The Sport of Kings (81 page)

“Why, you spin, my little catfish. You spin like an ad man on Madison Avenue. Slap some columns on your farmhouse and paint it all white, get you some Spanish moss, rustle up an ancestral line and hire a noble Negro for a portrait, a sorry brother still bowing to the Lost Cause, scraping his bitchass snout on the ground. And marvels never cease! It works”—Reuben hissed and winked and drawled slow—“'cause don't nobody know they history.”

A pinprick pierced the skin of Allmon's mind. The Reverend was right; I never should have crossed that river.

Reuben crowed in delight. “Yes! The Confederacy rose again for the very first time! Everybody forgot the Dark and Bloody Ground wasn't ever the Deep South at all, just a yellowbelly borderland of hellraisers and cowards. Most never fought for ole Jeff Davis a day in their lives! Kentucky didn't secede till the war was over! But hang your stars and bars, muddle a mint julep, stick a lawn jockey on the drive, and everybody forgets what there is to forget! The revelation of reinvention—it's the great white hope! The real American dream! Ain't no fact in this world like a white man's tall tale!”

Allmon stared down at the ground in wonder, the words transforming into fresh horrors in his mind. Reuben reached up one iron-rough hand and grasped his shoulder. It remained steady as he spoke, his voice now thick and heavy as a comfort. “But you didn't know, my friend. For that old fiction, they got a man to sign away his life. Got him to sign away his baby boy.”

Allmon shook his head to stave it off, but a soul sickness was rising up and he couldn't stop it. “I signed my name
,
” he whispered.

The jock waved away this objection with a brush of his other hand. “You need to unass that notion! Your black vernacular ass ain't signed shit. X don't mean nothing. Learn your history! White lies don't add up to the truth! Your only choice was no choice!”

“I made a choice.” Allmon's throat was full of shame, he was choking on it.

Reuben tossed up his hands in frustration. “No, goddammit—you keep telling the story all wrong! You think little sister had any choice when Massah sold her baby off the auction block at Cheapside, not seventy miles away from this here horse track? They call their madness logic, but that don't make it logic! Your life or your child? You call that a choice? Why, it's fuckery and perversion, the cant of the Kaintuckee! History, Allmon—learn your history!”

Allmon turned to him slowly like someone waking. “I know shit about them you don't even know.”

“Then use it! Tell the tale! Throw open the doors of that prison!” The grip of the jock's hand and grin grew monstrous. “Get loose and dark, get unruly and rank! Look at me—I'm black as a train and twice as fast, I'm gonna run you down with the new reality! The man that stole your child is the same man that killed your mother, the man that put you behind bars, that's the same man that's been stringing up the black brother since time immemorial. Think about that, Allmon! How you like them rotten apples? I picked them just for you.”

Allmon made an inhuman sound deep in his throat. Everything that had come before this moment was creating a bursting pressure in his chest.

Reuben raised one triumphant finger. “Let it penetrate your sticky ear! If that is not the truth, then they changed the definition of truth. What say you? Is it the truth?”

Allmon was dizzy with a swirling sensation, the muddy confluence of one will slipping into another.

“Tell me for the sake of that child! Yes or no?”

It shot out of him. “Yes!”

“Then cut your jesses and burst your bridle! That child belongs with its rightful owner!”

Mother and Momma. Her name was Marie.

Reuben's whisper was harsh. “This is your time, Allmon…”

No, wait, wait, wait—

“Allmon…”

Allmon shook his head.

“Be a man.”

Allmon drew a harsh, sudden breath. Then he straightened up and turned an unblinking eye on Reuben. He stared disdain down his nose. “I don't need you telling me what to do.”

Reuben blinked then and reached out to place a palm firmly on Allmon's chest. “No,” he said, shaking his head as if weary. “You don't. Your mind was made up before I turned the corner. I can see that now. You are the superior man in every way.”

Allmon shrugged off his hand. “I got to go.”

Reuben made a faint gesture toward Allmon's hand. “And now you have the keys to the kingdom.”

Allmon said nothing in response. He had already turned away to scan the massive parking lot for the Forge Mercedes, a silver fish in a lurid sea of luxury cars. First he limped along on his aching joints, then he was running through the pain to get where he knew he had to go, where he was meant to go, where his child was being held hostage. Reuben watched him weave unsteadily between cars. He muttered, “A late response is still a great response.” Then he turned his back and thumped his chest once to clear the phlegm, realizing that the after-parties were elsewhere and soon to commence. He grinned.

*   *   *

Henry stared over the dash at the undulating expanse of Forge Run Farm, the filly behind him in her trailer, Samuel asleep on the bucket seat of the dually, content in the farm dust and the animal dander. With some shock, Henry realized that despite the uproar of the day, the farm—this world he had created—was still in his possession and nothing could change that. Here was the two-hundred-year-old house, which had been the dream of the first Samuel; here was the crumbling fence and the perpetual stream. Here was the overgrown orchard and the old barns converted and stocked with horseflesh he had bred.

It struck him as preposterous, impossible, that in short order his family would be exposed and naked to the world, that the taproot name, from which all their brief names had sprouted like a season's leaves, would be ridiculed as some kind of fraud or, worse, would become synonymous with the way things fall apart, how autumn follows on every fulsome summer. Henry replayed his choices at the track, including his abrupt decision to bring Samuel and reveal him to his father. Allmon was a man he barely knew. Henry had imagined himself as stepping out of his family like a man emerging from shadow. But now on the firm ground of the farm, his resolve wavered, his old truculent defenses ever at the ready: if any crime had been committed, it was his father's doing, not his own. Yes, Henry had lied stupidly, but he'd merely been a prisoner of another man's ideas. His father had been the progenitor of hate and disunion, his father would have had half the world hanging from the boughs of a holly tree, his father was the one who—

His own thinking degenerated to white noise in his mind.

He could no longer convince his most faithful audience, himself.

Henry looked around helplessly, his old passions like vestigial organs. They couldn't fill the vacuum created by the lost generation. It was breathtaking: Once his daughter had been a little girl on this very ground, her ring finger crooked, her legs bandy, her face configured by irreplaceable, unrepeatable bones. She had held her hands to her hips in a particular way. She had frowned like this, tilted her head like that. She had emerged as a singular mystery, sui generis, from the womb of the woman who had once been his wife—a woman with red lips he'd met on the track, a woman who had left after many, many arguments, none of which were more important than the gum on the bottom of his shoe. He still recalled the set of his young wife's chin and how the iris of her eye soon turned the color of dissatisfaction. Now the little girl they had created was vanished. Her death was a marvel, a mystery, the ultimate school.

Henry raised a trembling hand to his brow as if shielding his eyes, though evening's evanescent light streamed from a distant eternity behind the truck. His heart beat terribly. How could life be so boring and terrifying and exhilarating and confounding all at once? Its contradictions did not seem possible. He felt so old suddenly. Yes, he
was
old. But this was newly unobjectionable. Cut the throat of
puer aeternus
and bury him in a vacant chamber of Henry's heart.

He watched with a kind of bland, uneventful horror as years of ambition swirled and washed rapidly down the drain.

My God, he had to get out of the truck or he was going to have a stroke, be laid down in the dust like his father had been that autumn day so many years ago. He eased his road-weary bones out into the dwindling warmth of the day. He needed the fresh breeze to clear his mind and strengthen his body. He needed his feet on the ground; he needed, most of all, to think.

So now there was nothing between him and the land. He saw that imminent change was all around him. The ragged and unattended orchard could be curated, its trees trimmed and grafted to produce a bounty of apples again. That could be enough to slake the thirst of a thousand people, and maybe it would. The breeding operation could be slowed, or halted—yes, even halted—and some of the paddocks returned to pasturage. After all, this was the finest growing land in the country outside of Iowa, and treasure troves of produce could be cropped. Even their new, relatively small garden could feed many more than Samuel and himself. Maybe, when all was said and done, he would return some of the land to its original wildness, something his daughter had seemed to value. Land needed no purpose after all. Land was an end in itself. Now to the barns—his excitement rose, he realized he could use them as they were. He could shelter and reschool retired Thoroughbreds. He had the permanent wealth to do so; racing had never been a moneymaking venture for him. Forge Run Farm could be a place of renewal and rest, where something old and broken could become fresh again. The very idea filled him with sober joy.

Hellsmouth interrupted his planning. She was stamping her impatience on the aluminum floor of the Turnbow, jutting her nose against the glass of the window. She swung her truculent head toward him when he pulled the ramp and unhitched the swinging door. She was here in this world as much as he was, and he would do well to remember it.

As he guided her out—and how good it felt in his shoulders, his hands, his whole being to handle his animal, the way it had felt when he was a younger man and racing was new to him, when the adventure of life was still largely to come—Hell seemed to have grown a hand on the journey. She loomed over him, her head swiveling on the tower of her neck, taking the farm in round. An uncontained shiver looped across her withers and under her girth. This was her old playground, and she recognized it, so she wouldn't come placidly. She was barking like a seal, dancing up on springy legs that reminded Henry, not for the first time, of dark and knotty rose stems.

Good sense dictated that he install his champion in the foaling barn far from the wild stimulus of the fields, let her recalibrate to the freedom of the farm, a freedom near limitless against her life on the track. But she had other plans and pulled Henry across the brick chip lane to the old paddock where she had once nursed greedily, where she had gamboled as a weanling in the simple restraint of a nylon halter, where she had gazed across rumpled earth like the sides of green bells to the eastern mountains with their black interstitial valleys and glinting rivers. She knew this was where she belonged.

When Henry clipped her off the lead, Hell rocketed out into the field, her aluminum shoes blurring arcs that trampled timothy grass and tossed turf. Reaching the center of the paddock, she kicked out with the silliness of a goat, then jumped once and turned, her conformation showing out speed and stamina, the Remus and Romulus of her sport. She snorted, then gathered herself up and, with a triumphant leap, began to run. Henry reached for the top rail, suddenly terrified that she would drive herself through the fencing into the safety lane and reopen her chest or break her own bones. Instead, she cut savagely left at the first corner and traced a round in the falling light, beating a retrograde path, brightening in evening's light and accelerating as she neared Henry like a heavenly body in egress. Her hooves reverberated into the roots of the trees.

Henry stepped away from the fence with his mind suddenly clear: If you closed every racetrack in the world, hung every bridle and threw open every paddock, horses would still race one another on the open plain. It was inevitable, undeniable, because their competition was innate. The greatest dreams of humans were nothing but clumsy machinations next to the natural ambition of animals.

Hell had barely slowed when Henry returned to the truck, where Samuel remained placidly asleep, exhausted by the excitement of the day. Henry drew up the bundled baby, but a question appeared suddenly in his mind, which had become like an empty room.

What if he had been born out on the tableland in a modest white farmhouse in Emerson, Nebraska, the child of landlocked Swedes, who told him, “This land will never make you rich. True wealth is in the hope for simple things. Son, work the land, dote on your children, and ease your elders into gentle deaths.”

Or, what if he had been born a fisherman in Mobile? What if he'd folded himself into his boat every morning and pressed out against the tide, trawling for tiny swimmers to feed to his neighbors, and did this every day for sixty years until his anonymous death, knowing nothing resembling worldly ambition, only the land and the sea and the land and the sea, and wanting nothing more?

But he, Henry Forge, had not been born into those lives. He had been born into this indelible life.
This
was his grandson against his chest and
this
was his diaper bag in his left hand. And
this
here was his kitchen door, which his father, that old colossus, had slammed again and again in frustration over the course of decades. Henry could not now bring himself to walk through that door, to reenter history. Not yet. Evening flooded everything. Final ruby light plunged across the pastures. It filled every corner of his senses. He had been favored by fate to live on this plot of land his entire life, as rooted as any plant. But for the plant there was no ambition, and so no madness into which it needed to descend to cut through the confusion of daily living, the crass noisemaking of everyday speech, the rapidity of time's passage and its pseudolosses—what the human called its losses.