The Sport of Kings (12 page)

*   *   *

My darling boy—sleeping there just as you did as an infant—I don't expect you to understand. You are so young, and we have no shared language between us, not really. I held you in my body for nine long months, and I gave birth to you, but you don't know me at all. I'm not just your mother; I'm a woman. I'm telling you something now that I can barely stand to see myself, that I have until very recently been a little girl. Married, pregnant three times and now thirty-eight years old, but still a little girl. No matter what anyone tells you, a person is not fully mature until they can love another human being. I love you, of course, but loving a child you gave birth to is not what I'm talking about. That's effortless. What I'm talking about is the love that occurs between equals, love being something that can
only
occur between equals. I know you don't think of that man as my equal. The truth is I didn't either—he's black and he drinks too much. I can't hear the way he talks, but I can just imagine how rough and rude it is. But what you may never understand, because you are not a woman, is that the first time he kissed me, he didn't kiss me just with his mouth; he kissed me with his eyes. He looked into me. No one had ever done that before. Then I was completely and totally ashamed, but not because of the sex, which is the natural course of things. I was ashamed of the glaring inequality that existed between us. He knew something of which I was completely ignorant, and from that moment on, against every impediment, I strove to become worthy of him, to become his equal.

*   *   *

In blistering dreams, he ascends a ladder out of the brilliant sunlit present into dark, roiling cumulus clouds where the troubled faces of his mother and father recede from countenance to anachronism to chiaroscuro to nothing. There in crumbling, sooty clouds, where the rotten-flesh dead cease their prattling and rutting long enough to point upward, saying, That way, Mister Henry; up, up, step after step into the future. Now over the rumbling of heaven's rusty gears, he detects a tolling deeper than blood: the bells of ambition and desire. Up, up to the very top of the ladder. With feverish effort, he hauls up the ladder and turns it onto its side and makes it a proscenium. So, here they come, advancing along its length, a procession of horses from time immemorial through the Age of Man, only the finest specimens: the dish-faced Arabian, the mighty Clydesdale, the wild Mustang, the cutting Quarter, the stalwart Morgan, and last but not least the royal Thoroughbred, that perfect marriage of speed and strength, of cold and hot blood, of high temper and astonishing speed! This alone is the culmination of the species, of this long, long line as old as the gods, standing behind you always watching you, Henry. Always.

Henry struggled in his sheets, but he couldn't wake. Demeter has returned with gentle hands and nothing to say, touching him here and there and everywhere, hands on his face and at the crux of her legs, and when he says, I've seen something amazing, she points up at the mistletoe above her head, smiling sweetly. But when she removes her painted mask, she's nothing but that bitch Aphrodite.

Father asks, Is the good the pleasurable?

Son: Mother thinks so!

Father: Is the wife the head of the house?

Son: The low seat of the house!

Father: Who made you the man you are?

Son: The long line behind me … It.

Father: I gave you blood.

Son: And
quantitas magna frumentorum
!

Father: Why are our voices not in communion?

Son:
Ut sementem feceris, ita metes!

Henry snapped awake, drenched in sweat and realizing he had crossed some invisible line into adulthood. He knew this, because he no longer found death interesting and certainly nothing to be afraid of. Anyone could do it.

*   *   *

He was waiting for his tutor, quiet and certain as a secret in the downstairs study, sitting behind a stacked rampart of Greek and Latin volumes, his hands folded into a rock of purpose, his bleary head high. He heard the front door open, listened to a deeply polite voice greeting his mother, then sat forward as the footsteps sounded down the hall. The tutor stopped short in the doorway.

“Good morning,” the man said, surprised to discover his young charge waiting for him in a soft pool of sunlight that sparked the gold lettering on the spines of the black and burgundy volumes. Dust motes danced around the boy like a swarm of gnats.

“I'm ready to start,” said Henry Forge.

The tutor was a slim, slight man, shorter than Henry, who walked with the gentle stoop of an older person. His skin was invalid-pale, but his book-trained eyes were sharp and unsentimental; there was no indecision about him as he stepped into the room and shut the door with a gentle, firm hand.

“Well, perhaps
I'm
not ready to start,” he said with the faintest of smiles on his face. “I've only just now walked in the door and met your lovely mother.” His voice was deep and flat with no bowing at the vowels. Henry inspected him carefully, as if the precise topography of his Northern home could be discovered in the lines and angles of his face.

“You're not from here,” he said slowly.

“Apparently,” said the tutor as he took stock of the room—the lazy whir of the ceiling fan, the antique Italian desk at which Henry sat—“Kentucky suffers from a dearth of classically trained educators. But I have to say it's a lovely state you have here. Remarkably green.” The man took his time advancing across the room and easing into a chair opposite the desk, crossing his legs with a care that spoke of old injuries or some other infirmity. All the while, he observed Henry with a mild, unblinking gaze.

“Kentucky is the best state in the union.”

“Is that right?” the man countered.

“That's right.”

“Better than New Jersey even?” There was a twitch of amusement about the lips.

The joke was lost on Henry, whose eyes widened. “People risked their lives getting here to escape states like New Jersey. They banned slavery in 1804 and a lot of families moved south with their niggers to establi—”

“Negroes.” The man cocked his graying head to one side, one brow on the rise. “Negroes, I think you meant to say.”

Henry made no reply; he looked down at the man's battered leather satchel resting against the sinuous leg of his chair. “Is my work in there?”

“It is.”

Henry edged forward. “But I already had an idea of what to start with.”

The man sat back against the spines of his Windsor chair and folded his hands at his belly. “Is that right? Enlighten me.”

Henry sat up straighter. “
On Horsemanship
,” he said.

Now the brow was soaring. “I might have chosen something less … esoteric. Something more suited to the educational needs of a young man your age.”

“
On Horsemanship
would be good, I think. Did you know that evolution is a ladder to perfection? It's true. You can chart the development of the horse right up the ladder: Eohippus, the dawn horse, which was about the size of a terrier, then Mesohippus, which was about six hands high, then Merychippus, which—”

“Young man,” the tutor interrupted. “I don't think your father wants you spending valuable time on something like
On Horsemanship
.”

Henry maintained a level gaze, but his tone slipped some. “I'm sure Father would allow me to read anything, so long as I work hard. I can translate it into English, then I can translate it for you into Latin. I need the practice.”

The man recrossed his legs, smoothed the pressed creases on his gabardine pant legs, and took his time responding. “Well, it sounds to me as if you intend to work very hard.”

“I do,” said Henry. “I wouldn't want to waste my father's money.” An attempted smile of his own.

“Your father said he's been tutoring you himself in Latin thus far. That's very impressive.”

“Well, he began studying Latin when he was five. We were one of the first families to come over the Wilderness Road. We're quite wealthy.”

“Young man,” the tutor said abruptly, “you look exhausted. Do you get enough sleep?”

“Yes. I really think my father's pronunciation could be better, though.” Henry leaned forward again. “I want my education to be very heavy on the classics—not that I won't study math and science; I'll study all of it. I intend to be excellent at everything I set my mind to, but what I want most is to be heavy on the classics. I want to be a classicist. I've already memorized most of the details of classical mythology. But I'd really like to start with
On Horsemanship
.”

“All right, all right,” said the tutor, holding up a hand. “I do, of course, have a curriculum for you based on your previous schooling and tutoring. But if your heart is set on it, then I suppose we can begin with
On Horsemanship
. What is extant, at least. If that's your … inclination, I certainly don't see the harm in it. Though I'm not sure I see the value either.”

“When can we start?”

The man didn't answer immediately, but lowered his head ever so slightly, so that he gave the impression he was gazing at Henry over invisible eyeglasses. “Wouldn't you like to know my name first?”

“My name's Henry.”

“Yes, I know that. My name is Gerald Price. Of Trenton, New Jersey.”

“When do we start?”

The man shrugged with a barely audible sigh. “We begin now, I suppose.”

And so his true education began. They studied this appraisal of animals for hours and when the older man left, the student remained exactly where he had begun the day. He grammared and translated and conjugated and declined, then read well into the night in his bed by flashlight and many nights thereafter, making penciled notes in composition books and memorizing Xenophon to the word, so he would never forget that
for soundness of foot a thick horn is far better than a thin. Again, it is important to notice whether the hoofs are high both before and behind, or flat to the ground; for a high hoof keeps the “frog,” as it is called, well off the ground; whereas a low hoof treads equally with the stoutest and softest part of the foot alike, the gait resembling that of a bandy-legged man. “You may tell a good foot clearly by the ring,” says Simon happily; for the hollow hoof rings like a cymbal against the solid earth.

And the boy paid keen attention to
the assemblage of a horse's body, particularly the shoulder blades, or arms, these if thick and muscular present a stronger and handsomer appearance, just as in the case of a human being. Again, a comparatively broad chest is better alike for strength and beauty, and better adapted to carry the legs well asunder, so that they will not overlap and interfere with one another … Again, the neck should not be set on dropping forward from the chest, like a boar's, but, like that of a game-cock rather, it should shoot upwards to the crest, and be slack along the curvature; whilst the head should be bony and the jawbone small. In this way the neck will be well in front of the rider, and the eye will command what lies before the horse's feet. A horse, moreover, of this build, however spirited, will be least capable of overmastering the rider, since it is not by arching but by stretching out his neck and head that a horse endeavors to assert his power.

Henry sketched his plans, made lists and calculations. He shaped a horse out of the dark clay of his mind, and it crept forth into the light of expectation: first its destrier head, then its massive barrel chest. From the turned hooves to the cut of the knife-tip ears, its body was designed for forward motion. Bred light, but heavily motored. Flexible, intelligent, full of force and fire, towering in height—not the servant of the Moirai but their trampler—this was a horse that made good on horseness. Tough enough for war, but more beautiful than any woman and even more necessary.

Every morning the tutor greeted the madder-eyed insomniac, saying, “Tell me what you know,” and Henry stood before him, maniacal with fatigue, but inlit with consuming desire:

I know that a horse is better than corn, and that a man is better than a horse, and that a boy is better than a man, because he has not become his father yet.

Tell me what you know
.

That this farm is just a sleight of land—a play at restraint! But the joke is on John Henry, not Jacob Ellison or Moses Cooper or William Iver or Richmond Cooper or Edward—

Tell me what you know.

That I am a Kentuckian first, a Virginian second, a Christian third. I am the refinement of Samuel's seed. I am a man made for my time, not my father's or his father's. I know that a city untended weakens and falls. Troy will fall, Rome will fall, any great city will fall without a show of strength.

Tell me
—

I know that when the Liberators killed Caesar, they stabbed him right through the heart.

*   *   *

A tall and beautiful Henry had just turned sixteen when his cousins made their yearly weeklong visit. They traversed the shimmering Florida byways in the late summer heat, and when they finally stumbled from their Chevrolet onto the Forge lawn, they were sweating like miniature prizefighters, throwing themselves into Lavinia's waiting arms. John Henry was cordial at her side, but their increasingly distracted son was nowhere to be seen. Henry had bicycled into Paris, his Saturday habit now, to pore over books in the public library. There he studied the principles of legacy. He spread out his books of pedigree charts, breeding formulas, family trees that branched crookedly back to the Godolphin Arabian, the Darley Arabian, Byerley Turk. Once he carefully ripped a page from an old encyclopedia, so that he could bring home the Turk, all greyhound head and legs like rose stems. The picture hid gamely under his mattress, waiting for the time when it would finally centerpiece a wall—when Henry was eighteen and matriculated at Sewanee alongside the sons of the South.