Nate’s father had a saying, one of his many farmer’s sayings: “If you have death on the farm, just keep it out of the house.” Like most of these wisdoms, something was left out that I could never quite define. The truth was that while the horses might die in their pastures, death was not kept out of the house — it entered, and whispered inside the little rooms, and hid in the closets at night, and brushed against my face in dreams and in my waking moments. Sometimes, it floated into the edges of my vision as I worked in the kitchen, or as I watched the spring’s newborn foals, or as I led the stallion himself out to the show ring on scorching days when such visions floated like waves of heat from the hoof-packed ground. Death was in our house, and because our weaknesses were so much alike that they meshed, one on one, like a huge invisible net, there was nothing we could do to ward off his evil eye.