The Sport of Kings (28 page)

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In the morning she awoke on an old mattress on the floor with the warm sun striking her full across the face. In an instant, her heart was roused to panic. Somehow she had fallen asleep and slept through the night, a mishap she'd never made before. She always, always went home to her father. An extraordinarily heavy arm was now flung across her midsection. She slid sideways along the sheets to free herself, heart pounding. She snatched up her clothes and escaped to the living room with a thought to dressing in private away from this stranger still sleeping. Through the sun-silty windows dressed in faded patchwork, she saw pastures of cows and what looked like a lone goose wandering open-beaked through the yard under an enormous pass of sky, strenuously blue. The house around her was a musty old inherited thing, and while it was not clean, it was tidy. Everything looked to have been found in a garage sale or secondhand shop, except for the bookshelves, which she saw, upon closer inspection, were planed by hand. They had not been further sanded down, so the hard hairs of wood sprang up spikily from the natural grain. On these shelves, poetry books were lined and stacked. The uppermost spines grazed the ceiling. She forgot herself and was reaching to pull a volume from the shelf when a voice called, “Lady, what are you doing in there?”

She turned at the sound, irritated that the man had woken. In an instant, she remembered the expression on his face when they'd had sex—not surprise exactly, but a pleasant mystification, as if he couldn't quite figure how he'd ended up in such a pleasant spot. He had been a gentle man; she was not accustomed to that.

She walked back to the bedroom door, stepping into her jeans on the way and tugging her shirt hurriedly down across her chest.

“You're dressed,” he said.

“I have to go home. I slept late.”

He sat up very quickly but he didn't say anything, just looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“Are you married?”

“No!” she said. “But I have to go.”

“Why are you going? I could make you some breakfast.”

She didn't answer, she just turned to walk through the door again, pausing momentarily to tuck her shirt into her jeans. There were photos and magazine clippings taped to the gray plastered wall by the light switch. Photos of a black-haired couple from the 1950s. A series of yellowed shots of a coal train passing by the photographer, the images shaky and ghostly blurred. A few photographs looked to have been taken in a desert setting. The young man in the photograph had short black hair and a military uniform. There were no lines on his face, but it was unmistakably the same man she'd just spent the night with—twenty years and twenty pounds ago. The same distinctly broad nose that reminded her somehow of her neighbor Ginnie Miller. Vaguely leonine.

“What made you go in the army?” she asked suddenly.

After a pause, during which it sounded as if he might not reply at all, he said, “I was a marine.”

“Why'd you enlist?”

“I was dumb,” he said flatly.

“I'm serious.”

“I am too.” She glanced at him. He sighed and laid a meaty forearm over his forehead, so he couldn't see anything but his own self-made darkness. “I don't know,” he said, “it's just what you did around here. I think I had a hero complex when I was a kid.”

She'd forgotten her need to leave. She stood there in wrinkled clothes with her arms hanging at her sides, so that she looked not so different—he would have seen if he'd looked—from a freshly woken child.

“Like…,” he said, and sighed again but with some irritation this time audible in the breath. “You grow up reading comic books and things, and you think you know what a hero is … that you have to save everybody … but then you grow up and you find yourself killing people just to follow orders. It's like growing up means you cross some invisible line where all the rules get totally reversed. I guess that sounds sort of weird to say out loud … but it seemed original to me when I thought it.”

Henrietta was about to interject when he went on, “The worst thing, though, is killing's not actually as hard as you think it's going to be…” He made a quick trigger motion without taking his forearm from his eyes. “You think you're going to be all messed up about it, but … I don't know. They diagnosed me with PTSD. But sometimes, I almost feel like…”

“What?”

“I don't know … I always get the feeling they want you to be more tore up than you really are, so people can feel okay around you. Nobody wants to know that it wasn't actually that hard.”

She came to, realized the time. She said, “I do have to go.”

“Was it something I said,” he sighed, but she was already out the door.

Henrietta felt only dread at the thought of what Henry would say, but when she stepped from the porch, she'd seen the vast unfurling of Madison County to the west where the mountains dropped breathlessly away. Against her will, she walked past a stagnant-looking cattle pond, where cane sprouted up and cattails wagged in the smart morning wind as it raced toward the cliff like water at the edge of a waterfall. Her hair flew into her face. She passed an old tobacco barn, but there were no tobacco fields up here that she could see. A few spare, dark cattle. A deep, karsty sink that looked like a drained pond with boulders in its belly. The farm was situated at the top of such a precipitous drop that the earth seemed to penetrate the sky here. The clouds were as close as viewing gauze, and there was a frighteningly swift wind. She passed away from man-made markers, she passed trees that in their cliff clutching had over time grown wary and bent, as if the spiraling wind spoke through them of how precarious it is to live, cliff or no, how one day all the winds might by fate or chance converge in one place, maybe even this place, and send them all tumbling roots over fingertips, because the world was full of faceless, random happenings; or the love affair of earth and sky would end and the rain, their congress, would also end, so all the green family of life would starve and shrivel, their roots contracting and withering so that all the bodies would fall, senseless, cliff or no. So the trees bowed to the cliff's lip, which also spoke. Henrietta could hear that. She approached the lip, felt the sickening lurch of open space. She edged gingerly onto a rock outcropping like a dais in a church with the annular remains of old trees petrified onto its ancient face. At this edge she peered over, her hair streaming ahead of her as if some part of her wanted to jump. Everything fell away, and the sky rode down a thousand feet like the falcon dropping. No ease here, toeing the crystalline seam of firmity and nothing. And the sense came, intuited perhaps for the first time, that the earth itself was predatory, inbuilt with dangers, and it suddenly made sense why people wanted to pave it and smother it and sell it to render it the simple past. Maybe they saw the beauty, maybe they could look out here to the west and admire the old knobs, the soft, bosomy remnants of the mountains, so lush in the soothing sunshine, but their genetic memory was far-reaching and wise and avenging. They knew the beauty of the earth rendered a fugue state, and while they gazed in blissful wonder, forgetting their own names and the names of their children, they froze in the Arctic chill and died of pustulent boils and rotting diseases, and sometimes they drowned or burned like bugs under glass or died of exposure, and some fell. So tamp the earth, burn the earth, pave the earth with abandon. Of course they did. Of course they would. It was their only revenge upon this wild, heartless theater.

She practically leaped away from the edge, stumbling back into a headwind toward the farmhouse, where the man was waiting for her in only a pair of orange bulldog boxers, each of his limbs trying to wrap around another limb for warmth. His eyes were half-lidded against the risen sun, his hair long down his back. He held a cup of coffee in his hand.

He said, “My grandmother had a horse once that ran itself off that cliff … She said it was in love with a cow. They sent the cow off for butchering, and the horse was so … upset, I guess, it ran itself off the cliff. Or at least that's what my grandmother said.”

“Where am I?” she said.

“Jackson County.”

She made an irritated face.

“Big Hill,” he said. “Go out to the right and drive down Big Hill, and you'll be in Madison County, and you just follow 421 up to Richmond and catch the bypass to 75.”

She gasped and turned once again toward the cow pond and the cliff's edge that she had just left. “We're in Big Hill? Where Daniel Boone…?”

“Yeah,” he said. “This was it. Sight of the promised land … last hurrah of the mountains.”

“My forefather walked this,” she said urgently, unable to turn her eyes from the view of the knobs and expansion of the Bluegrass out of the Wilderness Road. This view was the original splendor, the boundless promise, that thing left alone. Only the sky was more singular.

“Samuel Forge walked this,” she said. “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Penn said, looking at her curiously. “I recognize that name.”

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In Lavinia's last days, when the cancer in her breast had reduced her muscles to rope and her mind to ash, she was too weak to raise her hands. She could say nothing, only lie there, looking hugely at the ceiling with bone-dry eyes. Henry sat by her side day after day with her foundling hands in his, and it seemed to him that the whittled contours of her once elastic face were begging for something—Henry thought forgiveness, but in actuality relief. But soon, vacancy took up occupancy in those forever features. Her feet grew icy at the toes, the instep, the heel. Her cheeks and lips were packed with lead. Her son touched her brow, unable to look away from the horrifying inevitable. Again and again, he signed to her, but little darknesses intruded like the flickering in a silent film, until finally her lids fell and would not raise up again when she wished to see her son one last time. There was total dark. She died with her lips parted and her brow creased as if she had been expecting something more.

And of all the minutiae of his younger life, that is what he remembered most. His mother had died looking not at him, her son, her accomplishment, but into the well of herself at something. And that something was emptiness. He had felt its sucking draw. And felt it now.

Where in the hell was his daughter? He was flying out to Saratoga with Mack in two hours and he needed her to conduct interviews in his stead. But she hadn't come home, and here he was panicking like an orphaned child.

And then she was there, his dear, duplicitous mother, his first love—no, Henrietta, his troublesome, guileful girl, padding in on the balls of her feet as if she wouldn't be detected at nine thirty in the morning, as if she hadn't been missed, as if she wasn't one-half of his own damn self.

The cool air of morning accompanied her, and it was a good thing. His insides were like kindling threatening to ignite. Any number of battles were lost by the man who lost his cool.

His voice was level when he said “Henrietta.” She whirled with a gasp, took in the sight of her father in the disheveled clothes of yesterday, his face marred by a complicated fatigue. His graying hair fell forward into awful eyes, where tiny bright roads of blood traveled the curves of his sclera.

“Where were you?”

“I was alone,” she said abruptly.

A warning: “Henrietta, you can't just hell around…”

“A-lone!” she snapped as two words, and then raised a hand to her own lips as if startled by their rebellion. After coming atop last night's man, after teetering at the edge of the allowable world and staring down its heights, something had changed. The old poets knew all along: the wilderness has an awful tongue, which teaches doubt.

Henry just smiled down at her, trying to appear easy and loose, though his shaking hands belied his calm. He said, “My little Ruffian, all alone in the big, bad world.” He smiled tightly. “Are you too old for one last lesson?”

God! Was there really no escape? She looked up toward the ceiling as if perceiving many people through those storied floors, the Forge quorum pacing, observing, advising, alive. They were as real as scars on old wood. With a sigh, she said, “Sure, Daddy.” But her mind asked, Am I not a grown woman?

Lesson

You aren't like them, my little Ruffian. You'd like to think you can find real companions out there, but you can't. You'd like to think you can discover a mate, but you can't do that either. You imagine you'll be understood by people less intelligent than you are, because you don't actually believe they're less intelligent, but they are and, believe me, they don't understand you; they're incapable. Gold attracts gold. A natural aristocracy exists.

You should be proud of your position. Do you think history was actually made by ordinary men? History is made by the highly particularized, the ones who are intractable, stubborn, relentless. Men who are willing to become something other than their fathers. Yes, I know you're a woman, but you're a man in mind. They are the ones willing to risk everything, even their own sanity, maybe necessarily their own sanity, to achieve greatness, and greatness is absolutely and always contingent upon individuality. Are you listening?

I don't know where you go, with whom you spend your time, and it doesn't matter. What matters is that you understand that this notion of community life—this ridiculous, sentimentalized idea of a commonwealth, whatever you want to call it—is bankrupt. The ugly truth is that, despite the philosophical spoutings of a few founding fathers, men aren't created equal, not even close. So a community of equals isn't possible. A good sentence meant more to Jefferson than the truth. That's the definition of an aesthete!

Ask yourself this: How many kinds of genius are there in the world? I'll tell you: two. The first assimilates, because it lacks the willpower to stand on its own in isolation. It understands that the world will spare exceptional people, but only if they feign normalcy, live unremarkable lives, and don't threaten anyone with their difference. Of course, most of the time the masses have no idea they're even being condescended to; they're so ignorant, they don't even recognize genius when it's in their midst. The second kind of genius understands all of this, but is so extreme in its unique intelligence that it couldn't assimilate even if it wanted to. It's a born outlier. An individual is not necessarily a genius, but every genius is an individual.