The Sport of Kings (7 page)

Henry turned and, without saying a word, slunk to the door.

“Henry,” his father said.

The boy turned.

“I said, good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

*   *   *

“He hates me,” he whispered in the half dark, lying there with her original, originating face too close, so she could discern the words on his lips. “Why does he hate me?” Lavinia laid a cool, dry hand over his mouth, but he went on speaking around her fingers, while she shook her original, originating head,
no no no
. He snatched her hand from his mouth.

“Who did he want if not me? What is it that I'm not? He never listens to me, he ignores me, he acts like he's the king of everything!” Tears flooded him again, a young boy in an adolescent body. Still his mother didn't answer, only shook her head and wagged a reproving finger.

“Do
you
love me?” he said, and she kissed him on the lips, hard. Then his cheeks and the adjutment of his chin.

“Mother,” he said, “what would you think if I raised horses here someday?”

She followed his lips and her face—watchful, elastic, overfull—suspended all hasty movement like a figure balancing. Her eyes quizzed him.

“I've seen something amazing!” he said. “Have you ever watched a horse being broken?”

She smiled a sorrowful smile and signed,
When I was a girl, I saw a horse killed in the street. A drunk man shot his horse in the belly. Then someone else came and shot it in the head. In front of me
.

“No, no,” said Henry, impatient. “When we were at the Osbournes', I saw a horse being broken. Haven't you ever just known something? I
know
something.”

A sad little smile emerged, and she took his face in both her hands. Her eyes said,
Tell me what you know
.

*   *   *

Behind the Forge house stood an apple orchard, planted a few hundred yards down the acreage in the direction of the bowl. It boasted a two-acre stand of Yates and Rome Beauty with a line of deep red Foxwhelp for cider making in the fall. The orchard was nothing but a headache for Maryleen one week of the year, usually October, but this time early November, because the apples had ripened later than expected. Now everyone was there in her kitchen—
everyone
: the boy; his mother, who had all the personality of a pillow; Filip, who was quiet, but mostly because he was drunk on white lightning, and everybody in Claysville knew it, because despite his haughty, stoic airs, he had a special talent for public intoxication at festivals and carnivals and whatnot. Apple-picking help even came from the field hands on occasion, because there were simply too many apples, more than any single person could manage. The garden Maryleen handled on her own; the green beans came in first and then tomatoes and the lettuce early and late, so the whole process was staggered, neatly terraced in time. She'd can what she could, freeze just a little in the icebox, but she never needed any help with that, and if she needed help, she wouldn't ask for it, she just stayed late. That way she didn't have to deal with people. That was her specialty, besides cooking—refusing to suffer fools, and most everybody was a fool in her book. When she'd first interviewed, she said with that gravelly voice of hers, “I don't do child rearing.” She hadn't said, I ain't no Hattie McDaniel, you see two hundred pounds and a kerchief? She'd just kept that to herself and stuck to her intentions with the rigor of the devout. She only spoke to the child when he spoke to her, and she kept it to “yes” and “no” as often as not, and when nuance was called for, she said “Hmmmm” as if she were studying on it, which she wasn't; she was thinking, Get thee thither, fool. The tall-dark-and-silent Filip, who was supercilious as hell for no reason except he was a colored man with someone he could actually lord over, tried to impress upon her the importance of learning to talk to the lady of the house in signs, because that was the respectful, Christian thing to do, damaged as she was and all. Well, Maryleen wasn't about to do that, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. She could say yes and no with her hands, but she just begged off the rest. After all, didn't they train dogs with hand signals? Better to communicate with nobody at all than to have them flap their hands at you like you were a golden retriever. “Oh no, can't nobody teach me nothing,” she'd mouthed like some simpleton to the blonde lady, who always looked at you like she was the doe and you were the oncoming headlights, but the truth was Maryleen wasn't here to talk to anyone. She wasn't here to child rear, or make nice with some white lady, or play the role of kitchen slave to the pink toes and the Filips of the world. She was here to cook. And she was exceptionally gifted at it.

She'd come up in Claysville, the colored enclave, or what was left of it. The place was sagging on its foundations by the end of the war, which was to be expected. She always said, “You let a bunch of colored men run a town where there's liquor to be had, and you might as well turn the keys over to the white folk.” What they should have done, if anybody'd had an ounce of brains, would have been to kick the menfolk out—make them live in shacks on the outskirts of town, only allowed in to deliver food or for population replacement (a disgusting but occasionally necessary allowance)—and let Claysville be run by the ladies. Then, voilà! It would become the Brooklyn of Kentucky, Brooklyn being her only reference to a once-little town that had done something with itself, high blackness intact. Or something like that. Her own mother could have run an army if she hadn't been so tired when she came home from work every day. Too tired to be of any use as a mother. So Maryleen had taught herself to read. Well, a neighbor had taught her the letters and sounds, and then she'd figured out the rest. As a result, she'd always known she was smart. “Taught her own self to read,” her mother had always told everyone they ran into, as if that was something to brag about. But it had been simple, really, looking at the shapes, sounding them out, fitting them together. It was this drive toward sequential thought that made her a natural at solving mysteries. She'd begun reading them in the library when she was eight years old, and she could honestly say she hadn't read one in ten years that she hadn't figured out by the hundredth page. She always harbored the secret desire to write them when she retired—except what colored woman ever really retired? Anyway, she knew she was gifted. Everyone had thought she'd go to one of the colored colleges in Atlanta or Washington, D.C., which was not something anyone in Bourbon County did, everyone being the child of a farm laborer and whatnot, and she had in fact applied, because, like a peacock, she had some colors to show, but she'd turned them down flat when she received her acceptances. Aside from the getting-in part, she had nothing to prove to anybody—or so she told herself—and, besides, she already knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to cook. She'd taken every Home Economics class available to her (when she wasn't reading her Shakespeare, her Dickens, her Dunbar and Hughes) and then her teacher, Miss Martin, had invited her home after school every day for two months to teach her more recipes and to talk to her, probably because she was a lonely woman getting on in years. Miss Martin had even taken her in for a whole summer when Maryleen's mother was staying nights at her employer's, because there was a child there that had cancer. It ended up dying in August, but Maryleen wasn't sorry about that, because she had spent the best summer of her life at Miss Martin's. She learned to make beef tenderloin with horseradish butter and fried chicken brined in Coke; also chicken divan, citrus Cornish hens, the best sweet pickle relish ever, chowchow, peach cobbler, derby pie, and bread pudding with whiskey sauce. It was during that baking and cooking, when Miss Martin's conversation dwindled from current events to gossip to occasional rumination to companionable silence, that Maryleen's mind became suddenly, startlingly free, and she realized it was here she could make her home, in this deep quiet, regardless of whether it was in some white folks' house or in her parents' home, where her father did nothing but read his Bible and ignore her, and her mother was sleeping every moment she wasn't working. Silence was freedom.

Which was why she hated this particular week of … involvement. There was the picking of the apples, which was hard physical work. Then there was the peeling and the piecrust making, the sorting, then the mashing in an enormous old sugar kettle that—she'd bet fifty dollars if anyone actually cared—probably dated from slavery days. Then the boiling of lids and jars, the canning, the sealing, then sauce making, cider making, which meant the addition of crab apples, which she was allergic to, so her eyes swelled up just from looking at them, and everyone said, “Oh, Maryleen, dear, have you been crying?” to which she yearned to reply, “Oh, Massah, yes, I's just cryin' thinkin' 'bout where I'm a go affa Emancipation—oh!” But tongues were for biting. You just did what you had to do to get them out of your hair, which was help them, which was what she was doing today. They had spent the morning hours up and down like spiders on the ladders plucking Foxwhelp from the branches, so she would be able to start the cider in the morning. She had already gotten Filip to drive her to the A&P to purchase the sugar and nutmeg she'd ordered for the cider, and now they were trundling baskets from the orchard to the kitchen, and she was sweating so much that she couldn't stand the smell of herself. The day was unseasonably hot for November, a put-chipped-ice-in-your-tub-water kind of hot. And she was already irritated enough with the woman helping and Filip and the boy underfoot. If she'd had eight arms, she would have done the whole thing herself and let that be the end of it. But here she was with the white boy tagging after her—well, he wasn't a boy anymore, he was a teenager and not that far behind her in age, maybe five or six years. He was less talkative than he had been even just recently, but he still had plenty of irritating things to say, going on and on about the head of a horse, and wasn't it like the Sistine Chapel, just a marvel of architecture, and he was explaining in detail what the Chapel was (as if she didn't know!), and she was being very careful not to roll her eyes unless her back was to the boy—teenager. And there was his mother, picking apples in heels. Low heels, but heels. When Jesus comes back, everyone will be changed, that's what her father always said. He could not get his ass back here soon enough.

Somehow, during the heat and bustle of the day, she managed to shake them all. She'd gone round front to sit with a glass of tea and then, upon returning to the orchard, there'd been no one there at all, just empty ladders by the trees, staircases that went nowhere. She stood in the pleasing stillness for a moment, holding her empty glass, absorbing what was undeniably the amber beauty of the autumn day, and then, fatigued and finally easy because she was alone, she padded into the kitchen feeling almost pacified. There, dozens of apple baskets stunned the eye with their heaped red, and she heard herself sigh. Except she hadn't sighed. There was a snuffling sound. She thought the boy was crying in the pantry, because he liked to hide there when he was upset, and she was always the one to find him, because she was always the one in the kitchen, though of course she never comforted him, just took him firmly by the elbow and delivered him to his empty-headed mother. Maryleen took a single step toward the pantry, which led off from the kitchen by the stove, and she knew, suddenly, exactly what she would find, because she sensed things, because her mind had been prepared by many novels that taught her everything she needed to know about the human sex impulse (a thing she wouldn't learn from life, because she found men repugnant), and then there they were, Filip and the lady of the house, clutching at each other, the woman making hideous throat sounds against his mouth, probably because she was deaf—God, please don't let that be a normal kissing sound—and with the negative of their black and white scorching her eyes, she fled from the kitchen on the balls of her feet, her white tennis shoes making nary a squeak, her hand smacked over her mouth. She fled around the side of the house, a bright red blooming through the smooth darkness of her cheeks, and, absurdly, in a panic, she crawled between a juniper bush and the side of the old house and sank down on her haunches there, hidden from sight. She breathed raggedly into her palm, leaning back against the bare bricks, her eyes wide. There she remained until her breathing returned to almost normal, though now her fury was risen like a fire that rages once the winds calm. When her legs had all but fallen asleep, she heard the boy walk by talking to himself, and then she could no longer stand the tingling in her legs; she crept out from the bushes, feeling absurd and looking around. There was no one to be seen. She coughed loudly as if in a fit, walking around to the kitchen door. She swooped up an empty apple basket in her hands and said “Lord!” loudly, for no discernible reason. Then she went on into the kitchen, allowing the door to clatter terribly behind her. No one was there. With nothing less than absolute fear, she walked into the pantry, but it was empty too, and she sagged against the wooden shelving closest to her, then reached out and touched the wavy glass of a bell jar, angrily mouthing her thoughts. She didn't know how long she stood there before she heard the sounds of his feet, and she knew they were his because she'd memorized the family's footfalls, the better to avoid them. She flung herself into the doorway of the pantry, her hands clutching the doorjamb on both sides. Her eyes were wide, sloe-deep with fury. Filip started when he saw her, when he saw her face.

“Get in here!” she said, her voice brooking no alternative.

Whether he was startled by her tone, or by the strange fact of youth wrangling age without reserve, he simply did as he was told and stood before her there in the pantry, looking down curiously with that diffident blankness she knew he'd earned by right of his skin, but which she had no sympathy for. Not today.