driving into the sinking light, getting dazed by it. The ripe yellow-green of the fields in late afternoon could make her almost dizzy with pleasure. She sped toward the stud division of her parents’ farm, where Ned supervised the days and breeding schedules of the fourteen stallions, and on those days when she felt like it, or when she and Ned had plans for supper, she turned into that drive and walked down the pathway that ran from the farm office to the stallion barn. She might find Ned in the breeding shed, shouldering with all his weight into the side of a mounted stallion, trying to keep him on balance and unhurt until he’d had a successful cover. The grooms would be helping him, four or five men circling and supporting two tons of quivering, copulating horseflesh, calling “Whup,” “Steady,” “All right,” for the few minutes it took. Or she might find Ned in the little room off the shed, equipped as it was with microscopes for checking sperm motility and with video machines for going over the breeding tapes made for shareholders and the owners of the mares that had been vanned in from other farms. In the anteroom, with its plastic windows that looked onto the padded ring where Danny Boy or Banjo Man had met his mare, Ned would stare at one of the two television monitors, a petri dish full of the day’s sample having been slid into place on the microscope tray. Above him, on a screen, pale villi undulated against a gray ground, making Knox think each time, That is what white noise would look like, if white noise were visible.
When he wasn’t supervising a breeding, Ned might be giving a tour, leading a curious couple who’d stopped in on a cross-country driving trip from stall to stall in the stallion barn, recounting the racing careers of each of his charges, his hands deep in the pockets of the loose khakis he always wore. When he took his right hand out to adjust the bill of his cap or tug on a bridle to get one of the stallions to raise his head from the feed bucket for a snapshot, one of the tourists might ask before they thought: What happened? What happened to your hand? Knox had heard this question get asked once, having left her car to idle in the drive and run up to the barn with a quick request or bit of news, she couldn’t remember which. She’d hung back in the barn’s entrance, her hip flush against the fieldstone that curved up toward the central cupola, and waited for Ned to come clean the way he did for the foreign exchanges down at the Rosebud when they got curious after a few beers. Three years had passed since Dynamite, now dead, possessed of a wide cruel streak unusual even in a top stallion, had bitten Ned’s right index finger off at the top knuckle and spat the tip into the sawdust they used to soften the floor of the breeding shed. One of the grooms had hustled the horse back into his stall while the other two ran to her father’s office for help. Her father had called 911, then thought better of waiting for an ambulance and gone for Ned with the idea of getting him in his car and driving him to the closest hospital. He’d found Ned dead quiet, standing in the middle of the shed, squeezing his right hand with his left. There was blood, but not as much blood as you might have expected, her father had said. He’d asked Ned where the piece of finger was, and Ned told him, “Here. In my pocket.”
At the hospital, they’d offered to helicopter in a hand surgeon from Louisville. He could be there well within the hour, which was plenty of time. Knox’s father was relieved; he put his arm around Ned’s shoulders and said something like, Let’s sit down here to wait. It won’t be long.
But Ned just looked at him, pale, and shrugged against the pressure of her father’s arm. He kept gripping at the towel that was wrapped around his closed fist, said, I don’t see why I have to wait, let’s get this over with now, let’s do it. Her father protested, according to both of them, that Ned had to hang on until the surgeon got there. There was nothing to do but sit, and he’d find someone to give