In a pasture north of the highway, a band of horses wheeled to gallop along the fence line. Their coats were heavy with winter and powdered with snow. A big roan stallion led with his mane and tail flying in the wind, his neck stretched out, his great hooves cutting a path through the drifts. Emaline wanted to straddle his broad back and ride with her cheek pressed to his arched neck and the scent of horse in her nostrils, her fingers tangled in his mane, the icy wind freezing the tears on her eyelashes so that she rode blind, trusting the great roan stallion and the snow and sky and the wild and bitter wind.

She stared out at the weathered barns, the tall silos, the barbed-wire fences. Where the powdery snow had blown away, the remnants of the sugar beet harvest lay in the frozen earth. In November, they had tramped the empty beet fields for miles around, Velma with Emaline and Bobby, dragging gunnysacks over the frozen ground, risking broken ankles to search for beets to feed the pigs. Velma had laughed about it, saying that you knew you were poor when you couldn’t even afford to buy feed for the hogs. Now it was barely the end of January and Velma was dead.

Eli drove fifteen miles without saying a word. At Morrill he found the Stegall turnoff without needing directions and he had to slow down where the snow had drifted over the narrow gravel road. At last he spoke. “That was right kind of you to come along with me, Emaline.”

“Don’t mention it. She was my mother.”

“Yes, she was. And quite a mother you had.”

“It’s nice that you finally figured that out.”

“I never thought different. Not a day in my life.”

“You didn’t act like it.”

“Well, what a man feels and what he is able to do aint always the same thing.”

“They should be.”

“Maybe they should. There is no way I could feel worse, honey, I know that. I wanted to get down here while she was still alive and I just never made it. You always think you’re goin to have more time than you do, then it slips away and you’re left holdin nothin at all.”

Emaline stared out the window, not wanting to say more than she already had.

“You aren’t goin to cut me any slack, are you?”

“I guess not.”

“I don’t blame you. I’d probably feel the same in your place, growin up the way you did.”

“You mean getting bundled off to an orphanage because Mama was in the sanatorium with her consumption and you wouldn’t take us in?”