The Sport of Kings (9 page)

“Look at me, Henry, when I'm speaking to you.”

He looked at his father.

“You need to think like a man, not a child. There's a sore temptation upon youth to discard with tradition, but tradition is learning collected. You're a fool if you forget that and are forced to relearn what so many men before you have already learned. You owe obedience to them and you owe obedience to me, just as I owe it to them, and I owe it to my father, in greater degree than my brother because I am the eldest. All roads have led to you, Henry, and I won't have you throw everything away for a heap of rhinestones. I'm a planter's son, and you're a planter's son. There is no need for improvement, Henry, only adherence to a line that has never altered, because it's never proven unsound. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Henry said thinly.

His father narrowed his eyes. “Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say right now whatever it is you want to say. This is the one and only time we're going to have this conversation.”

“Well … I…,” Henry skated.

“Don't flirt with your words.”

“What if,” Henry rushed, “what if your father had asked you to marry a different woman?”

John Henry reared his head back slightly, but he didn't hesitate. He saw clear through his boy. “I would have married her,” he said, “just as he wanted me to.”

“But—”

“I would have married her,” he repeated firmly. “But I was smart enough to choose a woman of whom I knew he would approve. She came from good stock, she was beautiful and—”

“Never talked too much,” said Henry.

John Henry paused, his shrewd eyes gathering up the meaning in Henry's face, but then he smiled slowly as if they were sharing the joke. His shoulders eased in his suit jacket. He brought his hands together now, so his fingertips touched. “I told your mother I'd be taking you to dinner this afternoon to a restaurant where I take my clients. They don't normally admit children, but I spoke with them earlier and made an arrangement. Would that be to your liking?”

Henry nodded straight-faced and without speaking, his head bobbing in a mime of obligation. But then he pressed himself back into his seat and tasted the word “children” in his mouth as if it were something too vile to swallow. John Henry restarted the sedan, and Henry didn't turn his head to the left or the right but watched the farm pass from the corner of his eye, so it washed by like a grassy stream through which horses ran.

*   *   *

In the house, Lavinia waited, unable to step away from the window until she saw the sedan pull up the long drive in the interminable stretch between sundown and darkness. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She assumed her old, reliable smile and stretched out her arms when her son walked through the kitchen door. But when she stepped to him, he pushed her arm away from him with startling force and charged up the back staircase, so she felt the vibrations on the steps like hammer blows. Whatever it was that he said in that moment with his back to her, she didn't hear.

*   *   *

In the wintertime, John Henry took his bourbon in the front parlor. He returned home from Paris by five thirty and dinner emerged from Maryleen's kitchen no later than six o'clock. Then, satisfied and regardless of desperate cold or wild easterly wind, he would stand for some time on the el porch, watch the snowy farm weather to gray as the stars spangled out of the black, feeling the night freezing and contracting around him. By the time Venus was setting in the south, he had returned to the parlor, where he could enjoy his solitude for another hour or so before bedtime. He unlaced and removed his black wing tips, placing them side by side on the Aubusson, and selected a seventy-eight for the player. Then he smoked a single Dominican cigar, which he removed from a carved bone box on the mantel, and sat on the davenport to read the
Lexington Leader
. He did this every winter evening without fail.

Henry knew the rule: no one disturbed his father. But this evening he fretted pensively along the front hall, end to end, his weight distressing the old heartwood planks until the record screeched suddenly and his father called out, “Stop that incessant pacing right now!”

Henry peered swiftly around the doorway to the parlor. His father stood there in his black socks in front of the davenport, the newspaper wrenched up in one hand.

“I knew it wasn't your mother. She never makes a sound,” he said. To Henry's surprise, there was a hint of smile in his father's eyes.

“May I speak with you, Father?” Careful, discreet, he glanced both ways down the hall.

The smile vanished. “Henry, we will not be discussing horses again.”

“No, sir, I know. It's not about that.”

“Come in, then. I was meaning to speak with you anyway. I wanted to tell you that I found a tutor for you. He may not look like much, but his credentials are impeccable.”

Henry stepped into the room and closed the door as his father regarded him. In his stocking feet, the man was six feet but had grown somewhat thicker through the waist and redder, like the sun was turning him, his freckles now mixed with age spots. The cupreous, stalwart bulk of him was lessened somehow, and his son arrived at the fact of it without sentimentality, with eagerness even.

John Henry said, “I'll give you five minutes, and then I would prefer to return to my reading.” He seated himself again on the davenport with the paper, his eyes peering directly over it at his son. Waiting.

“Father,” began Henry, and though his body urged him to sit in the wing chair opposite his father, he forced himself to sit cross-legged at his feet like a servant, beside his emptied and stinking shoes. Quietly, he said, “Father, why is everyone so upset?”

“Upset?” His father's large head reared back, consternation on his brow.

“I mean, in the news. There's so much happening. It seems like there's more unrest every day.”

“Ah. Yes, that's right,” John Henry said, nodding. “It's a distressing time in many ways, an embarrassing time. It will only get worse, I imagine. No one—absolutely no one—remembers their place anymore, and we will all pay the price for this kind of national amnesia.”

Careful, steady, his face full of concern. “Is it true that they plan to desegregate the schools? What will happen after that?”

“After that?” his father said, and laughed. “After that, there will be social chaos and a breakdown in the educational system, and the Negro will be the first in line asking us to come back and fix it all. He never hesitates to implore others to come in and clean up the mess that results from his demands. His children, of course, will end up suffering the most. That's what always happens. He is simply incapable of predicting the consequences of his actions. There is potential in some of them, but as your grandfather used to say, the Negro is our Socratic shadow. I think the allusion is apt.”

John Henry lowered his paper and folded it. “You see, in the end, Henry, de jure segregation may be stripped in some segments of the society—in fact, it appears almost inevitable now—but de facto divisions will always remain. Segregation is inherent, natural, and inevitable, no matter what the dreamers would like to think, no matter what the town of Berea would have us believe. Bring twenty white men and twenty colored into a new town and within a week, the white men will be successful landowners and the colored will be tenants. Good tenants, perhaps, but tenants nonetheless. Nothing wrong with that. The world always needs good tenants.”

“I heard they'll send in the military to force the schools open if they have to.”

John Henry shook his head. “If it actually comes to that, there will be decent, God-fearing citizens to block the way. Men like Byrd. There's certainly nothing to be afraid of.”

Henry sat up straight, indignant. “Oh, I'm not afraid. Did you hear what Senator Darby—”

“Darby!” snorted John Henry. “Darby's a fool. He makes the Southerner appear the blubbering idiot, which is precisely what Northerners want in order to vilify the South—a vision of the South as mindless cracker. It makes them feel virtuous, when in fact they know absolutely nothing of the Southern situation. Darby!” He snorted again.

“The North—”

“The North is far more segregated than we could be, given the fact that half of our population is colored and we interact with one another constantly—daily. The Negro lives in our very homes and always has. The North can't even fathom. The North doesn't even know what a Negro is.

“You see, Henry, for them the race problem is either a mental abstraction or a romance. For us, as perhaps you're beginning to understand, it is a problem of practice and the everyday frustration of dealing with the colored appetite and intellect, which is entirely different from our own. It is quite easy to imagine the equality of all men when you sit on a high horse and don't have to walk among them in the fields. Indeed, everyone appears the same height from that view. But demount the horse and it soon becomes apparent that there are not merely masters and slaves by happenstance, or overseers and laborers by happenstance, but that these divisions are inherent and unavoidable. God save the mark—there were slaves in the Republic, and these liberals would imagine themselves greater minds!”

Now his voice was rising, the color bloomed in his cheeks. “The problem, Henry, as I have always seen it, is that the Negro is fundamentally a child, and children are incapable of understanding their own inferiority. Indeed, they generally err on the side of grandiose delusion. Mind you, the Negro is naturally playful, with a great capacity for joy, and I can appreciate that. But he's as self-pitying as he is playful, and like a child, he can despise you with as much passion in the evening as he loved and admired you with in the morning. Look at Filip—”

Henry leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you about Filip.”

“Filip is, I believe, only five years my junior, but has lived his life in a state of perpetual adolescence. You know him as a quiet and sober man, but that's only because I demand he stay sober in this house—and even then I sometimes have my doubts. My father always said Filip was weaned with a bottle of whiskey. You can't imagine the scrapes your grandfather saved him from time and time again, because the man has the aptitude of a child. He simply cannot fathom consequence. Each bottle of liquor is his first adventure in drinking. Each hangover a fresh surprise. Dealing with the man has been an uphill struggle, but my father was unreasonably fond of him, and my father was not a kind man. That says something, and so here he remains.”

John Henry settled back into the curve of the davenport. With one hand, he held his ankle where it rested on the opposite knee. He looked over Henry's head. With his other hand, he rotated his tumbler.

“I once heard a Northerner refer to the South as ‘that perplexing place,' and I can't say I disagree with him. Look at you—you're distinctly privileged to be among the planter class, yet you've been surrounded your entire life by Negroes of all manner of quality, and also by your common white redneck. Or, rather, rednecks recently of the hill class, which is to say of no class at all, and saddled with a character so low it can't claim the term. A sensible man would prefer the company of a hundred temperate Negroes to the prattling of one hillbilly. I know I certainly would.”

John Henry appeared on the verge of saying more, but then he cocked his head to one side, cleared his throat, and said, “White trash as your grandfather always called them. They have their uses. Their passions have their uses.”

“Like the men who cleared our fields when I was younger.”

“Yes, exactly,” said John Henry, “but I intended … Well, the story of the South is long. I sometimes think the Yankees hate us so much because the richness of our story frankly belittles theirs. The original nation is more alive here than it is in the North, and the Northerner resents that. We still know the land, we still know how to treat a woman, we still know the names of all our forefathers. Family actually means something here. Anyway, I was going to tell you a story about your grandfather's activities in the county, but perhaps I'd better not. Let me just say that there are … artifacts in the house I pray your mother never stumbles upon. I fear she would never recover. I mean only—to return to the original point—that the poor white serves a useful purpose from time to time. The Klan is comprised largely of these country types, almost unfathomably stupid and passionate. This is the sort of man who would kill a Catholic but couldn't define one. And yet, justice … Henry, it may seem a strange thing for a lawyer to say, but the courts can't be relied upon to mete out justice in all cases. Abstraction can paralyze. Trust me when I say I know this better than most. I've seen the failure a thousand times over. The Klan and their ilk, for all their rabble-rousing, often have a keen sense of right and wrong undiluted by relativism, and they can carry out justice with alacrity. Rough justice, yes, but justice. I don't wish to glorify the Klan—they're fools—but … as your grandfather used to say, ‘Manners are morals. And a gentleman always minds his manners … until he can no longer afford to.' That's when the Klan comes in handy. They're more discreet these days than they used to be.”

“Okay,” said Henry. But then, with an expression like petulance or confusion, he placed his chin in his palm and leaned forward and frowned.

John Henry watched his son through narrowing eyes. “Well, I've been speaking a good while. You came in to speak with me.”

“I don't know…”

“Don't be indirect, Henry.”

“Well,” said Henry innocently, “I guess I … Well, I just don't really like Filip.”

John Henry blinked a few times, drawing his mind round to this tangent. He cleared his throat. “When you were a child, he was my biting dog. It was only natural that you would feel a certain antipathy toward him. But your insolence was a sign of high spirit, and I wasn't unappreciative of that fact.”