facilities, which the broodmare manager circled slowly in his truck, watching for cribbers, early foals, listening to the whinnied keening of mothers and babies once they’d been weaned from one another into separate fields. Yearling division, where the babies built muscle tone and tolerance for handling, were walked before potential buyers, before being entered for sale. Foaling barns, quarantine barns, receiving barns. Paddocks—individual ones for the hot-tempered stallions. Fields—long cleared of thistles and brush, studded with pyramids of green-black manure, pats of ancient, sun-bleached dung, striped and seamed with dried grass overturned by the mower. Trees: tall, spreading rows of them planted along existing fence lines, along the phantom fences that had been razed as the property expanded and changed. Muck pit at the back, undulating with used straw, piled house high. Fox hole. Sinkhole. Spring.
Knox had had a recurring dream since childhood, of lying down in given places on the farm, rolling on the turf until it swallowed her up, and she felt surprised, even in sleep, at her happiness in going under. She’d grown up able to squint from her bedroom window, deliberately blurring her view of a roofline that marked the presence of the one house visible on a neighboring property. She’d imagined the fences that delineated Four Corners’ borders banked high as sea walls against a blank unknown that needn’t be thought about or explored while the grooms shouted to one another in the fields at dusk, while viburnum and honeysuckle and forsythia and fescue grew without stopping in the gathering dark until they had twined together to make a curtain tall enough to obscure the stars. This was their Eden, where her father chose which animals were bred and born and then named them, where they’d run around naked as Eve, she and Charlotte, in and out of the pond her cabin overlooked now, their bodies festooned with silky ribbons of algae when they emerged, awed at their own outrageousness, at the fact that there was nobody around to see, that all this, the daring, too, was theirs.
She knew that any stranger might look at her now, her cabin curled up at the bottom of the hill her parents’ house stood on like a child at the foot of the family bed, and make the assumption she was that daughter. The sad, stunted one. The one who couldn’t let go. She and her parents had long handled this with frequent jokes (Maybe someday you’ll get rid of me, Knox would proffer; God willing, they’d say, rolling their eyes). But she knew that her presence at the supper table and the ease with which they floated in and out of one another’s days were a comfort to them—a great and necessary comfort, Knox had told herself. Though Knox was plenty proud of the world-class breeding operation her parents had built in an industry famously populated by playboys, hustlers, and dilettantes, and of the integrity with which they had obviously done it, the truth was that she was always trying to get back to something, something that seemed to reside in a past just beyond her reach, and it had more to do with what she sensed within the land than with what went on on its now-manicured surface. When the place had been wilder, so had they, her family—wasn’t that true? If not wilder, then … purer. She remembered the time before the finer stallions had begun retiring off the track into her father’s barn, bringing success with them with each cover, as a time before her family had been contaminated by hurt and separation. Though she’d admit it to no one, Knox had come to half believe in the magical idea that, if she dug into the fescue under her feet, past the seams of earth and limestone and shale and scattered Wyandot arrowheads she occasionally overturned even now in her vegetable garden, she’d hit a lode that contained their former selves, that predated change.
Before the farm became what it became, her father had converted four stalls in a tobacco barn. Their living room, still unrenovated, was furnished in winter with the wrought-iron chairs that lived on their porch in summer. He’d started from scratch, at twenty-seven years old, and there was something eternally romantic for Knox in the vision of her parents, of all of them, at this nascent stage, her dad playing sappy country songs on his guitar for them in the evenings after dinner, painting the rooms of their house himself one