by C. E. Morgan
“I never could stand that nigger,” Henry said.
Now it was Loretta’s turn to rear back. “I get the feeling you can’t stand anyone! And don’t say nigger. It makes you sound like a bumpkin.”
“And you sound like a nigger lover.”
“Oh, I’m just a lover,” Loretta said airily. “I don’t even see color. I’m beyond all that.”
Henry scowled at her, and she said, “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”
Then she spotted their fathers now on the porch, still in conversation, John Henry’s back rimrod straight with his strict dignity, which never altered. Loretta grasped Henry’s elbow suddenly, so that he almost stumbled over his own shoes. She whispered, “Don’t tell about … okay?”
“You really do think I’m an idiot,” he snapped.
“Ha!” She laughed, tossing the fall of her hair over one shoulder. “I think you’re pure as the driven snow!” And she flounced on ahead of him toward the house.
* * *
“Henry Forge!”
No. He wouldn’t go. He was stacking boxes for his mother in the attic, where the family history lay organized and covered in sheets under the roof, where birds roosted as if on thin black soil, calling as his father was calling.
“Henry Forge!”
Who died and made me your slave? His insolence was a physical delight.
“Do not make me find you! Now!”
It still owned him. It. His lace-ups clapped the servants’ stairs, one after the other; they beat out the steady rhythm of John Henry. His only disobedience was his desultory pace.
His father was standing at the rear door off the kitchen, his pale blue striped sleeves rolled up over his freckled biceps, the short red hairs glinting there. By now, the hair on his head was completely gray. It always startled.
“What took you so long?” he said, turning to open the door to the backyard, where the morning was rioting in the dew and sparking off the crisp grass and the hedges. “Come along.”
As Henry descended the limestone steps off the back door, half-blinded by the acid light, his father picked up clippers and a saw from the ground. He said, “Fetch a ladder, please.”
“What for?” The words slipped off his truculent tongue before he could stop them. Even now, at the threshold of his adult life, he was just a little boy asking for answers from a man who wouldn’t answer.
But this time John Henry replied. “We’re cutting mistletoe from one of the trees. Apparently, if you want a job done correctly, you can’t hire men who are too busy rolling their own damn cigarettes to do any work. You have to do it yourself.”
By the time Henry had found the twenty-foot ladder in one of the old cabins, his father was a solitary figure in the orchard. Henry followed after him as best he could, clumsily balancing the shaky length of the ladder on two pinched palms. Before him, the wild fecundity of the orchard bloomed in the light wind that sluiced gently through the avenues of trees. The wind seemed to come directly from the sun, a perfect globe of red risen confidently out of the laden boughs. That globe commanded all the life of the garden, the many million blades of grass, the thick stalks of the trees with their secret rings, the gradations of green flourishing off the dark limbs and in their shadows, and the red, hanging apples.
John Henry stopped before one tree, about twenty deep, where the house couldn’t be seen and where the privacy was nearly primordial. He pointed upward. “Mistletoe,” he said. “Poison,” he added.
At first, Henry could detect nothing but bright fruit and limitless green punctured by the sun, but then, squinting, he discerned there, among the healthy branches, a smattering of pale seeds like tiny pearl onions or white trinkets clustered in a bush of hardy leaves. It had the look of a wildly disordered bird’s nest. The tree branch was suffering under the leaching plant, which drained its natural strength. With care, Henry positioned the ladder next to the blighted branch.
“My hope is that it can be merely clipped out. I don’t want to lose my tree, or any tree.”
“Well, one tree—” Henry began.
“I planted these two rows of trees when your brothers were born.”
It was as if the sentence had been said by someone else, so foreign was its meaning. At first, Henry simply stood there, staring stupidly as his father adjusted the clippers in his hand and set his hands on the ladder, peering upward.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Looking up at the mistletoe clump, where it encircled the branch in a draining embrace, John Henry said, “There were two children before you were born. The first died right after birth, the other died in its second month. There was a great deal of rejoicing, then a great deal of bitterness.”
Henry’s astonishment wrote red across his cheeks. There was a pained accusation in his voice when he said, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”
“Because it almost killed your mother, and it wasn’t your business,” came the reply. “So I have my reasons for preserving this orchard.” And after one deep breath, girding himself with self-assurance, John Henry placed one foot on the first rung and slowly began to climb. Henry, his outrage growing even as he held the ladder steady, blurted, “Why do you always treat me like a child?”
This time there was no reply as John Henry hesitated on the second rung, his brow furrowed and a trembling causing his khakis to shake.
It was the subtlest of movements, but Henry grabbed instinctively at his father’s strong, bunchy calf to steady him. “Are you okay?” He saw the steeling of his father’s jaw, the way he thrust his chin forward toward a rung of the ladder to gaze resolutely skyward, and he started in surprise. “Father, are you afraid of heights?”
Only a grunt as a reply. But his father seemed to inch up the ladder, rather than climb, each motion slowed by hesitation. What door had been opened on conversation was closed again, and the room of their understanding was silent.
Father, I didn’t know you were afraid of anything.
Oh oh but perhaps I did
For a moment, he wanted to say, Why don’t you let me do it, but he was spellbound by those strangely enfeebled movements his father made as he climbed and, toughened by his sense of injustice, he scraped the last bit of love off his tongue with his teeth. Presently, the gray head disappeared into the ceiling of green. Then the voice—the authority that had circumscribed his life for sixteen years—called down, “It’s too late. It’s gotten into the vasculature and the branch is stunted. Goddammit. Hand me the saw.” And the clippers dropped down with a thud to the ground.
Henry picked up the saw by its serrated teeth and, because his father had climbed so high, he ascended the first two rungs of the ladder. John Henry, watching him come, reached down with an awkward, curtailed gesture, still clinging with desperate force to a higher rung. Henry felt the ladder shake with his father’s shaking. It shook its way right past his fingertips into the muscles of his chest.
John Henry grabbed the saw and placed its teeth about two feet from the infestation.
“I hate to do it,” he said.
But of course you will, his son thought with a wintry scorn. His father began to cut away the injured limb to save the tree, draw after grating draw until it came crashing down with its mistletoe intact, bright green.
Henry watched it come down, but John Henry still gazed upward into the fragrant compass of the tree. Then he began his slow, unnerved descent, one painful rung at a time, as Henry said, quietly, “Take it slow,” as if his words were an encouragement and not a slap, and his father came, his breathing audible, the ladder trembling, until his feet were on firm ground, and he simply stood there, gripping the ladder sides, breathing like a gladiator.
John Henry turned his flushed face to the side and said, “What we talked about today, don’t mention it to your mother. She never wanted you to know.”
“Yes, sir.” The polite words were alloyed by a stingy metal in his voice. John Henry turned fully and looked into the ever-increasing
mystery of his son’s face, as if to determine whether this was sarcasm or straight, and the indecision in those aging eyes was a tiny glory to behold. He said, “Leave the ladder, and drag that branch back to the yard, where it can be chopped.”
Would his insolence get off so easy? He had only moved ten feet, when John Henry intoned three words: “And young man.” When Henry glanced back over his shoulder, John Henry’s right hand, that clamp, wrench, hold, vise, that old beater, was pointing at him: “I’ve been watching you.”
A depth charge shook the boy, and the whole of his sexual misdeeds were laid out in that moment, as if his father had been there in the tack room as Loretta had sucked on his tongue and worked her salivaed hand between his legs until he shuddered wretchedly and gasped, and instantly, in his father’s presence, before he said anything else, Henry’s mind was on fire with shame.
John Henry stared directly into his son’s guilty eyes. “Don’t chase after just any bitch in heat.”
“No, sir.” His mouth was sandy.
“You’re better than that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t believe I need to waste any more breath on this conversation.”
“No, sir.”
“Manage yourself.”
Henry stared down at the ground, conquered.
“Or I will manage you.”
* * *
John Henry: Son, what is desire in a strong man? Do you remember what I told you?
Henry: Desire is a draft horse, harnessed by tradition, working in service of the line.
John Henry: And desire in a weak man?
Henry: A Thoroughbred, wild and dangerous.
John Henry: And eros?
Henry: A blindfolded youth.
John Henry: Which results in mania.
Henry: Yes, but
Oh, Father, you hypocrite! Enfeebled and blind! Your Argument from Authority fails! Choke to death on your words—Mania transforms! It makes the cuckold the lover again, it makes the blind man see, it ripens the fruits that reason can only plant! Madness lays waste to shame! Even Socrates hid his face over his stupid speeches! Hide your own!
* * *
Paulette carried trays piled with pineapple-glazed ham with mint garnish, corn pudding, and dusky dinner rolls; chardonnay for the adults, virgin mint juleps for the children. But Henry’s silver cup sat sweaty and untouched, finely engraved with its curlicued F. Lonely Lavinia tried to catch his eye, and Loretta grinned her grin full of secrets, but Henry had eyes only for his father: how his straight spine formed the axis of the room, around which the entire earth revolved. How, once again, the men inclined their heads toward each other, speaking in a fraternal enclosure that excluded the bustling table of children, which unjustly included Henry. But he wasn’t cowed. His shoulders were as square as his jaw. He had grown to his full six feet one this summer and could look Uncle Mason in the eye. He was strong as new rope.
John Henry said, “We’ve rarely seen a worse drought, but I have faith it will rain soon.”
“We’re feeling the effects as far south as Florida,” said Uncle Mason. “I don’t believe it’s rained in twenty-seven days now.”
“Is that right?”
“But you’re worse off, to be sure. Much worse.”
“There has been some talk of families leaving the area,” said his father, but then he shrugged. “Many of these men have mishandled their black years, so my sympathies are limited to say the least.”
“Well, I’d hate to see that,” said Uncle Mason. “When an uneducated man leaves the only thing he knows—”
“There are lateral moves to be made into manufacturing. Not to mention there’s security in the factories that these farmers can only dream of,” said John Henry.
Loretta glanced up suddenly from her food. “They should move to Florida if they need work,” she said. “There’s a lot of work there, isn’t that right, Daddy? I always see men standing on the side of the road when I go to school.”
John Henry stared at her, blinking, and her mother hissed, “Loretta.”
“What?” she said, swiveling toward her with a blank look. “It’s true.”
Uncle Mason cleared his throat and glanced at his brother. “Well, Kentucky’s always been a corn deficit state. Are they bringing down surplus from Ohio?”
John Henry shook his head. “Even Ohio is baling corn this summer.”
“It’s like when we were kids all over again.”
“Yes,” John Henry said, and now he eyed the table round, his look a warning, as if they all should remember, though no one else could, except Lavinia, who watched him and nodded, sensing a strange energy in the room, but unable to parse it.
“Well, you have to wonder how many of these family farms can hang on,” said Uncle Mason. “What did Grandfather always say? All you need is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife? It’s not enough these days, apparently. Still, it’s a sorry sight to watch farms go under.”
“Well,” said Loretta brightly, “when Henry’s raising horses here you won’t have to worry about any of that ever again.” She grinned at them all, but the table plummeted into silence around her; then something stilled in her eyes, her broad smile contracting slowly to a line of poised alertness. She glanced at Henry, but he was not looking at her; he simply took another bite of ham as if by continuing to eat, as if by pretending he hadn’t heard, he could distend time and stave off what was to come.
“What did you say, young lady?” said John Henry. His voice was stony and low. Loretta looked at him, eyes wide, but said nothing at all into the raw, charged quiet of the table.
Then John Henry brought his utensils down to the tabletop, one in each hand, and it caused the table to rejolt with a crack like a branch breaking. “What did you say, young lady?” His voice was rising to a roar, and Loretta visibly started and cowered back into her chair, instinctively scooting against her mother. Mason laid a steadying hand on his brother’s upper arm, but that arm sprang loose from its cocked reserve, pointed out across the table at Henry, that hand the detonation, so the voice that followed was only a report. “I haven’t sacrificed everything so you could waste your goddamned life! I haven’t raised you to be an idiot!”
What other words were flung across the table at Henry he could not later reconstruct, not in their entirety. He simply rose up from the table with a strangely disembodied calm on his strong, new face, a face built for the future. Lavinia whipped around in her seat, reaching for him, but she was too late.
“Don’t you dare leave my goddamn presence, boy! Not without my permission!”
But Henry did just that, passing out of the dining room, walking faster and faster until he was almost jogging, leaving the assembled family with their mouths gaping and John Henry storming up from his chair, so that he knocked the table, causing the china to dance violently and the younger girls to cry. Loretta had already fled into the kitchen when, freeing herself from a tangle of chair legs and crying girls, Lavinia chased after John Henry as he stalked to the front hall. When she grabbed at his shirtsleeve, he lashed out blindly behind himself, striking the fine flesh of her cheek with his Sewanee class ring, so that she was bleeding even before she sat down hard on her bottom on the polished floor.
Henry, who was just rounding the foot of the staircase, saw his mother fall, and he screamed out to his approaching father, “I hate you!”
“Get back down here,” John Henry warned, not running, but also losing no ground as he followed his son, who was skipping stairs now in his haste to reach the second floor.
“Get back down here,” he barked again, trying to rein in his voice, but there was weakness in the repetition, and he seemed to sense it, because now he cried full-throated, “Look at me when I speak to you, goddammit!”
Henry whirled at the top of the stairs, sixteen years of fury wrenching the contours of his face. His lips rode back from his teeth like an animal’s as he pointed down accusation at his father.
�
��You’re a fucking tyrant!” he screamed.
“And you’re behaving like a fool, Henry. Control yourself.” The words came low and rumbling.
“You’re nothing but a coward!”
His father shook as he raised a meaty hand and pointed up at his son; even his jowls shook. “You’re embarrassing yourself in front of your entire family.”
“No, I’m just embarrassing you!” Henry cried. “There’s a difference!” He was stringing his arrows, now setting the bow. “You’ve always been afraid of ever trying to be truly great! No war medals, right, Father? Maybe the General Assembly, but never the governorship! And, oh, don’t touch the farm! Nothing you could ever fail miserably at! You weren’t even enough for your own wife!”
For a moment, all rage slacked, and his father looked at him as though at a stranger. “I made you to break my heart?” he said.
Henry spread his arms like wings. “Whether you like it or not, this land will be a horse farm.”
“I would sooner you die,” came the leaden reply from the foot of the stairs.
“But I’m not going to die,” Henry said, gasping for breath. “You are.”
John Henry’s face grew apoplectic. “Then I will not die!” he screamed, and the house shook.
But he did die. He collapsed from a massive stroke in the spring of 1965, and Henry immediately returned home from his graduate studies and let the fields go fallow, then reseeded with fescue and clover in the fall. The next year he bought his first horse at a claiming race in Florida, a mare called Hellbent. She was a spirited horse, fast, and almost perfectly formed. She would become his taproot mare.
INTERLUDE I
The following colors are recognized by the Jockey Club:
BAY: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a yellow-tan to a bright auburn. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.
BLACK: The entire coat of the horse is black, including the muzzle, the flanks, the mane, tail and legs, unless white markings are present.