The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

She gathered herself up, her skeleton clattering painfully under her skin. She stumbled into the house, her lungs on fire and her tongue burning.

  He was there, of course: Father and Lover. He was always there. He had given birth to this house, given birth to history. He had given birth to her.

  She leaned against the kitchen door, her face blighted by pain. “I’m pregnant,” she choked.

  “Good,” he said, and enfolded her in his arms—old man, still strong, still life giving, guiding, knowing, encroaching, forcing.

  Her tongue was scooped out, the empty place filling with tears.

  He said, “I’ll take care of you just like I’ve always taken care of you.”

  She was beginning to cry. The Forge endurance was cold comfort, no comfort at all.

  “Calm down now,” he said.

  “I hate him.”

  “Calm down, or you’ll hurt the baby.” And he laid a sunspotted hand over her flat belly.

  She flung his hand away and stepped back, unsteady on her feet, nearly hissing as she spoke, “You better pray it’s not yours—don’t you know old seed produces weak plants?”

  * * *

  Now Henrietta finally cried. She cried as she had not even cried as a young girl when her mother left. She cried with such passion that she could barely manage the old slave staircase that led to the upper hall, at one point sagging like a broken, discarded doll against the banister, then sinking to her knees on the landing and sobbing in utter, encompassing sorrow. Until this moment, there had been some kind of hope that love would be requited like a priceless gift returned to the giver. But now that shadow hope was dead in the daylight while the fetus went about its triumphant business, not giving a damn. Her wails rang through the house, that colossus trophy waste dream cenotaph bore. She couldn’t find the strength to rise; she crawled pathetically on her hands and knees into her bedroom. But at the sight of her highboy, her old notebooks, her tattered books—remnants of the old life—the constriction of her clothing was too much. She tore her tank top over her head, she wrestled out of her jeans as if they were on fire, finally rising to get out of her underwear and socks and stumbling into her blindingly white bathroom naked.

  She gripped the very real, very cold ceramic of the bathroom sink, but could not bring herself to look in the mirror. What now? Her actions were a mystery; she was a mystery. With anguish, she sensed that time’s blood had been merely passing through her seemingly discrete existence, her temporary form, and that when she was gone, time’s blood would flow dispassionately on. She was beginning to think she had spent her time badly.

  Remember the old books, Henrietta? She recalled the private education of her youth, the one sought by her own insistent will, not the one forced upon her by her father. Think. Perhaps the very point of education was to discover the world beyond the self. Think, think, think … God, how she struggled to rope her discursive, selfish thoughts.

  Her mind began to unfold like a late-summer blossom.

  Within her, life was busy with its divisions and multiplications. But she knew that the machine, with its supposedly higher mathematics, only manufactured mystery. The principles of organization were still cloaked in darkness. She contained so much—so much, in fact, that she couldn’t contain it at all. How was it possible to live so many years in a body, not knowing yourself to be a small everything? She had been so busy consuming without digesting, absorbing what she wanted and shitting out the rest, too numb to see that her hair was streams, her bones stones, her breath humid weather, her heart soil, her veins endless waterways that coursed through the earth she walked upon. She should have spent more time looking not at the earth but at herself. Maybe she had known this once, but something, someone had driven her to bed on her back, where she could see only four white walls and a low white ceiling. Then somehow, she’d worked a self-deluding magic, deciding she had always wanted pleasure above all things, and had gone about it as men said you should, with abandon, never asking whether abandon was the mother of satisfaction. Who enjoys sex more? Why, Teresias, I say it’s the woman! Nine times more.

  A little bit of strength returned, and she looked down out the window at the grassy paddocks with their horses, her father’s bucolic charms. Yes, she had been with men of all shapes and sizes, easing onto them, sliding with a timeless force, an urgency not even her own but nature’s, nature who she had always felt held a gun to her head. The men were reduced under her body to hard statuary, marble men with marble cocks until she was coming and in that nothing, the bliss of absolutelynothingandnoplace, where her father could not exist or ever have her, it didn’t matter what they were. That had seemed so easy. Yes, back then—was it only weeks ago? Twenty lifetimes ago?—back in the halcyon days of her ignorance, her monthly period had been only a nuisance. Her pussy like something she had invented—sui generis. There’s no business like my business! But, pregnancy shattered that illusion like so much cheap mercury glass. What differentiates man from animal is deferral of appetite. And here was the real silver that turned the blood blue: Each menstrual period was a bright reminder, a clotted remainder, a libation to the gods on behalf of every child unborn, those quietly waiting in the hidden place where the waiting gather. Woman was a tensile thing stretched taut between generations. So no fucking was casual and, further, there was no such thing as a free body in this world, our occasional choices laughably, infinitesimally rare. Each was born squalling and covered in blood with a bill coming due in her clenched hand, her tiny ovaries constellated with potential life, floating there in the warm, watery dark. The world, in fact, existed. She thought a woman’s body was then and now and forever beholden to an invisible First Cause—the unknown, unchosen, brute mistress, the goddess—yoked to it like a dumb, intractable mule, wrestling uselessly for freedom to the point of shredding its stubborn neck and letting its own blood in a vain effort to free itself, too ignorant to even know its name in the world: mule. A mule is not a hemlock is not a hame is not an ear of corn or a shot of bourbon, but a manifestation of fact called species: Equus mulus, a hybrid of the genus Equus of the tribus Equinii of the subfamilia Equinae of the familia Equidae, possessed of neither the sixty-two chromosomes of its ass father or the sixty-four of its horse dam, but a strange sixty-three, damned to a life of physical obligation through no fault of its own—a life of unmerited suffering, doomed once in a while to produce a little foal.

  And yet … this was not exactly right. She was mired in self-pity, her conscience moving and wrestling within her like the baby soon would. She wasn’t crying now; she was dry-eyed. There was some poison in the pie; she wanted the treacly sweet of determinism with its aftertaste of martyrdom, but that came at too high a cost. Easy answers required a death of the mind. Yes, thinking was hard physical labor and nowhere near as pleasurable as sex, so she had abandoned it long ago. That was the pitiless truth. All the distractions of workaday life were so much easier than thinking, because thinking’s consequence—belief—made unceasing and terrible demands. It spoiled every pleasure. Yet, to live with half a mind, lobotomized in the peerless world, was to be a dead woman walking.

  What she finally knew was shocking, even ugly in its power, but it brooked no equivocation. She took the leather strap between her teeth and sensed that she would survive the sawing off of an old, diseased limb. All of her life she had imagined herself a slave to a body she hadn’t acquired by choice, but this was only half the truth. Nature had never overridden her will. The gene is not the judge, only the court reporter. Or further: The gene is the prisoner trapped in an organism, which can reason and plan. She, Henrietta, had made many, many choices. Her body was female, but she was never a slave. Never that. She had only imagined herself so.

  * * *

  And now, poor Henry—the victory should have been his! This was the triumphant first month in the busy factory of his daughter’s womb. Yet he couldn’t discover an easy satisfaction. He listened to Henrietta’s animal howls on the stairs, and his ears bloomed with hom
e blood. A worrisome worm wriggled: What if the child was, in fact, not his? An unfamiliar, seizing sensation took up residence around his organs. He realized it was simple fear. What if it was not Henrietta but Henry himself who was under harness and curb? No, no, no—he knew that the great machinery of life, the mechanical divisions in her wailing wall, the water sac and the placenta emerging as globs of cell and the splashing of three translucent layers, had been set in motion by himself alone. His daughter was manufacturing not her own fresh, originating dawn horse, and certainly not a dark Barb, but a pure Thoroughbred, the line of which could be traced back generation by generation through the age-old stud book.

  * * *

  So in the second month our Kentucky Colonel is soothed. It’s surely emerging, the tiny, twinging child: come, apple seed, tiny globular thing, shiny as mail and newly recognizable—ancestor in egress; a simple fish, then a tadpole, which crowns and rears, reptilian eyes engorging, then the smallest horse. It makes imperceptible movements full of meaning. Its heart beats time on Henry’s drum. It will fill the frame of hope.

  * * *

  In the third month, fact asserts itself through the flexing wall of Henrietta’s belly. But Henrietta herself is now marked by a strange and preternatural calm, a deep silence roosting in her bones. It’s like the glassy calm that surrounds a ship on a windless day, and her lassitude is worse than her previous anguish. What does she know that Henry doesn’t? What secret is she keeping in that growing belly? Does she actually think she’s growing a brand-new thing that will burst into life’s bright pavilion? Warm blood doesn’t spring from cold, nor bronze from gold—

  Henrietta: Oh, come on, the Thoroughbred was a late hybridization, a mongrelization. That’s why they’re so strong.

  Henry: The breed is genetically pure.

  Henrietta: No, they married the sturdy English mares to the fast Moors—

  Henry: Blood will always tell.

  Henrietta: They were looking for free forward motion! Don’t you understand?

  Henry: Purity builds the empire.

  Henrietta: They made the world modern!

  * * *

  In the fourth month, Henry stubs his hotblood fingers deep into the curlicut channels of his ears, where no anxiety can wend its way into the old family brain. In that darkling matter grows a perfect, unalloyed specimen of his own making—now a pale clenched limb beginning to sprout hide, lengthening and straightening, testing newfound muscles from neck to wet tail, now wriggling here and there and growing heavy as platinum, waiting and preparing for the blast of life when with new-sprouted wings, which unfurl like translucent flags—vestiges of divinity—Pegasus will leap from his mother’s neck, whose spilled blood frees him to fly.

  * * *

  In the fifth month Henry’s terror grows steadily in the womb of his mind. What if the Blood Horse is born of Soured Milk? What if there exists no vestige of divinity at all but only a satyr, that beast of horsetail, cloven hoof, and black, pugnacious eye? It’s all her fault—seductress! She was too voluptuous, too hot-blooded and luxuriant. She lay in the undulatory grasses under green, fireworking trees, drunk on the liquor of Nature when the Other pricked her lip and butterflied her and split the red carbuncle. See how the ordered marvels have been made vulgar! Now the invasive little goat floats in the tendrils of his sodden horse’s tail; he is swilling her dark wine, strangely robust and grinning, that swarthy little fiend already stroking himself erect, good for nothing and unfit for work, a mother’s trouble and Nature’s excess, the child of a warmongering Orangutan and a woman, Simia satyrus. The bestiaries will designate him an indolent cline.

  * * *

  And now the thing is kicking her in the sixth month—she’s doubled over, a portrait of suffering. She grips her belly and moans, but all with the detached resignation of a fettered stock animal at the plow. Oh, Henry Forge, what have you wrought with your diseased imagination? What grotesque develops in that belly, bred by the convergence of father and daughter, that crime against Nature: hairy, fully grown ghouls with legs for arms and lips for eyes, sickly, feeble children with horns, perversions with four hands or as many flippers, beaked or tailed, fused ass to ass, a brand-new generation of evil so incontrovertible it should be killed at birth like the monsters of Krakow or Ravenna, disfiguration bequeathed upon them by the sins of the father—

  NO. Stop, Henry. STOP STOP STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP

  * * *

  Lou stood with her arm thrust up to the elbow in the uterus of a bay mare. Her neck was loose, her shoulders free, the silver in her bun sparking off the sun just now peeking out from smoky shower clouds. She squinted under a skylight, stinging tears coursing along her cheeks, her sunglasses accidentally smashed on the floor of her truck. But her eyes weren’t really necessary for this work, her hands pressing right and left for the pulse of life. Finally she detected them—not one but two.

  In her awkward position, there was nothing she could do but tilt her head away from the light streaming through the skylight, one of dozens Mack had installed in his training center’s barns to increase the tidal sloshing of the mares’ hormones. Pretty extravagant, some might say, but she had no opinion on the matter. She cared only about the animals, not their surroundings or their owners and their accomplishments. Some despised the industry for its abuses, some pursued its glories thoughtlessly, but so long as horses existed in proximity to humanity, the industry wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was she.

  Horses had always been deeply compelling to her, still were. She could find few points of connection between herself and these animals. Her favorite professor at Cornell had always emphasized this. Every day, your job will be about another animal’s body. Never confuse it with your own. Approach every animal as though you’ve never seen the species before and nothing will ever get past you.

  She’d always done her best to abide by this truth; in the barn, as in life, she tried to approach things unhampered by the baggage of excessive opinions. What good were they anyway? Opinions broke up marriages and started wars. Her husband sometimes accused her of being stubbornly apolitical, but what did she—one woman in Bourbon County, Kentucky—really understand of anything? And who cared what she thought? She didn’t need opinions to convince herself that she mattered. When you grow up the last of six children, you know your place in the world.

  I do not understand what I do not understand.

  Her right side was fatigued from work with the mares, so it was a good thing her palpating side was so strong and her hands so nimble. She managed to separate the two embryos instead of accidentally swooping the whole package into one hand and killing both. Her fingers separated out one twin and pinched hard until its tiny burgeoning life was aborted. The risk, of course, was that you might be pinching the next Man o’ War or Seattle Slew, but that was just part of the gamble. Spare them both and you’d end up with two weak, undersized foals.

  Lou withdrew her arm and patted the mare once on the round of her rump before peeling off her lubricated glove. Light-drawn tears were still streaming down her cheeks when she detected a presence behind her. She turned and saw a distorted shadow swimming in the pool of her tears. With an ungainly gesture, not unlike a cow swiping at flies, she wiped her eyes with the cotton on her shoulders and looked up again to see Henrietta Forge standing in front of her, her belly bossed out, heavily pregnant. Lou couldn’t swallow her surprise: “Oh!” The bump was incongruous, as unexpected as a dirty joke on the lips of a child.

  “Hello,” said Henrietta, unmistakably tired, the voice of a woman carrying an enormous burden. The sound alone made Lou’s hips ache in sympathy; she instantly remembered her ninth month, when the fun was over and the anxious desperation had set in.

  “Let me wash my hands,” said Lou. She untied the mare, scooted her gear bag out of the stall with the toe of her hiking boot, and moved without rushing to a barn sink, where she soaped up to the elbows. She cast a curious glance at Henrietta, who remained where she stood in t
he streaming light, a rustic Madonna in the sun-splashed shed row, her belly all aflame. Lou said easily, “How old are you now, Henrietta?”

  It was as though she hadn’t heard; she just stood there like a deaf-mute, seeming utterly innocent, then her hands twitched, and she said abruptly as if jerking awake, “Twenty-nine.” Lou thought, My God, she had to think about that; she had to count.

  “I guess I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said gently. “When are you due?”

  This answer came quickly. “Five weeks.”

  “Boy or a girl? You’re carrying pretty low.” Lou resisted the urge to reach out and touch her. Though she sensed some of the girl’s ice was melted, that was not the same thing as warmth.

  “I don’t know,” said Henrietta with an eerie, imperturbable calm—not exactly despondent, but low. Hard fact had come to roost in the girl’s mouth, and it crowded out small talk.

  Lou said, “Would you care to sit outside? There’s a bench under a tree at the end of the barn. It’s a nice place to take a minute.” Henrietta just nodded and followed, and they settled themselves there, the September sun as warm and comforting as bag balm on their faces and necks and their hair, one redheaded, the other early gray—or, not so early; Lou was now forty-five. Neither young nor old, but right in the middle of things.

  They sat in silence a while before Henrietta said abruptly: “How do you figure out how to be a mother?” She could have asked her own mother, but why would she?

  Lou didn’t have to think on it. “Some of it comes naturally. The hormones help, a lot of it will feel instinctive. But not entirely. I can tell you the worst day of my life was the day after my daughter was born, when I was exhausted and she wouldn’t breast-feed. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown.” Lou leaned back into the bench, remembering. “You know, babies are pretty shocking. No one ever tells you how hard it is to have small children, how utterly consuming. I remember feeling kind of angry about that—that other women hadn’t told me how tough it would be. They only shared the good stuff. Plus, babies are really disruptive to a relationship, even a good one.” She glanced at Henrietta sideways, carefully.