“I guess so,” Mother said dubiously.

Dawnette strode over to Fritillary, chomping at a bale of hay. “Now Miz Jenny,” she said reprovingly, “you haven’t dressed her?”

“I haven’t?” Mother asked.

“You got to wash her down with soap and water.”

“You mean like a car?” I asked. To wash down Fritillary would be like washing down a galleon. I wanted no part of it. “Won’t she catch cold? Shouldn’t she finish eating?” She could eat all day, I figured, which would give me time to invent another, possibly more valid excuse to avoid stress.

“You just wash around what you call her vulva,” Dawnette explained, “and wrap her tail to prevent germs and injury to old Sailor boy here. I mean,” she shook her head sternly, “you wouldn’t want old Sailor to get his penis all slashed up with a wild hair, now would you?”

Frankly, I didn’t care what happened to old Sailor boy’s penis; I wasn’t going to wash out some goddam horse’s snatch just to make him safe from wild hairs. “Not me,” I said firmly, and Mother looked as if she were about to faint. Her fortifications, built on cooking sherry, were crumbling.

“It’s easy.” A note of impatience crept into Dawnette’s voice. “For Christ’s sakes…”

“You do it,” I said.

“Can’t,” she said. “I ain’t nothin’ but a little ole shirttail girl delivering a stud. It says in the contract between Mr. Q. and my grandmama that’s what I am to do and then get him to home and that’s all.”

“What about the helpfulness, the traditional code of the West? I always thought being neighborly was like a sacred trust out here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Like when all the good folks get together to help a neighbor raise a barn.”

“This definitely is not a barn-raising and anyway I never heard of such a thing.”

Shit. I led old Fritillary to the breeding stocks; with every step she shied from her own sun-trapped shadow. I loose-wrapped her lead line around a post, rolled up my sleeves, and sloshed out her snatch with a bucket of soap and water. Her tail I swathed in an old but clean leg-wrap Dawnette found in the tack room. It was a sloppy job, made more so by Fritillary’s pissing all over me.

“Good,” said Dawnette, the indisputable maven in such matters. “Now get her down to the exercise run.”

“What’s that?”

She sighed loudly, pointing a finger of command toward an elongated enclosure, about twelve feet wide and eighty feet long, fenced in by horizontal logs with mesh wire spiked to the posts between them. Dutifully I maneuvered the mare out of the stocks and into the run. Now what?

“I think we ought to tease her a little,” the maven said. “You bring old Sailor into the paddock.”

“Why can’t we take them down to the pasture and let ’em the hell alone?”

“No way,” Dawnette said. “My grandmama says he’s got to be bred in hand.”