Fritillary hung her tail to the right, a flag of welcome. Sailor trumpeted, white-eyed, pawing the earth in archetypal conformance to the cliché. The muscles in his neck writhed like a nest of snakes under the twitching skin. His sculptured frame, engulfing as a wave, rose up and blocked out the sun. It was a long way to Fritillary; he shifted into overdrive. Flailing the savage air, wild mane flying, he plunged toward her. The lead line went taut. Anchored to the end of it, I went with him. Sweat caked his plated shoulders as he and I were swamped by an invisible tornado thick with the heat and dust and the rot smell of the stable. He flashed past me toward his tail-twitching seductress. With an awful effort I held on. The lead bound my hands as he jerked his head. I jerked back, hard as I could, which was a mistake. His terrible hoofs like twin pile drivers exploded into me just about equidistant from my belly and my balls. I went oozing into the corral, clutching my insides together. Everything went dark, diminished, and then in that crucible of pain the dark image intensified, etched forever on the retina of my mind. I saw Dawnette lean forward, framed in golden dust, her pretty head tilted in an angle of disbelief. I saw my mother breathlessly still, observing my punishment with unreasonable composure. I saw the neck of a small bottle protruding from the embroidered pocket of her lavender gown. I saw a deep grave, looking down at it from a great height, the grave my own. And I saw old Sailor pour over that fence, taking off as if launched by a red-hot missile up his ass. I exaggerate: he half poured. His forelegs got over the highest rail but the rest of him didn’t and he hung there, equipoised, like some rude and ungainly scales badly in need of adjustment. Served the bastard right—after all my pains with him, he had succeeded in mounting not Fritillary but the fence. I heard Dawnette say, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith—he’s rump-sprung. And his eyes are yellow, the whites of ’em!” Her words were a chant, or maybe they just seemed so, with Sailor bellowing an accompaniment like a rusty bugle. “You got any two-bys?” she shouted. “And a sheet of plywood? Before he gets his dick lopped off?”

Mother blinked uncomprehendingly, once more the languid slave of the cooking sherry.

“Come on,” Dawnette wailed, “before he castrates hisself!”

“Behind,” I mumbled hoarsely, “the barn.” She took off on her mission of mercy.