by C. E. Morgan
* * *
A wild desire had overcome Henry Forge, as strong and strident as the surges of spring. The hard labor of winter was done, and the sun was beginning to ripen the world. When March winds were winding up and early daffodils punctured the fluorescent soil, Henry could contain the urge no longer and called Penn, who said, “Yeah, I’ve been a little covered up, but this is good timing. Now’s sort of the sweet spot.”
He drove up on a Saturday afternoon, his rust-scabbed Toyota coughing exhaust up the long Forge drive. The closer he drew, the slower he drove, eyes widening behind the wheel as he absorbed the patrician heights of the house, the barns bright like snow blindness, stark equine silhouettes in the distance where the land swept down into a bowl bisected by a stream. Holy shit, he thought, taking it all in. She really did come from money.
He found Henry waiting there as still as a cenotaph on the el porch as if he’d been standing there the whole day, or possibly his whole life. At first, Penn was struck by the similarity again between this father and the woman he had known—the slim, elegant frame, the coppery hair. Then he noticed the child in Henry’s arms. From his erect perch against Henry’s chest, the boy sported all the wide, bright-eyed curiosity of a seal. He was fine, fat, and waving his chunky arms at the sunshine in obvious delight. Penn didn’t care one way or another about babies, and yet … this was Henrietta’s child, all that was left of her. She had died bringing him into the world. Should he hate it? Perhaps. But when he approached and the child laughed at him for no reason that any grown man could grasp, Penn smiled. He couldn’t quite muster a laugh.
The two men met again, and they shook hands properly this time. Then, in silent, mutual agreement, they walked southward, Henry on the el porch and Penn along a tended bed of eager, nodding daffodils. When he reached the banister, Henry lowered Samuel so he could stand his slippered feet against the wood and said, “This is the space I described on the phone.” Then he bent to kiss Samuel’s curly head and, at the same time, pointed out toward the apple orchard and the slim clearing between the last budding trees and old windbreak, forty years in its growing, durable now as any chestnut fencing.
Penn stood there with his hands on his thick hips, chewing his lip and taking measure this way and that. He said, “Well, if you want to grow your own food like how we talked about, you’ve got plenty of room.”
“I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided I’d like to do more than that. Feed more than us.”
“Really?” said Penn, dubious, looking around and wondering, How many folks could there be to feed? Forge didn’t seem like the type who wanted to start a CSA or something.
“And flowers,” Henry said.
“Flowers? Sure, well, it’s March, I could … maybe lay in some pansies if you want.”
“What else?” Samuel raised a sudden squall, so Henry drew him back to his chest, where he was nestled easily, his little cherub’s face turned into his grandfather’s chest.
“Well…,” Penn said, studying the idea for a moment. “You could maybe transplant in viola, some Lenten rose. But most early flowers … they’re bulbs, you know. You plant them in the fall when everything’s going to seed. Now in a month … I could lay in just about anything you want. Make a real flower garden.”
“Yes, I want a field of flowers. My grandson will like that.”
Penn smiled, but he was silent as he looked on the pair. There was something he didn’t quite trust about the older man. Not that he was a bad guy necessarily … just not fully formed or something. Did he want to grow a garden, or did he want to be the kind of guy who grew a garden?
Eh, what did it matter? Penn shrugged in his mind. He was watchful and methodical, the guardian of his own opinions, of which he had more than a few, but ultimately he would help out anyone in need. It’s how his dumb ass got sent to war.
“And I’d like to prepare additional space for next year.” Henry stepped down off the porch, so that he stood shoulder to shoulder with Penn. “Put marigolds and petunias in after the freeze.”
The younger man’s head ticked to the left. “Sure,” he said, “but if that’s what you want, you’re gonna need more room. What’s with these bushes?” He gestured to his right.
“That’s a windbreak.”
“Well, it’s in the way. You need it?”
Henry hefted his grandson higher onto his chest and, brow crumpled, watched as the boy busily gummed his own fist. He smelled like sunlight and the warm, particular, inimitable scent, which was his own person. His eyes were bright and impossibly untroubled. “Perhaps not,” Henry said softly.
“But you’ll need a backhoe.”
“I have a backhoe.”
“Well,” said Penn with a smile, shaking his head slightly. “All right. Show me where the backhoe’s at.”
So, they worked together, he and Penn. First Henry laid out a checkered tablecloth upon which Samuel rolled and made his froggish motions in the sun, a shaker clutched in his hands. One eye to Samuel, Henry helmed a rototiller that chewed its lurching way through the tender lawn, as Penn, perched on the sun-busted seat of the backhoe, began to extract the edges of—
—my God, I get so tired sometimes, I can’t tell you how it was. I try to cut to the pith with the blade of my life, but it’s a dull blade from a common kitchen. My people came out of the mountains to Ohio; my grandfather was born in a tent near the oil wells, and my parents were poor. I’m not beautiful or clever; all I can offer is the brief portrait of a spring’s plantation, the smell of the sweat of labor, the color of a child’s eye, and sometimes not even that. What can you do? You can’t pray for yourself. The gods disallow it—
“Hey! Henry!” Penn had ground the backhoe to a halt and was twisted back and around with one hand gripping the bucket seat, the other on the wheel. “What is this? You want it out?”
Henry left his post at the rototiller and picked his way along the fresh soil until he rounded the edge of the remaining windbreak. There the thing jutted out of the earth like an arrow pointing to the sky. For a moment, Henry could not configure the object in his mind, could make no sense of its height, its brown hue, the wood patina like rot. Then, when memory finally slid home and he realized it was the old whipping post, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t blink. Time rolled back his eyelids and pinned them to his skull.
He whispered something barely intelligible.
“What?” said Penn, leaning down. “You want it out…?”
Henry drew in one tremble of breath, made a roundabout gesture with one hand. When Penn just shook his head in confusion, Henry raised his voice. “Leave it there,” he said. “Make a scarecrow of it.”
Penn grinned slowly, then nodded. “For the garden. Right. Yeah. We can dress it up in some of your old clothes or something.” Then righting himself on the seat of the backhoe, he brought the engine back to life and managed to uproot the rest of the tangled thicket without disturbing the post where it remained, leaning like an old ruin, dark and scarred, a remnant of centuries-old hickory and hurt.
But Henry could not continue in his work. He turned his back on the post and walked the freshly fertile ground to Samuel, who was now gnawing fistfuls of fresh grass. As Henry plucked grass from his lips, the child began to whimper and then wail in outrage. Henry lowered himself to his knees, grasping the child’s crabby face in his hands and looking down at him with bright sadness and satisfaction. Again, he reckoned with the full enormity of the change in himself. The change was a disturbance and more: a deeper, astonishing resolution. For a moment, in the golden almost-liquid beauty of the afternoon, he felt that his daughter had finally fallen silent. Her mouth was shut, the ink in her notebooks dry. His grief felt less like the crushing of his chest and more like the memory of the crushing. Was the worst of his pain over? Was that possible?
Henry walked to the kitchen to make a gold rush for two: bourbon with lemon and honey over ice. He passed the site of the original kitchen fifteen yards from the house, a kitchen t
hat was razed when they filled in the old ice well. He had been seven then, just a kit in the yard, his mother a minx. He passed a hand over his eyes, weary and wary of his old mind.
As he arranged two icy tumblers on an old silver tray, a gem Lavinia had bought at auction in Nashville on a horse-buying trip, the landline shrilled. His hand jerked, and a tumbler shattered to shards in the white ceramic basin of the sink.
When he grasped up the receiver, the voice—firmly lodged in the nose and unmistakably northeastern—said: “Mr. Forge? Hello, I’m so glad to have reached you. I’m the assistant to M. J. Deane. I’d like to congratulate you on your amazing horse.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I’m sure you’re getting more interview requests than you can field, but my employer would very much like to interview you for a book on Kentucky history and horse racing. Would you be at all interested in participating?”
Henry was silent for a moment, trawling through the recesses. The name flicked at the edges of familiarity.
Into the silence the woman said, “Deane writes mysteries, but also general nonfiction. Perhaps you have read some of the books, or at least seen them around. Or articles in The New Yorker. On cuisine, mostly.”
The food articles—yes, that rang a bell. And, of course, he realized now, he’d seen the books in airports. With one careful hand, he reached down to arrange the glass shards, which littered the sink. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I believe we can work something out.”
The assistant said, “Wonderful. Well, an interview on the morning of the Derby would be perfect, if that’s not too much to ask. I’m sure that will be a crazy day for you, but we figured there’s no harm in asking.”
“The morning of the Derby?” It was an odd, even improbable request. He hesitated. But this wasn’t a journalist from a local paper or even the Times; this was something more intriguing, potentially more durable. A book featuring the Forge name. It stirred him. “Yes,” he said slowly, “that might be possible.”
“Will you be in Louisville or in Paris that morning, sir?”
He was startled to discover that he had no ready answer. Of course, he should be in Louisville—for the parties, the glad-handing, the carousing that would precede the running of the race. And yet … he gazed out the window, his heart a tuning fork tuned to Samuel. He watched his tiny grandchild on his fat belly, grasping again at bunches of grass; he was like a foundling who had arrived with a message for change from the deep underworld, a note passed to him from his daughter. So she was not silent after all. A knowing pressed up into the space where his heart had been knocking about uselessly for so long. It was both a blessing and an affliction. Relaxation flooded his body as if his old, worn organs were being replaced with an emptiness that was not terrifying but delicious. Into the emptiness wended a pride—yes, he was proud of everything he had accomplished, his farm and his horse, his new feelings for his grandchild, how he was transforming the family name. His smile was broad when he said, “Yes, I will be right here at Forge Run Farm on the morning of the Derby.”
* * *
Ever the good doer, Hellsmouth downed three quarts of oats and snatched at two proffered carrots on the morning of the Wood Memorial. She traced her rounds and lay heavily down in the stall to rise knuckering four times—nothing out of the ordinary, her usual race-day routine. But as Allmon stood there at the stall door watching her rise like a black wave for the fourth time to level him with the watery burn of her lucent eyes, what he found was only a flat, uninviting darkness, interminable night sky between stars that had flamed out; in the place of her personality, there was nothing.
His own body was on fire in every joint, his hands woolly and too warm as he slipped into the stall, patted from the bunched shoulder to the coronet of the hoof. He was nearly disabled by fatigue but could tell the leg seemed good and cold; they’d drawn out the heat with an old-time poultice of bran, Epsom salts, and clay. Now painkillers coursed along her ropy veins, pulsing through each chamber of her overlarge heart, sloping down her gaskins, softening the tips of her ears.
Though something was rubbing her soul against the grain, all he said as he stared into those altered eyes was a dull, blunt, “You’ll be fine.”
When Mack turned down the row, Allmon made a sharp, beckoning gesture and said under his breath, as though the filly could hear and understand, “She’s not happy.”
“Who the hell is?” Mack snapped, but he squatted and turned his own hands down the length of the leg. “She’s cold,” he said from his stoop. “I’m getting nothing here.” He leaned back on his haunches then, braced on one ruddy hand in the hay and peering up along the steep, sloped band of her nose. He sighed. “Give her some scotch. That’ll turn her up.”
Tucked behind posts draped with saddle blankets and a row of black velvety riding helmets, a smoky bottle of Caol Ila was kept on a shelf for just such a purpose. But when Allmon poured the scotch into the trembling scoop of his palm, which seemed so hot it would boil the liquor away, Hell just swung her head wide, and the tinkling of her stall bridle, very faint, was like Christmas sleigh bells without cheer.
“You’ll be fine,” he said again, but he didn’t know whether he was talking to himself or the horse. All he knew was he didn’t believe it.
Then Reuben; he sensed it in the saddling paddock when he was hoisted onto her gleaming back. Slipping his boots into the irons, he stopped suddenly as though listening for the faint beating of his own heart, then stooped in the irons, gazing bug-eyed down both sides of Hell’s long face as she stared straight ahead, blinking sedately and swishing her tail once. He detected the pulse in her articulated runner’s veins, then turned to Mack, his eyes narrowed. “What ails my black beauty?”
“She’s cold,” said Mack, but his brow was puckered. “She walked easy. You saw her.”
Fraction by fraction, Reuben eased down, reassuming his wary spot on the saddle. “Oh girl, this ain’t the time,” he whispered. The diaphragm of his eyes constricted, so the nervous colts and that worser animal—the ungovernable crowd—faded to a blur. He said nary a mischievous word as Allmon led them away. Reuben looked nowhere but down, his eyes bending pencils of light as they emerged from the tunnel, so he took in only the shortest field—Hell’s tented ears, and the gathering and releasing of her shoulders with each step. She came along sure, she came steady, but she wasn’t a horse who was born to just come along.
Reuben’s mouth was dry with determination, his hands clamped on the reins, his heart slowing: visions of paralysis, of death on the track under half-ton horses, his spalled flesh ground into the very fibers of the racing world. But then he straightened up. Whatever. His horse wasn’t right, that was for sure, but one minute on a half-well Hell was worth ten years on these other hacks. His grin bared his teeth.
The bell clanged, and for a moment, fresh out of the gate, all concern seemed unfounded: Hellsmouth rocketed from post position, instantly strong and upright; she broke with stomach-flipping loft in her three-year-old stride, her newly elongated signature. Inside of four strides, she separated herself from the field just as the bettors had banked on, as the oddsmakers had predicted. She was the fulfillment of every Saturday promise—inevitability itself—so the stands didn’t wait for her to roll into that first turn; they rose headily, drunkenly in advance of their sure thing, their cries rolling out across the infield like thunder before the storm. At the sound of their jubilation, Reuben, already tight with the hope of victory and plastered over her withers, twitched the crop back and delivered a perfunctory tap to Hell’s flanks just as they angled into the turn. Now the rude truth reasserted itself. Hell took the crop with a gathering of her muscle and a straining of the head, but her body delivered no burst of speed. She didn’t advance through the turn as she always did, the filly braggart who could walk on water as lesser horses slipped under the waves, the filly who rolled effortlessly around a curve on the strength of personality alone. And not only did she take the crop without a
surge, but when she switched leads on her bruiser’s legs, she faltered. The tectonics shifted.
Stop the Music pressed past Angelshare and Loop de Loop, crabbing out of the curve so his bulky ass moved up on Hell’s right shoulder. Another second into the straight, and there commenced a violent bumping and jolting as the other colts circled their wagons, boxing in Hellsmouth, so Reuben was forced to wield the whip again to spur her into any possible pocket, real or imagined. He snapped her flanks, then he bashed her flanks, calling out encouragement and demand, the crop suddenly electric as any cattle prod, but though she tried and tried, she couldn’t advance. Neither left nor right, the colts left her no avenue. Now her effort became an ugly thing to see; blood spurted from her nostrils despite the Lasix, the proud flesh on her chest pulsed white against her black.
“Haw, little bitch! Bring it home!”
How she strained and lunged under Reuben on the straightaway, slinging saliva back onto his shoulders and face, digging deeper than deep, but her pace was a sickening diminuendo, a single discordant instrument in the orchestra. When the wire approached, despite the desperation in her limbs and the agonized shearing of her lungs, there was nothing left to muster. She came in third after Stop the Music, her archrival, and Possum, a fat-nosed allowance horse born on a Tuscaloosa farm with a plastic spoon in his mouth, a colt with no fashion in his pedigree whatsoever, not a single placer in his line.
* * *
Jeff Burrow: Well, the 2006 season is no longer a done deal, a fixed race between perfection and a middling field. The almighty Hellsmouth, a filly all but guaranteed to wrap up the Derby in a rose-red ribbon, is no longer a sure thing. Horses lose every day in this sport, but there was something different in the air after Hell’s defeat on Saturday. Her loss seems to have peeled back the layers to reveal an unspoken truth just under the surface of this testosterone-fueled industry. Hellsmouth has never been just another equine athlete. In a sport overrun with huge colts and powerhouse geldings, she’s a filly, and a tremendous one at that, and that makes her unique. If, despite this loss, she manages to conquer the Derby’s mile and a quarter, it won’t just be a win for Hellsmouth, but a testament to the power and potential of her sex in the sport. In a world that downplays the accomplishments of women at every possible turn, a great female athlete is representative, whether she likes it or not. They change their sport and public opinion. So when May sixth rolls around, let’s not forget the much larger truth at play on the dirt track at Churchill Downs: this big filly runs for all fillies, and the distinction still matters.