The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  * * *

  Henry jabbed at the remote control in a daze. He rewound the DVR again and again, Samuel gnawing sloppily on a teething toy at his side, oblivious to what had just occurred. The last time Henry had felt such stupefaction, they had heaped dirt on his daughter’s casket. With this race, he’d been so close to the maximal, he’d felt victory was already accomplished. Now the vagaries of chance circled round him once again, chirping and pecking at the pebbles under his feet, their musty wings unsettling the dust and leaving him to shift with apprehension. Hell’s perfect record was broken. Someone help Henry: If Hellsmouth is not his perfect thing, then what exactly is she? What if she isn’t his at all, or worse, not a thing at all? What if she—

  * * *

  Did you see her body tumbling from orbit, all out of order? Call it a loss if you want, but did you notice how, like something breaking apart upon reentry, she grew even brighter as she came apart?

  This many times my heartbeat

  16¾ 16 74 28 37½ 46 40 24 40 53½ 68 8¼ 25

  an ungoverned thing,

  when I end circles,

  there is a remove like sleep but

  I am still the center

  I am worse

  I am undivided

  * * *

  I’m sorry, I know you want more and there is more and you deserve it, but this is all I have. I’m a beggar. I was pitched out of my mother onto a dirt floor, and all I was given at birth was two fistfuls of language.

  * * *

  HawHaw! cries the half-cocked jock. Y’all think I’m down for the count, this little coyote? Why, my filly’s tricky, there’s gunpowder on her breath! Your story’s a bore, your limits my delight! You set out your words like the farmer sets out his traps! But my eye is keen and my sense is uncommon; I watch the other kits get snatched up in your traps. They wail and moan and gnash their foxy teeth. They chew off their own limbs for freedom, the fools! But me? I’m mind, I’m wind! I’m wise, little girl, you can’t fathom me! I turn tables, debunk, redefine, and rout. I slip your constraints and shit on your traps! While you tipple your applejack and tap out your tale, I feign, fib, fabulate— How now, I climax revenge! Contradict, appall, instruct, assassinate! I rise like a raven from the black of your page. I’ll strip the very meat off your aching hands, little scribbler!

  * * *

  Mack: Okay, everybody calm the fuck down. I never wasted a minute of my life on worry and neither has that goddamn horse. Buy your burgoo, place your bets, and watch her do what she does. Jesus Christ almighty— Enough.

  * * *

  The tall-case clock announced noon.

  The writer didn’t come to the kitchen door as Henry had instructed, but parked at the front entrance of the house and knocked on the front door shining with spar varnish and crested by high mullion glass, cut to fit perfectly two hundred years before. Through the rilled sidelights, Henry detected a figure. When he drew open the door, a black woman stood there.

  She was short as a child but held herself with a military erectness. Her face was plain, severe, falsified neither by smile nor makeup. Perhaps seventy, perhaps more, she cut an unforgiving figure—gray hair scraped back into a tight bun, cheekbones made for cutting glass. Her shapeless gray silk blouse was buttoned to the neck and tucked into an equally shapeless black skirt that fell without a hint of sensuality to her calves. On her feet: black orthopedic shoes with fat soles. She looked like a nun.

  “You are M. J. Deane?” Henry said, a soft suspicion that looked very much like humor wrinkling his brow.

  “I am.” Two little words, but all of the South.

  “I’m Henry Forge.”

  She looked steadily at Henry with eyes so dark it was impossible to determine where the pupil ended and the iris began. When they shook hands, the woman’s hand was cool, dry, and weathered as an old cornhusk—but firm, almost too strong. The intensity of her gaze bordered on the familiar.

  “I’m afraid I have only one hour,” said Henry. “I’ll need to get to Louisville as I believe I mentioned to your assistant.”

  “Hellsmouth,” the woman said slowly, her voice low and throaty with age. “I have followed your little horse very closely.”

  “It’s been a good racing season. Two good racing years.” Even as Henry smiled, sweat sprung prickly across his back and under his arms. Outside, there was an urgent, early heat. His May dams drowsed with foals in thick shade, the tack already sprouted mold, the pawpaws were coming on. Kentucky was overripe and it was only the sixth of May.

  The little woman moved past Henry, a large purse swinging from her arthritic fingers by glossy straps, a purse that even he, who knew nothing of fashion, recognized as an artifact of tremendous luxury. The boxy satchel—perhaps alligator—was secured by a small gold latch and stamped with its provenance in gold letters too small for him to read.

  The woman stepped smartly into the parlor, then paused at the coffee table set for tea that separated the two Chippendale camelbacks. She took slow survey of the room, especially the Aubusson beneath her feet, its dun, gray, and tawny Gallic medallion edged with aubergine like bloodlines running through its pale arrangement. Then she lowered herself onto the divan.

  “What’s that?” she said abruptly, pointing with a knobby finger above the hearth.

  “Columbia jays,” Henry said, but looking at her, not the print. “Audubon, first folio. I bought it in Philadelphia and brought it back to Kentucky.”

  “Is it a real one?”

  Henry was almost too distracted to be offended. He was realizing suddenly that she’d walked ahead of him into the parlor prior to any invitation. He suffered a strange and phantom sense of displacement, as if he had suddenly walked out of his own story and into someone else’s.

  He didn’t serve her. He merely gestured at the tea service, which she also ignored, the exquisite purse now perched on her knees with all the stately presence of a sleek black cat.

  Henry said, “So you’ve written books on horse racing…?”

  “No, I have not,” said the woman. “I spent my life writing mysteries. And I made a king’s fortune doing it. Then, one day I decided it was time to write nonfiction.” She looked at him evenly, coolly. “It was time to tell the truth.”

  Outside the willows and the lilies and the buck roses were drooping in the voluptuous air. Henry said, “And where does your family come from?”

  A cocked brow. “They come from here. But I would not call this place my home.”

  Jarred by a distinct sense of unease, Henry crossed his arms. “And why is it that you publish under your initials?”

  Now the woman stared directly into his eyes. “’Cause I ain’t nobody’s business.” The drawl, the slide into dialect, caused his hair to stand on end.

  Henry said very slowly, very clearly, “You came to talk to me about horses and the racing life. Well, now you’re here.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Your assistant told me—”

  “Henry Forge,” she said, and she cocked her head ever so slightly, “do you not remember me?”

  Henry sat back into a moment of silence. From somewhere distant came the quiet inflection of hooves passing along the earth, then nothing. The woman smiled a smile that became colder as it grew, the shape of hate nursed over the course of a long and difficult life. Then she said: “Your father, John Henry Forge, was responsible for the death of Filip Dunbar; I know this because you told me yourself on the morning of January second, 1954. Filip was the lover of your mother, Lavinia. I know this because I saw them with my own eyes. You could never be convicted of anything in a bodyless crime; I realize that. It was your father who committed the crime. But I have the power to ruin the Forge name. That I can most certainly do. And I suspect for you that would be an end more permanent than actual death.”

  Time distended to the point of bursting, and nothing made a sound. The clock yawned. The drapes stilled in midbillow. The tea leaves settled in the pot. Nothing moved except Henr
y’s blood, which was older than time and could only be called by one name, a surname, which was a useless thing really, signifying nothing, a word that began with force in your ancestor’s lungs and died with a curl of the tongue behind your teeth.

  The words did not register at first. Henry peered at her as though her very person were impossible. “MJ…?” he uttered.

  “Maryleen Jesse Deane,” she said.

  The name shot through him, but Henry gathered himself, refused it, said evenly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Maryleen just lowered her chin, leveling him with a stare. “I plan to publish a book in August, just in time for the Belmont. I intend to tell the real story of your family, of this house, of Kentucky. I intend to tell the truth.”

  As if finally realizing the import of her words, Henry leaned forward suddenly. “Do you actually believe that you can piggyback on our fame and libel my family because a man who worked here once disappeared under mysterious circumstances? A man who was the town drunk, someone my father and grandfather had always supported?”

  “The truth, I said.” Her voice was steely.

  Henry’s own voice grew low. “Then I will take you for all you’re worth.”

  “You could come after my money,” the writer hissed, leaning forward too, “but you wouldn’t know how to get at my worth.”

  Suddenly, teetering on an edge, Henry pressed a palm to his chest, his face wrenched: “I lost my daughter this past fall. Do you understand that my daughter died, and here you come…” But instantly, he wanted to reel the cheap words back into his private heart; for the first time in memory, he was swamped by shame.

  The woman slowly shrugged, her face cold. “I am the bill collector.”

  Trembling, Henry said very quietly, “Get out,” but it was too late, she had already risen, and he could see the pleasure on her face as she stood there eyeing him, calm hands gripping her purse.

  So the words erupted from him again, coming not from him but through him, rolling down the endless corridors of time and memory. “Get out of my house!”

  But no sooner had the woman turned away from the davenport than she nearly collided with Ginnie Miller, who appeared suddenly in the doorway, Samuel hauled up against her shoulder and her face a portrait of alarm. “We were in the kitchen and I heard hollering—what’s going on in here?”

  “This woman was just leaving,” Henry said stonily, his hand still over his heart.

  But Maryleen couldn’t move, much less leave. She stood frozen in place where she had turned, her face suddenly still, like a sheet smoothed, her eyes newly wide. A single finger drifted like a leaf slowly falling up to graze the air around Samuel’s cheek, as he twisted round on Ginnie’s chest to gaze, alarmed, at the ancient face hovering near his. “Whose child is this?” Maryleen said wonderingly.

  Henry was silent.

  The woman’s eyes turned to Henry again, confused, wary. “This—this is your child?”

  Ginnie answered for him. “This is Henry’s grandson. He’s the son of—” And then she stopped abruptly, sensing she had perhaps said too much. She glanced worriedly at Henry.

  Henry drew himself to his full height. “I am raising my grandson,” he said simply.

  “Oh!” the writer cried, her composure pierced, and Samuel started, so Ginnie retreated into the hallway with a protective arm wrapped around him, her eyes all suspicion. Maryleen whirled around with a strange smile of bewilderment on her face. “Is this true?” she said, and then the air whistled out of her lungs. She inspected Henry’s guarded face. “It is! Lord God! The truth really is stranger than fiction!” Then a laugh erupted from her tiny frame, a howl pinned between outrage and hilarity. Samuel began to cry.

  “A black baby!” Maryleen cried. “Henry Forge has a black grandbaby! And here I come— Oh, maybe my daddy was right, that old religious fool. There’s no such thing as earthly justice! No such possible thing— Forgive me, Daddy! You were right! I think I understand you now!” She was barely able to get out the words, laughing uproariously and turning back to the child who was staring at her in frank fear, his little mouth opening to cry, interrupted only by the bellowing of his grandfather, a sound he had never heard and would never hear again from him, the voice of pure rage:

  “GET OUT OF MY HOME!”

  The woman’s laugh died slowly on her lips, her eyes once again impenetrable. She held up her hand as though swearing on the Bible.

  “You may believe you can still order me away,” she said, carefully enunciating each word. “But this time I leave on my own terms.” Without haste, she walked along the richly appointed hallway and out the front door, the luxurious purse swinging from her right hand. She left the door standing wide open.

  * * *

  Henry was very late. He grasped up Samuel, this thorough innocent, who was now smiling as if his earlier tears had served no purpose at all but to wash his face clean. Henry had meant to leave him for the day with Ginnie, but now he couldn’t remember why, couldn’t imagine any other course of action. He would bring him. Henry stumbled down the el porch and into the firecracker sunlight, requiring a moment to remember where he had parked his own car alongside his own home, then half ran toward it, guided only by the need to get Samuel into that car, because the car led to the future, and the future was the safe house where he could escape his old self—the Henry of his youth, the Henry of even one year ago, the Henry of grief. And guilt.

  The world existed before you, Henry Forge. Open your eyes.

  Drive across Kentucky on the waning strength of your old self. Look at Paris, barely changed from the Paris of your youth. It’s still your father’s town and your father’s father’s town, and the Paris–Lexington Road is still a billion-dollar byway, the homes exquisite baubles designed to impress, a gorgeous necklace on the white neck of the state. The child in this car was disinherited from these holdings long ago, though his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather built this place with all the strength of his body. Your strength was never strength at all but bantam posturing over shame. Hate has always coursed through your line like a mutant gene.

  And here’s Lexington—once the perfect Southern woman, modest, discreet, and not very large—with her masses packed and huddled into her cinched inches, ringed by a lush green skirt, a pleasure garden for pampered horses and wealthy men. Sit up straight and peer beyond the colonnaded mansions with their mile-long lawns, beyond the words your father said over and over and over again. Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact.

  A flash of panic lit Henry’s wilding mind—what was he doing, what on earth was he doing? He should turn around, drive the child home and hide him away, but he could not. This was his blood, his line.

  A reckoning was coming.

  Henry, who built this state?

  Quick! Quick! Henrietta said.

  Why, the help, Father, the servants, the bondsmen, the chattel, that species of property, those dark machines in the fields, who came through the Cumberland Gap from Fauquier, Fairfax, and Albemarle, or from Forts Pitt and Duquesne down the Ohio into Virginia’s pretty annex. They climbed the hills in iron chains, a premonition of the Cheapside coffle gangs to come; they felled trees and laid foundations under the eager eyes of rifles; they molded and fired red clay bricks and half slept on the ground or thin shuck mattresses. In a life of relentless labor with no hope of recompense, they plowed the karst fields and pastures, cut teepees of hemp, burned shives, cured tobacco, carded wool and dyed cloth, hauled salt, slopped hogs, cut back briar, tended gardens, cooked vittles, dried herbs, cured ham, dragged ice, polished silver, tended fire, wove baskets, caught babies, nursed them and rocked them, plaited hair, roached hair, beat rugs, brewed beer, stilled whiskey, pickled and preserved, made soap, worked leather, wove duck and fustian, darned socks, cobbled shoes, planed cabinets, fired iron, molded tools, picked worms, milked cows, raised barns, shoveled manure, skinned deer and slaughtered goats, drove the cattle
from field to market, and, yes, managed the horses.

  Henry’s eyes snapped to the rearview again. Samuel’s face had grown dreamy with a trace of spittle along his voluminous cheek. His eyes cast round once, focus drifting, followed by a shuttering of the lids in untroubled sleep. Henry said his name out loud to test the reality of the present time, because she was there—not beneath the color of the child’s face but in it, her bones building his bones moment to moment, the fullness of her face fleshing his. Her blood coursing through him.

  Henry, you spread your daughter’s legs the way you split a tree to build a house. Was it worth it?

  Suddenly, slowly, the line began to slowly flow backward like the Ohio, which reversed course after the great earthquake so many years ago. He couldn’t fight it and in an instant, Henry’s being was overfull; he began to drown with the new knowing. The earth was like a great king, and all the various beings in the world were only component parts of that majestic body. Henry had always imagined himself to be the king, but he was only the left hand, which had—in its madness—reached across and severed the right hand, thinking it would grow his station. And yet here he was bleeding out into endless space and time, because—Henry, now you know—the man who destroys another destroys himself. That is the taste of her blood in your mouth.