The Sport of Kings

 

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A Note About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

—
CHARLES DARWIN
,
On the Origin of Species

 

1

THE STRANGE FAMILY OF THINGS

Your spirit will spread little by little through the whole great body of empire, joining all things in the shape of your likeness.

—
SENECA

“Henry Forge, Henry Forge!”

How far away from your father can you run? The boy disappeared into the corn, the green blades whisking and whispering as he raced down each canopied lane. The stalks snagged him once, twice, and he cried out like a wounded bird, grasping his elbow, but he didn't fall. Once, he'd seen a boy break his arm in the schoolyard; there had been a boughlike crack of the thick bone snapping and when the boy stood, his arm hung askew with the bone protruding like a split ash kitchen spoon—

“Henry Forge, Henry Forge!”

Number one, I am Henry Forge.

His father's voice echoed across the warped table of the earth,
domine deus omnipotens, dictator perpetuo, vivat rex, Amen!
The thick husks strained their ears toward the sound, but the boy was tearing across the tillable soil, soil that had raised corn for generations and once upon a time cattle with their stupid grazing and their manure stench. He was sick to death of cattle and he was only nine.

Number two, curro, currere, cucurri, cursus. I am forever running.

Silly child, he couldn't know that the plants announced him, the flaxen roof of the corn dancing and shaking as he passed, then settling back to coy stillness, or that his father was not in pursuit, but stood watching this foolish passage from the porch. On the second story, a window whined and a blonde voiceless head protruded with a pale, strangely transmissive hand making gestures for John Henry, John Henry. It pounded the sill twice. But the man just remained where he was, eyes to his son's headlong retreat.

The young boy was slowing now in the counterfeit safety of distance. He boxed the corn, some daring to feint and return, some breaking at the stalk. He didn't care; his mind refused to flow on to some future time when redress might be expected or demanded. There was fun in the flight, fun borrowed against a future that seemed impossible now. He had nearly forgotten the bull.

Number three, Gentlemen of the jury, I am not guilty!

The corn spat him out. His face scraped by the gauntlet, he clutched handfuls of husk and stood hauling air with his hair startled away from his forehead. Here the old land is the old language: The remnants of the county fall away in declining slopes and swales from their property line. The neighbor's tobacco plants extend as far as the boy can see, so that impossibly varying shades of green seem to comprise the known world, the undulating earth an expanse of green sea dotted only by black-ship tobacco barns, a green so penetrating, it promises a cool, fertile core a mile beneath his feet. In the distance, the fields incline again, slowly rippling upward, a grassed blanket shaken to an uncultivated sky. A line of trees traces the swells on that distant side, forming a dark fence between two farms. The farmhouse roofs are black as ink with their fronts obscured by evergreens, so the world is black and green and black and green without interruption, just filibustering earth. The boy knows the far side of that distant horizon is more of the bright billowing same, just as he knows they had once owned all of this land and more when they came through the Gap and staked a claim, and if they were not the first family, they were close. They were Kentuckians first and Virginians second and Christians third and the whole thing was sterling, his father said. The whole goddamn enterprise.

Number four, Primogeniture is a boy's best friend.

He heard the whickering of a horse around the wall of the corn and sprang to the fence that separated Forge land from the first tobacco field belonging to the Osbournes. He scrambled over the roughcut rails. Casting back over his shoulder, he saw the proud bay head of a Walker turning the corner and darted to the first plants risen waist-high and crawled between two, prostrating himself on the damp, turned bed. His face pressed against the soil, which was neither red nor brown like bole when it stained his tattered cheek with war paint.

The horse and the man rounded the corner. The Walker was easy and smooth, head and neck supremely erect, its large eyes placid as moons with the inborn calm of its breed. It scanned its surroundings out of habit, slowing its pretty pace near the fence, then prancing alongside the timbers. A high tail jetted up like a fountain from a nicked dock, then streamed down overlaid pasterns almost to the ground. The tail trembled and betrayed the faintly nervous blood that coursed through the greater quiet of the horse.

“Hmmmm,” said its rider, loud enough for the boy to hear in his low, leafy bower. Filip.

Number five, This race was once a species of property. It says so in the ledgers.

The man sat as erect as the horse, his back pin-straight as if each vertebra were soldered to the next. One hand grasped the reins, one rested easy on his thigh. A bright unturned leaf obstructed the features of his face, but the boy could see the high polish of the head under dark and tight-kinked hairs. That head was turning side to side atop a rigid back.

“Aw,” said the man suddenly, then reined left, and with one dancing preparatory pace, the horse took the fence with heavy grace, and the startled boy breached the plants like a pale fish, diving deeper into the tobacco field. The horse didn't follow, but paused at the lip of the field, dancing sideways, her ears perked for her rider's voice.

“Mister Henry,” said Filip.

Henry scrambled away on his hands and knees.

“Martha White can catch you,” Filip said. “Think she won't?” He waited, then, “I'll catch you on my own two feet. Think I won't?”

Henry could no longer tell where he was in the endless tobacco. He curled around the base of a plant and yelled, “I didn't do it!”

“Oh, I know you ain't killed that bull!” Filip hollered back.

“I swear!”

“I know it, you know it. Some other fool done it,” said Filip. “Now get out of them plants.”

“No!”

“Come on now…”

Henry rose on unsteady feet, looking like a refugee wader in the sea. “Father's angry at me.”

The man shrugged a stiff shoulder. “Set him straight. The reasonable listen to reason.”

“He didn't send you after me?”

“Nah,” said Filip. “I seen you light out like a fox on the run, and I made after you.”

The boy bit his lip, fiddling with the last tailings of his reserve, then picked his way through the plants to the edge of the field. Filip stared down over the sharp rails of his cheekbones, but did not incline his head as he reached down his large hand, fingers unfurling. White calluses stood out on his skin like boils.

“Where will we go?” said the boy, all suspicion and still calculating the odds of the gamble.

“Where you want to go to?” the man said.

“Clark County,” Henry said, the first place that came to mind.

“That right?” Filip said, and a dry laugh scraped out of his burleyed throat. The boy could not make out the meaning of that laugh.

“Step up,” he said, and Henry did.

Number six, If you live, you gamble. A necessary evil.

Swung up by Filip's strength and his own leap, he scrambled his way onto the man's lap, straddling the withers. The short, wide neck of the horse shuddered and trembled under him like a dreaming dog. From where he sat, he could see straight down over her black cob and nose to her broad velvetine nostrils.

“Let's go,” he said.

“Not yet. I'm going to roll me a cigarette first. Hold this,” said Filip, who drew a foil packet out of the breast pocket of his plaid shirt. “Huh, I ain't got no papers,” Filip said, patting his pocket. “Want to ride to the store with me?”

“Sure,” Henry said, pressing tiny drops of blood from his knees into the bay's neck. He painted them in with one finger and they disappeared into the body of the horse, which was red as deep as wine.

Filip gathered the reins, and Martha White backstepped and squared the fence.

“Up on her now,” said Filip, and when the horse sprang from its quarters, the boy clutched up high on her neck in alarm as the man inclined toward the boy's back, and they sailed the fence.

“Don't take me by the house!” cried Henry.

Filip reined hard to the left, and the mare switched back, so they followed a faint trace around the far side of the cornfield along the grassy farrow that separated the plants from the fencing. Henry could just see over the tops of the corn, which reached to his own chest and over the bobbing head of the horse. The tufted tops were plumed and entirely still save for one roaming breeze that grazed the surface like an invisible hand, meandering down from the house to the tobacco basin behind them. To their left ran the zigzagging split rail fence and in its shadow, the remnants of its predecessor. Built seventy years before, the fence had rotted down until it was subsumed by grass and soil. Now it showed only a faint sidewinding mound behind the younger fence.