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disappear into a life of compulsive gambling and nocturnal assignations with unknown or even known women. She had spoken of going home to the old Tolliver farm so often that it became a kind of music, a ballad. It was “My Old Kentucky Home” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” a place of noiseless days and solitude and peaches and clear water from a well, without rent, unmortgaged. Jeanine believed every word of it.
    Mayme poses very carefully in a print dress, made especially for her high school graduation in Kilgore. She stands in front of a flowering crepe myrtle. The photograph does not give the slightest indication that in the town, twenty-four derricks stood within half a blockof each other along Commerce Street, or that another was driven in a churchyard or that a man sitting in a barbershop getting his morning shave watched as a roughneck walked in, painted a red X on the floor and said, We’ll drill here. Nor does the black-and-white photograph indicate the lovely dark red of her hair.
    There is a photo of Bea at the age of eight sitting with her schoolbooks on a running board, she holds them out for the camera, she is proud of them. She has just finished writing a story that she very much hoped would please her teacher, the story of a princess in an enchanted forest who ate nothing but peaches. A dwarf pulling a cart had come to offer her eternal life in exchange for her golden hair. She stares at the camera while invisible stories appear and evaporate inside her skull.
    The only professional photo is of Jeanine mashed in with forty-eight other children for her freshman high school picture. She turns her square face and long, bright eyes toward the school photographer, her light hair carefully curled. She is unfolding inside, leaf after leaf. She is becoming a young woman and it happens without effort.
    Pictures taken at match races are hard to come by. There were no racing sheets or published bloodlines, no bleachers or stands, no guardrail, no photo finish. It was roughhouse racing, where a Stetson was dropped to the ground as a starting signal, where once a jockey killed another with a loaded bat in a race in Rocksprings and nobody was ever charged. The horses that ran on these tracks were a breed that had no official name, they were short and hardy and had a phenomenal sprint that could carry them a quarter of a mile at blazing speeds. So different from the prestigious and expensive Thoroughbred racing on distant tracks in California and Maryland and Kentucky and New York where the tall sleek horses pounded out a mile, a mile and a quarter. This was Texas, it was old-time grassroots horse racing, a colonial holdover, and enormous amounts of money changed hands below the notice of tax collectors and lawmakers.
    Often the owners of these quarter-mile racehorses asked someone to take a picture of themselves with their champion in the front yard of the farmhouse or the ranch house. There are a great many of these photographs. Somebody to one side is flapping a blanket or opening an umbrella to get the horse to point his ears, to look alert, like the speed demon he is supposed to be. Many of these horses came to be famous in later years but in the Kodak Brownie photographs they always look commonplace and sleepy. If they did not win at the races they would go home and start herding cattle and dragging wood to the chuck fire.
    In one photo the man named Ross Everett who had rescued Jeanine at the blacksmith shop sits on the running board of a new 1934 Chevrolet truck with his western hat at the back of his head. A roan pony stands tied to the slats of the stock rack. The pony was for his boy, who was only five, and Jeanine was in a state of acute anguish over the fact that a five-year-old kid got his own horse and she, at seventeen, had none. And so she told Ross Everett that she used to like horses but she didn’t anymore, she was looking for something that talked and could sit in a seat at the movie