Niceville

earth, hemmed on three sides by the forest, a patchwork of fields, some pale green with spring wheat, some darker green with the first shoots of what he thought, from the white blossoms, might be potatoes, and at the far end the pale gold of canola, all of this stretching out for almost a mile into the blue distance.
    At the far end he could see figures stooping over the dark brown earth, hacking away at it with picks and shovels, A work party, from what he could make out without binoculars, digging drainage ditches or a foundation for a shed or something like that.
    Beyond that distant plot there were more dark figures clustered around the heavier bulk of a tractor, dragging a skid loaded with what looked like a mound of small round river rocks.
    Farm labor
, he thought.
Better you than me
.
    Looking up, he saw a sky that was clear and pure, without a cloud or even the scratch mark of a jet contrail, and the air smelled of hay, wheat, sweetgrass, budding flowers, turned earth.
    He looked down at the yard below him and saw the woman standing by a powerfully built workhorse, a Belgian or a Clyde—cars were his main thing but he knew horses and crops from the huge work farmsback at Angola. The horse had a shining hide the color of old rosewood, four very long and feathery white fetlocks, a white blaze, and a blond mane that flowed down the side of his muscled neck.
    Merle figured this animal would have to weigh in at twenty-five hundred pounds. They had teams of them at Angola, none of them nearly as magnificent as this one, and yet each one was valued in excess of a hundred thousand dollars.
    The impression of genteel poverty Merle had formed in the dark of the evening was being rapidly revised. The place was primitive, and he could see no modern farm machinery, other than the tractor and the generator, but he figured the overall worth of the farm at somewhere between two and three million.
    The woman was soaping the horse down with a foamy sponge that she dipped in a wooden bucket on the ground beside her. She was wearing the same jeans as she had the night before, a man’s jeans, too big for her narrow waist, and a faded plaid shirt, also much too big for her. She was barefoot and her tanned feet were coated in muddy water. Her hair, set free, fell in a shining black cascade down her shoulders and the muscles in her strong left arm flexed and relaxed as she scrubbed away at the horse’s withers and barrel.
    He watched her for a while, in a kind of trance, and was about to turn away and look for his clothes when she glanced up and saw him. She straightened, dropped the sponge into the soapy water, and used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun.
    “You’re up.”
    “I am,” he said, with a smile. “That’s a magnificent animal. He’s a Clyde, isn’t he?”
    The woman turned to stroke the horse’s neck, smiling with pleasure at the compliment.
    “He is. His name is Jupiter. You know horses, Mr. Zane?”
    “I’ve worked with Clydes,” said Merle, leaving out the bit about doing it at a maximum-security prison called Angola.
    “I approve of a man who understands horses. We thought we might have lost you. How do you feel?”
    He thought, but didn’t say, that he was glad not to be either dead or in jail. What he did say was, “You stitched me up. Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome,” she said, with a half smile, showing those fine but uneven teeth, her tanned face creasing and the lines around hereyes deepening. “I got that slug out of you too. Painted you up with iodine and sulfa powder. If you don’t go septic I guess you’ll live. I laid out some of my husband’s clothes for you. Also his safety razor and some shave cream are in the bathroom. With the stitches so fresh I don’t recommend you take a shower but you got a pretty good scrubbing last night. Your old clothes are soaking in a tub of lye out back. I doubt the blood will all come out, but we’ll see. You hungry?”
    Merle decided he was starving, and said so, and a few minutes later he was shaved and dressed in old-fashioned jeans and heavy farm boots, the soles worn down to the nails, a stiff white collarless shirt that smelled very strongly of mothballs, and he and the woman were sitting down in the austere kitchen, across the wooden table from each other, eating some sort of grainy porridge that she had spooned into bowls without a lot of ceremony.
    She set a jug of molasses down and poured out two glasses of something cold and