by C. E. Morgan
On the last day, three weeks before your release, that trainer—the one who’d been watching you for six months, took you aside and said, “Allmon, you continue to impress me. You’ve got good hands, some real talent. What do you intend to use it for?”
You say, “Do my thing.” It’s nobody’s fucking business how you intend yourself.
But he says, “I’ve got a feeling you’re looking for more than that. You feel like you’ve got something to prove?”
Quiet and steely a moment. Then you turn on him, on that white man who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know who you are, what you’re capable of. Whatever’s in your eyes must burn too bright, because the man rears back a little. “Yeah, I got something to prove. I ain’t asked to be here, but here I am. And now I aim to play the man’s game better than he can play it. I aim to make something of myself.”
The trainer doesn’t say anything for a moment, just looks at you, very quiet and evaluating. Then: “So I’m going to offer you some advice. As someone who was inside.”
This time it’s you who rears back, open surprise written on your face.
The man lowers his chin, eyes unblinking. When he speaks, his voice is harsh but low and not unkind. “Allmon, whatever you had to do to get by inside—leave it inside. Don’t ever breathe a word of it to anyone. Accept that you have to be a devil to fight the devil in hell. But you’re not in hell anymore, kid. You’re in Kentucky. They’re already going to call you nigger; don’t give them a reason to call you devil too.”
You’re still trying to comprehend how this slight man survived inside, then you comprehend his words, let them sink like a rock into your stomach. You nod finally. “Yeah.” And exhale audibly. “Yeah.”
The air clears, the man smiles almost ruefully. “So, you’ve got real talent. I take it you want to be on a good farm under someone with real ambition, not just some dilettante.”
“That’s right.” Gladiator words, but shame enflames your cheek; you have no idea what dilettante means.
“Well, I know just the place. Forge Run Farm is hiring. Their star is on the rise.”
Now that—that—is what you wanted to hear.
* * *
Because Memory is a faculty of Mind, and Mind is what most consider the man.
Which is why the wandering radical said, Die unto yourself. Love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life.
And why the acolyte went to the master and said, my mind is troubling me, and the master said, I can fix it if you will just hand me your mind, but when the acolyte went to give him his mind, he couldn’t find it and was enlightened. But that night, when he lay down to sleep, the acolyte felt a great love for his mother, and he lost his enlightenment, and said good riddance, got up the next morning and went to market.
Because the path—well, it’s as difficult to find the words as it is the path.
* * *
The foal knew nothing but milk and play. It lolled and scratched its new ear with the soft bundle of its leaf-layered foot, it flung itself through timothy grass in fits of exuberance, darting beside its dam and nipping at her long tail and forelegs. It knickered its fresh song at everything.
But it wouldn’t let Henry come near.
When he approached, the foal first stood warily apart, its ears pert and sharp as two attenuated thorns, and when he reached out his hand in the gesture of every man who ever offered an animal food and then tamed it, it sprung loose from its trance, spindly spider legs carrying it away. Then, as if aware of a new game, it would slow and turn at the center of the paddock and watch Henry with a kind of evil delight. It stood there, so fine and full of itself, it robbed Henry of his breath.
So: “Henrietta!”
That seemed to be the refrain of his living these days. It’s what made the world go round—men chasing women. He was always chasing his.
He stalked the shed row, empty now, the broodmare band all turned out in the southern paddock, tracing maternal circles around their foals. The stalls were redolent with the musk of horseflesh and sunlight heating once-living grasses and old, oiled leather. The place was quiet, no grooms, no business, no daughter.
“Henri—”
They came face-to-face, he and the man who’d been haunting his barn these four months. They’d never spoken; he was the cause of a row such as there’d never been before in the Forge house. Henry would be the first to say he was no longer imprisoned by the hotblood hate he’d felt in his youth, but he objected to this new world of unequal opportunity, a man hired being a man unfireable. In his father’s time, under the old dominion …
“Where’s my daughter?”
“I’m Allmon Shaughnessy.”
Henry simply turned from that tough face, all overhanging brow and unblinking eye, and hollered “Henrietta!” under the open blue sky. Allmon used the moment to size him up. The rich tan, feathery copper brows, box jaw. A blue linen shirt casually wrinkled, a brown leather jacket, belted khakis. Wearing good clothes around animals. Like money was water and there was an unlimited supply.
“What do you need?” Allmon said, an edge in his voice that scraped at Henry’s patience.
“I don’t need your help,” was the acid response. “I’ve got a jumpy foal I need haltered—I’m looking for my daughter.”
He stalked off in the direction of the broodmare barn, but his heart was galling his throat. He couldn’t stand the man’s city voice. It was as though his daughter had taken a marker and drawn a black line down the center of his farm.
He didn’t find her, and when he came rounding back along the side of the broodmare barn again, his tongue curling her name in his mouth, he stopped abruptly. At first, he thought that the man was hurting his foal, cinching her in a stranglehold. But then his disconcerted mind knocked right, and he realized Allmon was cradling her in his arms as if just waiting for the bridler. Textbook.
“I got your foal,” Allmon said needlessly. Slowly, Henry slipped back into the paddock, the bridle dangling at his side. His eyes were on the man’s enormous hands, which caged the gangly foal without any gentling whatsoever, just even pressure, so the foal was easy, quiescent.
Henry’s eyes narrowed. “Have you ever worked with foals?”
Allmon shook his head.
“Well, they’re infants, not just tiny horses.” Now Henry stepped in, so there ensued a small contest of bodies and their shadows tangled, but Allmon did not retreat, maintaining his hold on the horse and taking the bridle right out of Henry’s hand. “I got this.”
“You need two sets of hands.”
“I got this.”
And he did. He let loose the foal, but instead of running it stood still, a soft, volitionless statue. Allmon slipped the nylon straps over the long, narrow bones of the nose, under the velvetine jaw, and secured the buckle behind the skull. The filly stood, curious, and after the cinch was checked with the width of one finger, it shook its head as if to test the permanence of its new restraint, and then sprang off, its mane snapping like a flag in the breeze.
Allmon straightened up, his face unmistakably triumphant, almost smug. Henry crossed his own shaking arms over his chest and said, his voice slung low with anger, “I want you to look at that horse, young man.”
He turned slowly, casually with a kind of cool disregard in his body, but he turned nonetheless.
“That horse you’re looking at is two hundred and fifty years old.”
Allmon’s brow contracted, and Henry went on. “That horse came over the Wilderness Road when it was a death trail, it broke the ground you’re standing on, it built that house I live in, and it bred itself. It’s entitled—do you understand me—entitled to exist in its own flesh, because of its history. And if you ever so much as look at my two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old horse again without my permission, you can kiss this job goodbye. Do you understand me?”
If he was looking for fear, for a cowed spirit, Henry didn’t find it. There w
as only a deepening concentration, as though the man was memorizing his words for some purpose invisible to Henry.
That made his voice pitch up with irritation. “Do you understand me?”
“Yeah, sure.” Insouciant.
Henry’s voice was steely. “Let me be very clear. My daughter hired you. I would not have. I’m not interested in having convicts on my property.”
No change on that stoic face.
Now Henry smiled a hard smile. His words were clipped, surly. “Why are you even here anyway? What do you want?”
With an almost imperceptible tilt of the head, as if he was honestly surprised by the question, Allmon said, “I want what you got.”
Henry’s scornful smile died. He drew himself up to his full height and said, “All my life, I’ve made my name. It’s the most valuable thing I have.”
“And I got the rest of my life to make mine.”
Without a pause: “You can’t make a name from nothing.”
And just like that Henry was walking away on his money legs in his money shoes, and Allmon just stood there watching him go. Behind them, the filly shook her head again and again, trying to ascertain the nature of a halter.
* * *
He damn near lost his head in a rookie grooming accident, but it got him exactly where he needed to be. He’d been picking Acheron’s left rear hoof when the bay gelding—usually calm to the point of soporific—stamped his hoof free and swung his belly weight into Allmon, knocking him so hard against the stall wall, he saw stars for the first time since he was a kid. He didn’t even register the cry that erupted from him as his own until he felt the unmistakable swill of blood tracing down his temple, seeping warm and wet into the neck of his polo.
In the next instant he was crabbing instinctively out of harm’s way, scrambling into the aisle, when he felt hands at the neck of his shirt, and Henrietta was hauling him up as if he were nothing more than a plank board she was raising. He wasn’t a lightweight; she had crazy strength for a slim woman.
“Can you walk?”
He turned, but her face was distorted by his fun-house pupils. He took one wobbly, wasted step.
“Let’s go outside,” she said, “and get some fresh air. Try not to bleed on everything.”
She had one arm wrapped around his shoulder as she led him out of the barn into the shocking, undiluted light of day. Allmon could barely open his eyes against it. When they didn’t stop immediately, when he sensed their general trajectory toward the white farm truck, which was parked in the precipitous noon shadow of a barn wall, he began to resist.
“Let’s get you to the hospital,” Henrietta said.
Allmon didn’t reply; he just wrenched his arm out of her hands and shoved his back against the barn wall, inadvertently knocking his head against the boards. The air went out of him in a surprised puff.
“Whoa,” Henrietta said, watching as Allmon sank down against the spiky grain of the wall, breathing hard, blood still trickling. He squashed bright splashes of marigold beneath him as he sank into the mulch.
“No, no, no, no way,” he said.
“You really should.” Henrietta curbed her tongue and didn’t say, It’s more for our protection than yours. She said it through the distraction of the sharp smell of his sweat and the muskier underlying message of his body.
“No!”
The word burst from him, as hard and abrupt as a bark, but it was the unexpected look on his face that truly surprised her—ferocious, but with some mysterious, angry passion. There was no arguing with it. So, perplexed, Henrietta sank down on her haunches and took his face in her hands. When he tried to pull away, she snapped, “Stop.” Then, gentler: “You’ve got a pretty deep scrape. I think either Acheron hit your nose or you bumped it on the wall. Either way, you’ll have a black eye tomorrow.”
He made a dismissive face.
“Well, you need to stop the bleeding.”
She made a move as if to rise, but he wrenched his polo up in his fist and pressed it as a bundle to the side of his head. The skin of his belly was exposed to the cool air and in a moment he was covered in goose flesh.
Henrietta was unsure what to do then, half-risen, but then settled beside him in the mulch with her forearms resting on her knees and her fingers shredding the delicate lace of a fern’s leaf. For some time, they simply sat there in the sunlight until she said, “Are you tired of us yet?”
“Who?” he muttered.
“Southerners.”
He was kind of dizzy; he had no idea what she was talking about. His disordered breathing had just begun to settle into its regular rhythm.
“We’re incredibly annoying,” she said, watching as one of their colts was led out of his paddock by a long-term employee. “If you can listen to our tall tales for more than fifteen minutes, you’re a saint. But it’s all just rocksalt and nails.” She looked at Allmon sideways. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: we’re just an insecure species in a vanishing ecosystem. A conquered nation. The only power a Southerner really has is to never forgive and never forget. It’s not worth much.”
Allmon closed his eyes to stave off nausea, which Henrietta saw only as a dark listening, a quiet absorption that fed something in her.
“Honestly, though?” she said. “I think Northerners are worse than Southerners. They think they’re better than us because they survive the world’s shittiest weather and they’re convinced of the religious retardation of the South. They’re ignorant but arrogant. Southerners, on the other hand, know perfectly well they’re ignorant; the problem is they’re proud of it.” She cleared her throat. “My mom had the right idea—she just left the country.” Henrietta looked down; there was much more than an ocean between them now after all these years. Monthly phone calls were the height and breadth of it.
If she wasn’t going to stop, he might as well get something out of it. Allmon said, “When’d your father get this place?”
She sighed, capping her head with her hands and looking out wearily at a paddock. “A long, long, long time ago.”
Carefully, he said, “What’s he like?”
She looked at him with irritation. She didn’t want to talk about her father.
“Ask me why I do what I do,” she said suddenly.
“What do you mean?” He tried to turn his head, but pain swamped him and he cringed. He maintained the pressure of the polo to his temple.
“Why do you think I do what I do?”
Allmon didn’t have to hesitate. “’Cause you got family.”
“It’s less noble than that,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe it’s because my father didn’t want me to go to college, and my mother left me here to my own devices, and I don’t know how to do anything else.” Another sigh and then she said, “So have you figured out that my dad’s a huge racist?”
Allmon reared back slightly, almost laughed from a whole different kind of discomfort.
She shrugged. “He’s from a different generation. We’re not all like that.”
It took every bit of his strength and self-control for Allmon not to roll his eyes. Oh man, white girls and their … His mind paused. He leveled a long, considering glance at the house. This information felt like a little key in his pocket.
He was quiet so long, it was as if he’d forgotten Henrietta. She chewed on her pink lip, her face querulous. Then she looked in the opposite direction, away from the fences and horses, toward the generative east and the earth that lay rumpled there like something discarded. She said cryptically, “It used to be wild here. And green.”
Green, exactly! His first day on the farm rolled around again like a bright white horse on a carousel: the green had hurt his eyes like it was hurting them now; everything was lime and kelly and forest, with trees and grass and streams in every direction, just so much … green. These folks—people like her—could walk out into all that green anytime they wanted because they owned it. Green was white.
“Are you feeling much pain?” she said,
then she reached out and, in a gesture that felt unfamiliar to both of them, gently touched his shoulder.
He surprised her by laughing abruptly. Not just a chuckle, but a laugh that transformed from a cough to a rough sound that rolled out of the center of him. His shoulders shook and tears sprang suddenly to his eyes.
“What?” she said warily.
“You think this is pain?” he said. “Shit. Let me tell you, when I was in two months, I saw a man get killed right beside me. Like far away as you are. We was—were walking down the hall to the yard and some dudes were coming back and this brother in front of me reached out with a shank and just sliced this other dude’s belly open. Like left to right and up. Opened up his belly and his guts came out.”
“Jesus,” said Henrietta in a whisper.
Allmon didn’t even notice. “Your guts ain’t red like you think they’ll be. They’re gray. And not big.”
Then two things happened at once: he realized Henrietta was staring at him with a gaze as bright as a shadeless bulb, and he remembered his vow to never breathe a word of his life inside. He clamped his eyes shut and she said, much to his surprise, “Your life has been hard.”
Set against the backdrop of his existence, it was absurd undertalk and should have made him angry, but it didn’t. It was just simple, true. When she reached forward and lifted the polo away from the cut to check the bleeding, he didn’t open his eyes, but he didn’t resist. She said, “Do you know who Darwin was?”
Now he opened his eyes and looked at her sharply from the side.