The Carousel Summer of Juniper Lane

• Chapter 1 The Barn at Juniper Lane
• Chapter 2 Chipped Paint and Cobalt Eyes
• Chapter 3 Stripping Down the Primer
• Chapter 4 Sweet Tea and Sticky Fingers
• Chapter 5 The Tail of the Dapple Gray
• Chapter 6 Crickets in the Clover
• Chapter 7 Sandpaper and Soft Bruises
• Chapter 8 Golden Hour in the Hayloft
• Chapter 9 The Starlight Jumper
• Chapter 10 Heat Lightning Over Ohio
• Chapter 11 Brass Rings and Secret Wishes
• Chapter 12 Tangled Brushes
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Coat of Varnish
• Chapter 14 Fireflies in Mason Jars
• Chapter 15 The Runaway Mane
• Chapter 16 A Dip in the Quarry
• Chapter 17 Gold Leaf and Trembling Hands
• Chapter 18 Sudden Downpour
• Chapter 19 The Broken Stirrup
• Chapter 20 County Fair Confessions
• Chapter 21 The Rose-Crowned Mare
• Chapter 22 Grease, Gears, and Heartbeats
• Chapter 23 The Last Layer of Lacquer
• Chapter 24 Testing the Calliope
• Chapter 25 First Spin at Twilight
• Chapter 26 Music in the Autumn Wind

The heat in Meigs County did not fall from the sky so much as it rose from the dirt, thick with the smell of river water, crushed chicory, and souring clover. By the second week of June, the air had turned into wet wool. June Vance hopped down from the cab of her uncle’s battered Ford Ranger, the soles of her sneakers hitting the packed yellow gravel of the driveway with a dull thud. Her shins immediately began to itch, as they always did the second the Ohio weeds caught wind of her presence.

Uncle Earl was already around the back of the truck, hauling a toolbox that clanked with iron pipe wrenches and mismatched sockets. He was a small, round-shouldered man whose posture suggested he had spent the last forty years trying to avoid hitting his head on low attic rafters. He wore a faded blue twill shirt with the sleeves sheared off at the elbow, revealing forearms browned like smoked ham.

"Don't just stand there letting the gnats nest in your ears, Junie," Earl said, not unkindly. He set the box down on the tailgate with a metallic rattle. "Get the side doors unhitched. If there’s skunks under the foundation again, I’d rather give 'em an exit route before we start dragging horses around."

June wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a smudge of dust from the dashboard across her temple. "Horses," she repeated. "You still haven't told me what kind of condition they're in. Pop said they’d been sitting since the county fair association went belly-up in seventy-nine."

"Your father likes to make things sound like a disaster because it gives him an excuse to stay in Columbus on his porch with a fan," Earl said. He fished a key ring out of his pocket that was large enough to look like something carried by a turn-of-the-century jailer. "They aren't ruined. They’re just... tired. Needs a woman’s touch, he said. I told him what they need is five hundred gallons of mineral spirits and someone under sixty whose knees don't sound like popping bubble wrap."

The barn sat at the end of Juniper Lane, a long spur of gray dust bordered on both sides by drainage ditches choked with wild mustard. The structure itself had once been an apple-packing shed, built high and long out of rough-sawn pine that had baked under eighty years of summer sun until the boards were the color of lead sinkers. The roof was corrugated tin, patched in places with rusted squares of road signs and roof tar that had bubbled and congealed like burnt sugar.

June walked toward the wide double doors. The brass padlock holding the iron hasp together was swollen with green oxidation. When Earl jammed the square-toothed key into its belly, he had to beat the bottom of the lock with the heel of his palm twice before the spring released with a dry clack.

The doors didn't slide; they groaned along an iron track choked with bird droppings and dried wasps' nests, requiring June and her uncle to throw their combined weight against the timber. A crack of hot gray daylight sliced into the interior, widening until the floorboards of the threshold were laid bare.

The smell came out to meet them first. It wasn't the smell of hay or manure, which was what June had braced herself for after two hours in the truck. It was linoleum, dried glue, dry-rotted canvas, and the strange, peppery scent of ancient cedar shavings. Beneath all of that was grease—heavy, black, mineral grease that had turned solid in the cold of three dozen winters and was now liquifying again under the June sun.

"Well," Earl said, hitching up his jeans. "Go on in. Don't touch the pulleys till I check the joists."

June stepped over the sill. Her eyes took several seconds to adjust from the glare of the noon sky to the cavernous brown dimness inside.

The center of the barn was dominated by a circular skeletal framework of iron girders, forty feet across, rising toward the rafters like the cage of an enormous prehistoric bird. The sweep arms branched out from a central cast-iron center-pole, thick as an oak trunk, painted a faded industrial vermilion. Suspended from the arms, or leaning haphazardly against the rough perimeter walls, were shapes wrapped in gray moving blankets, tied with frayed hemp rope. Some had lost their coverings altogether.

Right beside the entrance, propped against a stack of dry-rotted bushel crates, stood an outside jumper.

June stopped walking. Her fingers, which had been hooked into her belt loops, dropped to her sides.

The horse was life-sized, carved from segmented blocks of basswood, but the wood had shrunk and swelled until the joinery was visible beneath the cracked enamel like pale surgical scars. It was frozen in full gallop, hind legs tucked under its belly, front hooves reaching for an imaginary hurdle three feet off the pine floor. Its head was tossed sharply to the left, nostrils flared wide enough to show the original red ochre wash inside the carved cartilage.

One of its ears was missing, snapped clean off at the base to expose the pale, grain-straight heartwood beneath, and the paint on its rump had flaked away in large, curved sheets that looked like fish scales. The dapples on its flank, once white over charcoal, had turned the color of ditch water and stale lard. But its teeth—bared in a wild, wooden grimace—were carved with astonishing care, individually shaped and grooved behind a lip that curled back with real fury.

"Is that a Dentzel?" June whispered, her voice sounding small in the vast, dead air of the barn.

"Spillman Engineering," a voice said from the shadows near the far wall. "Nineteen-twenty-two. You can tell by the rounded tuck of the saddle blanket and the way the breastplate has those little molded acorns. Herschell-Spillman didn't mess around with those little ribbon carvings like the Philadelphia guys did. They liked them stout."

June jumped, her elbow clipping the side of a rusted barrel of nails.

A figure emerged from the narrow passage between the central mechanism and a mountain of folded canvas. She had been sitting on an overturned five-gallon paint bucket, completely obscured by the flank of an enormous wooden chariot carved with the relief of a roaring lion.

The girl wasn't much older than June—maybe nineteen, with shoulders that suggested she spent more time lifting sacks of grain than turning pages in a library. She wore a pair of men’s work trousers that had been hacked off at the mid-calf with shears, fraying around ankles dusted with powdered chalk. Her tank top had once been white, but was now patterned with gray grease-smudges and yellow sweat rings around the scoop neck. Her hair, the dark, reddish-brown color of dry buckeyes, was chopped blunt below her jaw and pinned away from her temples with two plain bobby pins that had begun to rust.

She was holding an iron scraper in one hand and a rag that smelled violently of turpentine in the other.

"You must be the niece," the girl said, looking June up and down without any particular hostility, but with an efficiency that made June feel abruptly conscious of her clean canvas sneakers and the neat braid hanging over her shoulder. "Earl said you had two years of studio art down in Athens."

"Three," June said, clearing her throat to get rid of the gravel in it. "Printmaking, mostly. But I’ve done prep work. Conservation too, on frames."

"Frames don't have bellies," the girl said. She walked out into the strip of light that fell through the door, wiping her thumbs on her thighs. Her hands were broad, the fingernails trimmed straight across and rimmed with black sludge. "I’m Martha. Martha Ross. My granddad owned the orchard across the creek before the state took the lower half for the culvert."

"June," June said. She didn't extend her hand because Martha’s were currently dripping with gray-tinted solvent. "June Vance."

"I know. You look like Earl around the eyes. Same squint." Martha turned back toward the jumper by the bushel crates. "He's the worst of the lot, by the way. Don't start with him or you'll want to drown yourself in the drainage ditch by Tuesday. Some kids got in here back in ninety-four and used him for target practice with a Daisy rifle. There's three lead pellets stuck in his shoulder that we'll have to gouge out with an auger."

Earl came trundling through the doorway then, carrying two heavy metal halogen work lamps with yellow cords trailing behind him like entrails. "I see you two met. Good. Martha’s been here since six this morning getting the grease out of the track-roller bearings. We got thirty-six animals in here, Junie. Twelve jumpers, twelve standers, twelve prancers, plus the two chariots. If we don't have the first dozen stripped down to the gesso by the Fourth of July, the fair committee’s going to lease a fiberglass rig from that carny outfit out of Fort Wayne, and I’ll be damned if I let them park a bunch of plastic molded tubs on the square after seventy years of real wood."

"They aren't plastic, Earl," Martha said, her tone level and weary, as though this was an argument they had rehearsed three times already that week. "They're resin. And they’re cheap, which is why Miller likes them."

"Miller’s an undertaker who thinks with his wallet," Earl snapped. He set the lamps on the floor with a heavy clack of metal against wood. "Go on, show her the roster, Martha. I’m going to climb up and see if the crown gear still has all its teeth or if the raccoons have been chewing on the babbitt."

Earl disappeared into the dark heart of the machine, his boots squeaking on the rungs of an iron ladder that led straight into the cross-bracing fifty feet above their heads. Within seconds, the dry, hollow sounds of his hammer began to ring out through the shed, rhythmic and metallic, scaring a trio of barn swallows from the upper eaves.

Martha reached into the back pocket of her trousers and pulled out a small, oil-stained notebook with a pencil stuck through the wire binding. She didn't hand it to June; she simply flipped it open with her thumb and held it at chest height, forcing June to take two steps closer to read the pencil marks.

June stepped into the circle of Martha’s heat. The girl smelled of linseed oil, cedar sawdust, and the sharp, sour tang of cedar sweat. It was a heavy, physical presence that seemed entirely in keeping with the massive timbers of the barn.

"Earl thinks we can do three a week," Martha said, her eyes fixed on the lined paper. "Which is crazy. The primer alone takes forty-eight hours to cure when the humidity is over eighty percent, and it’s going to be ninety degrees every day until August. Look here."

She pointed a blunt forefinger at the page. Her skin was warm, the knuckle scarred by an old white line that ran from joint to nail.

"The inside row isn't bad," Martha explained. "Small horses, three-quarters size. Most of them have original paint under two coats of Sears house enamel. We can hit them with citrus stripper and scrape them down to the wood in an afternoon if the joints are tight. But the middle row—that’s where the water got in when the roof blew off back during the tornado in eighty-six. The glue let go. Three of the legs are in pieces inside those bushel hampers, and two of the heads have split down the seam from the ear to the jaw."

"What about the gold?" June asked, pointing to a notation in the margin that read: 24-K leaf (ears/hooves/trappings).

Martha let out a short, dry laugh through her nose. "Earl's dreaming. We aren't using gold. We’ve got four cans of bronze powder and some clear varnish. Unless you’ve got five grand sitting in your pocket that your uncle didn't mention?"

"I have forty dollars and a box of pastels," June said.

"Then we’re using the bronze powder." Martha snapped the notebook shut with an authoritative snap and shoved it back into her pocket. "Grab that milk crate. We’re starting on the bay jumper in the back. He’s already off the sweep, so we don't have to wait for Earl to rig the block and tackle."

June followed her deeper into the barn, stepping carefully over lengths of three-quarter-inch hemp rope, rusted drive chains, and piles of cedar shingles that had fallen through the roof over the decades.

The heat grew denser the further they got from the door. It hung in the high corners of the barn like wool blankets, trapped by the iron tin above. Sunlight pierced the gloom through dozens of tiny nail holes in the metal roof, creating thin, shimmering needles of light that shifted as the wind outside stirred the willow branches against the siding.

In the back corner, laid out across two heavy carpenter’s sawhorses, was a second horse.

This one was different from the one by the door. It was longer, leaner, its head tucked down toward its chest in an arched, proud curve that gave it an almost haughty expression. Its ears were pinned back, carved with delicate veins running through the timber, and its mane was a thick, braided tangle that fell down both sides of its neck like heavy rope.

The paint had once been a rich, dark seal-brown, but it was now covered in a milky, spiderwebbed glaze of dead varnish. Someone had tried to paint over the saddle thirty years ago with what looked like red barn paint, leaving thick, drippy brush marks that had hardened into ridges across the carved stirrups.

"Look at the tail," Martha said, stopping beside the sawhorses.

June reached out and touched it. Unlike the body, which was solid, laminated basswood, the tail was made of real horsehair, coarse and black, plugged into an iron hole in the rump and sealed with a wooden bung. It had been braided once, but the braid had frayed into a stiff, dusty whisk that smelled faintly of salt.

"We have to boil that," Martha said. "Take it out, soak it in borax, and comb it out with a wire brush. If you try to pull on it while it's dry, the hairs’ll snap off like toothpicks."

"He's beautiful," June murmured. She laid her palm flat against the horse’s shoulder. The wood beneath the dead paint was warm, almost feverish from the ambient air of the barn. Despite the peeling enamel and the dust that coated every groove of the carving, the life in the wood was unmistakable. The carver had known how a real horse’s shoulder moved under the skin—how the muscle bunching at the base of the neck pulled against the shoulder blade.

"He's a Spillman," Martha said simply. "They knew what they were doing back then. Not like now. Now everything’s balanced on a computer and cut with a router out of foam. Look at the eyes."

June leaned in. The eye wasn't painted wood. It was an oval of hand-blown glass, dark cobalt blue, set deep into the socket with an iron ring that had rusted to a dull umber. In the dim barn light, the glass caught the reflection of the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams, giving the animal a wet, liquid stare that seemed impossible for something that had sat in the dark since the Carter administration.

"Someone took care of this one," June said. "Even when they put it away."

"Old Man Henderson," Martha said, leaning her hip against the sawhorse. Her shoulder was bare, the skin dotted with tiny brown freckles that June hadn't noticed until they were standing this close. "He was the ride superintendent until he had his stroke. My dad said Henderson used to come out here every November with five pounds of mutton tallow and grease down all the ironwork so it wouldn't seize up over the winter. He's the one who tied the blankets around the heads."

A sudden clang shook the rafters as Earl dropped something heavy onto the iron platform above them, followed by an impressive string of curses involving the Methodist church, a crescent wrench, and several species of local rodents.

"Earl!" Martha shouted up into the shadows. "You coming down, or do you want me to throw the winch?"

"Leave it alone!" Earl yelled back, his voice muffled by thirty feet of hemlock trusses. "The cable's jumped the drum. Go on and get the stripper on that jumper! We’re burning daylight, and the humidity’s going to peak before four!"

Martha looked at June, her mouth curling into a small, half-amused line that June found herself watching more closely than was strictly necessary. "You hear the boss. Get your gloves on, Vance. We've got eighty years of lead paint to take off, and it doesn't come off with good intentions."

She reached down into an open cardboard box beside the sawhorses and pulled out two pairs of heavy, elbow-length rubber gloves—the kind used for cleaning industrial ovens—and two flat, stiff-bladed putty knives. She handed one of each to June.

When their fingers brushed during the exchange, Martha’s skin was surprisingly cool compared to the sweltering heat of the room, her thumb rough against June's knuckles where a callous had formed from the scraper.

"Don't breathe the dust when it starts coming up," Martha warned, pulling her own gloves on with two sharp snaps against her forearms. "Earl says lead makes you crazy, but around here, I don't know that anyone would notice the difference."

June pulled the rubber over her hands. The gloves were hot and smelled like a tire store, but as she stepped up to the wooden flank of the jumper, her putty knife gripped firmly in her right hand, the vast, echoing heat of the barn seemed to settle into a rhythm.

Outside, a semi-truck shifted gears out on the state route, its engine brake barking in the distance, but inside the barn at Juniper Lane, the only sound was the swallows in the rafters, the steady ticking of the tin roof as it expanded in the noon sun, and the scrape of iron against sixty-year-old wood.

The smell of the chemical paste was somewhere between rotting oranges and kerosene. It came out of a yellow five-gallon drum with a warning label featuring a drawing of a hand dissolving down to the metacarpals, which Earl had treated as entirely advisory. Martha dipped a four-inch boar-bristle brush straight into the drum, slathering a translucent, yellow-green slime onto the bay jumper's neck. The jelly sat on the old lead coats, bubbled instantly, and let out a soft, hissing sigh like soda water.

"You don't want to get this stuff inside your sleeves," Martha said, dragging her brush down the groove between two carved locks of the mane. "It doesn't hurt right away. It waits until you're sweating enough for it to sink into the pores, and then it feels like somebody put a lit cigarette out on your forearm."

"Comforting," June said. She took her own brush, dipping the tip into the muck, and approached the horse’s left rump.

"I'm just saying. Earl thinks vinegar neutralizes it, but all vinegar does is make you smell like a pickled turnip while your skin comes off." Martha worked with quick, brutal strokes. She didn't dab or fuss; she laid the stripper down thick, let the solvent bite into the lacquer, and kept her eyes moving across the surface, looking for fractures where water might have seeped under the wood glue.

The barn had turned into an oven by two in the afternoon. The corrugated tin above hummed with heat, radiating a dry, brown warmth that settled behind June’s ears. Every twenty minutes or so, a freight train would rattle the crossing three miles south toward Racine, sending a tiny vibration through the sawhorse legs that caused the dead flakes of red enamel to shiver off the saddle like red pepper flakes.

June set the edge of her putty knife against the top layer of paint on the jumper's hip. The Sears red came away easily enough, curling up into stiff ribbons that revealed a sickly mint green beneath it. Under the mint green was a layer of black asphaltum varnish, brittle as peanut brittle, and beneath that, stubborn and chalky, lay the original coat: an oxblood ground with gold pin-striping along the cantle.

"Look at that," June said, leaning in until her breath stirred the curled chips. "The tooling on the leatherwork isn't just painted. The carver actually cut the stitches into the basswood."

Martha paused, her scraper dripping a bead of green sludge onto the newspaper-covered dirt. She reached out with a gloved thumb and cleared away a gray patch of loosened primer. "That's Marcus Illions' style, but Spillman bought the shop out in nineteen-twelve. They kept some of the old German carvers on piece-work. They got paid by the piece, so if a guy wanted to spend an extra four hours putting faux-buckles on the cinch strap, he was basically paying himself to do it out of his own hide."

"He did a good job," June murmured, carefully sliding the steel blade under a stubborn scab of black paint. "It's not symmetrical. See? The strap on the near side hangs lower than the off side, like it's taking weight."

Martha looked at the wooden buckle, then looked up at June. Her eyes were an ordinary hazel in the shadows, but when she tipped her head toward the sunbeam slicing down from the hayloft door, they flashed with gold flecks, sharp and questioning. "You’ve got a good eye for things that don't make anyone any money, Vance."

"That's what Pop told the bursar when he paid my tuition," June said, not missing a stroke. "Three thousand dollars a semester to learn how to tell the difference between lampblack and bone black."

"Which one is this?"

"Bone black," June said without hesitating. "Lampblack has a bluish undertone when you cut it with turpentine. This stuff is brown where it's thin. Charred cow shins, probably. Cheap and greasy."

Martha made a small, appreciative grunt in the back of her throat and went back to work on the neck. "Well, your bone black has been holding twenty years of river moisture against this joint. Look here."

She tapped the scraper against the horse's crest. June leaned over the horse’s spine. The wood had opened slightly where two laminated billets met, creating a dark, hair-thin fissure that ran from the poll down to the wither. Inside the gap, tiny white threads of mold clung to the ancient animal glue.

"We can't strip that with the wet stuff," Martha said. "If the solvent gets into the lamination, the whole neck will pop apart like dry firewood the first time a two-hundred-pound farmer sits on it at the fair."

"Heat gun?" June suggested.

"Heat gun'll scorch the basswood if you blink, and it smells like burning hair because of all the linseed oil. But yeah. We don't have a choice on the seams. Earl’s got an old Sears heat gun up in the tool room, behind the crate of fan belts. Go get it, but watch your head on the ceiling joists. The wasps have been building on the northern stringer."

June peeled her gloves off, her hands white and damp inside the rubber, and headed for the rear of the barn.

The back section had been partitioned off with rough two-by-fours and chicken wire, likely back when the shed had been used to grade red delicious apples. The smell here was different: mouse droppings, ancient motor oil, and the sweet, dry stench of yellowing seed catalogs stacked five feet high against a workbench. A single light bulb hung by a frayed green cord from an exposed rafter, its pull-chain extended by a piece of rusty baling wire.

June tugged the wire. The bulb buzzed, flickered twice, and settled into a yellow, jaundiced glow.

The heat gun was where Martha had said it would be, nestled between three grease guns and an ancient box of blue chalk. It was heavy, made of cast aluminum with a red Bakelite handle, its cord wrapped in stiff, fraying black cloth. June lifted it, blowing a layer of gray dust off the vents. Beside the box of fan belts sat something else: a flat wooden tray divided into twelve square compartments, each lined with faded green baize.

June set the heat gun down and stepped closer.

Inside the compartments were glass eyes.

There were dozens of them, loose and unmounted, rolling slightly in their felt nests as June's sneakers shifted the uneven floorboards. Some were amber, like maple syrup, with elongated, horizontal pupils meant for carousel goats or pigs. Others were pale hazel, rimmed with delicate crimson veins painted onto the reverse of the glass. But the three in the corner compartment were the same violent, electric cobalt as the jumper's eyes.

She reached out and picked one up. It was heavy, cold as a river pebble, and completely smooth except for the rough iron pontil mark on the back where the glassblower’s rod had been snapped away. When she held it up to the bare bulb, the cobalt wasn't solid; it had swirls of clear, pale violet running through the iris, mimicking the wet depth of a living animal's eye.

"Find it?" Martha’s voice called from the front of the barn, her boots hollow against the pine planks.

"Found the gun," June called back, her voice shaking slightly as she set the glass eye back into its nest. "And some other stuff."

Martha appeared in the doorway of the wire cage, wiping her neck with a blue cotton bandana. The sweat had soaked the collar of her tank top, darkening the ribbed cotton to gray, and there was a crescent of dried green stripper clinging to the bridge of her nose like a dry leaf.

"Oh," Martha said, seeing the tray. "Henderson’s spares. He bought them off an outfit in Brooklyn before they closed down during the war. He told my dad that if a carousel horse loses its eyes, it looks like a carcass. Said people won't let their kids ride an animal that looks dead."

"They're handmade," June said, pointing to the cobalt ones. "You can see the shears marks on the edges."

"They don't make them like that now," Martha said. She stepped into the small wire room, her shoulder brushing against June's as she looked down at the box. The space was barely six feet square, crowded with iron junk and the sharp scent of old machine oil, and with Martha standing there, the heat seemed to double instantly. June could hear the tiny, rhythmic tick of Martha’s watch, an old stainless-steel Timex on an elastic band. "The ones on the modern fiberglass rigs are just clear marbles with brown paper glued to the back. If you drop one, it bounces."

"These wouldn't bounce," June said.

"No. They’d shatter." Martha reached out, her finger hovering over the tray, then touched the cobalt sphere June had just set down. Her hand was broad and scarred, her nails short and practical, completely unlike June’s own long, charcoal-stained fingers. Yet there was a gentleness in the way Martha turned the glass marble over that didn't match the rough work she’d been doing with the iron scraper. "The jumper out there—the one on the sawhorses—he’s the only one with the blue ones. The rest of the outside row has amber. Henderson called him the Blue Soldier."

"Why?"

"Because he was the lead horse," Martha said simply. "First one behind the chariot on the outside row. The one the kids fight over because he’s got his legs out furthest. Henderson told Earl that when they ran the machine at the county fair in thirty-six, during the flood, they ran it for three days straight just to give people something to hear besides the river hitting the levee. He said you could see those blue glass eyes through the rain from fifty yards off."

She let go of the glass, the sphere clicking softly against its neighbor in the compartment.

"Come on," Martha said, her voice dropping back into its normal, flat clip. "If we don't get the paint off that shoulder before three, the stripper’ll dry out and turn into glue again, and then we’ll have to do it twice."

June grabbed the heavy heat gun, and they walked back out into the open barn.

Uncle Earl was down from the central shaft now, sitting on an overturned milk crate by the big doors with a half-gallon jug of tap water between his feet. His gray hair was plastered to his forehead in wet spikes, and his hands were black to the wrist with ancient grease that looked like licorice.

"The spider's cracked," he said without looking up, unscrewing the cap of the water jug. "Three of the arms have play in the collar. If I can't find a machine shop in Pomeroy that can turn a two-inch bronze bushing, we’re going to have to shim it with babbitt metal like they did in the twenties."

"Can you pour babbitt?" June asked, setting the heat gun on the sawhorses.

Earl gave her a look that suggested she had asked if he knew how to use a spoon. "I’ve been pouring babbitt since your father was wetting his rubber pants, Junie. The problem isn't pouring it; the problem is finding lead-free antimony so the state inspector doesn't have an apoplexy when he comes out here with his clipboard. Everything’s illegal now. You can't even oil a gear without three permits from the conservation district."

He took a long, noisy swallow from the jug, wiped his mouth with the back of his filthy wrist, and looked over at Martha. "How's that bay looking?"

"He's basswood on the outside, pine in the core," Martha said, picking up her scraper again. "The pine’s solid. Somebody sealed it with white lead back when they built it, so the worms never got into the heart. But the joints on the neck are loose. We’re going to have to drill and pin them."

"Don't use steel," Earl warned, pointing a grease-blackened finger at her. "Steel rusts, expands, and splits the timber right down the glue line. Use oak dowels. Half-inch. There’s a bundle of dried white oak rods under the miter box."

"I know where they are, Earl," Martha said patiently.

"Just telling you. Young people always want to use drywall screws for everything. Put a drywall screw in a Herschell-Spillman and you ought to be horsewhipped." Earl groaned as he pushed himself up from the milk crate, his knees popping with three distinct, dry snaps. "I'm going into town to see if Miller's got any three-phase wire at the hardware. If he tries to sell me that aluminum Romex again, I'm going to tell him what he can do with his funeral home."

He shuffled out into the gravel, his truck door slamming a moment later with the sound of a falling shovel. The Ranger’s starter whined three times before the motor caught with a wet, bubbling roar, then rattled off down Juniper Lane, leaving a pale cloud of road dust hanging in the humid air outside the open double doors.

The silence that followed was immense.

The barn seemed to settle around them, the heat expanding into the vacuum Earl had left behind. June plugged the heavy heat gun into an orange extension cord that snaked back to the temporary service panel near the door. The motor screamed to life with a high-pitched, metallic whine, blowing a stream of superheated air against the bay’s left flank.

"Hold it further back," Martha said, stepping close behind June.

June felt the heat of Martha’s chest before she felt her hand. Martha reached around June’s right side, her fingers closing over June’s rubber-gloved hand on the grip of the tool. The contact was firm, unhesitating, guiding June’s wrist in a slow, wide arc three inches above the wood.

"If you hold it in one spot, the paint doesn't melt—it chars," Martha murmured, her breath warm against the side of June’s neck, smelling faintly of peppermint drops and well water. "You want to wave it like you're ironing a shirt. Watch the surface. When it turns from dull to greasy-looking, that’s when you scrape."

June’s heart gave a sudden, ridiculous jump against her ribs that had nothing to do with the hundred-degree air in the barn. She kept her wrist loose, following the movement of Martha’s hand.

Beneath the hot air, the eighty-year-old paint began to shimmer. The dead varnish liquefied, turning the color of dark sorghum, and then, with a tiny popping sound, a blister the size of a half-dollar rose on the jumper’s shoulder.

"Now," Martha said, letting go of June’s hand.

June dropped the blade of the scraper behind the blister and pushed.

The lead paint slid off the basswood like cold butter from a warm knife. It came away in a single, three-foot curl, rolling up against the iron blade with a dry, papery hiss. Beneath it, the wood emerged for the first time in nearly a century: pale, honey-colored, the fine, dense grain of old-growth American basswood showing the clean, rhythmic scallops of the original carving gouges.

"There he is," June whispered, her eyes wide.

The wood wasn't smooth like modern sanded lumber. You could see the carver’s strokes—the broad, sweeping curves where the flat chisel had shaped the massive muscle of the shoulder, and the tiny, delicate cuts of a veiner that indicated the veins branching down toward the forearm. It was confident, fast work, executed by someone who didn't have time to second-guess the angle of the blade.

"That's the real stuff," Martha said, leaning her elbow on the horse's rump, her face just inches from June's shoulder. "No gesso here. Just clear glue size and three coats of raw oil before they laid the first pigment down. Look at the chisel marks. See how clean the cut is? The guy who carved this had his tools sharp enough to shave with."

June switched the heat gun to her other hand, wiping her dripping forehead on the sleeve of her t-shirt. "How many of these did one person carve?"

"Back then? A master carver could rough out a horse in two days," Martha said. "The apprentices did the legs and the tails, and the shop boy did the sanding. The master just came in to do the heads and the trappings—the stuff people actually look at. Then they threw them into the paint shop and started the next one."

"It seems like a shame," June said, leaning over the newly exposed wood. She couldn't resist taking her glove off again to touch the bare timber. It felt silky, completely different from the rough lumber of the barn, seasoned by eighty years of darkness until it felt more like bone than pine. "To make something this fine and just know it’s going to get rained on at a county fair while people drop popcorn on it."

"Better than sitting in a museum where nobody can touch it," Martha said. She had picked up a small brass-bristled brush and was working the scorched paint residue out of the crevices of the braided mane. Her shoulder bumped June’s again, but neither of them moved away. "My granddad used to say that a machine that doesn't run is just scrap iron waiting for an excuse. These things weren't made to be looked at, Vance. They were made to get the grease hot."

June looked from the clean basswood up to the horse's head. With the cracked paint removed from the cheek and jaw, the expression on the animal’s face had changed. It no longer looked decayed and sinister; it looked fierce, its wooden mouth pulled wide against the carved iron bit, its neck arched in an effort that seemed almost desperate.

And then there was the eye.

The cobalt glass caught the light coming through the open barn doors, reflecting the green leaves of the wild mustard outside in a tiny, distorted crescent across its surface. It was deep, dark, and clear as pool water, fixed on some point forty feet beyond the timber walls, out where the heat was shimmering over the blacktop of the state route.

"We have to finish this side before the sun goes down," Martha said, though she didn't sound like she was in a hurry. She had stopped scraping. She was leaning against the sawhorse, watching June's hand where it rested on the jumper's pale, naked shoulder. Her gaze was steady, completely lacking the nervous flutter that June was used to from the boys back at the art department in Athens. It was the same way she looked at the joinery of the wood—measuring, testing the grain, seeing what would hold and what would give under pressure.

"I’m not stopping," June said, though her fingers were cramping from the weight of the heat gun.

"Good," Martha said, her mouth ticking up at the corner again. "Because Earl’s got three more barrels of that citrus stripper coming in tomorrow, and that stuff smells like sour candy. You’ll be begging for the lead paint before we’re done with the chariots."

She reached down, took the heat gun from June’s hand, and switched it off. The sudden quiet that filled the barn was massive, broken only by the dry chink-chink of the cooling metal nozzle and the distant, rhythmic call of a mourning dove out in the chicory.

"Five minutes," Martha said, nodding toward the open doors where the yellow gravel of the driveway was beginning to throw long, blue shadows across the weeds. "Earl’s got a crate of Nehi peach soda in the back of the tool crib. It’s warm, but it’s wet."

June looked at the horse’s flank, half-stripped, half-scabbed with black lead, the pale basswood looking like new flesh under an old wound. Then she looked at Martha, who was already walking toward the tool crib, her boots stirring the sawdust into golden clouds in the late light.

"Peach?" June asked, pulling off her second glove.

Martha glanced back over her shoulder, the blue glass eye of the horse behind her catching the sunset so that for a second, she seemed framed between the animal's flared nostrils and the orange glare of the sky.

"Peach," Martha said. "Take it or leave it, Vance. We don't get fancy until July."