The bay mare wouldn't put her foot down. She stood in the shade of the shed with her head low, the injured leg folded under her, and watched Ruth approach as if Ruth had personally arranged the trouble.
“Stone,” Harlan said. “Under the shoe. Mateo got it out, but she's sore.”
“A stone wouldn't leave that swelling.”
“Then you can tell me something I don't know. I've been waiting years.”
They worked the foot up together. Harlan took the weight while Ruth cleaned the sole. A puncture lay close to the frog. She pressed beside it and the mare jerked, nearly throwing Harlan against the boards.
“All right, you old nuisance,” he murmured. “I said I had you.”
He wasn't talking to Ruth. His cheek rested briefly against the mare's shoulder. For several minutes he stood bent, bearing the animal's weight while Ruth worked, and didn't complain.
By noon they had the foot clean and wrapped. A small measure of feed waited in a bucket. Harlan took a chair outside the stall and began peeling an apple with his pocketknife.
“You needn't sit with her,” Ruth said.
“I needn't sit with you either.”
He cut the apple in two, offered her half, and fed his own piece by piece to the mare.
Ruth sat on an overturned box. This was how they had spent whole afternoons when she was young: a lame horse between them, work done for the moment, Harlan offering opinions about buyers, saddles, the astonishing incompetence of men who believed a good hat could conceal a poor seat.
“You remember that lawyer with the yellow gloves?” he asked.
“He tried to buy a horse by looking at its teeth from behind.”
“I thought I'd lose him before we settled the price.”
She laughed hard enough to bring tears into her eyes. Harlan watched her, pleased.
“There she is.”
Something in the way he said it made her feel both welcomed and inspected.
After dinner he sent her to his desk to fetch the sale figures. She knew the drawers without asking. His spectacles lay beside the ink bottle. Beneath the sale sheet was a narrow account book, its cloth corners rubbed bare. Carmela Varela's name ran down the open page.
Ruth saw the figures before she meant to. Flour. Cloth. Salt. A doctor's visit. Another sum carried from an older volume. No wage entered against it.
She lifted the book.
“That one's not the horses.”
Carmela stood in the doorway carrying clean linen. Ruth set it down too quickly.
“I was looking for the sale sheet.”
“Underneath.”
Ruth found it. Carmela didn't move.
“He still keeps everyone's accounts?” Ruth asked.
“He has you sometimes. Other people sometimes.”
“Not for ten years.”
Carmela put the linen on a chair. She took the book, turned back several pages, then went to the shelf and pulled out an older volume. Ruth recognized its cracked red spine.
“Here.”
Ruth didn't take it.
“I know what my writing looks like.”
“Then look.”
On the page, in her own careful script, was an amount carried forward. She remembered practicing that capital V, making both sides equal. Beside it lay entries she had copied from scraps Harlan gave her. She had hated a blot on a clean page more than she had disliked any of the figures.
“What am I looking at?”
“Mateo's coat. We bought it in the fall. Paid for it with two colts he broke. Here it is again in the spring.”
Ruth bent closer. The coat appeared under a different heading, bundled with store charges. Seven dollars and fifty cents.
“It could have been—”
“Don't.”
The word was quiet. Ruth's face heated.
Carmela turned a page. “You asked him about it. You came into the kitchen with the book. I told you. You said you'd see to it.”
Ruth could remember a candle burning low, Harlan tired, herself eager to finish. She could remember him saying that family purchases were easy to confuse and Carmela had enough on her mind. She couldn't remember going back into the kitchen.
“I was twenty.”
“Yes.”
Carmela closed the book.
Ruth reached into her pocket. “Seven fifty. I can pay that now.”
“To whom?”
Ruth stopped with the folded money in her fingers.
“If you give him money, he'll put down another amount. If you give it to me, he'll ask where it came from and put down that I stole it.” Carmela gathered the linen. “You came to buy horses. Buy horses.”
She went out, leaving the old book beside Ruth's hand.
When Harlan returned, Ruth was still standing at the desk.
“Carmela says a coat was charged twice.”
He looked at the book, then at her. “Which coat?”
“Mateo's. Years ago.”
“Lord, Ruth. Years ago.”
“Did he owe it?”
“He owed more than a coat.” Harlan reached for his spectacles. “They've had food here in bad years when other folks had none. A roof. A doctor when there was sickness. You can't pull out one line and say that's the whole account.”
“Then where are the wages?”
“Working against it.”
He said it patiently, as if she had lost the knack for a familiar task.
Outside the bay mare struck the stall with her wrapped foot. Harlan turned at once. Ruth followed him, the sale sheet still in her hand. He unlatched the stall and let the mare lean into his chest while he felt the bandage.
“She'll rub it loose if we don't watch,” he said.
Ruth watched his hands, so careful on the swollen leg. Then she looked down at the figures she had come to bargain over and realized she had been holding them hard enough to tear the edge.