Chapter 9

"I owe you an apology," Addie said.

She said it in front of all of them. She stood at the folding table with the binder open and the scanner lying on it and said it loud enough for the back of the barn, and then she turned to the buyers and said it to them too.

"You came here on my word," she said. "And a man in my employ tried to sell you something that wasn't what the paper said. That's on me, not on him. Dr. Reyes has scanned every yearling on this consignment and every one of them matches. If any of you want to walk the row again with her, she'll do it, and I'll stand here while she does."

Nobody walked. The woman with the sale book opened it and wrote something down. Sonny Delacroix's client from Ocala called his office and told them to hold the order. That was the moment Hollis understood that it was over, and that he was still standing.

Then Addie turned to him.

"Hollis," she said. "Come here."

He walked over with his cap in his hands. Up close, in the daylight from the doors, he could see how old she'd gotten, and how old he'd gotten, and how long it had been since the two of them stood anywhere together that wasn't a foaling stall at three in the morning.

"You sat up with that foal three nights," she said. "Nobody asked you to. Nobody paid you to. And this morning, when a man stood in my barn and called you a thief in front of buyers, you didn't say one word back to him."

"There wasn't anything to say yet," Hollis said.

"No," Addie said. "There wasn't. But there is now, and I want it on the record." She raised her voice. "As of this morning, Hollis Renn is bloodstock foreman emeritus at Willow Bend Farm. That's a title and it's a paycheck and it's forty-four years late. And if anybody in this barn has a question about the identity of a horse on this farm, they come to him first."

Somebody at the rail clapped. Then somebody else, and then it went down the row like a horse trotting, and Hollis stood there with his cap in his hands and his face hot and his boots muddy and did not know where to put his eyes.

Sonny Delacroix came over. He didn't shake hands. He just said, "Lot 122 walks in at two forty. I want you on the shank."

"You've got grooms," Hollis said.

"I've got grooms," Sonny said. "I want you."

So at two forty in the afternoon, Hollis Renn put a lead shank on the bay colt out of Sabella's Run, the one he had pulled out of the straw in April and sat up with in September, and walked him up the ramp into the sale pavilion, past the buyers in their seats, with Sonny Delacroix a half-step behind him in work boots, and the colt went in with his head up and his ears forward like he'd done it a hundred times.

He brought three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars.

Afterward, in the dusk, with the barn lights coming on and the last buyers pulling out of the gravel drive, Hollis stood at the rail of the empty pavilion with a bucket in his hand. Alma came and stood beside him and didn't say anything for a while.

"He'll be all right," she said finally. "New owners, good farm, they'll call you if he doesn't eat."

"They always call," Hollis said.

She laughed, once. Then she looked at him sideways. "You never did answer the question they all asked this morning. What were you really doing in that stall at three o'clock?"

Hollis watched the lights on the far fence line for a second.

"Foal had the scours," he said. "I gave him electrolytes and sat with him until he passed manure. Then I went back at four twenty to check him again. That's all it was."

"That's all it ever is," Alma said.

Hollis nodded and picked up his bucket. Above them the sky had gone the color of a good bay coat, and somewhere in Barn A a mare nickered for her feed, and the old man walked down the aisle he had walked for forty-four years, in the boots he had worn for all of them, and nobody in that barn needed a scanner to know who he was.