As soon as we’d carried Jack out of the barn, she ran to Mercury. He was still wild with fear, kicking, screaming, and the other horses were whinnying and banging, their panic magnifying his. At the stables in Ann Arbor a stallion had killed a man by pinning him to a wall. People said the man was to blame—he’d whipped the horse—but she had always kept her distance. Now she was afraid of Mercury, and he was afraid of her. Perhaps he could smell the gun. She stood at the door of his stall, talking to him—No one’s going to take you away. You’re safe—until at last he lowered his head. The boy at the shooting range had told her that when the police in his town shot a junkie, the bullet had passed straight through the junkie and hit another man, a teacher, in the throat. “He was a standup guy,” the boy had said. “No justice in that.” So when she took off Mercury’s blanket and saw his dappled coat gleaming, no sign of blood, she gasped with relief. To have shot Jack was unspeakable; to have shot Jack and Mercury was unthinkable.
