The Sport of Kings (21 page)

On many days, she shadowed her father on the grounds as he consulted with Barlow, called his bloodstock agent, his lawyers, read the
Racing Form
, and made his travel plans around the racing season. He sent her off with one of the female grooms, who taught her the duties of the broodmare barn, how to muck the stalls and change hay, how to lave the horses and pick their hooves, to detect when the mares turned temperamental in estrus. Henrietta often accompanied Henry to Keeneland to watch Forge horses in their early-morning workouts, the animals wheeling in and out of the cool mist, their breath blooming. The pair made an odd couple of railbirds: the man tall, thin, and talkative, the girl tall, thin, and quiet, both sipping coffee from paper cups. The girl held a silver stopwatch in her free hand and soon knew the horses by their gaits, the track speed by the report of hooves, the trainers by their curses, the jocks by the curve of their spines as they bowed over their mounts, and a year passed.

She took thrice-weekly riding lessons on the other side of Paris; this was something her father demanded. The other girls arrived with their hair scraped back into neat tails, their high boots shined to a gloss. Henrietta's boots were caked with old, dry manure the color of mastic. She was deeply tan to the others' schoolkept pallor. She lasted there only four months, by then a rider equal to her instructor, a seeming natural with no fear of the animal, but no discernible love either. She rode as though she were walking, the horse like the ground beneath her feet, and another year passed.

Only Henrietta's nights were her own. During these hours, while lying in bed perusing the old books, she discovered the ultimate luxury, which was solitude. She tried her best to like the poetry that her father admired, but the Greeks bored her, and, besides, that was all part of her morning lessons. She tried the poems from an anthology she found and liked some, especially those that made no claims, strove for nothing but the revelation of a small, beautiful thing—a vase or a blackbird. But she read no novels, finding them a waste of time. She resisted how they worked on her, asking her to suffer on someone's behalf. If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn't speak with the limited tongue of sense. Her father taught her that.

What roused her to an almost pained interest, what caused her to copy down long passages into her notebooks and stay awake into the night, her mind running like a stallion on a track, was the mystery of the earth's composition and all of its inhabitants. She devoured the books that had belonged to her great-great-
in-aeternum
-grandfathers—atlas volumes, topographical maps, weathered pamphlets from the Geological Survey, the tomes of Lamarck and Darwin and Lyell; also physiographic diagrams, strata illustrations, and expedition records, which together told the brute story of geology, how it grew continents and plant populations, gave them life and dug their graves. She slowly discerned that Kentucky was a strange and abundant place, half-mad with a restless and protean geology, secreted away under a cloak of limestone and swaying seas of timothy and bluegrass. She came to believe that the earth longed to be known. So she pressed one ear to the lip of its mouth, listening to tales that babbled up from its karsty throat, from jagged fissures in the sandstone hills, gurgling streambeds and salt licks. She learned how the primordial state had formed itself from the mystery of swirling sedimentary detritus under Paleozoic seas: sandstone out of inky silt and sand; clay and black shale from viscous mud that settled like a pitch lime on the Devonian beds before millennial tides rolled back and forth; also layers of friable igneous rock, bits of charred matter that traveled from the hot center of the earth; gravel and nameless shards scrabbled together into conglomerates; delicate, fluted shells forming sleek, packed limestone that made up the thickest strata, four hundred million years old and counting. Casket-gray and underscoring half the state, the preterite limestone founded the old Mississippian plateau with their faulted escarpments and the steep barrowing knobs, which Samuel Forge had spied as he stood with Ben at the verge of what would be Madison County, surveying the thin soils of the Outer Bluegrass, which was itself cinched tight by a belt of Eden Shale. It was in the core of the Bluegrass that limestone, sandstone, dolomite, and shale were pressed together like the layers of an earthen cake, until a massive upwarping formed the Cincinnati Arch, where the young, thin stones were soon eroded by ferocious winds, and the limestone found itself naked before the elements, runnelled and pocked by water until it had transformed itself into karst, a tumulous landscape of sinking streams, sinkholes, caves, and soil so wildly fecund that men lost their religion for a share. It was a rolling dreamscape, a heaven for the raising of crops and horses—better than the modest farmland of the Pennyroyal plains, the coalfields, and Western embayment, which sloped down to the alluvial foreshores of the Mississippi River.

In the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest mountains on earth, a different tale was told. There, organic matter had compressed into bituminous coal. Five hundred million years before Henrietta was born, those mountains extended all the way down into the extraterrestrial deserts of West Texas, pressed into being by the clashing of two young continents, which closed the Iapetus Ocean—an ocean so old it gave birth to the Atlantic—thrusting the abyssal plains and all their doomed marine life into the air like an offering for the gods. As the mountains rose and heaved and eroded, generations of saplings tumbled into the swamps, and hairy grasses too, seed coats, stamens, involute gondola leaves, chips of bark, white and chocolate roots, mosses mixed with stringy vines, hardy stamens, and even the gentle, primordial flower beds in the height of their flowerage fell too soon like the mayflies, dropping their leaves and tumbling into the self-heating morass, which, under the slurried sediment of Mesozoic seas, turned all the fallen vegetal world to rich, flammable peat. But the peat was covered and itself compressed and, with a mountain atop it, vanquishing its air, was tamped and starved into coal, thin, glossy, striate seams of carbon between dingy Pennsylvanian stones, thin, dark pages in a long, long book—

You can close a book, which she did. But then she would just lie there charged, apprehensive, electric, confused. She knew that men extracted coal and sometimes died in the mining. She wondered at their deaths. Was it childish to ask why? How many mountains had been uprooted to light a home like hers? And all the churches dotting the state? Fathers felled the world their children were supposed to live in, Tantalus eternally slaughtering his Pelops. Was it worth it? Was this farm worth it? Was the human nothing but a machine that extracted coal from the hills and horses from the fields? Civilization stood at the ready with its answers, but she bypassed those answers for a deeper, stranger question: What was the earth itself? This teeming, generative thing, which forced human life in a hothouse, only to turn that life like compost back into the soil. She was thirteen, but geological time was 4.6 billion years old. She had just gotten her period, only to discover there was nothing fixed in the geographical world. Even the poles moved. She discovered in her a deep, deep dread, but it wasn't like a horse, you couldn't just assign it a name. You had to discover its name. She suffered from the realization that others had been asking these questions long, long before her, but to no avail. The old books all agree: God is a terror.

*   *   *

On Valentine's Day when she was thirteen, Henrietta saw her first mare bred.

That morning, Henry had called over to Claiborne and spoken with a manager. He said, “My mare is due to be covered on Thursday.”

“Yes, sir, we've got Hellcat on the books, and Big Red's in good form.”

“I'd like to be there.”

“You're welcome to bring her up, but—”

“I'd like to be in the shed.”

There was a polite and cursory silence on the line. “Mr. Forge, all due respect, we don't permit owners in the breeding shed for safety reasons. I'm sure you understand. But everything will be videotaped, and you've got her insured to the hilt. You know we've got your interests in mind at all times.”

“Regardless, I'd like to be there, and I'd like to bring my daughter, who's—”

“You— What? Your daughter?”

“My daughter is involved in our operation and I'd like—”

The curt laugh severed his sentence, followed by two words: “Mr. Forge.”

“If I can speak with Mr. Hancock, then—”

“Now, Mr. Forge.” The voice was louder, parental. “If you want to chat with Mr. Hancock, that's fine. But I'm telling you right now you'll get a no that'll break the sound barrier. So let's just get your mare up here to get her covered, and with a little luck and godspeed, we can meet your daughter at the Derby in three years' time.”

Henrietta had never seen her father so angry, not even when her mother left. He was stiff-necked with fury when he steered her, one hard hand on her shoulder, out the kitchen door and toward their small black breeding shed, erected a quarter mile back from the broodmare barn.

“Where are we going?” she asked, craning her neck to see him, hot coffee splashing out onto the tender flesh of her hand.

His only answer was, “Those assholes have no right—no right—to tell me how to handle my own property, or what I should allow my daughter to see.”

“Who? Who did that?”

By way of answer, he drew up short and pulled her round, leaning abruptly at the waist so they stood eye to inherited eye. He tipped her chin up with one finger. “Breeding is the heart of this business and you are the heart of my operation,” he said. “You need to know how this business is run. I have no tolerance for these idiots and their ideas of what's age-appropriate. I reject their shame—I reject it unequivocally. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she said, drawing back slightly.

“Henrietta, listen to me,” he said. “The sex act is an amoral action of the body designed by nature to perpetuate the species. It should be harnessed and controlled for that purpose, not because it's shameful. It's not morally different from shitting or eating. What's perverse is our attachment of religious mores to a simple, biological act! Be very careful, Henrietta,” he said, suddenly straightening. “The world is trying to turn you into a stupid, conventional woman. Don't let it happen.”

“Okay,” she said, bewildered, because she didn't recognize this strange and lofty tone, John Henry having died a long time before she was born. But she did as she was told; in an instant she rejected this thing, this shame she knew nothing about. She wouldn't become that woman. But a new thought occurred to her: “Daddy, why don't you ever have a girlfriend?”

The question took Henry by surprise. He looked around him suddenly at the brisk morning, considering the question. “Most men throw away their sperm on inferior women. An orgasm is a cheap thing; you can get one for free.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “But a wise man harnesses his energies and expels them in a manner designed to improve his line, not dilute it. That's how I got you. Your mother, for all her faults, was a damn fine piece of property.”

Henrietta stared at the ground in consternation. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I was reading about linebreeding, and I read that it can produce weak horses, that incest—”

Henry waved his hand, dismissing the thought. “They overstate the case. Yes, you sometimes produce a genetically weak animal from inbreeding and linebreeding, but there's no surer way to hit the jackpot. Breeding a line back to its own line can produce the perfect horse—and that's worth every risk.”

“Okay,” she said softly, her face flushed. “Evolution by artificial selection. Darwin on pigeons.” But in her deepest mind, she asked: Who are you?

In the barn, three grooms were waiting beside a large, thick-legged mare with an ass as broad as the stern of a boat and a tail that swished gently. The men barely looked up as Henry strode into the barn, but all reared back in a collective startle when they noticed Henrietta following behind, her ponytail swinging. One blond man named Jonathan, who held the shank of the mare, actually hauled himself up on the withers of the placid creature to gaze wide-eyed at Henrietta. He said, “What the hell?”

“Good morning, gentlemen.” Henry's voice was brisk.

“What's
she
doing here?” Jonathan demanded, pointing accusingly with one hand and coming around the horse now with the shank still gripped in his fist. The brown-eyed mare turned too, peering through the tangled mass of her cob as if to see to whom he referred.

“My daughter will be joining us this morning.”

One of the other grooms spoke up now—Henrietta knew him only by the name Sandy—ducking his curly red head in a tentative, preemptive apology, saying, “Yeah, I don't know, Mr. Forge—”

“That's dangerous!” Jonathan barked, and passed off the shank to the third, silent man standing nearby, who stared resolutely at the ground as the tension in the room rose. Jonathan came at Henry with a wash of wondering disbelief on his face. His gaze slashed briefly through Henrietta, who snugged up instinctively against her father's side. But that thing—that shame—she rejected. Her chin jutted out.

“This is no place for a girl!” Jonathan said with open disgust. “It's barely a place for a grown man! Jesus Christ, you can't ask us to do this thing in front of a kid.” He stood there with his hands on his hips, staring up at her father in a way Henrietta had never seen another man do. For an instant, she couldn't breathe, afraid the confrontation would come to blows, or, worse, that her father would step down.

But Henry stepped forward instead, his voice steely, low, and final: “If any man is uncomfortable with the situation, he can leave my employ. Now.”