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shoe . . .”
    â€œBecause the horse had a problem. Navicular maybe.” Harry suggested a degenerative condition of the navicular bone, just behind the main bone of the foot, the coffin bone, often requiring special shoeing to alleviate the discomfort.
    â€œPerhaps, but the blacksmith decided to give the animal more striking area in the back. He moved the point of contact behind the normal heel area.” Kimball placed his hand on his desk, using his fingers as the front of the hoof and his palm as the back and showed how this particular shoe could alter the point of impact.
    â€œI didn’t know you rode horses.” Harry admired his detective work on the horseshoe.
    â€œI don’t. They’re too big for me.” Kimball smiled.
    â€œSo how’d you know this? I mean, most of the people who do ride don’t care that much about shoeing. They don’t learn anything.” Susan, a devout horsewoman, meaning she believed in knowing all phases of equine care and not just hopping on the animal’s back, was intensely curious.
    â€œI asked an expert.” He held out his palms.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œDr. O’Grady.” Kimball laughed. “But still, I had to call around, dig in the libraries, and find out if horseshoeing has changed that much over the centuries. See, that’s what I love about this kind of work. Well, it’s not work, it’s a magical kind of living in the past and the present at the same time. I mean, the past is ever informing the present, ever with us, for good or for ill. To work at what you love—a heaping up of joys.”
    â€œIt is wonderful,” Harry agreed. “I don’t mean to imply that what I do is anything as exalted as your own profession, but I like my job, I like the people, and most of all, I love Crozet.”
    â€œWe’re the lucky ones.” Susan understood only too well the toll unhappiness takes on people. She had watched her father drag himself to a job he hated. She had watched him dry up. He worried so much about providing for his family that he forgot to be with his family. She could have done with fewer things and more dad. “Being a housewife and mother may not seem like much, but it’s what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t trade a minute of those early years when the kids were tiny. Not one second.”
    â€œThen they’re the lucky ones,” Harry said.
    Kimball, content in agreement, pulled open a drawer and plucked out a bit of china with a grayish background and a bit of faded blue design. “Found this last week in what I’m calling Cabin Four.” He flipped it over, a light number showing on its reverse side. “I’ve been keeping it here to play with it. What was this bit of good china doing in a slave cabin? Was it already broken? Did the inhabitant of the little cabin break it herself—we know who lived in Cabin Four—and take it out of the Big House to cover up the misdeed? Or did the servants, forgive the euphemism, go straight to the master, confess the breakage, and get awarded the pieces? Then again, what if the slave just plain took it to have something pretty to look at, to own something that a rich white person would own, to feel for a moment part of the ruling class instead of the ruled? So many questions. So many questions.”
    â€œI’ve got one you can answer.” Susan put her hand up.
    â€œShoot.”
    â€œWhere’s the bathroom?”

5
    Larry Johnson intended to retire on his sixty-fifth birthday. He even took in a partner, Hayden McIntire, M.D., three years before his retirement age so Crozet’s residents might become accustomed to a new doctor. At seventy-one, Larry continued to see patients. He said it was because he couldn’t face the boredom of not working. Like most doctors trained in another era, he was one of the community, not some highly trained outsider come to impose his superior knowledge on the