A white horse gives the herd away. That's what Malachi always says. A band of wild, dark horses fleeing from predators into the safety of cut-slate mountains, to seek their refuge inside the brown and violet shadows of twisted brush, can be immediately betrayed by the flash of a white horse.

Malachi's my farm manager, and he always likes to tell me how nature separates dark and white horses. Or maybe, eventually, the dark and white horses separate themselves, he was never clear about that. Still, the white horse is ostracized. Shunned. Becoming an outcast, driven to live at the fringes of horse society, left behind to fend for himself, because his bright color can spell death for the rest. Malachi always squeezes his eyes shut before telling me that part, as though he has to first envision it.

"Funny thing about horses and color," he says, finally opening his eyes and settling himself down with a grunt onto a bale of hay. His fingers fuss through the strands before selecting a thin stalk to slide between his lips. "Horses can't help themselves, splitting apart like that. It's always been that way; it will always be that way. It's nature's rules."

It made sense to me. I could picture a white horse moving across burnt sienna hills like a flash of lightning slicing through a thunderous sky. It made sense, though I've learned not to believe everything Malachi has told me over the years.

* * *

Malachi Charge had come with the farm, along with the tractor, the extra motor for the well pump, and six bags of lime — although they were all in better shape than he was. When I first met him ten years ago, I couldn't help but notice the slight tremor in his hands, the barely perceptible drag of his left leg, the pale cast of cataracts in his dark brown eyes.

"I'm seventy-five," he told us then. He was six foot, thin as a tenpenny nail, and wearing clean but faded jeans, a short-sleeved yellow shirt, and a tan newsboy cap tilted back atop his thick white hair. "But I'll do you a favor and stay on, because I been managing this farm for fifty years."

Though the deed showed that our horse farm had only been in existence for eighteen, we didn't quibble with him. We're not farmers by occupation, David and I, only by optimism. And with David working in the city at a large law firm, and me putting in long hours in my home office writing books, we needed this man who seemed to be part of the natural order of farming.

Malachi is black, and we're white, and we felt squeamish "acquiring" a person along with the farm in a sort of package deal, as if he were a piece of farm equipment. It didn't sit right with us, and we were embarrassed by even the thought of it.

"You may as well let me live here," he said, when I told him how I felt funny about it. "I got no place to go." I guess it was that Robert Frost thing. Home is, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. He didn't seem to have family, and so we told him of course he could stay on.

"I won't be any trouble at'al," he declared. "I got my Social Security."

But we insisted on a regular salary and the title of farm manager, and then made things proper and official by naming the place Water-from-a-Rock Farm, because it seemed like that was what we were trying to get. He lived in the small cottage he had always lived in, behind the barn, except that we renovated it for him. And he continued to do what he had apparently always done: gardening, puttering, fixing things, napping the afternoon away, and being bossy.

It's been ten years.

And Malachi, still wearing the tan newsboy cap, insisted on his last birthday that he was just turning seventy-five. Again. If it even was his birthday, since it floats from month to month each year, depending on his mood, needs, and circumstances.

"I could use a new winter coat," he told me in the beginning of November, when the air started to chill. "It's my birthday, anyways."

I couldn't say no to him, because he was my friend, my guide, and my father-substitute, but I couldn't resist teasing him. "I thought your birthday was in May, when you picked out all those new plaid shirts."

He just nodded and spit on the ground. "Yep. May, too."

* * *

My career keeps me at the computer, but I make sure I get outside for a few hours every day. I need to feel the changes in the wind, see the sky moving through its expressions of grays and blues, and witness the tangerine pinks that sweep through at sunset in what the old artists used to call the Hudson Valley sky. I like to stand by the barn at night and stare up, looking for the first shift of stars and moon that heralds another gliding change of constellations and seasons.

* * *

Spring is the best.

I am always pleased how the flowers know enough to come back on time, how all the grass renews at once, how green things push out of the ground, filling in the dead spaces. The earth lies dreamless for months, brown and empty, then thin emerald blades glide up through the black loam, celadon buds, rolled up like tiny, tight cigarettes, appear on once-dormant sticks, everything obeying a simultaneous choreography. The protocol of brave gold daffodils, followed by an unvarying succession of grape hyacinth, yellow forsythias, pink tulips, purple and white lilacs. I finger the new leaves, gently touch the folded infant flowers, and wonder how they all know when it's their time. How do they strike their annual bargain with the warm spring sun and cool nights? What summons them? The lengthening of days? The rains? Do they hold underground meetings? They come without bidding, they come in their time. I can't figure it, but all these things make sense to Malachi because he knows nature.

"They can't help themselves," he says. "It's in the rules."

* * *

He told me once that he was born and raised in Missouri, and had farmed all his life and that's how he knows things. He begins watering and tilling the soil as soon as the ground warms and softens, usually late April. He's "waking the gardens," he says. He prunes bare branches and sows seeds in little paper cups that he leaves on his windowsill and bosses me into buying more plants, more seeds, more bags of fertilizer, more equipment. He'll stand with me a few months later, nodding proudly as I marvel again at small, curled lettuce leaves and tomatoes flowering yellow, and basil growing like a fragrant weed.

"What did you learn?" he would ask me. "What did you learn?"

And like a schoolgirl, I recite his lessons back to him. "Start your seeds early, be patient, make sure they get what they need."

* * *

Foals come in the spring.

That is something I understand very well.

I breed horses, have bred them for years, and I understand the swelling promise of equine life that mares carry for eleven months. Though I never wanted children of my own, I think I understand how the mares feel when their bellies bulge out and shift from side to side. When their legs swell as they clumber around wearily, waiting to foal.

"I'll sit up with her," Malachi tells me when a mare begins to bag up, her udders engorging with milk, the area around her tail sinking in. Signs that she is ready to foal. I will watch her for hours, fretting, waiting, until Malachi finally pushes me out of the barn. "Go get some rest and let me do my job." He sends me off to the house as evening falls. "Trust me."

And I do. I trust him more than I ever...