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hands.
    Its head seemed distorted because it wore a large plowing collar that had come loose, worked its way around the back, and swung ever wilder the more the horse tried to shake it off, and it had forced the horse to carry its head awkwardly high to one side. As to the growth on the front, a large and decorative knee-length harness medallion had been hung onthe horse’s chest, but it got buckled in some collision suffered by the galloping animal, had worked its way up to the horse’s face, and had begun to bite into its flesh, and was thus wedged.
    Mother took command. In those days she had the gift of always being understood. She walked around to the horse’s shoulder and began to pat it further. The poor creature accepted her affection so readily and eagerly that his nuzzling almost knocked her off her feet.
    “Get Billy,” she told me. “Tell him to bring a ladder. And go for Mr. Treacy.”
    Billy Moloney ran our farmyard, and was constitutionally unable to speak a sentence in the English language without, as Mother put it, “cursing like a sailor.” She and I worked out a method by which I could report his conversation to her; every time he swore I would substitute my father’s euphemism “flock.”
    I found him in the milking shed.
    “What she want a flockin’ ladder for?”
    “A big horse,” I said.
    “Big flockin’ horse to want a ladder.”
    “He’s very big, Billy.”
    “Ah, flock it,” he said. “I’ll get the flockin’ ladder. Jizz, God, you’d swear I do have nothing else to flockin’ do, Jizz, flockin’ wimmen, flock it.”
    Billy sometimes bisected words with a profanity: “cata-flockin’-gorically” and “un-flockin’-deniably.” Sometimes he doubled down on his lexicon; my father claimed that he once heard Billy say “cata-flockin’-flockin’-gorically.” As my father remarked, “Prob-prob-probably for emphasis.”
    While Billy fetched the ladder, I climbed on my bicycle and rode up the hillside path through our woods to find Mr. Treacy, who followed me down in his truck. He recognized the horse. It belonged to a plowing team that went all over the country giving demonstrations. A week later, when the horse was being collected, the plowing team told us that a rat had spooked the horse, and the horse had bolted. By the time the poor Clydesdale reached us he had traveled more than twenty miles.
    That night, with the horse fast asleep in one of our loose boxes, Mother told the story to my father. She turned to me and said, “Why were you so frightened?”
    “I didn’t know what it was.”
    My father said, “Ask-ask-ask your mother for her lecture on seeing things.”
    Mother said, “In this world, there are two of everything. There’s the thing that we see—like this sugar bowl on the table. And there’s the thing we think we see. When the thing we see is the same as the thing we think we see—fine. If it’s not—watch out for trouble.”
    She delivered this in that voice of hers that I grew up with—a voice that had no threat in it, a voice that up to then had never been raised at or against me. How could I have anticipated the ferocity, the persistence in this tall, capable woman with her boy’s haircut, who had the most beautiful hands I have ever seen? And, as I’d find out, a capacity to make dreadful errors, and reap terrible harvests.

M ost men have three lives, public, private, and secret. My father had four.
    The world knew him as a successful general farmer who owned a horse or two. We had dairy, grain, and crops, held in place each season by this warm and well-liked man. When forking out a cowshed or clipping a hedge, he wore the big boots with the hobnails, and the “gaiters” made from the cutoff tops of Wellington rubber boots. He then wore tweed suits when he went to town, and red polka-dot pocket handkerchiefs, a man who was as comfortable with Billy flockin’ Moloney as he was with Professor Fay and his sister, Miss Dora Fay, who came down