Mebane filled up his glass and let it set on the old stained green blotter. As if he just wanted the glass full. He still had not looked at Foster. In the same quiet voice he said, “The man you’re talking about was called Peter. He was yardboy to my parents. And he took care of the driving horses and mostly except when my father got a burr under his butt did the driving for them. Now Peter was a horseman. This is something you need to know; most white people that owned Negroes would brag about them. If they wasn’t complaining. But it was all how good a cook this one was or how good with the children that one was or what a hand with the flowers or the horses.” Mebane looked then at Foster and held up his hand palm out flat. “Thing is, most of the time what we’re talking about is one people that elevated simple everyday skills to something special and appointed some of those other people to hold them. Not because the first people couldn’t have had those same skills, mostwise. But because it held the whole delicate balance a little more firmly. As if there were some things one set could do better than the other. What they disregarded was that it was a simple matter of what you have to do. If being treated well depends on how well you cook or fertilize a rose garden, then you’re going to do it well. And if you don’t have to do that, you can attribute some special level of skill to those who can. Most especially if you don’t have to know anything about it. If you can just set down and eat the food or walk through the garden and see how pretty it all is. You understand?”

Foster said nothing.

Mebane went on. “With that said, Peter was a horseman. Now, you have that automobile. Do you know anything of horses?”

“Not much.”

“You see? It’s a new world. All the time there are old worlds slipping away from us that we don’t even see going. What you’re here after is one old world, one thing, but there’s countless of them. Horses is one. Your children, their children certainly, will think there was never anything but motorcars. Yet they’re brand new. And behind them is ten thousand years of men and horses working together. Think about that. All going away. The horse will be a plaything in the world to come. And fewer and fewer will be the men who understand them, who know them down in their blood and sinew and sweat. I guess there will be men what know automobiles that way. I wouldn’t care to meet one. But forever, there have been horsemen. It’s not just grease and bearings and pistons and such. It’s the souls of two creatures that somehow line up. Link up. So one knows the other. The best of them, those horsemen, did not do well with people. But they could walk up to a strange horse and twist up its lower lip in one hand and lift the head to look up straight into that creature’s eye and talk to it and they would understand one another.”