The Sport of Kings (70 page)

As if on cue, Stu Penderson, a Woodford County acquaintance of some forty years, clapped him abruptly on the back and said, “Where's that old rascal Henry tonight?”

Mack scowled openly; he didn't even try to hide his disgust. “You don't want to know,” is all he said as he tugged loose his bolo tie and returned to his drink to suffer the rest of the banquet alone until he found some lonely desperado who would suffer him in turn.

*   *   *

I don't care who you are—a breeder of champions, the scion of scions—a crying baby can bring you to your knees. Henry was snatched from sleep for the third time that night, prisoner to Samuel's wailing. Nothing in the world could soothe him, not the whirring of a fan, no amount of sweet talk or pacing. He refused the bottle, he struggled righteously against a fresh diaper, he waved his fat arms in fury, and screamed over Henry's lullabies as if to wake the world with his frustrations.

After an hour of it, Henry was nearly in tears himself, and there was nothing left to try but read from Henrietta's notebooks, the soft roll of his reading voice serving as a balm, the words a communiqué from another world. Henry arranged Samuel, beet red and squalling, in the valley of his lap, then flipped through the pages. This was a shared habit of their mornings and nights, looking for something he hadn't yet read. Here was a chart of worms in Kentucky soils, a diagram of the Cincinnati Arch, a quote about the men of Tierra del Fuego killing old women before dogs, because dogs are more useful. Finally, he found a fresh page and read over Samuel's cries: “Gene Schwartz Jefferson Lecture, transcribed from Penn's tape.”

The speech was scrawled in excerpts that covered a half dozen pages. Henry transformed the words into a parent's singsong as he read: “‘I am a farmer and always have been. When I was born, this country supported thirty-two million farmers. My mother used the
Farmer's Almanac
to teach me to read, and my father took me out in the fields before I was even able to walk and instructed me properly in the art of plantation. I was educated in the very best sense of the word.

“‘But something has gone amiss in the almost sixty years since I was born. Today, America has only four million farms. That is less than two percent of the population—less than two percent! Can you think of anything less significant than that? Yes, one percent, and it's coming. We're on a slippery slope to a postagricultural hell. The how and why of this turn of events is a painful story, and a portentous one if the best predictor of the future is the past.'”

The singsong lilt slipped from Henry's voice. Samuel was hiccupping his way into calm, listening now with rapt attention, his wide, deep gaze locked on Henry's face.

“‘… We live in a consumptive world, where we consume more food than we need, where animals are forced to consume our cast-off poisons and the bodies of their own species, where we use more of the world's resources than is right, where we empower corporations, which consume the lives of their workers with all the blessings of our government, which grants them the same rights and recognitions historically reserved for humans by the Fourteenth Amendment—the amendment designed to guarantee slaves their status as human beings! This, my friends, is consumption. And if you will recall, consumption is an insidious disease, creating for much of its progress the illusion of increased vitality. It promises health, but it delivers death.

“‘We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, and we have suffered from that disastrous ideal ever since, this notion that a man's life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor's water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We've turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

“‘In the 1700s, when we fought our war for supposed independence, we were actually securing our rightful dependence upon the land, upon each other, and upon our deepest religious impulses, which cannot be governed by a king, but only by mystical union with … We have always been trying to establish a mystical union with what is ultimately ineffable. This invisible reality leaves its mark everywhere; in friendship, intimacy, prayer without dogmatism, laughter, compassion. Camus said man's only real choice is whether or not to commit suicide. I say when we choose not to commit suicide, our reasons for living divulge the meaning of life itself. They give voice to the ineffable. And all of those reasons for living point us toward community, rather than singularity and division.

“‘… These days, I'm often accused of being a moralist, but if this is a critique, if being called a moralist is now an insult, then it merely indicates how far we've fallen and how resolute and inflexible our relativism has become. Unlike many of you, I was born immediately after the Second World War. If the twentieth century was not a clarion call for humanity to awaken and choose sides, what could possibly wake us? It was a time for staking moral claims. Yet our sleepwalking culture persists in looking for the easy answer, waiting for someone to tell us what to think. I'm not here to tell you how and what to consume, what technologies to embrace or avoid, how to organize your communities, how to vote, how to live. America has many ills, but none greater than the refusal of so many to think long and hard, to think critically. We must learn to be choosers, not merely receivers; to be self-critical; to cast a suspicious eye on the powers that be, including one's own unearned power. We want easy answers, but we must refuse them. The only true answer is to think.'”

Samuel was finally deeply asleep. He lay there, Henry's right hand a warm cradle under his head, his breath coming in even passes and collecting around them both as a pocket of warmth. Looking down at him, Henry's heart beat a complicated rhythm. He remembered suddenly his own daughter as a child, so flush with life, a life he had always assumed was indistinct from his. Yet, here he was holding her difference in his very hands even after her death. In life, he had held up her flesh only as a mirror. Now a complication was rising like bile; it was bitter with the first taste of regret.

Barely able to turn his gaze from Samuel's face, Henry fumbled back through the leaves of the notebook, looking for something he had spied earlier. Yes, there it was: a Sandgap address for Penn, presumably the same one who owned the tape. An 859 telephone number. Under the number, scrawled in Henrietta's impatient handwriting, he read the sentence again:
The movement of evolution is from simple to complex
.

*   *   *

Animalia—Chordata—Vertebrata—Aves—Passeriformes—Hirundinidae—Progne subis
: In one of the many mysteries of spring, the purple martins, our loyal, royal swallows, return in pairs to their high nesting grounds in the hills of Kentucky. Here, their young fledge every year. They come in monogamous pairs as if a compass were guiding them, driven forward by a wild, inborn sense of the sun and the poles, a knowledge deep within the eye that has little to do with sight.

I was and am forever trapped not by Father, but by myself. Until I become a god or a bird. Irony is life's central condition. A god experiences no limitations, which is why it cannot exist. Or if a god exists, you cannot experience it or think about it or know it, because it has no explicable border. What can't be talked about is not worth talking about. That's what I mean by irony.

She followed him everywhere, even as he traveled like one of those martins, drawn inexorably back to his place of origin. The farm he found—if you could call it that—was a humble copestone atop the outer fortifications of the mountains. A proper gentleman's farm perhaps fifty years prior, the white farmhouse long shorn of its beauty, and the Lincoln log corncrib slumping to rot in the rocky soil. Of the numerous pastures fitted onto these high flats, fully half were unturned, and Henry soon saw why. A man—presumably the man he sought—was struggling in the right field with a plow and two thick-necked oxen. What old-time conceit was this? They seemed ghosts of the previous century, now stymied in the mud, the blade of the plow lodged in the late February muck, the oxen sunk to their fetlocks in the mire. One ox brayed heavily as if in warning when it spotted Henry's car. Like an animal sensing danger, the driver remained very still for a moment, shielding his brow, then he raised one muddy hand in greeting, and Henry returned the gesture.

The man called out across the pasture, “Boots on the porch!”

There were old, weather-crackled LaCrosse hunters behind Henry on the warped porch boards. He slipped off his fine loafers and pressed his feet and wool trouser hems into the mud-caked boots. Then he trudged out into the early-spring fields, feeling foolish and vaguely abused. But this man had known his daughter.

The man had gray and black hair, thick as a barge rope and cinched by an elastic at the nape. Gray-green eyes and freckles, incongruous on a face so lined—lined less by age perhaps than a life spent outside hunting and drinking and doing this, tending to a thankless plot of land attached to a threadbare home. Couple of curs for company. A talent for home brew. An old truck, some pornography, some pot. It wasn't hard to imagine.

Before Henry could introduce himself, the man pointed to the ground where the old moldboard plow was lodged and said, “Not much rain this week, but there's this funny spot”—he gestured at the declivity where the field sloped gently like the sides of a French salad bowl—“and I forgot … it holds rain. I fill it every spring and harrow around it … but it sinks again every winter.” The man had something slow and untutored about him, or it seemed that way because of his measured speech, but he had wide, watchful eyes that took quiet notes on everything around him, even as his mouth was busy with something else.

Henry said, “You should have plowed in the fall.” It startled him that he remembered that; it had been over forty years since he'd last witnessed a laying-in.

“Had pneumonia,” the man said simply, then gestured at the coulter and share, wedged deep in the mud. “You guide these guys … and I can press the plow. Straight like an arrow now.”

Henry did as the man asked, standing at the shoulder of the enormous lead ox with one hand to its bridle, and when Penn gave a heaving, half-angry cry of encouragement in the plow lines, the oxen impended forward as one, and—twice, thrice, four times, they did this until the man's voice was nearly wracked with calling “Git up!” and, with a sucking slosh and a spattering of fresh, clean mud, the plow moved forward and continued to trundle along the earth. Down the row they went, unfurling a slow wave of brown soil, the traces tinkling. Henry let loose the bridle of the lead ox and Penn drove the train with ease now that they had achieved level ground. Comparatively free, the oxen moved swiftly along and Henry watched as the chest of the earth was sliced open. The exposed earth wriggled with life:
Lumbricus terrestris
,
Narceus americanus
,
Procellio scaber
,
Armadillidium nasatum
,
Talpa europaea
,
Walckenaeria acuminata
, and all the
Kingdom Monera
and all the
Kingdom Protista
. His daughter knew them all by heart. These bottom-feeder servants would now feast on the remains of the supposedly higher plants.

When they cleared the last forty yards of the row, Penn called “Gee!” and the team made the lumbrous turn onto the next unriven row; they moved as the Greeks had written their language. But Penn pressed back with the full weight of his body, crying, “Whoa!” which Henry mirrored instinctively with a soft “Whoa,” and the whole rattling configuration came to a halt.

It was only now, with the leggy oxen resting idle in their harnesses, that Henry could take a proper look at them. They stood to his chest, their enormous white bulk—solid and stolid as if carved from marble yet radiating heat—brockled thick with black. Upon closer inspection, one ox's black was more like midnight blue with white showing through like fat stars. Their long backs were plain with white but without the black that peppered their blockish heads. Their points too were black. They were animals of distinct stature, boasting a heavy, bulky dignity even as ropy mucus strings spooled from their nostrils and eager flies pestered them. Henry had never seen anything quite like them before.

“Randall Linebacks,” Penn said, approaching the blue and patting it where the yoke beam pressed into the heavy flesh of the neck. “America's rarest breed. Colonial cattle. They came out of a closed herd up in Vermont. I got these two, because … I can't work on tractors. And I can't afford a tractor. Repairs are too expensive.”

As if in response, one ox lowed and stamped and rubbed with irritation against the curves of the oxbow.

Penn swiped at his sweaty face with his sleeve, but just smeared warrior lines of sweat and soil. He said, “They weren't worth a damn when I got them here … Barely plow trained. This one especially, Boss”—he pointed to the steer with the blue buckling—“was just ornery. Every time I'd say gee, he went left. Every time I said haw, he'd go right … I could have got more done with a team of fainting goats.” He indicated with one hand. “That black one's Taurus. She named them.”

Henry said nothing. He just listened.

Penn shoved his hands in his pockets and fixed Henry with an unblinking stare. “Thanks for calling me. I wouldn't have known … Sometimes she just didn't show up here for a long time.”

Henry nodded once.

Then Penn said, “I loved your daughter,” and the man's forthright declaration startled Henry into looking into his broad face. Dappled spring sun was playing with shadow there like fleetings of emotion. The man said simply, “I really did.”