The Sport of Kings (23 page)

Barlow looked up, found the arrivals sign, checked his watch again. He stood now, but he didn't spring up; he weighted his knees first before his hips followed and his chest found its center. It was time to retire, whether or not Deena was ill. His arthritis was a misery.

He saw the girl then; she emerged from the tunnel gripping a backpack and a yellow blanket he'd not seen before, something she must have got from a stewardess on the plane. He watched how she scanned the crowd of people, and realized she was a lot skinnier now than she'd been when she left, just skin and bone. Everyone passed her as she stood there like a lone rock in a stream. She would be looking for Mr. Forge, he thought, so he raised one arm, the arm that wouldn't open all the way anymore after it took a kick, and she saw him and for a second looked disappointed, and old as he was, about-to-retire-seen-it-all-tried-it-all-survived-it-all as he was, it hurt his feelings just a little bit. He had to smile at himself and when she saw him smile, she half ran to him and stood before him, looking like the mostly grown thing that she was, though still curveless as a boy and probably always would be, poor thing, and she tucked her chin and leaned her head into his chest. She didn't hug anybody full body anymore. It was a mystifying and sad thing to watch little girls grow up.

“Hey, darlin',” he said.

“Hi.” She gazed up into his face. “Your hair looks funny. Where's Daddy?”

“Well, he planned on picking you up, but … he's kinda under the weather.” He looked over her head as he ran his fingers through his hair and he saw the open mouth of the tunnel that led back to the plane, thought maybe there was a chance he would never be on a plane again. It wasn't the worst thing he could think of.

“Is he sick?”

“Well, no, he ain't ill exactly. He's in a foul mood is all. He got some bad news. Everybody got some bad news today.” He didn't say that he'd seen Mr. Forge blow up, or tell her some of the things he'd said, the whole emotion of the business embarrassed him when you got right down to it. But maybe he just couldn't understand, maybe he just never cared for horses that way, what did he know? He was a pretty simple guy.

“What bad news?”

“Big Red expired today—Secretariat expired.”

Henrietta's eyes grew wide. “What? How?” The horse had only been nineteen.

“Laminitis. It just started to rot up his leg and they had to put him down today.”

“Oh shit,” she said.

“Well, no need for slang,” he said. Then: “Yeah, he made a real good horse with that one.” He was undertalking, of course; the horse had been the best thing he'd ever seen in his life, and he'd seen some marvelous horseflesh in his time.

She said, “I guess Daddy's really upset?”

“Aw, kind of. He'll be fine. Thought I'd better pick you up, though.” He smiled.

She sighed then, and he patted her on the shoulder. They made their way to the baggage claim and they were standing side by side when she said, suddenly, “I guess it's a good thing Hellcat's pregnant.”

“Suppose so.”

“But what if it's a filly? Daddy's praying for a colt.”

“Well,” said Barlow, and then he said something he wouldn't normally have ever said, seeing as it might read as criticism. “Your daddy ought not to pray for a thing like that. With people sick and dying and all. You ought to be happy with whatever life gives you.” But then he thought immediately of Deena, of her crying on that day fifteen days ago, and he thought, Well, I'm probably wrong, you also ought not to cast stones at your employer, even if it is your last day on the job.

“Daddy has to have a colt,” Henrietta insisted. “If he doesn't, he'll never leave me alone about it.”

“How come's that?”

“Oh,” she said, “when Daddy gets worked up, he gets mad if I spend too much time away from him. You know, taking walks and reading science stuff or whatever.”

“Well, it's your life,” Barlow said suddenly before he could stop himself, his tongue apparently just doing whatever it wanted today.

“I guess…,” Henrietta said slowly.

“Honey, you just go on and do what you want. You can grow on up to be anything you want to be.” Now he actually laughed out loud for a moment, and then he coughed so that she turned to watch him strangely. Lord Jesus, he thought, shut my mouth. Barlow the evangelist. I'm getting old and sassy. Time to retire, indeed.

“I'm like Zeno's arrow,” she said.

“You're too smart for me,” Barlow said, shaking his head, and then the older man put his arm around her and looked as though he were helping this younger girl through the airport to the truck, as if she were the doddering one with the ruined hips and knees and not he.

As they left the airport, they both gazed out at Keeneland as they passed, at the vast green pastures, the tracks, the fences, the shattering blue of the sky overhead. Cars streamed from the acreage following the afternoon races.

“I'm missing the fall meet,” Henrietta said, but Barlow didn't reply, concentrating on reaching 64 to avoid the city, the traffic, and all the changes that had occurred there in his lifetime, things he didn't care to see today. He cleared his throat, pictured again that big, beautiful red horse, dead now, and then shook his head. He was like a fish today, like a fish that kept getting reeled back in. He'd get cleaned and cooked soon enough.

The girl beside him closed her eyes and seemed to sleep and he looked over at her occasionally and he thought kind thoughts about her and he drove her most of the way home in silence.

When they reached the farside outskirts of Paris, she yawned and stretched and opened her eyes.

Old Barlow said, “I ever tell you about the best night of my life?”

“I don't think so.” She yawned again.

“Well,” he said, and he paused, because the onset of the memory felt good. And also because he thought, Well, my wedding night ought to have been the best night of my life or the births of the boys, and those were almost the best, but this was really the best, and that was just the truth. “Well,” he said, “when I was about your age, I was still living with the McCourys, they raised me up. My folks weren't dead, but the McCourys raised me. Kind of complicated, but never mind that. Anyhow, one night, one summer night, they had to get thirty head of cattle to Mount Sterling to sell at the market there. They lived just a couple miles from your all's place. So me and one of the older boys, we saddled up two horses—they had quarter horses—and we drove that thirty head of beef to Mount Sterling. It took us from just after sundown till morning.” Then Barlow paused.

“Did something fun happen?” Henrietta said.

He looked over at her in surprise and slowed just slightly, downshifting as he tried to think. It sounded like almost nothing when he put words to it. “Well, I don't know,” he said. “I guess what I'm saying is … Well, the moon was pretty full, so it was light and it was the summertime, so it felt pretty nice out. And those cattle didn't give us any trouble at all. The other boy rode along the middle and I brought up the rear and we ran them right up the middle of the road. Nobody passed us the whole night. I guess it was kind of like breaking the rules. It felt pretty good.”

“Did somebody pick you up when you got there?” Henrietta asked politely.

“Nope, I guess we just rode on back. It didn't take too long without the cattle.”

“You must have been tired.”

“I suppose so. I don't really remember that part.”

They were pulling into the drive, and he was downshifting in earnest now and the horses were gazing at them and old Barlow thought, here I come for the last time. He looked over the spread of the farm, where he had spent the last twenty years of his adult life. Now he would go home to his wife, who was passing.

“Oh,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head and said nothing. Then when his eyes cleared, he saw Henry standing in the door of the el porch, holding a glass of what looked like bourbon or iced tea in his hand, and he wasn't doing a thing but standing there on the porch, but an odd thing happened. Old Barlow's stomach suddenly twisted up, and he suffered such a pained sense of misgiving, one that was so strong and so foreign to him that he would tell his wife of it later and she would say, “Maybe Jesus wanted you to say something to that poor little girl.”

He stopped the truck abruptly, far shy of its destination beside the el porch. It stuttered on the idle. He didn't turn to Henrietta; his eyes were locked on the figure of her father, and it was true, something else seemed to have his tongue, something had had it all day, he couldn't own it anymore, he felt like crying. “How old are you, Henrietta?”

“Almost fourteen.”

“Well,” he said, “that's almost grown. It's old enough to have a boyfriend.”

“Okay,” she said quietly.

He said, “Plenty old to start thinking about what you want. Someday you'll have a family.”

Growing embarrassed, she shifted. “But what if I don't want to have a family?” she said.

Now he turned and looked at her and she was amazed to see tears in his eyes. “Sometimes…,” he said, “sometimes you don't even want the thing that you got to have in this life. That you absolutely for the sake of everything got to have. And only from the other side, you see it saved you. You get me?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Well,” he sighed, and laughed suddenly, and it was as if he were clearing cobwebs away from the tiny room of their conversation. “Yeah, I reckon not. I don't know I get me either. I'm having a funny day. It's my retiring day.”

“Your what? You're retiring? You're going away?”

“Yeah. I'm going home to my wife. Just the other side of Paris, though. Almost to Middleburg.”

“Oh.” Henrietta looked down at her lap. She too felt the stare of her father from the porch and when she looked up, his posture had not changed—his lean against the porch frame remained exactly the same—but his body was angry, somehow she knew that.

“Barlow,” she said, “can I come visit you?”

“Honeypie, you can come visit old Barlow and Deena anytime you want.”

She leaned over then. She pressed her lips to his old cheek, and the wrinkles felt like old leather against the soft skin of her lips.

“Daddy's waiting,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess he is.”

*   *   *

She tried to hold herself apart, though she hadn't seen him in nearly a month. She didn't know why. She thought it was because he was angry.

He said, “You go away and, I swear to God, the world falls apart.”

She stared up at him, into the blistering reproval of his face. It almost snatched her breath away, the flush of emotion she saw there like a port-wine stain covering his too-familiar face. She could only whisper, “It's not my fault Secretariat died.”

“I didn't say it was your fault,” he snapped.

“Then why are you blaming me?”

“Why three weeks away and not a year? Three years! Anything Judith says—”

“Well, Mother wanted … But you agreed!”

“I never agreed! Your mother thinks she can just—”

Now she looked through him, her ears blunting his words, the tiny whorls cinched tight. Mute, stony, intransigent, cold, stonewalling. For the first time ever, he was refused entry, and he saw the change, the quiet mutiny, and it shocked him.

“Henrietta,” he said, and he reached out and grabbed the girl by the shoulders and pulled her to him. As soon as he touched her, she felt against her will just how long she'd been gone, and she hugged him back as if she would break him and was overcome with homesickness, though now she was finally home. Home at last. She did not look up, did not look down, but her face was pressed directly into his chest so that she could not breathe, feeling his hands against her back like irons. When he was like this, when his face was like this, she'd rather be against him than gazing upon him. But eventually she had to breathe and she turned her face up. He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, and his lips were parted and her lips were parted too, because she was dying for air.

*   *   *

Child, it's simple, really, in the broad, inexorable scheme of biological diversity, and its oft-assumed corollary the pursuit of perfection: blame the isolating trait. The Forges, once a distinct subspecies, are quickly becoming a closed gene pool with a natural history all their own. You didn't ask to be a part of this taxonomic unit, yet here you are, little redheaded rosebud, ransacked Ruffian, Daddy's little girl. Once upon a time you might have interbred with another subspecies, meandering from the fold, discovering the strange scents of bodies on the verge of a foreign range. But bred long enough, a subspecies becomes a species in its own right, possessed of its distinct mark, the isolating trait. Soon you will begin to emit a sour smell; soon the other animals will recognize your difference, show you their tails, and race away. But don't blame your father, even if he is the author of your isolation; he too is a reservoir of genes he didn't request. He too is a machine designed for survival.

“Henrietta!”

She was not asleep, had not even closed her eyes, and she was moving the moment he called her name, rising even as the word was echoing down the halls. She slipped down the back stairs with her sheets clenched around her like pale cerements, her face drained of color.

He was in the back study, his tan face perfectly calm. He was the same, always the same, his face like a banquet table all grandly arrayed, full of every good thing. She wondered for a moment whether she was mad, her memory faulty.

“Come here, sweetheart,” he said. “I've been waiting for the right time and now is that time … I want to show you what's going to be yours—now that your mother has decided to consort with a German Jew.”