—
When Amy Raye returned to Farrell, Julia asked Amy Raye to promise that she would never go away again, and Farrell made Amy Raye dinner. And after they ate and were sitting on the futon on Farrell’s porch, Amy Raye told him about her childhood, about her father working as a highway patrolman, about her mother working weekdays and every other weekend at the library. She told him about the horses and the barn, and she told him about Lionel and Nan. And she cried when she told him these things. He held her hands as she spoke. He kissed her face. He told her he loved her. He told her she was safe and that everything was okay now. And she had believed him because she had wanted for it to be so. “I don’t want to go back,” she’d said. “I can’t. I won’t go back there again.”
But that night Amy Raye didn’t tell Farrell about the man working next door when she was only sixteen, and the other men, until she could not remember how many men there had been. And she didn’t tell him about the night it had been raining and she was on her way home from the Sensing Farm’s Free Rein Stables where a girl from school whom she’d almost become friends with was boarding a two-year-old quarter horse mustang. The girl had wanted to show Amy Raye her new horse, and when Amy Raye said the horse reminded her of a hemlock because of the horse’s gray-brown coloring like that of the hemlock’s bark, and because she thought the horse would grow to have great stature, and a hemlock could grow to be a hundred and fifty feet tall, the girl said that was what she was going to name the horse, and Amy Raye thought the name was a fine one.
“I think his father was a free-roaming mustang,” Amy Raye said.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “The mother came from a long line of domesticated quarter horses. I don’t know much about the father.”
The girl had purchased the horse with the help of her parents from a breeder in Kentucky.
“Why do you think he was free roaming?” the girl asked.
“Something in his eyes,” Amy Raye said. “You ever see a wild horse?”
“No.”
“There’s places out west that round up the wild horses and auction them off. Maybe Hemlock’s father was one of those.”
“Maybe,” the girl said.
“Have you ever been out west?” Amy Raye asked.
“No.”
“I think I’d like to go out west,” Amy Raye said. “I think I’d like to see the wild horses.”
“I’ll let you ride him,” the girl told Amy Raye. “I’m going to start breaking him in soon.”
“I’d wait another year,” Amy Raye told her. “He’s still awfully young, but I’d like to ride him.”
The evening had grown dark and the rain was coming down hard.
“I better be getting home,” Amy Raye said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The two girls had recently graduated from high school and were both spending the summer working at a convenience store on the edge of town. Amy Raye had plans to start college at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga in the fall. The other girl was going to take a year off and save her money by living at home.
Amy Raye climbed into her 1991 Ford Ranger that she’d bought two years before from money she’d saved from working on her grandparents’ farm. The Sensings’ farm was a sixteen-mile drive from her house, down Highway 50. Amy Raye was about halfway home and was singing along to “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” over the radio. The windshield wipers were turned on high. She might have been driving too fast, but she didn’t recall. And she was so busy singing and thinking of the quarter horse mustang that by the time she saw the blue flashing lights, the highway patrolman was right up on her. She slowed down, and as soon as the shoulder was wide enough, she pulled over and came to a stop.
A lot of minutes seemed to pass before the patrolman was at her window, tapping on it with his flashlight. When she rolled down her window, the rain poured in. The patrolman asked her to step out. She rolled her window back up and did as he said. But standing outside her truck, the patrolman and she were both getting so wet, and Amy Raye wasn’t wearing a rain jacket or a hat like the patrolman, but rather a pair of cutoff jean shorts and a white tank top with an Opryland decal, so the patrolman said why didn’t they get in his patrol car so they could get out of the rain.