The Sport of Kings (14 page)

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.

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.”