when the SUV hit a pothole, flipped, and landed upside down in a ditch.

  Theo remembered the headmaster’s low voice, his terse account of the accident. He remembered shivering in his damp polo uniform, staring intently at the rivulets of rainwater snaking around the lead of the diamond-paned windows in the head’s study. The bands of cold light gleaming dully on the polished desk, the Persian carpet. His awareness of mud on his boots. Struggling to control his voice as he asked, “Where’s Mummy?”

  “Your mother. Delegation, apparently. Key member. Negotiations with the Shabab in Addis Ababa. Delicate stage. Can’t leave just now. She asked me to tell you she will phone you just as soon as she can.” The headmaster turned to gaze out the window so that he wouldn’t have to notice Theo’s tears. There were whispered voices in the outer office. “Matron’s here. She’s made a cup of tea for you in the infirmary. Best go along with her now, there’s a good chap.”

  His mother had called that night. But she hadn’t come to see him, even after the Addis Ababa negotiations wound up. There was another pressing mission, he couldn’t remember what. He realized then that her work had always come first and always would. Ahead of her marriage, ahead of her child. It was a harsh truth for a lonely boy, but also a liberating one. He was his own man long before any of his peers even realized that was an option. He’d embraced life as a rootless loner, at home in the world but belonging nowhere in particular. Comfortable with a wide range of people, close to very few.

  He blinked and swallowed. Abiona would disapprove mightily if she saw him spending time with this haphazardly groomed White woman. And yet there was something about her clumsy, unstudied personality and her deep enthusiasm for her strange occupation. He was intrigued by her. Perhaps, as she’d said, he was overnostalgic for his childhood, those few scant years in Australia when he’d felt entirely secure, entirely loved.

  Well, if so, so what? It wasn’t as if he had unlimited options. He couldn’t date the undergrads in his TA sections. He disliked dating apps; too many waste-of-time dates, too much ghosting. His Yale friend Daniel had set him up, just after he got to Georgetown, with Makela, a DC native who worked as a curator at the Anacostia museum. They’d hit it off at first. He liked her mix of sass and seriousness. But after a few dates, she stopped answering his texts. When he finally called Daniel to ask if he knew what had gone wrong, there was a long sigh. “You really want to hear it? She declared you ‘insufficiently steeped in an experience of American Blackness.’ ”

  “What?”

  “She said she felt like she had to explain more stuff to you than she would to a White guy. She told me about the ‘Dixie’ incident, and I was like, ‘Girl, I feel you.’ ”