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

John Henry turned his flushed face to the side and said, “What we talked about today, don’t mention it to your mother. She never wanted you to know.”

“Yes, sir.” The polite words were alloyed by a stingy metal in his voice. John Henry turned fully and looked into the ever-increasing mystery of his son’s face, as if to determine whether this was sarcasm or straight, and the indecision in those aging eyes was a tiny glory to behold. He said, “Leave the ladder, and drag that branch back to the yard, where it can be chopped.”

Would his insolence get off so easy? He had only moved ten feet, when John Henry intoned three words: “And young man.” When Henry glanced back over his shoulder, John Henry’s right hand, that clamp, wrench, hold, vise, that old beater, was pointing at him: “I’ve been watching you.”

A depth charge shook the boy, and the whole of his sexual misdeeds were laid out in that moment, as if his father had been there in the tack room as Loretta had sucked on his tongue and worked her salivaed hand between his legs until he shuddered wretchedly and gasped, and instantly, in his father’s presence, before he said anything else, Henry’s mind was on fire with shame.

John Henry stared directly into his son’s guilty eyes. “Don’t chase after just any bitch in heat.”

“No, sir.” His mouth was sandy.

“You’re better than that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t believe I need to waste any more breath on this conversation.”

“No, sir.”

“Manage yourself.”

Henry stared down at the ground, conquered.

“Or I will manage you.”

John Henry: Son, what is desire in a strong man? Do you remember what I told you?

Henry: Desire is a draft horse, harnessed by tradition, working in service of the line.

John Henry: And desire in a weak man?

Henry: A Thoroughbred, wild and dangerous.

John Henry: And eros?

Henry: A blindfolded youth.

John Henry: Which results in mania.

Henry: Yes, but

Oh, Father, you hypocrite! Enfeebled and blind! Your Argument from Authority fails! Choke to death on your words—Mania transforms! It makes the cuckold the lover again, it makes the blind man see, it ripens the fruits that reason can only plant! Madness lays waste to shame! Even Socrates hid his face over his stupid speeches! Hide your own!

Paulette carried trays piled with pineapple-glazed ham with mint garnish, corn pudding, and dusky dinner rolls; chardonnay for the adults, virgin mint juleps for the children. But Henry’s silver cup sat sweaty and untouched, finely engraved with its curlicued F. Lonely Lavinia tried to catch his eye, and Loretta grinned her grin full of secrets, but Henry had eyes only for his father: how his straight spine formed the axis of the room, around which the entire earth revolved. How, once again, the men inclined their heads toward each other, speaking in a fraternal enclosure that excluded the bustling table of children, which unjustly included Henry. But he wasn’t cowed. His shoulders were as square as his jaw. He had grown to his full six feet one this summer and could look Uncle Mason in the eye. He was strong as new rope.

John Henry said, “We’ve rarely seen a worse drought, but I have faith it will rain soon.”

“We’re feeling the effects as far south as Florida,” said Uncle Mason. “I don’t believe it’s rained in twenty-seven days now.”

“Is that right?”

“But you’re worse off, to be sure. Much worse.”

“There has been some talk of families leaving the area,” said his father, but then he shrugged. “Many of these men have mishandled their black years, so my sympathies are limited to say the least.”

“Well, I’d hate to see that,” said Uncle Mason. “When an uneducated man leaves the only thing he knows—”

“There are lateral moves to be made into manufacturing. Not to mention there’s security in the factories that these farmers can only dream of,” said John Henry.

Loretta glanced up suddenly from her food. “They should move to Florida if they need work,” she said. “There’s a lot of work there, isn’t that right, Daddy? I always see men standing on the side of the road when I go to school.”

John Henry stared at her, blinking, and her mother hissed, “Loretta.”

“What?” she said, swiveling toward her with a blank look. “It’s true.”

Uncle Mason cleared his throat and glanced at his brother. “Well, Kentucky’s always been a corn deficit state. Are they bringing down surplus from Ohio?”

John Henry shook his head. “Even Ohio is baling corn this summer.”

“It’s like when we were kids all over again.”

“Yes,” John Henry said, and now he eyed the table round, his look a warning, as if they all should remember, though no one else could, except Lavinia, who watched him and nodded, sensing a strange energy in the room, but unable to parse it.

“Well, you have to wonder how many of these family farms can hang on,” said Uncle Mason. “What did Grandfather always say? All you need is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife? It’s not enough these days, apparently. Still, it’s a sorry sight to watch farms go under.”

“Well,” said Loretta brightly, “when Henry’s raising horses here you won’t have to worry about any of that ever again.” She grinned at them all, but the table plummeted into silence around her; then something stilled in her eyes, her broad smile contracting slowly to a line of poised alertness. She glanced at Henry, but he was not looking at her; he simply took another bite of ham as if by continuing to eat, as if by pretending he hadn’t heard, he could distend time and stave off what was to come.

“What did you say, young lady?” said John Henry. His voice was stony and low. Loretta looked at him, eyes wide, but said nothing at all into the raw, charged quiet of the table.

Then John Henry brought his utensils down to the tabletop, one in each hand, and it caused the table to rejolt with a crack like a branch breaking. “What did you say, young lady?” His voice was rising to a roar, and Loretta visibly started and cowered back into her chair, instinctively scooting against her mother. Mason laid a steadying hand on his brother’s upper arm, but that arm sprang loose from its cocked reserve, pointed out across the table at Henry, that hand the detonation, so the voice that followed was only a report. “I haven’t sacrificed everything so you could waste your goddamned life! I haven’t raised you to be an idiot!”

What other words were flung across the table at Henry he could not later reconstruct, not in their entirety. He simply rose up from the table with a strangely disembodied calm on his strong, new face, a face built for the future. Lavinia whipped around in her seat, reaching for him, but she was too late.

“Don’t you dare leave my goddamn presence, boy! Not without my permission!”

But Henry did just that, passing out of the dining room, walking faster and faster until he was almost jogging, leaving the assembled family with their mouths gaping and John Henry storming up from his chair, so that he knocked the table, causing the china to dance violently and the younger girls to cry. Loretta had already fled into the kitchen when, freeing herself from a tangle of chair legs and crying girls, Lavinia chased after John Henry as he stalked to the front hall. When she grabbed at his shirtsleeve, he lashed out blindly behind himself, striking the fine flesh of her cheek with his Sewanee class ring, so that she was bleeding even before she sat down hard on her bottom on the polished floor.

Henry, who was just rounding the foot of the staircase, saw his mother fall, and he screamed out to his approaching father, “I hate you!”

“Get back down here,” John Henry warned, not running, but also losing no ground as he followed his son, who was skipping stairs now in his haste to reach the second floor.

“Get back down here,” he barked again, trying to rein in his voice, but there was weakness in the repetition, and he seemed to sense it, because now he cried full-throated, “Look at me when I speak to you, goddammit!”

Henry whirled at the top of the stairs, sixteen years of fury wrenching the contours of his face. His lips rode back from his teeth like an animal’s as he pointed down accusation at his father.

“You’re a fucking tyrant!” he screamed.

“And you’re behaving like a fool, Henry. Control yourself.” The words came low and rumbling.

“You’re nothing but a coward!”

His father shook as he raised a meaty hand and pointed up at his son; even his jowls shook. “You’re embarrassing yourself in front of your entire family.”

“No, I’m just embarrassing you!” Henry cried. “There’s a difference!” He was stringing his arrows, now setting the bow. “You’ve always been afraid of ever trying to be truly great! No war medals, right, Father? Maybe the General Assembly, but never the governorship! And, oh, don’t touch the farm! Nothing you could ever fail miserably at! You weren’t even enough for your own wife!”

For a moment, all rage slacked, and his father looked at him as though at a stranger. “I made you to break my heart?” he said.

Henry spread his arms like wings. “Whether you like it or not, this land will be a horse farm.”

“I would sooner you die,” came the leaden reply from the foot of the stairs.

“But I’m not going to die,” Henry said, gasping for breath. “You are.”

John Henry’s face grew apoplectic. “Then I will not die!” he screamed, and the house shook.

But he did die. He collapsed from a massive stroke in the spring of 1965, and Henry immediately returned home from his graduate studies and let the fields go fallow, then reseeded with fescue and clover in the fall. The next year he bought his first horse at a claiming race in Florida, a mare called Hellbent. She was a spirited horse, fast, and almost perfectly formed. She would become his taproot mare.

INTERLUDE I

The following colors are recognized by the Jockey Club:

BAY: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a yellow-tan to a bright auburn. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.

BLACK: The entire coat of the horse is black, including the muzzle, the flanks, the mane, tail and legs, unless white markings are present.

CHESTNUT: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a red-yellow to a golden-yellow. The mane, tail and legs are usually variations of the coat color, unless white markings are present.

DARK BAY/BROWN: The entire coat of the horse will vary from a brown, with areas of tan on the shoulders, head and flanks, to a dark brown, with tan areas seen only in the flanks and/or muzzle. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.

GRAY/ROAN: The Jockey Club has combined these colors into one color category. This does not change the individual definitions of the colors for gray and roan and in no way impacts the two-coat color inheritance principle as stated in Rule 1(E).

GRAY: The majority of the coat of the horse is a mixture of black and white hairs. The mane, tail and legs may be either black or gray, unless white markings are present.

ROAN: The majority of the coat of the horse is a mixture of red and white hairs or brown and white hairs. The mane, tail and legs may be black, chestnut or roan, unless white markings are present.

PALOMINO: The entire coat of the horse is golden-yellow, unless white markings are present. The mane and tail are usually flaxen.

WHITE: The entire coat, including the mane, tail and legs, is predominantly white.

—Jockey Club Registry

The master of color is the gene. The gene is found inside the cell on the chromosome, coiled material formed in arkan pairs, a chain provided by each parent with the allele a blind toss from dam and sire to foal. Genes, like many tyrants, are small but manifest in a multiplicity of forms. Allele pairs dictate the genotype, which, due to the vagaries of expression, may or may not correlate precisely to phenotype: black, brown, bay, dun, grullo, buckskin, chestnut/sorrel, red dun, palomino, silver dapple, cremello, which subdivide to reflect allelic combinations of jet and raven and summer black; or dark and light and seal browns; slate, lobo, olive, smutty, or silver grullos, and so on; also the white markings, which increase upon the infinite with roans, or the gray of age, or rabicano, frosty, paint, or tobiano; this is to say nothing of the effects of dappling, foal transition, seasonal change, & Etc.

Nature manipulates her colors—or color happens, insofar as the gene has no Mind to mind the gene—either as alleles occupy loci in homozygous and heterozygous pairs, or through the wily machinations of epistasis, where brute dominance shoulders its autocratic way through the old bloodlines, while recessives wait in genetic shadow, eyeing the dominant pairs and biding their time until, in tandem, the recessives in a surprise move—

No, perhaps it’s better to render genetics a descriptive but meaningless math as it concerns the hard colors, these colors being chestnut, black, and bay:

ee

EE or Ee

&

EEAA, EEAa, EeAA, or EeAa

But math won’t satisfy. Why do we always want the story? A dominant allele storms the House of Agouti and seizes half its resources, producing a bay horse, AA or Aa. Most recessive combatants will ultimately join forces with the house to produce the expected black EE or Ee, but sometimes a chestnut, ee, emerges victorious from the House of Extension, outmaneuvering the blacks and dominant bays of Agouti.

One would imagine that mastering the houses—Agouti, Extension, Dun, Silver Dapple, Champagne, and their meddling servants Pangare, Sooty, Shade, Flaxen, Brindle—would allow for the rational construction of color, including the dilutes that form from the hard, fundamental colors. But then there is white. White is less a color than a superimposition. It is a pigmentless pattern, a roan or gray intrusion upon all the hard colors and their various configurations. A white is the only horse without pigment, though even the white horse has dark eyes, WhW. White serves to mask color, though color lives forever in the genes. Therefore, a white horse—or what seems a white horse—is capable of great reproductive surprises.

Ultimately you may breed for color just as you may breed for conformation, speed, strength, & Etc, but the organism itself exerts no will to form. The natural dispersal of color is neither random nor intentional. Which is all to say that there may be tyrants with no ambition for power.

2

THE SPIRIT OF LESSER ANIMALS

On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together.

—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species

There was a culling of resources: which represents tolerance of risk, a form of courtship display, i.e., the organism’s ability to assert itself in the war of sexual selection. So, the detritus of the old plantation was sold away: the slump-shouldered plow, a corn planter with its four ugly teeth, jointers and froes and poleaxes and chisels and a thousand antiques lined out for appraisal and bidding on the side lawn, all sold to strangers on Valentine’s Day 1966. Even the old Tennessee Walkers were auctioned off, but purchased by the Millers, so the six were led in a head-hanging line down the drive like bewildered cow ponies off to their first cattle drive, while Henry stood on the el porch, bourbon in hand, watching without regret. At this point both of your grandparents have died.

There followed a reorientation of remaining resources: Stallion paddocks were arranged in two-acre units near the house with a yearling barn erected some way behind a stallion barn. The old whipping post was not uprooted in the redesign of the farm, but left to stand perversely in the path of an emerging thicket windbreak, so the evergreen bushes grew up around it like a rose around its thorn. The Osbournes’ land was purchased when they went bankrupt in the summer of 1968, so the old land of the silt bowl, which had once been Forge property before being sold in William Iver’s generation, was Henry’s and yours once again, and it came with a broodmare band and a foaling barn only thirteen years old and the assurance of hardy grass over limestone; also a sweet-tasting Stoner Creek streamlet that pooled in the bowl, glimmering there like gray ice on cloudy days.

Another note on display: Your father paints the plank fences wedding-dress white instead of black, an unnecessary expense. However, in the wild, male suitors often develop brightly colored, highly ornamented tails or wings that display genetic excess, which is to say wild tolerance of risk (see above), in order to secure a suitable mate and reproductive success. The female, frequently the choosier of the species, selects. Note how in this schema, the male and female are merely avenues to reproduction, dispensable agents of futurity.

A note on the 1 percent: The human is an organism defined by its 1 percent genetic difference from the chimp, which involves improved hearing, protein digestion, sophisticated speech, and all the other necessary conditions of humanity, not least of which is hope: in this case a horse. Hellbent is well balanced with a head neither too large nor too small, situated nicely on her neck over a slim swell of belly; driven by quarters that are strong but not stocky; legs set neither forward nor back but perfectly straight; unimpressive in her first races, but intriguing on paper; a gamble, your father’s roughcut gem, a daughter of Bold Ruler, showing some of his high temperament and nerve, if not his power at the mile and beyond.

But there follows disappointment: dejection at the frustration of design. During Hellbent’s life the broodmare band was expanded then culled, stallions were purchased and sold, mares crossed out and inbred, but there never came a horse that made the farm, or made your father. Hellbent herself became a solid producer of horses, including stakes winners, though a few broke down, overextended in distance by overeager trainers, and one died of colic in the pasture, its guts twisted like engorged ropes, striking its head against the ground in vain attempts to rise, so it had beaten itself to death before the vet could arrive.

Disappointment is compounded by perfection: Henry sees Secretariat, the big red colt by Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, at the 1972 Laurel Futurity, then again at next year’s Belmont, where the chestnut springs from the inside and establishes a lead along the backstretch against his rival Sham and ahead of Twice a Prince and My Gallant, firing out the first three quarters in 1:09⅘, at which point Sham begins to fall away under the scorching pace—Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine, Secretariat by twelve, Secretariat by fourteen lengths—with Turcotte wild-eyed and asking for nothing and the grandstand rising with an oceanic roar around Henry, who stands transfixed as Secretariat takes the only purse of real value, greatness, charging under the wire thirty-one lengths ahead of Sham in 2:24, a record that stands even today.

But your father procured a mate that fateful day in Saratoga: a woman thin as a pin with a glassy blonde bob and lips painted burgundy, displaying near-perfect conformation with only minor defects: pigeon-toed with a hard voice; but also restlessness, the quality of perpetual dissatisfaction, a state which represents a subtle but very real threat to young prior to the age of separation; see Bowlby’s work on maternal deprivation, also Ainsworth, Winnicott, & Etc. You call this woman Mother. She is one-half responsible for your corporeal organization, your particular form of accumulated inheritance. Together with your father, she is a conduit of the great law, the Unity of Type.

And so you were born: into the Conditions of Existence. Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.

The Quarter is a cutting horse and the Morgan is a generalist. The Kentucky Saddle is a smooth ride, the Connemara a great jumper, the Mustang an independent. The Mongolian is an ancient primitive and the toady Exmoor is exceedingly rare. The Akhal-Teke has endurance, and the Belgian Draft the strength of ten. But only the Thoroughbred can claim to be the fastest horse in the world—and here it was resident in their lush spring fields, bathing in the sunlight, calling antiphonally over Henrietta’s head as she spent herself each and every day on her father’s holdings, his very earth.

Her eyes were always open.

She saw wheat rounds as they rolled off the tongue of the baler.

Doves lined into the air when a cat came and parted the grasses.

Clouds were piled and red-tipped like a sunshot mountain range inverted.

The faces of the tall horses were riddles.

Perhaps her parents could discover their meaning? Her father was not in the stallion barn, not in the orchard, so she ran in search of her mother and found Judith in the master bedroom, reclining against a landslide of silken pillows, magazines fanned around her, speaking urgently under her breath on the phone to one of her sisters. With her pale skin and blonde hair, she almost disappeared into the sheets the way fences vanish into snow in the wintertime.

Henrietta barnstormed the room, her arms wide. “Mother, I want to know why—”

Judith shrank into her pillow, covered the receiver with one palm, and said, “Jesus, Henrietta. A little warning next time.”

“I want to know—”

“Hold on,” her mother said into the phone, struggling to sit up straight and pressing the receiver between her breasts. She gathered herself, arranging her good-night smile, cheer like bright paint over irritation. Then she leaned over, offering her cheek. “Henrietta, you know I don’t like it when you yell indoors. Now kiss me good night. Did you say good night to the horses?”

Henrietta sighed, her question abandoned. “Yes,” she said very simply, leaning over the magazines, crumpling their glossy pages as she kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Good girl,” said Judith, clearing her throat. “Now go to bed, and your father will be in shortly to tell you a story. Go on.”

“Okay.”

But when Henrietta straightened up from the bed, her mother said very suddenly, “Henrietta, wait—tell me, did you have a good day?”

“Yes.”

“And did you have fun?”

Henrietta shrugged. “Yes.”

Then, Judith’s crystalline blue eyes narrowed. “But—are you happy?”

Henrietta laughed the evergreen laugh of the very young; of course she was happy. It was the natural state of childhood.

“Well, good night.”

She was almost through the door when a hard, desponding voice halted her one more time. “But you would tell me if you were unhappy, right?”

Impatiently: “Yes, Mother.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” Then only a dark, empty space remained where the child had stood. Sighing so loudly that Henrietta heard it on the threshold of her own room, Judith said, “Yes, I’m still here.”

This is your story, Henrietta. It was 1783, during the waning heat of the Revolutionary War. Thousands of soldiers had already died on the field, or were injured in their drive to beat back the British. Your great-great-greatest-grandfather was one of those injured at Yorktown, and he received a bounty land warrant offering him surveyable acreage west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This whole area was part of Virginia at the time, and that’s why we are Kentuckians first and Virginians second and Christians third. Well, Samuel Forge was more than eager to go. The state of his birth was too populous and too loud, and he was saddled with a pioneer’s roving mind, which demands space. So Samuel set out west and brought with him a slave, who was smart with black magic and a very fine cook, and together they traversed the mountains. But those mountains were dark and forbidding. The two of them followed the old buffalo blaze and battled mightily against the elements, wary of Shawnee to the north and Cherokee to the south, because in those days a scalp was very valuable. The way was rough and full of dangers, but Samuel persevered. When they finally reached the Gap, they discovered a cave, an opening right there in the sheer wall of rock. Now his slave had a special feeling about this cave and wanted to explore it, but first they needed protection from the gods, so they sacrificed four bulls that they found wandering around in the open land around the Gap, and then his slave led the way down into the dark. This was a cave that led to the underworld. They wandered in the dark past Dread and Hunger and Want and Sleep and Toil and War and Discord, who had wild, long, horrible hair and was the worst thing Samuel Forge had ever seen, and they walked past the Tree of Dreams, but it didn’t catch any of Samuel’s dreams. He was too slippery and his dreams too big to be caught. Down, down, down they went until they came to the milling crowds of the unhappy dead that gathered on the bank of a river as wide and muddy as the Ohio. A boatman rowed them across the river, and they walked onto the fields of heaven, and all the noble dead were alive like gods. They crowded around him with stories on their tongues, but Samuel Forge had come to look for only one man—his father, Andrew Cooper Forge, who had died back in Virginia and never again seen his son once he’d set out to make his own way in the world. Samuel wanted his forgiveness for past wrongs, and he did indeed discover him there on the green underground fields of heaven. The old man was making a census of all his descendants, and had in trust all their futures and their fates, everything they would be and everything they would do, all the Forges, who in their time would march out of the cave into the bright daylight on the Kentucky side of the Gap. He was gathering his numbers, and I was there and you were there, even though we hadn’t come to be yet—