Mercury Read Online Free Page A

cave paintings at Lascaux and Pech Merle. The wealthy King Croesus had a soothsayer who described the horse as a warrior and a foreigner, and another king, I forget his name, was buried surrounded by a dozen stuffed horses. Until the twentieth century, horses fought on many battlefields and were part of most people’s daily lives. They have the largest eyes of any land mammal and are blessed with both binocular and monocular vision. Historically horses are divided by a kind of class system. Hardworking horses—cart horses and plow horses—are described as cold-blooded. Racehorses, Thoroughbreds, and Arabians are hot-blooded. Those in between—the warm-blooded horses—are bred to combine the best of the other two.
    Mercury, true to his name, was unmistakably hot-blooded. The lines of his body, the arch of his neck, the rise and fall of his stride, were, I agreed with Viv reluctantly, beautiful. I was so absorbed in watching him that I paid no heed to his rider until, nearing the fence, she waved. Then I recognized Diane’s mother. Turning back to the circling ponies, I saw that the girl on the brown pony, not quite trotting, was my patient, minus her carefully chosen glasses.
    Besides the indoor arena, the stables consist of a large barn that houses most of the stalls, a tack room, a feed room, and the office, and a smaller building that houses additional stalls and storerooms. Inside the barn I made my way to the office, a modest room furnished with various castoffs. My mother donated the redcurtains and the table and chairs. I contributed two filing cabinets that Merrie wanted to replace and a coffeemaker. That afternoon Marcus and Trina were working at opposite ends of the table: Marcus on homework, Trina on an elaborate drawing.
    â€œHi, Daddy,” they said.
    â€œHow was your patient?” added Marcus. He has Viv’s fair coloring, but his high forehead, straight eyebrows, and slightly blocky nose are, according to my mother, a direct throwback to my namesake: Uncle Donald. He is an ardent swimmer and almost always smells faintly of chlorine.
    â€œMy patient was all right,” I said. “He liked knowing about his surgery. Some people do, some people don’t.”
    â€œWhich are you?” Trina reached for another crayon. Small for her age, pale-skinned and dark-haired, she is the barometer of our household, monitoring approaching storms, pleading for calm weather. She can work on a single picture for an hour.
    â€œI like to know about things in advance,” I said, “but I tend to worry. What about you?”
    â€œI don’t like surprises,” she declared. “And I don’t want anyone to cut me open.”
    â€œSurprises, yes,” said Marcus. “Definitely no cutting.”
    Like many children, mine are deeply interested in bodily functions: how long they can hold their breath, or stand on one foot, whether they can walk in a straight line with their eyes closed, where sweat comes from. When Marcus broke his leg on the playground last May, they were both fascinated by the X-ray showing the thin dark line across the tibia. And when my father, in a last vain effort to control his illness, had an operation that involved cauterizing areas of the brain, Trina drew a picture of him, his head haloed in sparks.
    â€œWhere’s Viv?” I asked.
    â€œWith the horses,” said Marcus, unhelpfully.
    She was not in the feed room or the tack room. She was not in the first row of stalls. At last I heard her voice coming from a stall in the second row. She was talking to Charlie, one of the stable girls, who was grooming the school’s oldest pony, the stalwart Samson. I rode him once, and it was like riding a carousel; whatever I did, he followed the horse in front. Now I patted his whiskery nose and joked that they were getting him ready for the rodeo.
    â€œPoor Samson,” said Viv. “You don’t give him enough