The Sport of Kings (78 page)

Mack's lips blanched against each other for a second, then: “Don't believe I've seen him in the neighborhood.”

“No winning owner has ever missed a Derby that I can recall,” said Costas. “This would be an unusual first in the history of the sport.”

In front of the crowd, in front of God and a live television audience, Mack reached out and wrestled the cold, beringed trophy out of the governor's startled hands and said, “Well, it's hard as hell to find good help these days.”

*   *   *

They don't even know who he is. He's not leaping up as a victor on Millionaires Row or spilling a julep down his shirtfront, he's not roaring beside an overpriced trainer like an Achaean in Troy. No one reaches out to pump his hand or clap his back. He's nothing but a common spectator on the ground floor of the grandstand—behind all the celebrants, back where they sell burgoo and beer on tap. He's standing on a bed of torn gambling stubs, and there's gum on the bottom of his expensive shoe. He's struggling to cover the ears of a smiling baby, but his eyes are trained on the horse, now being led back into the tunnel, the monster filly that has left the crowd delirious. Someday they will tell their grandchildren they were there the day the big girl won. They will say how they knew it was her, even though they all looked alike, how strong she was, how she danced at the finish and spun like a weathervane. They will make a legend of her simple runner's life. They won't understand that she was racing on a prayer of a leg. They won't know that painkillers were coursing through her gladiator's blood. And they won't understand what happened next. They'll think Henry was an idiot or a madman. But the madness had all come before.

New knowledge is sunflower honey on the tongue.

And so began the third and final movement of Henry Forge's life.

 

INTERLUDE V

There were voices on the river, and one was his own. It was a pleasing baritone that chatted easily with the other picnickers and called out greetings to a few acquaintances, but Scipio heard it as if from a great distance, as if it had come rolling down a long corridor, startling him before he recognized it as his own. This happened to him often. He would walk into their home in Bucktown after a long day up at the Rankin house, where he was busy constructing a new carriage house, and suddenly see a woman standing there in what he knew to be his own little home, and think: Who is this gal with the brown calico eyes and the heavy bosom, who stands there so familiar-like? One time he had even said hello and embraced her before he remembered with the whole of his body, oh yes, this is my wife. The woman I have sworn to love.

His family had brought him here today, but he hadn't wanted to come—never ever wanted to return to the river's edge, even though his house stood a mere half mile from its banks. Mercy had pleaded, as well as Joe, who had recently begun to apprentice with the blacksmith on Liberty, and then there was little Laney. Little Gal, Big Trouble, that's what he called her. Such a bold child and only eight years old. It stalled his heart to think of her lack of fear—always beating up on boys, even those a few years older than herself, showing up afternoons at the Rankin doorstep, having dodged wagons and herds of swine and God knows what else to escape her mother and arrive there alone. Where on earth had she gotten such unvarnished force? From him, of course. Once upon a time, he too had been without fear. Back when he lived in the body he had been given at birth, back when he had belonged to himself even within the devil's system of slavery, back when he did not wait for voices—his own and many others, all lost now—to roll down time's corridors to confuse his ear.

The voices on the river belonged to the church all gathered there for the Fourth of July celebration. Scipio did not believe in anything resembling a god. How could he? But Mercy was a good, obedient citizen of the Lord's free city, and she believed. Scipio had met her the day after he stumbled wet and half-mad into the black district and found the safe haven of the A.M.E. church near Broadway and Sixth. The door was opened by Mercy's sister and brother-in-law. They soon took him into their own home, where he recovered for a time, and a young Mercy had been waiting there for him with her beautiful name, which he didn't deserve, and her loving arms, which he didn't deserve, and in time, she had brought forth two babies—nature's blessing, which he knew deep in his broken heart he could never deserve.

“Laney, behave yourself!” Scipio cried out suddenly, almost before he realized he was crying out. He looked around guiltily. The anger in his voice frightened him. Laney, who'd been yanking a younger child along by a braid like a farmer pulling a mule's reins, whipped around at the water's edge, her linsey-woolsey pinafore swinging around her scabbed knees. She lowered her chin—more bull than child, he thought—hands to her hips, so that even from a distance, he could read the obstinance there. Scipio glanced about for Mercy, but she was deep in conversation with another woman and there was only a single elder close by, smiling and saying, “She got the Lord's own fire, she do,” and Scipio muttered, “She 'bout to get the Lord's own punishment.” But it was just talk. He couldn't control his own child. And it troubled him. He looked past her at the river—the hateful, swollen, sickening river with its view of the Kentucky hills—and thought, Our children, they get spoiled by freedom. Laney don't even understand they kill girls like her over there—high-spirited, bold. Dark.

And that was his last clear thought before the incident, though prior to her fall there was a hazy swinging time, through which he waded, confused and sweating under a sweltering July sun that melted his mind and what remained of his will. He drank lemonade; he remembered later how it puckered the edge of his lip. There was a mélange of berries and apple that he knew he should enjoy, but it just reminded him how fruit inevitably rots, and all the while he tried not to look at the river, which hastened any dead thing into its decay. Finally, he looked at his wife to make sure of the time and place, and counted back fifteen years to their marriage day, also in July. When he couldn't remember where he was, he looked at her. And prayed he remembered her.

Then Laney fell in. She fell from one of the three mighty old-growth oaks that had fallen over in a terrible lightning storm the previous spring and landed like partially collapsed bridges in the shallows of the river. Like a bandleader, Laney had been guiding a small line of children out onto the slick, bark-stripped trunk of one tree when, irritated by the whining of the younger and more hesitant, she had turned to scold them, lost her footing, and slipped from the tree, sending up a small rictus like a white crown when she struck the hard water.

Scipio jolted forward instantaneously before the impulses of his body made any sense. He was running across the pebbly mud of the banks before he even realized it was his own daughter who had fallen in, his very own lifeblood subsumed by the waters. When he did realize it was Laney—his usually slow mind snapping puzzle pieces together with the speed of the lightning that had riven the trees—his only thought was: My baby can't swim. Because he refused to let his children anywhere near water.

Scipio flung himself into the river. His arms were an axe chopping it down, splintering it apart. Blood nearly burst the boundaries of his veins as it rushed through him, firing him through the shallows to the place where the cruel white crown had briefly appeared. With a madman's strength, Scipio dove straight down at the spot, while above him the children clung to the fallen tree, weeping and shrieking and pointing down where Laney had disappeared. Down, down he dove, his work-hewn arms fanning wildly in all directions, searching blind in the thick river waters, where the catfish lazed and the eels sidled, where bits of the further north drifted past on their journey to the Deep South, where the dead watched with bemusement or—he wondered—vindication. He could feel the river in his mouth, threatening to fill him.

Then he found a snatch of wet linsey-woolsey. When he tugged, it threatened to tear, so he jetted forward, found Laney's little waist, and while she struggled against him, her elbow finding his eye, he struggled mightily to rise, dragging her toward the surface. His little girl kicked and fought like a first-round prizefighter—radical strength and determination in such a small, wiry body—unable to understand her fighting was her dying. She jerked away and he pulled, she twisted and he wrestled her to him, and somehow against the odds of water's gravity, they rose and rose until with a great angry burst like two fishes in a death struggle, they breached the surface of the river, Laney sputtering and flailing in all directions, and Scipio grappling for her arms and inching them toward the bank. He employed no gentleness, simply dragging her by any means, but Laney had found oxygen now and began to scream in her husky, distinctive voice, in offense or fear or both, she didn't know and would not be able to reconstruct later. She only knew that she was dragged bodily toward the shore with her whole life rising up in her throat, echoing on both sides of the river.

Once on the safety of the bank, Scipio began to beat her. He whipped her around, his face a foreign mask of rage, and yanked up the sopping pinafore and began to smack her behind, but sloppily, hitting like a brute, like a wild man, so Laney was twisting and howling, causing his blows to land on the small of her back and her hip. When his open hand abruptly found the side of her face, she went sprawling from the blow, landing like a bedraggled doll on the bank, and in an instant Scipio was grasped and pinned down by what seemed like a thousand hands, and then the voices rolled down the corridor Brother Scipio Brother Scipio Scipio Scipio Scipio She all right The Lord is good Scipio Scipio Scipio

Scipio.

The world began to return and pixelate around the edges of his vision, then the light creeped inward, and he saw his little girl raised up off the wet earth where he had flung her. I don't deserve my own child, he thought, dazed. He watched as she was embraced and petted by two elders, watched her try to shrug them off, her dark, wounded, angry eyes turned on him. Mercy was behind him, he felt the distinctive touch of her hands even amidst the other hands, the voices now saying, We got you, Brother Scipio. Everybody all right. Quit your struggling. Quit now.

Quit now? Someone began to pray even as he struggled to understand what quitting was, and he was reminded of that first prayer meeting he attended as a free man in Cincinnati, how he'd looked around at the worshippers gathered in the church, holding the borrowed Bible in his lap, thinking, You ain't safe here, even in the North. If the Lord even exist, he can't offer nobody safety nowhere. He knew that because the shore of Kentucky was always visible, a permanent reminder. A forever place.

Then he grew confused as to the year, as to whether Miss Abby was alive, or whether he had killed her in the river yet.

Again, he looked at Laney. No, he would never deserve any good thing. The devil didn't need to do his work on earth so long as servant Scipio was alive. A keening sorrow rose up and filled him. He felt his bones collapse in the building of his body, his lungs empty of air. And in the moment before he sputtered for breath, he knew suddenly and with an unshakable certainty, a prescient knowing, that soon his worn-out soul would go to the Rankins' house—a house he had built with his two hands—and he would say his final prayers to a God he did not believe in, a God who had abandoned him to a white world that extended far beyond the physical borders of slavery, and he would steal away to the attic where he had strung rope and placed a ladder. Then he would ascend the ladder of forgetting.

Scipio began to cry, and the sound snuffed Laney's tears in an instant. Her anger and self-pity evaporated as quickly as her clothes were drying in the July sun. She stared in open-mouthed astonishment as her great, gruff father, usually so still and stoic, a man in residence many miles behind his eyes, began to cry like a child in the arms of the elders as they prayed over him, their voices a gentle stream like the burbling of the river.

“Daddy,” Laney said, struggling against some old woman who was holding her. “Daddy!”

Scipio didn't look at her, didn't seem to hear her; his weeping eyes were trained on the far distance. Abruptly, confusedly, Laney turned to see what he was staring at. What she saw then she would never forget: It was not just the expanse of Kentucky with its fine gradations of summer green, the sloping rise of gorgeous hills that led to a graceful interior. This time she saw something inside of the prettiness, something that had captured her father's gaze, or perhaps captured him. She saw the shadows between the trees, the grave-black spaces that could harbor secrets. Or people. They were natural hiding places. Your father is still hiding there, a voice inside her said—not her own voice but many voices, like the elders were speaking in the round of her heart. Your father never escaped, he couldn't. White folks won't give you nothing you don't demand, and you got to demand your soul long after the body reaches freedom. Then, like a good soldier, you got to fight for the souls of others, and if necessary you offer up your most precious thing—your life—to do so.

Laney whipped back around, facing the church crowd, full of new and sudden understanding. Then she took off running, stumbling briefly on the uneven ground of the riverbank, and slapping away the elderly hands that would hold her. She ran with arms outstretched, asking for what was not in her nature to need, something she would never again request, not even as a ploy when she was once captured guiding slaves out of Kentucky to the promised land. She asked forgiveness of her beloved father for the sin of ignorance, for wasting all the fight in her heart on foolishness, for not taking up arms in God's great war. She would never make that mistake again.

 

6

THE INTERPRETATION OF HORSES