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

Today, he made his scrupulous notes on mare stamping, the intractable tendency of the female to raft her features over the weaker male and mold her get in her image. It was a tenuous and risky task to breed when male strength was infinitely subject to the savvier, prepotent female. Henry was just now learning how to linebreed and inbreed a horse to a desired constitution, delving back to the same female ancestor on both sides, so that the lines rhymed and the foals showed a dam’s taproot strengths without being dominated by her. A large heart came through the dam; one could trace its passage from foal to granddam and beyond; it stoked the chests of all descendants, it fueled limbs across finish lines and into winner’s circles. The heart was the thing—and how to get it.

Henry cycled back to the house in the amber afternoon with borrowed books crammed into his rucksack, a cap tilted across his brow. He’d nearly run over his youngest cousin in diapers before he remembered that the family had arrived today, that he’d been expected back well before the supper hour. He dropped his bike in the gravel, so the wheels spun with a useless rattle, and lifted the first child he saw to his chest, a small human shield against the remonstration sure to come. But his father was engrossed in conversation with his brother, a man with dark red hair just beginning to gray and the easy, open face of a younger brother. Never close, they were as different as spring and autumn. Beyond them, the girls played croquet—

Henry detected his cousin Loretta among them.

When the new cook, Paulette, called for supper, the girls all dropped their mallets and sprang across the lawn, calling “Henry! Henry! Henry!” as they angled past him toward the house, waving and sparking white and all redheaded in their bowtied dresses. Lavinia, on a step of the el porch, ushered them inside, touching each on the shoulder as they went by in a bright wash, blessing them as they went, but her eyes were on her son, on whom Loretta was advancing like a gay shadow. Henry turned to her, reinforcing his face against her prettiness, which he couldn’t remember having seen before. It changed the temperature of his skin.

“Oh my gosh,” Loretta said, “what happened to you?” It was a statement, not a question, but Henry looked down at himself as if his shirt were fouled or his zipper undone. His face returned to hers, wary.

She was watching him as if she knew something he didn’t, smiling from one side of her pretty mouth as an older person might smile at a child, and propping her white, heart-shaped glasses on the crown of her head. Her eyes were green, disarming, bold. Like his, but more adult, even he could see that.

“You’re gorgeous,” Loretta said.

If he didn’t move, his eyes started somewhat in their sockets, and he fought the urge to turn his head away from the soft blow of her compliment. Instead, he blushed so badly his face burned. Then he did allow his eyes to escape from hers, but they only turned awkwardly down toward the mother-of-pearl buttons on her blouse.

She laughed then, but the sound was young, and so much sweeter and less sophisticated than her speaking voice that he was able to look into her eyes again.

“God, how did you get to be so good-looking?” she said, and she grabbed his elbow, guiding him toward the house. Henry snuck a peek in the direction of his mother, but she was gone, watching them now from a window in the dining room that he couldn’t see. Henry and Loretta advanced on the house slowly; she owned him by the time they had walked ten paces.

“You could be in movies, I’m not kidding,” she said. “Aunt Lavinia is pretty, but your dad, not so much. So what happened to you?”

He was still blushing as he eyed the exquisite slope of her coral-colored lips. His mind was fumbling for something to say when she said, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Do you still have horses?”

She laughed. “Liar.”

“No,” he said, “I have a girlfriend. I was just curious if you still have horses.”

Arm in arm they went and she rolled her eyes and sighed, but said, “A couple.”

“Yeah, but real horses.”

“Yes, real horses,” she said. “I still compete.”

Now it was his turn to roll his eyes. “I meant Thoroughbred horses.”

Loretta withdrew her hand suddenly from his elbow. “Yes, we have horses. Real horses. Yes, some of them are Thoroughbreds. Mother and I do dressage. You know that. What’s your point?”

Henry’s laugh was a foil for a secret, and for a moment their ages seesawed.

“What’s that laugh supposed to mean?” she said.

“Nothing.” He shrugged, turned up his shoulders a bit, allowing a small insouciant smile to play around the corners of his mouth.

Loretta stopped walking altogether. He stopped to look back at her.

“When did you get so high and mighty?” she snapped. “You don’t even have a girlfriend. I don’t think you have a foot to stand on.” Her tone was acid, her face hard, and now she marched past him, all slicing shoulders and high chin, angling for the side door.

“Hey!” he called after her. “I was kidding!” A moment later: “Hey, I don’t think dressage is stupid.”

Loretta paused with her hand on the screen door and turned toward him, so he had a proper glimpse of her bright copper hair and newgrown breasts, her legs white and gleaming. Through eyes turned to slits, she regarded him without saying a word.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Henry said softly.

For a moment it seemed as if she was going to turn her back on him again, but then she laughed that childish laugh, and she made a kissing motion at him before she skipped on into the house.

He followed after her like a dog.

John Henry and Uncle Mason sat deep in discussion of the farm and its plantation, their heads tilted together at the breakfast table, their plates pushed hastily aside, so their fingers could make maps of the linens. The girls were a messy, squabbling flock, while their mother, Melissa Jeane, hovered over them, ever the harried hen, too overwhelmed by the task of feeding her brood to eat anything herself. Lavinia sat in the cocoon of her silence as Paulette moved unnoticed at their outskirts, replacing dishes, filling glasses, covering eggs and potatoes in their silver servers. Henry had no interest in any of it; he abandoned the room, grabbing a piece of toast and escaping through the kitchen’s swinging door.

He was standing on the porch, surveying the farm drenched in morning’s brisk light—his crucible, where a new world would be forged—when Loretta appeared behind him, tapping a smart rhythm with the toe of her shoe. “I’m bored to death,” she whispered, and her breath whispered too against the skin of his neck.

“Yup,” he said, chewing his toast, and when he made no further response, she stepped in front of him, her robust figure interrupting the light.

“Show me the Walkers,” she said.

“I thought you were already bored.” He wiped his fingers on his khakis.

“Come on,” she said, and reached out to tug at his arm. She was surprisingly strong, but then she was no small girl. She grinned at him, her lipstick nearly worn away by her breakfast.

“I have no interest in the Walkers,” he said.

“But,” she said slowly, “don’t you want to go for a ride?” And to his utter surprise, she swiveled her hips once in a carnal, circumscribed dance for him, which instantly made his insides lurch. Caught in the warm vise of alarm and arousal, he stood there, saying nothing at all.

“Listen, if you don’t want to come, that’s fine.” Loretta sighed and moued, her hands on her hips. “I’ll just go find Jimmy then.” She marched down onto the grass.

“What?” Henry snapped, flinging aside what was left of his toast and starting after her across the lawn. Jimmy was a teenager from Louisville who’d been passed relative to relative in Claysville for over two years. He’d been an occasional employee on their farm, a handsome and raucous boy, whose laughter was always cut short when Henry came around. Then he would stand mute with dark, bruised eyes, his smile withering on his lips. Henry was startled that Loretta even remembered him.

“Why would you even say that?” Henry pressed, whispering as if someone was close by and listening. “That’s disgusting.”

“What’s disgusting?” Loretta said innocently.

“I know what you meant,” he whispered.

“Oh, your mind is in the gutter,” she mocked.

“You’re the one who said it!” He felt the rising heat of fury on his cheeks.

“I never said coloreds have big cocks,” she said, and Henry reared back, shock eclipsing his anger, but she only grabbed at his elbow, that easy female gesture again, and he remained at her side, that easy male acquiescence.

“My gosh, I’m just trying to rile you up,” Loretta said, rolling her eyes. “You’re such a bumpkin! Who knew you were so … sensitive.”

“I have standards,” Henry said, and snatched his arm back, but they kept on until the syncopated rhythms of their feet formed a unison.

“Father won’t let you ride the Walkers,” Henry warned when they reached the barn door.

“Oh, I’m not afraid of Uncle John,” Loretta tossed back. “Are you?”

Henry paused where he stood, feeling the great, reassuring warmth of the morning pressing against his back, and a prickly sense of discomfort arising. He watched, circumspect, as Loretta sashayed down the row. Then he followed his cousin into the barn, because her hips and lips were warmer than even the bedazzling light of morning.

The horses were immediately aware of their presence. They stirred, collecting one after the other at their stall doors, dark heads swinging over crib doors, drafts of air quivering down the channels of their nostrils.

“Oh,” Loretta sighed, “they smell like sunshine and earth.” She slid the palms of her hand along one filly’s jaw—the yearling foal of Martha White—and stared into her eyes, that dark, confounding space. Then she traced the jagged line of her brilliant blaze, but the other horses blew and stamped, so she moved to each in turn.

“Don’t you just love them?” she said.

Henry made a face. What use were the Walkers to him? They were predictable and unsurprising as time, heavy on their bones with their absurdly long underlines. And, too, they were the province of Filip, a man he could not think of without his stomach turning to a hard plum pit.

“Let’s ride,” said Loretta, whirling around suddenly.

“No way,” Henry said.

“Where’s the tack room?”

“No, Loretta,” he said again, more sternly, he hoped.

“I’ll find it myself then.” She started off down the row with fresh purpose, horse heads pointing the way, their tails tossing as they blew for want of affection or a ride. One Walker whickered and traced a needy circle in his stall as she passed.

Henry jogged along after Loretta, but just as her hand lifted the latch of the tack room door, and just as he was trying to draw her back, their hands wrestling briefly, the door swung open, and Loretta dragged him inward, slamming the door shut again. Before their eyes could adjust to the swamping dark, her mouth missed his for his cheek, then latched onto his lips. Her hands plied at his shoulders and his bottom.

“Lie down,” she said. He felt about with his foot, his heart beating madly, until he nudged the edge of a hayrack. He scooted back onto the bed of scratching hay, and she joined him there and began to work on the buttons of his fly. She half lay over him then, her pliant tongue reaching into unexplored regions of his mouth. The pressure of her breasts was strange and insistent as she rooted around in his shorts. His breath came in ragged draws. Then she schooled him with her hand.

Even before his breathing had slowed, he was shoving himself still half-hard into his khakis and fumbling with the buttons. Loretta lay beside him, wiping her hands on the hay, but only found that it clung to her palms.

“Do you think I was good at that?” she said.

He nodded, but inside him he discovered an awkward twinge of disappointment. Was this some kind of farewell address to childhood? It felt less than spectacular.

“Guess where I learned to do that,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“One of my teachers; he’s my boyfriend.” She waited for his response, which didn’t come. It was all he could do to get his pants buttoned in the half dark. His hands were leeched of strength, the buttons downright disobedient.

Suddenly, a small sound caused his blood to leap like a lasso, and he started up from the hay. “Relax,” Loretta hissed, “no one’s coming.”

She was right. They waited, but the only thing Henry could hear was the untaxed rhythm of her breath. There was nothing out there; even the horses were silent.

“I have to say,” Loretta said, staring at his face in the dark, “you really don’t look like you get enough sleep.”

Henry sighed. “Well, I read a lot,” he said. “I have plans.”

“Plans for what?”

Henry was silent for a moment, finding his cousin lacking in seriousness and unworthy of his private, curated thoughts, but under the spell of this new relaxation, he went on. “Nobody knows this, so you need to keep it a secret, but someday I’m going to turn Forge Run Farm into a Thor-oughbred operation.” He tried to ape the calm of an adult, but his eagerness pressed through. “All this corn farming is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a waste of this farm’s potential, a waste of this family’s legacy! Do you know how long we’ve been here? I mean, you’re in Florida now, it’s almost like you’re not part of the family anymore—”

“Hey,” Loretta said, but listlessly, and he barreled on. “This is what happens when you get complacent, when you don’t have the courage to dream big or grab the opportunities that are right before you. I mean, Tennessee Walkers? Give me a break. This is Kentucky—this land is destined for Thoroughbreds.”

“Thoroughbreds again,” Loretta sighed, and rolled her eyes.

Henry bullied her down with a rising voice. “You’re all the same! None of you know how to think big! I can’t stand the way Father’s running this place! It makes me crazy! We’re like runners in the middle of the pack. Why even compete, what’s the point? Run out front or quit.”

Loretta shrugged and rolled up to a sitting position to check the buttons on her blouse.

“Hey, where’s my headband?” she said suddenly, and turned over on her hands and knees, scouring the hay, but Henry didn’t move. He just spoke to her back.

“Everybody thinks there’s so much chance involved in horse racing, but that’s not how I see it. It’s about controlled usage of every resource. ‘Chance’ is a word ignorant men use when they don’t know how to plan and take calculated risks. Life is ten percent chance and ninety percent willpower and intelligence. Think of—”

“There it is,” Loretta said, and she returned the checkered band to her hair.

“—Signorina and Chaleureux. Their meeting on the road might have been chance, but the breeding of Signorinetta was anything but. A great breeder has to know when to seize the opportunity to get the dam’s heart.”

“Shhhhhh!” Loretta said, and she sprang suddenly up from the hay, tipped forward on her toes with her hands out to her sides in the attitude of a startled dancer.

Henry lost his thought in an instant and flung himself up, fumbling in the dark to secure his clothing. Loretta was raking wildly at her hair, all the gold straw drifting around her shoulders when the door opened.

They were confronted with a man’s embarrassed face for only a moment before they tumbled out, Henry fairly flying down the row, but Loretta stopping suddenly and saying, “Hey, you’re not Filip.”

Henry was light-blind with one foot out the barn door when he realized she wasn’t following. He said “Loretta!” hard, as if he were her father.

“Who are you?” Loretta said, gazing up with consternation into the white man’s face.

“Uh,” the man said quietly, looking anywhere but at the door the two had exited from, “I’m Robert Forester.”

“Where’s Filip?”

“Loretta!” said Henry sharply again.

“I reckon he don’t work here no more,” said the man with a shrug.

“Well, that’s odd,” said Loretta. “He’d been with this family since forever.” Baffled, she turned and walked slowly out of the barn into the now harsh light of the risen sun. She looked at Henry and said, “Why on earth would you let Filip go? He was my favorite.”

“I never could stand that nigger,” Henry said.

Now it was Loretta’s turn to rear back. “I get the feeling you can’t stand anyone! And don’t say nigger. It makes you sound like a bumpkin.”

“And you sound like a nigger lover.”

“Oh, I’m just a lover,” Loretta said airily. “I don’t even see color. I’m beyond all that.”

Henry scowled at her, and she said, “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”

Then she spotted their fathers now on the porch, still in conversation, John Henry’s back rimrod straight with his strict dignity, which never altered. Loretta grasped Henry’s elbow suddenly, so that he almost stumbled over his own shoes. She whispered, “Don’t tell about … okay?”

“You really do think I’m an idiot,” he snapped.

“Ha!” She laughed, tossing the fall of her hair over one shoulder. “I think you’re pure as the driven snow!” And she flounced on ahead of him toward the house.

“Henry Forge!”

No. He wouldn’t go. He was stacking boxes for his mother in the attic, where the family history lay organized and covered in sheets under the roof, where birds roosted as if on thin black soil, calling as his father was calling.

“Henry Forge!”

Who died and made me your slave? His insolence was a physical delight.

“Do not make me find you! Now!”

It still owned him. It. His lace-ups clapped the servants’ stairs, one after the other; they beat out the steady rhythm of John Henry. His only disobedience was his desultory pace.

His father was standing at the rear door off the kitchen, his pale blue striped sleeves rolled up over his freckled biceps, the short red hairs glinting there. By now, the hair on his head was completely gray. It always startled.

“What took you so long?” he said, turning to open the door to the backyard, where the morning was rioting in the dew and sparking off the crisp grass and the hedges. “Come along.”

As Henry descended the limestone steps off the back door, half-blinded by the acid light, his father picked up clippers and a saw from the ground. He said, “Fetch a ladder, please.”

“What for?” The words slipped off his truculent tongue before he could stop them. Even now, at the threshold of his adult life, he was just a little boy asking for answers from a man who wouldn’t answer.

But this time John Henry replied. “We’re cutting mistletoe from one of the trees. Apparently, if you want a job done correctly, you can’t hire men who are too busy rolling their own damn cigarettes to do any work. You have to do it yourself.”

By the time Henry had found the twenty-foot ladder in one of the old cabins, his father was a solitary figure in the orchard. Henry followed after him as best he could, clumsily balancing the shaky length of the ladder on two pinched palms. Before him, the wild fecundity of the orchard bloomed in the light wind that sluiced gently through the avenues of trees. The wind seemed to come directly from the sun, a perfect globe of red risen confidently out of the laden boughs. That globe commanded all the life of the garden, the many million blades of grass, the thick stalks of the trees with their secret rings, the gradations of green flourishing off the dark limbs and in their shadows, and the red, hanging apples.

John Henry stopped before one tree, about twenty deep, where the house couldn’t be seen and where the privacy was nearly primordial. He pointed upward. “Mistletoe,” he said. “Poison,” he added.

At first, Henry could detect nothing but bright fruit and limitless green punctured by the sun, but then, squinting, he discerned there, among the healthy branches, a smattering of pale seeds like tiny pearl onions or white trinkets clustered in a bush of hardy leaves. It had the look of a wildly disordered bird’s nest. The tree branch was suffering under the leaching plant, which drained its natural strength. With care, Henry positioned the ladder next to the blighted branch.

“My hope is that it can be merely clipped out. I don’t want to lose my tree, or any tree.”

“Well, one tree—” Henry began.

“I planted these two rows of trees when your brothers were born.”

It was as if the sentence had been said by someone else, so foreign was its meaning. At first, Henry simply stood there, staring stupidly as his father adjusted the clippers in his hand and set his hands on the ladder, peering upward.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Looking up at the mistletoe clump, where it encircled the branch in a draining embrace, John Henry said, “There were two children before you were born. The first died right after birth, the other died in its second month. There was a great deal of rejoicing, then a great deal of bitterness.”

Henry’s astonishment wrote red across his cheeks. There was a pained accusation in his voice when he said, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”

“Because it almost killed your mother, and it wasn’t your business,” came the reply. “So I have my reasons for preserving this orchard.” And after one deep breath, girding himself with self-assurance, John Henry placed one foot on the first rung and slowly began to climb. Henry, his outrage growing even as he held the ladder steady, blurted, “Why do you always treat me like a child?”

This time there was no reply as John Henry hesitated on the second rung, his brow furrowed and a trembling causing his khakis to shake.

It was the subtlest of movements, but Henry grabbed instinctively at his father’s strong, bunchy calf to steady him. “Are you okay?” He saw the steeling of his father’s jaw, the way he thrust his chin forward toward a rung of the ladder to gaze resolutely skyward, and he started in surprise. “Father, are you afraid of heights?”

Only a grunt as a reply. But his father seemed to inch up the ladder, rather than climb, each motion slowed by hesitation. What door had been opened on conversation was closed again, and the room of their understanding was silent.

Father, I didn’t know you were afraid of anything.

Oh oh but perhaps I did

For a moment, he wanted to say, Why don’t you let me do it, but he was spellbound by those strangely enfeebled movements his father made as he climbed and, toughened by his sense of injustice, he scraped the last bit of love off his tongue with his teeth. Presently, the gray head disappeared into the ceiling of green. Then the voice—the authority that had circumscribed his life for sixteen years—called down, “It’s too late. It’s gotten into the vasculature and the branch is stunted. Goddammit. Hand me the saw.” And the clippers dropped down with a thud to the ground.

Henry picked up the saw by its serrated teeth and, because his father had climbed so high, he ascended the first two rungs of the ladder. John Henry, watching him come, reached down with an awkward, curtailed gesture, still clinging with desperate force to a higher rung. Henry felt the ladder shake with his father’s shaking. It shook its way right past his fingertips into the muscles of his chest.

John Henry grabbed the saw and placed its teeth about two feet from the infestation.

“I hate to do it,” he said.

But of course you will, his son thought with a wintry scorn. His father began to cut away the injured limb to save the tree, draw after grating draw until it came crashing down with its mistletoe intact, bright green.

Henry watched it come down, but John Henry still gazed upward into the fragrant compass of the tree. Then he began his slow, unnerved descent, one painful rung at a time, as Henry said, quietly, “Take it slow,” as if his words were an encouragement and not a slap, and his father came, his breathing audible, the ladder trembling, until his feet were on firm ground, and he simply stood there, gripping the ladder sides, breathing like a gladiator.