by C. E. Morgan
Allmon turned to him slowly like someone waking. “I know shit about them you don’t even know.”
“Then use it! Tell the tale! Throw open the doors of that prison!” The grip of the jock’s hand and grin grew monstrous. “Get loose and dark, get unruly and rank! Look at me—I’m black as a train and twice as fast, I’m gonna run you down with the new reality! The man that stole your child is the same man that killed your mother, the man that put you behind bars, that’s the same man that’s been stringing up the black brother since time immemorial. Think about that, Allmon! How you like them rotten apples? I picked them just for you.”
Allmon made an inhuman sound deep in his throat. Everything that had come before this moment was creating a bursting pressure in his chest.
Reuben raised one triumphant finger. “Let it penetrate your sticky ear! If that is not the truth, then they changed the definition of truth. What say you? Is it the truth?”
Allmon was dizzy with a swirling sensation, the muddy confluence of one will slipping into another.
“Tell me for the sake of that child! Yes or no?”
It shot out of him. “Yes!”
“Then cut your jesses and burst your bridle! That child belongs with its rightful owner!”
Mother and Momma. Her name was Marie.
Reuben’s whisper was harsh. “This is your time, Allmon…”
No, wait, wait, wait—
“Allmon…”
Allmon shook his head.
“Be a man.”
Allmon drew a harsh, sudden breath. Then he straightened up and turned an unblinking eye on Reuben. He stared disdain down his nose. “I don’t need you telling me what to do.”
Reuben blinked then and reached out to place a palm firmly on Allmon’s chest. “No,” he said, shaking his head as if weary. “You don’t. Your mind was made up before I turned the corner. I can see that now. You are the superior man in every way.”
Allmon shrugged off his hand. “I got to go.”
Reuben made a faint gesture toward Allmon’s hand. “And now you have the keys to the kingdom.”
Allmon said nothing in response. He had already turned away to scan the massive parking lot for the Forge Mercedes, a silver fish in a lurid sea of luxury cars. First he limped along on his aching joints, then he was running through the pain to get where he knew he had to go, where he was meant to go, where his child was being held hostage. Reuben watched him weave unsteadily between cars. He muttered, “A late response is still a great response.” Then he turned his back and thumped his chest once to clear the phlegm, realizing that the after-parties were elsewhere and soon to commence. He grinned.
* * *
Henry stared over the dash at the undulating expanse of Forge Run Farm, the filly behind him in her trailer, Samuel asleep on the bucket seat of the dually, content in the farm dust and the animal dander. With some shock, Henry realized that despite the uproar of the day, the farm—this world he had created—was still in his possession and nothing could change that. Here was the two-hundred-year-old house, which had been the dream of the first Samuel; here was the crumbling fence and the perpetual stream. Here was the overgrown orchard and the old barns converted and stocked with horseflesh he had bred.
It struck him as preposterous, impossible, that in short order his family would be exposed and naked to the world, that the taproot name, from which all their brief names had sprouted like a season’s leaves, would be ridiculed as some kind of fraud or, worse, would become synonymous with the way things fall apart, how autumn follows on every fulsome summer. Henry replayed his choices at the track, including his abrupt decision to bring Samuel and reveal him to his father. Allmon was a man he barely knew. Henry had imagined himself as stepping out of his family like a man emerging from shadow. But now on the firm ground of the farm, his resolve wavered, his old truculent defenses ever at the ready: if any crime had been committed, it was his father’s doing, not his own. Yes, Henry had lied stupidly, but he’d merely been a prisoner of another man’s ideas. His father had been the progenitor of hate and disunion, his father would have had half the world hanging from the boughs of a holly tree, his father was the one who—
His own thinking degenerated to white noise in his mind.
He could no longer convince his most faithful audience, himself.
Henry looked around helplessly, his old passions like vestigial organs. They couldn’t fill the vacuum created by the lost generation. It was breathtaking: Once his daughter had been a little girl on this very ground, her ring finger crooked, her legs bandy, her face configured by irreplaceable, unrepeatable bones. She had held her hands to her hips in a particular way. She had frowned like this, tilted her head like that. She had emerged as a singular mystery, sui generis, from the womb of the woman who had once been his wife—a woman with red lips he’d met on the track, a woman who had left after many, many arguments, none of which were more important than the gum on the bottom of his shoe. He still recalled the set of his young wife’s chin and how the iris of her eye soon turned the color of dissatisfaction. Now the little girl they had created was vanished. Her death was a marvel, a mystery, the ultimate school.
Henry raised a trembling hand to his brow as if shielding his eyes, though evening’s evanescent light streamed from a distant eternity behind the truck. His heart beat terribly. How could life be so boring and terrifying and exhilarating and confounding all at once? Its contradictions did not seem possible. He felt so old suddenly. Yes, he was old. But this was newly unobjectionable. Cut the throat of puer aeternus and bury him in a vacant chamber of Henry’s heart.
He watched with a kind of bland, uneventful horror as years of ambition swirled and washed rapidly down the drain.
My God, he had to get out of the truck or he was going to have a stroke, be laid down in the dust like his father had been that autumn day so many years ago. He eased his road-weary bones out into the dwindling warmth of the day. He needed the fresh breeze to clear his mind and strengthen his body. He needed his feet on the ground; he needed, most of all, to think.
So now there was nothing between him and the land. He saw that imminent change was all around him. The ragged and unattended orchard could be curated, its trees trimmed and grafted to produce a bounty of apples again. That could be enough to slake the thirst of a thousand people, and maybe it would. The breeding operation could be slowed, or halted—yes, even halted—and some of the paddocks returned to pasturage. After all, this was the finest growing land in the country outside of Iowa, and treasure troves of produce could be cropped. Even their new, relatively small garden could feed many more than Samuel and himself. Maybe, when all was said and done, he would return some of the land to its original wildness, something his daughter had seemed to value. Land needed no purpose after all. Land was an end in itself. Now to the barns—his excitement rose, he realized he could use them as they were. He could shelter and reschool retired Thoroughbreds. He had the permanent wealth to do so; racing had never been a moneymaking venture for him. Forge Run Farm could be a place of renewal and rest, where something old and broken could become fresh again. The very idea filled him with sober joy.
Hellsmouth interrupted his planning. She was stamping her impatience on the aluminum floor of the Turnbow, jutting her nose against the glass of the window. She swung her truculent head toward him when he pulled the ramp and unhitched the swinging door. She was here in this world as much as he was, and he would do well to remember it.
As he guided her out—and how good it felt in his shoulders, his hands, his whole being to handle his animal, the way it had felt when he was a younger man and racing was new to him, when the adventure of life was still largely to come—Hell seemed to have grown a hand on the journey. She loomed over him, her head swiveling on the tower of her neck, taking the farm in round. An uncontained shiver looped across her withers and under her girth. This was her old playground, and she recognized it, so she wouldn’t come placidly. She was barking like a
seal, dancing up on springy legs that reminded Henry, not for the first time, of dark and knotty rose stems.
Good sense dictated that he install his champion in the foaling barn far from the wild stimulus of the fields, let her recalibrate to the freedom of the farm, a freedom near limitless against her life on the track. But she had other plans and pulled Henry across the brick chip lane to the old paddock where she had once nursed greedily, where she had gamboled as a weanling in the simple restraint of a nylon halter, where she had gazed across rumpled earth like the sides of green bells to the eastern mountains with their black interstitial valleys and glinting rivers. She knew this was where she belonged.
When Henry clipped her off the lead, Hell rocketed out into the field, her aluminum shoes blurring arcs that trampled timothy grass and tossed turf. Reaching the center of the paddock, she kicked out with the silliness of a goat, then jumped once and turned, her conformation showing out speed and stamina, the Remus and Romulus of her sport. She snorted, then gathered herself up and, with a triumphant leap, began to run. Henry reached for the top rail, suddenly terrified that she would drive herself through the fencing into the safety lane and reopen her chest or break her own bones. Instead, she cut savagely left at the first corner and traced a round in the falling light, beating a retrograde path, brightening in evening’s light and accelerating as she neared Henry like a heavenly body in egress. Her hooves reverberated into the roots of the trees.
Henry stepped away from the fence with his mind suddenly clear: If you closed every racetrack in the world, hung every bridle and threw open every paddock, horses would still race one another on the open plain. It was inevitable, undeniable, because their competition was innate. The greatest dreams of humans were nothing but clumsy machinations next to the natural ambition of animals.
Hell had barely slowed when Henry returned to the truck, where Samuel remained placidly asleep, exhausted by the excitement of the day. Henry drew up the bundled baby, but a question appeared suddenly in his mind, which had become like an empty room.
What if he had been born out on the tableland in a modest white farmhouse in Emerson, Nebraska, the child of landlocked Swedes, who told him, “This land will never make you rich. True wealth is in the hope for simple things. Son, work the land, dote on your children, and ease your elders into gentle deaths.”
Or, what if he had been born a fisherman in Mobile? What if he’d folded himself into his boat every morning and pressed out against the tide, trawling for tiny swimmers to feed to his neighbors, and did this every day for sixty years until his anonymous death, knowing nothing resembling worldly ambition, only the land and the sea and the land and the sea, and wanting nothing more?
But he, Henry Forge, had not been born into those lives. He had been born into this indelible life. This was his grandson against his chest and this was his diaper bag in his left hand. And this here was his kitchen door, which his father, that old colossus, had slammed again and again in frustration over the course of decades. Henry could not now bring himself to walk through that door, to reenter history. Not yet. Evening flooded everything. Final ruby light plunged across the pastures. It filled every corner of his senses. He had been favored by fate to live on this plot of land his entire life, as rooted as any plant. But for the plant there was no ambition, and so no madness into which it needed to descend to cut through the confusion of daily living, the crass noisemaking of everyday speech, the rapidity of time’s passage and its pseudolosses—what the human called its losses.
The flora and the simple fauna, they had no fathers, only genetic predecessors, and because they had no fathers, they had no stories, and because they had no stories, they didn’t suffer any notion of themselves. In the landscape behind his eye, Henry fashioned a prairie of purple coneflowers, lovely and indistinguishable. He imagined the absurdity of one flower asserting its singularity, its glory, yearning to stand a hard-won inch above its nearest neighbors, straining on its flimsy stalk, flailing its petals, whispering in a hoarse, pollen-choked voice, “Me! Me! Me!”
Ambition is a form of suicide if it kills the simple self.
He looked down into Samuel’s face. What do you know, Henry? His mind no longer howled with a grief that obscured fact; he had no more strength left to resist naked realization. There were galaxies in the body of every man and woman; Henrietta’s had gone unexplored. He had flung her life away before her death. And he had mistaken the black body for a beggar’s suit. Until today, until he had brought Samuel into the rain-washed open air of Churchill Downs, he had never rebelled against his father, not really.
What he knew could barely fill a teaspoon, and it looked mostly like hope: Samuel’s diaper would be dirty again shortly, he would wake once during the night, there would be a few more ear infections, then he would begin to crawl and come rounding along the el porch on a shiny red bicycle his grandfather had bought him, he would read many books full of useless information, then make love with a woman and have a child, succeed at something, fail at many more things, argue perhaps to the point of breaking with his own child, then stoop and shrivel and go slack on some hospice bed somewhere, his eyes wide with Lavinia’s disappointed wonder.
Still, Henry did not reach for the door. Though his body was exhausted—never more so—his mind was not fatigued. In his arms, Samuel was making the kittenish sounds of waking. In a minute or two, they would pitch headlong into a darkly blue night. But Henry’s race was not yet run. There was still something to be known, something that arrested his movement. His mind pressed forward, grappling for it; he could feel the ache of its muscular exertions.
He might be a fool, a climber, a dreamer, supremely guilty, maybe he was even evil, yet hadn’t he preserved the perfection of this land? Who else but the Forges and their ilk had done this, could do this? The poor of the earth were the tramplers of the earth, and that was the truth. Give them a beautiful thing and they would foul and wreck it. One last time, the old fire reasserted itself: Why should he, Henry, restrain himself? He was not the child of immigrants, not a fisherman, not a simple, unremarkable flower in a field. Look at what he had built; look at what he alone had made from the mud of his will and the mortar of his desire! If he was indeed a member of the animal kingdom—and he would grant that he shared something with the crude and base animal—why should he restrain himself when restraint was required of no other beast? The dogs rutted in the yard and the lions slaughtered the antelopes. The owl was as ruthless as the rattlesnake and so on and so on. Even the earth obeyed the demands of its nature: it snatched everything, absolutely everything, whether mountain or beast or daughter, back to its breast. Human beings alone were capable of greatness. Only they could even conceive of greatness. So he had stomped on necks, so he had used his daughter. He had grown rich in the wild capitalism of life! Those incapable of greatness despise greatness the most; theirs were the loudest voices denying its very possibility.
Father, we are uniquely capable of morality. We must be moral, because we can be moral.
He stood very still as the words settled like silt to the floor of his veins.
We can snatch from the air the abstractness of numbers, adding and subtracting and making logic from magic, and because we can, we do, and we must. We can build pyramids and sky-piercing towers, so we must. We can wrestle language from our grunting, so we must. We can map our physical mysteries with machines of our own making. We can classify the species of the earth, name every stone and streamlet. We can run a hundred miles, and we can walk on the face of the moon, so we must—and then we must go farther.
We can, from the chaos of existence, extract meanings, which do not exist. We can make ourselves philosophers and scientists and priests. We can construct our unnatural civilizations—we can, and therefore we must. To starve our genes is to honor our genes. With fear and loathing we can stand on the necks of our parents and refuse them. We can evolve from simple to complex. We can choose survival of the species over survival of the self. We can say
no to nature and form a conspiracy of doves.
We are uniquely capable of morality, therefore we must be moral. That is our nature.
* * *
Across miles of time, I am coming for you, Henry Forge, and I am coming to settle for my son. I’m taking from you what’s not yours, what I had no earthly business giving away. My fingers are shanks, my arms are lead pipes, my head is a cinder block to your skull. My life is death.
It’s the bullpen for you, Henry Forge.
Let me tell it to you straight. Let me open your fucking ears until they bleed. I’m going to rip your eyelids away. In your fancy fucking car, I’ve got a story to tell.
The holding cell is this: dumb, dirty, sick, tired, evil, bored motherfuckers—forty of them shoved into a cell built for fifteen. I’m a kid among men. It’s crazy, terrifying loud, sound of a cranked-up soap opera with bad reception over the wailing honky-tonk singer on the guard’s radio, and there’s so much talk, high-pitched crank chatter, two dudes fighting and someone yelling nonstop at the guards, begging and pleading, then talking shit, then begging again, and somebody’s sick, the noise makes your head spin. And the smell! You try to breathe without using your nose so you don’t retch—it’s cigarettes, urine tang, BO smell, whole place like a barnyard and shit, oh my God, the shit. Only two things nonhuman in this crowded, sweaty hellhole, concrete benches and a stainless steel toilet clogged with shit. You got to go so bad, you don’t think you shit since Cincinnati, but you’re not about to do that in front of these people. You know what happens. You’ve heard all the talk, half the brothers in Northside had gone up inside. So you know. And they’re all watching. Big-ass black Gs with hooded eyes and tattooed arms like trees, and white, meth-addled motherfuckers, strung out with open sores and scabs all over and mean, you can tell, like raw pitbull mean, a few wore-out men smoking or muttering or coughing up spit, but all of them keeping an eye on you, because nobody here is white with money, so you’re the lowest on the totem pole, just a kid, someone says,