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

“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.”