I longed to let them out of their small field, for they’d eaten the winter grass bare in most parts, and just beyond their fence was more grass, thick in parts, with patches of clover. ‘It won’t do,’ Roy said, when I asked him one night in bed, his breath reeking of the home-brewed spirit. ‘Not unless you’re going to tether them to a post. There’s no fence there, and they’re bound to run off and cause trouble.’ He tried to caress me then but I told him it was my time of the month. This wasn’t true, but it was close, I could feel it in the soreness of my breasts.

The next day was Sunday, and after we had been to church Roy came and helped me put on their halters and leads (I had cleaned and oiled the old, cracked leather). We picketed them beside the old apple tree, where the grass looked the thickest. We had already eaten Sunday dinner, and I had done the dishes. Mr Jackson sometimes ‘read the Bible’ in the sitting room after dinner on Sundays, but by now I knew that just meant taking a nap. The end of that everlasting church service for another week and the horses munching in the sun made me restlessly happy, and I swung myself up into the apple tree, climbing a few branches to sit in a fork, everything so close yet still beneath me. Roy grinned from where he sat beside the fence, licking his thumb and rubbing the dust off the toes of his polished Sunday shoes. Between us were the horses, ripping the grass in chunks from the damp ground, their lips smacking, their tails swishing against muscled haunches. We didn’t talk but it was as happy as we had been since I’d come to America, together but separate, a brief moment of grace in which we weren’t letting each other down.

After washing the lunch dishes the following day I went to the stables to feed Him ’n Her and brush their coats, which were just beginning to heal, to show some gloss and shine. They were not in the stall and I didn’t see them when I first approached the paddock. They lay, side by side, near the western fence, each with a gunshot wound between the eyes. Their forelocks were matted with blood. Flies gathered around their open eyes, clinging to the wet surface of the dark, filmy irises. Their bodies were stiff when I crouched down to touch them. I stroked their long cold legs, their sticky blood-crusted noses. He would have done it that morning before going to the fields. I wondered if Roy knew. If he’d tried to stop him.