The Sport of Kings (2 page)

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: