The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  Henrietta nodded curtly, her face inexpressive. Then: “Will I be a good mother?”

  Instantly, unbidden, Lou was charged with a sense deeper than knowing that this woman—this girl, rather—had never been properly loved, that she didn’t know the first thing about real intimacy. It cracked Lou’s heart. But the awareness was fleeting, and she said, with the equanimity of a counselor, “You’ll do just fine. I can tell you the titles of a few good books. My only real advice is don’t leave the hospital until that baby’s latched on good and tight.”

  When Henrietta said nothing further, an easy silence washed in like a gentle stream that carried their conversation away. Lou fought the urge for further niceties: How is your father? How is that magnificent filly, that two-year-old everyone is talking about? She’s showing awfully well against the boys, placing four out of four and inspiring talk of greatness. But Lou waited. She waited, because she was quite confident this girl had never delivered a social call in her life.

  Then Henrietta cleared her throat and said, “You told me something once. Something I didn’t understand. I remembered it the other day.”

  Ah, here it was. Lou turned her palms up to the warm September sun and waited.

  “It was the day Hellsmouth was foaled. You said something about every horse being the product of evolutionary failure. Something to that effect.”

  Lou stretched back her head a moment, looked up at the sky. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “I guess it’s kind of ironic.”

  “What do you know that I don’t?”

  It struck Lou as a funny phrasing, and she smiled. Then she turned toward Henrietta, who turned toward her, so their heads almost touched, and they spoke in quiet tones, the red, desiccated leaves of the tree falling all around them, a few onto their laps.

  When Henrietta straightened up, her face was pinched with consternation.

  “Then why are we chasing the perfect horse…?”

  “Who knows,” said Lou, ticked her head to one side. “There’s no such thing. Beauty, maybe. We always seem to get sidetracked by that. And horses are such beautiful remnants.” She glanced sideways at Henrietta. “I thought you would have learned all this in school. Horses used to be the model for evolution, at least when I was a kid.”

  Henrietta flushed. She suddenly looked angry, but not at Lou. She stared out over the black, peeling fences, the green bluegrass under the sun with its tireless recapitulations, over the many fillies in the field before them. She was struck by a sudden lash of jealousy. These imperfect little fillies would be protected, coddled, and prized in aeternum if they proved themselves in the sport of kings—what strange luck to be a thoughtless horse. What woman could hope for half as much in this world? Suddenly, she began to laugh. It was not the sound of amusement. It emerged as a confused cry, a conflicted cry. Then it boiled up and spilled out from the center of her with absurd force. She leaned forward, and the sound crashed like cymbals in her mouth. My God, she was laughing so hard she was gripping herself as if in pain, her shoulders heaving with grieved humor, tears spilling from her eyes, but then she was suddenly quiet with her head bent, so it seemed at first she was merely spent, having released some demon from her imagination. Lou realized she was hunched over herself, looking down at her protruding belly.

  “Henrietta, are you all right?” said Lou.

  She couldn’t speak. The seizing was strong and swift. It gripped her with such ferocity that she seemed mildly surprised to see her belly wasn’t actually moving, though she’d sensed for days that something indeed was gathering its energies within her. It was coming as sure as the change of seasons, shifting from elegiac autumn to hard winter.

  Lou was watching her carefully. She counted in the habit of her training. “Well, that’s a long contraction,” she said in an even voice. “Are you sure this is your first one?”

  It was a moment before Henrietta could raise her head. A fine film of sweat had formed on her upper lip, and her cheeks were flushed with a ruby color. She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s been … shifting.”

  “Have you felt crampy…?”

  Henrietta nodded weakly.

  “For how long?”

  “Three days.”

  Lou didn’t ask, she just tightened her arms around the girl’s shoulders and said, “Okay, sweetheart, up you go. Let’s get you to the hospital just to be sure. Just to be safe.”

  Henrietta said, “University of Kentucky.”

  “Okay, no problem. I’m going to take you right there.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said Henrietta.

  Lou smiled. “I’ve been afraid every day of my life,” she said. What she did not say: When my own labor started, I thought I was going into battle, but, honestly, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. I’ve had ruptured cysts that were worse. But even as she thought the words, making their way to her truck, Henrietta’s arm was slipped through hers like a fish through a holey net, landing on the ground, where she moaned steadily, steadily as a song, a dirge, an incantation. She sat there on her crossed legs, her hands grasping at her belly, simple suffering on her face. Lou could do nothing but kneel beside her as an attendant, patting her back.

  When Henrietta’s face finally loosened, Lou helped her to her feet. A few tentative steps and she was walking easy again, helping herself into the cab of Lou’s truck and waiting there for Lou to slip in behind the wheel. Only then did she say, “Will you call my father?” which Lou did, saying they were headed to UK and detecting panic there in the man’s voice, so different from the low, even, steady, unmoved, resilient, enduring voice beside her. It made the hair stand up on her arms.

  Lou thought to soothe her, wanted to say: Don’t worry. My mother filled my head with all sorts of fears—how she bled, how she was cut and couldn’t feel pleasure properly afterwards, and how her last, which was me, had led to a hysterectomy. But all Lou said was, “Hang in there, sweetheart. It’s worth it. I ended up with a child I love more than I love myself. She’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

  They were some way down the Paris–Lexington Road when Henrietta was once again clenched over her belly, deep in communion with this emergent, wrestling thing. She lost her sense of travel, of Lou at her side. Her baby argued viciously with her body, and she grimaced in complicated pain over it. When the baby’s demands eased, she laid her damp head on the headrest and looked out at the virginal white barns, the cupolas with their vanes pirouetting in an insistent wind, the horses with tangled manes fallen over bulbous eyes. History like floodwaters swamped them to the pupils. The stone walls began to totter and disintegrate even as she looked; the karst caved into sinks and ponds, and she laughed again through the pain, atop the pain, in the face of what was to come.

  She saw Kentucky as a land of country contentments, rolling like an ocean in the sights of a ten-gun brig. The ocean reveals the most distant, dazzling islands to honest ships only after strenuous searching—by that worst journey, which is the ascetic’s choice. A midshipman’s boat is a cell, and a cell is the mind’s spyglass. You are a measurer of the winter farrow and summer effulgence and everything in between: girl turned fearless sailor. When you grow up and become a mother, never forget the delightful, early days of discovery. Remember the green, milky constancy of the ocean, the sturdy ship of your body with unsuckled breasts masthead to the wind, how you spied green, glossy life on basalt shores, how birds trilled the infinities for you. Remember how you journeyed in your body across the world only to discover that you were the original uncharted topography.

  Disconcerted by Henrietta’s laughter, Lou said, “Are you breathing? Are you keeping your breath deep and even?”

  “Yes,” with irritation now, “yes!” She was breathing out the last of the Old Dominion air her father had blown into her lungs and looking past the farthest row of white plank fencing: the rolling bluegrass has turned to bottle-green waves, and she can see ten volcanic islands rising in the wriggling heat. This
is fresh, unknown land and so beautiful, though the islands appear to be divided, barren, and lava-scarred below the hanging clouds and above, ensconced in the damp humor of the heights, crudely efflorescent with life. As they draw near the first mass of land, she can see, amidst the many black conicals, reptiles hissing and dull-colored birds who care no more for her than they do for the great tortoises.

  My God, the great tortoises! Heavy, lumbering giants. The second island is striated with crisscrossing blazes that the ponderous beasts have cut across the sloping green hillsides. Tiring of succulents in the fire-pit districts, the tortoises travel day and night for water, their crepey heads thrust before them up the precipitous slopes until they discover the springs where their kin are just now returning, moving with the stolid gait of those obedient to nature. They pass one another as they’ve passed before and will pass again. Now, the newly arrived slip into the crystalline pool past their heavy-lidded eyeballs to drink and drink and drink.

  Henrietta’s guts reached around her lower back and wrenched hard. The grip was so strong, so quick on the last that Lou, who had been watching the dash clock, said, “That was awfully fast.” Henrietta’s answer was silence, because it was too strong for words. Now there was no doubt in Lou’s mind: The child wanted out. And soon.

  Lou’s voice was calm but urgent. “Henrietta, I think you may have been in labor for the last couple days. You may be active right now. Promise me that if you feel the urge to push, you’re going to resist. Okay? We’re almost there, so just hang on.”

  Henrietta wasn’t listening. The sea of volcanic islands came to an abrupt end, and the city flashed before her with its gaudy distractions—aluminum siding, pocked roofing, garish billboards, trash aflutter in the streets. Yet, there were still snatches of green grass under the vivid noon. Century-old trees with ancient memory. And there, perched on roofs and wires, arcing over the truck, commenting upon the sprawling growth of the city, were the daring little perspicacious finches, dull but quick, at first darting at the corner of her eye, then everywhere she looked congregating on porches and porticoes, strutting for worms and berries, swooping on the wing, staring black-eyed into the truck. They were of a family, yet they varied enormously, thirteen species all peculiar to the various neighborhoods of the city. Amazing how tame they are, how unafraid, so this one—with its abrupt tail and modest beak; Geospiza parvula, so tiny and pert—alights on her hand, and after observing it a while in curiosity and admiration, Henrietta snuffs its life with a single blow. Now she opens its chest with the obstetrician’s scalpel, while all its kin crowd around, perching on the hood of the truck, the ashtray, on her shoulders, observing with beady curiosity as she makes her careful incisions. The feathery flesh is spread, showing the small veiny networks and coiled viscera. The finches chatter with great vivacity, their talk overwhelming the honking horns, the squealing tires, the radios, as she cracks open the fragile rib cage and exposes the organ of animation. Like a wet treasure, here is the mystery. It’s too hot to touch with her hands. Now she realizes that along with its endlessly varying kin, the dead bird is still singing, its throat pulsing with blood and sound, and that the song is for her.

  She lays the carcass down and is fully persuaded. Hadn’t she always been like a ripe fruit even when life was hell? It was perhaps true that she had never been happy, but happiness was a cheap, ephemeral thing brought on by novelty or chance; happiness was a trinket from a fair; inevitably the fair moved on, and the trinket was broken, stolen, or lost. Only joy abided. It was like blood, and as long as blood flowed, joy flowed, intrinsic to the organism. She looked at the wild and abundant world, the new and old species forever mutating, the violent sun and its cool hanger-on the moon, which she knew remained in the sky uncaring whether seen or unseen. She had joy. If you carry a hardy pagan god in you, no parent or enemy can kill it. She realized with surprised relief that someday in the distant future when this day of great pain was long past, they could raise a monument over her bleaching bones that read: Accomplished.

  And that was her last thought before the work of her body engulfed her and this time would not let go. In the midst of that overriding pain, hands were trying to ease her out of the truck—were they at the hospital already?—yet she couldn’t uncurl, her body wouldn’t allow it, so they brought a gurney and now Henry was before her, his beloved face twisted with worry the way her guts were twisted.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” he said as they eased her onto the gurney. They were wheeling her now, Henry trotting along at her head, listening to her moan, “It won’t stop.”

  “Your contractions won’t stop?” But her answer was an animal’s panting and groaning, her hands a knobby lace over her distended belly. Henry saw how her hands were distorted with swelling. In these last weeks, her skin had been scorched by itching. Her belly, too big for her slim frame, was bursting like a late-season watermelon. It stretched so taut that raw fissures opened, and he was sick with guilt. In the unnaturally aseptic light of the hospital corridors, he was stricken with the memory of when they had first handed her to him swaddled in a pink cotton blanket. This is mine? he had thought. I made this miracle happen?

  In the birthing room, the questions came furiously: Were you having contractions for the last few days? Mild ones? Are you sure your water didn’t break? Bloody show? Is the father on his way?

  But Henrietta remained clamped in the vise of her pain, sweat tracking down her red, brutalized face—and bland tears too—as the contraction refused to release her. Pain was a hideous symphony, every note sounding at once, and it didn’t matter if every pitch was labored, slaved over, overwrought, caressed, or hated. I don’t care whether you can detect the fruits of my labor! I can’t hide anything, birth is breaking all of me. Sounds emerged from the deepest part of her.

  Henry’s face was close to hers, almost against hers, almost kissing her cheek, saying, “The doctor’s here,” and then the man was gently prying apart her clamped legs.

  “Should it be this hard?” she cried out in bewilderment. “Should it be this hard?”

  “Goddammit,” hissed Henry. “Give her something!”

  The doctor dispensed his obfuscations: “Dilated to five, but hypertonic uterus.” Henrietta interrupted: “I’m peeing.” The seep of warmth turning instantly cool in the mortuary chill of the room.

  The doctor placed a gloved hand on her knee. “Miss Forge, your water just broke. I’m concerned, because there’s too much blood in your fluid, and you’re just starting to spike a fever, which we want to contain. Your uterus is hyperstimulated; that’s why you’re not coming down off these contractions. We’re not going to use an epidural, because—”

  Henry’s eyes were wild and he gripped the plastic edge of the bed rail. “Why on earth?”

  A nurse’s voice then and a whirling from the periphery: “Flat strip—”

  “What is that? What is that?” Panic made its own contractions on Henry’s heart.

  The doctor remained maddeningly calm. “It means there’s minimal variability in the fetal heart rate. I suspect abruption. This is something that requires immediate intervention. But there’s no need to panic.” He turned to Henrietta. “Miss Forge, we’ll need to give you general anesthesia, because I’m concerned about your baby and need to expedite the delivery. Placement of a spinal will just take too long. We’re going to move you into the pre-op room now.”

  To a nurse, he said, “I want Miss Forge hooked up as well as the baby.”

  Henrietta nodded weakly with a face that looked like doubt but was all pain. Why were they breaking into her private world? She was busy with her hurting, which was immutable and constant, pain breathing in, pain breathing out, pain eclipsing her mind.

  Her eyes were glassy, and they were instantly moving again, the ceiling passing her, this must be the operating room; she knew because she recognized the many-bulbed lamps like blinding, wide-mouthed carp. Her father’s face—comfort, intrusion, her everything—interrupted the light
. Someone said, “Sir, you can’t be in here,” and yet he remained. Henrietta’s eyes focused suddenly with a consternation so savage that Henry felt her pain move all along the length of his body like a lightning strike. For a brief moment, she abandoned her struggle. She said, “You never loved me.”

  All he could do was stare at the garrulous shock of red on her cheeks. He struggled for language. “How can you say that?” he whispered. “Everything I’ve ever done is for you.”

  “Lou said…” Her words drifted, evanesced, vanished into pain.

  “What?” he said. “Lou the vet? What did she say?”

  She could hear someone speaking to her father, but she was sunk down into her body again, any words elongated into wails by the pain wracking her, pressing her with the weight of oceans and mountains. Her face grew hideously pale, even her eyes appeared blanched. The relentless contractions were reshaping her into something foreign and alone.

  The tenor of the room changed. She had no words now, all of herself concentrating on this pain. Language was done. The anesthesiologist was wrestling with the IV catheter as she made deep, guttural wounded sounds. But under it all she felt—far beneath the wretched pain and the fear—a deep and primitive excitement. It came from her bedrock self. Soon her child would appear, and everything would begin again.

  In the first miracle, the universe created itself out of nothing. So there is always hope.

  When the anesthesiologist moved in with the oxygen mask, she gripped his arm to stay him. Her voice was barely recognizable now, chafed and roughened by labor. She gestured, rolling her hand, so her father leaned in, and she laid her hand against his beautiful, weathered, beloved cheek. “Father…”

  “What, darling?”

  She grinned an ugly grin. “Every animal knows more than we do.”

  “Someone get him out of here,” said the anesthesiologist, but Henrietta was already drawing her hand back to her chest, and because she needed to release the burden, she said, “Quick. Quick!”