The Sport of Kings (60 page)

Henrietta: No, they married the sturdy English mares to the fast Moors—

Henry: Blood will always tell.

Henrietta: They were looking for free forward motion! Don't you understand?

Henry: Purity builds the empire.

Henrietta: They made the world modern!

*   *   *

In the fourth month, Henry stubs his hotblood fingers deep into the curlicut channels of his ears, where no anxiety can wend its way into the old family brain. In that darkling matter grows a perfect, unalloyed specimen of his own making—now a pale clenched limb beginning to sprout hide, lengthening and straightening, testing newfound muscles from neck to wet tail, now wriggling here and there and growing heavy as platinum, waiting and preparing for the blast of life when with new-sprouted wings, which unfurl like translucent flags—vestiges of divinity—Pegasus will leap from his mother's neck, whose spilled blood frees him to fly.

*   *   *

In the fifth month Henry's terror grows steadily in the womb of his mind. What if the Blood Horse is born of Soured Milk? What if there exists no vestige of divinity at all but only a satyr, that beast of horsetail, cloven hoof, and black, pugnacious eye? It's all her fault—seductress! She was too voluptuous, too hot-blooded and luxuriant. She lay in the undulatory grasses under green, fireworking trees, drunk on the liquor of Nature when the Other pricked her lip and butterflied her and split the red carbuncle. See how the ordered marvels have been made vulgar! Now the invasive little goat floats in the tendrils of his sodden horse's tail; he is swilling her dark wine, strangely robust and grinning, that swarthy little fiend already stroking himself erect, good for nothing and unfit for work, a mother's trouble and Nature's excess, the child of a warmongering Orangutan and a woman,
Simia satyrus.
The bestiaries will designate him an indolent cline.

*   *   *

And now the thing is kicking her in the sixth month—she's doubled over, a portrait of suffering. She grips her belly and moans, but all with the detached resignation of a fettered stock animal at the plow. Oh, Henry Forge, what have you wrought with your diseased imagination? What grotesque develops in that belly, bred by the convergence of father and daughter, that crime against Nature: hairy, fully grown ghouls with legs for arms and lips for eyes, sickly, feeble children with horns, perversions with four hands or as many flippers, beaked or tailed, fused ass to ass, a brand-new generation of evil so incontrovertible it should be killed at birth like the monsters of Krakow or Ravenna, disfiguration bequeathed upon them by the sins of the father—

NO. Stop, Henry. STOP STOP STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP

*   *   *

Lou stood with her arm thrust up to the elbow in the uterus of a bay mare. Her neck was loose, her shoulders free, the silver in her bun sparking off the sun just now peeking out from smoky shower clouds. She squinted under a skylight, stinging tears coursing along her cheeks, her sunglasses accidentally smashed on the floor of her truck. But her eyes weren't really necessary for this work, her hands pressing right and left for the pulse of life
.
Finally she detected them—not one but two.

In her awkward position, there was nothing she could do but tilt her head away from the light streaming through the skylight, one of dozens Mack had installed in his training center's barns to increase the tidal sloshing of the mares' hormones. Pretty extravagant, some might say, but she had no opinion on the matter. She cared only about the animals, not their surroundings or their owners and their accomplishments. Some despised the industry for its abuses, some pursued its glories thoughtlessly, but so long as horses existed in proximity to humanity, the industry wasn't going anywhere, and neither was she.

Horses had always been deeply compelling to her, still were. She could find few points of connection between herself and these animals. Her favorite professor at Cornell had always emphasized this. Every day, your job will be about another animal's body. Never confuse it with your own. Approach every animal as though you've never seen the species before and nothing will ever get past you.

She'd always done her best to abide by this truth; in the barn, as in life, she tried to approach things unhampered by the baggage of excessive opinions. What good were they anyway? Opinions broke up marriages and started wars. Her husband sometimes accused her of being stubbornly apolitical, but what did she—one woman in Bourbon County, Kentucky—really understand of anything? And who cared what she thought? She didn't need opinions to convince herself that she mattered. When you grow up the last of six children, you know your place in the world.

I do not understand what I do not understand.

Her right side was fatigued from work with the mares, so it was a good thing her palpating side was so strong and her hands so nimble. She managed to separate the two embryos instead of accidentally swooping the whole package into one hand and killing both. Her fingers separated out one twin and pinched hard until its tiny burgeoning life was aborted. The risk, of course, was that you might be pinching the next Man o' War or Seattle Slew, but that was just part of the gamble. Spare them both and you'd end up with two weak, undersized foals.

Lou withdrew her arm and patted the mare once on the round of her rump before peeling off her lubricated glove. Light-drawn tears were still streaming down her cheeks when she detected a presence behind her. She turned and saw a distorted shadow swimming in the pool of her tears. With an ungainly gesture, not unlike a cow swiping at flies, she wiped her eyes with the cotton on her shoulders and looked up again to see Henrietta Forge standing in front of her, her belly bossed out, heavily pregnant. Lou couldn't swallow her surprise: “Oh!” The bump was incongruous, as unexpected as a dirty joke on the lips of a child.

“Hello,” said Henrietta, unmistakably tired, the voice of a woman carrying an enormous burden. The sound alone made Lou's hips ache in sympathy; she instantly remembered her ninth month, when the fun was over and the anxious desperation had set in.

“Let me wash my hands,” said Lou. She untied the mare, scooted her gear bag out of the stall with the toe of her hiking boot, and moved without rushing to a barn sink, where she soaped up to the elbows. She cast a curious glance at Henrietta, who remained where she stood in the streaming light, a rustic Madonna in the sun-splashed shed row, her belly all aflame. Lou said easily, “How old are you now, Henrietta?”

It was as though she hadn't heard; she just stood there like a deaf-mute, seeming utterly innocent, then her hands twitched, and she said abruptly as if jerking awake, “Twenty-nine.” Lou thought, My God, she had to think about that; she had to count.

“I guess I haven't seen you in a while,” she said gently. “When are you due?”

This answer came quickly. “Five weeks.”

“Boy or a girl? You're carrying pretty low.” Lou resisted the urge to reach out and touch her. Though she sensed some of the girl's ice was melted, that was not the same thing as warmth.

“I don't know,” said Henrietta with an eerie, imperturbable calm—not exactly despondent, but low. Hard fact had come to roost in the girl's mouth, and it crowded out small talk.

Lou said, “Would you care to sit outside? There's a bench under a tree at the end of the barn. It's a nice place to take a minute.” Henrietta just nodded and followed, and they settled themselves there, the September sun as warm and comforting as bag balm on their faces and necks and their hair, one redheaded, the other early gray—or, not so early; Lou was now forty-five. Neither young nor old, but right in the middle of things.

They sat in silence a while before Henrietta said abruptly: “How do you figure out how to be a mother?” She could have asked her own mother, but why would she?

Lou didn't have to think on it. “Some of it comes naturally. The hormones help, a lot of it will feel instinctive. But not entirely. I can tell you the worst day of my life was the day after my daughter was born, when I was exhausted and she wouldn't breast-feed. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown.” Lou leaned back into the bench, remembering. “You know, babies are pretty shocking. No one ever tells you how hard it is to have small children, how utterly consuming. I remember feeling kind of angry about that—that other women hadn't told me how tough it would be. They only shared the good stuff. Plus, babies are really disruptive to a relationship, even a good one.” She glanced at Henrietta sideways, carefully.

Henrietta nodded curtly, her face inexpressive. Then: “Will I be a good mother?”

Instantly, unbidden, Lou was charged with a sense deeper than knowing that this woman—this girl, rather—had never been properly loved, that she didn't know the first thing about real intimacy. It cracked Lou's heart. But the awareness was fleeting, and she said, with the equanimity of a counselor, “You'll do just fine. I can tell you the titles of a few good books. My only real advice is don't leave the hospital until that baby's latched on good and tight.”

When Henrietta said nothing further, an easy silence washed in like a gentle stream that carried their conversation away. Lou fought the urge for further niceties: How is your father? How is that magnificent filly, that two-year-old everyone is talking about? She's showing awfully well against the boys, placing four out of four and inspiring talk of greatness. But Lou waited. She waited, because she was quite confident this girl had never delivered a social call in her life.

Then Henrietta cleared her throat and said, “You told me something once. Something I didn't understand. I remembered it the other day.”

Ah, here it was. Lou turned her palms up to the warm September sun and waited.

“It was the day Hellsmouth was foaled. You said something about every horse being the product of evolutionary failure. Something to that effect.”

Lou stretched back her head a moment, looked up at the sky. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “I guess it's kind of ironic.”

“What do you know that I don't?”

It struck Lou as a funny phrasing, and she smiled. Then she turned toward Henrietta, who turned toward her, so their heads almost touched, and they spoke in quiet tones, the red, desiccated leaves of the tree falling all around them, a few onto their laps.

When Henrietta straightened up, her face was pinched with consternation.

“Then why are we chasing the perfect horse…?”

“Who knows,” said Lou, ticked her head to one side. “There's no such thing. Beauty, maybe. We always seem to get sidetracked by that. And horses are such beautiful remnants.” She glanced sideways at Henrietta. “I thought you would have learned all this in school. Horses used to be the model for evolution, at least when I was a kid.”

Henrietta flushed. She suddenly looked angry, but not at Lou. She stared out over the black, peeling fences, the green bluegrass under the sun with its tireless recapitulations, over the many fillies in the field before them. She was struck by a sudden lash of jealousy. These imperfect little fillies would be protected, coddled, and prized
in
aeternum
if they proved themselves in the sport of kings—what strange luck to be a thoughtless horse. What woman could hope for half as much in this world? Suddenly, she began to laugh. It was not the sound of amusement. It emerged as a confused cry, a conflicted cry. Then it boiled up and spilled out from the center of her with absurd force. She leaned forward, and the sound crashed like cymbals in her mouth. My God, she was laughing so hard she was gripping herself as if in pain, her shoulders heaving with grieved humor, tears spilling from her eyes, but then she was suddenly quiet with her head bent, so it seemed at first she was merely spent, having released some demon from her imagination. Lou realized she was hunched over herself, looking down at her protruding belly.

“Henrietta, are you all right?” said Lou.

She couldn't speak. The seizing was strong and swift. It gripped her with such ferocity that she seemed mildly surprised to see her belly wasn't actually moving, though she'd sensed for days that something indeed was gathering its energies within her. It was coming as sure as the change of seasons, shifting from elegiac autumn to hard winter.

Lou was watching her carefully. She counted in the habit of her training. “Well, that's a long contraction,” she said in an even voice. “Are you sure this is your first one?”

It was a moment before Henrietta could raise her head. A fine film of sweat had formed on her upper lip, and her cheeks were flushed with a ruby color. She shook her head. “I don't know. It's been … shifting.”

“Have you felt crampy…?”

Henrietta nodded weakly.

“For how long?”

“Three days.”

Lou didn't ask, she just tightened her arms around the girl's shoulders and said, “Okay, sweetheart, up you go. Let's get you to the hospital just to be sure. Just to be safe.”

Henrietta said, “University of Kentucky.”

“Okay, no problem. I'm going to take you right there.”

“I'm not afraid,” said Henrietta.

Lou smiled. “I've been afraid every day of my life,” she said. What she did not say: When my own labor started, I thought I was going into battle, but, honestly, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. I've had ruptured cysts that were worse. But even as she thought the words, making their way to her truck, Henrietta's arm was slipped through hers like a fish through a holey net, landing on the ground, where she moaned steadily, steadily as a song, a dirge, an incantation. She sat there on her crossed legs, her hands grasping at her belly, simple suffering on her face. Lou could do nothing but kneel beside her as an attendant, patting her back.

When Henrietta's face finally loosened, Lou helped her to her feet. A few tentative steps and she was walking easy again, helping herself into the cab of Lou's truck and waiting there for Lou to slip in behind the wheel. Only then did she say, “Will you call my father?” which Lou did, saying they were headed to UK and detecting panic there in the man's voice, so different from the low, even, steady, unmoved, resilient, enduring voice beside her. It made the hair stand up on her arms.