by C. E. Morgan
The old tavern door was manned by a wizened groom in age-old livery, bowing at the waist as he ushered them into the dark, cramped space of the low-ceilinged foyer. A single sconce twinkled. With his hand at her back, Henry steered his daughter through a narrow hall toward snapping candlelight and high, sharp chatter, voices like breaking glass. They descended three stone steps into a small banquet room.
Now they all turned as one, forty or fifty heads as a single body, conversation halting, all eyes on the lamplit pair. Henrietta clutched once at her bodice, sensing the almost irresistible draw of the passage behind them, the aloneness it offered, but Henry stepped smartly into the room ahead of her, a childish grin of delight on his face.
A smartly dressed woman of sixty disengaged herself from the crowd, setting aside her glass and reaching for Henry with both hands. Her eyes were rimmed with blue kohl and her feathered blonde hair reached improbable heights in all directions. Her long bejeweled earrings swung to and fro, snatching the light as she turned to the small crowd, crying, “The guests of honor!”
Henrietta barely heard the cheer that followed. She’d been here before, but never at night, never when the scarlet walls were turned to swampy blood by flickering lamps and candles, clashing with the swagging salmon drapes. The woman was speaking into her face with boozy breath when someone pressed a chilled tumbler of bourbon into her hand. She took the thing as a shot.
“To the memory of John Henry, that Old Regular sonofabitch!” came a rallying cry, and she knew there were no strangers here. These white, warm faces, pink with alcohol, all possessed surnames that had struggled over the Wilderness Road to this bloody ground, naming it Paris after other trodden and trammeled wildernesses. Kentucky had folded all their lives together into a tight braid.
Look at them all raising glasses to her munificent grandfather, her ambitious father—panegyrics for the living and the dead. The bourbon Henrietta was drinking was florid and complex, but she tasted only confusion. She had lain under Allmon just this afternoon, cursing with want and wanting his need. She was in love, but maybe she was also hopelessly naïve. She blinked. Did she actually think that love offered some kind of escape? There is kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. You could step out of your heels, walk backward along the hall, recede from their collective gaze, but you could never escape the category of your birth and all the morphological categories which precede it.
The garish mouth of the woman cried, “Come on, y’all! Dinner awaits!” and they were ushered to their tables, where gold flatware, crystal goblets, and old china sparked under the low lights. The woman raised a glass and knocked the tines of a fork against its faceted side. “We are here to celebrate the new Genealogical Museum of Central Kentucky”—applause all around—“funded in large part by a towering donation from the Forge family in the name of John Henry, whom we all remember as a treasured member of the community, deceased now more than thirty years. We wouldn’t be—we couldn’t be—who we are without men like John Henry and Henry Forge, men who preserve our past and guide us into a future where the past still matters. The Forge family is one of the crown jewels of the Bluegrass and, though they probably would have preferred to give anonymously, we just couldn’t let them do that. We want to polish the jewels of our hometown. Now give a big Kentucky thank-you to Henry and Henrietta Forge! Join me in raising a toast!”
One long swig of bourbon and Henrietta’s tongue was dry and bleached as a bone. There was raucous cheering and faces were speaking at her, but all she could think was: God, we all look alike, as if they’d crawled from the birth canal of the same remote ancestor. Love was an in-house project. When Judith had left, it was almost as if she’d never existed. Her bloodline offered no lifeline.
They launched into the repast: encrusted scallops with a mango spice reduction, roasted parmesan asparagus, local greens with raspberry vinaigrette and crème brûlée.
“Drink up,” her father said, and she did. Her third.
Through the warbled glass at her nose, she watched Henry assume his stance at the lectern, his drink wobbling in his hand. Or was it her eyes that wobbled in their sockets? Another swig would answer.
“I want to tell you a secret!” Henry said. “A secret that not even my daughter knows.” The room leaned forward, smiling. “It may surprise you to hear that as a young man I was disinherited by my father.”
Disconcerted laughter thinned to a trickle, then ceased. Glasses half-raised were lowered. Henrietta sat up straight in her chair and tried to rally her focus.
Henry’s gaze was steady on the room. “As you probably know, my father, John Henry, was a man of rigid principle, unbending in ways I couldn’t understand when I was a young man. But what did I know? I was just a callow youth. When I looked out over our corn farm, I saw a pathetic, conservative misuse of land. When my father imagined a horse farm, he saw nothing but ostentation; he thought his son would forget where he had come from, where his allegiance ought to lie.”
Henry folded his arms across his chest. “So we were at odds, you see, my father and I. I detected in him a failure of nerve, a fear of risk, and he thought my plans were beneath his dignity. Our dignity. Dignity that—like yours—was purchased at high cost over many generations. In short, he feared a reversal of hard-earned fortune in every sense of that word.
“My father was right, of course,” he said, smiling into the shocked silence, smiling at Henrietta. “But please don’t misunderstand me; I was right too. I’ll get to that in a moment.
“My father, the man we are here celebrating tonight, saw my rebellion as a threat to something far more important than me: our family. That he was mistaken is now of no consequence. The important thing is that he would do anything to protect the family name, to protect the women in our house, to maintain the land, to store up honor for his children and their children. He understood that our lives are really lived in the minds of others. Their good opinion is worth more than gold. So, the most important thing—the critical component of my father’s character—is a seeming paradox I didn’t understand then, but understand now. He loved his family more than he loved his own child.”
Henrietta choked down what was left in her tumbler, and it was instantly refilled.
“Now, my uncle never wanted to farm, and he returned the land to me. He understood what my father couldn’t understand: that my plans for the land were no threat to the family name or fortune. And that’s why my rebellion was never wrong. Because it furthered the cause of the family. And I know that’s something that everyone here tonight can understand, because there’s true-blue blood running through the heart of the Bluegrass, and that’s been the case for two hundred and fifty years. We built this state brick by brick, and we saved it twenty times over from the riffraff that would unthinkingly tear it down. Why, families like all of ours are the only reason we’re not … Mississippi!”
Laughter erupted in the room, brightened by the high, sharp overtones of relief. “We were the Old South and, unlike most of our sister states, we still are!” Henry raised his glass. “So let’s drink to John Henry!”
The room exploded, but when he turned to Henrietta, his gaze was a kill shot.
“And let’s drink to Henrietta Forge. I want you all to look at her, how beautiful she is tonight. If you ever want to see the pride of my life, look at her. I’ve done everything for this precious woman and, as far as I’m concerned, she’s the crowning glory of the family. She’s never done me wrong, and I know beyond the darkest shadow of a doubt that she never will. Because she knows what my father knew. She’s more like him than she can even know.”
The room turned to look at her.
“Henrietta, I’m drinking to you, my Ruffian,” her father said. “We’re all drinking to you.”
She raised her fourth glass.
“To you!”
She hesitated.
“To you!” they said as a single organism.
She quaffed the shot, her eyes stinging. The hideou
s pink of the curtains swam before her. She tried to hang on to Allmon’s name as a bouy, but it was slipping out of her grasp.
“And let’s drink to Hellsmouth, my favorite racehorse.” Without taking his eyes from Henrietta, he said, “A fine example of controlled usage, of taking great chances with breeding. We’re going all the way with this one!”
The waiter was behind her, reaching around her, so she could smell the rank odor of his underarms, and even before he was done pouring, she was raising the tumbler again, they were all raising their glasses to Hellsmouth, the promise of Forge Run Farm, of Henry. A quintet was tuned, and now their chords were flushing the diners from their velvet seats to take the parquet dance floor, which was too small for their numbers, but they crowded there anyway, glasses in hand. It was much too much of too much—dancers filmed with sweat, low, guttural laughter, the stridency of some woman’s voice too loud for the environs, shoved here by a body and there by another, until her father was wrapping her up in his arms and swept her down a slim corridor between bodies, so the fishtail hem of Henrietta’s dress flared, and they were eye to eye.
As they turned on the floor, Henry breathed in the bourbon on her breath, strong enough to make a man drunk. He gripped her drinking hand and raised the tumbler to her lips.
He said, “Henrietta, young people think life is just a game. A sport.”
She tried desperately to focus her disobedient eyes on the buttons of his collar.
“But you’re smarter than that.”
The scooping of his vowels was broad as a river. They all talked like this, she realized with a start, as if life were happening in slow motion, their words a hundred years behind the times. She wanted to put her hand to her hot forehead, but she couldn’t, because it was raising her drink to her lips. He was.
“I love you, Henrietta.”
She was nauseous. She was revolving on the axis of him.
“But I also love perfection.”
She nodded slowly, his due.
He drew her tighter than a bow. “And perfection is worth every risk.”
* * *
The knock came when she was half stumbling out of her dress, her hair fallen around her shoulders and her mascara smeared from rubbing. She turned clumsily in her drunkenness, gripping the bedstead to remain upright.
“Knock, knock.” His voice, that old familiar, almost her own.
The ceramic knob turned and when the door opened, it creaked on its ancient hinges.
“Knock, knock,” he said quietly, all eyes.
She turned half-naked in the dim light.
“Come in, Daddy.”
* * *
Success: wealth, status, fame; involves the attainment of the worldly good only insofar as these attainments ensure the survival of selfish genes; autologous continuation; not merely survival but increasing complexity, including larger cranium or diminishment of dangerous vestigial organs, such as appendix; dependent upon genetically mutant transitional forms; see evolution of theropods & Etc for evidence of speciation and other deviations from ancestral forms; dependent in ancient thought upon the leniency of the gods and the mastering of fate; or, predestination generally requiring a supernatural agent (i.e., fate as a spindle, around which Clotho, Lachesis & Atropos wind an individual’s thread, analogous to fate as the spindle in the cell); archaic: the good or bad outcome of an undertaking.
* * *
Now Henry was like a teenaged boy, bouncing on his heels, his strength renewed by a bold new diet. He was seeking out the groom, the antiphonal calling of mares and foals ringing over his head like church bells, celebrating the hour. He smiled. The other groom was late to the church, entirely too late.
Their regular farrier, a mustachioed man with hair the color of a chestnut roan, was exiting his Nissan and moving in the direction of the stallion barn.
“Have you seen Allmon?” Henry asked.
The man raised his darkly red brows. “Which one’s Allmon?”
“Stallion groom. Black.”
The man shook his head. “Not yet, but I’m headed up there directly.”
“Well, when you do see him, tell him to come meet me in the back office. I’ll be expecting him.”
Now, Allmon’s waiting had long turned to dread. When the farrier relayed the message in his disinterested tone, he remained rooted in his spot for a long time, bent over a grain bin in midmotion, barely breathing until black speckled at the edges of his vision. Electric alarm had shot through him—what should have been excitement, what should have been the gambler’s triumph at holding an ace hand, stalled when he flipped the card and found it was a portrait of the boss man’s daughter. He felt … sick. He turned and faced the tack room and could not make himself move for the longest time.
But he did move. He started before indecision could freeze him again. After all, you got your foot in when you got your cock in. That was the whole point, right? Yes. Exactly. He gained momentum as he moved across the yard.
Then, for the first time since that day he was hired by the woman who was now his lover, his first and only, he was standing in the kitchen of the big house. High coffered ceilings, brass fittings, white molded cornice, glimmering appliances, sienna tile floor, all laid-back, rich. But he found that he couldn’t associate Henrietta with it anymore, not exactly. She had been some stony figurine initially, something glossy and cold, but now she was a personal warmth that enveloped him in his room, the hair that washed over his face when she was rocking over him, the— He had to stop thinking. Jesus Christ.
A wide hall paraded out of the kitchen toward the front, western half of the house, but as if he’d been there before, Allmon turned instinctively to a narrow perpendicular corridor, which ran alongside a staircase to the dark second floor. At first, he stood quietly at the door, able to stare in for a moment at Henry sitting at his desk and absorb the principled beauty of the man. Henry glowed in the fall of sunlight streaming through the double six-panes, the drapes drawn away as if to purposely frame him. He was golden as the calf at Mount Sinai. If the light had been lower, if the hair had been darker, it could have been Allmon’s own beautiful father, but Henry was thicker, redder.
“Come in,” Henry said without looking up from his paperwork. “Come in and sit down.”
Allmon hesitated, feeling something good twining into his dread—yes, what he initially wanted was about to happen—and the future before him. He entered and sat.
“I’ve been mulling over a conundrum,” Henry said when he finally looked up. “But I think I’ve solved it.”
Allmon held his power in his mouth, his chin slightly lowered, eyes unblinking.
Henry muttered softly, “What to do with Allmon … What to do with the stallion groom.”
Allmon couldn’t move an inch, lest he betray something.
Henry said, “I asked you once what you were here for and now I know. There’s nothing new under the sun. And I’ll hand it to you—you’ve maneuvered your way in in a manner of speaking. But let’s be clear: I’m not going to tolerate you near my daughter any longer.”
Now Allmon’s mouth slid open like a fish for the bait, but Henry was there first: “I’m no fool. I know I can’t make you stay away from her. But I can offer a proposition that I doubt you’ll refuse, and that could be to our mutual benefit.”
Allmon had to drag the words forcibly out of his closing heart. “Like what?”
“I have an extraordinary horse,” Henry said. “I know it like I’ve never known anything before in my entire life. I’ve been doing this since I was half your age, and, believe me, I know I’m right. What I propose to do is send you with Hellsmouth to Mack’s training facility, let you oversee her conditioning. I’m saying I want you to be her personal groom. You’ll have a groom’s pay, but I have a contract here promising you five percent of the purse in her third year, payable upon her retirement. After the third year, you’ll get your payout, and then you move on. End of story.”
“No,” Allmon s
aid abruptly. “No deal.” And as soon as he said it, he felt sudden, yawning relief, like there was still a way out of the madness. He could walk right out the door. But in reality, he could only fool himself for a brief moment. With a finality like fate, he knew they would work a deal. It felt beyond his control.
Henry sat back in his chair, incredulity smudging the veneer from his beauty. “Please don’t try to tell me you’re in love with my daughter. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Allmon leaned forward suddenly toward the desk, his face shining with purpose. “Ten percent of earnings.”
“Ten percent! For a groom? You’re lucky Mack will pay you three-fifty a week!”
“You think I intend to do this my whole life?” Allmon hissed, and now words began to roll out with momentum, words that had been trapped in him for far too long. “You think I ain’t got a vision? What do you care about the money? It’s not why you do this! I want two of her foals—fifth year and sixth year and a breeding share every season for five years on your best stallion when he goes to stud. That’s what I want. What you got?”
Henry struggled for composure as he took in the sight of this youth practically foaming at the mouth for the same things he’d spent a lifetime striving to achieve. His derision was plain. “Why am I not surprised that you want a handout?”
Allmon stood up from his chair, his height seesawing the room. He glared at Henry, his blood thick: On my seventh day in I saw this white dude stomp this black dude, and his jaw folded under his boot like you fold a piece of paper, his tongue sticking out like a dead dog’s tongue. One of his eyes was lying on the floor attached by the root. He didn’t die right away; it took him five days. You really think what I want is a handout?
What he said: “You need to learn what reparations means.”