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“Yeah?” I said, staring past him at the red horse in the stall nearest us.

“You start off mucking out stalls and we’ll take it from there. You can call me Sandman, by the way.”

“I’m Ben.”

“You got a last name, Ben?”

“Nester,” I said.

“I got a horse named Nester,” Sandman said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yup,” the guy said.

And that was it. He put me to work. Showed me how to muck the stalls out. Some of them, I had to change all the bedding, take out all the straw, and then put down a layer of lime and fresh straw. It took forever. I did about fifteen stalls and my back started aching but I didn’t mind. It was good pain.

Sandman had gone off somewhere and it was just me and the horses and the barn with all those good smells in it. It was a little eerie how there was no one around. I had no idea what Sandman did with all these horses or how many other people he had working for him but I didn’t see anyone else all day long.

Once it started getting dark out, Sandman came back and told me I was going to help him bring some of the horses in from outside. I’d never actually had much to do with horses other than hanging out and talking to the ones in the pasture but I wanted to learn. Out in the field, Sandman showed me how to stand at the horse’s left side, get the horse to put his nose through the halter, and then slip it over the ears, fasten it, and lead the horse forward. I had trouble with one little horse, a baby, only a year old. I’d get close to him and he’d prick his ears forward and his eyes would get bright but then, the moment I tried slipping the halter on, he’d bolt and throw a little buck and make a squealing sound. Eventually, Sandman helped me by getting on the other side of the yearling so we had him boxed in, and I finally got a halter on him. As I led him though, he kept trying to take a nip at my arm.

“That one’s gonna race,” Sandman told me once we were back inside the barn.

“Oh yeah?” I’d put the little guy in his stall and he’d immediately relieved himself all over his clean straw.

“Yup. I got a couple trainers coming by tomorrow have a look at him. Kind of spirit he’s got, I bet he makes it. Might even make it to one of the big tracks, win some real money. His mama won a stakes race at Aqueduct in New York once,” Sandman said, looking thoughtful.

I didn’t really know what he was talking about that day but I learned pretty quickly.

Sandman had two other people working for him. A guy named James who was around forty and hunched over and kind of yellow, too, and a girl, Kathy Kitterman, a small but muscular girl, who was in her early twenties like me. Between those two and Sandman, I had a whole new world of knowledge within a week. I knew all about the different kinds of brushes and leg bandages and liniments. I knew how to muck out a stall and clean out feed tubs and I was beginning to understand about equine nutrition. I started getting a good feeling. I could sense that my mother was looking down from the ether and approving of what I was doing. I thought of my mother a lot on the day when one of Sandman’s mares got sold and put on a van headed to Versailles, Kentucky. My mother had been born in Versailles. I’d never been there and I felt like I should go because I know, in her last days, she was missing it badly and I was part of why she never made it back. My mother had been a quiet girl till she hit seventeen and went a little wild. She got pregnant by a guy who took off. Her parents kicked her out and she hitchhiked around for a while and ended up in Oklahoma. Her older brother, Edgar, eventually came and lived with her and helped her out, putting food on the table when she got so pregnant she couldn’t waitress anymore. Then she had me. When I was fourteen, she got cancer and started wasting away. As she lay dying, she kept insisting that I had to make sure to get to Versailles one day. I told her I’d do my best. In turn, she hung on as long as she could. The pain from the cancer made her eyes huge and black.