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

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.