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

Henry leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you about Filip.”

“Filip is, I believe, only five years my junior, but has lived his life in a state of perpetual adolescence. You know him as a quiet and sober man, but that’s only because I demand he stay sober in this house—and even then I sometimes have my doubts. My father always said Filip was weaned with a bottle of whiskey. You can’t imagine the scrapes your grandfather saved him from time and time again, because the man has the aptitude of a child. He simply cannot fathom consequence. Each bottle of liquor is his first adventure in drinking. Each hangover a fresh surprise. Dealing with the man has been an uphill struggle, but my father was unreasonably fond of him, and my father was not a kind man. That says something, and so here he remains.”

John Henry settled back into the curve of the davenport. With one hand, he held his ankle where it rested on the opposite knee. He looked over Henry’s head. With his other hand, he rotated his tumbler.

“I once heard a Northerner refer to the South as ‘that perplexing place,’ and I can’t say I disagree with him. Look at you—you’re distinctly privileged to be among the planter class, yet you’ve been surrounded your entire life by Negroes of all manner of quality, and also by your common white redneck. Or, rather, rednecks recently of the hill class, which is to say of no class at all, and saddled with a character so low it can’t claim the term. A sensible man would prefer the company of a hundred temperate Negroes to the prattling of one hillbilly. I know I certainly would.”

John Henry appeared on the verge of saying more, but then he cocked his head to one side, cleared his throat, and said, “White trash as your grandfather always called them. They have their uses. Their passions have their uses.”

“Like the men who cleared our fields when I was younger.”

“Yes, exactly,” said John Henry, “but I intended … Well, the story of the South is long. I sometimes think the Yankees hate us so much because the richness of our story frankly belittles theirs. The original nation is more alive here than it is in the North, and the Northerner resents that. We still know the land, we still know how to treat a woman, we still know the names of all our forefathers. Family actually means something here. Anyway, I was going to tell you a story about your grandfather’s activities in the county, but perhaps I’d better not. Let me just say that there are … artifacts in the house I pray your mother never stumbles upon. I fear she would never recover. I mean only—to return to the original point—that the poor white serves a useful purpose from time to time. The Klan is comprised largely of these country types, almost unfathomably stupid and passionate. This is the sort of man who would kill a Catholic but couldn’t define one. And yet, justice … Henry, it may seem a strange thing for a lawyer to say, but the courts can’t be relied upon to mete out justice in all cases. Abstraction can paralyze. Trust me when I say I know this better than most. I’ve seen the failure a thousand times over. The Klan and their ilk, for all their rabblerousing, often have a keen sense of right and wrong undiluted by relativism, and they can carry out justice with alacrity. Rough justice, yes, but justice. I don’t wish to glorify the Klan—they’re fools—but … as your grandfather used to say, ‘Manners are morals. And a gentleman always minds his manners … until he can no longer afford to.’ That’s when the Klan comes in handy. They’re more discreet these days than they used to be.”

“Okay,” said Henry. But then, with an expression like petulance or confusion, he placed his chin in his palm and leaned forward and frowned.

John Henry watched his son through narrowing eyes. “Well, I’ve been speaking a good while. You came in to speak with me.”

“I don’t know …”

“Don’t be indirect, Henry.”

“Well,” said Henry innocently, “I guess I … Well, I just don’t really like Filip.”

John Henry blinked a few times, drawing his mind round to this tangent. He cleared his throat. “When you were a child, he was my biting dog. It was only natural that you would feel a certain antipathy toward him. But your insolence was a sign of high spirit, and I wasn’t unappreciative of that fact.”

Henry breathed once very deep, felt his heartbeat in his jaw, looked up into the face of his father. “I don’t trust him.”

There was a twitch of the lip. “Deservedly so. One ought not to entirely trust a drunkar—”

“I heard people talking.”

Into the warm tenor of their talk, a cool wind snaked. John Henry shifted almost imperceptibly, his chin lowering a fraction of an inch. “And what precisely was the nature of this talk you heard?”

“It was probably nothing.”

“Don’t equivocate, Henry.”

Henry’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know—”

“Henry!”

“I think it was about Mother.”

John Henry sat back. “What do you mean?”

“They were talking about someone touching Mother. Maybe Filip.”

The silence in the room was total.

Into its vast expanse Henry said, “I’m not even sure what they meant.”

His father laid his tumbler aside and sat up straight. “Who is they?”

“I don’t know; they were around a corner. Well, I think it was Filip and Maryleen talking? It was a while ago. I’m not sure. But Mother’s so clumsy without her hearing, maybe he was catching her as she fell. I’ve done that myself.”

“Have you spoken to your mother about this?”

“No, should I have?”

The response was a curt “Your five minutes are up.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, sir.” Henry was instantly on his feet, standing over his father, who was now reaching down for his shoes. His heart was hammering in his chest, but he felt suddenly unable to step back to open the door. With his father’s head downturned, Henry had a clear view of his thinning crown. In a strange gesture, Henry reached up and touched his own thick hair gingerly. Then, as if the motion had caught his eye, John Henry looked up at his son, who stood there with his hand to a tendril of his hair in what was a strangely winsome—even girlish—manner, looking perplexed and unsure. John Henry’s face was blasting furnace red. He rose up from his seat on the davenport with a suddenness that almost unbalanced him, so he swayed for a moment.

“Henry,” his father said, but then absolutely nothing followed on the name, so they simply looked at each other, and on Henry’s face plain fear appeared. Suddenly and surely with a force that alarmed him, he wanted to retract every word that had been spoken and rip up the court record, but he heard himself saying simply, “Good night, Father.” Then he walked out of the room, feeling as though an enormous, age-old wheel had been set creaking into motion. He moved slowly through the lower halls of the house to the back steps and then climbed woodenly to the second floor. He didn’t know where his mother was and, suddenly, belatedly, was enveloped by a supreme panic, certain that his father was going to kill her. That fear was immediately allayed when he felt the reverberations of the front door slamming, and then, just moments later, the sound of the sedan prowled down the icy lane like a big black cat.

The next morning, Filip did not show up for work at the Forge house, nor did he appear any day thereafter, and the code on the white, silencing streets of Paris was that the man had simply left town.

And why not? After all, sometimes black men simply left a small, Southern town. Especially when the snow was falling so finely, and there were elderly relatives to visit in Cincinnati and Detroit and trees to trim down in Jackson, Birmingham, and Atlanta. Sometimes a man just went away for the holidays, and then he stayed. Stranger things have happened. Who can say?

Case in point: sometimes a man didn’t even have to leave town to disappear, he just went to the opera like Will Porter, who shot a man in honest self-defense but was ripped from a Kentucky jail, carried high on shoulders like an athlete dying young, down the roiling streets to the opera house. They charged a penny admission and strung him up high over the stage, and the strangling sounds were lost in the blaze of pistol fire from the orchestra seats, and good shots all.

Or a man headed down to the court of public opinion, like C. J. Miller after he allegedly raped and murdered two little girls he’d never seen in a county he’d never been to before. Poor, pathetic killer, half-mad with guilt, they dragged him down to the open-air court, and there were five thousand jurors that day, and all thumbs went down as Mr. Miller, he went up.

Others just burned to leave—like Richard Coleman, a hand on a farm when he rode the black train to Covington for supposed rape and murder. Upon his holiday return, ten thousand good souls were waiting, who bound him to a pole and stoked a creeping fire. All the little children brought kindling and bits of twig and laid them on the hearth of his life and roasted him good and slow. And when the smoke cleared, well, you must forgive the rush for the bones—this was a Kentucky delicacy.

No, this was the 1950s and Kentucky had stopped hanging its black laundry, or so they say. Surely Filip Dunbar wasn’t what his mother used to call the Christmas babies, the ones killed at Christmas, his mother born out of the foul pussy of slavery on a Jessamine County farm, where horses now run. Until she died in 1940, she lit candles during Advent for all those who had perished, and even then the count was quietly rising.

December 20: Moses Henderson, James Allen, Mr. Lewis, Scott Bishop, the brothers Da Loach, Clinton Montgomery, George Baily, Cope Mills, Samuel Bland, William Stewart, and two unidentified men.

December 21: James Stone, John Warren, Henry Davis, Henry Fitts, two pregnant women, and three unidentified men.

December 22: Joseph James, Jerry Burke, George Finley, and H. Bromley.

December 23: Sloan Allen, George King, seven men together in Georgia, James Martin, Frank West, Mack Brown, Mr. Brown, and one unidentified man.

December 24: Kinch Freeman, Eli Hilson, James Garden, five together in Virginia, and fourteen unidentified men in Meridian on this day.

Christmas Day: William Fluid, Calvin Thomas, J. H. McClinton, Montgomery Godley, King Davis, and Mr. and Mrs. Moore and more and

Filip Dunbar was one of the lucky ones, or so they say. Surely he walked out of Paris of his own free will that freezing Christmas Eve night without a word to his wife, without even his jacket or shoes. And the only things left hanging in Kentucky that Christmas were the ornaments on the trees, or so they say.

If Maryleen heard nothing, it was likely because her father had come down with the flu over Christmas and not attended church, so of course her mother had not gone but stayed home to tend to her husband, and Maryleen had not gone because she hadn’t seen the inside of a church since she was thirteen, when she’d announced she wouldn’t worship a God as cruel as this one. (“Maryleen, you fixing to go to hell!” “I’m sure the food’s better there.”) As far as she was concerned, all religious foolishness ended right then and there, even if—and she would be the first to acknowledge this—religion had saved the black race from certain suicide. But she wasn’t the black race and didn’t answer to it; she was Maryleen, and she wasn’t nearly as stupid as most folks, black or white.

If she heard nothing, it might have been because December was the busiest month in her calendar; it was hog-killing time, and she didn’t work at the Forge house from the twentieth of December until the second of January. Instead, she was busy cooking in her parents’ hall-and-parlor cottage on the outskirts of Claysville. Her mother told her with no small amount of resentment curdling her voice that Maryleen was the only colored girl in Bourbon County who got the holidays off, but Maryleen had insisted upon it when she was hired; take it or leave it. They accepted it, because her reputation preceded her, and her trial cooking sealed the deal. She had authentic talent, which she had learned was a powerful bargaining chip, and she used it to her advantage. Plus the white lady had seemed to actually like her a little bit, or perhaps merely sensed Maryleen’s dislike, which had worked its strange allure. Lavinia had probably never been disliked before. That sort of thing could unsettle a white woman and make her needy, the way cats only want to be petted by the hand that won’t touch them.

If she heard nothing, it was probably because hog killing was an all-consuming chore. Maryleen didn’t give a damn about the old-timey ways, and she was certainly aware she could purchase any pork product she wanted down at the A&P, but she did give a damn about her cooking and knew that no store-bought lard or fatback competed with what she could get from hogs fattened on their property by her own hand and then butchered in December when the old cutter came down from Georgetown. That man, born in another century to ex-slaves, would wait for a cold snap and the moon to increase; this kind of backwoods superstition and conjuration threatened Maryleen’s always tenuous relationship with patience, but she tolerated it with unusual forbearance, because the man could core a pig like it was no more trouble than an apple. His butchering was fast and deliberate and neat: he built the scaffolds himself from last year’s wood, then death came quick with barely any squealing, then the carcasses were scalded and hoisted up and hung with a gambrel. Even her father managed to put his Bible down for a few hours to aid in the process, and all the while Maryleen either helped with the cutting or stood in the kitchen, boiling coffee for the men. She wouldn’t touch coffee herself, considering it a drug no less harmful than any liquor and not something a human with good sense would tolerate in the body. The men sliced the hogs so their entrails spilled down like loose mottled sausages into the old copper pots, and from the scaffolding the shaved carcasses hung empty like glabrous, translucent lanterns for three days—bright pink with the winter sun lighting them just so—until they could be cut apart. During those three days, Maryleen went to Lexington to shop for ingredients, paying for it all herself as a Christmas gift to her parents, and then she spent the last week of the year undressing the pigs and cooking from dawn until dark. She separated the leaf lard, then rendered it in huge cast iron pots in what had once been a summer kitchen and which now saw no use except during hog-killing time; various cuts were carved, trimmings rendered down for common lard for when she didn’t need a fine pastry flavor; she saved some lean with the fat to be used later in sausage making. Then she laid away middling and jowl bacon seasoned with saltpeter and brown sugar in a meat box, and made her own sausages from the trimmings. Most of the pig couldn’t be used right away, but she was now set for a year of deep, bold flavor, at least in her own home. In the Forge house, everything was store-bought with flavors as shallow as an August pond, so she had to work twice as hard to create half the depth, but so be it. She doubted that kind of people could even tell the difference between a well-raised meat and supermarket cardboard. White folk were stupid like the sun was bright. Which was to say, shatteringly.

So she was tired when she walked the three miles to the Forge house at five in the morning on the second of January, 1954. She was sweating through her blouse despite the cold when she finally approached the house, which stood tomblike on its hillock alongside the slushing creek, barely visible against the cinder-colored sky. It was not yet dawn, but normally there would already be at least two lights burning in the upper house and in a barn as well, where a worker would be tending to the horses. But the house was dark. Only when Maryleen slipped into the kitchen did a single bulb illuminate a room on the second floor, but that she didn’t see.

The kitchen was so quiet, hollow-feeling, and undisturbed that she did something unusual: she lit a fat, drippy beeswax candle instead of switching on the bulb over the stove. It preserved a bit of the early-morning peace, while she laid out buttermilk and butter to warm for biscuits, and rooted around for peach jam in the outdated icebox. She reached behind her for the egg bowl, which Filip placed on the butcher-block island every morning prior to her six o’clock arrival—but no egg bowl. She swiveled around, staring at the deeply scarred block, exactly at the spot where the bowl should have been, and thought, why that lazy old drunk—

The boy was in the room. He stood there in his boxer shorts and a rumpled white undershirt, which was risen up and showed some of his pale stomach. The sight of his flesh made Maryleen rear back in distaste and alarm. Not only was he dressed improperly, but he appeared ravished and worn, as though he’d suffered some wasting disease over the holidays that left his hair sweaty and deep hollows like blackened lime slices beneath his eyes. Even in the mild, shifting candlelight, he looked like a buzzard off a gut pile.

“What’s wrong with you? You ill?” Even her concern sounded like an insult.

Henry didn’t move further into the room. He just shook his head, exhaustion lining his face.

“If you’ve got a fever, I don’t want you near me. Make your mama tend you.”

“Mother isn’t here. Father sent her away to Florida.”

Maryleen raised a hand. “That’s not my business. Go on back to bed. I need to fetch eggs. Filip didn’t fetch them for me this morning.” She scooped up a yellow ware bowl, actually glad now that the chore hadn’t been done, as it gave her a chance to escape this strange troll of a boy, but he said, “Filip isn’t here anymore.”

It wasn’t just the words, but the way he said them—so deliberately, like something memorized and carefully recited to an audience of one. It made Maryleen stop with her hand on the brass knob of the door with just enough time to note the cool oval shape, how similar it was to an egg only nowhere near as fragile, before her mind reared up. That thing that had been waiting like a stalking cat ready to spring had sprung.

“Oh,” she said, her voice oddly cool, disembodied from her beating chest. “Where’s he working now?”

His voice wavered, hesitant. “I don’t believe he’s working anywhere anymore, Maryleen.”

The way he said her name filled her with dread. She stepped out the door without another word, clutching the bowl to her belly and walking a few paces, then half running through the dark toward the chicken coops behind the horse barn. Her breath was coming in shallow draws and her face was flushed. She kneeled on shaky legs and reached around blindly in the coop, pushing hens aside impatiently, so they winged about and complained, and she dropped two eggs in her haste, one chicken escaping the hutch, so it required a minute to wrestle it back in. Six eggs in the bowl now, and she was walking back to the house, because she didn’t know what else to do. In lieu of proper thought, her legs just ferried her back, the minions of habit. The morning was still dark as the inside of a stove, the sun a long way off.

Thank God the boy was no longer in the kitchen when she returned. She placed the bowl on the butcher block, just as Filip would have done, and without further hesitation tiptoed as quickly as she could to the black phone, where it hung in the hallway. She couldn’t call her mother; her white folk didn’t rise until seven. Anyway, her mother would have told her if she’d known something. Her father’s preacher? No—Miss Martin, her old Home Economics teacher, the woman who had taught her everything she knew about cooking. Miss Martin would be awake; she woke every morning at four thirty for her morning prayers.

The phone was answered swiftly after two rings. There was that reliable, gracious voice with its precise elocution. “Good morning,” it said. “This is Ella Martin speaking.”

“Miss Martin!” Maryleen rasped with a hand curved around the receiver. “It’s Maryleen!”

“Yes, Maryleen. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. What are you doing calli—”

“Where’s Filip?” Maryleen interrupted. Into the tiniest hint of a pause, Maryleen whispered, “Filip Dunbar.”

“I know the Filip to whom you’re referring,” said Miss Ella. “Maryleen, he ran off over a week ago, just up and went. Left Susah on her own, which some might argue is for the best. They’d been having a lot of trouble recently from what I hear. My goodness, child, surely you didn’t call me at this hour to gossip with an old woman.”

“Oh God.”

“Maryleen.” The voice was curving into a question when Maryleen abruptly hung up the phone and stood there in the dark, her mind sorting and measuring, but knowing she was way too late to the equation. The final numbers had already been calculated by others.

“Who were you talking to, Maryleen?”

Despite the alarm that sent her body rimrod straight, despite the fact that she would whip around and see him standing there like a ghost in the shadows of the hall, her first acid thought was “with whom.”

“My mama,” she lied, her answer formulated before she even turned. There was a frightening stillness in Henry’s form, and his face was set in shadows, so she couldn’t know exactly what it held. She was sweating now, and her charged breath was audible.

“Today’s my shopping day,” she said uselessly into the silence, but he didn’t respond.

Then she snapped, her voice keening upward from a barely suppressed panic, “Go ask your father how I’m supposed to get to the grocery without a driver!”

“He’s not awake.”

“Go!” she cried.

For a second, he looked as though he was about to go do just that, but he didn’t. He said, “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Her mind reeled. The last time she’d been in the house, only ten days prior, she could have told him to drink lye and somehow, by virtue of her bandsaw personality or her seniority or just her evil eye, she could have gotten him to do it. But whatever power she had held in her hand at the end of December, he was holding in his hands now in this hallway, in this new year. Wearing a thin mask of frustration over rising fear, she shouldered roughly past him, stalked down the hall to the kitchen, trying her best to appear angered by his eavesdropping.

But he followed her. He stood watching as she banged copper and tin pots around mindlessly. She wasn’t a cryer, but the first droplets of grief and fear were wringing from the winepress of her mind.

“I can’t cook with you staring at me like that,” she finally hissed over her shoulder.

“Maryleen,” he said. “Do you think we all eventually get the punishment we deserve?”

“What?” she snapped.

“I mean, if God doesn’t exist, then he can’t punish anyone. I guess we have to do it ourselves,” he said. “See, man actually is the measure of all things. Man wrote all the books, so he’s the measure even if he says he isn’t. We invented God to tell us to do what we already wanted to do. That’s what I think.”

“Punishment? You mean men? What?” She had no idea what he was talking about, what he was trying to riddle out to her, but her body made its own interpretation, a trace of cold wending its way down from between her shoulder blades to her tailbone, and the sudden feeling that she had to pee.

“I heard you say Filip did something,” he said quietly, and the sound of his voice was the thing that frightened her most of all, the queer way he sounded like a little boy when he said it. When she turned, his eyes were enormous and febrile, and she couldn’t stop the words as they rose up from her very belly, passing through the esophagus constricted by fear and then through the ashes in her mouth: “What have you done?”

He reared back, a look of injury on his face. When he spoke, she could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “Nothing. I was trying to do the right thing. All I want is to grow up.”

“I said”—she hissed—“what have you done.”

“I didn’t do anything! I just told Father what you said.”

Maryleen’s brow crumpled up in bewilderment. “What I said?”