Hollis remembers that he and March hid on the far side of a stone wall so that March could count the horses. It was a hot, windy day and March had to keep grabbing at her long, dark hair so it wouldn’t fly into her eyes. The wind echoed, like a drumbeat or a warning, and everything smelled like grass. Mr. Cooper’s horses were hardly the same species as the bony haybags found in backyards along Route 22. These horses had run at Belmont and at Saratoga; they were so fast they could outrace the storm clouds that came down from Fox Hill.
As soon as Hollis married Belinda, he sold off nearly all the horses, and now there are only three in a barn large enough to house dozens: his son Coop’s lazy, old pony; the ancient workhorse, Geronimo, who used to pull bales of hay into the fields for the thoroughbreds; and Tarot, Belinda’s horse, who killed two of his riders before they took him off the track. Hollis hates them all. He hates the sound and smell of horses; he hates the stupid ones, who shy at garter snakes and pools of rainwater, and he hates the smart ones, like Tarot, even more. Right now, as he nears the barn, Hollis can hear the pony whimpering. It’s a faint, small sound, but it sets Hollis in mind of how horrible a horse’s scream is. Before he can stop himself from thinking, he sees a white horse fall to its knees. It falls like snow, like a drift which can cover you completely. Well, Hollis isn’t about to dwell on that. He turns off all consciousness when it comes to the years he was away. Some people might say three years isn’t that long to be gone, but Hollis knows it’s time enough to have a hole form inside you. It’s exactly the right amount of time to leave you empty, forever after, no matter who you once were or what you once might have been.
Tarot is in the first stall, which has been his home since the day he came to the Farm. A bay thoroughbred, dark as mahogany, he would have brought more at auction than any of the horses Hollis disposed of, if his reputation hadn’t been so notorious. Breeders up and down the East Coast still refer to Tarot when they want to call up a horse whose potential is chewed to pieces, a champion who went so haywire he might as well have been sold for dog food. Even though he would behave for Belinda, people in the village still talk about the times when Tarot escaped. Some of the shopkeepers-Sam Deveroux, who owns the hardware shop, for instance, and Mimi Frank, who styles hair at the Bon Bon-insist that Tarot breathed out fire when he ran through the town. They swear there was one warm evening in May when he singed all the lilacs on Main Street. To this day, the flowers that bloom on these bushes carry the scent of sulfur; they’ve been known to burn a child’s hand, if one is foolish enough to grab for a bunch of the blossoms.
People in town wonder why Hollis bothers to keep a worthless old racehorse around. The women like to think it’s a mark of respect for Belinda, who loved the horse so, but the men joke it’s simply because Hollis refuses to take a low price for his property. Neither assessment is correct. Hollis retains the horse because he is a waste, just as Hollis himself is. Every night they face off, and each time they do, they despise each other a little more. This feud doesn’t mean that Hollis would ever get rid of Tarot. All in all, you don’t take the only creature mean enough to be your equal out behind the barn so you can shoot him in the head.
“Hey, buddy,” Hollis whispers as he approaches Tarot’s stall. As usual, the thoroughbred looks right through him. “Fuck you too.” Hollis is always astounded by how damned haughty a horse can be. “Double fuck you.”
On that day when he and March first came here, they were caught by Jimmy Parrish, who now uses a cane and spends all his evenings at the Lyon Cafe, spouting racetrack statistics and boring people silly. Back then, Jim was the foreman at Guardian Farm, and he took his job seriously. It was a dog who gave them away, one of Annabeth Cooper’s stupid poodles, who yapped like crazy and led Jimmy Parrish right to the stone wall where they were hiding.
The Coopers weren’t friendly with people in the village and No Trespassing signs lined the perimeters of their property. Even their parties, given all summer long, had guests imported from New York and Boston, although local people were always well aware when Annabeth Cooper threw one of her bashes. Truckloads of roses would be delivered from Boston, and so much champagne was served that the bees got drunk and wandered into houses all over the village, buzzing like crazy, but too giddy and confused to sting.
Hollis and March knew they weren’t wanted at the Coopers’, but they came to count horses anyway. Hollis can still hear the wind the way it was on the day they were caught. He hears it in his dreams, and when he walks across the pastures he now owns. It was impossible to make out what March was saying over the roar of the wind, but Hollis could see her foot was caught between two stones. Annabeth Cooper’s poodle was snapping; it had surprisingly large teeth for a dog of its type, and it must have struck flesh, because March’s hand was bleeding.
“I’m phoning the police,” Jimmy Parrish had shouted, loud enough for them to hear.
March was wearing a white shirt which billowed out like a flag in the wind. She knew that Hollis had had several run-ins with the police. He’d been caught taking some magazines he couldn’t afford at the pharmacy, and the owner of the liquor store had ratted on him when he tried to buy a six-pack of beer. He was a city boy, brought to Fox Hill with his city ways intact, and March didn’t hold it against him. Still, one more strike and he might just be out.
“Go,” March mouthed to him. “Go on,” she insisted.
Afraid of the police, spooked by the wind, Hollis turned and ran. Hollis was a good runner, but there’s not a day that goes by when he doesn’t wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t been so fast, if he’d been caught, or if he’d simply stayed where he was. What if he and March had spent that day up at Olive Tree Lake instead of spying at the Farm? Is this how fates are made and futures cast? An idle choice, a windy day, a dog that can’t mind its own business?
Some people know the exact moment when they’ve lost everything. They can look back and see it plain as day and for the life of them they can’t understand why they didn’t spot the situation as it was happening. Why didn’t Hollis stop running? Why didn’t he stay by her side? He waited for March for what seemed like forever, on the rutted back road which led from the Farm to Fox Hill. As the afternoon went on the wind died down, but the blood rushing in Hollis’s own head had replaced the sound. His head was pounding, and the more time that passed, the worse his headache became. Finally, the sky turned inky. The peepers were calling and the moon was climbing into the sky by the time March appeared.
She was holding a handful of roses cut from Annabeth Cooper’s own garden; Unity and Double Delight and Peace were all clutched to her chest as she ran toward him. That’s what Hollis saw first, pink roses in the dark night. All at once he felt like crying, and he might have done so, if March hadn’t started talking right away. It wasn’t that he was listening to what she said-certainty he didn’t want to hear how smart Richard Cooper was, or that his sister, Belinda, was so kindhearted she kept an opossum as a pet, feeding it bread softened in warm milk. allowing it to sleep on the quilt at the foot of her bed, even though Mrs. Cooper had forbade any animals but her poodles in the house. No, he didn’t need to hear those details, because he knew what had happened from the look on March’s face. In a single afternoon, all because of a stupid dog and a stone wall, it had happened. He had lost her.
As soon as Guardian Farm legally became his, Hollis cut down all of Annabeth Cooper’s roses. They used to grow by the split-rail fence, and they’re a lot more stubborn than Hollis would have imagined. Every year or so he has to take a sickle and hack away at the branches which insist on growing back. This past spring he found a red rose on the ground beneath the fence, and it was just as startling to him as a pool of blood would have been. He kicked the flower beneath a hedge of evergreens, and yet he continued to see it from the comer of his eye. He saw that rose long after it had already wilted, and died.