The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  Now the preacher looked gently but firmly at Henry, then at Judith, allowing them to shelter under his gaze. “So Judith and Henry, in the presence of Christ’s community, how do we begin to cope with the death of a beloved daughter? We have already been given the facts. Henrietta had a difficult labor that required general anesthesia when her son’s heartbeat began to falter. Under anesthesia, Henrietta experienced sudden cardiac arrest and passed away. Her child survived. These are the facts as they’ve been told to us.” He paused, leaned across the lectern with his arm outstretched so he appeared to be gathering something in the air over Henrietta’s coffin. “But her child survived. This is where we must let go of the facts and begin to tell the truth. Henrietta wasn’t the victim of a medical mistake, Henrietta didn’t have a defective heart, Henrietta wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time—don’t relegate her to that, which is what the materialists want us to do, all those trapped unwittingly in the prison of the physical world. They want you to call this an accident. But believe me when I tell you that if she’d wanted to, Henrietta could have continued on with a regular labor, even though it was threatening her son’s life. She could have waited longer before beginning anesthesia, or she could have refused it altogether. But she chose not to, even though she knew the risks. Instead, she said, “Quick. Quick.” Henry told me that; he was there with her in the operating room. Henrietta told the doctor, “Quick. Quick,” and when she said that—make no mistake about it—she forfeited her life for her child’s. She suffered mightily in Gethsemane, but when the soldiers came, she stood and said, “I am she.” As a result of that choice, we lost her in the physical world but see her transformed in the spiritual one, and we gained her beloved son, who now possesses the gift of life and more than that, the knowledge of his mother’s gift, which will form the foundation of his own life and self-understanding. A double blessing has been bestowed upon this new life, one that we can barely comprehend with our worldly minds. Isn’t love a mystery?”

  The preacher leaned further into the room. “Judith and Henry, I know your hearts are broken. Sometimes it seems as though children are born to break their parents’ hearts. But Henrietta was a parent too”—his voice was barely a whisper—“and Henrietta’s heart just broke a little sooner. Isn’t love a miracle?”

  Henry stared at him, stricken.

  “Now, your daughter isn’t here today to hold her baby, and she won’t be able to watch him grow up, but I already know everything I need to know about what kind of parent Henrietta would have been, the parent she was. We call God the Father because, like a good father, there isn’t anything that God won’t do for his children. And if we are truly made in this image of God’s love, then, accordingly, there isn’t anything a parent won’t do for a child. Even accept death.”

  Behind him, Judith was silent as the void. Her crying had stopped. Henry’s hands parted at the word “death” as if, perhaps, he might grasp hold of the thing and contain it, stop it, but his hands held nothing, less than nothing. His face twisted with confusion.

  “Even accept death,” the preacher repeated. Then he looked up from Henrietta’s peaceful, final face, where he had been gazing. “Now, as a community, can we begin to retell the story of Henrietta’s death? Can we talk about the ultimate sacrifice she made, which shows us what love really is, love which requires nothing in return, love which promises nothing for the lover, but which gives everything to the beloved? Can we now stop talking about the terrible accident of her death and speak instead about her hero’s death? We, as a community, have the power to do that. We were the ones who knew Henrietta, and only we can rewrite the story to tell the truth.”

  They were rising and singing. More words were spoken, but the only thing Henry understood was the too-awful truth that his only child was dead. When the mourners had filed out, when he had shaken three hundred hands, when he stood with Judith beside the silent remains of their daughter, there was finally that cold reckoning. The peace of her perfectly preserved body was false; she had never been placid in life. Makeup was visible on her pores; she had never worn it. He stared hard for her breath, thinking the agony of his effort might force oxygen into her lungs, but it wasn’t there.

  The preacher placed his hand on the casket lid with a question in his eyes, but Henry could not answer it. His entire being was overwhelmed by grief. Suddenly into his mind came sapphirine skies, mineral-green streams, tilled soil, and endless vistas. The casket lid threatened the significance and integrity of the natural world itself. He began to shake visibly.

  The preacher’s voice was low. “May I close the casket, Henry?” Henry could not say yes. How could he? His lips were frozen, his mind harrowed, his tongue paralyzed in his mouth. As the lid was gently lowered, it cast his darling daughter first into a shadow, which grew gradually deeper, then her features were eclipsed, inch by inch, until her physical form vanished forever, and the casket was locked. Henry realized with horror that he could not recover the key. There was no key to the world.

  * * *

  Far across the road, cattle moaned with longing for a night coming in fits and starts. The air was restless and the crickets thrummed. The hot, humid breath of October was lifting now from the ground, where it had boiled all day, rising to meet the cooler streams of air that hovered over it. Airs kissed and stratified, whitening and thinning as the sun slipped its moorings and sank to the bank of the earth. Its center was as orange as its umbral rim was black. The sky grew redder and redder as the sun turned an earthier orange and less brilliant. Above it, purling clouds showed terraced bands of dark against crimson, and the rungs spanned the breadth of the sky. They stacked one upon the next on and on above the sun until the highest bands stretched into interminable shadow, darkening as they reached the top of the bow of the sky, then drifting edgeless into the risen evening. Blackish blue emerged from the east and stretched over the house like an enormous wing extended in nightlong flight. But day was not done, it shook out its last rays, and as low clouds skimmed before the spent sun, the roaming, liberal light was shadowed and then returned like a lamp dampered and promptly relit. The westernmost rooms of the house registered this call and response—walls now flush with color, now dimmed, now returned to red, the orange overlaid with gray, molten color penetrating the sheers and staining the interiors. Walnut moldings and finials and frames were all cherry-lit like blown glass—

  No. The old language is dead. Henrietta is dead.

  Henry stood in his foyer alone. He had invited no one back for supper after the funeral; he couldn’t bear the thought of polite company, how everyone would invade her home, chatter in her living room, sit on her sofas and wing-back chairs, all while he stood there, listening to the relentless ticking of the tall clock in the hall. It was impossible.

  When a hand reached out gently to grip his elbow, he turned slowly as though moving underwater. The nurse, whom he’d hired for these few weeks, was beside him, whispering in her gentle voice: “He fed right on schedule and slept until you walked in the door.”

  He? Who? The child, wrapped tight in a blanket of lilac cotton, one creamed-coffee fist escaped to find the plush petals of his lips and wave smally in the air. He was fat and ancient-looking, smelling vaguely of sour milk and sweet, warm skin. Dark skin. Henry’s breath hitched. Beneath that brown, he could detect the sure set of his daughter’s brow, the shape of her eyes. This black child was like the living memory of her, but altered. Henry wanted nothing more than to push him away even as he pulled him close, his mind churning with the new reality.

  Bearing the mewling child carefully away from his body, as if he were a fresh-baked loaf from the oven, Henry ascended the evening-strewn stairs. He peered down his own hall, which had once held his wealth but now only echoed his bankruptcy. He remembered purchasing the Oushak on the floor; had he really spent the precious moments of his life in a store purchasing a rug? And here was his daughter’s room, which had once been his and his father’s before him and before him NO
NONONONONOSTOP

  Time, that old murderer, was now the room’s only occupant.

  Henrietta’s beingness, her recency was lodged in every object; it permeated the air. Henry took dazed survey of his newly unfamiliar surroundings, and an old, confounding gear ground into motion: life would continue on somehow, but as long as Henry lived, rotary grief would come round again and again like a nail on a wheel.

  He moved at a stuttering pace along Henrietta’s bookcases, tracing a single finger over the spines of books that had furnished her life—scriptures to which he had given no prior thought. Bartram, Lyell, The Birds of Kentucky, The Descent of Man, The Diversity of Life. He hesitated over a uniform row of black, unmarked spines, her old notebooks. He touched one lightly as if touching a relic, then slid it free. First arranging his sighing, squeaking grandson on the bed, Henry eased onto the bed beside him and read sentences at random:

  Shy fish and bold fish; inborn temp; Journal of Fish Bio; Apr 2003. Are genes determinants, or are they merely expressed? Black box or …

  For a long time, I thought I was nominally a body, really just Father’s idea, a meme produced by his brain. But no one can invent a human wholesale. Why else would we have invented a god? Being is too great for a single mind, because it did not emerge from a single mind. Mind itself is an epiphenomenon of changing nature and the contingencies of history. That’s why I don’t know if I am free, or to what degree I can experience freedom.

  Having found the generation distance between A and B via a particular common ancestor, calculate that part of their relatedness for which that ancestor is responsible. To do this, multiply ½ by itself once for each step of the generation distance. —R. Dawkins

  Am not the center of the universe. Am a speck of matter so minuscule as to be almost nothing—a no thing, less than a no thing, a space between subatomic particles, which have no name and are themselves divisible into infinity and forever vibrating.

  Is there a difference between happiness and joy, and why can I feel neither?

  The appearance of man is the last phenomenon. —Lyell

  What strange creature had jotted down these notes? Henry held the notebook away from him in consternation as he disentangled the scratchy, idiosyncratic cursive of a girl pulled out of school just as her formal education had begun. Yes, it was Henrietta’s hand, but … who exactly was that?

  He realized with a start that death and perfection could not both exist.

  He gazed down at the baby. This child had killed his daughter, this dark thing, this emblem. The old hateful designation tried to return, but it was distorted by distance, wriggling in the heat of time. It still lived in Henry’s heart, but not in his mouth. This was his … grandson? God, how he wanted to hate him! Henry’s mind fumbled, and there was a panic born of loss and change. Was there some other word—a replacement—for the strangeness, the difference, the not Henry? He didn’t know. It occurred to him that it wasn’t really a problem of words.

  For the first time in his life, questions yawned before him like open graves.

  “Henry Forge! Henry Forge!”

  His old man again, forever angry about something, yelling up from the foot of the stairs. Henry snatched up the sleepy baby and rushed to the landing, an argument already rising like a bruise on his teenaged lips, ready to shout or spit or draw his bow—

  “Henry Forge!”

  It was Ginnie Miller from across the road, no longer a redheaded child in pigtails but a woman well into middle age, standing with one foot planted on the first step and holding a foil-wrapped casserole in both hands. Her hair was all gray curls about her pink, farm-worn face, but her eyes were the same piercing blue of so many years ago. Without apology, as if it hadn’t been years since they last exchanged words, she announced, “Henry, I just let myself in when no one answered. My husband said I should leave you be since you’re probably exhausted, but when I heard there wouldn’t be people over after the funeral, I thought, that can’t be right. It’s not good for you to be locked up in this big house all alone. You need to keep your strength up what with— Ooooooh!” Her remonstration collapsed into a soft cry. She deposited the casserole on the second step and hurried up the steps with her arms outstretched. “Oh my goodness, here he is…!” She swept the chubby swaddling right out of Henry’s arms, gazed down rapturously, then cocked her head slightly. “Why … well, you’re not exactly what I was expecting, but…” A slightly perplexed smile wavered on her lips, then broadened: “Oh, aren’t you just the most perfect little man! So handsome—just look at him, Henry—isn’t he just perfect?” With a kiss to his downy forehead, Ginnie ferried him down the staircase and over her shoulder said, “What’s his name?”

  Henry peered at her from deep within the geography of his shattered mind. He shook his head faintly.

  “Well, there’s no rush, I suppose,” Ginnie said. “The right name will come when it comes. Until then, I simply can’t allow you to eat alone. In fact, why don’t we just go over to the house. Leave the casserole. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  Henry wanted to retreat—his whole body was an open wound without hope of a scab—but he lacked the strength or volition to withdraw; he allowed Ginnie to guide him through his own front hall, down the sloping lawn of his childhood, across the black ribbon road to the Miller property. He hadn’t set foot on their land since he was ten. God, had he once been a little boy with a father and a mother still alive? The years had flung themselves past him with stunning certitude and no mercy at all.

  “Go right on in,” said Ginnie, bracing the screen door with her shoulder while snuggling the now sleeping child against her chest. Henry did as he was told and saw the inside of his neighbor’s house for the very first time: the low ceilings and thread-worn furniture, pleasantly tattered Persians on the floor, pictures plentiful and cheaply framed. Two Cardigan Corgis charged from an inner bedroom and circled their legs with frantic joy as room followed upon tight hallway upon room—all dark and comforting as a rabbit warren—until they emerged into a kitchen, which glowed with soft lights. At a kitchen table pressed to the wall, a tall man sat stooped over a disassembled radio, his long fingers sorting rivets and washers.

  “Really, Roger? On Rosie’s tablecloth?”

  The man glanced up, startled, then rose from his chair, standing nearly to the low ceiling at his full height. Whereas his wife’s gray hair sprung from her head with all the vim of a forsythia bush, his was nearly gone, showing only thin, sun-battered scalp. Behind his head hung an engraved slab of cherry wood, which read, Ruby Anniversary—Congratulations, Roger and Virginia! This was a man whom Henry had seen for many years passing in a red pickup truck, but whose name he had never known. He seemed quiet, though not exactly shy. “Mr. Forge,” he said, “may I offer my condolences.”

  “Look, Roger, look,” said Ginnie, wading through Corgis and holding out the baby in her arms. “Tell me this isn’t the most darling thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life.”

  Roger peered down his nose, considered the napping child, then the couple exchanged a long, signifying glance. With a voice so deep it had made dogs crouch and roll and whimper all his life, Roger said simply, “Very cute, indeed.”

  “Here,” she said, passing the baby carefully into his arms, “I told Henry I couldn’t bear to leave him over there to eat alone, so I dragged him over. Neighbors should support one another, you know.” She glanced meaningfully at Roger, who met her gaze with barely arched brows. “Now, I intend to feed the man. It’s the very least we can do.”

  “Certainly.” Roger cradled the child in the crook of his arm and swept the innards of the radio as well as a checkbook and bills and various pens off to the side of the table. With his free hand, he indicated the chair opposite. Then he and Henry sat while Roger rocked the child with the easy, practiced arms of a man who’d raised two children.

  “Was your daughter married?” he asked with a glance down at the child.

  “No,” Henry sa
id, his voice barely a whisper.

  “So, she was dating an African-American gentleman?”

  Henry nodded dumbly; he didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, it’s heartening to see the way times have changed,” Roger said, dandling the child. “The world used to be so ugly about these things. Even good folks … well, your father was a bit of a racist, wasn’t he, Ginnie?”

  “Oh, Daddy was a good man,” Ginnie said, “but yeah, maybe a bit. Nothing too crazy.”

  “My folks were Quakers,” said the man, turning his warm eyes on Henry and not waiting for his response. “They taught me that God made of one blood all peoples of the earth. My mother actually had a cross-stitch of that, which hung in our foyer. And they lived that verse. Especially my mother. She was a very politically active woman.”

  Ginnie moved smartly about her kitchen until she returned with plates heaped, saying, “But my daddy was kind too, Roger. He was. He just had some backwards ideas. You can’t help the way you were raised.”

  “Ah,” said Roger, and cocked his head, “but when you grow up, you have to take responsibility for your adult mind.”

  “Well, anyway, enough about that,” Ginnie said, reaching out, “give me back that baby.” She situated herself at the corner of the table, where she could dandle the child with one arm and eat with her free hand.