The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017

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.