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The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017
C. E. Morgan
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARAn American myth and a contemporary portrait of the scars of the past that run through a family, and of our desperate need to escape our history, to subsume it with pleasure – or to rise above it with glory.‘You and I are family. Blood and treasure. Listen to me, I created this world with my own two hands, and I am going to leave it all to you.’Hellsmouth, an indomitable thoroughbred filly, runs for the glory of the Forge family, one of Kentucky’s oldest and most powerful dynasties. Henry Forge has partnered with his daughter, Henrietta, in an endeavour of raw obsession: to breed the next superhorse. But when Allmon Shaughnessy, an ambitious young black man, comes to work on their farm after a stint in prison, the violence of the Forges’ history and the exigencies of appetite are brought starkly into view. Entangled by fear, prejudice, and lust, the three tether their personal dreams of glory to the speed and grace of Hellsmouth.A spiralling tale of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in shadow by the enduring legacy of slavery. A vital new voice, C. E. Morgan has given life to a tale as mythic and fraught as the South itself – a moral epic for our time.







Copyright (#ulink_4b87ec6b-3fda-5a4d-b4e3-85a33ddbdaa9)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2016
First published in the United States in 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2016 by C. E. Morgan
Map copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey L. Ward
Cover photograph © Shutterstock
Design by Anna Morrison
C. E. Morgan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following material:
‘How to Identify a Thoroughbred’ from The Jockey Club Registry, reprinted with permission of The Jockey Club. Copyright © 2016 The Jockey Club.
Secretariat’s measurements from the Daily Racing Form copyright 2016 by Daily Racing Form, LLC. Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007313266
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780007313280
Version: 2017-03-31

Dedication (#ulink_b13e8c0e-f9e9-5fb7-b618-95e6aa0fc885)
This book is dedicated to the reader.

Map (#ulink_604dbe2f-e559-5fc4-864c-93d201dbb4b0)



Epigraph (#ulink_a247b591-6121-5ad7-acc3-78761c2a2d53)
As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.
—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species
Contents
Cover (#u4f756e08-9a71-57bb-910e-87a90e172c2d)
Title Page (#u5553a4b7-bd60-55ce-9eec-a2ca8f8de2cc)
Copyright (#u86f0c3d8-3097-5fc5-b5f5-cc02de290baf)
Dedication (#u9537072c-be55-58f9-8c90-c5c442b0998a)
Map (#u537cca5e-06b1-591a-83ff-03f7c03949ca)
Epigraph (#udce121f7-2ad9-5230-82b6-124a990485db)
1
THE STRANGE FAMILY OF THINGS (#uda7011b0-82c9-5c45-ad86-a2b5c7946ad8)
INTERLUDE I (#u7aba5b1b-37fc-5859-bdf1-61d8557f976d)
2
THE SPIRIT OF LESSER ANIMALS (#u170a1ae5-7499-5751-849e-a3bfc0120e94)
INTERLUDE II (#litres_trial_promo)
3
NOTHING BUT A BURNING LIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
INTERLUDE III (#litres_trial_promo)
4
THE SURVIVAL MACHINE (#litres_trial_promo)
INTERLUDE IV (#litres_trial_promo)
5
HELLSMOUTH (#litres_trial_promo)
INTERLUDE V (#litres_trial_promo)
6
THE INTERPRETATION OF HORSES (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by C. E. Morgan (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


1
(#ulink_44c77f04-778b-5a6a-be9f-d825d101347e)
THE STRANGE FAMILY OF THINGS (#ulink_44c77f04-778b-5a6a-be9f-d825d101347e)
Your spirit will spread little by little through the whole great body of empire, joining all things in the shape of your likeness.
—SENECA
Henry Forge, Henry Forge!”
How far away from your father can you run? The boy disappeared into the corn, the green blades whisking and whispering as he raced down each canopied lane. The stalks snagged him once, twice, and he cried out like a wounded bird, grasping his elbow, but he didn’t fall. Once, he’d seen a boy break his arm in the schoolyard; there had been a bough-like crack of the thick bone snapping and when the boy stood, his arm hung askew with the bone protruding like a split ash kitchen spoon—
“Henry Forge, Henry Forge!”
Number one, I am Henry Forge.
His father’s voice echoed across the warped table of the earth, domine deus omnipotens, dictator perpetuo, vivat rex, Amen! The thick husks strained their ears toward the sound, but the boy was tearing across the tillable soil, soil that had raised corn for generations and once upon a time cattle with their stupid grazing and their manure stench. He was sick to death of cattle and he was only nine.
Number two, curro, currere, cucurri, cursus. I am forever running.
Silly child, he couldn’t know that the plants announced him, the flaxen roof of the corn dancing and shaking as he passed, then settling back to coy stillness, or that his father was not in pursuit, but stood watching this foolish passage from the porch. On the second story, a window whined and a blonde voiceless head protruded with a pale, strangely transmissive hand making gestures for John Henry, John Henry. It pounded the sill twice. But the man just remained where he was, eyes to his son’s headlong retreat.
The young boy was slowing now in the counterfeit safety of distance. He boxed the corn, some daring to feint and return, some breaking at the stalk. He didn’t care; his mind refused to flow on to some future time when redress might be expected or demanded. There was fun in the flight, fun borrowed against a future that seemed impossible now. He had nearly forgotten the bull.
Number three, Gentlemen of the jury, I am not guilty!
The corn spat him out. His face scraped by the gauntlet, he clutched handfuls of husk and stood hauling air with his hair startled away from his forehead. Here the old land is the old language: The remnants of the county fall away in declining slopes and swales from their property line. The neighbor’s tobacco plants extend as far as the boy can see, so that impossibly varying shades of green seem to comprise the known world, the undulating earth an expanse of green sea dotted only by black-ship tobacco barns, a green so penetrating, it promises a cool, fertile core a mile beneath his feet. In the distance, the fields incline again, slowly rippling upward, a grassed blanket shaken to an uncultivated sky. A line of trees traces the swells on that distant side, forming a dark fence between two farms. The farmhouse roofs are black as ink with their fronts obscured by evergreens, so the world is black and green and black and green without interruption, just filibustering earth. The boy knows the far side of that distant horizon is more of the bright billowing same, just as he knows they had once owned all of this land and more when they came through the Gap and staked a claim, and if they were not the first family, they were close. They were Kentuckians first and Virginians second and Christians third and the whole thing was sterling, his father said. The whole goddamn enterprise.
Number four, Primogeniture is a boy’s best friend.
He heard the whickering of a horse around the wall of the corn and sprang to the fence that separated Forge land from the first tobacco field belonging to the Osbournes. He scrambled over the roughcut rails. Casting back over his shoulder, he saw the proud bay head of a Walker turning the corner and darted to the first plants risen waist-high and crawled between two, prostrating himself on the damp, turned bed. His face pressed against the soil, which was neither red nor brown like bole when it stained his tattered cheek with war paint.
The horse and the man rounded the corner. The Walker was easy and smooth, head and neck supremely erect, its large eyes placid as moons with the inborn calm of its breed. It scanned its surroundings out of habit, slowing its pretty pace near the fence, then prancing alongside the timbers. A high tail jetted up like a fountain from a nicked dock, then streamed down overlaid pasterns almost to the ground. The tail trembled and betrayed the faintly nervous blood that coursed through the greater quiet of the horse.
“Hmmmm,” said its rider, loud enough for the boy to hear in his low, leafy bower. Filip.
Number five, This race was once a species of property. It says so in the ledgers.
The man sat as erect as the horse, his back pin-straight as if each vertebra were soldered to the next. One hand grasped the reins, one rested easy on his thigh. A bright unturned leaf obstructed the features of his face, but the boy could see the high polish of the head under dark and tight-kinked hairs. That head was turning side to side atop a rigid back.
“Aw,” said the man suddenly, then reined left, and with one dancing preparatory pace, the horse took the fence with heavy grace, and the startled boy breached the plants like a pale fish, diving deeper into the tobacco field. The horse didn’t follow, but paused at the lip of the field, dancing sideways, her ears perked for her rider’s voice.
“Mister Henry,” said Filip.
Henry scrambled away on his hands and knees.
“Martha White can catch you,” Filip said. “Think she won’t?” He waited, then, “I’ll catch you on my own two feet. Think I won’t?”
Henry could no longer tell where he was in the endless tobacco. He curled around the base of a plant and yelled, “I didn’t do it!”
“Oh, I know you ain’t killed that bull!” Filip hollered back.
“I swear!”
“I know it, you know it. Some other fool done it,” said Filip. “Now get out of them plants.”
“No!”
“Come on now …”
Henry rose on unsteady feet, looking like a refugee wader in the sea. “Father’s angry at me.”
The man shrugged a stiff shoulder. “Set him straight. The reasonable listen to reason.”
“He didn’t send you after me?”
“Nah,” said Filip. “I seen you light out like a fox on the run, and I made after you.”
The boy bit his lip, fiddling with the last tailings of his reserve, then picked his way through the plants to the edge of the field. Filip stared down over the sharp rails of his cheekbones, but did not incline his head as he reached down his large hand, fingers unfurling. White calluses stood out on his skin like boils.
“Where will we go?” said the boy, all suspicion and still calculating the odds of the gamble.
“Where you want to go to?” the man said.
“Clark County,” Henry said, the first place that came to mind.
“That right?” Filip said, and a dry laugh scraped out of his burleyed throat. The boy could not make out the meaning of that laugh.
“Step up,” he said, and Henry did.
Number six, If you live, you gamble. A necessary evil.
Swung up by Filip’s strength and his own leap, he scrambled his way onto the man’s lap, straddling the withers. The short, wide neck of the horse shuddered and trembled under him like a dreaming dog. From where he sat, he could see straight down over her black cob and nose to her broad velvetine nostrils.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Not yet. I’m going to roll me a cigarette first. Hold this,” said Filip, who drew a foil packet out of the breast pocket of his plaid shirt. “Huh, I ain’t got no papers,” Filip said, patting his pocket. “Want to ride to the store with me?”
“Sure,” Henry said, pressing tiny drops of blood from his knees into the bay’s neck. He painted them in with one finger and they disappeared into the body of the horse, which was red as deep as wine.
Filip gathered the reins, and Martha White backstepped and squared the fence.
“Up on her now,” said Filip, and when the horse sprang from its quarters, the boy clutched up high on her neck in alarm as the man inclined toward the boy’s back, and they sailed the fence.
“Don’t take me by the house!” cried Henry.
Filip reined hard to the left, and the mare switched back, so they followed a faint trace around the far side of the cornfield along the grassy farrow that separated the plants from the fencing. Henry could just see over the tops of the corn, which reached to his own chest and over the bobbing head of the horse. The tufted tops were plumed and entirely still save for one roaming breeze that grazed the surface like an invisible hand, meandering down from the house to the tobacco basin behind them. To their left ran the zigzagging split rail fence and in its shadow, the remnants of its predecessor. Built seventy years before, the fence had rotted down until it was subsumed by grass and soil. Now it showed only a faint sidewinding mound behind the younger fence.
Henry patted the mane of the horse. “Make her walk fancy,” he said.
Filip clicked twice and adjusted the reins and set the mare to a running walk, so her front legs appeared to labor, reaching and pulling the unbent back legs that boldly followed, her head rising and falling like the head of a hobbyhorse. The natural urge to run pressed hard against her stiff limbs, and in that dynamic tension her back neither rose nor fell, so her riders glided forward on her restraint as if on the top of a smooth-running locomotive. Henry leaned back against the wall of Filip’s chest.
“Does her head hurt?” said Henry, noting the jerky treadling of her head before him.
“Nah.”
“Does she want to run?”
“She ain’t never said.”
“She’s like a machine.”
“Huh.”
Number seven, Living beings are just complex machines.
They rode on in silence to where the creek discoursed about the southern edges of the property, forming cutbanks and small sandy half-submerged shoals amidst weeds and tall grasses and cane. Broad-trunked walnut and alder sprang up from the creek bed to shade it and to form a secret lane of the rocky waterway.
“Let’s jump the fence and ride down in the water so they can’t see us,” said Henry.
Filip said nothing.
Henry twisted his neck to find the man’s face. “Do it,” he said.
“Martha White don’t want to get her feet wet.”
The end of the field was approaching, the house loomed.
“I don’t want to go to the store anymore,” Henry whined just as, with a sudden gripping motion, Filip slapped the reins hard, his arms fitting over the boy’s like a brace over muslin.
“No!” But the Walker was bearing down into a gallop and the boy, unprepared, bounced painfully against the protruding pommel as they swerved hard around the corn’s edge to where his father waited on the far side. Henry cried out, struggling as the horse pulled up before John Henry, neck extended and ears flattened away from the kicking, flailing passenger on her withers.
John Henry stepped to the horse, his lips pressed together so they looked like pale scars.
“You tricked me!” Henry cried, twisting around in the saddle to strike Filip with the point of his elbow but baring his neck as he did, so his father snatched him off the saddle by the ruff of his shirt like a runt puppy, and he hung there, suspended, making a strangling noise, his hands grappling up for his father’s hands. He was dropped unceremoniously as the bay skittered to one side, sweeping Filip away.
“Nigger!” Henry cried.
“Be still!” said John Henry.
Number eight, Niggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggernig
Filip reined toward the stables, and the mare sauntered away slow and sinuous, and though Henry’s eyes were filling with tears and he could barely see, his mind scrambled for an association, the horse was like, the horse was like: something, someone, he couldn’t name how it moved away on its widemold hips, ass dimpling with sinuous inlaid muscle, though he knew it was feminine, yes: it moved like a woman from the rear.
His father yanked him up, his hands an old story.
“I didn’t do it!” Henry cried, but his mouth formed words he was not really thinking, his mind having been startled by the strange family of things.
“Up!”
He would not up; he made himself be dragged, forgetting the horse now, forgetting Filip’s lying, begging until his voice rose so high that his words destructed into a bleating cry.
Father dragged son across a broad swath of grass to the post by the old cabins, all the while unfastening his black belt with one hand. He struggled to cinch it around his son, but the boy puffed out his belly like a horse tricking a girth strap loose. John Henry just turned him around, face to the post, so all the air expelled in a woof.
“Undo that belt and believe me you will regret it,” John Henry warned. The boy’s hands sagged at his sides without any more fight, and his head fell forward, cheek scraping the post. He cried without moving.
John Henry placed one hand firmly on his son’s crown. “Do you realize you might have died today? The foolish thing you did … I’m going to let you stand here a while and think about what that would have done to your mother.”
Henry said nothing.
“When I come back I’m going to whip you,” his father said, “but not until you’ve had a chance to stand here and think. Do not touch that goddamn buckle, boy.”
“But I didn’t do it,” Henry parleyed.
John Henry narrowed his eyes and said with thorny quiet, “You’re a liar, and that makes you an embarrassment to me.”
The boy went to cry or speak.
“I gave you that mouth. I’ll tell you when to open it.”
He puckered his lips in a tiny sphincter of sorrow, and then his father was gone.
The scotched and furrowed pole had stood for more years than the boy could count. It was half as tall and nearly as thick as a man, long debarked and burnished by the years, its length seasoned by tears and blood and weather, but oh what did it matter, he was strapped like a pig to a spit, but he didn’t do it, he didn’t go onto the Miller property, where the bull stood with its
Number nine, Man shall rule over all the animals of the earth.
head turned away, utterly still, as if sleeping on its feet the way a horse does, not moving an inch—not for Henry’s creeping along the tall grass, not for his striking of the match—until the firecracker burst with a pop and a scream. Then the bull took one startled step forward and slumped stiffly to the ground, its chest seizing and its back legs twitching like electric wires, breath hissing out of its lungs like air escaping a tire.
John Henry was back, standing over him, casting him in shadow. He was broad and red to the coppery blondness of his son, but they were clearly of a kind, bound and separate as two pages in a book.
“I want you to listen to me well,” he said, the tart tongue of a crop gathered up in a hand lightly freckled by middle age. “I have a duty toward you, just as you have a duty toward me.”
“Father …,” low, imploring.
“No son of mine would ever lie to me.” He set his feet apart. “I don’t care, Henry, that you killed an animal today. An animal is just unthinking matter. I’m not sentimental about that. But you didn’t just kill an animal, you destroyed another man’s property. Bob Miller’s family has lived on that farm for three generations. Do you think he values his land? Ask yourself if we value ours. If he places value on land that bears an animal as relatively worthless as beef cattle and milk cows, how much more then do we value the land we’ve stewarded twice as long? Our crop is our family. So when you behave in a manner that’s beneath us, when you act the fool, then you shame a long line of men that is standing behind you, Henry, standing behind you watching you always.” Then he said, “I can only hope you’re listening to me. You have no idea what a man sacrifices for his son.”
He reached down and tugged the shorts from the boy’s hips, so they pooled in a khaki heap around his ankles. His white underpants were sweated through, and the crack of his bottom showed a dark line through the cotton.
“Today I’m not whipping my son, just an animal. Because that’s how you’ve behaved.”
Henry pressed his torn cheek to the pole, his eyes bugging behind the lids. But the blow did not come. His father, ever the attorney, asked, “Do you have anything to say in your own defense?”
To this question, Henry craned his neck wildly over his shoulder, his eyes half-lidded against the coming blow, and cried,
Number ten, I’ve hated you since I was in my mother! Sic semper tyrannis!
“I am not guilty!”
John Henry raised the crop and struck his son.
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 August 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. Now there was a slight breeze, the curtains moved, the sun sank to a sliver, and in the last light bats swarmed the eaves, fleet and barely weighted and screeching smally. Somewhere, an animal called for its mate. A scale tipped. Then it was dark.
The boy lay on his stomach in his bed. He wasn’t sure if he’d been sleeping or not. The light no longer played against the thin film of his eyelids, and his mother had returned. When she tugged the lamp cord, the room flooded with warm light. Henry made a small petulant sound, turning his face to the black window. When she didn’t reach out to him, he turned back to see a slender finger wagging in gentle reprimand. His mother wore a pale dressing gown belted tight under her small breasts, and the curls on her blonde head had retired to limp strands in the heat.
Henry only eyed her sullenly.
Inclining her head to one side and staring intently with wide dark brown eyes, she raised her hands palms up at her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” Henry mumbled.
She bent further to see his mouth. Her brows drew in, folding the pale skin between them, her gaze swallowing him.
Talk, she signed.
No talk, he signed back with the hand that lay curled by his chin, the gestures terse and incomplete, more like flicking than signing.
She scooted forward off the chair and lay down on her side, a sylph, so he had to hold himself back from falling into her. He found the scent of faded perfume and talcum powder and something on her breath he could not identify, but it was not unpleasant, like graham crackers or creamed coffee. She touched the nape of his neck and the top of his back, but not lower, where crisscrossing wales had risen along his waist and lower still, where split raw flesh like a red rope followed the crack of his bottom.
You could have died, she signed with a sad and clownish face, then made her hands flip and die on the mattress.
He shrugged, staring resolutely at the mattress, refusing her. The silk of her dressing gown rippled and washed as she breathed her loud, awkward breaths, the material falling like water from her crested hip to a pool on her inner thigh.
You don’t care about me, she signed, and fingered the track of an invisible tear from the inside corner of her eye to her lip.
He shrugged. “Father says I talk too much.”
She shook her head against the mattress, a pin curl bobbling loose across her penciled brow.
“He says my mouth is my Achilles heel.”
Am I not pretty enough to talk to? she signed, her eyes sparkling, her lip thumbed out.
“Talk with Father if you want to talk,” he whined, and his aim was true. Her face evened slightly of expression, a white cloth ironed. But when Henry saw the sudden stony and monkish reserve that marred her face, he conceded. His father had only learned the simplest signs.
He signed, Okay.
She brightened, but before a word was shaped by her hands, he began to cry raggedly. “It hurts.”
Nodding, one toe whispering in nylon over his instep, her hand caressing the air above the broken and welted skin, where each thewing lash had landed. The whole of his body was concentrated in the concave of his back and between the cheeks of his bottom, where the painful lines his father had drawn all swelled together in a hot rosette. The pain rose and fell in a syncopation against his breath and the regular beat of his blood. He would not be able to shit without pain for two months.
“He hurt me,” he cried softly. His mother scooted against him now, all silk to his pain. She kissed him on the nose.
Darling boy, she signed, Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you.
“I hate him,” he said, tears flooding his eyes.
She pursed her lips. She signed, Blood waters the vine.
“When I have children, I’ll never be mean to them,” he spat. “Never.” But when he tried to imagine his children, his only reference was himself. There would simply be more of him, and then he would assume his position in the line his father spoke of, that concatenation formed in the begotten past, one that wouldn’t end with him. It.
He wanted to think about It, but he was so tired and the aspirin was working, and his mind kept slewing free, then knocking to rights again with a jolt, and always his mother was there, gazing on him with eyes as deep and dark as mouths. He drifted and sensed her gentle touch on the lines and curves of his face—the ridge brow that would soon emerge from its soft recess, the jaw that would widen like his father’s under fine cheekbones, a proud nose, all markers of those men residing in him, forming rings in his bones, rings in the family tree: John Henry by Jacob Ellison Forge out of Emmylade Sturgiss, and Jacob by Moses Cooper Forge out of Florence Elizabeth Hardin, and Moses by William Iver Forge out of Clara Hix Southers, and William by Richmond Cooper Forge out of Florence Beatrice Todd, and Richmond by Edward Cooper Forge out of Lessandra Dear Dixon, and Edward by Samuel Henry Forge out of Susanna Lewellyn Mason, and it was Samuel Forge who had come through the Gap in the old time in the old language:
He was raised up on the graded slopes of Virginia, where the Forge clan had resided a hundred years on a piedmont tobacco farm, far east of the mysterious, canopied wildernesses. But the Old Dominion was too small, too tame for a man like Samuel Forge, and Virginia was fighting for a freedom already hemmed and hedgerowed, so he thought his hands empty despite his wealth, and his restless eye turned to the wooded West. He set out for that expanse, leaving behind for now the woman who had borne his son, Edward, taking with him only a Narragansett Pacer he had raised from a colt and a bondsman he had bought for $350 on Richmond’s Wall Street, younger than himself but stronger, fine-speaking, and useful. The black rode a stock roan with feathering over its thick draft pasterns and followed behind, his flintlock rifle strapped along his leftside flap. They crossed the bucolic piedmont, heading west along well-worn roads, over the first blue ridges that wrinkled and buckled up from the rocky flats, until the wide roads narrowed and sparsed to a trace like a roughspun thread through the wilds. The cultivated world of Virginia dimmed to a hum, then fell silent, replaced by the ungoverned noise of hardwood forest. Beyond those first beckoning ridges with their white mist over black deciduous interiors was the promise of infinite land. Forge and his slave both settled into their saddles and checked their rifles. Beyond the last fort they encountered a few starveacre farms with straggling corn patches and children outfitted in woolen rags like worn poppets with yarn hair, unschooled heads atop churchless bodies. A half day beyond these, they encountered a pack of dogs run off from slaughtered families in distant cabins, the dogs now roaming the trace as the bison once had, shaggy and grinning. An acrid sliver of cooking smoke here or there. The sound of chopping wood far beyond the steep escarpments of trees and rocky soil. One day they rode beneath a parrot escaped from its filigreed past, perched now on a chestnut limb, counting one, two, three. Then nothing, nothing but an ever-narrowing passageway through interminable wilderness. They rode on, the black behind the white, neither speaking. The road grew rough as it went sidewinding up the ridges of rock, wet with lichen and moss, and down into notches narrow and dank as graves, the wood and many generations of leaves rotting there as midden. They rode on. Upon besting the highest ridges, the great dissected plateau extended before them, long ridges baring strata of the earth, endless green and blue and gray under the augmenting sky. When the valleys sometimes widened for rills and rivers, the land blossomed bright in sunlight and thronged with birds. There the men would rest and water the horses and then ford the rivers, the last ferry having been many waterways ago.
They took to sleeping on opposite sides of the same tree, their backs to the bark, half-awake even in their deepest slumber. The slave spared one eye for Cherokee and Forge an eye for Shawnee. And every morning they resumed their westward trek, sometimes leading the horses along by their bridles, sometimes mounted and poured flat over the saddles to evade the low raftery of trees. They climbed and weaved and scrambled and hacked, their senses alert for natives. When they had struggled their way through the worst of the trace and were within hope of the valley called Powell’s, a man without a horse came staggering out of a crook in the path, and they stood their own horses in amazement as the man took no notice of them at all, but walked past with a torn burlap satchel and a dressing knife, staring straight ahead with wild eyes and murmuring child’s talk as he went. Forge tightened the grip on his rifle and spurred on, but the bondsman turned and watched until the man was out of sight, and a long time after.
They came to the Gap in the afternoon, easily traversing the six level miles before it and watching the vast pinnacle loom to their right, the shallower ridge to the left and the low curtsy between. They found a stream and a cave in that open land, and they passed as quickly as possible, and though they did not see any natives, the natives saw them. They rode through the saddle passage and into the hot and humid hills that redoubled their pleating on the far side, so the trail rose and fell with maddening redundancy with no reprieve for days, and their fear was like pain. A horse was snakebit while foraging, and they bled the horse and waited three long days until he finally took the bit again. Then they continued and the next day found a scalped dog in a field of fiddle ferns, a hound. They buried it beneath a sepulchre of geodes and for another week saw no other signs of travelers, only bear, wolf, fox, and rabbit, and at night heard the womanly cries of wildcats.
Finally the land eased, calmed, and they walked in expansive sunlight through a glade. Approaching the crest of one of the last great hills, Forge stopped and gazed back over the fraught land they’d traveled, where in a year’s time he would bring his belongings, his will the windlass by which all the packhorses and the children and the slaves and the mules would be hauled across the mountains. On this last big hill, Forge finally spied the knobs that announced the end of the mountains, and they made for them.
Beyond the knobs, they discovered a transylvanic broadening of the land, where it rolled out its high shale hills and sloped to a distant river they could not see but expected. Forge stopped on this high meadow and reached down, scraping the soil with his finger, his heart stalling at the thin yellow soil reminiscent of clay. His slave said nothing; there was still a ways to go before they reached their destination. Forge remounted and slipped his feet into the irons that had borne him across two hundred miles of agony, and shortly they arrived at the river that snaked three hundred feet below its upper limestone cliffs. They wondered at the sheer drop and then clambered down the palisades, the horses shying and sinking into their quarters as the trail sank, the day and the heat fading. They passed the exposed musculature of the plateau’s rockbed, loose limestone shedding where cleft plates had formed the canyon; the horses stumbled on these shed innards as they walked the barely hewn path, blowing air and straining. At the cool base of the canyon, they swam the green river and remounted the ramparts on the far side. When they finally regained the summer day far above the river, they had passed the last great impediment west of the mountains, and their destination was closing. They were in Lexington by nightfall of the next day.
But there was a bustling at this outpost and cabins with yards neatly set, and women walked there in chattering pairs on land already parceled and named, so spurred by dissatisfaction, Forge set out northeastward, and they rode quickly on the level forest with its occasional meadows of clover. They saw no one, though they followed a faint path broken largely by hooves. Soon, the underbrush grew denser all around until they dismounted and were forced to reblaze the trail.
They crossed streams thick with fish and passed through groves of maple and black ash and finally came to a river they had heard of, though they veered south from the settlements there. They passed an outlying chimneyless cabin by a stream, where a man named Stoner offered them black bread and cream, and then there was nothing more that spoke of enclosure or obligation or entrapment or civilization. Forge’s blood rose and in a few hours’ time, they came upon a gently wending stream that fed a long brake of cane, ideal for battening cattle, with a broad swath of level land to the north. The two men rode east along the prattling tongue of the stream until it slipped deep beneath black lips to an aquifer mouth. In another half mile the even land sloped gradually down to another stream and rose again in the far distance. The men dismounted at the curb of this vast bowl. Their overrun horses stared straight ahead beside them, wasted, their eyes enormous in the shrunken frames of their heads.
Forge raised one hand to his sunburned brow and gazed out over the vast tract of land. Then he turned to the man beside him, nodding and smiling. “This is the land I’ve waited a lifetime to find,” he said.
The slave, who was called Ben but named Dembe by a mother he could not remember, did not need to shield his eyes as he gazed out over the woodland with its streamlets and springs gushing lustily through the dark bedrock.
“A bit karsty,” he said. “Perhaps we should turn back.”
Forge threw back his head and laughed, then he bent at the waist and snared the lush rye grasses in his hands, reminded once again of why he had brought his favorite slave instead of one of his younger brothers—to properly scout a land only dreamed of, to protect Forge’s life at the expense of his own, and to amuse him.
A rough, three-bayed cabin was erected next to the stream that came to be known as Forge Run. This remained the dwelling of Samuel Forge for seven years, then became a cabin for slaves when a team of English masons built a new stone house with two stories, as many staircases, gable-end chimneys, and paned windows. But this house shivered thirty years later when the earthquake made the pit silos collapse like old drifts, when Forge Run splashed out of its shallow banks, covering the corn and standing the startled cattle in six inches of slate water, so they bawled down in alarm at their vanished pasterns. When the water withdrew, the left side of the stone house had settled strangely with one shoulder slumped, and it was soon leveled, and the settler’s cabin too. The new Forge home was built two hundred yards north of the stream, a house formed from thousands of pounds of red brick fired by slaves on the land, who packed clay and fired kilns for months. When it was complete, the new house was hardier than its stone predecessor, with a black tile roof and a protruding el porch on its southern side that gazed out over the fields and the creek. Its interior moldings were stained dark, the walls dun, scarlet, and robin’s-egg blue with double-hung windows on all sides, and small ellipse fanlights along the eaves. The sun rose from across the bowl every morning and sparked its many windows, then peered down from high angles all afternoon, so that the house did not appear like a house at all but only a pitch stain on the green fields, and then in the evening, a wide, red, optimistic face. This house stood without complaint through the abandonment of corn for hemp, the building of stone fences by Irish masons, the arrival of neighboring families, the War when Morgan’s men camped alongside the creek and requisitioned all the cattle and horses, then the eventual reintroduction of corn, the selling of many of the original three thousand acres, and the getting up and dying of seven generations. In this house, Henry Forge was born and raised.
The wheals on his back soon faded to a faintly risen road map of pink, then white, then disappeared altogether. He never once placed a foot in the Miller bull yard again, but settled his debt for the bull’s life with a year of remunerative labor in the milking shed. He spent the crisp September mornings in the tie-stall barn, where the dung stench crowded out the clean air as smoke fills a burning room. God, he hated the cows with everything in him. He shuddered when he first gripped the swollen teats, extruding streams of warm milk that whined in the bottom of a tin bucket. He refused to rest his cheek on the hide of the cow as the farmer’s three girls did while they milked, but craned his neck to the side to keep from brushing against the distressing mass of the animal. He endured this indignity every day.
On a September afternoon, when the calves’ seventy days of nursing were through, it was finally time for weaning. The youngest Miller showed him how it was done—a girl of seven with violently red hair, a face mottled with freckles, and knees as fat as pickle jars. She stuck her little fingers into the mouth of a skinny black calf and looked up at Henry, her own mouth a small O of delight. “This is my favorite part,” she said. “I wish I could stick my whole arm in there.” She motioned with her free hand for him to do the same. His calf took his fingers into its urgent mouth, and Henry fought the desire to snatch his hand back, but let it stay, worked and pulled by that alien, suckling muscle.
“Pull them down,” said the little girl, whose name was Ginnie. They guided the calves to their waiting buckets until their hands and the calves’ mouths were bent into new milk. Then Henry slipped his fingers free, and the calf sputtered the white milk, foaming it. This was repeated again and again until the calves finally drank willingly from the bucket. Henry wiped the slime and milk onto his jeans and stared at the foam-spattered face of the calf. It was pathetic how the teatlorn creature so easily traded its mother for a bucket.
“The only thing better than cows,” sighed Ginnie, “is Corgis. The big ones. With tails.”
Henry just moved on to the next calf. The Holstein’s baby black turned a glossy red as a chilling evening light slanted into the crib, casting sudden, severe black shadows across the barn floor. Late autumn brought these shadows early now. The lemony light of summer was done, the fruits were overripe or rotten, the leaves sapped to ocher. The corn stalks were knived and soon, in the fields, the first frost would stiffen any forgotten remainders, encasing them in ice. Staring at this light, Henry turned ten.
Ginnie said, “Henry, are you gonna get married?”
Henry made a face. “Someday, maybe, I don’t know.”
“Let’s you and me get married!”
“You? No way, you’re ugly.”
“I am not!”
Henry sighed. “When I get married, I’m going to marry a beautiful woman. My father says not to waste energy on ugly girls.”
Great dollop tears formed in Ginnie’s eyes. “A pretty girl won’t be half as fun as me!” she whined, but Henry was distracted by the blooms of his breath in the suddenly icy barn air.
“When did it get so cold in here?” he said, jogging to the tack wall, where his winter coat hung from a shaker peg. Through a keyhole knot in a wallboard, he fisheyed the farm, which was now a snowglobe of white interrupted by the dark shape of the calves grown tall. Not so long ago, they had gamboled alongside their mothers, but now stood in staggered, snowy groups. As Henry watched, the dark of the winter wasteland crept over them. Ginnie, busy shoveling manure in a crib, seemed to have forgiven him and said, “Maybe you can stay late today, and we can play?” She eyed him with sneaky delight. “We can pretend your farm is a wicked kingdom, and you’re a baby I save from the wicked king!”
“Ginnie, I’m too old to play.” Henry yanked a woolen cap down over his copper hair and was moving out the barn door when something was hurled against the back of his jacket. A cow patty.
He said nothing, it would only encourage her.
“I’ll throw more!” Ginnie cried with the passion of young love, which had grown positively anguished as winter warmed under a restless trade wind. When Henry didn’t look back or even acknowledge her, she came charging out of the barn with more manure in her hands, but was stymied by snow melting into mud. Dirty remnants of winter remained draped like old, tattered white cloth all about the farm.
“Henry!” she called, as he was moving steadily down the lane peeling off his hat and coat and breaking a spring sweat. The air was raucous and thick with birdsong, the afternoon’s light refracted through a veil of pollen. In the field to their left, which bordered the road, the male calves were now cattle, sturdy on their legs and fattening. They chewed their cud with the resignation of age.
Ginnie was panting along behind Henry. “You know what’s next for them? You know what’s next, Henry Forge?”
Henry risked a glance back and, grinning madly, Ginnie drew a finger across her throat, her eyes wide.
He rolled his eyes. “I have to go, Ginnie. I have lessons with Father in five minutes.” The sun was blistering his already red neck.
“Well, my daddy says your daddy thinks his shit doesn’t stink! And I think your lessons are boring and stupid!” Ginnie was falling behind now, attempting to scrape ashy, sun-dried manure from the instep of one boot. There were sweat beads on her upper lip, and she was flushed the color of a strawberry.
Henry turned on her. “Stupid? I study Latin and Greek, math, philosophy—”
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
“Yeah, you don’t even know what that is.”
Henry Forge left Ginnie on the side of the road in defeat. She watched as a late Indian summer sun slung his shadow out before him, and just as his feet touched the far side of the country road that separated their farms as surely as any fence, just as Henry turned eleven, she cried out, “Henry Forge, don’t you ever have any fun?”
John Henry: Close the door, son.
Henry: Yes, sir.
John Henry: All the way.
Henry: Yes, sir.
John Henry: Have you brought your translation?
Henry: I have, but … I was trying to figure out a word, and I—
John Henry: A simple yes or no will suffice.
Henry: Yes.
John Henry: Did you translate like an automaton, or did you actually use your mind?
Henry: I did.
John Henry: You did what?
Henry: I did use my mind.
John Henry: So, tell me—is man the measure of all things? Henry:
John Henry: Since you’re never at a loss for words, I have to assume that you’ve come unprepared. Henry, these works can’t be read like your modern claptrap. They’re valuable only insofar as your mind is engaged. Novel thought to those who think there’s value in a pretty phrase that means absolutely nothing. Can you define “aesthete”?
Henry: No, sir.
John Henry: The fool who finds value in the merely pretty.
Henry: Mother likes pretty things.
John Henry: I love your mother, but I’ve never met a truly educated woman. Now, I’ll ask you one more time—is man the measure of all things?
Henry: Socrates says no …
John Henry: And why is that?
Henry: Because, the wind can’t be cold and hot at the same time?
John Henry: Because it is impossible to determine anything absolutely based on one man’s perceptions, which are subjective. Tell me more.
Henry: And if some men are mad …
John Henry: If man was the measure of all things, then the perceptions of madmen would necessarily be true, and that’s nonsense. So, tell me, what would result if an individual man thought he was the final arbiter of all things?
Henry: Chaos?
John Henry: Yes. Sanity begins with knowing your place.
Henry: But if people wrote all these books, then they made up all the ideas. Doesn’t that make them the measure of everything they’re saying they’re not the measure of?
John Henry: Don’t interrupt me, Henry. I swear, your mouth is a millstone around your neck.
Henry: That doesn’t make sen—
John Henry: Stay on point!
Henry: Well, I like it when he says dreamers are the best kind of men.
John Henry: Why does that not surprise me? Henry, you spend too much time in your mind. Do you want to wallow in daydreams, or do you actually want to understand the order established by minds greater than your own?
Henry: But great men cut new paths. They think outside the box.
John Henry: No—great men pursue excellence, but the standards of excellence were established by those who came before them. You have no knowledge not granted to you by others. Henry, you’re always hijacking a principled conversation with nonsense and daydreams, and it’s a result of spending so much goddamned time with your mother. She coddles you too much.
Henry: I just want to know how to know.
John Henry: Then I’ll share with you what my tutor would have said to me if I’d had the impertinence to pester him. Real knowledge begins with knowing your place in the world. Now, you are neither nigger, nor woman, nor stupid. You are a young man born into a very long, distinguished line. That confers responsibility, so stay focused on your learning. And as far as your imagination is concerned, it should be relegated to secondary status. You’ll never have an original thought, never be great, never invent anything truly new, and this shouldn’t bother you one bit. There’s nothing new under the sun. You just need to know your place. It’s unexciting, but the truth is often unexciting.
Henry: And what exactly is my place?
John Henry: Your place is as my son.
Henry: But … what if …
John Henry: Goddammit, Henry, don’t be indirect.
Henry: But what if I have an opinion that’s different from your opinion?
John Henry: Then we can’t both be right, and one of us must be wrong.
And who would that be?
Henry: Me?
John Henry: The first stage of wisdom.
Henry:
Two weeks later, his father taught him to drive.
They were running errands on an October afternoon strangely stagnant and thick under a slant sun the color of ripe tomatoes. By the time they reached the tracks by the Paris depot, their shirts were suckered to their backs, the black hood of the sedan turned into a boiling plate. The air was dusty with the scent of old leaves and the faint cloying scent of a decaying animal somewhere close by.
When his father killed the engine, Henry asked him a question that had been bothering him for a long while. “Father, what made you want to go into the legislature?”
John Henry considered the approach of the train before replying. “It was a natural progression,” he said. “There are so few well-educated men, we’re all but obligated to serve the public. The world is nearly overrun by idiots these days. There are more white niggers in this world than one can know what to do with.”
“Are there any women in the legislature?”
John Henry scoffed. “A few. But the core of femininity is a softness of resolve and mind; reason is not their strong suit.”
The train interrupted. Henry watched in silence as the gray and canary-yellow coal cars clacked by, coal heaped above the open tops of the cars, the black nubs glossy in the sunlight. The train, as it rolled against the rails, raised a great clanging noise and the slenderest breeze.
His voice loud against the clattering, John Henry said, “What you don’t yet comprehend about women, Henry, is a great deal.” He stared at the cars as they flipped past. “I wouldn’t say that they’re naturally intellectually inferior, as the Negroes are. They’re not unintelligent. In fact, I’ve always found little girls to be as intelligent as little boys, perhaps even more so. But women live a life of the body. It chains them to material things—children and home—and prevents them from striving toward loftier pursuits.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to be born a woman,” Henry said.
His father just laughed, and for a moment, Henry found himself unwillingly laughing along. But he stopped suddenly, wary. He distrusted his father’s laugh and its magnetic draw, how it always seemed to bubble up out of a secret his father possessed, one that might be at Henry’s expense.
With a sudden cessation of noise, the train’s caboose tailed into the trees, snaking into Fayette County, and John Henry said, “It’s time you learned to drive.”
“It’s against the law,” Henry objected. He was only thirteen.
“I trust I can keep you out of federal prison,” John Henry said, his brow arched. “Filip wastes untold time and money chasing after your mother’s every whim, and I can’t be bothered to keep her entertained. I’m certainly not going to hire her a driver. No need when there’s a young man in the house.”
Nodding, Henry said, “Yes, sir.”
“But don’t ever touch the vehicle unless your mother asks you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The older man exited the automobile, stretched briefly with a growling sound of a bear come out of hibernation, and walked around to the passenger side.
With nerves wicking his mouth dry, Henry slid into his father’s spot, perched on the front springs of the seat, gripping the wheel and toeing about beneath the dash with both feet.
“First, second, third, fourth,” said John Henry, pointing. “Off the gas while on the clutch, shift, on the gas again. It’s not difficult.”
Henry grasped the stick.
“Depress the clutch, turn the ignition.” He did this.
“Clutch down, first.” He did this too.
“Gas, and slow off the clutch.” The car moved forward on a halting stream of fuel as if it were shy, and they crossed the tracks with an uneven rattle.
“More gasoline.”
Henry pressed, but the car emitted a wounded screech, then barked and quit. For a moment there was only quiet, but Henry could feel the temperature in the car rising, then his father snapped, “Henry—this isn’t that difficult.”
One more attempt, barely breathing as they crept haltingly down the road, closer to where the town evanesced house by house into the rural district.
“Faster.” He pressed the gas and the engine sang. They drove for one mile, Henry barely blinking and his eyes stinging, accosted by the late sun.
“I’m considering taking you out of school,” said John Henry suddenly.
“What!” He hazarded a glance at his father. “Why?”
“Because your school is mediocre. The students are mediocre.” A curt wave of one hand, then John Henry crossed his arms over his chest. “And things are happening right now in the courts. There are changes in the air, changes I don’t want you exposed to. I swear the Negroes seem intent on delivering themselves to hell.” He passed a hand over his heavy brow. “These men who always seek to improve things rarely know much about human nature. One smart monkey can find his way out of the cage, but that doesn’t make him any less a monkey. And, naturally, the other monkeys follow suit. They never realize until they leave the cage that they were warm and well fed in the cage.”
Henry had no idea what his father was talking about. “You’re not going to send me to school in Atlanta, are you?” he said, his stomach creeping up around his heart. He’d long dreaded the thought of boarding school, of separation from his mother for an excellence whose grammar he could not yet parse, that he was just beginning to speak.
John Henry said, “Your mother has never wanted that. And I’ve considered her request, because I pity her predicament. You’ll be her only child, you know that. I’ve been considering a tutor instead.”
“But you already tutor me.”
“I’m not truly qualified. You’re not a child anymore. Your mother can prepare a decent meal, but we have Maryleen because Lavinia isn’t a cook. It’s no different.”
At the edge of a tobacco field the car stalled out, snapping them forward in their seats. John Henry sighed, but louder this time, and Henry flinched hard under the whip of judgment. God, how he hated his father, loved him, hated him—regardless, all the tangled roots of his inherited heart grew forever in the same direction: I am his.
The boy stuttered out into first again and the car juddered and spun its tires as it progressed. John Henry finally reached for the wheel, but Henry blurted out, “No, I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”
“Facta non verba,” his father said, and the boy looked at him and thought—not for the first time—that his pronunciation was not all it could be. And then he stalled again.
“Pull over, Henry,” said his father, and they switched places yet again. John Henry was releasing the parking brake when, suddenly, in a tone from which all irritation was wiped, he said, “All I really want is to be proud of you.” Then, with uncharacteristic hesitation, as if testing the words on his tongue: “There’s nothing more vulnerable than a man with everything to lose. Don’t disappoint me.”
A man reasons his way to irrational numbers. It was a strange paradox. Mother’s beauty was never-ending, thus never-repeating, it went on and on and on, an irrationality. Her face was a beautiful math, a womanly number without equivalent fraction: the depth of her brown eyes, which were cavernous in her silence; the sublime distance between pupils, a neat third of the width from cheek to cheek; the plucked half-shell brows, each hair articulate and precise against pale, powdered skin, which was lineless; a nose subtly dished with a bridge as delicate as the handle on a teacup; the philtrum, just a gentle scoop over bowed lips the color of Easter silk, lips that even Plato would have kissed. Perfect.
But they couldn’t speak, and the fact never failed to startle. Her physical debility was like a gash across a masterwork, never more plain than when she spoke with her hands, her face contorting with agonized efforts to make herself known—the brow reaching, the eyes bright as solariums, the lips wrenched up. Then her face embarrassed Henry; it became the hysterical face of an actor without any vanity and not the placid face one would want from a mother.
Mr. Osbourne.
He snapped alert from his daydream. “What, Mother?”
Drive me to Osbourne? She signed. Maryleen made lunch for them.
Dean Osbourne was their neighbor across the bowl, a short, black-haired man who’d long despaired of the farm he’d inherited, making day wages as a police officer until he became deputy sheriff, farming only at night and on weekends. But he’d been shot one year ago at the First County Bank, and just when the town was collecting half-dollars to pay for a mahogany casket and a flag, he’d rallied and survived. But he’d never gone back to his fields. Now there was talk of morphine and erratic behavior, and the seedman at the store said there’d been no winter order. Someone mentioned Thoroughbred horses.
It was a short drive down the frontage road to the lane that curved around the bowl to the Osbourne place. As Henry fanned his hands over the wheel and scanned the road, Lavinia sat easily beside him, her hands a gentle, quiet knot in her lap. Henry had barely enough time to feel familiar at the wheel before they were parked in front of the Italianate cottage, Lavinia slipping from the car, picnic basket in hand.
But her drop of the iron knocker drew no reply. Henry stepped around her and rapped up and down the door. After half a minute’s pause, he turned the knob and pressed the old door as his mother bent behind him, so two light heads peered samely round the jamb. The house was cool in the shade of the porch balcony, the remnants of night still present in the day. But in the quiet, there was some vibration adrift. Lavinia felt it with the soles of her small feet.
She prodded Henry with one finger to his back.
“Mrs. Osbourne?” he called, all hesitation as he tiptoed into the room, his mother a brief shadow trailing behind him. A great thump distressed the floorboards of the upstairs and sent tiny tailings of dust spiraling down.
“Mrs. Osbourne!” he called louder now, but again no reply. His mother tugged at his shirt in inquiry, but Henry shrugged her off, pointing upward.
They had just reached the broad newel of the staircase when a voice barely muffled by its distance from the pair cried out, “Betsy! Betsy! Please, I’m fucking begging you—Fuck!” And then the voice unleashed a stream of obscenities that Lavinia could not hear, but which caused Henry’s jaw to drop.
“Open this door, you fucking bitch!”
Henry grabbed at his mother’s thinly veined arms, but she just patted his hand off her arm, smiling and climbing upward with her picnic basket before her.
At the end of the second-story hall, Mrs. Osbourne rested on a ladder-back chair in front of a closed door. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and both palms to her lined forehead. Behind the closed door, the voice of Mr. Osbourne rumbled forth, words distending into an agonized cry. When the body of the door rejolted against its jamb, Mrs. Osbourne reared up with a start and saw Henry’s mother with her picnic basket. She stared open-mouthed for a moment, then she cried, “Oh, Lavinia, the boy!” and she rose with a start from the chair, flapping her hands like small, useless, exhausted wings. “My husband’s coming down off the morphine—he made me lock him in that room and promise not to let him out until he’s clean! Oh Lord, get the boy out of here!”
Lavinia only looked at her in alarm and confusion, but Henry was already backing up on his own, angling behind his mother like a much younger child.
“Oh, please!” Mrs. Osbourne cried, her voice almost overpowering her husband’s agonized complaints. “It’s not fit!”
Lavinia turned, bewildered.
Mr. Osbourne’s in there—he pointed—saying bad things, then hollered, “I’m going, I’m going!” and all but threw himself down the stairs, leaping three at time, one finger to the balustrade. He raced straight to the kitchen in the back, where a rear door opened to the newly fallow fields. But when he reached the door, he lingered suddenly with his hand on the knob, his heart pounding like a burglar’s, one ear cocked for Dean Osbourne screaming fuckfuckfuck as if it were the refrain to an obscene song. The raw, unleashed sound of it thrilled him. Then it occurred to him that Mrs. Osbourne would be waiting for the banging sound of his departure, so he yanked open the door and slammed it after him with a glass-rattling clap.
His mind was startled by the absence of tobacco. Without its leafy spread, the land seemed strangely naked, a shorn sheep, all sinew with the bones of its conformation laid bare. The nearest barn was emptied of tobacco, its doors flung wide to reveal an interior newly outfitted with windowed stalls, ones Henry knew were for horses. A paned cupola had been erected on the slant roof, the black boards all painted white with kelly trim. Beyond the barn stretched young green pasture grass carefully squared but not yet fenced, so it beckoned like a park lawn or a pleasure garden. He walked toward it.
Short, abrupt calls from the far side of the barn. Henry turned the corner and saw, situated out of view from the main house, a new round pen. Two men worked there, one standing outside the fence, a boot and both elbows resting on the planking, the other standing in the center, driving a rangy red horse in frantic circles round the pen with a rope line. The horse lurched and kicked, its eyes rolling like marbles in its head. It was oddly rigged in a harness of rope, the likes of which Henry had never seen. The constraint circled the neck, the girth, looped beneath the switching tail to circle the foreleg on one side, but it served no purpose that he could see, its remaining length looped and tethered to itself, draped along the shoulder. The horse charged around the pen regardless of its awkward corseting, fretting and stamping and blowing air, clearly terrified of the thin man who stood quietly in the center. Neither man saw the boy approach, but the horse did, one eyeball trained on him as it made a dust-raising round.
The man leaning on the fence caught the flash of eye and turned. He squinted without a hat, but the broad, overhanging brows made a hat almost unnecessary.
“We’re working here, kid,” the man said.
Henry made a backward motion, but kept one hand on the pine plank, nailed between two posts made from telephone poles. The man eyed him sideways but didn’t shoo him off again.
“You ever seen a horse broke?” the man finally said after a minute of silence.
“No.” Henry’s eyes were pinned to the place where the horse ran, head low and ears flat, in the pen.
“Well, you got you a front row seat,” the man said.
“What kind of horse is that?”
“That’s a Thoroughbred—a filly. Mr. Osbourne nickel-and-dimed her off some lady what let her go to seed in a oat field. She ain’t had no idea what this horse is worth. You’re looking at the next Regret. Wait and see if she ain’t. Look at them sticks.”
Henry saw nothing like potential in the horse. The filly was immature, stringy, and loose-limbed, with parts that seemed hastily cobbled together. Her long, ungainly legs might have belonged to a moose rather than a horse. Her ears swiveled wildly on a head slightly large for her short, slender neck, which snaked now in a fearful, colicky gesture as she slowed and edged along a far portion of the fencing. Henry didn’t know a horse could move its neck that way, as if it were a boneless thing.
The filly trained one moony eye on the man in the center of the pen. He took a single step forward, and she stopped the waving of her neck, blinking warily.
“Aw, see,” said the man, “she’s just showing out. She’s fixing to quit here in a minute. Giving us the devil ’fore we set her straight. Oh, shit,” he said, and ducked his head into his own neck as the filly charged the center man, her ears flat, her mouth snapping like a turtle’s, neck extending straight out from her body. But the man lined her back to the edge of the pen, where she continued her fretful circling, and, beside Henry, the man laughed an uneasy laugh.
“She looks crazy,” said Henry.
“We like to died loading her in the trailer.”
“Maybe you can get your money back?”
“Naw, Duncan’s the best. Tame a lion, that boy could. And that horse don’t look like it, but she’s coming around.”
“You’ve been doing this all day?” Henry marveled.
“Shit, son,” the man said. “The whole everloving week.”
“So, this is how it’s done …,” Henry wondered, shading his eyes with one hand to cut the midday sun.
“Nah, not hardly,” said the man, brushing a bit of chaff from his lip. “Not if you’re lucky. You raise ’em up right and gentle ’em, then you ain’t got to do all this, but some skirt leaves ’em out in a field, and they ain’t never been rubbed and rode, then you got to whip the devil out of ’em. And them’s the worst,” he said, pointing. “Ain’t never seen a human hand. You whup ’em and saddle ’em, but you can’t turn your back less they backslide and when they do that, they whup you heaven high and valley low. She’s a nasty one, but I seen worse. I done worked the breeding shed up at Castleraine Farms and this stallion one time—a stallion is just bad as sin, you got to eyeball ’em every second you got ’em on a lead. This stallion was fixing to pop this mare and his handler—I knowed him two years ’fore this happened—his handler gone to push his shoulder to situate him, and the mare kicked out just a real little bit, so the stallion, he, uh, toppled out sort of, and lost his foot and fell out and, Lord, I ain’t never seen a horse get so riled. And what he done, he turned and bitten the throat off that handler. Jack Houghton. Never forget that name. He come from England, and they done return shipped him in two parts. Head and the rest of him. All was left of his neck was the spiny part, and that got bitten too.”
The man touched his forehead briefly, and his face twisted. “Makes you appreciate beef,” he said. “They don’t make no trouble. The worst bull ain’t nothing but a breeze next to a stallion.”
Henry turned new eyes back to the harassed horse, where she stood in sudden, stark relief from her surroundings like a black horse in a snowy field. Her head was long and dished, so the nose tip rose with a pert slope to its bony protrusion, the nostrils stretching wide, cupping air. Her lips were risen off the broad, faintly humorous teeth, already browned at the dogeared meeting of enamel at pink gums. The teeth clacked like rocks brought together when she snapped. Without realizing, Henry had leaned his head into the pen.
“Back up now,” said the man beside him, pulling him bodily from the planks. The filly passed them, but some of her fire was banking, Henry could see that. Her head wagged, lower and lower, her tempo and temper flagging. Then she stopped entirely with just a faint weave in the line of her neck, as though she were a blade of grass moving slightly in the wind.
“Here she comes now,” said the man. The man called Duncan approached the horse, his upper body angled slightly out as if listening to a distant sound the horse could not hear, all the while looping up his line. The animal feinted as if to skitter to the side, but remained where she was, blowing and chewing. Now the man unhooked the line and let it drop and untethered the other looped line from the horse’s back, holding it in his hand.
“How come she’s roped up like that?” said Henry.
“Shhh,” said his companion, and held up a stubby finger for silence.
Duncan called out lowly without turning, “Floyd, I think we’re ready for some more sacking.” His voice was flat and barely inflected, not sliding up and down like Kentucky talk. Henry guessed he was from Iowa or Kansas or some other unlucky place without hills.
Floyd called out, “I believe so, yes.”
Duncan remained for a moment at the horse’s side, passing a slow and gentle hand along her quivering flanks and up her neck, charming her skin into stillness. Her breath came in short, wary bursts under his hand, but she stood planted. Then Duncan backed slowly to the middle of the pen, stooped, and brought up what looked like a drying line with dark laundry attached. The horse blinked quickly, and her tail snapped. Then Duncan lunged in, drawing taut her loose line in his right hand and sailing out the cloth line with the other, so the cotton rags snapped and fluttered like terrible black birds across her back, and she squealed and lunged forward, her ears plastered to her head and her eyes rolling. When she burst from her quarters, the man jerked her rigging and in a single motion her head was drawn savagely toward her tail, her right front leg was cinched to her surcingled belly, and she crashed all eight hundred pounds onto her rib cage in the dust, which plumed around her. She thrashed and cried and rolled away from the winging birds, then the man was there, snatching the fluttering cloths away and slacking her line, so she could rise to blow and clatter along the planks, her muscles leaping under her skin. But he stayed right with her, returning the furiously flapping line to her back, and she shot out again, an awful sound emerging from her mouth like the squeal from a tortured cat, a heart-shredding sound, but every present heart was pointed, an arrow toward its target. Henry could barely breathe as he watched the horse being chased and overpowered, forced into a submission it couldn’t know was permanent. He watched as the filly was rigged tight and rolled to the ground again, where it suffered the birds again, only to jerkily rise, then fall again, and roll again, the man now risking his own limbs to pin hers down, overpowering her briefly before stepping off and allowing her to rise—shaking visibly—to her full height. She was sacked again and again and again until finally, when Duncan lashed her sweaty back, her will followed on her weariness, and she moaned pitifully through her downcast eyes and staggered forward a single step, but did not leap or lunge or fall. The sound she made was unmistakably broken; even Henry’s virgin ears could hear that.
“Oh my God,” Henry said, turning breathless to Floyd. “Does he ride her now? Can I ride her when he’s done?”
The man turned to him with a bemused smile, his arms crossed over his chest. “How many years on you, son?”
“Sixteen,” said Henry.
The man laughed. “She’d serve you spiral cut for Sunday supper.”
“No, no, I can ride! I know how to ride!” He failed to mention he’d never ridden anything but the Walkers, who were gentle and placid as kine. “Please!” he said. “I’m begging you!”
“Naw, naw, naw,” the man said, waving a dismissive hand at him. “Shit. You think you can ride that?”
“Fuck yes,” he said, testing it out, and found it smarted his tongue only a little.
“Whoo!” The man laughed. “Don’t let Duncan hear you talk like that. That man’s a follower of Jesus Christ and then some.”
“We’re all Christians,” said Henry, his eye swerving back to the horse, who stood breathing hard, finally allowing the breaker to stroke her, huge eyes cast groundward in search of a self spalled to bits on the round pen floor.
“Some of us is Christian like you’s sixteen. Get on now, you got your show.”
“No, really!”
“Get,” said the man, tested.
“I’m Henry Forge,” the boy said suddenly.
Another bemused glance. “Honey, I know it. You got the stamp of your daddy all over you. Now get.”
“But—”
“Get now!” Floyd swung out loosely with feigned scorn at the boy, and Henry could do nothing but move off. The horse spared no eye for him as he retreated. He had never before felt so young or useless as he did in this moment, spurned from the Osbourne house, spurned from the events of the round pen. Why was the province of grown men such a secret place? Adults were always misreading his youth for an ignorance he only needed an opportunity to disprove. He glanced back at the horse, at her head hung low and her black mane fallen over her face, obscuring her bloodshot eyes. Floyd offered only the neglect of his back. Adults were nothing but schoolyard bullies—they made you beg for small favors, his father most of all! It was only your mother who gave freely—gave her whole entire life to Henry Forge, Henry Forge, I am! He felt his strength rising. Why on earth shouldn’t he ride a horse like that—or own a horse like that? He’d seen the ruling strength of the breaker’s body, how dominant it was—a man like more than a man—and how quickly the larger, braver thing succumbed to the one who refused to alter his path, the one who offered no concessions. A man and a horse were a perfect pair. Henry was nearly wild with excitement now, stalking around the shrubbery that bordered the house, kicking out at the grassed lawn in exuberant frustration, his mind in a tangle. Finally, he threw himself on the porch, looking out over the frontage road to the drab cattle farm on the other side, and waited there with hammering impatience for his mother, only occasionally hearing the sound of someone crying out and cursing somewhere in the house above him.
His first memory was of the last hand harvest. The men came from town during the first week of September, a dozen or more, the same who had been coming for years. They swarmed the acreage, hats tugged low, corn knives flashing like mirror shards. He’d been so young—he couldn’t remember how young, but no longer in diapers—that he’d chased along after those men, finding himself at Filip’s side as he waded into the forest of plants. Filip counted the corn hills as he walked, and the boy chimed beneath him onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight until they arrived at the center, where Filip gathered and tied four middle stalks to a coping vault. Then he stooped and bladed the surrounding stalks, circling and circling from one corn hill to its neighbor and leaning them on the foddershock. By the onset of noon, the shock looked like a fat teepee. Henry did his own work, sawing on a stalk with a butter knife, until Filip came and stood over the boy, casting him into a sudden shadow that stilled his play. Henry could smell the astringent odor of Filip’s armpits as he bent and gripped the fibrous trunks, chopping and carrying them away, leaving the boy in a bald patch of sun.
Then Henry’s mouth was dry, his knees shaky from the heat, his hands the color of worked leather. The day was flaming when he toddled back onto the shaggy lawn, where his red wagon stood, and also his mother, now carrying a pitcher of sweet tea with their cook, Maryleen, following behind with a tray of glasses, stepping over him. The men were trickling in from the foddershocks like red-faced insects, and soon his mother retreated toward the house and beckoned with her hand. Filip was always there, always there in every memory.
Come, she signed. Come.
Filip went. Henry would not go, asked or unasked, remembering this, forgetting that; memory is a combine cutting and mixing everything. He ran toward the men, handing one of them his red ball. The man turned and long-armed it into the corn, and Henry went bounding after it, disappearing into the standing plants. When he returned on this day or another, they were eating their lunch and drinking tea and smoking hand-rolled burley. Filip sat at some distance beneath a maple, a wet blue bandana over his eyes. Henry settled behind them and made cigarettes of grass.
“Twenty-four today I bet,” one of the men said.
Another: “Think bigger, boys. I need the cash.”
“Shit, son, you just lucky anybody lets you cut nowadays. How much you wanna bet this here’s the last time? Nowadays … Look at this place, don’t tell me he can’t afford no picker. He ain’t even got no tobacco patch. Rich men can afford to do things sideways.”
“Him ain’t got no stock neither.”
A man said, “Y’all tell me this: You ever seen a man just grow corn and nothing else?”
“Onced or twiced.”
“But what does he do with the blades?”
No one answered.
“What does he do with the cobs?”
“They are some horses in that black barn.”
“And what about the nubbins?”
No one answered.
One whispered, “Well is he stupid or crazy …?”
“If you’re rich, you can afford to be both!” And there was uproarious laughter.
Henry was too young to feel a frisson of shame. Then the talk drifted; some of the men reclined on their backs and slept with their hats steepled atop their faces, so they wouldn’t burn. Henry curled around his red ball and slept too. And when he awoke, his mother was carrying him into the house, and the men were scattered in the fields again, and Filip was somewhere else.
By the evening, half the corn plants had been stripped and in their place stood scores of ricks, funereal heaps that would remain for weeks in the sun until the ears and the blades cockled and paled. Henry played among the short stalks when the men went home, the sharp, severed plants scraping at his ankles and shins. He leaned hard against the lee sides of the foddershocks, where no one in the house would see him. Sometimes his mother paid him a nickel to gather the gleanings for a neighbor woman, so he would stuff the raspy blades in a woven basket. He discovered worms and crawling beetles in the dirt and killed them. He tucked a blade in his mouth like an old man with a pipe. And when he slept at night, he dreamed he was climbing the ricks, but in his dreams there was never any top to them, they went forever upward like a magical beanstalk that he climbed under the watchful eyes of that age-old line of men looking down at him, watching him always.
Then the season ended, and the bright roulette of the year spun, and the next fall the men did not come. Only Filip and his teenaged nephew and a shiny new cornpicker with a wagon attachment. The store-bought contraption lumbered across the acres, swallowing ears off the stalks, leaving them upright and stripped in the field. Henry loved the brontosaurus neck of the picker, how quickly it spat ears from its mechanical mouth into the rolling wagon. He wagged and skipped along the line where the grass met the field, dueling the machine as it cobbed two rows in a single run, until one day his father returned unexpectedly at the lunch hour and snatched him from the field’s edge and thrashed him on the lawn and yelled at his mother. Later, when it was too painful to sit, Henry stood on his bedroom bay window seat, his hands frogged to the deadlight, watching the progress of the machine, wishing he could ride it like a metal horse. And he would have were it not for his father.
But this September, with the boy turned fourteen, the old picker was retired to its shed, and a new combine was driven through the streets of Paris. It came to devour the acres, threshing its way through their fields with a furious mouth and a fricative roar. Ruthless and fast, it snatched the stalks from the ground, mashing them. It would have handily outpaced the boy, but this year Henry didn’t even think about racing it. He was seven days out from the Osbournes’ farm and the spectacle of the broken filly. He stood pensive and alone with his back to the old cabins, where the picker was now abandoned, watching the combine as it routed the fields. The machine made quick, wasteless work of the corn and its speed was a marvel—he couldn’t deny that. But he also couldn’t care. Yes, he liked machines; in fact, he loved them. He was fascinated by the intestinal fittings of the tubes and fans beneath the hood of their sedan, how the bodies out of Detroit were yearly improved and refined. A short time ago he’d admired nothing better than the old picker he’d chased alongside. But he could see now that all these machines ran out of an obligation that was man-made; a thing without a will could run, but never race. Anyway, how much could you improve upon the combustion engine? It was—in some irreducible way—already the perfect fulfillment of its own potential, its invention and destiny the same damn thing.
Suspicion came to roost in his bones, and it tarnished everything. Here was the old dairy barn, its cribs retrofitted for the six Tennessee Walkers. Here were the slatted outdoor cribs, their sod floors still littered with last year’s kernels. There was the all-purpose barn, where the tractor idled; and there, the old equipment shed in which he had played as a child, that dank, battened place, sieved of sun, where he had found his first toys: corn knives in rows and hand-turned wood boxes with winches that no longer cranked, bladed objects that had not bored or shaved or whittled for so long that the blades were now thick with a hide of rust, an old plow stretching in the shadows that a boy could only pretend to drive, a boy born too late under the sign of advancement.
But Henry was ready to put away childish things. The bright, shiny apple of his youth now had brown spots. He knew that any beautiful thing not used rightly in its time would rot to its core. Bite the apple, build a better garden. He seized upon this certainty, and he took it to his father.
John Henry stood alone on the side porch, sipping his bourbon from a crystal tumbler, the faint warblings of his record player in one ear, the cleanup clatter of Maryleen’s kitchen in the other. Deep evening had draped itself across the burred fields and shrunk the day to downy mist. A full, unblinking moon rose up over the house as fresh night soaked into the grasses.
Slipping quietly, almost stealthily onto the porch, Henry cleared his throat. “Father, I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been thinking about the farm.”
John Henry didn’t turn. From the far side of the creek, he heard the whir of a baler working well past the supper hour, and occasionally, a snatch of swinging yellow lantern light shone through the Miller tree line, drawing his eye. It would be one of the Miller girls returning from milking.
“I’ve been thinking,” Henry said again, “that—” but he swerved suddenly from his course and said instead, “How long have we grown corn here?”
His father spared a glance, his head notched to the side, but was slow to answer. “Ever since we arrived here,” he finally said. “After the Revolution, any man who came to this region and planted a crop of corn became the owner of that land.”
“And the corn was always for—”
John Henry held his tumbler aloft and pointed, the boy nodding. “Good bourbon. Good feed. In that order.”
“I think,” said Henry slowly, turning away slightly, gripping the porch banister and rocking as if he would almost launch himself rather than continue. “I think—”
“Don’t be indirect, Henry.”
“The farm will be mine someday.”
John Henry nodded once, but his tongue withheld assent.
“I’ve been thinking maybe when I’m older I’ll raise racehorses here instead of planting corn.” His voice rose in spite of itself, taking a kind of flight in lieu of his body, attached as it was to the banister by white-knuckled fists, and he was looking up as if his words had been directed to the expansive ear of the sky instead of his father. John Henry didn’t reply immediately, only looked at his son. Then he cleared his throat and with a voice low and pregnant with intent, like a man reading slowly from a family Bible, he said, “You are expressly forbidden to raise horses on this land.”
Henry’s head whipped round. “But—”
“You disappoint me, Henry,” he said. “You don’t speak up when you should, and you speak nonsense when you do. It makes me alarmed for the future.”
Henry’s eyes swam with instant, resentful tears.
His father shook his head. “I don’t want to speak about this tonight,” he said. “You know you can come to me whenever you have a real need, but you’ve interrupted my solitude, which I’ve earned, with what I frankly regard as an insult.”
He held up his free hand when the boy objected with a sound. “You don’t realize what the insult is, I recognize that. And I don’t fault you for it.” He laid a hand broad as a spade on Henry’s shoulder, turned him, so they faced squarely. He patted or cuffed him twice on the bone of the shoulder.
“We’ll talk soon. Good night,” he said, and he pointed toward the side door.
Henry turned and, without saying a word, slunk to the door.
“Henry,” his father said.
The boy turned.
“I said, good night.”
“Good night, sir.”
“He hates me,” he whispered in the half dark, lying there with her original, originating face too close, so she could discern the words on his lips. “Why does he hate me?” Lavinia laid a cool, dry hand over his mouth, but he went on speaking around her fingers, while she shook her original, originating head, no no no. He snatched her hand from his mouth.
“Who did he want if not me? What is it that I’m not? He never listens to me, he ignores me, he acts like he’s the king of everything!” Tears flooded him again, a young boy in an adolescent body. Still his mother didn’t answer, only shook her head and wagged a reproving finger.
“Do you love me?” he said, and she kissed him on the lips, hard. Then his cheeks and the adjutment of his chin.
“Mother,” he said, “what would you think if I raised horses here someday?”
She followed his lips and her face—watchful, elastic, overfull—suspended all hasty movement like a figure balancing. Her eyes quizzed him.
“I’ve seen something amazing!” he said. “Have you ever watched a horse being broken?”
She smiled a sorrowful smile and signed, When I was a girl, I saw a horse killed in the street. A drunk man shot his horse in the belly. Then someone else came and shot it in the head. In front of me.
“No, no,” said Henry, impatient. “When we were at the Osbournes’, I saw a horse being broken. Haven’t you ever just known something? I know something.”
A sad little smile emerged, and she took his face in both her hands. Her eyes said, Tell me what you know.
Behind the Forge house stood an apple orchard, planted a few hundred yards down the acreage in the direction of the bowl. It boasted a two-acre stand of Yates and Rome Beauty with a line of deep red Foxwhelp for cider making in the fall. The orchard was nothing but a headache for Maryleen one week of the year, usually October, but this time early November, because the apples had ripened later than expected. Now everyone was there in her kitchen—everyone: the boy; his mother, who had all the personality of a pillow; Filip, who was quiet, but mostly because he was drunk on white lightning, and everybody in Claysville knew it, because despite his haughty, stoic airs, he had a special talent for public intoxication at festivals and carnivals and whatnot. Apple-picking help even came from the field hands on occasion, because there were simply too many apples, more than any single person could manage. The garden Maryleen handled on her own; the green beans came in first and then tomatoes and the lettuce early and late, so the whole process was staggered, neatly terraced in time. She’d can what she could, freeze just a little in the icebox, but she never needed any help with that, and if she needed help, she wouldn’t ask for it, she just stayed late. That way she didn’t have to deal with people. That was her specialty, besides cooking—refusing to suffer fools, and most everybody was a fool in her book. When she’d first interviewed, she said with that gravelly voice of hers, “I don’t do child rearing.” She hadn’t said, I ain’t no Hattie McDaniel, you see two hundred pounds and a kerchief? She’d just kept that to herself and stuck to her intentions with the rigor of the devout. She only spoke to the child when he spoke to her, and she kept it to “yes” and “no” as often as not, and when nuance was called for, she said “Hmmmm” as if she were studying on it, which she wasn’t; she was thinking, Get thee thither, fool. The tall-dark-and-silent Filip, who was supercilious as hell for no reason except he was a colored man with someone he could actually lord over, tried to impress upon her the importance of learning to talk to the lady of the house in signs, because that was the respectful, Christian thing to do, damaged as she was and all. Well, Maryleen wasn’t about to do that, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. She could say yes and no with her hands, but she just begged off the rest. After all, didn’t they train dogs with hand signals? Better to communicate with nobody at all than to have them flap their hands at you like you were a golden retriever. “Oh no, can’t nobody teach me nothing,” she’d mouthed like some simpleton to the blonde lady, who always looked at you like she was the doe and you were the oncoming headlights, but the truth was Maryleen wasn’t here to talk to anyone. She wasn’t here to child rear, or make nice with some white lady, or play the role of kitchen slave to the pink toes and the Filips of the world. She was here to cook. And she was exceptionally gifted at it.
She’d come up in Claysville, the colored enclave, or what was left of it. The place was sagging on its foundations by the end of the war, which was to be expected. She always said, “You let a bunch of colored men run a town where there’s liquor to be had, and you might as well turn the keys over to the white folk.” What they should have done, if anybody’d had an ounce of brains, would have been to kick the menfolk out—make them live in shacks on the outskirts of town, only allowed in to deliver food or for population replacement (a disgusting but occasionally necessary allowance)—and let Claysville be run by the ladies. Then, voilà! It would become the Brooklyn of Kentucky, Brooklyn being her only reference to a once-little town that had done something with itself, high blackness intact. Or something like that. Her own mother could have run an army if she hadn’t been so tired when she came home from work every day. Too tired to be of any use as a mother. So Maryleen had taught herself to read. Well, a neighbor had taught her the letters and sounds, and then she’d figured out the rest. As a result, she’d always known she was smart. “Taught her own self to read,” her mother had always told everyone they ran into, as if that was something to brag about. But it had been simple, really, looking at the shapes, sounding them out, fitting them together. It was this drive toward sequential thought that made her a natural at solving mysteries. She’d begun reading them in the library when she was eight years old, and she could honestly say she hadn’t read one in ten years that she hadn’t figured out by the hundredth page. She always harbored the secret desire to write them when she retired—except what colored woman ever really retired? Anyway, she knew she was gifted. Everyone had thought she’d go to one of the colored colleges in Atlanta or Washington, D.C., which was not something anyone in Bourbon County did, everyone being the child of a farm laborer and whatnot, and she had in fact applied, because, like a peacock, she had some colors to show, but she’d turned them down flat when she received her acceptances. Aside from the getting-in part, she had nothing to prove to anybody—or so she told herself—and, besides, she already knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to cook. She’d taken every Home Economics class available to her (when she wasn’t reading her Shakespeare, her Dickens, her Dunbar and Hughes) and then her teacher, Miss Martin, had invited her home after school every day for two months to teach her more recipes and to talk to her, probably because she was a lonely woman getting on in years. Miss Martin had even taken her in for a whole summer when Maryleen’s mother was staying nights at her employer’s, because there was a child there that had cancer. It ended up dying in August, but Maryleen wasn’t sorry about that, because she had spent the best summer of her life at Miss Martin’s. She learned to make beef tenderloin with horseradish butter and fried chicken brined in Coke; also chicken divan, citrus Cornish hens, the best sweet pickle relish ever, chowchow, peach cobbler, derby pie, and bread pudding with whiskey sauce. It was during that baking and cooking, when Miss Martin’s conversation dwindled from current events to gossip to occasional rumination to companionable silence, that Maryleen’s mind became suddenly, startlingly free, and she realized it was here she could make her home, in this deep quiet, regardless of whether it was in some white folks’ house or in her parents’ home, where her father did nothing but read his Bible and ignore her, and her mother was sleeping every moment she wasn’t working. Silence was freedom.
Which was why she hated this particular week of … involvement. There was the picking of the apples, which was hard physical work. Then there was the peeling and the piecrust making, the sorting, then the mashing in an enormous old sugar kettle that—she’d bet fifty dollars if anyone actually cared—probably dated from slavery days. Then the boiling of lids and jars, the canning, the sealing, then sauce making, cider making, which meant the addition of crab apples, which she was allergic to, so her eyes swelled up just from looking at them, and everyone said, “Oh, Maryleen, dear, have you been crying?” to which she yearned to reply, “Oh, Massah, yes, I’s just cryin’ thinkin’ ’bout where I’m a go affa Emancipation—oh!” But tongues were for biting. You just did what you had to do to get them out of your hair, which was help them, which was what she was doing today. They had spent the morning hours up and down like spiders on the ladders plucking Foxwhelp from the branches, so she would be able to start the cider in the morning. She had already gotten Filip to drive her to the A&P to purchase the sugar and nutmeg she’d ordered for the cider, and now they were trundling baskets from the orchard to the kitchen, and she was sweating so much that she couldn’t stand the smell of herself. The day was unseasonably hot for November, a put-chipped-ice-in-your-tub-water kind of hot. And she was already irritated enough with the woman helping and Filip and the boy underfoot. If she’d had eight arms, she would have done the whole thing herself and let that be the end of it. But here she was with the white boy tagging after her—well, he wasn’t a boy anymore, he was a teenager and not that far behind her in age, maybe five or six years. He was less talkative than he had been even just recently, but he still had plenty of irritating things to say, going on and on about the head of a horse, and wasn’t it like the Sistine Chapel, just a marvel of architecture, and he was explaining in detail what the Chapel was (as if she didn’t know!), and she was being very careful not to roll her eyes unless her back was to the boy—teenager. And there was his mother, picking apples in heels. Low heels, but heels. When Jesus comes back, everyone will be changed, that’s what her father always said. He could not get his ass back here soon enough.
Somehow, during the heat and bustle of the day, she managed to shake them all. She’d gone round front to sit with a glass of tea and then, upon returning to the orchard, there’d been no one there at all, just empty ladders by the trees, staircases that went nowhere. She stood in the pleasing stillness for a moment, holding her empty glass, absorbing what was undeniably the amber beauty of the autumn day, and then, fatigued and finally easy because she was alone, she padded into the kitchen feeling almost pacified. There, dozens of apple baskets stunned the eye with their heaped red, and she heard herself sigh. Except she hadn’t sighed. There was a snuffling sound. She thought the boy was crying in the pantry, because he liked to hide there when he was upset, and she was always the one to find him, because she was always the one in the kitchen, though of course she never comforted him, just took him firmly by the elbow and delivered him to his empty-headed mother. Maryleen took a single step toward the pantry, which led off from the kitchen by the stove, and she knew, suddenly, exactly what she would find, because she sensed things, because her mind had been prepared by many novels that taught her everything she needed to know about the human sex impulse (a thing she wouldn’t learn from life, because she found men repugnant), and then there they were, Filip and the lady of the house, clutching at each other, the woman making hideous throat sounds against his mouth, probably because she was deaf—God, please don’t let that be a normal kissing sound—and with the negative of their black and white scorching her eyes, she fled from the kitchen on the balls of her feet, her white tennis shoes making nary a squeak, her hand smacked over her mouth. She fled around the side of the house, a bright red blooming through the smooth darkness of her cheeks, and, absurdly, in a panic, she crawled between a juniper bush and the side of the old house and sank down on her haunches there, hidden from sight. She breathed raggedly into her palm, leaning back against the bare bricks, her eyes wide. There she remained until her breathing returned to almost normal, though now her fury was risen like a fire that rages once the winds calm. When her legs had all but fallen asleep, she heard the boy walk by talking to himself, and then she could no longer stand the tingling in her legs; she crept out from the bushes, feeling absurd and looking around. There was no one to be seen. She coughed loudly as if in a fit, walking around to the kitchen door. She swooped up an empty apple basket in her hands and said “Lord!” loudly, for no discernible reason. Then she went on into the kitchen, allowing the door to clatter terribly behind her. No one was there. With nothing less than absolute fear, she walked into the pantry, but it was empty too, and she sagged against the wooden shelving closest to her, then reached out and touched the wavy glass of a bell jar, angrily mouthing her thoughts. She didn’t know how long she stood there before she heard the sounds of his feet, and she knew they were his because she’d memorized the family’s footfalls, the better to avoid them. She flung herself into the doorway of the pantry, her hands clutching the doorjamb on both sides. Her eyes were wide, sloedeep with fury. Filip started when he saw her, when he saw her face.
“Get in here!” she said, her voice brooking no alternative.
Whether he was startled by her tone, or by the strange fact of youth wrangling age without reserve, he simply did as he was told and stood before her there in the pantry, looking down curiously with that diffident blankness she knew he’d earned by right of his skin, but which she had no sympathy for. Not today.
She raised a straight, slender finger right up to his face. “You idiot!” she hissed.
There was no change in his face, except his eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, then he made a move to go, so she reached out and grasped up his shirtfront in her fist to pull him back around. Her grip was so hard it threatened the hold of the seams.
“Are you crazy?” she whispered, but to her own ears it sounded like hollering. “You know where you’re going to end up? Nigger, they’re going to hang you from a tree!”
He refused to answer, refused by turning again to leave, but Maryleen reached up with her free hand, and with a feeling of something near glee, which she would allow herself to acknowledge only later, she slapped him hard across the face.
He just stared at her in wordless shock while she said, “Have you lost your damn mind? Stop this madness! Don’t touch her again!”
And then, like an actor showing up late for his cue, the boy was in the kitchen, just standing there slack-armed between the butcher block and the sink, looking up into their faces with his mouth slightly ajar. Maryleen let loose Filip’s shirt, and the man was gone in an instant, shouldering past the boy, who stepped aside to let him go, all the while continuing to look up into Maryleen’s flushed face. He said, “I just wondered where everyone went.”
“We’ve been right here,” she said smartly, moving past him into the kitchen, so that she could reorder her expression without his eyes on her. “Right here the whole time.”
The boy turned slowly on his heels to watch her, but he didn’t follow. His face was soft, just the faint beginnings of an unreadable expression perched there.
“Where’s Mother?” he said slowly.
“How would I know?” Maryleen said gruffly with her back still turned.
“What were you and Filip arguing about?”
“Folks argue,” she said sharply. “It’s no concern of yours.”
“But—”
She turned quickly then, trying to project more passion and less fear than she felt. Her eyes were wide. “He said something nasty about my mother, all right? And I don’t care to talk about it anymore!”
Henry said nothing in response to this, only reared back slightly with distaste or wariness, and Maryleen made a quiet drama of calming herself for his benefit, but she could have cried with relief when he finally walked haltingly, sullenly to the kitchen door that led outside. He stood there on the step for a long moment with his hands in his pockets, surveying the orchard, which was quiet now, deserted, and full of ragged shadows. Then he walked out onto the grass lit yellow with the fading afternoon, and he turned suddenly. Maryleen, who’d been eyeing him like a hawk from the kitchen window, thrust her hands under the faucet and pretended to wash, but from the side of her eyes, she watched as Henry cast a wary glance back over the house, looking it up and down. And though she didn’t believe in God at all, and certainly not in some white man in the sky who’d sanctioned everything evil in this world, she prayed.
Church: the father, the son, the holy ghost, and his mother—his own original, originating Lavinia!—who always fanned Henry’s heavy head when he nodded off, enveloping him in a rosed perfume and the unnamed scent of her person. There was a change in her son, she eyed him now with the wariness of a doe that senses the hunter is afoot. He didn’t lean into her on the pew anymore, didn’t doze like a child against her shoulder; he no longer smiled.
Dark dissatisfaction ran through him like a coal seam. He no longer cared for the old, unsatisfying stories, the Bible just a crass country cousin to the myths and nothing more. He counted the commandments: Honor thy mother and thy father. Really? Why? So you could climb some rickety ladder to heaven? When he sat in those worn pews and tried to imagine God’s heaven, all he could conjure was a glistering expanse of nothingness. Roads of gold stretched without event farther than imagination, farther than forever, until his hope of heaven was a distress, and his heart flagged in his chest. Henry knew you had to make your own heaven—a place where, when your mother said she loved you above all others, it meant that she loved you more than a lover, more than God. He was newly sick to his stomach. Was church the wrong place to pray for the death of a man?
The ride back to Forge Run was an exercise in strained silence, his father concentrating on the road, Henry turned mulishly to the passing fields. The theater of razed greenery was fading before their eyes under the blue autumn sky, death hatching a mottled dun on the withering shocks. Their dying bored him to death. Easy come, easy go. His eyes slashed the back of his father’s head, and his tongue felt perverse. Loose. He could not latch it to his better sense, which was silence. He said, “I can’t stand to listen to all that preaching about rules.” His voice felt like breaking something.
There was no immediate response. His father seemed determined to teach him the rudest of life lessons: there is nothing worse than being ignored.
“I’m tired of rules for no reasons.” This time his belligerence was barely contained.
Without turning his head, John Henry said, “That you don’t understand the reason for a rule is no indication of its absence.”
Henry sulked, his shoulders crouching down around his spine. Then he reached forward suddenly and pressed on his mother’s shoulder until she turned.
“Do you believe God answers prayers?”
She raised her brows, her pretty mouth puckered, and they both inclined their heads in mutual misunderstanding like confused dancers curtsying.
“Yes or no?” he said, impatient.
“Leave your mother be,” said John Henry, but the boy was staring at his mother angrily and frowning.
Do you understand me? he signed.
She nodded.
Do you understand the preacher? he signed with terse, pithy gestures.
She smiled a smile like an apology.
“You mean you don’t understand him?” He said this out loud.
She shrugged.
“Father!” he cried accusingly. “She doesn’t even understand what the preacher’s saying! I always thought she was reading his lips!”
John Henry said nothing.
“Then why even bother going to church?” he spat, but his mother was swiveling away from him to face forward. He tapped her on her shoulder, hard, and he said, “Why even go, then?” And then she turned and brushed at his hand as if it were a fly and not her own son, and he had never seen her do that. He sat back in surprise.
“Be quiet, Henry,” said his father, one slate eye to the rearview mirror.
Henry seethed, clenched his jaw, and locked eyes with John Henry. His mother ignored them both and gazed out her window, refusing them. Henry fairly boiled with irritation all the way home, but when they reached the house, John Henry didn’t cut the purring motor as expected, or pull alongside the house. Instead, he idled on the circular drive that traced the front of the estate. He gestured to his wife to go on in without them, so she slid from her seat and stood awkwardly on the drive. Henry refused to look at her, only assumed her place slump-shouldered, and John Henry eased down the lane again. No one looked back to see Lavinia standing still where she had been, a solitary figure with a bright yellow clutch tight in her hands, her face cast in shadow by her half veil.
Henry wanted to ask where they were going, but he refused to speak, so they drove in silence, two men hard and unbending with thirty-five years between them. Henry wrapped his arms around himself, though it was warm enough in the car, closing his eyes and feigning disinterest. When he opened them, he didn’t know where they were and recognized none of the farms on either side of the road.
He finally buckled. “Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something,” said John Henry, “because of your recent concerns.”
“About what?” In the ensuing silence, his regret was instant. His father was always biding his time, withholding answers like scraps from a bitch.
When they turned east onto a new gravel road, John Henry slacked his speed and coasted to the top of a gradual incline, where they attained a broad view of the green, rolling hills. They parked on the side of the road and John Henry pointed, but it was not necessary, because there was nothing else to see but the farm.
The property was situated directly before them, a vast spread of impossibly verdant green that rolled like ocean swells, the bright fields curbed by virgin white plank fencing. The scattered barns and outbuildings were dressed in white and green, all cupolaed and topped by striding iron horses not yet gone to verdigris in the weather. The vanes wheeled and spun in a high wind that seemed to come from all directions at once. The barns were pristine, no dirt or manure to mar their snowy sides, no stray chaff or markings on the sun-sparked fan windows. Brick walks paved paths from building to building, and men led horses into paddocks and out of barns, and the horses were dark and leggy. North of the barns, far beyond the horses, the main house was an astonishment: Ionic-columned and endlessly gabled, shingled in a gray almost white, and built to four towering stories, from which it gazed down on the adventure of its own beauty. The acreage stretched beyond sight in all directions but one, and there a threadbare tobacco barn stood beyond the last line of fencing, a poor and classless interloper, only its upper half visible from its perch on a declivitous slope, where it leaned away from its new neighbors, boards rafting into disrepair, a sorry sight before stupendous wealth.
John Henry sat quietly, his heavy hands on the wheel. “Tell me what you see,” he said.
Henry tore his eyes from the groomed land and looked at his father, weighing the truth against the trap he sensed there. “A horse farm,” he said cautiously, reluctantly, the words drawn out of him by sheer paternal force.
John Henry’s lips pinched into a hard smile. “Spoken like a child with a child’s understanding. Henry, I intend to have this conversation with you only once, and then the subject will be closed. Let me tell you what a grown man, a man of discernment, sees. What looks like a horse farm is really a cheap attempt at dignity. All these pretty things before you amount to a heap of goddamn rhinestones. Caveat emptor: significance is not for sale. Dignity can’t be purchased, Henry, least of all by these latecomers, these … these outsiders, who dress up their addictions in Sunday clothes and Derby hats. People call it a sport, but I’ll tell you this: this so-called sport is driven by compulsion, and weak men love nothing more than to abandon themselves to their compulsions.”
He turned to his son now, something raw in his eyes, though his voice remained low and controlled. “I saw that in the war,” he said. “And I believe you’ve seen it in our neighbor, Mr. Osbourne, who’s an embarrassment as far as I’m concerned. The man knows nothing about animal husbandry, nothing about the proper raising of horses, and his Wild West simpletons know even less. A gunshot wound, however impressively heroic it may appear to you, is merely the kind of excuse a weak man seizes upon to wriggle his way out of his real responsibilities. The very definition of a white goddamned nigger.”
He considered for a moment. “Henry, the education I’m purchasing for you is to keep you on the established path. Do you understand me? This …” He spread a hand forward toward the fields like an indignant blossom, his palm a ruddy ocelle, his fingers hard petals. “This is nothing but a rich man’s game, where he bets his better self and loses.”
“But we’re rich,” said Henry.
“There are two different kinds of rich, Henry. Our family name depends on your ability to distinguish between the two.”
Henry did not respond immediately, but stared ahead at the sweep of this farm, its perfectly painted buildings shining like white knights standing guard over an emerald expanse. His one ear was trained to his father, but the other extended itself in the direction of the fields and whatever sounds might be rising from them, which were none. Nature was manicured into silence. The horses moved slowly in that distant silence as if underwater.
Again, his father pointed out over the wheel. “Look how they’re trying to outshine every modest tradition that the first families established here two hundred years ago. This is just ostentation. Does your mother need to dress like a common prostitute to prove her value?”
Henry looked down, startled.
“And look at this one here.”
Henry turned to watch the slow progress of a black man stooped over his mower as he traced the outer edge of the fencing. His face was turned down against the midmost glare of the sun. He moved as if burdened by an unearthly fatigue.
“Watch how he slouches around without any dignity whatsoever. Born colored but made a nigger by being caught up in all this—and he knows it. He’s panning for fool’s gold, and it demoralizes him. The black race has always depended upon our guidance to steward them into lives worth leading. A colored man uses his place of employment as a school to learn the best of what white society can offer. It’s the only place he can hope to better himself, regardless of what the restless voices may shout from time to time. The irony of Negro intelligence is that it makes them aware of the poverty of their own intellect. The only proper response to white influence is humility. And the only right schooling is correction. To whatever degree is necessary.”
“But it doesn’t have to be as fancy as all this,” said Henry. “Mr. Osbourne just—”
“To condescend to any of this would be to insult your family.”
Henry’s eyes escaped his father’s and returned to the man at his mower. The boy’s heart rebelled, but there was a kind of plain disregard in the man’s body; he saw that, and it disappointed him.
“There’s a long line behind you, Henry.”
“I know,” he whispered, his mouth and eyes appearing downcast, but they were only distracted by his warring selves.
“Look at me, Henry, when I’m speaking to you.”
He looked at his father.
“You need to think like a man, not a child. There’s a sore temptation upon youth to discard with tradition, but tradition is learning collected. You’re a fool if you forget that and are forced to relearn what so many men before you have already learned. You owe obedience to them and you owe obedience to me, just as I owe it to them, and I owe it to my father, in greater degree than my brother because I am the eldest. All roads have led to you, Henry, and I won’t have you throw everything away for a heap of rhinestones. I’m a planter’s son, and you’re a planter’s son. There is no need for improvement, Henry, only adherence to a line that has never altered, because it’s never proven unsound. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Henry said thinly.
His father narrowed his eyes. “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say right now whatever it is you want to say. This is the one and only time we’re going to have this conversation.”
“Well … I …,” Henry skated. “Don’t flirt with your words.”
“What if,” Henry rushed, “what if your father had asked you to marry a different woman?”
John Henry reared his head back slightly, but he didn’t hesitate. He saw clear through his boy. “I would have married her,” he said, “just as he wanted me to.”
“But—”
“I would have married her,” he repeated firmly. “But I was smart enough to choose a woman of whom I knew he would approve. She came from good stock, she was beautiful and—”
“Never talked too much,” said Henry.
John Henry paused, his shrewd eyes gathering up the meaning in Henry’s face, but then he smiled slowly as if they were sharing the joke. His shoulders eased in his suit jacket. He brought his hands together now, so his fingertips touched. “I told your mother I’d be taking you to dinner this afternoon to a restaurant where I take my clients. They don’t normally admit children, but I spoke with them earlier and made an arrangement. Would that be to your liking?”
Henry nodded straight-faced and without speaking, his head bobbing in a mime of obligation. But then he pressed himself back into his seat and tasted the word “children” in his mouth as if it were something too vile to swallow. John Henry restarted the sedan, and Henry didn’t turn his head to the left or the right but watched the farm pass from the corner of his eye, so it washed by like a grassy stream through which horses ran.
In the house, Lavinia waited, unable to step away from the window until she saw the sedan pull up the long drive in the interminable stretch between sundown and darkness. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She assumed her old, reliable smile and stretched out her arms when her son walked through the kitchen door. But when she stepped to him, he pushed her arm away from him with startling force and charged up the back staircase, so she felt the vibrations on the steps like hammer blows. Whatever it was that he said in that moment with his back to her, she didn’t hear.
In the wintertime, John Henry took his bourbon in the front parlor. He returned home from Paris by five thirty and dinner emerged from Maryleen’s kitchen no later than six o’clock. Then, satisfied and regardless of desperate cold or wild easterly wind, he would stand for some time on the el porch, watch the snowy farm weather to gray as the stars spangled out of the black, feeling the night freezing and contracting around him. By the time Venus was setting in the south, he had returned to the parlor, where he could enjoy his solitude for another hour or so before bedtime. He unlaced and removed his black wing tips, placing them side by side on the Aubusson, and selected a seventy-eight for the player. Then he smoked a single Dominican cigar, which he removed from a carved bone box on the mantel, and sat on the davenport to read the Lexington Leader. He did this every winter evening without fail.
Henry knew the rule: no one disturbed his father. But this evening he fretted pensively along the front hall, end to end, his weight distressing the old heartwood planks until the record screeched suddenly and his father called out, “Stop that incessant pacing right now!”
Henry peered swiftly around the doorway to the parlor. His father stood there in his black socks in front of the davenport, the newspaper wrenched up in one hand.
“I knew it wasn’t your mother. She never makes a sound,” he said. To Henry’s surprise, there was a hint of smile in his father’s eyes.
“May I speak with you, Father?” Careful, discreet, he glanced both ways down the hall.
The smile vanished. “Henry, we will not be discussing horses again.”
“No, sir, I know. It’s not about that.”
“Come in, then. I was meaning to speak with you anyway. I wanted to tell you that I found a tutor for you. He may not look like much, but his credentials are impeccable.”
Henry stepped into the room and closed the door as his father regarded him. In his stocking feet, the man was six feet but had grown somewhat thicker through the waist and redder, like the sun was turning him, his freckles now mixed with age spots. The cupreous, stalwart bulk of him was lessened somehow, and his son arrived at the fact of it without sentimentality, with eagerness even.
John Henry said, “I’ll give you five minutes, and then I would prefer to return to my reading.” He seated himself again on the davenport with the paper, his eyes peering directly over it at his son. Waiting.
“Father,” began Henry, and though his body urged him to sit in the wing chair opposite his father, he forced himself to sit cross-legged at his feet like a servant, beside his emptied and stinking shoes. Quietly, he said, “Father, why is everyone so upset?”
“Upset?” His father’s large head reared back, consternation on his brow.
“I mean, in the news. There’s so much happening. It seems like there’s more unrest every day.”
“Ah. Yes, that’s right,” John Henry said, nodding. “It’s a distressing time in many ways, an embarrassing time. It will only get worse, I imagine. No one—absolutely no one—remembers their place anymore, and we will all pay the price for this kind of national amnesia.”
Careful, steady, his face full of concern. “Is it true that they plan to desegregate the schools? What will happen after that?”
“After that?” his father said, and laughed. “After that, there will be social chaos and a breakdown in the educational system, and the Negro will be the first in line asking us to come back and fix it all. He never hesitates to implore others to come in and clean up the mess that results from his demands. His children, of course, will end up suffering the most. That’s what always happens. He is simply incapable of predicting the consequences of his actions. There is potential in some of them, but as your grandfather used to say, the Negro is our Socratic shadow. I think the allusion is apt.”
John Henry lowered his paper and folded it. “You see, in the end, Henry, de jure segregation may be stripped in some segments of the society—in fact, it appears almost inevitable now—but de facto divisions will always remain. Segregation is inherent, natural, and inevitable, no matter what the dreamers would like to think, no matter what the town of Berea would have us believe. Bring twenty white men and twenty colored into a new town and within a week, the white men will be successful landowners and the colored will be tenants. Good tenants, perhaps, but tenants nonetheless. Nothing wrong with that. The world always needs good tenants.”
“I heard they’ll send in the military to force the schools open if they have to.”
John Henry shook his head. “If it actually comes to that, there will be decent, God-fearing citizens to block the way. Men like Byrd. There’s certainly nothing to be afraid of.”
Henry sat up straight, indignant. “Oh, I’m not afraid. Did you hear what Senator Darby—”
“Darby!” snorted John Henry. “Darby’s a fool. He makes the Southerner appear the blubbering idiot, which is precisely what Northerners want in order to vilify the South—a vision of the South as mindless cracker. It makes them feel virtuous, when in fact they know absolutely nothing of the Southern situation. Darby!” He snorted again.
“The North—”
“The North is far more segregated than we could be, given the fact that half of our population is colored and we interact with one another constantly—daily. The Negro lives in our very homes and always has. The North can’t even fathom. The North doesn’t even know what a Negro is.
“You see, Henry, for them the race problem is either a mental abstraction or a romance. For us, as perhaps you’re beginning to understand, it is a problem of practice and the everyday frustration of dealing with the colored appetite and intellect, which is entirely different from our own. It is quite easy to imagine the equality of all men when you sit on a high horse and don’t have to walk among them in the fields. Indeed, everyone appears the same height from that view. But demount the horse and it soon becomes apparent that there are not merely masters and slaves by happenstance, or overseers and laborers by happenstance, but that these divisions are inherent and unavoidable. God save the mark—there were slaves in the Republic, and these liberals would imagine themselves greater minds!”
Now his voice was rising, the color bloomed in his cheeks. “The problem, Henry, as I have always seen it, is that the Negro is fundamentally a child, and children are incapable of understanding their own inferiority. Indeed, they generally err on the side of grandiose delusion. Mind you, the Negro is naturally playful, with a great capacity for joy, and I can appreciate that. But he’s as self-pitying as he is playful, and like a child, he can despise you with as much passion in the evening as he loved and admired you with in the morning. Look at Filip—”
Henry leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you about Filip.”
“Filip is, I believe, only five years my junior, but has lived his life in a state of perpetual adolescence. You know him as a quiet and sober man, but that’s only because I demand he stay sober in this house—and even then I sometimes have my doubts. My father always said Filip was weaned with a bottle of whiskey. You can’t imagine the scrapes your grandfather saved him from time and time again, because the man has the aptitude of a child. He simply cannot fathom consequence. Each bottle of liquor is his first adventure in drinking. Each hangover a fresh surprise. Dealing with the man has been an uphill struggle, but my father was unreasonably fond of him, and my father was not a kind man. That says something, and so here he remains.”
John Henry settled back into the curve of the davenport. With one hand, he held his ankle where it rested on the opposite knee. He looked over Henry’s head. With his other hand, he rotated his tumbler.
“I once heard a Northerner refer to the South as ‘that perplexing place,’ and I can’t say I disagree with him. Look at you—you’re distinctly privileged to be among the planter class, yet you’ve been surrounded your entire life by Negroes of all manner of quality, and also by your common white redneck. Or, rather, rednecks recently of the hill class, which is to say of no class at all, and saddled with a character so low it can’t claim the term. A sensible man would prefer the company of a hundred temperate Negroes to the prattling of one hillbilly. I know I certainly would.”
John Henry appeared on the verge of saying more, but then he cocked his head to one side, cleared his throat, and said, “White trash as your grandfather always called them. They have their uses. Their passions have their uses.”
“Like the men who cleared our fields when I was younger.”
“Yes, exactly,” said John Henry, “but I intended … Well, the story of the South is long. I sometimes think the Yankees hate us so much because the richness of our story frankly belittles theirs. The original nation is more alive here than it is in the North, and the Northerner resents that. We still know the land, we still know how to treat a woman, we still know the names of all our forefathers. Family actually means something here. Anyway, I was going to tell you a story about your grandfather’s activities in the county, but perhaps I’d better not. Let me just say that there are … artifacts in the house I pray your mother never stumbles upon. I fear she would never recover. I mean only—to return to the original point—that the poor white serves a useful purpose from time to time. The Klan is comprised largely of these country types, almost unfathomably stupid and passionate. This is the sort of man who would kill a Catholic but couldn’t define one. And yet, justice … Henry, it may seem a strange thing for a lawyer to say, but the courts can’t be relied upon to mete out justice in all cases. Abstraction can paralyze. Trust me when I say I know this better than most. I’ve seen the failure a thousand times over. The Klan and their ilk, for all their rabblerousing, often have a keen sense of right and wrong undiluted by relativism, and they can carry out justice with alacrity. Rough justice, yes, but justice. I don’t wish to glorify the Klan—they’re fools—but … as your grandfather used to say, ‘Manners are morals. And a gentleman always minds his manners … until he can no longer afford to.’ That’s when the Klan comes in handy. They’re more discreet these days than they used to be.”
“Okay,” said Henry. But then, with an expression like petulance or confusion, he placed his chin in his palm and leaned forward and frowned.
John Henry watched his son through narrowing eyes. “Well, I’ve been speaking a good while. You came in to speak with me.”
“I don’t know …”
“Don’t be indirect, Henry.”
“Well,” said Henry innocently, “I guess I … Well, I just don’t really like Filip.”
John Henry blinked a few times, drawing his mind round to this tangent. He cleared his throat. “When you were a child, he was my biting dog. It was only natural that you would feel a certain antipathy toward him. But your insolence was a sign of high spirit, and I wasn’t unappreciative of that fact.”
Henry breathed once very deep, felt his heartbeat in his jaw, looked up into the face of his father. “I don’t trust him.”
There was a twitch of the lip. “Deservedly so. One ought not to entirely trust a drunkar—”
“I heard people talking.”
Into the warm tenor of their talk, a cool wind snaked. John Henry shifted almost imperceptibly, his chin lowering a fraction of an inch. “And what precisely was the nature of this talk you heard?”
“It was probably nothing.”
“Don’t equivocate, Henry.”
Henry’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know—”
“Henry!”
“I think it was about Mother.”
John Henry sat back. “What do you mean?”
“They were talking about someone touching Mother. Maybe Filip.”
The silence in the room was total.
Into its vast expanse Henry said, “I’m not even sure what they meant.”
His father laid his tumbler aside and sat up straight. “Who is they?”
“I don’t know; they were around a corner. Well, I think it was Filip and Maryleen talking? It was a while ago. I’m not sure. But Mother’s so clumsy without her hearing, maybe he was catching her as she fell. I’ve done that myself.”
“Have you spoken to your mother about this?”
“No, should I have?”
The response was a curt “Your five minutes are up.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes, sir.” Henry was instantly on his feet, standing over his father, who was now reaching down for his shoes. His heart was hammering in his chest, but he felt suddenly unable to step back to open the door. With his father’s head downturned, Henry had a clear view of his thinning crown. In a strange gesture, Henry reached up and touched his own thick hair gingerly. Then, as if the motion had caught his eye, John Henry looked up at his son, who stood there with his hand to a tendril of his hair in what was a strangely winsome—even girlish—manner, looking perplexed and unsure. John Henry’s face was blasting furnace red. He rose up from his seat on the davenport with a suddenness that almost unbalanced him, so he swayed for a moment.
“Henry,” his father said, but then absolutely nothing followed on the name, so they simply looked at each other, and on Henry’s face plain fear appeared. Suddenly and surely with a force that alarmed him, he wanted to retract every word that had been spoken and rip up the court record, but he heard himself saying simply, “Good night, Father.” Then he walked out of the room, feeling as though an enormous, age-old wheel had been set creaking into motion. He moved slowly through the lower halls of the house to the back steps and then climbed woodenly to the second floor. He didn’t know where his mother was and, suddenly, belatedly, was enveloped by a supreme panic, certain that his father was going to kill her. That fear was immediately allayed when he felt the reverberations of the front door slamming, and then, just moments later, the sound of the sedan prowled down the icy lane like a big black cat.
The next morning, Filip did not show up for work at the Forge house, nor did he appear any day thereafter, and the code on the white, silencing streets of Paris was that the man had simply left town.
And why not? After all, sometimes black men simply left a small, Southern town. Especially when the snow was falling so finely, and there were elderly relatives to visit in Cincinnati and Detroit and trees to trim down in Jackson, Birmingham, and Atlanta. Sometimes a man just went away for the holidays, and then he stayed. Stranger things have happened. Who can say?
Case in point: sometimes a man didn’t even have to leave town to disappear, he just went to the opera like Will Porter, who shot a man in honest self-defense but was ripped from a Kentucky jail, carried high on shoulders like an athlete dying young, down the roiling streets to the opera house. They charged a penny admission and strung him up high over the stage, and the strangling sounds were lost in the blaze of pistol fire from the orchestra seats, and good shots all.
Or a man headed down to the court of public opinion, like C. J. Miller after he allegedly raped and murdered two little girls he’d never seen in a county he’d never been to before. Poor, pathetic killer, half-mad with guilt, they dragged him down to the open-air court, and there were five thousand jurors that day, and all thumbs went down as Mr. Miller, he went up.
Others just burned to leave—like Richard Coleman, a hand on a farm when he rode the black train to Covington for supposed rape and murder. Upon his holiday return, ten thousand good souls were waiting, who bound him to a pole and stoked a creeping fire. All the little children brought kindling and bits of twig and laid them on the hearth of his life and roasted him good and slow. And when the smoke cleared, well, you must forgive the rush for the bones—this was a Kentucky delicacy.
No, this was the 1950s and Kentucky had stopped hanging its black laundry, or so they say. Surely Filip Dunbar wasn’t what his mother used to call the Christmas babies, the ones killed at Christmas, his mother born out of the foul pussy of slavery on a Jessamine County farm, where horses now run. Until she died in 1940, she lit candles during Advent for all those who had perished, and even then the count was quietly rising.
December 20: Moses Henderson, James Allen, Mr. Lewis, Scott Bishop, the brothers Da Loach, Clinton Montgomery, George Baily, Cope Mills, Samuel Bland, William Stewart, and two unidentified men.
December 21: James Stone, John Warren, Henry Davis, Henry Fitts, two pregnant women, and three unidentified men.
December 22: Joseph James, Jerry Burke, George Finley, and H. Bromley.
December 23: Sloan Allen, George King, seven men together in Georgia, James Martin, Frank West, Mack Brown, Mr. Brown, and one unidentified man.
December 24: Kinch Freeman, Eli Hilson, James Garden, five together in Virginia, and fourteen unidentified men in Meridian on this day.
Christmas Day: William Fluid, Calvin Thomas, J. H. McClinton, Montgomery Godley, King Davis, and Mr. and Mrs. Moore and more and
Filip Dunbar was one of the lucky ones, or so they say. Surely he walked out of Paris of his own free will that freezing Christmas Eve night without a word to his wife, without even his jacket or shoes. And the only things left hanging in Kentucky that Christmas were the ornaments on the trees, or so they say.
If Maryleen heard nothing, it was likely because her father had come down with the flu over Christmas and not attended church, so of course her mother had not gone but stayed home to tend to her husband, and Maryleen had not gone because she hadn’t seen the inside of a church since she was thirteen, when she’d announced she wouldn’t worship a God as cruel as this one. (“Maryleen, you fixing to go to hell!” “I’m sure the food’s better there.”) As far as she was concerned, all religious foolishness ended right then and there, even if—and she would be the first to acknowledge this—religion had saved the black race from certain suicide. But she wasn’t the black race and didn’t answer to it; she was Maryleen, and she wasn’t nearly as stupid as most folks, black or white.
If she heard nothing, it might have been because December was the busiest month in her calendar; it was hog-killing time, and she didn’t work at the Forge house from the twentieth of December until the second of January. Instead, she was busy cooking in her parents’ hall-and-parlor cottage on the outskirts of Claysville. Her mother told her with no small amount of resentment curdling her voice that Maryleen was the only colored girl in Bourbon County who got the holidays off, but Maryleen had insisted upon it when she was hired; take it or leave it. They accepted it, because her reputation preceded her, and her trial cooking sealed the deal. She had authentic talent, which she had learned was a powerful bargaining chip, and she used it to her advantage. Plus the white lady had seemed to actually like her a little bit, or perhaps merely sensed Maryleen’s dislike, which had worked its strange allure. Lavinia had probably never been disliked before. That sort of thing could unsettle a white woman and make her needy, the way cats only want to be petted by the hand that won’t touch them.
If she heard nothing, it was probably because hog killing was an all-consuming chore. Maryleen didn’t give a damn about the old-timey ways, and she was certainly aware she could purchase any pork product she wanted down at the A&P, but she did give a damn about her cooking and knew that no store-bought lard or fatback competed with what she could get from hogs fattened on their property by her own hand and then butchered in December when the old cutter came down from Georgetown. That man, born in another century to ex-slaves, would wait for a cold snap and the moon to increase; this kind of backwoods superstition and conjuration threatened Maryleen’s always tenuous relationship with patience, but she tolerated it with unusual forbearance, because the man could core a pig like it was no more trouble than an apple. His butchering was fast and deliberate and neat: he built the scaffolds himself from last year’s wood, then death came quick with barely any squealing, then the carcasses were scalded and hoisted up and hung with a gambrel. Even her father managed to put his Bible down for a few hours to aid in the process, and all the while Maryleen either helped with the cutting or stood in the kitchen, boiling coffee for the men. She wouldn’t touch coffee herself, considering it a drug no less harmful than any liquor and not something a human with good sense would tolerate in the body. The men sliced the hogs so their entrails spilled down like loose mottled sausages into the old copper pots, and from the scaffolding the shaved carcasses hung empty like glabrous, translucent lanterns for three days—bright pink with the winter sun lighting them just so—until they could be cut apart. During those three days, Maryleen went to Lexington to shop for ingredients, paying for it all herself as a Christmas gift to her parents, and then she spent the last week of the year undressing the pigs and cooking from dawn until dark. She separated the leaf lard, then rendered it in huge cast iron pots in what had once been a summer kitchen and which now saw no use except during hog-killing time; various cuts were carved, trimmings rendered down for common lard for when she didn’t need a fine pastry flavor; she saved some lean with the fat to be used later in sausage making. Then she laid away middling and jowl bacon seasoned with saltpeter and brown sugar in a meat box, and made her own sausages from the trimmings. Most of the pig couldn’t be used right away, but she was now set for a year of deep, bold flavor, at least in her own home. In the Forge house, everything was store-bought with flavors as shallow as an August pond, so she had to work twice as hard to create half the depth, but so be it. She doubted that kind of people could even tell the difference between a well-raised meat and supermarket cardboard. White folk were stupid like the sun was bright. Which was to say, shatteringly.
So she was tired when she walked the three miles to the Forge house at five in the morning on the second of January, 1954. She was sweating through her blouse despite the cold when she finally approached the house, which stood tomblike on its hillock alongside the slushing creek, barely visible against the cinder-colored sky. It was not yet dawn, but normally there would already be at least two lights burning in the upper house and in a barn as well, where a worker would be tending to the horses. But the house was dark. Only when Maryleen slipped into the kitchen did a single bulb illuminate a room on the second floor, but that she didn’t see.
The kitchen was so quiet, hollow-feeling, and undisturbed that she did something unusual: she lit a fat, drippy beeswax candle instead of switching on the bulb over the stove. It preserved a bit of the early-morning peace, while she laid out buttermilk and butter to warm for biscuits, and rooted around for peach jam in the outdated icebox. She reached behind her for the egg bowl, which Filip placed on the butcher-block island every morning prior to her six o’clock arrival—but no egg bowl. She swiveled around, staring at the deeply scarred block, exactly at the spot where the bowl should have been, and thought, why that lazy old drunk—
The boy was in the room. He stood there in his boxer shorts and a rumpled white undershirt, which was risen up and showed some of his pale stomach. The sight of his flesh made Maryleen rear back in distaste and alarm. Not only was he dressed improperly, but he appeared ravished and worn, as though he’d suffered some wasting disease over the holidays that left his hair sweaty and deep hollows like blackened lime slices beneath his eyes. Even in the mild, shifting candlelight, he looked like a buzzard off a gut pile.
“What’s wrong with you? You ill?” Even her concern sounded like an insult.
Henry didn’t move further into the room. He just shook his head, exhaustion lining his face.
“If you’ve got a fever, I don’t want you near me. Make your mama tend you.”
“Mother isn’t here. Father sent her away to Florida.”
Maryleen raised a hand. “That’s not my business. Go on back to bed. I need to fetch eggs. Filip didn’t fetch them for me this morning.” She scooped up a yellow ware bowl, actually glad now that the chore hadn’t been done, as it gave her a chance to escape this strange troll of a boy, but he said, “Filip isn’t here anymore.”
It wasn’t just the words, but the way he said them—so deliberately, like something memorized and carefully recited to an audience of one. It made Maryleen stop with her hand on the brass knob of the door with just enough time to note the cool oval shape, how similar it was to an egg only nowhere near as fragile, before her mind reared up. That thing that had been waiting like a stalking cat ready to spring had sprung.
“Oh,” she said, her voice oddly cool, disembodied from her beating chest. “Where’s he working now?”
His voice wavered, hesitant. “I don’t believe he’s working anywhere anymore, Maryleen.”
The way he said her name filled her with dread. She stepped out the door without another word, clutching the bowl to her belly and walking a few paces, then half running through the dark toward the chicken coops behind the horse barn. Her breath was coming in shallow draws and her face was flushed. She kneeled on shaky legs and reached around blindly in the coop, pushing hens aside impatiently, so they winged about and complained, and she dropped two eggs in her haste, one chicken escaping the hutch, so it required a minute to wrestle it back in. Six eggs in the bowl now, and she was walking back to the house, because she didn’t know what else to do. In lieu of proper thought, her legs just ferried her back, the minions of habit. The morning was still dark as the inside of a stove, the sun a long way off.
Thank God the boy was no longer in the kitchen when she returned. She placed the bowl on the butcher block, just as Filip would have done, and without further hesitation tiptoed as quickly as she could to the black phone, where it hung in the hallway. She couldn’t call her mother; her white folk didn’t rise until seven. Anyway, her mother would have told her if she’d known something. Her father’s preacher? No—Miss Martin, her old Home Economics teacher, the woman who had taught her everything she knew about cooking. Miss Martin would be awake; she woke every morning at four thirty for her morning prayers.
The phone was answered swiftly after two rings. There was that reliable, gracious voice with its precise elocution. “Good morning,” it said. “This is Ella Martin speaking.”
“Miss Martin!” Maryleen rasped with a hand curved around the receiver. “It’s Maryleen!”
“Yes, Maryleen. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. What are you doing calli—”
“Where’s Filip?” Maryleen interrupted. Into the tiniest hint of a pause, Maryleen whispered, “Filip Dunbar.”
“I know the Filip to whom you’re referring,” said Miss Ella. “Maryleen, he ran off over a week ago, just up and went. Left Susah on her own, which some might argue is for the best. They’d been having a lot of trouble recently from what I hear. My goodness, child, surely you didn’t call me at this hour to gossip with an old woman.”
“Oh God.”
“Maryleen.” The voice was curving into a question when Maryleen abruptly hung up the phone and stood there in the dark, her mind sorting and measuring, but knowing she was way too late to the equation. The final numbers had already been calculated by others.
“Who were you talking to, Maryleen?”
Despite the alarm that sent her body rimrod straight, despite the fact that she would whip around and see him standing there like a ghost in the shadows of the hall, her first acid thought was “with whom.”
“My mama,” she lied, her answer formulated before she even turned. There was a frightening stillness in Henry’s form, and his face was set in shadows, so she couldn’t know exactly what it held. She was sweating now, and her charged breath was audible.
“Today’s my shopping day,” she said uselessly into the silence, but he didn’t respond.
Then she snapped, her voice keening upward from a barely suppressed panic, “Go ask your father how I’m supposed to get to the grocery without a driver!”
“He’s not awake.”
“Go!” she cried.
For a second, he looked as though he was about to go do just that, but he didn’t. He said, “You can’t tell me what to do.”
Her mind reeled. The last time she’d been in the house, only ten days prior, she could have told him to drink lye and somehow, by virtue of her bandsaw personality or her seniority or just her evil eye, she could have gotten him to do it. But whatever power she had held in her hand at the end of December, he was holding in his hands now in this hallway, in this new year. Wearing a thin mask of frustration over rising fear, she shouldered roughly past him, stalked down the hall to the kitchen, trying her best to appear angered by his eavesdropping.
But he followed her. He stood watching as she banged copper and tin pots around mindlessly. She wasn’t a cryer, but the first droplets of grief and fear were wringing from the winepress of her mind.
“I can’t cook with you staring at me like that,” she finally hissed over her shoulder.
“Maryleen,” he said. “Do you think we all eventually get the punishment we deserve?”
“What?” she snapped.
“I mean, if God doesn’t exist, then he can’t punish anyone. I guess we have to do it ourselves,” he said. “See, man actually is the measure of all things. Man wrote all the books, so he’s the measure even if he says he isn’t. We invented God to tell us to do what we already wanted to do. That’s what I think.”
“Punishment? You mean men? What?” She had no idea what he was talking about, what he was trying to riddle out to her, but her body made its own interpretation, a trace of cold wending its way down from between her shoulder blades to her tailbone, and the sudden feeling that she had to pee.
“I heard you say Filip did something,” he said quietly, and the sound of his voice was the thing that frightened her most of all, the queer way he sounded like a little boy when he said it. When she turned, his eyes were enormous and febrile, and she couldn’t stop the words as they rose up from her very belly, passing through the esophagus constricted by fear and then through the ashes in her mouth: “What have you done?”
He reared back, a look of injury on his face. When he spoke, she could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “Nothing. I was trying to do the right thing. All I want is to grow up.”
“I said”—she hissed—“what have you done.”
“I didn’t do anything! I just told Father what you said.”
Maryleen’s brow crumpled up in bewilderment. “What I said?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
She stared at him without a word, waiting.
“You said Filip touched Mother. I heard you.”
She gasped. “Oh my God.”
“Maryleen—”
Her finger was trembling when it punctuated the air between them. “You are evil.”
Sudden rage blasted through him like fire. “No, I’m not! He touched Mother!”
Maryleen’s eyes grew impossibly wide. “He touched your whore mother,” she said, and then leaned so far over the butcher block, she was practically lying on it to yell into his face, “BECAUSE SHE WANTED IT!”
Henry reached out and swept the bowl with its eggs onto the floor, fury undoing what was left of his reserve. “Get out of my house, Maryleen!” he screamed. “Get out now!”
Only later would she look back furiously and think of herself as some slave ordered about by a little boy who had just discovered he would be master someday, talking big at the kitchen girl, who obeyed him, not even stopping to snuff out the candle, just grabbing her jacket and a black goatskin purse she’d spent a week’s wages on. The door spun a draft that gutted the candle and left Henry in the darkness behind her.
Maryleen raced down the drive in a flat-out panic and onto the road toward Paris; it was only six fifteen; there was no one about and still no play of light on the eastern horizon. A sense of unreality enveloped her now as she hastened along; had those words really passed between them, had she just imagined the absence of Filip? But no, there’d been no egg bowl waiting, this was real and actually happening. Yet, surely she was overreacting; she tried to calm her mind, she didn’t really think anyone was coming after her, not really, there was no lynch mob waiting for the girl cook, though she glanced fearfully over her shoulder for headlights; yes, the boy was just messing with her, she was turning this into something it wasn’t, she just needed to calm down. But by the time she was approaching the outskirts of town, sweating through her blouse, she could almost see Filip hanging from a tree right before her eyes, and her decision was made. Later, she would realize there had been a sneaky joy smuggled into her fear, that she hadn’t been quite as afraid as she remembered, that she had forced her own panic like a hothouse flower to compel her stubborn spirit to the action for which it had always—always—been intended. What had she been thinking, turning down colleges and ending up in a white kitchen like that? What exactly had she been trying to prove? Or avoid?
Her own house was empty, her mother and father both at work. In the wallpapered room where she had grown up—odd how the ugly trellised pea-blossom paper would soon be a thing she remembered fondly—she shoved two outfits and her spare pair of shoes into an old fabric traveling bag, but then eyed the single line of mysteries on her shelf and removed the extra shoes, returning them to her nearly empty closet. Nine mysteries and her pocket Shakespeare fitted snugly into the bag, all that the space would allow. Quickly, she removed her sweaty clothing and shrugged into a loose-fitting black blouse and a rayon skirt that fell below her knees, identical to the other three sets she owned and under which no hint of a figure could be discovered. With that final task complete, she was down the steps and out of the old house, site of her father’s Bible reading, of her mother’s weariness, of her own bad-tempered childhood. She didn’t leave a note, she would call them from Lexington—no, Cincinnati; first she would leave this bloody borderland behind. She intended to apologize to Miss Martin for hanging up on her, but Miss Martin would understand—she loved her like a daughter; Maryleen knew that. Then as she was shutting the old walnut front door, bag in hand, she suddenly stopped, her swarming thoughts stilled, and she stood at her fullest height, fear vanishing. She didn’t know where the certainty came from or why, but she suddenly knew she was going to New York City, that she’d find a job in a restaurant and then figure it out from there, and she felt now that she didn’t have a moment to lose, that her very life depended on it.
Oh, Mr. Forge, is your son ill?
Yes, yes, he is.
When did he take ill?
Over the holidays. There was a fever in the house.
John Henry picked up his wife at the Paris train station. He waited on the platform, an utterly motionless figure. His affectless face was outperformed by the fine details of his wool pin-striped suit, his black silk overcoat, gold cuff links, and houndstooth handkerchief, his wedding band, which winked dully. Every hair on his graying head was arranged into a still life, and his absolute stillness was betrayed only by the redness of his ears. It was very cold out.
When the train arrived, it came without urgency, its whistle distorted by the distance, its black flashing brokenly through the trees; then came the falling rhythm of its deceleration, the whine and hush of brakes. When it finally stopped, John Henry half wanted it to roll on, carry her away and fail its engine somewhere else. His head turned abruptly, found the straight black tail of the locomotive and the people who poured from it. They were all embracing. Someone kissed someone. He found their displays vulgar and invasive and turned away. Then she was there, standing hesitantly on the last step, blonde and pale, looking at him with all the native shyness he remembered from when they first met eighteen years ago. The wife of his youth, looking no worse for her obvious wear. He stepped forward, his cold hands helping her to navigate the last step onto the platform. He grasped up her suitcase. His other hand made a small, solicitous gesture at the small of her back. His father, Jacob Ellison Forge, had told him that a woman’s bones were lighter than a man’s—and may my words alone be a lesson to you in that regard. Only an animal visibly damages its mate.
They drove home in their usual silence made newly entire; they drove in the tame light of dusk and the aseptic chill. John Henry tried not to think of anything, but watched the thrifty sky as it diminished into evening, a sky like middle age, without eagerness or gladness, without the bright light and heat of youth. His wife shifted on the seat beside him. The motion caught his eye, and he looked at her as he pulled the sedan up the drive. She was looking at the house he had given her—she came from a family that had more name than money—in wonder or regret or some other unjustifiable female emotion. When she made a tiny mouselike motion to open the door for herself as if he would not do it for her, as if she had forgotten in her time away that it was the husband’s place to open the door for his wife, as if in her absence their marriage had ended, this was too much, and he suddenly reached over and placed one hand firmly against the back of her head. Without explanation, he pressed her head forward toward the dashboard, feeling her resist only for a moment, her left hand darting up once the way her heartbeat would flutter lightly when they made love, then he took up her pocketbook and landed three hard blows against her head, high enough on the back of the skull so the bruise would not show and where there was no danger of breaking her neck. She made no noise but a grunting exhalation with each blow, her shoulders shrinking up around her ears. Then he flung the pocketbook onto her lap and used both hands to turn her now, so that she could see his lips as he said, “Your son is sick. Go tend to him.”
And that would have been it. Except that she cried. They had already come into the house, John Henry following after her with her suitcase and pointing her upstairs, as though she were a child. She had walked up the stairs gripping the walnut banister, but then stumbled awkwardly on the last one, looking back down at him with fear wrinkling up her face, and he saw tears on her cheek. Despite her actions, her guilt, what she had done to him, despite the fact that her wet little tongue had no doubt licked the rotten fruit before she had taken it in her mouth and swallowed it, here she stood, crying, and the naïve innocence of her look, which was at best a lie and at worst cuckoldry, made a mockery of his strict dignity, his family, of his manhood. The high heat of rage flooded him instantaneously. He rushed the stairs like a bull, and for a moment Lavinia could only stare in alarm, never having seen him wholly uncontained, before she turned and fled down the hallway, and he realized she planned to escape him by rushing into their son’s room—his son’s room! He overcame her as she was reaching for the door, twisting her under him, his hands like manacles on her wrists. He dragged her to their room and kicked the door shut, beyond caring about the clatter they made or their heavy breathing. Her strained grunting and struggling only aroused him, and he unleashed himself. He forced her face-first onto the bed with her arms folded against her chest and struck her with his open hand against the back of her head with increasing force until she mewled into the bedspread. Forcing her tweed skirt above her hips, he was stymied by a hard white girdle and belts and straps and stockings so tight around her—like a chastity belt—that his fingernails scratched her as he ripped them down from her hips. He didn’t say anything, there was no need, she understood absolutely nothing of him anyway even after all these years, so this was both his farewell address and a reconfiguration of his vows. He dropped his trousers and shorts and, hard with the potency of his anger, he forced himself into her dry, the rude, fleshy slap of his hips beating against her flanks. He breathed like a gladiator as he stared down at the back of her deceitful head. But when she shifted under him once in pain, he shuddered with pleasure, and, against his will, he remembered suddenly their youthful coming together with a vibrancy like lightning, and he paused midthrust, panting, blinded by the memory of it—the plangency of old delight, of her lost charms, how her eyes had once admired him. But she had changed and turned away and made a fool of him, and he had wasted the energy of his adult life on her luster; it was not so much that he hated her now, but that he respected himself. And with that thought, he was moving again, stabbing into her, fast and with no feeling now, not even anger, in a strict charade of lovemaking again and again in the old, rote motions again and again until she cried out, but not in pleasure.
My darling boy—sleeping there just as you did as an infant—I don’t expect you to understand. You are so young, and we have no shared language between us, not really. I held you in my body for nine long months, and I gave birth to you, but you don’t know me at all. I’m not just your mother; I’m a woman. I’m telling you something now that I can barely stand to see myself, that I have until very recently been a little girl. Married, pregnant three times and now thirty-eight years old, but still a little girl. No matter what anyone tells you, a person is not fully mature until they can love another human being. I love you, of course, but loving a child you gave birth to is not what I’m talking about. That’s effortless. What I’m talking about is the love that occurs between equals, love being something that can only occur between equals. I know you don’t think of that man as my equal. The truth is I didn’t either—he’s black and he drinks too much. I can’t hear the way he talks, but I can just imagine how rough and rude it is. But what you may never understand, because you are not a woman, is that the first time he kissed me, he didn’t kiss me just with his mouth; he kissed me with his eyes. He looked into me. No one had ever done that before. Then I was completely and totally ashamed, but not because of the sex, which is the natural course of things. I was ashamed of the glaring inequality that existed between us. He knew something of which I was completely ignorant, and from that moment on, against every impediment, I strove to become worthy of him, to become his equal.
In blistering dreams, he ascends a ladder out of the brilliant sunlit present into dark, roiling cumulus clouds where the troubled faces of his mother and father recede from countenance to anachronism to chiaroscuro to nothing. There in crumbling, sooty clouds, where the rotten-flesh dead cease their prattling and rutting long enough to point upward, saying, That way, Mister Henry; up, up, step after step into the future. Now over the rumbling of heaven’s rusty gears, he detects a tolling deeper than blood: the bells of ambition and desire. Up, up to the very top of the ladder. With feverish effort, he hauls up the ladder and turns it onto its side and makes it a proscenium. So, here they come, advancing along its length, a procession of horses from time immemorial through the Age of Man, only the finest specimens: the dish-faced Arabian, the mighty Clydesdale, the wild Mustang, the cutting Quarter, the stalwart Morgan, and last but not least the royal Thoroughbred, that perfect marriage of speed and strength, of cold and hot blood, of high temper and astonishing speed! This alone is the culmination of the species, of this long, long line as old as the gods, standing behind you always watching you, Henry. Always.
Henry struggled in his sheets, but he couldn’t wake. Demeter has returned with gentle hands and nothing to say, touching him here and there and everywhere, hands on his face and at the crux of her legs, and when he says, I’ve seen something amazing, she points up at the mistletoe above her head, smiling sweetly. But when she removes her painted mask, she’s nothing but that bitch Aphrodite.
Father asks, Is the good the pleasurable?
Son: Mother thinks so!
Father: Is the wife the head of the house?
Son: The low seat of the house!
Father: Who made you the man you are?
Son: The long line behind me … It.
Father: I gave you blood.
Son: And quantitas magna frumentorum!
Father: Why are our voices not in communion?
Son: Ut sementem feceris, ita metes!
Henry snapped awake, drenched in sweat and realizing he had crossed some invisible line into adulthood. He knew this, because he no longer found death interesting and certainly nothing to be afraid of. Anyone could do it.
He was waiting for his tutor, quiet and certain as a secret in the downstairs study, sitting behind a stacked rampart of Greek and Latin volumes, his hands folded into a rock of purpose, his bleary head high. He heard the front door open, listened to a deeply polite voice greeting his mother, then sat forward as the footsteps sounded down the hall. The tutor stopped short in the doorway.
“Good morning,” the man said, surprised to discover his young charge waiting for him in a soft pool of sunlight that sparked the gold lettering on the spines of the black and burgundy volumes. Dust motes danced around the boy like a swarm of gnats.
“I’m ready to start,” said Henry Forge.
The tutor was a slim, slight man, shorter than Henry, who walked with the gentle stoop of an older person. His skin was invalid-pale, but his booktrained eyes were sharp and unsentimental; there was no indecision about him as he stepped into the room and shut the door with a gentle, firm hand.
“Well, perhaps I’m not ready to start,” he said with the faintest of smiles on his face. “I’ve only just now walked in the door and met your lovely mother.” His voice was deep and flat with no bowing at the vowels. Henry inspected him carefully, as if the precise topography of his Northern home could be discovered in the lines and angles of his face.
“You’re not from here,” he said slowly.
“Apparently,” said the tutor as he took stock of the room—the lazy whir of the ceiling fan, the antique Italian desk at which Henry sat—“Kentucky suffers from a dearth of classically trained educators. But I have to say it’s a lovely state you have here. Remarkably green.” The man took his time advancing across the room and easing into a chair opposite the desk, crossing his legs with a care that spoke of old injuries or some other infirmity. All the while, he observed Henry with a mild, unblinking gaze.
“Kentucky is the best state in the union.”
“Is that right?” the man countered.
“That’s right.”
“Better than New Jersey even?” There was a twitch of amusement about the lips.
The joke was lost on Henry, whose eyes widened. “People risked their lives getting here to escape states like New Jersey. They banned slavery in 1804 and a lot of families moved south with their niggers to establi—”
“Negroes.” The man cocked his graying head to one side, one brow on the rise. “Negroes, I think you meant to say.”
Henry made no reply; he looked down at the man’s battered leather satchel resting against the sinuous leg of his chair. “Is my work in there?”
“It is.”
Henry edged forward. “But I already had an idea of what to start with.”
The man sat back against the spines of his Windsor chair and folded his hands at his belly. “Is that right? Enlighten me.”
Henry sat up straighter. “On Horsemanship,” he said.
Now the brow was soaring. “I might have chosen something less … esoteric. Something more suited to the educational needs of a young man your age.”
“On Horsemanship would be good, I think. Did you know that evolution is a ladder to perfection? It’s true. You can chart the development of the horse right up the ladder: Eohippus, the dawn horse, which was about the size of a terrier, then Mesohippus, which was about six hands high, then Merychippus, which—”
“Young man,” the tutor interrupted. “I don’t think your father wants you spending valuable time on something like On Horsemanship.”
Henry maintained a level gaze, but his tone slipped some. “I’m sure Father would allow me to read anything, so long as I work hard. I can translate it into English, then I can translate it for you into Latin. I need the practice.”
The man recrossed his legs, smoothed the pressed creases on his gabardine pant legs, and took his time responding. “Well, it sounds to me as if you intend to work very hard.”
“I do,” said Henry. “I wouldn’t want to waste my father’s money.” An attempted smile of his own.
“Your father said he’s been tutoring you himself in Latin thus far. That’s very impressive.”
“Well, he began studying Latin when he was five. We were one of the first families to come over the Wilderness Road. We’re quite wealthy.”
“Young man,” the tutor said abruptly, “you look exhausted. Do you get enough sleep?”
“Yes. I really think my father’s pronunciation could be better, though.” Henry leaned forward again. “I want my education to be very heavy on the classics—not that I won’t study math and science; I’ll study all of it. I intend to be excellent at everything I set my mind to, but what I want most is to be heavy on the classics. I want to be a classicist. I’ve already memorized most of the details of classical mythology. But I’d really like to start with On Horsemanship.”
“All right, all right,” said the tutor, holding up a hand. “I do, of course, have a curriculum for you based on your previous schooling and tutoring. But if your heart is set on it, then I suppose we can begin with On Horsemanship. What is extant, at least. If that’s your … inclination, I certainly don’t see the harm in it. Though I’m not sure I see the value either.”
“When can we start?”
The man didn’t answer immediately, but lowered his head ever so slightly, so that he gave the impression he was gazing at Henry over invisible eyeglasses. “Wouldn’t you like to know my name first?”
“My name’s Henry.”
“Yes, I know that. My name is Gerald Price. Of Trenton, New Jersey.”
“When do we start?”
The man shrugged with a barely audible sigh. “We begin now, I suppose.”
And so his true education began. They studied this appraisal of animals for hours and when the older man left, the student remained exactly where he had begun the day. He grammared and translated and conjugated and declined, then read well into the night in his bed by flashlight and many nights thereafter, making penciled notes in composition books and memorizing Xenophon to the word, so he would never forget that for soundness of foot a thick horn is far better than a thin. Again, it is important to notice whether the hoofs are high both before and behind, or flat to the ground; for a high hoof keeps the “frog,” as it is called, well off the ground; whereas a low hoof treads equally with the stoutest and softest part of the foot alike, the gait resembling that of a bandy-legged man. “You may tell a good foot clearly by the ring,” says Simon happily; for the hollow hoof rings like a cymbal against the solid earth.
And the boy paid keen attention to the assemblage of a horse’s body, particularly the shoulder blades, or arms, these if thick and muscular present a stronger and handsomer appearance, just as in the case of a human being. Again, a comparatively broad chest is better alike for strength and beauty, and better adapted to carry the legs well asunder, so that they will not overlap and interfere with one another … Again, the neck should not be set on dropping forward from the chest, like a boar’s, but, like that of a game-cock rather, it should shoot upwards to the crest, and be slack along the curvature; whilst the head should be bony and the jawbone small. In this way the neck will be well in front of the rider, and the eye will command what lies before the horse’s feet. A horse, moreover, of this build, however spirited, will be least capable of overmastering the rider, since it is not by arching but by stretching out his neck and head that a horse endeavors to assert his power.
Henry sketched his plans, made lists and calculations. He shaped a horse out of the dark clay of his mind, and it crept forth into the light of expectation: first its destrier head, then its massive barrel chest. From the turned hooves to the cut of the knife-tip ears, its body was designed for forward motion. Bred light, but heavily motored. Flexible, intelligent, full of force and fire, towering in height—not the servant of the Moirai but their trampler—this was a horse that made good on horseness. Tough enough for war, but more beautiful than any woman and even more necessary.
Every morning the tutor greeted the madder-eyed insomniac, saying, “Tell me what you know,” and Henry stood before him, maniacal with fatigue, but inlit with consuming desire:
I know that a horse is better than corn, and that a man is better than a horse, and that a boy is better than a man, because he has not become his father yet.
Tell me what you know.
That this farm is just a sleight of land—a play at restraint! But the joke is on John Henry, not Jacob Ellison or Moses Cooper or William Iver or Richmond Cooper or Edward—
Tell me what you know.
That I am a Kentuckian first, a Virginian second, a Christian third. I am the refinement of Samuel’s seed. I am a man made for my time, not my father’s or his father’s. I know that a city untended weakens and falls. Troy will fall, Rome will fall, any great city will fall without a show of strength.
Tell me—
I know that when the Liberators killed Caesar, they stabbed him right through the heart.
A tall and beautiful Henry had just turned sixteen when his cousins made their yearly weeklong visit. They traversed the shimmering Florida byways in the late summer heat, and when they finally stumbled from their Chevrolet onto the Forge lawn, they were sweating like miniature prizefighters, throwing themselves into Lavinia’s waiting arms. John Henry was cordial at her side, but their increasingly distracted son was nowhere to be seen. Henry had bicycled into Paris, his Saturday habit now, to pore over books in the public library. There he studied the principles of legacy. He spread out his books of pedigree charts, breeding formulas, family trees that branched crookedly back to the Godolphin Arabian, the Darley Arabian, Byerley Turk. Once he carefully ripped a page from an old encyclopedia, so that he could bring home the Turk, all greyhound head and legs like rose stems. The picture hid gamely under his mattress, waiting for the time when it would finally centerpiece a wall—when Henry was eighteen and matriculated at Sewanee alongside the sons of the South.
Today, he made his scrupulous notes on mare stamping, the intractable tendency of the female to raft her features over the weaker male and mold her get in her image. It was a tenuous and risky task to breed when male strength was infinitely subject to the savvier, prepotent female. Henry was just now learning how to linebreed and inbreed a horse to a desired constitution, delving back to the same female ancestor on both sides, so that the lines rhymed and the foals showed a dam’s taproot strengths without being dominated by her. A large heart came through the dam; one could trace its passage from foal to granddam and beyond; it stoked the chests of all descendants, it fueled limbs across finish lines and into winner’s circles. The heart was the thing—and how to get it.
Henry cycled back to the house in the amber afternoon with borrowed books crammed into his rucksack, a cap tilted across his brow. He’d nearly run over his youngest cousin in diapers before he remembered that the family had arrived today, that he’d been expected back well before the supper hour. He dropped his bike in the gravel, so the wheels spun with a useless rattle, and lifted the first child he saw to his chest, a small human shield against the remonstration sure to come. But his father was engrossed in conversation with his brother, a man with dark red hair just beginning to gray and the easy, open face of a younger brother. Never close, they were as different as spring and autumn. Beyond them, the girls played croquet—
Henry detected his cousin Loretta among them.
When the new cook, Paulette, called for supper, the girls all dropped their mallets and sprang across the lawn, calling “Henry! Henry! Henry!” as they angled past him toward the house, waving and sparking white and all redheaded in their bowtied dresses. Lavinia, on a step of the el porch, ushered them inside, touching each on the shoulder as they went by in a bright wash, blessing them as they went, but her eyes were on her son, on whom Loretta was advancing like a gay shadow. Henry turned to her, reinforcing his face against her prettiness, which he couldn’t remember having seen before. It changed the temperature of his skin.
“Oh my gosh,” Loretta said, “what happened to you?” It was a statement, not a question, but Henry looked down at himself as if his shirt were fouled or his zipper undone. His face returned to hers, wary.
She was watching him as if she knew something he didn’t, smiling from one side of her pretty mouth as an older person might smile at a child, and propping her white, heart-shaped glasses on the crown of her head. Her eyes were green, disarming, bold. Like his, but more adult, even he could see that.
“You’re gorgeous,” Loretta said.
If he didn’t move, his eyes started somewhat in their sockets, and he fought the urge to turn his head away from the soft blow of her compliment. Instead, he blushed so badly his face burned. Then he did allow his eyes to escape from hers, but they only turned awkwardly down toward the mother-of-pearl buttons on her blouse.
She laughed then, but the sound was young, and so much sweeter and less sophisticated than her speaking voice that he was able to look into her eyes again.
“God, how did you get to be so good-looking?” she said, and she grabbed his elbow, guiding him toward the house. Henry snuck a peek in the direction of his mother, but she was gone, watching them now from a window in the dining room that he couldn’t see. Henry and Loretta advanced on the house slowly; she owned him by the time they had walked ten paces.
“You could be in movies, I’m not kidding,” she said. “Aunt Lavinia is pretty, but your dad, not so much. So what happened to you?”
He was still blushing as he eyed the exquisite slope of her coral-colored lips. His mind was fumbling for something to say when she said, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Do you still have horses?”
She laughed. “Liar.”
“No,” he said, “I have a girlfriend. I was just curious if you still have horses.”
Arm in arm they went and she rolled her eyes and sighed, but said, “A couple.”
“Yeah, but real horses.”
“Yes, real horses,” she said. “I still compete.”
Now it was his turn to roll his eyes. “I meant Thoroughbred horses.”
Loretta withdrew her hand suddenly from his elbow. “Yes, we have horses. Real horses. Yes, some of them are Thoroughbreds. Mother and I do dressage. You know that. What’s your point?”
Henry’s laugh was a foil for a secret, and for a moment their ages seesawed.
“What’s that laugh supposed to mean?” she said.
“Nothing.” He shrugged, turned up his shoulders a bit, allowing a small insouciant smile to play around the corners of his mouth.
Loretta stopped walking altogether. He stopped to look back at her.
“When did you get so high and mighty?” she snapped. “You don’t even have a girlfriend. I don’t think you have a foot to stand on.” Her tone was acid, her face hard, and now she marched past him, all slicing shoulders and high chin, angling for the side door.
“Hey!” he called after her. “I was kidding!” A moment later: “Hey, I don’t think dressage is stupid.”
Loretta paused with her hand on the screen door and turned toward him, so he had a proper glimpse of her bright copper hair and newgrown breasts, her legs white and gleaming. Through eyes turned to slits, she regarded him without saying a word.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Henry said softly.
For a moment it seemed as if she was going to turn her back on him again, but then she laughed that childish laugh, and she made a kissing motion at him before she skipped on into the house.
He followed after her like a dog.
John Henry and Uncle Mason sat deep in discussion of the farm and its plantation, their heads tilted together at the breakfast table, their plates pushed hastily aside, so their fingers could make maps of the linens. The girls were a messy, squabbling flock, while their mother, Melissa Jeane, hovered over them, ever the harried hen, too overwhelmed by the task of feeding her brood to eat anything herself. Lavinia sat in the cocoon of her silence as Paulette moved unnoticed at their outskirts, replacing dishes, filling glasses, covering eggs and potatoes in their silver servers. Henry had no interest in any of it; he abandoned the room, grabbing a piece of toast and escaping through the kitchen’s swinging door.
He was standing on the porch, surveying the farm drenched in morning’s brisk light—his crucible, where a new world would be forged—when Loretta appeared behind him, tapping a smart rhythm with the toe of her shoe. “I’m bored to death,” she whispered, and her breath whispered too against the skin of his neck.
“Yup,” he said, chewing his toast, and when he made no further response, she stepped in front of him, her robust figure interrupting the light.
“Show me the Walkers,” she said.
“I thought you were already bored.” He wiped his fingers on his khakis.
“Come on,” she said, and reached out to tug at his arm. She was surprisingly strong, but then she was no small girl. She grinned at him, her lipstick nearly worn away by her breakfast.
“I have no interest in the Walkers,” he said.
“But,” she said slowly, “don’t you want to go for a ride?” And to his utter surprise, she swiveled her hips once in a carnal, circumscribed dance for him, which instantly made his insides lurch. Caught in the warm vise of alarm and arousal, he stood there, saying nothing at all.
“Listen, if you don’t want to come, that’s fine.” Loretta sighed and moued, her hands on her hips. “I’ll just go find Jimmy then.” She marched down onto the grass.
“What?” Henry snapped, flinging aside what was left of his toast and starting after her across the lawn. Jimmy was a teenager from Louisville who’d been passed relative to relative in Claysville for over two years. He’d been an occasional employee on their farm, a handsome and raucous boy, whose laughter was always cut short when Henry came around. Then he would stand mute with dark, bruised eyes, his smile withering on his lips. Henry was startled that Loretta even remembered him.
“Why would you even say that?” Henry pressed, whispering as if someone was close by and listening. “That’s disgusting.”
“What’s disgusting?” Loretta said innocently.
“I know what you meant,” he whispered.
“Oh, your mind is in the gutter,” she mocked.
“You’re the one who said it!” He felt the rising heat of fury on his cheeks.
“I never said coloreds have big cocks,” she said, and Henry reared back, shock eclipsing his anger, but she only grabbed at his elbow, that easy female gesture again, and he remained at her side, that easy male acquiescence.
“My gosh, I’m just trying to rile you up,” Loretta said, rolling her eyes. “You’re such a bumpkin! Who knew you were so … sensitive.”
“I have standards,” Henry said, and snatched his arm back, but they kept on until the syncopated rhythms of their feet formed a unison.
“Father won’t let you ride the Walkers,” Henry warned when they reached the barn door.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of Uncle John,” Loretta tossed back. “Are you?”
Henry paused where he stood, feeling the great, reassuring warmth of the morning pressing against his back, and a prickly sense of discomfort arising. He watched, circumspect, as Loretta sashayed down the row. Then he followed his cousin into the barn, because her hips and lips were warmer than even the bedazzling light of morning.
The horses were immediately aware of their presence. They stirred, collecting one after the other at their stall doors, dark heads swinging over crib doors, drafts of air quivering down the channels of their nostrils.
“Oh,” Loretta sighed, “they smell like sunshine and earth.” She slid the palms of her hand along one filly’s jaw—the yearling foal of Martha White—and stared into her eyes, that dark, confounding space. Then she traced the jagged line of her brilliant blaze, but the other horses blew and stamped, so she moved to each in turn.
“Don’t you just love them?” she said.
Henry made a face. What use were the Walkers to him? They were predictable and unsurprising as time, heavy on their bones with their absurdly long underlines. And, too, they were the province of Filip, a man he could not think of without his stomach turning to a hard plum pit.
“Let’s ride,” said Loretta, whirling around suddenly.
“No way,” Henry said.
“Where’s the tack room?”
“No, Loretta,” he said again, more sternly, he hoped.
“I’ll find it myself then.” She started off down the row with fresh purpose, horse heads pointing the way, their tails tossing as they blew for want of affection or a ride. One Walker whickered and traced a needy circle in his stall as she passed.
Henry jogged along after Loretta, but just as her hand lifted the latch of the tack room door, and just as he was trying to draw her back, their hands wrestling briefly, the door swung open, and Loretta dragged him inward, slamming the door shut again. Before their eyes could adjust to the swamping dark, her mouth missed his for his cheek, then latched onto his lips. Her hands plied at his shoulders and his bottom.
“Lie down,” she said. He felt about with his foot, his heart beating madly, until he nudged the edge of a hayrack. He scooted back onto the bed of scratching hay, and she joined him there and began to work on the buttons of his fly. She half lay over him then, her pliant tongue reaching into unexplored regions of his mouth. The pressure of her breasts was strange and insistent as she rooted around in his shorts. His breath came in ragged draws. Then she schooled him with her hand.
Even before his breathing had slowed, he was shoving himself still half-hard into his khakis and fumbling with the buttons. Loretta lay beside him, wiping her hands on the hay, but only found that it clung to her palms.
“Do you think I was good at that?” she said.
He nodded, but inside him he discovered an awkward twinge of disappointment. Was this some kind of farewell address to childhood? It felt less than spectacular.
“Guess where I learned to do that,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“One of my teachers; he’s my boyfriend.” She waited for his response, which didn’t come. It was all he could do to get his pants buttoned in the half dark. His hands were leeched of strength, the buttons downright disobedient.
Suddenly, a small sound caused his blood to leap like a lasso, and he started up from the hay. “Relax,” Loretta hissed, “no one’s coming.”
She was right. They waited, but the only thing Henry could hear was the untaxed rhythm of her breath. There was nothing out there; even the horses were silent.
“I have to say,” Loretta said, staring at his face in the dark, “you really don’t look like you get enough sleep.”
Henry sighed. “Well, I read a lot,” he said. “I have plans.”
“Plans for what?”
Henry was silent for a moment, finding his cousin lacking in seriousness and unworthy of his private, curated thoughts, but under the spell of this new relaxation, he went on. “Nobody knows this, so you need to keep it a secret, but someday I’m going to turn Forge Run Farm into a Thor-oughbred operation.” He tried to ape the calm of an adult, but his eagerness pressed through. “All this corn farming is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a waste of this farm’s potential, a waste of this family’s legacy! Do you know how long we’ve been here? I mean, you’re in Florida now, it’s almost like you’re not part of the family anymore—”
“Hey,” Loretta said, but listlessly, and he barreled on. “This is what happens when you get complacent, when you don’t have the courage to dream big or grab the opportunities that are right before you. I mean, Tennessee Walkers? Give me a break. This is Kentucky—this land is destined for Thoroughbreds.”
“Thoroughbreds again,” Loretta sighed, and rolled her eyes.
Henry bullied her down with a rising voice. “You’re all the same! None of you know how to think big! I can’t stand the way Father’s running this place! It makes me crazy! We’re like runners in the middle of the pack. Why even compete, what’s the point? Run out front or quit.”
Loretta shrugged and rolled up to a sitting position to check the buttons on her blouse.
“Hey, where’s my headband?” she said suddenly, and turned over on her hands and knees, scouring the hay, but Henry didn’t move. He just spoke to her back.
“Everybody thinks there’s so much chance involved in horse racing, but that’s not how I see it. It’s about controlled usage of every resource. ‘Chance’ is a word ignorant men use when they don’t know how to plan and take calculated risks. Life is ten percent chance and ninety percent willpower and intelligence. Think of—”
“There it is,” Loretta said, and she returned the checkered band to her hair.
“—Signorina and Chaleureux. Their meeting on the road might have been chance, but the breeding of Signorinetta was anything but. A great breeder has to know when to seize the opportunity to get the dam’s heart.”
“Shhhhhh!” Loretta said, and she sprang suddenly up from the hay, tipped forward on her toes with her hands out to her sides in the attitude of a startled dancer.
Henry lost his thought in an instant and flung himself up, fumbling in the dark to secure his clothing. Loretta was raking wildly at her hair, all the gold straw drifting around her shoulders when the door opened.
They were confronted with a man’s embarrassed face for only a moment before they tumbled out, Henry fairly flying down the row, but Loretta stopping suddenly and saying, “Hey, you’re not Filip.”
Henry was light-blind with one foot out the barn door when he realized she wasn’t following. He said “Loretta!” hard, as if he were her father.
“Who are you?” Loretta said, gazing up with consternation into the white man’s face.
“Uh,” the man said quietly, looking anywhere but at the door the two had exited from, “I’m Robert Forester.”
“Where’s Filip?”
“Loretta!” said Henry sharply again.
“I reckon he don’t work here no more,” said the man with a shrug.
“Well, that’s odd,” said Loretta. “He’d been with this family since forever.” Baffled, she turned and walked slowly out of the barn into the now harsh light of the risen sun. She looked at Henry and said, “Why on earth would you let Filip go? He was my favorite.”
“I never could stand that nigger,” Henry said.
Now it was Loretta’s turn to rear back. “I get the feeling you can’t stand anyone! And don’t say nigger. It makes you sound like a bumpkin.”
“And you sound like a nigger lover.”
“Oh, I’m just a lover,” Loretta said airily. “I don’t even see color. I’m beyond all that.”
Henry scowled at her, and she said, “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”
Then she spotted their fathers now on the porch, still in conversation, John Henry’s back rimrod straight with his strict dignity, which never altered. Loretta grasped Henry’s elbow suddenly, so that he almost stumbled over his own shoes. She whispered, “Don’t tell about … okay?”
“You really do think I’m an idiot,” he snapped.
“Ha!” She laughed, tossing the fall of her hair over one shoulder. “I think you’re pure as the driven snow!” And she flounced on ahead of him toward the house.
“Henry Forge!”
No. He wouldn’t go. He was stacking boxes for his mother in the attic, where the family history lay organized and covered in sheets under the roof, where birds roosted as if on thin black soil, calling as his father was calling.
“Henry Forge!”
Who died and made me your slave? His insolence was a physical delight.
“Do not make me find you! Now!”
It still owned him. It. His lace-ups clapped the servants’ stairs, one after the other; they beat out the steady rhythm of John Henry. His only disobedience was his desultory pace.
His father was standing at the rear door off the kitchen, his pale blue striped sleeves rolled up over his freckled biceps, the short red hairs glinting there. By now, the hair on his head was completely gray. It always startled.
“What took you so long?” he said, turning to open the door to the backyard, where the morning was rioting in the dew and sparking off the crisp grass and the hedges. “Come along.”
As Henry descended the limestone steps off the back door, half-blinded by the acid light, his father picked up clippers and a saw from the ground. He said, “Fetch a ladder, please.”
“What for?” The words slipped off his truculent tongue before he could stop them. Even now, at the threshold of his adult life, he was just a little boy asking for answers from a man who wouldn’t answer.
But this time John Henry replied. “We’re cutting mistletoe from one of the trees. Apparently, if you want a job done correctly, you can’t hire men who are too busy rolling their own damn cigarettes to do any work. You have to do it yourself.”
By the time Henry had found the twenty-foot ladder in one of the old cabins, his father was a solitary figure in the orchard. Henry followed after him as best he could, clumsily balancing the shaky length of the ladder on two pinched palms. Before him, the wild fecundity of the orchard bloomed in the light wind that sluiced gently through the avenues of trees. The wind seemed to come directly from the sun, a perfect globe of red risen confidently out of the laden boughs. That globe commanded all the life of the garden, the many million blades of grass, the thick stalks of the trees with their secret rings, the gradations of green flourishing off the dark limbs and in their shadows, and the red, hanging apples.
John Henry stopped before one tree, about twenty deep, where the house couldn’t be seen and where the privacy was nearly primordial. He pointed upward. “Mistletoe,” he said. “Poison,” he added.
At first, Henry could detect nothing but bright fruit and limitless green punctured by the sun, but then, squinting, he discerned there, among the healthy branches, a smattering of pale seeds like tiny pearl onions or white trinkets clustered in a bush of hardy leaves. It had the look of a wildly disordered bird’s nest. The tree branch was suffering under the leaching plant, which drained its natural strength. With care, Henry positioned the ladder next to the blighted branch.
“My hope is that it can be merely clipped out. I don’t want to lose my tree, or any tree.”
“Well, one tree—” Henry began.
“I planted these two rows of trees when your brothers were born.”
It was as if the sentence had been said by someone else, so foreign was its meaning. At first, Henry simply stood there, staring stupidly as his father adjusted the clippers in his hand and set his hands on the ladder, peering upward.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Looking up at the mistletoe clump, where it encircled the branch in a draining embrace, John Henry said, “There were two children before you were born. The first died right after birth, the other died in its second month. There was a great deal of rejoicing, then a great deal of bitterness.”
Henry’s astonishment wrote red across his cheeks. There was a pained accusation in his voice when he said, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”
“Because it almost killed your mother, and it wasn’t your business,” came the reply. “So I have my reasons for preserving this orchard.” And after one deep breath, girding himself with self-assurance, John Henry placed one foot on the first rung and slowly began to climb. Henry, his outrage growing even as he held the ladder steady, blurted, “Why do you always treat me like a child?”
This time there was no reply as John Henry hesitated on the second rung, his brow furrowed and a trembling causing his khakis to shake.
It was the subtlest of movements, but Henry grabbed instinctively at his father’s strong, bunchy calf to steady him. “Are you okay?” He saw the steeling of his father’s jaw, the way he thrust his chin forward toward a rung of the ladder to gaze resolutely skyward, and he started in surprise. “Father, are you afraid of heights?”
Only a grunt as a reply. But his father seemed to inch up the ladder, rather than climb, each motion slowed by hesitation. What door had been opened on conversation was closed again, and the room of their understanding was silent.
Father, I didn’t know you were afraid of anything.
Oh oh but perhaps I did
For a moment, he wanted to say, Why don’t you let me do it, but he was spellbound by those strangely enfeebled movements his father made as he climbed and, toughened by his sense of injustice, he scraped the last bit of love off his tongue with his teeth. Presently, the gray head disappeared into the ceiling of green. Then the voice—the authority that had circumscribed his life for sixteen years—called down, “It’s too late. It’s gotten into the vasculature and the branch is stunted. Goddammit. Hand me the saw.” And the clippers dropped down with a thud to the ground.
Henry picked up the saw by its serrated teeth and, because his father had climbed so high, he ascended the first two rungs of the ladder. John Henry, watching him come, reached down with an awkward, curtailed gesture, still clinging with desperate force to a higher rung. Henry felt the ladder shake with his father’s shaking. It shook its way right past his fingertips into the muscles of his chest.
John Henry grabbed the saw and placed its teeth about two feet from the infestation.
“I hate to do it,” he said.
But of course you will, his son thought with a wintry scorn. His father began to cut away the injured limb to save the tree, draw after grating draw until it came crashing down with its mistletoe intact, bright green.
Henry watched it come down, but John Henry still gazed upward into the fragrant compass of the tree. Then he began his slow, unnerved descent, one painful rung at a time, as Henry said, quietly, “Take it slow,” as if his words were an encouragement and not a slap, and his father came, his breathing audible, the ladder trembling, until his feet were on firm ground, and he simply stood there, gripping the ladder sides, breathing like a gladiator.
John Henry turned his flushed face to the side and said, “What we talked about today, don’t mention it to your mother. She never wanted you to know.”
“Yes, sir.” The polite words were alloyed by a stingy metal in his voice. John Henry turned fully and looked into the ever-increasing mystery of his son’s face, as if to determine whether this was sarcasm or straight, and the indecision in those aging eyes was a tiny glory to behold. He said, “Leave the ladder, and drag that branch back to the yard, where it can be chopped.”
Would his insolence get off so easy? He had only moved ten feet, when John Henry intoned three words: “And young man.” When Henry glanced back over his shoulder, John Henry’s right hand, that clamp, wrench, hold, vise, that old beater, was pointing at him: “I’ve been watching you.”
A depth charge shook the boy, and the whole of his sexual misdeeds were laid out in that moment, as if his father had been there in the tack room as Loretta had sucked on his tongue and worked her salivaed hand between his legs until he shuddered wretchedly and gasped, and instantly, in his father’s presence, before he said anything else, Henry’s mind was on fire with shame.
John Henry stared directly into his son’s guilty eyes. “Don’t chase after just any bitch in heat.”
“No, sir.” His mouth was sandy.
“You’re better than that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t believe I need to waste any more breath on this conversation.”
“No, sir.”
“Manage yourself.”
Henry stared down at the ground, conquered.
“Or I will manage you.”
John Henry: Son, what is desire in a strong man? Do you remember what I told you?
Henry: Desire is a draft horse, harnessed by tradition, working in service of the line.
John Henry: And desire in a weak man?
Henry: A Thoroughbred, wild and dangerous.
John Henry: And eros?
Henry: A blindfolded youth.
John Henry: Which results in mania.
Henry: Yes, but
Oh, Father, you hypocrite! Enfeebled and blind! Your Argument from Authority fails! Choke to death on your words—Mania transforms! It makes the cuckold the lover again, it makes the blind man see, it ripens the fruits that reason can only plant! Madness lays waste to shame! Even Socrates hid his face over his stupid speeches! Hide your own!
Paulette carried trays piled with pineapple-glazed ham with mint garnish, corn pudding, and dusky dinner rolls; chardonnay for the adults, virgin mint juleps for the children. But Henry’s silver cup sat sweaty and untouched, finely engraved with its curlicued F. Lonely Lavinia tried to catch his eye, and Loretta grinned her grin full of secrets, but Henry had eyes only for his father: how his straight spine formed the axis of the room, around which the entire earth revolved. How, once again, the men inclined their heads toward each other, speaking in a fraternal enclosure that excluded the bustling table of children, which unjustly included Henry. But he wasn’t cowed. His shoulders were as square as his jaw. He had grown to his full six feet one this summer and could look Uncle Mason in the eye. He was strong as new rope.
John Henry said, “We’ve rarely seen a worse drought, but I have faith it will rain soon.”
“We’re feeling the effects as far south as Florida,” said Uncle Mason. “I don’t believe it’s rained in twenty-seven days now.”
“Is that right?”
“But you’re worse off, to be sure. Much worse.”
“There has been some talk of families leaving the area,” said his father, but then he shrugged. “Many of these men have mishandled their black years, so my sympathies are limited to say the least.”
“Well, I’d hate to see that,” said Uncle Mason. “When an uneducated man leaves the only thing he knows—”
“There are lateral moves to be made into manufacturing. Not to mention there’s security in the factories that these farmers can only dream of,” said John Henry.
Loretta glanced up suddenly from her food. “They should move to Florida if they need work,” she said. “There’s a lot of work there, isn’t that right, Daddy? I always see men standing on the side of the road when I go to school.”
John Henry stared at her, blinking, and her mother hissed, “Loretta.”
“What?” she said, swiveling toward her with a blank look. “It’s true.”
Uncle Mason cleared his throat and glanced at his brother. “Well, Kentucky’s always been a corn deficit state. Are they bringing down surplus from Ohio?”
John Henry shook his head. “Even Ohio is baling corn this summer.”
“It’s like when we were kids all over again.”
“Yes,” John Henry said, and now he eyed the table round, his look a warning, as if they all should remember, though no one else could, except Lavinia, who watched him and nodded, sensing a strange energy in the room, but unable to parse it.
“Well, you have to wonder how many of these family farms can hang on,” said Uncle Mason. “What did Grandfather always say? All you need is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife? It’s not enough these days, apparently. Still, it’s a sorry sight to watch farms go under.”
“Well,” said Loretta brightly, “when Henry’s raising horses here you won’t have to worry about any of that ever again.” She grinned at them all, but the table plummeted into silence around her; then something stilled in her eyes, her broad smile contracting slowly to a line of poised alertness. She glanced at Henry, but he was not looking at her; he simply took another bite of ham as if by continuing to eat, as if by pretending he hadn’t heard, he could distend time and stave off what was to come.
“What did you say, young lady?” said John Henry. His voice was stony and low. Loretta looked at him, eyes wide, but said nothing at all into the raw, charged quiet of the table.
Then John Henry brought his utensils down to the tabletop, one in each hand, and it caused the table to rejolt with a crack like a branch breaking. “What did you say, young lady?” His voice was rising to a roar, and Loretta visibly started and cowered back into her chair, instinctively scooting against her mother. Mason laid a steadying hand on his brother’s upper arm, but that arm sprang loose from its cocked reserve, pointed out across the table at Henry, that hand the detonation, so the voice that followed was only a report. “I haven’t sacrificed everything so you could waste your goddamned life! I haven’t raised you to be an idiot!”
What other words were flung across the table at Henry he could not later reconstruct, not in their entirety. He simply rose up from the table with a strangely disembodied calm on his strong, new face, a face built for the future. Lavinia whipped around in her seat, reaching for him, but she was too late.
“Don’t you dare leave my goddamn presence, boy! Not without my permission!”
But Henry did just that, passing out of the dining room, walking faster and faster until he was almost jogging, leaving the assembled family with their mouths gaping and John Henry storming up from his chair, so that he knocked the table, causing the china to dance violently and the younger girls to cry. Loretta had already fled into the kitchen when, freeing herself from a tangle of chair legs and crying girls, Lavinia chased after John Henry as he stalked to the front hall. When she grabbed at his shirtsleeve, he lashed out blindly behind himself, striking the fine flesh of her cheek with his Sewanee class ring, so that she was bleeding even before she sat down hard on her bottom on the polished floor.
Henry, who was just rounding the foot of the staircase, saw his mother fall, and he screamed out to his approaching father, “I hate you!”
“Get back down here,” John Henry warned, not running, but also losing no ground as he followed his son, who was skipping stairs now in his haste to reach the second floor.
“Get back down here,” he barked again, trying to rein in his voice, but there was weakness in the repetition, and he seemed to sense it, because now he cried full-throated, “Look at me when I speak to you, goddammit!”
Henry whirled at the top of the stairs, sixteen years of fury wrenching the contours of his face. His lips rode back from his teeth like an animal’s as he pointed down accusation at his father.
“You’re a fucking tyrant!” he screamed.
“And you’re behaving like a fool, Henry. Control yourself.” The words came low and rumbling.
“You’re nothing but a coward!”
His father shook as he raised a meaty hand and pointed up at his son; even his jowls shook. “You’re embarrassing yourself in front of your entire family.”
“No, I’m just embarrassing you!” Henry cried. “There’s a difference!” He was stringing his arrows, now setting the bow. “You’ve always been afraid of ever trying to be truly great! No war medals, right, Father? Maybe the General Assembly, but never the governorship! And, oh, don’t touch the farm! Nothing you could ever fail miserably at! You weren’t even enough for your own wife!”
For a moment, all rage slacked, and his father looked at him as though at a stranger. “I made you to break my heart?” he said.
Henry spread his arms like wings. “Whether you like it or not, this land will be a horse farm.”
“I would sooner you die,” came the leaden reply from the foot of the stairs.
“But I’m not going to die,” Henry said, gasping for breath. “You are.”
John Henry’s face grew apoplectic. “Then I will not die!” he screamed, and the house shook.
But he did die. He collapsed from a massive stroke in the spring of 1965, and Henry immediately returned home from his graduate studies and let the fields go fallow, then reseeded with fescue and clover in the fall. The next year he bought his first horse at a claiming race in Florida, a mare called Hellbent. She was a spirited horse, fast, and almost perfectly formed. She would become his taproot mare.

INTERLUDE I (#ulink_1fffd16d-665e-5f19-9958-cd723bc5b093)
The following colors are recognized by the Jockey Club:
BAY: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a yellow-tan to a bright auburn. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.
BLACK: The entire coat of the horse is black, including the muzzle, the flanks, the mane, tail and legs, unless white markings are present.
CHESTNUT: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a red-yellow to a golden-yellow. The mane, tail and legs are usually variations of the coat color, unless white markings are present.
DARK BAY/BROWN: The entire coat of the horse will vary from a brown, with areas of tan on the shoulders, head and flanks, to a dark brown, with tan areas seen only in the flanks and/or muzzle. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.
GRAY/ROAN: The Jockey Club has combined these colors into one color category. This does not change the individual definitions of the colors for gray and roan and in no way impacts the two-coat color inheritance principle as stated in Rule 1(E).
GRAY: The majority of the coat of the horse is a mixture of black and white hairs. The mane, tail and legs may be either black or gray, unless white markings are present.
ROAN: The majority of the coat of the horse is a mixture of red and white hairs or brown and white hairs. The mane, tail and legs may be black, chestnut or roan, unless white markings are present.
PALOMINO: The entire coat of the horse is golden-yellow, unless white markings are present. The mane and tail are usually flaxen.
WHITE: The entire coat, including the mane, tail and legs, is predominantly white.
—Jockey Club Registry
The master of color is the gene. The gene is found inside the cell on the chromosome, coiled material formed in arkan pairs, a chain provided by each parent with the allele a blind toss from dam and sire to foal. Genes, like many tyrants, are small but manifest in a multiplicity of forms. Allele pairs dictate the genotype, which, due to the vagaries of expression, may or may not correlate precisely to phenotype: black, brown, bay, dun, grullo, buckskin, chestnut/sorrel, red dun, palomino, silver dapple, cremello, which subdivide to reflect allelic combinations of jet and raven and summer black; or dark and light and seal browns; slate, lobo, olive, smutty, or silver grullos, and so on; also the white markings, which increase upon the infinite with roans, or the gray of age, or rabicano, frosty, paint, or tobiano; this is to say nothing of the effects of dappling, foal transition, seasonal change, & Etc.
Nature manipulates her colors—or color happens, insofar as the gene has no Mind to mind the gene—either as alleles occupy loci in homozygous and heterozygous pairs, or through the wily machinations of epistasis, where brute dominance shoulders its autocratic way through the old bloodlines, while recessives wait in genetic shadow, eyeing the dominant pairs and biding their time until, in tandem, the recessives in a surprise move—
No, perhaps it’s better to render genetics a descriptive but meaningless math as it concerns the hard colors, these colors being chestnut, black, and bay:
ee
EE or Ee
&
EEAA, EEAa, EeAA, or EeAa
But math won’t satisfy. Why do we always want the story? A dominant allele storms the House of Agouti and seizes half its resources, producing a bay horse, AA or Aa. Most recessive combatants will ultimately join forces with the house to produce the expected black EE or Ee, but sometimes a chestnut, ee, emerges victorious from the House of Extension, outmaneuvering the blacks and dominant bays of Agouti.
One would imagine that mastering the houses—Agouti, Extension, Dun, Silver Dapple, Champagne, and their meddling servants Pangare, Sooty, Shade, Flaxen, Brindle—would allow for the rational construction of color, including the dilutes that form from the hard, fundamental colors. But then there is white. White is less a color than a superimposition. It is a pigmentless pattern, a roan or gray intrusion upon all the hard colors and their various configurations. A white is the only horse without pigment, though even the white horse has dark eyes, WhW. White serves to mask color, though color lives forever in the genes. Therefore, a white horse—or what seems a white horse—is capable of great reproductive surprises.
Ultimately you may breed for color just as you may breed for conformation, speed, strength, & Etc, but the organism itself exerts no will to form. The natural dispersal of color is neither random nor intentional. Which is all to say that there may be tyrants with no ambition for power.


2
(#ulink_232f5b0a-0709-56d3-9613-4571f035a6d5)
THE SPIRIT OF LESSER ANIMALS (#ulink_232f5b0a-0709-56d3-9613-4571f035a6d5)
On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together.
—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species
There was a culling of resources: which represents tolerance of risk, a form of courtship display, i.e., the organism’s ability to assert itself in the war of sexual selection. So, the detritus of the old plantation was sold away: the slump-shouldered plow, a corn planter with its four ugly teeth, jointers and froes and poleaxes and chisels and a thousand antiques lined out for appraisal and bidding on the side lawn, all sold to strangers on Valentine’s Day 1966. Even the old Tennessee Walkers were auctioned off, but purchased by the Millers, so the six were led in a head-hanging line down the drive like bewildered cow ponies off to their first cattle drive, while Henry stood on the el porch, bourbon in hand, watching without regret. At this point both of your grandparents have died.
There followed a reorientation of remaining resources: Stallion paddocks were arranged in two-acre units near the house with a yearling barn erected some way behind a stallion barn. The old whipping post was not uprooted in the redesign of the farm, but left to stand perversely in the path of an emerging thicket windbreak, so the evergreen bushes grew up around it like a rose around its thorn. The Osbournes’ land was purchased when they went bankrupt in the summer of 1968, so the old land of the silt bowl, which had once been Forge property before being sold in William Iver’s generation, was Henry’s and yours once again, and it came with a broodmare band and a foaling barn only thirteen years old and the assurance of hardy grass over limestone; also a sweet-tasting Stoner Creek streamlet that pooled in the bowl, glimmering there like gray ice on cloudy days.
Another note on display: Your father paints the plank fences wedding-dress white instead of black, an unnecessary expense. However, in the wild, male suitors often develop brightly colored, highly ornamented tails or wings that display genetic excess, which is to say wild tolerance of risk (see above), in order to secure a suitable mate and reproductive success. The female, frequently the choosier of the species, selects. Note how in this schema, the male and female are merely avenues to reproduction, dispensable agents of futurity.
A note on the 1 percent: The human is an organism defined by its 1 percent genetic difference from the chimp, which involves improved hearing, protein digestion, sophisticated speech, and all the other necessary conditions of humanity, not least of which is hope: in this case a horse. Hellbent is well balanced with a head neither too large nor too small, situated nicely on her neck over a slim swell of belly; driven by quarters that are strong but not stocky; legs set neither forward nor back but perfectly straight; unimpressive in her first races, but intriguing on paper; a gamble, your father’s roughcut gem, a daughter of Bold Ruler, showing some of his high temperament and nerve, if not his power at the mile and beyond.
But there follows disappointment: dejection at the frustration of design. During Hellbent’s life the broodmare band was expanded then culled, stallions were purchased and sold, mares crossed out and inbred, but there never came a horse that made the farm, or made your father. Hellbent herself became a solid producer of horses, including stakes winners, though a few broke down, overextended in distance by overeager trainers, and one died of colic in the pasture, its guts twisted like engorged ropes, striking its head against the ground in vain attempts to rise, so it had beaten itself to death before the vet could arrive.
Disappointment is compounded by perfection: Henry sees Secretariat, the big red colt by Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, at the 1972 Laurel Futurity, then again at next year’s Belmont, where the chestnut springs from the inside and establishes a lead along the backstretch against his rival Sham and ahead of Twice a Prince and My Gallant, firing out the first three quarters in 1:09⅘, at which point Sham begins to fall away under the scorching pace—Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine, Secretariat by twelve, Secretariat by fourteen lengths—with Turcotte wild-eyed and asking for nothing and the grandstand rising with an oceanic roar around Henry, who stands transfixed as Secretariat takes the only purse of real value, greatness, charging under the wire thirty-one lengths ahead of Sham in 2:24, a record that stands even today.
But your father procured a mate that fateful day in Saratoga: a woman thin as a pin with a glassy blonde bob and lips painted burgundy, displaying near-perfect conformation with only minor defects: pigeon-toed with a hard voice; but also restlessness, the quality of perpetual dissatisfaction, a state which represents a subtle but very real threat to young prior to the age of separation; see Bowlby’s work on maternal deprivation, also Ainsworth, Winnicott, & Etc. You call this woman Mother. She is one-half responsible for your corporeal organization, your particular form of accumulated inheritance. Together with your father, she is a conduit of the great law, the Unity of Type.
And so you were born: into the Conditions of Existence. Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.
The Quarter is a cutting horse and the Morgan is a generalist. The Kentucky Saddle is a smooth ride, the Connemara a great jumper, the Mustang an independent. The Mongolian is an ancient primitive and the toady Exmoor is exceedingly rare. The Akhal-Teke has endurance, and the Belgian Draft the strength of ten. But only the Thoroughbred can claim to be the fastest horse in the world—and here it was resident in their lush spring fields, bathing in the sunlight, calling antiphonally over Henrietta’s head as she spent herself each and every day on her father’s holdings, his very earth.
Her eyes were always open.
She saw wheat rounds as they rolled off the tongue of the baler.
Doves lined into the air when a cat came and parted the grasses.
Clouds were piled and red-tipped like a sunshot mountain range inverted.
The faces of the tall horses were riddles.
Perhaps her parents could discover their meaning? Her father was not in the stallion barn, not in the orchard, so she ran in search of her mother and found Judith in the master bedroom, reclining against a landslide of silken pillows, magazines fanned around her, speaking urgently under her breath on the phone to one of her sisters. With her pale skin and blonde hair, she almost disappeared into the sheets the way fences vanish into snow in the wintertime.
Henrietta barnstormed the room, her arms wide. “Mother, I want to know why—”
Judith shrank into her pillow, covered the receiver with one palm, and said, “Jesus, Henrietta. A little warning next time.”
“I want to know—”
“Hold on,” her mother said into the phone, struggling to sit up straight and pressing the receiver between her breasts. She gathered herself, arranging her good-night smile, cheer like bright paint over irritation. Then she leaned over, offering her cheek. “Henrietta, you know I don’t like it when you yell indoors. Now kiss me good night. Did you say good night to the horses?”
Henrietta sighed, her question abandoned. “Yes,” she said very simply, leaning over the magazines, crumpling their glossy pages as she kissed her mother’s cheek.
“Good girl,” said Judith, clearing her throat. “Now go to bed, and your father will be in shortly to tell you a story. Go on.”
“Okay.”
But when Henrietta straightened up from the bed, her mother said very suddenly, “Henrietta, wait—tell me, did you have a good day?”
“Yes.”
“And did you have fun?”
Henrietta shrugged. “Yes.”
Then, Judith’s crystalline blue eyes narrowed. “But—are you happy?”
Henrietta laughed the evergreen laugh of the very young; of course she was happy. It was the natural state of childhood.
“Well, good night.”
She was almost through the door when a hard, desponding voice halted her one more time. “But you would tell me if you were unhappy, right?”
Impatiently: “Yes, Mother.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” Then only a dark, empty space remained where the child had stood. Sighing so loudly that Henrietta heard it on the threshold of her own room, Judith said, “Yes, I’m still here.”
This is your story, Henrietta. It was 1783, during the waning heat of the Revolutionary War. Thousands of soldiers had already died on the field, or were injured in their drive to beat back the British. Your great-great-greatest-grandfather was one of those injured at Yorktown, and he received a bounty land warrant offering him surveyable acreage west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This whole area was part of Virginia at the time, and that’s why we are Kentuckians first and Virginians second and Christians third. Well, Samuel Forge was more than eager to go. The state of his birth was too populous and too loud, and he was saddled with a pioneer’s roving mind, which demands space. So Samuel set out west and brought with him a slave, who was smart with black magic and a very fine cook, and together they traversed the mountains. But those mountains were dark and forbidding. The two of them followed the old buffalo blaze and battled mightily against the elements, wary of Shawnee to the north and Cherokee to the south, because in those days a scalp was very valuable. The way was rough and full of dangers, but Samuel persevered. When they finally reached the Gap, they discovered a cave, an opening right there in the sheer wall of rock. Now his slave had a special feeling about this cave and wanted to explore it, but first they needed protection from the gods, so they sacrificed four bulls that they found wandering around in the open land around the Gap, and then his slave led the way down into the dark. This was a cave that led to the underworld. They wandered in the dark past Dread and Hunger and Want and Sleep and Toil and War and Discord, who had wild, long, horrible hair and was the worst thing Samuel Forge had ever seen, and they walked past the Tree of Dreams, but it didn’t catch any of Samuel’s dreams. He was too slippery and his dreams too big to be caught. Down, down, down they went until they came to the milling crowds of the unhappy dead that gathered on the bank of a river as wide and muddy as the Ohio. A boatman rowed them across the river, and they walked onto the fields of heaven, and all the noble dead were alive like gods. They crowded around him with stories on their tongues, but Samuel Forge had come to look for only one man—his father, Andrew Cooper Forge, who had died back in Virginia and never again seen his son once he’d set out to make his own way in the world. Samuel wanted his forgiveness for past wrongs, and he did indeed discover him there on the green underground fields of heaven. The old man was making a census of all his descendants, and had in trust all their futures and their fates, everything they would be and everything they would do, all the Forges, who in their time would march out of the cave into the bright daylight on the Kentucky side of the Gap. He was gathering his numbers, and I was there and you were there, even though we hadn’t come to be yet—
Are you awake, Henrietta? When you lie so still like that, it’s as if you’re dead and if you’re dead, then I’m dead too, because you are the very pupil of my eye. Are you listening?
Yes, Father. I’m awake. I’m always listening.
“All I want is a little pleasure.”
Pleasure: a sensation of enjoyment, satisfaction; the indulgence of appetite; sometimes personified as a female divinity. Considered by most to be the opposite of pain.
What was there to do for pleasure on a Sunday in Paris, Kentucky, 1983? The only thing that didn’t drive Judith completely and utterly insane was to spend a quiet hour in the Paris Cemetery. The space reminded her—granted, in peacefulness only—of the Tuileries and the Jardin des Plantes, which she had enjoyed when she was pregnant with a teenager’s hope and limitless expectation but not yet pregnant with Henry Forge’s child. She had at first tried to take Henrietta to the park in the center of town, but the girl was relentless, pressing endlessly for a push on the swing—One more push! One more! Mother!—then Watch!Watch!Watch!—so Judith couldn’t read the real estate section of the Times, and she was forever stubbing out fresh cigarettes to attend to the girl, who made a mess, an absolute, irredeemable mess of her own clothes and her mother’s sanity. What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designed to further men’s lives at the expense of their own.
“All I want is a little pleasure.”
What did Henrietta know or care about any of this? She had plenty of pleasures, such as the cemetery’s Gothic chalk gates, white as the Cliffs of Dover, through which broughams and phaetons once rattled under the old sign: It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. When her mother stopped their Mercedes to light her first cigarette of the hour, Henrietta—free, unmolested, wild—would run out among the graves to trample on the dead, skipping over their complaints and concerns, their dreamy chatter and arguments of confinement, their hate bred by close quarters, not so different perhaps from her parents’ ferocious arguments, which she heard when she was tucked in her bed at home. The dead had nothing to break or slam except their dull coffin lids. Her mother had the dishes of life and the doors of happenstance. And a voice for shattering windowpanes.
“Jesus,” Judith said, “this place is just unspeakably boring. It simply defies words.” A great, trembling ash broke free from her long cigarette and floated alongside the car.
Henrietta looked about in confusion. “The cemetery?”
“Everything, Henrietta. Every last thing.”
“Mother, why do you smoke?”
“It keeps my weight down,” Judith said distractedly. “I mean, please explain to me how I ended up here. I lived in Paris, honey, the real Paris. The only Paris. Sometimes I can’t believe I bought Henry’s pack of lies and … traded Paris and Deauville for this.” She shook her head and lowered her chin. “Just promise me that when you grow up, you’ll know exactly what you’re choosing between when you make your choices. Men like naïve girls, and there’s a reason for that.”
Henrietta gazed up at her mother’s delicate profile. “Can I have brothers?”
Judith’s finely sculpted head snapped round, her brilliant eyes nearly sewn shut. “Did your father tell you to say that to me? Did he put you up to that?” she said.
“No—”
“God, I can’t stand men. It’s always all about them. They’ll even use their children to further their own ends.”
“Daddy says—”
“Go play, Henrietta! Please! Just give me a few minutes of quiet.”
Yes, go play among the graves, turn cartwheels over those tucked into their grass bedding, snatch at any excitements they left behind. Find the sloping declivity with Lavinia’s cenotaph, under which she lies with dusty eyes closed, hands folded on her cancerous breasts. What pleasures she once flung away in her dying, Henrietta, take up now in your mouth.
The time-tattered granary loomed across the road.
When she approached birds, they all fled heavenward.
Chips of cloud formed scissors. They threatened to cut every thread in the world.
In joyful horror, Henrietta grasped up a single flower and raced back to the car. Her mother sat resting with her chin on her hand, her elbow on the window chrome. Her face had regained its equilibrium, but as the girl approached, her brow drew tight.
“Henrietta—have you been lying in the grass?”
The girl slowed, her mood suddenly veiled, her lips pressed together so tight they puffed out, showing a faint belligerence.
“Have you been lying in the grass?” This time the voice was not so sharp, but it seemed to shake with a strange and mysterious grievance, which the girl sensed but could not understand. “I’m not interested in putting you in a new dress every hour of the day. Why do you always do that?” And then turning to the windshield and saying to no one: “Why does she always do that …?”
Henrietta said, “I brought something for you.” She held out a yellow carnation, soft as a horse’s muzzle, its edges already curling and tea-stained with decay.
“Henrietta,” Judith admonished, “did you steal this from a grave?” but she reached out and gently lifted the flower from her hand.
“No.”
Her mother couldn’t help it, she smiled. “Get in the car,” she said, and her daughter came round dutifully and slid in beside her.
“Grandmother says hi,” Henrietta said as she struggled with her seat belt.
Judith reared back slightly. “Don’t say things like that,” she said. “It’s creepy.”
“Okay,” said the girl. Then she said, “Did you know that if there were only two elephants in the world and they mated, in five hundred years there would be fifteen million elephants?”
“You’re only seven,” said Judith. “Why do you know anything about mating?”
“Daddy told me. Mother, what if you had to spend your whole life being chained to a tombstone, and you couldn’t get anybody to unlock your chain?”
“My God, Henrietta, what awful things you think of,” said Judith, the delicate plane of her brow wrinkled up in distaste.
“Probably nobody would want to be around you, and wild dogs would come and try to eat you.”
“Well,” said Judith, starting the car and remaining attentive only by an anemic and diminishing force of will, “maybe you could train the dogs and name them and then they might leave you alone.”
“Wild dogs don’t have names, silly!” Henrietta cried, and she laughed uproariously, and her mother just bent her head slightly away from the sound of that shrill and disruptive laughter, a sound she herself could not remember ever having made.
But their horses did have names. In the early spring of each year, Henry led his daughter out to a pasture at the rim of the bowl, where three or four mares were turned out with shiny new foals—copper and bay and a dappled gray almost white. Unlike their dark and calm dams, they sprang about, bouncing here and there and spending their small energies. They were comically, even absurdly, composed with root beer barrel knees and cannons thin enough to snap over a grown man’s thigh. Their eyes, like their legs, were set awkwardly wide, their tails as short and bushy as the tails of rabbits.
Henrietta was reading by her fourth year, and by the time she was eight, she was attendant to the namings, standing beside her father with a stenographer’s notebook and a pencil, marking down his choices like a small actuary. She balanced her book on the second plank of the fence while Henry rested a loafered foot on the first, his freckled forearms crossed on the top plank, as he gazed out over the dams and foals. Casuistry passed near, her foal peering curiously around her, its head already framed by a halter, though it was merely days old.
When old Jamie Barlow appeared beside them, leaning on the fencing and flicking up the frayed brim of his ball cap, Henry said, “What do you think of this one? He’s by Motor Running over at Dale Mae Stud.”
Barlow was sanguine as he considered the foal. “I’d say that’s a mess of feathers, but no bird.”
“I was asking my daughter,” said Henry, and if there was anything in Barlow’s silence then, Henrietta was too young to sense it. “What do you see, Henrietta?”
With her pencil tucked behind her ear, she said, “He’s okay, I guess?”
Henry shook his head. “A horse I see, but horseness I do not. He’s inbred to Casuistry’s line, but he looks hackish, pedestrian. I don’t see the right balance of bodily weight and light bone.”
His daughter was barely listening. At her feet, the grass roiled and shook with its invisible machinations, teeming with life’s orchestra. The blades of grass were little bows making its music. The green there was so sincere, so undiluted, it rivaled the sun for intensity.
Henry reached down and, with a gentle but firm hand, turned her head forcibly back to the matter at hand, and it made her squirm. He was too enthusiastic, like a candidate on the hustings. “See how thick his legs are already? That’s cold blood and not at all what we’re aiming for. This is selective breeding we’re engaged in, nothing random about it. Evolution is a ladder, and our aim is to climb it as quickly as possible. We’ll most likely geld him.”
“That Motor Running ought to be a kill shot,” said Barlow, shaking his head. “Don’t know how come we can’t get a winner out of him.”
“Call the foal Castrato,” Henry said suddenly. “Write that down. Castrato out of Casuistry.”
Kastroto, she wrote, sounding out the word with the tip of her pencil.
“Now, take a close look at Hellbent’s foal.”
Henrietta peered between the planks. Hellbent’s foal was darkly red as a steak with a blaze and two white kneesocks. She bucked out with gangly legs and lunged gamely at the neck of her dam, who brisked and shone in the light.
“That’s a mighty good-looking filly right there,” said Barlow.
Henry looked down at his daughter. “I’ve been waiting for the right mare to send over to Secretariat, but I’ve wanted the best materials to work with. We’ll have to see if she runs as good as she looks. I’m sure they’ll think I’m breeding too far up the ladder—”
“Nah, she’s got the Bold Ruler look, good hind end, smart face—”
“And perfect legs.”
Barlow reached down and with no warning swung Henrietta up and positioned her on the top plank, so she was facing the man, who smelled of dusty hides and cigarettes, which she was soon rooting for in his breast pocket. She discovered one, slipping it from its pack, but he playfully knocked her hand away, said, “That ain’t Christian. You be good or I’ll take you home and let my old lady straighten you out. She always wanted a little girl.”
“No,” she said, grinning.
“Oh my, yes,” said Barlow. “She’ll fix you up. Raised four wild and woolly boys, think she can’t handle you? You ain’t got any kind of wicked she can’t bring to Jesus.”
“No!” she cried.
Henry reached over and ruffled her reddish hair. “You’d still be my little Ruffian.”
“What’s a Ruffian?”
Henry turned a considering eye on her. “The best filly to ever run the race. You’d have to go back to the turn of the century to find another one like her.”
“She was smart?”
“She was beautiful.”
“Can I go see her?”
“No …”
Henrietta’s brows gathered to a V of disappointment. “Why not?”
“Well, honeypie, she broke down,” said Barlow.
“But doing what she loved most,” Henry interjected.
Barlow grinned. “Blessed are they who run in circles, for they shall be called big wheels.”
Staring at his new filly, Henry said, “For the great, death dies.”
Henrietta sighed and looked up at Barlow, who was gazing down on her with a curious expression on his face. Smiling ruefully, he hoisted her off the plank fence and into his arms, so she was enveloped in the physical warmth of a grown person. She looked over his shoulder in the direction of the green expanse of the bowl with its promise of free play, and because Henry caught her longing glance and it worried something in his mind, he reached down and rapped gently on her head. “Knock, knock,” he said. “Are you there?” She nodded, and with her feet returned to the fields of Henry’s confidence, she did as she was told, taking her pencil from behind her ear and writing down six potential names for each foal, names that they would then send to the Jockey Club for consideration. Their first choice for Hellbent’s foal was Hellcat and in a few months’ time, they learned the name had been accepted.
Henrietta would remember the storms that came two years later in the spring of her tenth year, not because the farm was so altered, which it was, but because her mother did not come home. Around dinnertime the sky grew flavid and discontent and earth colors seeped up from the soil into the atmosphere, where clouds gathered, mossed with the green cast of tornadoladen storms. A siren wailed in town, the sound bowing in and out as the gaping mouth turned to the four corners of the county. Everywhere horses pranced with their ears up to catch the rising wind, barn cats skulked for shelter, cows bellowed in alarm. The trees shook and flung their glossy leaves into the changing light and the sun, a useless and retiring thing, slinked away. The farm was swallowed into the dark of the storm and it was terribly still, then the silence was staved in by a mighty crack and the rain began to fall. In their stalls, the horses cried. Lightning forked across the sky and inflected downward to the earth, where it lashed its electric tongue on trees and housetops and cupolas and lit the rolling eyes of the animals and the entire achromatic world.
In her bed, Henrietta listened to the storm as it battered the house, its soughing sounds like the moaning of many anguished people. She watched the water cascade from the coping inches above her window and nursed a seed of panic for her mother, who had not yet appeared. Tears gathered in the girl’s green eyes. She strained for the sound of the phone ringing for as long as she was able, but being young and tired, she was asleep before she knew it, and then it was morning and the rain was gently washing the brick skin of the house and its windows. She ran into her parents’ room, but neither one was there. From their window gazing down, she could see their three resident stallions being led, frantic with nerves, into waiting trailers. Down beyond the white barn, the stream was wildly gray and belling out of its banks, sweeping fronds into its current, where they waved like tangled hair. She spotted her father and the figure of Barlow. She flung off her nightclothes, leaving them in the hall as she ran back to her own room, where she struggled into jeans and a sweater, racing downstairs even as she was dressing. She was cramming her feet into boots and looking for a rain jacket when Henry came stomping into the kitchen. She flung herself at him, taking him by surprise and knocking him back against the door he had just shut. It was like embracing a tree in a rainstorm, but she didn’t care. She was instantly wet through by the outdoors he had brought in with him.
“Henrietta, honey,” he said with surprise.
“Where’s Mother?” she said. “Did Mother come home?” There were tears in her voice that startled him. He blinked rapidly as she stared up into his face.
“Your mother is fine,” he said slowly, carefully. “She just couldn’t come home last night.”
“Why not?” Henrietta said. “Did she get in an accident?”
“No,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “She’s fine. She stayed in Lexington.”
“Why?” she said, and as a ghost of suspicion flitted in her eyes, Henry thought, she’s nothing like her mother; there’s so much of me in her.
“Well,” he said, “your mother …” Then he paused and waited for something to come into his mind and when it didn’t appear, he winced and hurried on. “Your mother has an apartment in Lexington, where she might want to stay sometimes.”
“But she’s coming home.” The words seesawed between question and insistence.
Henry looked down into that worried face and his mouth struggled momentarily as he redirected his words. “Soon,” he said, and brighter: “Soon!” But his own smile was alloyed by hesitation. She pressed her face into the flat of his belly, and he heard her mumble, “Good.”
Outside, there was the sound of the first trailer rumbling down the lane with a frightened stallion kicking inside.
“Where are the horses going?” she said, her voice muffled.
“To a training center just until the creek settles. We don’t want it to rise and carry them away.”
In her mind, the black and brown horses were swept off in the raging current of Forge Run, open-mouthed and screaming shrilly in the frothing stream, their eyes rolling in terror and their bodies battling in slow motion against forces stronger, much stronger, than themselves.
“No,” she said. “Please keep them all safe, Daddy.”
The storm continued for three days without abating. The creek flashed out of its margins, spilling over half the paddocks and into the stallion barn, though it was sandbagged and wrapped to three feet in heavy plastic. Hay and straw floated out on the rising tide and swirled in a gray mass that soaked the earth. The sky was sodden and tiresome, the earth was sodden and tiresome. Henrietta watched it all from the kitchen and from her parents’ room as she waited for the phone to ring.
When the rain finally stopped, the clouds thinned and were wicked from the drying sky as quickly as they had come, and the creek began to fall back with a sigh into its banks, leaving behind little pluvial courses like open veins in the soil. Henrietta ventured out in her mother’s polka-dotted galoshes and explored the paddocks that oozed water with each step. She stood on the edge of the creek, where it continued to shrink back as if newly shy absent the blustering weather. She could not move about freely without slipping and sliding, so she just stood there and stared, and in her silence and in her fixity was some hint of a pained dawning. There was a change coming, and its germinal moments arrived not when she lay in her bed with panic in her breast, but here as she stood staring dully at the surface of a creek too muddy to see into, too dull to divulge its contents or reflect back anything of the world—not even her own face. She glanced back at the house, wondering whether she would hear the phone ringing down here.
She wandered down in the direction of the road where the rain-sickened creek was still engorged, swirling around the lower line of the old stone fence. A few of the limestone slabs, craggy and cut thin, had tumbled into the water and then either settled into the soil or slipped back into the current, where they lay camouflaged with their neighbors on the streambed. On the western, Perry side of the stream, the gray hands of the water had pushed the fence until a portion toppled over fully intact onto its side, as neatly fallen as it had previously stood for over a century. Henrietta labored on the Forge side for a few minutes, returning limestone chunks to their spots in the wall and reordering the top vertical stones, so they were stacked together again in a line like books or a row of neolithic dinner plates.
“Miss Henrietta!” a voice called to her, and she straightened up abruptly with a hand shading her brow. There were some few straggling clouds now, but the atmosphere was thick with the moisture of the storm and the light seemed to come dully from everywhere and nowhere. Henrietta saw their neighbor, Ginnie Miller, plump and redheaded, waving one arm above her head and calling, “Miss Henrietta!”
Henrietta remained where she was on her side of their fence, affectless and staring.
“Come here, child,” said Mrs. Miller with a beckoning gesture. Ginnie was the youngest of the Miller siblings, but had married a man named Marley, so she was Ginnie Marley. Her husband was quiet and when he drove past them on the road, he lifted only two fingers from the wheel by way of greeting. As if his lack of a first name rendered the marriage null and void, everyone still called her Mrs. Miller, though Henrietta could not recall her father referring to the woman at all.
Henrietta crossed the wet road and stood next to this woman she’d only seen from a distance. She was winded, as though coming from a dance, and her hair, slightly gray with voluminous curls puffed up from her face, resembled petals framing the rosy heart of a flower. It was the ruddy face of a life lived outdoors, her cheeks red as if sunburned, though it was only the middle of spring.
“My goodness,” the woman said, “you’re just a little slip. I guess it runs in the women of your family.” She was leaning down slightly, and Henrietta saw her eyes were the color of dark chocolate. She said, “Well, I need your help. A couple of my cows got past my water gap, and my husband just took both my girls back to college. I need you to help me guide them back along the road. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Henrietta said.
“Then let’s you and me go get us some beeves.”
Henrietta followed her down the road away from the Miller drive, along the cow pasture, which spread to the west, inclining mildly to a hillock about a half mile away. A concrete waterer had been poured there, topping the rise like a crown on a grassy head. Black-and-white cattle were scattered about here and there, lowing a deep and dolorous sound.
They passed the spot where Forge Run ran dark-complected and swollen through a galvanized culvert under the road, running its course along the Miller property. The water gap was just two steel hoods from old cars chained across the creek to form a primitive stanch. One of the hoods still bore traces of its original red paint like old blood. On the far side of the artificial barrier, she saw the bulky figures of two black-and-white Holsteins steeping placidly in the muddy water. The water rose up past their hocks, but no further. They stood there appearing drowsy and mild until the two figures approached, then they bawled in tandem.
“How did they get out?” asked Henrietta.
“Well, when the water all rose up, the water gap went so”—Mrs. Miller raised her flattened palms so they were parallel to the ground—“and they just sort of squeezed on through and went about their merry way.”
“They didn’t get very far,” said Henrietta.
“I think they used up all their fighting spirit just getting through the water gap.”
They stopped at the top of the bank and looked down at the cows.
“Hello, my pretties,” said Mrs. Miller, and then turned to Henrietta. “So, here’s the plan. I’m gonna go on in there and move them up your way, and I just need you to head them off down the road toward the house.”
“Okay.”
“So set your legs apart like you mean business. Now, don’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared,” Henrietta snorted. She set her legs apart like a sawhorse.
Mrs. Miller waded on into the creek upstream of the cows and the water plashed around her legs and filled up her green galoshes as little eddies spooled grayly away from her. The cows eyed her warily and were already making their first lurching motions toward the bank when the woman came up behind them, shooing. They jolted forward with real force, fat harlequins clambering out of the water, which shook in coffee droplets from their shining black limbs. They were clumsy on the rocky bank, slipping and lunging, their quarters jolting under the skin as they climbed.
“Just direct them,” Mrs. Miller called, and Henrietta faced them down with her arms spread.
“No sudden motions now.”
Henrietta made subtle pointing hand gestures as if they were wet airplanes being directed on tarmac, and they went easily as directed, trotting heavily, but veering for the middle of the road. Mrs. Miller came scrambling out of the creek, wet to above her knees, and moved on past Henrietta in a hustle to the first cow that was heading Forge-ward.
“Don’t let them get in the road now,” she said over her shoulder. “I want you between that cow and the car. I can afford to lose neighbors, but not cattle.”
“Okay,” said Henrietta.
She looked over her shoulder. “Honey, I’m kidding.”
Henrietta walked beside the second cow with both her hands out toward its flank. It moved steadily along as though it were a wholly unremarkable event to walk on the wrong side of its pasture fence with the larger body of the herd gathering now as a congregation to watch. Mrs. Miller kept casting over her shoulder to check on their progress. As the Forge paddocks came into view, she said, “Guess there’s a lot to keep a girl busy on a horse farm, huh?”
“I guess.”
“What does a girl like you like to do?” she said.
Henrietta shrugged, a strange new mood was on her; the rains and her mother’s absence had brought it on. “Study diagrams.”
Ginnie reared back. “Diagrams! Of what?”
“Animals and plants. The history of their evolution. That sort of thing.”
The woman hooted and looked back over her shoulder again with a different expression on her face, as though just discovering a different child in Henrietta’s place, one who deserved a second glance. “Is that right,” she said.
Encouraged, Henrietta said, “Did you know there are fifty thousand species of trees? That number’s going down. They come in five shapes—round, conical, spreading—What’s that?”
Mrs. Miller turned to see that Henrietta was pointing at the cursive M on the cow’s rump.
“That’s a brand.”
“What’s a brand?”
“We burn our family letter into them so if they ever get out like today, everybody will know they’re ours and bring them back to us. Just like puppies.”
“You brand puppies?”
“No, honey,” said Mrs. Miller.
They were now approaching the squat Miller bungalow, where begonia pots hung in bursts of color from the scalloped porch trim and the flower beds stood pert in a wealth of watered soil.
“Run ahead and unlock the gate,” said Mrs. Miller, and Henrietta did as she was told, pulling the pin and springing the gate, so the woman could pass on through with the two cows just as the herd was beginning to gather in a mass around the sojourners. With the cows captured, they stopped and watched the reunion, their forearms resting on the top steel rung like two old cowpokes, the older barely taller than the younger.
From this place, Henrietta had a new and clear vision of their home across the road and the black stallion barn atop the rise. Their stone fence was trim and neatly kept except where it had been rearranged by the swollen stream. The Millers’ fence was crumbled and tumbled out of its original form along its length, limestone lying everywhere in heaps.
“Our fence is prettier than yours,” Henrietta said.
Mrs. Miller snorted once and shook her head. “A good-looking fence is not high on my list of priorities. In my opinion, some people mind a little too much about how a place looks and not enough about how it runs.” She looked very pointedly at the girl, but Henrietta was looking across the road to their fields, the grass mowed just so, the fences white as cotton bolls.
“Good looks are an evolutionary mark of health,” she said. “That matters when it comes to mating. I read that.”
Ginnie cocked her head. “Based on my cows, I’m gonna say that’s probably not the whole story. In fact, that sounds like something a man would say to a woman just to get the upper hand. Both of my daughters are dating right now, and they’re running into all sorts of foolishness like that.” Ginnie leaned down and grasped one of her galoshes by the shank and gave it a tug. It came off with a sucking sound and brown water poured out in a stream like old tea from a kettle stroop. Her socks were gray and sodden. Then she said, “You know, I used to have a big old crush on your daddy when I was about your age.”
“Really?” said the girl. “Did he want to marry you?”
Ginnie laughed again. “If he did, he had a poor way of showing it,” she said. “But things turn out the way they should. Just think, if I’d married your daddy, then I never could have married the man who holds the Guinness World Record for the least words ever spoken in a marriage.”
Henrietta’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Honey, I’m kidding,” she said. “But you know,” she went on suddenly, turning toward the girl with a level gaze. “Mind how you grow up. Strive to be a good egg. You’re gonna have to watch yourself. You’re kind of swimming upstream if you know what I mean, which you probably don’t.”
Henrietta just stared at her blankly. Then Mrs. Miller reached down, took her time removing her other rain boot as she gripped the gate with her free hand, and said, “I’ll tell you another secret.”
“What?”
“Your daddy tried to buy us out. Twice.”
Henrietta’s eyebrows rose up in little arcs of surprise. “He wanted your cows?”
“Well, I don’t expect that was the attraction, no,” Mrs. Miller said. “But he wouldn’t offer anywhere close to what this place is worth. My own daddy wasn’t very fond of your daddy, truth be told. He’d have sooner sold it … Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you that.” She sighed, struggling her feet back into her floppy boots.
“Why?”
She turned a mild, considering eye on the girl. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know. I suppose it’s just the truth when it’s all said and done.” Then she said, “How old are you?”
“Almost ten.”
“That’s why. You’re just a little slip. You’re too young for the workings of the world. The world can be a pretty crappy place. Just have a good time being a little girl.” She sighed.
“I like your cows,” said Henrietta.
Ginnie Miller actually blushed a bit when she smiled. “Well, they’re not Cardigan Corgis, but … yes,” she said. “I’m very fond of them myself. I really can’t eat beef anymore. I think I’d consider eating my husband before one of my herd. That was a joke.” Then she cleared her throat and said, “You know, sometimes the apple falls pretty far from the tree. And if it’s really brave, when it grows up, it can get up and walk over to another orchard. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“No, I suppose not.” She smiled, and Henrietta realized suddenly the hour was late, and her father would be wondering where she was, so she moved toward the wet black ribbon of the road and the house beyond. Then Ginnie called out, “Henrietta Forge, did you have fun today?”
Henrietta didn’t even have to hesitate; she turned and, walking backward, she called, “Yes, I did!”
She lay there on the davenport in the front parlor by the phone, her hands still smelling of the damp outdoors, but resolved not to move until the call came. No one bothered her, her father still out with the horses and the cleaning lady polishing and vacuuming around her. When the phone rang in the early evening, she had only to reach over her own head without rising to grasp the receiver. It was her mother.
“I’ve been missing you,” Judith said in a voice too gentle.
“You have an apartment in Lexington now?” Henrietta blurted. “But you still live here, right?”
“Is that what your father told you?”
“He said he wants you to come back home right now.”
There was silence on the line.
“When are you coming home?”
“Well,” her mother said, and sighed. “I think I’ll come out to the farm tomorrow.”
“Why can’t you come right now?”
“I’ll come tomorrow, darling.”
But her mother didn’t come the next day. She came the day after that, and she arrived wearing a dress Henrietta had never seen before, her hair cut in a glassy blonde bob, and with a pained twinge the girl struggled with a strange, phantom sensation that Judith had been gone not three days but three years. She was altered like a heap of coins melted down and newly minted into a foreign currency. When they hugged, her mother’s arms were painfully thin, but maybe they had always been so? Henrietta heard a kissing sound above her head but did not feel the press of lips anywhere.
Her mother said, “You look good, Henrietta.” Even her voice was music playing in another room. “Why don’t we go out to the porch?”
“Where’s Daddy? I want him to come too.” Henrietta managed to turn herself halfway around, looking wildly behind her without letting go of her mother.
“I’m not really sure.” That old, barely suppressed irritation was audible.
“Daddy!” she called out into the house, and she felt her mother flinch as the word came echoing back.
“Henrietta!” Judith snapped, and then softer: “Your father’s not here right now.”
“Where is he?”
“He didn’t want to be here for this.”
Now it was Henrietta’s turn to be silent. She stared mutely at her mother, and where the older woman expected to see confusion, there was only a dark kind of withholding, which was new. The girl let go of the hem of her mother’s jacket, which she had wrenched up into the sweaty heart of her fist. Judith smoothed it down and Henrietta saw her manicure was the color of a ripe raspberry. She used to bite her nails, but that was different now too.
“Let’s go out to the porch,” Judith said. “I always hated the inside of this house.”
“Well, I like it.”
“You don’t even know what you like yet,” her mother said. “This house is like living in another time. And not a good one.”
They went out and they sat on the porch swing, but Henrietta’s legs were not long enough to reach the wood planks, so she was forced into a lulling motion by her mother. She clung to the chain for balance but it was rusted. It left visceral stains on her palm.
For a long time Judith just swung them in silence and her face appeared undisturbed, as if she were alone in the world with her thoughts, as if she never had any intention to speak at all.
“Well, I don’t have an apartment in Lexington is the first thing,” she finally began.
“Then Daddy lied.” Henrietta stared straight ahead at the road and the Millers’ property, her face devoid of feeling.
“Let’s do this nice and easy, Henrietta,” Judith said.
“Where’s your apartment?”
“Well, I don’t have an apartment, not exactly. The thing is I’ve met someone. Someone I really love and who really loves me.”
“Daddy loves you,” Henrietta said abruptly against the swift and sudden closing of her throat.
“Daddy loves you,” said Judith while looking down at her shoes, her yellow heels. She turned a foot this way and that, as if admiring the motions of her own ankles, but her face was downcast and carved close at the cheek. “Listen, Henrietta, I could be angry and, believe me, I have every right to be, but … frankly, I’m too young to waste all my good years. I’m not going to sit around here the way your grandmother did, waiting for death to end my awful marriage. God, that poor woman. I’m sure she went slowly insane here. We’re trained from childhood to behave like dogs who sit and stay and wait for scraps.” She looked up suddenly. “Everyone has to find a way to be happy. When I was a girl, I always, always wanted to get married. I was so naïve I thought that if a man married you, then that actually meant he loved you, not just that he wanted something from your body. The reality is you never really know a man until he marries you and thinks he’s got you trapped. Then you find out if you really are his prize, or just his prize heifer.”
She sighed. “What’s funny is I used to model wedding dresses. I mean, for God’s sake—that was my niche! I was only high fashion when I starved myself, but I couldn’t keep that up. But I actually liked catalog work. I thought it was fun. And now, I mean, look at me. My stomach is ruined. I’ve just finally woken up, and I want nothing more than happiness. I don’t care if it comes in an imperfect package. I don’t care where I have to go to find it. It just … Henrietta, it has nothing to do with you.”
“Nothing to do with me,” the girl echoed flatly.
“Nothing at all. I promise.” Judith sighed and looked out over the sloping lawn and the frontage road. Softly, she said, “I was really so happy when I was a little girl. There has to be a way back, there has to be. Or else what’s the point of all this … of life?” She sighed again. “The truth is men aren’t interested in your happiness; they’ll make you think that’s the case, they’ll treat you really great for a while and make all sorts of promises and give you all their attention, but they all reach a point where they can’t pretend anymore. They’re just selfish animals, and in the end, animals can’t hide their nature.”
“But you’re happy here with me,” insisted Henrietta, her words reaching out with both hands.
Her mother fished around in her pocketbook and removed a black book with blank pages. “Look. I bought you a journal. Since I won’t be here for you to tell them to, you can record all your most precious thoughts here.” She set the book on Henrietta’s knees and smiled sadly. “I know this probably isn’t … adequate, but … God, there’s really no good option here.” She smiled sadly.
“You’re smiling,” Henrietta pressed, ignoring the book.
“I’m smiling, sweetheart, because the man I’ve met is really wonderful,” Judith said. “He actually loves me for who I am, not for what I can give him, not for how I look on his arm. He’s involved in horses too, so he and your father have a lot in common. And he has sons. See? You’ll have brothers now like you’ve always wanted. The only thing is … he lives most of the year in a town called Donaueschingen.”
Henrietta looked at her blankly.
“It’s in Germany,” her mother said.
Still there was no response.
“That’s across the ocean. Do you know where Germany is?”
Henrietta knew the DNA of a bacterium contained hundreds of millions of nucleotides; that horses and humans had the humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges in common; that Mendel’s pea plants held all the secrets of genetics; she knew where Germany was. But instead of answering, she looked out across the road where only two days prior, she and Mrs. Miller had led the cows back into the pasture. That pleasure was already beginning to rot, and there was no way to reconstitute it into joy, not even through memory. She would have to find a new pleasure altogether.
Watching a dawning realization on her daughter’s face, Judith reached over to grasp her hand, but Henrietta jumped up from the swing, not slapping away her mother’s hands as they reached toward her and not casting a hateful glance over her shoulder, just leaving with the black notebook clutched to her chest. She let the front screen door slam behind her as she went into the house, going nowhere in particular, but very quickly.
“Henrietta,” her mother called, then gave chase, so the girl heard those staccato cracks on the wood floors, a sound that somehow seemed to perfectly match the woman herself. The sound caught her in the kitchen. Judith gripped her shoulders from behind and then, with real force, turned her around and pulled her to her body. The girl felt her shivering with a sorrow that came in little waves. Then Judith reached down and took her face tightly in her pale, skinny hands.
“Henrietta, this isn’t selfishness—”
“Please don’t go.”
“—it’s survival.”
“Stay,” Henrietta whispered.
Her mother’s eyes bored into her. “Can you even remember the good times?”
Henrietta’s mind fumbled for the right answer.
“See?” came her mother’s strained but triumphant whisper. “Neither can I.”
“Henrietta!”
“Henrietta!”
He found her slumping down the stairs from the attic, where she’d spent hours curled on an old linen-draped divan, surrounded by the boxed and labeled artifacts of her ancestors’ lives. They stank of mothballs and of lives extinguished.
His grip on her shoulders stopped her short. “Henrietta, have you been in the attic? I’ve been looking everywhere.”
She tried to look him in the face, but it was too much to bear. There was a strange, fresh exuberance there, something overly bright, a mania impelled by grief. It was like a door swinging open wildly on one hinge.
“Mom went away?” was all she could choke out. Downstairs, as if in affirmation, the tall clock chimed for two.
Now, Henrietta, see how you are swept against your father, the air crushed from your lungs? Head torqued to the side, you are confronted with a yellow wall and two portraits of men who bear your noble nose, the fine cut of your cheekbones, your eternal eyes. Every corner of the house is filled with the purpose of your father’s life. Which is … you … or a horse.
“Please make Mom stay,” Henrietta blurted.
“I can’t.” She felt his exhalation on the top of her head. “Why not?”
It took him an eon to reply. “I take responsibility for this, Henrietta,” and once again with both hands to her shoulders, he drew back to peer into her wrenched face. “In so many respects, I chose poorly. I was so … It reminds me of something my father once said—a damaged beauty is the only kind of beauty capable of gratitude. But when I met your mother, I was too young and easily impressed by her … conformation to really understand the truth in what my father said. To be honest, I probably didn’t believe him.” He laughed wryly. “If I’d been wise like Boone … do you remember me telling you how Boone chose Rebecca?”
Now it was Henrietta who pulled away; she didn’t want a story, a history, a textbook.
Henry hooked a finger under the strong bone of her jaw and raised her chin. “When he decided to court her, he took her out to an orchard, where they could sit in the grass and get to know each other. While they sat there talking, Boone started to toss his knife into the ground, blade first. But this wasn’t just absent-minded fiddling. He was testing Rebecca to see how she would react. Again and again, he drove the knife into the ground closer and closer until it was in the fabric of her skirt and almost slicing her thigh. Rebecca saw what he was doing, but she didn’t run, she didn’t tell him to stop, she never even said a word. And that’s how Boone knew he had found the right woman. A woman who doesn’t flinch is one in a million.”
Henrietta stared straight at the pearl buttons on his shirt, bewildered and barely listening. I am a hybrid seed. A parent form has disappeared from the record. She tried to translate this into a configuration another person would understand. “I want my whole entire family,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
“You and I are family,” Henry said with too much force. “Blood and treasure. Listen to me, Henrietta. I created this world with my own two hands, and I am going to leave it all to you—the acreage, the buildings, the horses, everything. It’s lying in trust for you, because you are my real family. And when you have children, all of this will be theirs in turn. Everything you need is already in this house.” That old music again, his dark, fathomless pupils a spinning record, playing the old refrain, playing It.
“Tell me your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s name,” he said, staring into her eyes.
“Daddy—”
“Tell me.”
“Samuel Forge.”
“Samuel Henry Forge and Edward Cooper Forge and Richmond Cooper Forge and William Iver Forge and Moses Cooper Forge and Jacob Ellison Forge and your grandfather, John Henry Forge, and me, Henry Forge. And now you. You. You—”
“I know,” she said to interrupt him, her mouth trembling. “But I’m a girl.”
“Well, then you won’t be like any other girl,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “I won’t let you.”
She needed a girl to stand behind her in the looking glass, to part her reddish hair down the middle and scrape it over her ears into a bun coiled through with black ribbon and covered with a square of black lace; to ease her grieving limbs into white cotton drawers and a long chemise; to snap her stockings into garters and cinch up a corset until it was too tight for her to draw breath, much less cry; to secure the caging crinoline; to tug over her head a dress of flat black, strangling at the neck but with sleeves like church bells; to slip her feet into black boots so she could totter here and there, tapping out unspoken grief on the plank floors in the long-lost code of broken women; but she didn’t have twenty yards of black Parisian cotton or a veil or a colored girl, and, alas, people would say this wasn’t a death, just a divorce, but they were all mistaken, because it was a difference of degree, not of kind. The pain was almost the same. And because she didn’t have that girl to rail against, to beat about the head and shoulders, because there was no one weaker, she flung her black bonnet against the walls of her mind and clattered about like a drunkard and wailed at the vaporous absent bitches hate sonofabitchspoilevilrottenfuckfuckniggers, because there was no one else around smaller and weaker than she was—
For example:
Class, what is the capital of Kentucky?
Frankfort.
And who works hardest for Kentucky’s economy?
Horses.
And who built our world-famous limestone fences?
Niggers.
Mrs. Garrett, after her face righted itself, spun Henrietta out of the classroom like a top, spun her round so quick she felt bile rising in her throat, standing there unsteady in the nauseating green hallway—green as a swimming pool—her head swooning back against the cool tiles as her teacher towered over her, leaning in so close that Henrietta could smell the tuna from lunch on her breath as she said, “There is only one appropriate word for a black person that begins with an n, and it has one g, not two. Young lady, do you understand what I’m saying?”
“A river in Africa?” the girl said.
Mrs. Garrett just stared at her for a moment with an anger so righteous and consuming, it was almost erotic, peering first into one pupil and then the other, as if trying to discover which eye was the source of this evil. She said, “First of all, the walls were built by Irish stonemasons. Second of all, if I had one black student, I’d be marching you back in there to apologize. But seeing as there are none, I’m sending you home straightaway, because I’ve had enough of your attitude. Believe me when I say that I’ll be speaking with your parents.”
“Incorrect usage,” Henrietta said.
“Excuse me, what did you say?”
“You used the plural instead of the singular. I’ll be speaking to your parents, Mrs. Garrett.” She was spun forthwith to the principal’s office, where her singular was called on the telephone, and then spun again out to the broad concrete steps of the school, where she rested dazed and relieved, like a prisoner suddenly released from years of hard, useless detail. She preferred to sit out here alone. Almost as soon as her mother had left, she’d decided that she would no longer tolerate humans, especially the barely bipedal variety by which she was surrounded: their relentless chatter, the strong smell of their bodies, their dumb games. She classified them far, far down in the family of tailless primates. School had long been a matter of sitting blandly for the duration, eyes locked on the proceedings with your mind flatlined, maybe rereading your textbooks for typos and collation errors. She’d begun to spend her time in the bathroom, picking at her nails or counting the holes in the pegboard ceiling there. She’d gone so frequently and stayed so long that Mrs. Garrett had finally called the farm with a concern that she needed to be examined. She was sent to a urologist at the University of Kentucky who, after numerous tests and return visits, was the first to simply ask why she went to the bathroom so often, to which she replied, “To be by myself.”
“Right, but you’re peeing a lot,” he said. “No.”
“You’re not urinating?”
“No.”
“You’re going to the bathroom to be alone, but not to urinate?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus!” he’d snapped, and dropped his clipboard down on the examining table beside her, then rubbed his eyes for a long while without bothering to take his glasses off. “This is why I’m not a pediatrician,” he said through his hands. “I don’t speak childese.”
“Me neither,” she said. He took his hands away from his eyes and looked at her in consternation, and then, fifteen minutes later, her father was driving her home along Richmond Road, saying, “I don’t understand what just happened here,” and Henrietta said, “I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Now she sat very still on the school steps, motionless as a dial casting time’s shadow. She was waiting for her remaining parent, her immediate genetic antecedent, the Forge who had forged her, but it was old Barlow who showed up in one of the rattling farm trucks—a white 250 with a toolbox in the bed, shedding farm chaff in a swarm as it braked before her. Barlow reached over and popped open the passenger door, his wizened face etched with concern.
“You sick, honeypie? Your daddy sent me up to fetch you.”
Henrietta just shook her head and crawled up beside him as he lit a cigarette and pulled out of the school’s drive. They were silent as they passed the glassed storefronts of Paris, the antebellum homes with American flags snapping smartly from porch roofs. Through the glass of the windshield, through the bitter brown lacework of the trees, the sun meted out an autumnal afternoon, weakening even as they watched.
She turned to Barlow. “Who built the stone fences?”
“Boy, um … the Irish, maybe? I think I heard that before.”
“Are you Irish?” she said.
“I don’t really know, darlin’, I’m just a country mutt.”
As they passed the courthouse, on the other side of the road, the familiar sight of three old black men on rickety metal chairs. They sat there every day shaded by their Kangol caps, cigars and folded newspapers in hand, paling of white hair on their cheeks. One glanced at her briefly as she passed, but in another instant, the dark round of his face was gone.
She turned a speculative and careful eye on Barlow. “Did you know n-i-g-g-e-r is a bad word?” she asked.
“You ever hear me say it?” said Barlow.
“No.”
“There you go. Guess I knew it then.”
“Yeah, but who decided that?” she pressed.
“God did …,” he said, flipping his cigarette butt out his open window. “God hath made of one blood all peoples of the earth.”
“There are four different kinds of blood,” she said. “It’s a medical fact.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”
She expected no further response, and she didn’t get one. Barlow just nodded with a considering face and drove easily beside her. He was a man who had stayed married forty years and raised four bullheaded boys by holding tight the gunnels and steadying the boat. He was content with his holdings and not inclined to fight.
They drove for a time behind a truck loaded with tawny, bundled tobacco, the cured and withered leaves making small, abrupt motions in the breeze like yellow hands waving. The flatbed turned into the low redbrick tobacco warehouse on East Main, where Henrietta could see, stacked and heaped in golden sheaves, the harvest prepared for auction. The dead plants were even more beautiful than plants in the field—crisp, sculptural, turned by curing to the brown of baked bread. For the first time in weeks, something stirred in her as she gazed at what had to be tobacco’s heaven.
“Why don’t we grow any tobacco?” she asked.
“Kinda slow out of the starting gate,” was Barlow’s dry reply as he rooted around in his breast pocket for another cigarette. As always, he got the small smile he was aiming for. But then Henrietta shifted wearily and Barlow turned to her and said, “You wanna tell old Barlow what happened at school today?” but she just shook her head, staring out the window.
As they pulled into their own drive, she said, “I hate school.” She stomped once on her book bag, where it lay in a heap on the floorboard of the truck, and she crossed her arms. Acid tears smarted her eyes.
Barlow cocked his head and said, “I liked it so much I stayed all the way to the eighth grade. Come on.” He eased out of the truck, careful on his feet, which were arthritic, a far cry from the day he first went to work on a farm as a spry ten-year-old boy Friday. But Henrietta remained where she was, watching him with a sullen expression. Barlow circled around to her side of the truck, unlatched her door, and drew it wide.
“Come on, honeypie,” he said.
“Carry me,” she said sullenly, laying her head back in a faint manner on the headrest.
“Huh—do what?” An eyebrow cocked with amusement.
“Carry me.”
“You’re too heavy—why, you’re practically a grown woman!” He laughed.
“I’m nine.”
“Well.”
“Carry me.” She pulled herself up by the plastic ceiling handle and stood balancing on her toes on the side of the runner, her face turned down to his, because he wasn’t very tall. “Come on,” she whined softly, and he made a mock roll of his eyes and shook his head, but said, “Fetch your satchel then.” She yanked it up in one hand, and Barlow gripped her under her skinny knees and shoulders and raised her up. She was lighter than a newborn foal. Henrietta wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. The expression of spoiled petulance on her face settled into something like sadness. She jostled against his chest with each step, and her book bag struck him lightly on the back a few times before she let it drop to the ground behind him. He didn’t notice. He just said, “You are one funny valentine.”
Of course Henry fielded the phone call, and of course it flung him into a rage, and of course his daughter came home with a hangdog droop and eyes like dull brads. What rage it aroused in him! This was his child—his child—the fruit of his loins, the hope of his age, the apple of his eye, and his own. She’d never been as much child as other children were, already possessed of a natural disregard. There was something aristocratic about her, and since her mother’s departure, she’d become even chillier and less soft. She broke the mold, and Henry knew it. She didn’t like the commonality of school, she didn’t like to mix. Her spirit didn’t rhyme with the spirit of lesser animals.
Hadn’t his own education, prior to his tutoring, been a waste? Even at Sewanee, he’d had to fight for the relevance of his education to his true life as a horseman. Formal education had always seemed a war of attrition designed to starve him of his own history and bring his culture to its knees. But the farm was a whole round world, and Henrietta was a product of that world—she’d one day take ownership of it. It was his bounden duty to reverse the effects of her miseducation.
He placed a hand on each slumping shoulder and said, “Look at me, Henrietta.” He noted the wrinkle of worry between her red brows, the lashes made by tears into little black spikes. He said, “Were they very hard on you today?”
She nodded once.
“Tell me who built our fences,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Who built the stone fences?”
“The … Irish?”
“No, goddammit, our slaves. The impolite, inconvenient truth, but there it is.”
“I said a bad word.”
“You got a bad education! Consider yourself withdrawn.”
She reared back. “What?”
“Henrietta, you’ve suffered the misfortune of being born into an age of political correctness, when a polite lie is the truth, and the truth is anathema. The simple reality is what no one dares to say: Blacks are inferior and it’s always been that way. It’s a genetic reality. People police words to avoid grappling with reality.”
“Daddy, I don’t think—”
“Henrietta, listen to me. Consider this your first
Lesson
Is a horse a blank slate? Is each animal sprung from the forehead of Zeus? Is a foal a patented invention? No, the horse is a house we build from the finest materials of the previous generations. How can we accomplish this with any reliability? Because biology is destiny, that’s why. Gold from gold, and brass from brass. Secretariat wasn’t born from a hack and a knacker; he was from Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, winning horses from long and respectable lines. Secretariat never had the option to be slow. Speed and stamina are heritable. The animal bred true.
Oh, I can see the objection in your eyes that a horse isn’t a human. Fine. But the human is just as subject to his biology by fate. Now, I’m not going to bore you with the histories of the polygenists and craniometrists, but I will tell you that Morton’s skulls are a fact; the White brain is bigger than the Black brain. This should appeal to your little scientific mind. Just as musical skill and athletic prowess are inheritable, so is intelligence. How could it be otherwise? The average African IQ is 70; the average White is 100. And that’s a fact even the Marxists can’t avoid! You can find exceptions, but the exceptions don’t disprove the rule. And how did racial difference develop in the first place? Think about it, Henrietta. The human populations that headed north contended with difficult weather and living conditions that demanded the development of higher intelligence and organized societies in order to survive. Those left near the equator could get away with investing no attention in their innumerable children, and ignoring social development. The laxity of the elements created a species of indolence, and what no one will say out loud is that Blacks were decreed different by nature. The ascendance of certain races is, in fact, proof of the wisdom of nature. You don’t have to be a madman to acknowledge the obvious.
I’m going to tell you what my father told me: throughout the history of this country, we have saved an inferior people from themselves, and now that they’ve won everything they clamored for, they can’t manage their own freedoms. They’re the kings and queens of dissolution. They’re ruled by base instincts, but lasciviousness is so intrinsic to their nature, most don’t even see it as abnormal anymore. Look at our cities—Black women can’t keep their legs shut, and they’ve run the country down with their endlessly multiplying, uneducated spawn. They still live off the White man’s money, only now they don’t even have the protection they once enjoyed on a plantation or in a small town. They get to live like rats in their projects, because they don’t possess the genetic wherewithal to make anything productive of their lives. They’re seemingly incapable of the abstract thought required to plan for the future or even to detect a suitable mate. It’s not 1860, but rest assured, there still has to be a White man making sure they get enough to eat and that they have a roof over their heads. The reality is White men saved Black people in this country. They saved them from themselves.
The most painful irony is that Blacks clamored for a freedom that can never be. So long as they are bound to bodies bequeathed to them by their ancestors, they can never taste true freedom. They’re enslaved by their own materiality, and no White man anywhere has the power to free them from that.
Over her drowsy head, the daily war of morning ensued: dews rose, shrugging off their sleep and skimming briefly over the fields in the shifting dark. After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armored sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering, to earth’s antipodal edge. Now the lingering armies of dew turned to mist, mustering over the great house and muffling the voices of animals. The sun cast great handfuls of heated light, looting what was left of shadow, and the dew dispersed, not retreating toward night but fleeing in all directions.
Henrietta shambled down from the upstairs at six thirty, pouring the cup of coffee her father now allowed her to drink and turning into the study where he waited. There, the books were spread wide before him, so it appeared he had been sitting, waiting here for his student all night. He gestured toward the black Windsor chair beside the desk. Her education was under way:
They began with the classics, working through The Iliad for the third time in Henrietta’s life, and soon thereafter Xenophon and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; then science through the esotery of pedigree charts and animal husbandry and the variables of genetic inheritance; mathematics through word problems exploring the numerical influence of a mare if she appeared four times in a foal’s chart; but also by working with Beyer’s numbers, then the basics of handicapping. Anatomy was equine form, and soon she could parse the elastic maze of musculature, which through endless acts of flexion, extension, and adduction made the horse an animal of tremendous power and speed, and drew men to race it. History was the tale of the Greeks, their branched and ill-fated houses; and also the dynasties of speed and conformation—the lines of the Darley Arabian and his Eclipse, Sir Archie, Sir Gallahad III, War Admiral, Native Dancer, Danzig. The families branched and then their limbs curled back again to their source as bloodhorses were bred back into their own lines, so the families grew deep and redundant with inbreeding, their limbs twisted. For Henry, recalling his own earliest years in study, these recounted histories were so long and tangled; they became confused in his mind, all houses the names of myth, so the horses became indistinguishable from the Greeks and the Greeks from the horses, or the horses became attendant somehow to the fall of the houses, like night-bred furies saddled by fate and ferrying black messages from the gods to men and back again. He often confused their names and misspoke, but his daughter could intuit his meaning. Through it all Henrietta asked no questions, said no unnecessary words, eyes strict on the page, listening, absorbing, memorizing. The first four hours of the day were spent side by side in this manner, heads bent, poised between past and future. There were no breaks until her coffee dried in the mug’s white well, and then it was dinnertime. What she could not manage to learn in these four hours of the morning—what she did not learn of the rest of the world—she did not learn at all, and a year passed.
On many days, she shadowed her father on the grounds as he consulted with Barlow, called his bloodstock agent, his lawyers, read the Racing Form, and made his travel plans around the racing season. He sent her off with one of the female grooms, who taught her the duties of the broodmare barn, how to muck the stalls and change hay, how to lave the horses and pick their hooves, to detect when the mares turned temperamental in estrus. Henrietta often accompanied Henry to Keeneland to watch Forge horses in their early-morning workouts, the animals wheeling in and out of the cool mist, their breath blooming. The pair made an odd couple of railbirds: the man tall, thin, and talkative, the girl tall, thin, and quiet, both sipping coffee from paper cups. The girl held a silver stopwatch in her free hand and soon knew the horses by their gaits, the track speed by the report of hooves, the trainers by their curses, the jocks by the curve of their spines as they bowed over their mounts, and a year passed.
She took thrice-weekly riding lessons on the other side of Paris; this was something her father demanded. The other girls arrived with their hair scraped back into neat tails, their high boots shined to a gloss. Henrietta’s boots were caked with old, dry manure the color of mastic. She was deeply tan to the others’ schoolkept pallor. She lasted there only four months, by then a rider equal to her instructor, a seeming natural with no fear of the animal, but no discernible love either. She rode as though she were walking, the horse like the ground beneath her feet, and another year passed.
Only Henrietta’s nights were her own. During these hours, while lying in bed perusing the old books, she discovered the ultimate luxury, which was solitude. She tried her best to like the poetry that her father admired, but the Greeks bored her, and, besides, that was all part of her morning lessons. She tried the poems from an anthology she found and liked some, especially those that made no claims, strove for nothing but the revelation of a small, beautiful thing—a vase or a blackbird. But she read no novels, finding them a waste of time. She resisted how they worked on her, asking her to suffer on someone’s behalf. If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn’t speak with the limited tongue of sense. Her father taught her that.
What roused her to an almost pained interest, what caused her to copy down long passages into her notebooks and stay awake into the night, her mind running like a stallion on a track, was the mystery of the earth’s composition and all of its inhabitants. She devoured the books that had belonged to her great-great-in-aeternum-grandfathers—atlas volumes, topographical maps, weathered pamphlets from the Geological Survey, the tomes of Lamarck and Darwin and Lyell; also physiographic diagrams, strata illustrations, and expedition records, which together told the brute story of geology, how it grew continents and plant populations, gave them life and dug their graves. She slowly discerned that Kentucky was a strange and abundant place, half-mad with a restless and protean geology, secreted away under a cloak of limestone and swaying seas of timothy and bluegrass. She came to believe that the earth longed to be known. So she pressed one ear to the lip of its mouth, listening to tales that babbled up from its karsty throat, from jagged fissures in the sandstone hills, gurgling streambeds and salt licks. She learned how the primordial state had formed itself from the mystery of swirling sedimentary detritus under Paleozoic seas: sandstone out of inky silt and sand; clay and black shale from viscous mud that settled like a pitch lime on the Devonian beds before millennial tides rolled back and forth; also layers of friable igneous rock, bits of charred matter that traveled from the hot center of the earth; gravel and nameless shards scrabbled together into conglomerates; delicate, fluted shells forming sleek, packed limestone that made up the thickest strata, four hundred million years old and counting. Casket-gray and underscoring half the state, the preterite limestone founded the old Mississippian plateau with their faulted escarpments and the steep barrowing knobs, which Samuel Forge had spied as he stood with Ben at the verge of what would be Madison County, surveying the thin soils of the Outer Bluegrass, which was itself cinched tight by a belt of Eden Shale. It was in the core of the Bluegrass that limestone, sandstone, dolomite, and shale were pressed together like the layers of an earthen cake, until a massive upwarping formed the Cincinnati Arch, where the young, thin stones were soon eroded by ferocious winds, and the limestone found itself naked before the elements, runnelled and pocked by water until it had transformed itself into karst, a tumulous landscape of sinking streams, sinkholes, caves, and soil so wildly fecund that men lost their religion for a share. It was a rolling dreamscape, a heaven for the raising of crops and horses—better than the modest farmland of the Pennyroyal plains, the coalfields, and Western embayment, which sloped down to the alluvial foreshores of the Mississippi River.
In the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest mountains on earth, a different tale was told. There, organic matter had compressed into bituminous coal. Five hundred million years before Henrietta was born, those mountains extended all the way down into the extraterrestrial deserts of West Texas, pressed into being by the clashing of two young continents, which closed the Iapetus Ocean—an ocean so old it gave birth to the Atlantic—thrusting the abyssal plains and all their doomed marine life into the air like an offering for the gods. As the mountains rose and heaved and eroded, generations of saplings tumbled into the swamps, and hairy grasses too, seed coats, stamens, involute gondola leaves, chips of bark, white and chocolate roots, mosses mixed with stringy vines, hardy stamens, and even the gentle, primordial flower beds in the height of their flowerage fell too soon like the mayflies, dropping their leaves and tumbling into the self-heating morass, which, under the slurried sediment of Mesozoic seas, turned all the fallen vegetal world to rich, flammable peat. But the peat was covered and itself compressed and, with a mountain atop it, vanquishing its air, was tamped and starved into coal, thin, glossy, striate seams of carbon between dingy Pennsylvanian stones, thin, dark pages in a long, long book—

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