The Sport of Kings (55 page)

“Allmon,” she said, and that too struck him as a new curiosity, the way she said his name. It was big and round like a dipper that could hold him. When he looked at her face, he saw what looked like wonder or the joy of discovery, something as bold as the morning light itself. It jarred him; he looked away. But she reached with both hands and turned his face toward her, so he could see her as she undressed him. It was so clear that she was taking joy in this—in him—but that was too much, almost repugnant. He tried to turn away, but then she climbed over him and pressed him into her. She was entirely concentrated, her body so open, they were soon one strong rhythm, and he felt he was becoming her or maybe the other way around. Then she was pulling him over her, and it was Allmon who was making sounds now, release pressing up through reluctance, some kind of desperate song as she was saying please, please, please like the only thing she wanted in this world was for him to come inside her with nothing between them, and the rise and fall was coming—but it wasn't orgasm this time, it was the other wave, the great worst wave from forever ago, suffocating and dreadful, about to crest over him now, and he was off her in an instant, hunched over and dry heaving beside her, his body wracked.

“My God,” Henrietta said, too surprised at first to move, jerked from the sex and the warmth into the cold. Then she recovered herself and reached out for him, but Allmon extended one forearm and pushed her back, shaking his head like a wounded bear.

“No,” he choked, swallowing hard, struggling to hold himself in.

“Allmon.” Henrietta's voice was soft—that change had come once they started having sex; it was a woman's voice like he had never heard before. “Allmon, what's wrong?”

He just shook his head, back and forth, back and forth, hunched. Henrietta lay there on her side and observed him for a moment, the only thing he would allow her to do. She took her time considering all the confounding details of his downcast face, then said, “Allmon, tell me why you're not free with me.”

It was so unexpected, so absurd, he laughed from his hunched position—but it was an ugly sound, like a bark. Wholly dismissive.

“What?” she said, but not rearing back.

When words came, they were as cutting as any knife blade: “White people—!” he blurted.

“White people what?”

He was ready—even wanted—her words to be sharp too, but they weren't, and when he looked over quickly at her face, it remained open, curious. He didn't know whether to believe in the openness he saw there, or whether it was some kind of trick.

“Y'all don't get it. You really don't,” he muttered, hate now beginning to stanch his tears.

“Get what?” she said. “I don't understand you.”

When he spoke, he spat. “No, you don't!” His words were launched arrows. “Y'all fuck up our lives for fucking hundreds of years and then tell us we aren't free? What the fuck! Can you even hear yourself?”

Henrietta didn't defend herself, and he didn't know what to do if he couldn't get her to fight, to hate him back. So he waved his hand abruptly, confusion suddenly present, regret tannic like blood in his mouth. “I don't even know if I mean you anymore,” he said, but he did, because she was like a white pebble on a white beach that ran all the way around the world, containing all the oceans she had seen and he hadn't.

Henrietta's touch interrupted the roiling of his mind. Something was moving in her, emerging out of shadow into consciousness. She was seeing the real Allmon, and she knew it. Her hand was light when it stroked the hard slope of his shoulder, then tugged insistently at his arm.

“Tell me about prison,” she said, but her words were salt in that wound.

He didn't even hesitate. “No. That ain't never gonna happen.”

“Why not? Don't you trust me?”

He shook his head. “I can't trust myself.”

“Trust yourself to what?”

Still looking at the ground, he said very deliberately, “If I said my life out loud, I don't know what I'd do. So don't push me.”

She didn't. When she did finally speak again, she said simply, “Allmon, I just don't want you to be unfree with me.”

He made a hateful, smirking face.

“What's the most unfree thing about you?”

He half laughed, still dismissive, but wouldn't look at her face. “I don't even know what we're talking about. Forget it. Seriously.”

“Allmon, what's still holding you prisoner?”

The blood rushed to his face. It came so fast, he felt dizzy. He shook his head, looking at the ground.

“Tell me. Please,” she said, and only held him more firmly when he tried to pull back from her hand on his arm.

“Fuck,” he said, blinking. His voice was thick.

“Tell me.”

Suddenly, he rocked back on his heels, naked there beside her, his arms raised. He looked furious when he pounded once at his chest, a single thud. “Hurt!” he roared, like she had caused it.

Henrietta wasn't afraid of his anger but was totally confused. “Hurt? Like physical pain?”

He shook his head angrily.

“Grief?”

He nodded violently then, his neck straining, his eyes feeling wild like they didn't know where to look. He tried once, tried again. “My momma, my life—” he choked out.

“What?”

“Died!”

Henrietta rose onto her elbow, her brow wrinkled. “Your mother died?”

He didn't move for a moment, a wave of utter self-disgust wrenching his heart. Then he blurted, “Fuck!” like he'd made some awful mistake, and he spat a little when he said that, so he lowered his head in embarrassment, and then as if his bowed head were granting permission, he began to cry, first with a strange, strangled sound and then huge sobs. Henrietta was off the mattress in an instant like an animal taking flight; she grabbed at Allmon, half in alarm, half in affection, but that only made it worse.

He was losing control, the reins slipping his grasp. He was almost incoherent when he spoke through the tears that flooded his cheeks. “I don't know … why you even want to be with me. They broke me. I'm fucked up. Prison fucks you up. I can't tell you what I did … I'm broke.”

Her arms were around him like iron bands, but they didn't feel like a constraint when she said, “I don't think you see what I see.”

He couldn't stop the horrible, stupid words as they began to run as furiously as the tears. “Why? I'm poor. I'm fucking ugly. They used to call me old-man Allmon. All anyone sees is black. I wish I was smarter … had money. I'm just average, you know.” He laughed bitterly and made a downward sweeping gesture toward his lap. “I didn't get nothing good in this life. I didn't get nothing that lasts. Prison killed me. You're fucking a dead man.”

What Henrietta said next shocked her, because she once believed its very opposite, but she recognized the truth of it as soon as it was on her tongue. “It's not the body I want; it's the man. And that man is not dead.”

Allmon shook violently once as though he might cry forever, but then he stopped suddenly and laughed a rueful laugh of total humiliation, and was finally silent. When Henrietta heard that laugh, however minor the key, she scooted back onto the mattress on her back with her arms open. “Lie down with me,” she said.

Allmon looked toward her once, warily, wishing to escape. He was horrified to the marrow of his bones that he had cried in front of her.

“Come here,” she said again, and patted the mattress.

Gingerly, reluctantly, like he was testing broken bones that had only recently begun to knit, he rolled onto his side next to her. Everything hurt.

Henrietta placed her head next to his on the pillow, twined one leg over his, and held him fast until she felt certain he wasn't going to roll away or get up.

“What's the best thing you can think of?” she said.

He was surprised by the question but responded with surety. “The river.”

“The Ohio River?”

Allmon nodded, and in his exhaustion closed his bloodshot eyes to savor a private vision. “Because my momma … I know she's on the other side. It's like she's alive and just waiting for me to come home.” His words drifted away. Quietly, he said, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. What's the best thing you can think of?”

Henrietta's face, as always, was serious. “Don't you know?”

“What?” He turned finally to look at her, quizzical.

“You,” she said. “You're the best thing I can think of. I feel like the real me when I'm with you, and I've been waiting my whole life for that.”

*   *   *

He's asleep, and she isn't going to wake him. She's leaving, but it's impossible to return to the house, impossible ever to return to her old self. There's a new spirit transplanted into the old, worn body. So, she wanders away across the grounds, which are her father's, through a brand-new morning under a brand-new sun. Born out of his grief, which he planted in her with his words, she can feel ecstasy growing.

The truth? His nakedness—the nakedness of his heart—is her first happiness.

The world is busy rearranging its terrors and its joys, and something in her quickens. She's aware of herself, perhaps for the first time, as constantly varying, no longer separate from nature, no longer the watcher.

She feels like a woman—or like more, like she herself is the spring, which once seemed like something outside of her: force and violence, charging the barren landscape and murdering winter, beholden to nothing—certainly no human or animal. Spring comes as a reconnoitering scout, a first slip of green peeking from the very bough tips of the oaks, barely there at all, just a weighted abeyance. Winter is damaged but still dreadful and full of poison ice and useless powder; every human heart senses that brief lull; it's only a first flirtation, but they're raw with expectation, impatient after the long revolution of the year. They let their stoves and hearths go cold. They turn their animals loose as a prayerful incantation. Then the air fills with a natural heat as if from many bodies crowding close. The birds trill early and through the night. The hours quicken in their clocks, then a late March blooms gulfstream heat, then the lead goose returns with its followers, and suddenly, the season emerges, an influx of green overlaying the old, dead architecture and breaking through fading, whitened scars. The green comes up and out, like a river that's been running under everything, rising, swirling, and pressing out of every living thing in wet, ripe presence, so the gushing river is in everything and covering everything—in the vasculature, the buds, the bark, the veins, the teeth, the tendons, the marrow. Up and out and over. This green burns the human eye. She isn't adornment; she doesn't care what you think of her beauty. This isn't a gift; it would burn you if you held it. She's brilliance without intellect, mother without love, a lover with two differently colored eyes: comfort and disaster. She destroys animals in their birthing, she floods the world, makes youth hasten out of itself, ripens everything to rot, she makes the graves warm.

This and more: viburnum in the yards, pungent as an ovulating woman, pink labial pistils, the leaf bottom shaped like a heart; fresh sun knocking down every shadow; the overeager daffodils, early every time; infantry grasses storming animal blazes and human paths; the lilac buds of the redbuds; pendant racemes of black locust; sumac's lip-red fruit; mosses on bleachy bones; mosses on the hunched river stones; mosses on man's abandoned hunting huts; also the drone of carpenter bees; bobbing nine-pin tails of deer; red-hooded woodpecker alighting; all the small animal bodies bathing in the sweetgrass; the green foliage glazed with yellow; new life in the old ossuaries; there's the frog in the muddy shallows, gripping a twig with one splayed hand and floating loose and easy in the shallow waters; tiny penile head of the turtle poked from the depths of the pond, auras of water rippling from his briefly borne movements; turkeys in their heavy, improbable flight; crickets; gnats; flies.

Everything comes from everything and nothing escapes commonality. I am building a house already built, you are bearing a child already born. Everything comes from everything: a single cell out of another single cell; the cherry tree blossoms from the boughs; the hunter's aim from his arm; the rivers from tributaries from streams from falls from springs from wells; the Christ thorns out of the honey locust; a word from an ancient word, this book from many books; the tiny black bears out of their durable mothers tumbling from dark lairs; eightieth-generation wild crab abloom again and again and again; your hand out of your father's; firstborn out of firstborn out of firstborn out of; the weeping willows and the heart leaf, the Carolina, the silky, the upland, the sandbar willows; every tart berry; our work, which disappears; our mothers' whispers, which disappear; every Thoroughbred; every violet; every kindling twig, bone out of bone; also the heat light-borne, the pollen airborne, the rabbits soft and crickets all angles and the glossy snakes from their slithering, inexhaustible mothers, freshly terrible. When you die, you will contribute your bones like alms. More and more is the only law.

Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much—the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin? I say there's no such thing—any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever-expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. There aren't too many words; there aren't enough words; ten thousand books, all the world's dictionaries and there would never be enough; we're infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night sky, the flakes of snow common and heartbreaking; before the steady rocking of a man and a woman, the earthworm's curling, the leopard killing the mongoose killing the rat over the ant in its workmanlike machinations, the anonymous womb that knit the anonymous, the endless configurations of cloud, before the heron, the tern, the sparrow, and the wily peacock too, the peacock turning and splaying his designs, each particular shimmering feather a universe invested with its own black sun, demanding, Look before you die, Look—Don't turn away for fear you'll go blind; the dark comes down soon enough. Until then, burn!