The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  He was losing control, the reins slipping his grasp. He was almost incoherent when he spoke through the tears that flooded his cheeks. “I don’t know … why you even want to be with me. They broke me. I’m fucked up. Prison fucks you up. I can’t tell you what I did … I’m broke.”

  Her arms were around him like iron bands, but they didn’t feel like a constraint when she said, “I don’t think you see what I see.”

  He couldn’t stop the horrible, stupid words as they began to run as furiously as the tears. “Why? I’m poor. I’m fucking ugly. They used to call me old-man Allmon. All anyone sees is black. I wish I was smarter … had money. I’m just average, you know.” He laughed bitterly and made a downward sweeping gesture toward his lap. “I didn’t get nothing good in this life. I didn’t get nothing that lasts. Prison killed me. You’re fucking a dead man.”

  What Henrietta said next shocked her, because she once believed its very opposite, but she recognized the truth of it as soon as it was on her tongue. “It’s not the body I want; it’s the man. And that man is not dead.”

  Allmon shook violently once as though he might cry forever, but then he stopped suddenly and laughed a rueful laugh of total humiliation, and was finally silent. When Henrietta heard that laugh, however minor the key, she scooted back onto the mattress on her back with her arms open. “Lie down with me,” she said.

  Allmon looked toward her once, warily, wishing to escape. He was horrified to the marrow of his bones that he had cried in front of her.

  “Come here,” she said again, and patted the mattress.

  Gingerly, reluctantly, like he was testing broken bones that had only recently begun to knit, he rolled onto his side next to her. Everything hurt.

  Henrietta placed her head next to his on the pillow, twined one leg over his, and held him fast until she felt certain he wasn’t going to roll away or get up.

  “What’s the best thing you can think of?” she said.

  He was surprised by the question but responded with surety. “The river.”

  “The Ohio River?”

  Allmon nodded, and in his exhaustion closed his bloodshot eyes to savor a private vision. “Because my momma … I know she’s on the other side. It’s like she’s alive and just waiting for me to come home.” His words drifted away. Quietly, he said, “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. What’s the best thing you can think of?”

  Henrietta’s face, as always, was serious. “Don’t you know?”

  “What?” He turned finally to look at her, quizzical.

  “You,” she said. “You’re the best thing I can think of. I feel like the real me when I’m with you, and I’ve been waiting my whole life for that.”

  * * *

  He’s asleep, and she isn’t going to wake him. She’s leaving, but it’s impossible to return to the house, impossible ever to return to her old self. There’s a new spirit transplanted into the old, worn body. So, she wanders away across the grounds, which are her father’s, through a brand-new morning under a brand-new sun. Born out of his grief, which he planted in her with his words, she can feel ecstasy growing.

  The truth? His nakedness—the nakedness of his heart—is her first happiness.

  The world is busy rearranging its terrors and its joys, and something in her quickens. She’s aware of herself, perhaps for the first time, as constantly varying, no longer separate from nature, no longer the watcher.

  She feels like a woman—or like more, like she herself is the spring, which once seemed like something outside of her: force and violence, charging the barren landscape and murdering winter, beholden to nothing—certainly no human or animal. Spring comes as a reconnoitering scout, a first slip of green peeking from the very bough tips of the oaks, barely there at all, just a weighted abeyance. Winter is damaged but still dreadful and full of poison ice and useless powder; every human heart senses that brief lull; it’s only a first flirtation, but they’re raw with expectation, impatient after the long revolution of the year. They let their stoves and hearths go cold. They turn their animals loose as a prayerful incantation. Then the air fills with a natural heat as if from many bodies crowding close. The birds trill early and through the night. The hours quicken in their clocks, then a late March blooms gulfstream heat, then the lead goose returns with its followers, and suddenly, the season emerges, an influx of green overlaying the old, dead architecture and breaking through fading, whitened scars. The green comes up and out, like a river that’s been running under everything, rising, swirling, and pressing out of every living thing in wet, ripe presence, so the gushing river is in everything and covering everything—in the vasculature, the buds, the bark, the veins, the teeth, the tendons, the marrow. Up and out and over. This green burns the human eye. She isn’t adornment; she doesn’t care what you think of her beauty. This isn’t a gift; it would burn you if you held it. She’s brilliance without intellect, mother without love, a lover with two differently colored eyes: comfort and disaster. She destroys animals in their birthing, she floods the world, makes youth hasten out of itself, ripens everything to rot, she makes the graves warm.

  This and more: viburnum in the yards, pungent as an ovulating woman, pink labial pistils, the leaf bottom shaped like a heart; fresh sun knocking down every shadow; the overeager daffodils, early every time; infantry grasses storming animal blazes and human paths; the lilac buds of the redbuds; pendant racemes of black locust; sumac’s lip-red fruit; mosses on bleachy bones; mosses on the hunched river stones; mosses on man’s abandoned hunting huts; also the drone of carpenter bees; bobbing nine-pin tails of deer; red-hooded woodpecker alighting; all the small animal bodies bathing in the sweetgrass; the green foliage glazed with yellow; new life in the old ossuaries; there’s the frog in the muddy shallows, gripping a twig with one splayed hand and floating loose and easy in the shallow waters; tiny penile head of the turtle poked from the depths of the pond, auras of water rippling from his briefly borne movements; turkeys in their heavy, improbable flight; crickets; gnats; flies.

  Everything comes from everything and nothing escapes commonality. I am building a house already built, you are bearing a child already born. Everything comes from everything: a single cell out of another single cell; the cherry tree blossoms from the boughs; the hunter’s aim from his arm; the rivers from tributaries from streams from falls from springs from wells; the Christ thorns out of the honey locust; a word from an ancient word, this book from many books; the tiny black bears out of their durable mothers tumbling from dark lairs; eightieth-generation wild crab abloom again and again and again; your hand out of your father’s; firstborn out of firstborn out of firstborn out of; the weeping willows and the heart leaf, the Carolina, the silky, the upland, the sandbar willows; every tart berry; our work, which disappears; our mothers’ whispers, which disappear; every Thoroughbred; every violet; every kindling twig, bone out of bone; also the heat light-borne, the pollen airborne, the rabbits soft and crickets all angles and the glossy snakes from their slithering, inexhaustible mothers, freshly terrible. When you die, you will contribute your bones like alms. More and more is the only law.

  Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much—the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin? I say there’s no such thing—any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever-expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words; ten thousand books, all the world’s dictionaries and there would never be enough; we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night sky, the flakes of snow common and heartbreaking; before the steady rocking of a man and a woman, the earthworm’s curling, the leopard killing the mongoose killing the rat over the ant in its workmanlike machinations, the a
nonymous womb that knit the anonymous, the endless configurations of cloud, before the heron, the tern, the sparrow, and the wily peacock too, the peacock turning and splaying his designs, each particular shimmering feather a universe invested with its own black sun, demanding, Look before you die, Look—Don’t turn away for fear you’ll go blind; the dark comes down soon enough. Until then, burn!

  * * *

  It sounded like a bad joke, how Mack came from a place called Holler—too backwards to even have a proper goddamned name. Way out in Letcher County past Whitesburg under a ridge as tall as any New York skyscraper. Holler. I mean, goddamn. Holler for help was more like it. Too far in to get penicillin when you were sick or to get out when your daddy was drunk and tumbling down Jericho. He came from a family where almost nobody gave a damn if you didn’t go to school, where you were eight the first time you got sick on spruce moonshine. Excepting his dear mother, who loved all her children gay or straight or green, his clan was full of shrew-faced mamaws that ruled the roost and men so cowed they could have been cattle. A stereotype of a stereotype, that was Holler. Even the word was arsenic on his tongue. Of course, it wasn’t politically correct now to talk about the mountains that way—a bunch of self-righteous cockroaches would crawl through the Internet and infest your inbox, call you a traitor to the ones you left behind. But that was all a song and dance to look better for the Yankees, and Mack liked Yankees about as much as he did mountains. Sure, people liked to wax romantic about down home, about places like Holler or Crine or Sundown—Mama’s cooking and eighty-seven-verse ballads and awshucks I ain’t knowed we was poor, that whole whitewash—but they only indulged it once they’d got out. Then they’d forget about the beatings, everybody dying too young from drugs and car crashes on mountain roads, the hellfire, the damnation, the everloving ignorance. Sentimental memories were just a way of apologizing for being the kind of asshole who escapes. And escape Mack had.

  He was pretty sure they’d flung him up on a nag straight out of the womb. Just a spraddle-legged little fucker on the back of a bow-back mare, taking jam and pork cuts to his cousins over in the next holler, fetching mail in Holler proper for Mother and Daddy, making himself a general nuisance by egging on anyone with a horse or a mule to race down the length of Big Hammer Holler, from Mine no. 11 down to the cluster of Union graves at the far end (his clan ran Jefferson, opposition to most of the county, which just figured). He was always sneaking up on somebody’s horse, riding hogs for fun, telling folks he tamed a deer and rode it too, which was bullshit of course, but the story got so big, so reckless, he couldn’t remember if he’d rode the thing or just told the tale. Didn’t matter. It made him a minor legend, so somebody had actually heard of him on the Alabama Circuit when he went down there begging to ride—a fourteen-year-old with cannonballs in his Wranglers. But he conquered that rinky-dink show pretty fast and then headed west with a boyfriend who only made it as far as Peoria before Mack left him on the side of the road, and then he rode quarter horses in Wyoming until he got thrown hard and was busted up for three solid months. That’s when he switched over to training, which was a natural progression, seeing as he was constitutionally incapable of getting along with people, much less taking orders from them. Soon enough he tore the Old West a new asshole and got bored again, ended up back in Kentucky. Of all places. Eating where he used to shit, he supposed, but he never went back to the mountains. He stayed in Lexington with his scratchy, undiluted Letcher County accent, and when people called him a hillbilly, he flexed his wrist under his Rolex and curled his toes in his custom Lucchese boots and thought, You have no fucking idea.

  Mack slowed down for nothing but whiskey and his dear mother, whom he’d brought up to a Lexington retirement home pretty much the instant his daddy died, and just now he was charging at his customary speed through Henry’s stallion barn, looking for the manager’s office. Henry had said he would be there first thing in the morning. They were planning to roll through footage together, debate the new prospects for Seconds Flat, talk about siblings going to stud. He didn’t do it like this for everyone; he was in the enviable position of choosing whom to work with so closely, but few were as driven as Forge. Henry was a man who never called it “the game,” and Mack appreciated that. If you were born in Letcher County, you knew that nothing involving more than fifty bucks was a game.

  He heard the sounds before they registered, but hell, it was February and every horse he encountered was cock-addled or in estrus, and his poor brain was echoing with the sounds of breeding or grooms talking about breeding or his own thoughts on breeding, so he didn’t realize what it was until he saw it, though he certainly should have; his body already knew. He heard that sound of someone moaning low, and the slapping of skin that made his dick move before his brain could get involved. He only stood there at the office door for maybe two seconds—the fools left it cracked! Or maybe they got off on that, who knows—but it seemed just shy of an eternity: the black guy moving over a white woman who had turned her face away, but whose hair was unmistakable as she moaned and gripped the groom’s buttocks, so it stood out in his mind later with all the startling, upending stark of a photographic negative. It was only when he had stepped smartly and immediately away, when he was marching off to the house, realizing Henry had meant that office, that he understood exactly what he’d seen.

  At the far end of the shed row, he laughed once, a harsh, surprised sound. Mack wasn’t a cruel man—well, he’d been accused of cruelty by a couple of employees, but mostly he was just impatient—but, more to the point, he appreciated a good joke. Especially at another man’s expense. A wealthy man? One who paid him to be the best, all the while thinking he was a step above on the ladder? He felt a twinge of compunction when he thought of those kids just having their suds-in-the-bucket fun … But yeah, this was pretty goddamn irresistible.

  Which is why he was grinning over Henry’s head when he stepped into the house office, why he could barely tuck away that grin as they watched the seven prospect videos, and why he ended up saying something, even though he really knew he shouldn’t, even though he felt a tiny twinge of almost-regret.

  It didn’t stop him. He was a risk taker, just like Henry Forge. “Tell me again the name of that black kid you got working for you, Henry.”

  “Allmon. Why?” said Henry from where he was switching off the DVD player and straightening up to see him out.

  Mack tapped his Stetson against his thigh and torqued up his lip. “Well”—the world in the pause—“I know you watch your investments, Henry.” The words were just barely weighted with the drag of meaning, but Henry looked at him sharply.

  Henry paused before he spoke. “That’s right.”

  “And you no doubt got big plans for your daughter.”

  This time, Henry didn’t answer, just looked, and Mack played it easy, played it cool. He knew how to handle a whipsaw. “I can see how you’ve been grooming her to take over this operation. She’s a talented lady, for sure. But things sure can go wrong in a hustle. All sorts of things. A girl headed for the big time can end up hauling coal. It’s a crazy world.”

  The meaning settled and the sclera of Henry’s eye brightened with blood. He said, lowly, “And you speak from experience? You’ve seen that sort of thing happen, I assume?”

  They were standing at the side door to the el porch now, looking out over the acreage, which men like Henry were handed on silver platters at birth. Mack said, all casual, “Yeah, sure. I’ve seen it myself. It’s just a reality of life how even the best-laid plans can get fucked. Funny how that can happen.” Then he popped his hat back on his head and said, “It sure is funny.”

  * * *

  “Henrietta!”

  Henry made a hard knot of his Burberry tie and dragged a comb through his silvery hair, but his pugilist hands trembled in the mirror; there was disturbance beneath the water.

  “Henrietta!”

  Careful, Henry. The overeager go out in the first round, and the obdurat
e are softened by something other than hard blows. Night was encroaching and Kentucky was folding in on itself and, with it, untold possibilities for a man who couldn’t manage himself.

  “I’m right here.” Henrietta was just outside the door of the bedroom, standing before the hall mirror in a red silk dress he’d bought her seven years ago for a Derby run—the year Hellcat finished second. He remembered the race; he remembered the red dress.

  “You look beautiful, daughter.”

  Henrietta smiled, not turning from the mirror as she clipped her grandmother’s pearls to the lobes of her ears. But Henry could see her eyes were too alive and elsewhere—the look of a woman only recently visiting foreign countries, her mind not yet returned home.

  “Where have you been?” he said easily.

  She stiffened, the old steel in her eyes again. “What am I—a child?” she said.

  A cock of the head, a curb of the mind’s tongue. It was Henry’s turn to say nothing.

  As she pinned up her hair, Henry stepped in and kissed the back of her neck. But his gall rose: from her shoulders drifted the heated smell of woman, that wandering sex; it was a noisome stench. “Your grandfather would be very proud of you,” he said, and watched as her glance stalled, seemed to catch the waft of meaning almost after it had drifted past. She shifted in her low heels, adjusted the dangerous bodice.

  “Are you ready?” she said.

  He was ready.

  Across the black expanse of farm, across the farrow winter-world of Bourbon County in January, across town, the old Tavern blazed. The centuries-old building, a gray limestone structure as pale in the night as the adjacent courthouse, built by pioneer hands and maintained by Old Dominion faith, stood festooned with stringed white bulbs and garlands. A round, hyperfecund moon loomed over her slate rooftop, and the stars were all dimmed before the overbright, nettling lights of Paris.