The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  “I found this in Philadelphia for twenty-five thousand dollars. First edition. A Kentucky original belongs in Kentucky, don’t you think?”

  She didn’t turn, only felt the smallness of the two of them in the overriding catholic luxury of the house.

  “This is yours,” he said again, and then she turned and, perhaps for the first time, really looked at him.

  * * *

  In her notebook she wrote:

  You think you’re so smart, but you’re wrong. You’re antediluvian. You’re proud to be a Megatherium but, Father, a dinosaur is still a dinosaur. You’re propagating the wrong memes, and the wrong ones parasitize the mind as well as the right ones.

  —“Race” is a word, and someone made up the word. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is also a word.

  —Racial categories are inconsistent, because what they measure is inconsistent. What’s inconsistent isn’t really real in any categorical sense.

  —See, traits don’t have distinct boundaries. There are gradations of every trait, including skin tone. Genes flow the way a glacier melts. Slowly.

  —Racial groups aren’t homogenous at all; 85 percent of variation occurs within any ethnic group.

  —IQ? Men and women have different cranial capacities with no correlating IQ difference. Everybody’s known this forever.

  —The anthropologists beat the eugenicists a long time ago. Supposedly immutable traits are malleable under the forces of environment. “Genes have given away most of their sovereignty.” E. O. Wilson

  —Difference is real, but the issue isn’t racial difference. We’re talking about tiny genetic differences created by transmutation under the limits of geography and climate. The limits change constantly, so the descriptors change constantly. Agassiz actually called blacks and whites separate species! Static definitions aren’t useful.

  Father, did you know they used to think there were only two kingdoms of life? Plantae and Animalia. They actually reduced the whole wide world to two. Then it started to look more complicated, and they decided there should be five kingdoms. They split Plantae into three additional groups: Monera, so bacteria and algae were together, Protista for eukaryotes, and another for the Fungi.

  They used to think the big divisions occurred only between the higher plants and animals and everything else. But the closer you look, the more you see that big divisions occur between every two beings. It’s an ontogeny/phylogeny problem. There are visible differences, but even more we can’t see down at the chromosomal level, and every new life contains mutations—so the potential is always there for more. There should be 6 billion kingdoms on earth.

  * * *

  Two weeks after she returned from Germany she gave herself to the Irishman, and he took her. She didn’t have to do much to make it happen. She simply followed him around the broodmare barn and gazed at him unblinkingly until he couldn’t help but notice, and finally he curled his finger at her, and she followed him around a corner into the feed room. He kissed her breasts a little, told her she had a good body, and then lay down on her and did it to her that way. She said nothing at all. He lay on her afterward, bent awkwardly at the waist with his jeans pooled foolishly around his work boots, and then he had smiled at her—only the second smile she had ever seen on his face. But she recoiled from that smile. She was already renovating the act in her mind—how it could be different, better, how she wouldn’t let anyone do it to her quite like that again. And she didn’t. When the Irishman came to her the next time with his knowing grin and his game eyes, she stared right through him and began to walk away, and when he caught at her sleeve, she said, without explanation, “Just leave me alone.”

  She tried it with other grooms, the ones who did not shy away from the unexpected advances of their employer’s underage daughter. The few who accepted seemed doubly aroused by their own illicit desire and fear. These were the ones she had to battle against—they tried to pin her under their demanding, oblivious weight—to climb atop. She figured out quickly to take what she could get, because these men would offer her no pleasure of their own accord. She had no way of knowing that these men were the least worth having, the gates of their inhibition irreparably broken, any native compassion trampled by baser instincts. She didn’t know how to want something better. Nothing mattered beyond the landscape of their hard, alien bodies, which she slid over, around. When she moved on them like that, she discovered that the old way of making herself feel good could be moved inward to some dark place that no one could see and no one had ever named for her. What had been up front and tinny and immediate was now shuddering and agonizingly deep. A birthing in. It was the only thing that was hers alone and it required no thought, and so she became addicted to it. But she had to have a man to do it. She had to have a man to bear down on.

  * * *

  She dutifully called her mother every other Sunday. When Judith picked up the receiver, before Henrietta could say anything more than “It’s me,” her mother would burst into tears in a manner uncharacteristic but increasingly frequent. Her voice was urgent across the transcontinental air, the trackless air.

  Judith: Oh, Henrietta, was I wrong to leave? Tell me your father’s good to you.

  Henrietta: I guess.

  Judith: You guess? God, he better be. Sometimes I feel I should have fought for custody, but I never could have won against him. Sometimes I …

  Henrietta: What?

  Judith: I—I don’t know … I don’t know what I think. I guess I … it just seems like men aren’t interested in knowing women. Even the decent ones. Everything is lonely after the excitement. Do you ever get lonely?

  Henrietta: Not really.

  Oh, Mommy …

  Judith: Even though I’m not there?

  Henrietta: No. I have Daddy. I guess I miss old Barlow.

  Judith: Oh.

  Henrietta: Don’t cry, Mother.

  Mommy, there’s nothing here at all.

  Judith: It’s just … Why do you have to lose everything to understand just a little? I feel so powerless, like nothing ever really changes. You just trade one thing for the next thing, and it ends up being exactly the same thing. Whatever you do, Henrietta, don’t grow up. I swear, they’ve rigged the whole game so women can’t win. I don’t know why they hate us so much.

  Henrietta: I don’t think I get to choose anything, Mom.

  Judith: I wish you didn’t know that yet.

  Henrietta: Can’t you come back?

  Judith: Do you know I love you even though I’m all the way over here?

  Then why did you leave me in this black breach?

  Henrietta: I have to go now.

  There are people ahead of us and people behind us, but there’s no one else at all in the breach.

  Judith: Oh, honey. They should have named me Regret, just like the goddamn horse.

  * * *

  She withdrew from the house and began to take long walks to be away from people. She wandered down the road past the Miller property where the curious, bellwethering cows streamed in her direction, following until they could follow no further, stopped short by the perimeter fencing. A coal-eyed, affectless crowd. She wondered what they would say to her if they could open their closed throats, what they would ask.

  She discovered that 150 acres had been placed on the market a mile down the road. The property boasted two creeks and a white mansion on a slight rise of land like a white pillar on a plinth, near analog to the Forge land, though this house was even grander, and the land did not depress to a bowl behind the house. The family had left for Florida without waiting for a buyer. In their wake, winter had come. Every morning she hiked up the driveway, huffing frigid air in her exertions until she made her way to a frosted wall at the rear of the mansion where she could spy through the windows the gleaming glassed cabinetry of a white kitchen with its white tiles, where dusty boot marks remained from the movers who had last walked there. She would lean against the outside wall, pull her woolen hat low over h
er ears, stuff her winter-crimsoned hands into her parka pockets. Then, perfectly still in the freeze, she paid the land mind. The old pastures were deadened by winter—she liked that the season had no scruples, it swept out most of the life to be found there, leaving only spare, hardy, scavenging birds and some winter hares that foraged. The spent grasses waved, and the sky impoverished of clouds sent cold, furious, wasted breezes, far colder than the resting air, to toss the weeds, which were brittle and arthritic. Some days they appeared candied with light snow. She could remain a long time against that frozen wall, not moving, part of the motionless winter statuary that included the stolid trees, the black fencing now white, and the barns, only closing her eyes when the winds came in a flurry. Many hours would be spent in this manner.

  But by late April, the “For Sale” sign had been taken down, and one of the abandoned pastures had sprung up a mass of rye as tall as her hips. Still there were no people to be seen. She went wading into the pastures and was soon wet with dew, as wet as a wader in the sea. With her jeans heavy and suckered to her thighs, she could watch morning rise. The fringed rye shook and shimmied, its braided feather tips strung with beads of lit dew glazed white like the hides of those long-gone winter hares. The sky conducted, its windy arms swept low as waves of rye moved in a rustling choral. At this particular hour between first light and the sun’s emergence, the birds didn’t sing, they screamed for morning, as if the wait itself did some kind of violence to them. Then when the sun began to grow a crescent on the horizon, the birds were calm and easy again and began to call for mates now that the first matter, the matter of survival, was settled. The world was renewing itself and it sustained the birds with their small fears and sustained the girl who stood motionless, chilled to the bone and watchful.

  Then one morning Henrietta arrived in the early hours to find two white SUVs parked in the driveway of the mansion behind a moving van. And two days later, when she chanced by with her father, she saw that the front paddocks had been mowed and horses installed, horses that turned to watch with dark, extinguished eyes as she passed.

  * * *

  On a mild winter night in 1990, Hellcat gave birth to a foal. It was not a colt but a gentle, bug-eyed filly that Henry, in his initial disappointment, could not bring himself to name. Henrietta called her Seconds Flat, in honor of her sire, Secretariat, and, hopefully—pray gods and goddesses—her propulsive, thundering, unbeatable speed.

  * * *

  The life of the racehorse unfolds: first there is the bright newness of the suckling, all dawn-eyed and gawky with legs too long for the body. Seconds Flat was even more awkward than most, her legs just brown crutches she stumbled upon, suggesting a height she would not ultimately deliver. As a weanling, she was still tethered to Hellcat, but haltered and handled now and beginning to explore the limits of her paddock. In the blink of a breeder’s eye, she was turned out in a fresh field with the other motherless foals, skittish and afraid, tracing bereft circles in the grass and gentling to human hands, turning yearling under the watchful eye of her handlers, settling into tender legs and attaining slowly a hint of the conformation of her sire. She was still small with a lady’s legs and a trimmer waist, but possessed his sharp head, the same steely, intelligent eyes, and a haughtiness that made her bite. The grooms knew to be wary of her, and when, as an eighteen-month-old, she was shipped to a trainer’s farm to begin the process of saddling and bridling, they remained circumspect, careful. One man forgot and nearly lost two fingers, but he never forgot again. Her life in training there was a regular one—a pattern of feed and water and stall work, walking in circles, learning to bear the saddle pad and the corset of the surcingle. She snapped and whined when a man lay like a sack across her back for the first time. She fought against the bit as well but ultimately took it, and when the saddle came again, this time with a man atop it, she bucked, emitted a piercing cry that made the other horses dance with anxiety, but then took that too, as they all would, each in their turn. They were broken now and learning to canter on the outdoor track, then jogging singly, sprinting in packs, and the filly began to show the long reach of her inheritance—the balance, self-assurance, stamina accruing like money in the bank.

  The second year in a Thoroughbred’s life, the watershed year, begins quietly. Seconds Flat was released to pasture to gain weight. The stem of her neck elongated, the buds of her eyes brightened, then she surprised them all by not growing taller but filling out with a sprinter’s cabbagey, bunched muscles. As the weather turned and her winter coat began to shed, she returned to the track for conditioning. She galloped hobby-horse miles and dropped her winter fat, so dappling sprung up on her hide like sunflung shadows. She learned to slice through mere slivers of air that separated horse from horse in a pack, and to hold her power in reserve, then finish with decisive strength. But she was a young gladiator with one terrific weakness: she balked at the starting gate. She would rear and buck and snap as four men forced her from behind into the padded enclosure. Once inside the panic box, she shook and whined until they led her out again and back around. The pushing, crying, and straining was repeated until finally, when they were all exhausted, man and horse equally, her resistance failed and she managed herself at the exhausted brink of terror just long enough to qualify, then leaped clean from the gate at the bang of the bell and was issued her gate card. She was gleaming, muscled, dappled, fearsome, and terrified; she was ready to race.

  And race she did. They never did discover the distance her pedigree promised, and she remained clumsy if propulsive out of the gate, but grew to be a terror in the half mile with the speed of a young colt, a jetter, a fast-twitch bitch, as Henrietta liked to say. Never as elegant as her sire, she chopped the air with her forelegs like an overeager dog, so that Henry would cover his head with his Racing Form, his cheeks bright red, but she won—four first-place wins in her juvenile year, and as many seconds. By the spring of her third year, her Derby year, she had no more fear of turf flung into her eyes or slippage on wet dirt tracks; what tremblings had existed the year before had been burned from her in the refining fire of competition. Her speed was only increasing. The Derby was in sight for Henry Forge.

  * * *

  Henrietta, at nineteen, could remember the names of every horse she’d ever seen place. From enduring stars like Silver Charm, Unbridled, and Thunder Gulch to those who shined brightly in a single classic, then fell away swiftly from the public eye, they were all locked in her memory. It wasn’t love or passion, but the taxonomical principle of her mind at work.

  It was life between the races, the quotidian details of a horsewoman’s day that had become indistinguishable, save the strange or startling detail. She recalled one day in the saddling enclosure when a horse reared in fright and fell backward, breaking its own skull, so its blood unfurled like a red flag on the brick—it was euthanized on the spot, its tongue bitten in half between its clamped teeth; there was the man she’d had sex with in a private bathroom upstairs, only to find out he was an old friend of her father’s and in the Assembly, no less; the day she’d been overcome with food poisoning on the back stretch and run to kneel behind a stable, vomiting into the dirt when a tiny Peruvian jockey known only as Minnie Ball rounded the corner and found her. He’d held up an apologetic hand and said, “No problem. Me also. I do this also.”

  And, of course, she remembered all of the Derbys, though like most in the business, she was interested in the results and impatient with the festivities, which rankled like overeating store-bought cake on a full stomach, all sickly sweet layers of drunkenness, celebrity, and overexposure of every kind. She wasn’t one to mingle in Millionaires Row, watching men shake hands and clap each other on the back, standing dutifully beside her father in their hermetically sealed box. She spent some of the afternoon checking in on Seconds Flat on the backstretch, then braving the crowds at the betting arcade and the food stands, where bettors jostled cheek to jowl and the offense of hot burgoo, sweat, and treacly perfume was undercu
t only by the persistent and oddly comforting odor of manure. The celebrities were mostly up top in the grandstand; down here the mildly monied pressed against one another in a crush, their cheer tinged always with the tang of violence—and the drive to perpetuate the species. Nowhere else outside a Nevada brothel could you see so many bosoms on display down to the edge of puckering areolas. Coral and red lips and chalk-white manicures, precipitous candy-colored pumps. Men with their penguin chests puffed, strutting dandy before the women, purchasing wine and Cokes and waving stubs and pretending to a knowledge cribbed quick for the first Saturday in May. At the Derby, every male was an expert, so long as there was a female in the room.