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

“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—

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.