2

THE SPIRIT OF LESSER ANIMALS

On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together.

—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species

There was a culling of resources: which represents tolerance of risk, a form of courtship display, i.e., the organism’s ability to assert itself in the war of sexual selection. So, the detritus of the old plantation was sold away: the slump-shouldered plow, a corn planter with its four ugly teeth, jointers and froes and poleaxes and chisels and a thousand antiques lined out for appraisal and bidding on the side lawn, all sold to strangers on Valentine’s Day 1966. Even the old Tennessee Walkers were auctioned off, but purchased by the Millers, so the six were led in a head-hanging line down the drive like bewildered cow ponies off to their first cattle drive, while Henry stood on the el porch, bourbon in hand, watching without regret. At this point both of your grandparents have died.

There followed a reorientation of remaining resources: Stallion paddocks were arranged in two-acre units near the house with a yearling barn erected some way behind a stallion barn. The old whipping post was not uprooted in the redesign of the farm, but left to stand perversely in the path of an emerging thicket windbreak, so the evergreen bushes grew up around it like a rose around its thorn. The Osbournes’ land was purchased when they went bankrupt in the summer of 1968, so the old land of the silt bowl, which had once been Forge property before being sold in William Iver’s generation, was Henry’s and yours once again, and it came with a broodmare band and a foaling barn only thirteen years old and the assurance of hardy grass over limestone; also a sweet-tasting Stoner Creek streamlet that pooled in the bowl, glimmering there like gray ice on cloudy days.

Another note on display: Your father paints the plank fences wedding-dress white instead of black, an unnecessary expense. However, in the wild, male suitors often develop brightly colored, highly ornamented tails or wings that display genetic excess, which is to say wild tolerance of risk (see above), in order to secure a suitable mate and reproductive success. The female, frequently the choosier of the species, selects. Note how in this schema, the male and female are merely avenues to reproduction, dispensable agents of futurity.

A note on the 1 percent: The human is an organism defined by its 1 percent genetic difference from the chimp, which involves improved hearing, protein digestion, sophisticated speech, and all the other necessary conditions of humanity, not least of which is hope: in this case a horse. Hellbent is well balanced with a head neither too large nor too small, situated nicely on her neck over a slim swell of belly; driven by quarters that are strong but not stocky; legs set neither forward nor back but perfectly straight; unimpressive in her first races, but intriguing on paper; a gamble, your father’s roughcut gem, a daughter of Bold Ruler, showing some of his high temperament and nerve, if not his power at the mile and beyond.

But there follows disappointment: dejection at the frustration of design. During Hellbent’s life the broodmare band was expanded then culled, stallions were purchased and sold, mares crossed out and inbred, but there never came a horse that made the farm, or made your father. Hellbent herself became a solid producer of horses, including stakes winners, though a few broke down, overextended in distance by overeager trainers, and one died of colic in the pasture, its guts twisted like engorged ropes, striking its head against the ground in vain attempts to rise, so it had beaten itself to death before the vet could arrive.

Disappointment is compounded by perfection: Henry sees Secretariat, the big red colt by Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, at the 1972 Laurel Futurity, then again at next year’s Belmont, where the chestnut springs from the inside and establishes a lead along the backstretch against his rival Sham and ahead of Twice a Prince and My Gallant, firing out the first three quarters in 1:09⅘, at which point Sham begins to fall away under the scorching pace—Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine, Secretariat by twelve, Secretariat by fourteen lengths—with Turcotte wild-eyed and asking for nothing and the grandstand rising with an oceanic roar around Henry, who stands transfixed as Secretariat takes the only purse of real value, greatness, charging under the wire thirty-one lengths ahead of Sham in 2:24, a record that stands even today.

But your father procured a mate that fateful day in Saratoga: a woman thin as a pin with a glassy blonde bob and lips painted burgundy, displaying near-perfect conformation with only minor defects: pigeon-toed with a hard voice; but also restlessness, the quality of perpetual dissatisfaction, a state which represents a subtle but very real threat to young prior to the age of separation; see Bowlby’s work on maternal deprivation, also Ainsworth, Winnicott, & Etc. You call this woman Mother. She is one-half responsible for your corporeal organization, your particular form of accumulated inheritance. Together with your father, she is a conduit of the great law, the Unity of Type.

And so you were born: into the Conditions of Existence. Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.

*   *   *

The Quarter is a cutting horse and the Morgan is a generalist. The Kentucky Saddle is a smooth ride, the Connemara a great jumper, the Mustang an independent. The Mongolian is an ancient primitive and the toady Exmoor is exceedingly rare. The Akhal-Teke has endurance, and the Belgian Draft the strength of ten. But only the Thoroughbred can claim to be the fastest horse in the world—and here it was resident in their lush spring fields, bathing in the sunlight, calling antiphonally over Henrietta’s head as she spent herself each and every day on her father’s holdings, his very earth.

Her eyes were always open.

She saw wheat rounds as they rolled off the tongue of the baler.

Doves lined into the air when a cat came and parted the grasses.

Clouds were piled and red-tipped like a sunshot mountain range inverted.

The faces of the tall horses were riddles.

Perhaps her parents could discover their meaning? Her father was not in the stallion barn, not in the orchard, so she ran in search of her mother and found Judith in the master bedroom, reclining against a landslide of silken pillows, magazines fanned around her, speaking urgently under her breath on the phone to one of her sisters. With her pale skin and blonde hair, she almost disappeared into the sheets the way fences vanish into snow in the wintertime.

Henrietta barnstormed the room, her arms wide. “Mother, I want to know why—”

Judith shrank into her pillow, covered the receiver with one palm, and said, “Jesus, Henrietta. A little warning next time.”

“I want to know—”

“Hold on,” her mother said into the phone, struggling to sit up straight and pressing the receiver between her breasts. She gathered herself, arranging her good-night smile, cheer like bright paint over irritation. Then she leaned over, offering her cheek. “Henrietta, you know I don’t like it when you yell indoors. Now kiss me good night. Did you say good night to the horses?”

Henrietta sighed, her question abandoned. “Yes,” she said very simply, leaning over the magazines, crumpling their glossy pages as she kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Good girl,” said Judith, clearing her throat. “Now go to bed, and your father will be in shortly to tell you a story. Go on.”

“Okay.”

But when Henrietta straightened up from the bed, her mother said very suddenly, “Henrietta, wait—tell me, did you have a good day?”

“Yes.”

“And did you have fun?”

Henrietta shrugged. “Yes.”

Then, Judith’s crystalline blue eyes narrowed. “But—are you happy?”

Henrietta laughed the evergreen laugh of the very young; of course she was happy. It was the natural state of childhood.

“Well, good night.”

She was almost through the door when a hard, desponding voice halted her one more time. “But you would tell me if you were unhappy, right?”

Impatiently: “Yes, Mother.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” Then only a dark, empty space remained where the child had stood. Sighing so loudly that Henrietta heard it on the threshold of her own room, Judith said, “Yes, I’m still here.”

*   *   *

This is your story, Henrietta. It was 1783, during the waning heat of the Revolutionary War. Thousands of soldiers had already died on the field, or were injured in their drive to beat back the British. Your great-great-greatest-grandfather was one of those injured at Yorktown, and he received a bounty land warrant offering him surveyable acreage west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This whole area was part of Virginia at the time, and that’s why we are Kentuckians first and Virginians second and Christians third. Well, Samuel Forge was more than eager to go. The state of his birth was too populous and too loud, and he was saddled with a pioneer’s roving mind, which demands space. So Samuel set out west and brought with him a slave, who was smart with black magic and a very fine cook, and together they traversed the mountains. But those mountains were dark and forbidding. The two of them followed the old buffalo blaze and battled mightily against the elements, wary of Shawnee to the north and Cherokee to the south, because in those days a scalp was very valuable. The way was rough and full of dangers, but Samuel persevered. When they finally reached the Gap, they discovered a cave, an opening right there in the sheer wall of rock. Now his slave had a special feeling about this cave and wanted to explore it, but first they needed protection from the gods, so they sacrificed four bulls that they found wandering around in the open land around the Gap, and then his slave led the way down into the dark. This was a cave that led to the underworld. They wandered in the dark past Dread and Hunger and Want and Sleep and Toil and War and Discord, who had wild, long, horrible hair and was the worst thing Samuel Forge had ever seen, and they walked past the Tree of Dreams, but it didn’t catch any of Samuel’s dreams. He was too slippery and his dreams too big to be caught. Down, down, down they went until they came to the milling crowds of the unhappy dead that gathered on the bank of a river as wide and muddy as the Ohio. A boatman rowed them across the river, and they walked onto the fields of heaven, and all the noble dead were alive like gods. They crowded around him with stories on their tongues, but Samuel Forge had come to look for only one man—his father, Andrew Cooper Forge, who had died back in Virginia and never again seen his son once he’d set out to make his own way in the world. Samuel wanted his forgiveness for past wrongs, and he did indeed discover him there on the green underground fields of heaven. The old man was making a census of all his descendants, and had in trust all their futures and their fates, everything they would be and everything they would do, all the Forges, who in their time would march out of the cave into the bright daylight on the Kentucky side of the Gap. He was gathering his numbers, and I was there and you were there, even though we hadn’t come to be yet—

Are you awake, Henrietta? When you lie so still like that, it’s as if you’re dead and if you’re dead, then I’m dead too, because you are the very pupil of my eye. Are you listening?

Yes, Father. I’m awake. I’m always listening.

*   *   *

“All I want is a little pleasure.”

Pleasure: a sensation of enjoyment, satisfaction; the indulgence of appetite; sometimes personified as a female divinity. Considered by most to be the opposite of pain.

What was there to do for pleasure on a Sunday in Paris, Kentucky, 1983? The only thing that didn’t drive Judith completely and utterly insane was to spend a quiet hour in the Paris Cemetery. The space reminded her—granted, in peacefulness only—of the Tuileries and the Jardin des Plantes, which she had enjoyed when she was pregnant with a teenager’s hope and limitless expectation but not yet pregnant with Henry Forge’s child. She had at first tried to take Henrietta to the park in the center of town, but the girl was relentless, pressing endlessly for a push on the swing—One more push! One more! Mother!—then Watch!Watch!Watch!—so Judith couldn’t read the real estate section of the Times, and she was forever stubbing out fresh cigarettes to attend to the girl, who made a mess, an absolute, irredeemable mess of her own clothes and her mother’s sanity. What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designed to further men’s lives at the expense of their own.

“All I want is a little pleasure.”

What did Henrietta know or care about any of this? She had plenty of pleasures, such as the cemetery’s Gothic chalk gates, white as the Cliffs of Dover, through which broughams and phaetons once rattled under the old sign: It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. When her mother stopped their Mercedes to light her first cigarette of the hour, Henrietta—free, unmolested, wild—would run out among the graves to trample on the dead, skipping over their complaints and concerns, their dreamy chatter and arguments of confinement, their hate bred by close quarters, not so different perhaps from her parents’ ferocious arguments, which she heard when she was tucked in her bed at home. The dead had nothing to break or slam except their dull coffin lids. Her mother had the dishes of life and the doors of happenstance. And a voice for shattering windowpanes.

“Jesus,” Judith said, “this place is just unspeakably boring. It simply defies words.” A great, trembling ash broke free from her long cigarette and floated alongside the car.

Henrietta looked about in confusion. “The cemetery?”

“Everything, Henrietta. Every last thing.”

“Mother, why do you smoke?”

“It keeps my weight down,” Judith said distractedly. “I mean, please explain to me how I ended up here. I lived in Paris, honey, the real Paris. The only Paris. Sometimes I can’t believe I bought Henry’s pack of lies and … traded Paris and Deauville for this.” She shook her head and lowered her chin. “Just promise me that when you grow up, you’ll know exactly what you’re choosing between when you make your choices. Men like naïve girls, and there’s a reason for that.”

Henrietta gazed up at her mother’s delicate profile. “Can I have brothers?”

Judith’s finely sculpted head snapped round, her brilliant eyes nearly sewn shut. “Did your father tell you to say that to me? Did he put you up to that?” she said.

“No—”

“God, I can’t stand men. It’s always all about them. They’ll even use their children to further their own ends.”

“Daddy says—”

“Go play, Henrietta! Please! Just give me a few minutes of quiet.”

Yes, go play among the graves, turn cartwheels over those tucked into their grass bedding, snatch at any excitements they left behind. Find the sloping declivity with Lavinia’s cenotaph, under which she lies with dusty eyes closed, hands folded on her cancerous breasts. What pleasures she once flung away in her dying, Henrietta, take up now in your mouth.

The time-tattered granary loomed across the road.

When she approached birds, they all fled heavenward.

Chips of cloud formed scissors. They threatened to cut every thread in the world.

In joyful horror, Henrietta grasped up a single flower and raced back to the car. Her mother sat resting with her chin on her hand, her elbow on the window chrome. Her face had regained its equilibrium, but as the girl approached, her brow drew tight.

“Henrietta—have you been lying in the grass?”

The girl slowed, her mood suddenly veiled, her lips pressed together so tight they puffed out, showing a faint belligerence.

“Have you been lying in the grass?” This time the voice was not so sharp, but it seemed to shake with a strange and mysterious grievance, which the girl sensed but could not understand. “I’m not interested in putting you in a new dress every hour of the day. Why do you always do that?” And then turning to the windshield and saying to no one: “Why does she always do that…?”

Henrietta said, “I brought something for you.” She held out a yellow carnation, soft as a horse’s muzzle, its edges already curling and tea-stained with decay.

“Henrietta,” Judith admonished, “did you steal this from a grave?” but she reached out and gently lifted the flower from her hand.

“No.”

Her mother couldn’t help it, she smiled. “Get in the car,” she said, and her daughter came round dutifully and slid in beside her.

“Grandmother says hi,” Henrietta said as she struggled with her seat belt.

Judith reared back slightly. “Don’t say things like that,” she said. “It’s creepy.”

“Okay,” said the girl. Then she said, “Did you know that if there were only two elephants in the world and they mated, in five hundred years there would be fifteen million elephants?”

“You’re only seven,” said Judith. “Why do you know anything about mating?”

“Daddy told me. Mother, what if you had to spend your whole life being chained to a tombstone, and you couldn’t get anybody to unlock your chain?”

“My God, Henrietta, what awful things you think of,” said Judith, the delicate plane of her brow wrinkled up in distaste.

“Probably nobody would want to be around you, and wild dogs would come and try to eat you.”

“Well,” said Judith, starting the car and remaining attentive only by an anemic and diminishing force of will, “maybe you could train the dogs and name them and then they might leave you alone.”

“Wild dogs don’t have names, silly!” Henrietta cried, and she laughed uproariously, and her mother just bent her head slightly away from the sound of that shrill and disruptive laughter, a sound she herself could not remember ever having made.

*   *   *

But their horses did have names. In the early spring of each year, Henry led his daughter out to a pasture at the rim of the bowl, where three or four mares were turned out with shiny new foals—copper and bay and a dappled gray almost white. Unlike their dark and calm dams, they sprang about, bouncing here and there and spending their small energies. They were comically, even absurdly, composed with root beer barrel knees and cannons thin enough to snap over a grown man’s thigh. Their eyes, like their legs, were set awkwardly wide, their tails as short and bushy as the tails of rabbits.

Henrietta was reading by her fourth year, and by the time she was eight, she was attendant to the namings, standing beside her father with a stenographer’s notebook and a pencil, marking down his choices like a small actuary. She balanced her book on the second plank of the fence while Henry rested a loafered foot on the first, his freckled forearms crossed on the top plank, as he gazed out over the dams and foals. Casuistry passed near, her foal peering curiously around her, its head already framed by a halter, though it was merely days old.

When old Jamie Barlow appeared beside them, leaning on the fencing and flicking up the frayed brim of his ball cap, Henry said, “What do you think of this one? He’s by Motor Running over at Dale Mae Stud.”

Barlow was sanguine as he considered the foal. “I’d say that’s a mess of feathers, but no bird.”

“I was asking my daughter,” said Henry, and if there was anything in Barlow’s silence then, Henrietta was too young to sense it. “What do you see, Henrietta?”

With her pencil tucked behind her ear, she said, “He’s okay, I guess?”

Henry shook his head. “A horse I see, but horseness I do not. He’s inbred to Casuistry’s line, but he looks hackish, pedestrian. I don’t see the right balance of bodily weight and light bone.”

His daughter was barely listening. At her feet, the grass roiled and shook with its invisible machinations, teeming with life’s orchestra. The blades of grass were little bows making its music. The green there was so sincere, so undiluted, it rivaled the sun for intensity.

Henry reached down and, with a gentle but firm hand, turned her head forcibly back to the matter at hand, and it made her squirm. He was too enthusiastic, like a candidate on the hustings. “See how thick his legs are already? That’s cold blood and not at all what we’re aiming for. This is selective breeding we’re engaged in, nothing random about it. Evolution is a ladder, and our aim is to climb it as quickly as possible. We’ll most likely geld him.”

“That Motor Running ought to be a kill shot,” said Barlow, shaking his head. “Don’t know how come we can’t get a winner out of him.”

“Call the foal Castrato,” Henry said suddenly. “Write that down. Castrato out of Casuistry.”

Kastroto, she wrote, sounding out the word with the tip of her pencil.

“Now, take a close look at Hellbent’s foal.”

Henrietta peered between the planks. Hellbent’s foal was darkly red as a steak with a blaze and two white kneesocks. She bucked out with gangly legs and lunged gamely at the neck of her dam, who brisked and shone in the light.

“That’s a mighty good-looking filly right there,” said Barlow.

Henry looked down at his daughter. “I’ve been waiting for the right mare to send over to Secretariat, but I’ve wanted the best materials to work with. We’ll have to see if she runs as good as she looks. I’m sure they’ll think I’m breeding too far up the ladder—”

“Nah, she’s got the Bold Ruler look, good hind end, smart face—”

“And perfect legs.”

Barlow reached down and with no warning swung Henrietta up and positioned her on the top plank, so she was facing the man, who smelled of dusty hides and cigarettes, which she was soon rooting for in his breast pocket. She discovered one, slipping it from its pack, but he playfully knocked her hand away, said, “That ain’t Christian. You be good or I’ll take you home and let my old lady straighten you out. She always wanted a little girl.”

“No,” she said, grinning.

“Oh my, yes,” said Barlow. “She’ll fix you up. Raised four wild and woolly boys, think she can’t handle you? You ain’t got any kind of wicked she can’t bring to Jesus.”

“No!” she cried.

Henry reached over and ruffled her reddish hair. “You’d still be my little Ruffian.”

“What’s a Ruffian?”

Henry turned a considering eye on her. “The best filly to ever run the race. You’d have to go back to the turn of the century to find another one like her.”

“She was smart?”

“She was beautiful.”

“Can I go see her?”

“No…”

Henrietta’s brows gathered to a V of disappointment. “Why not?”

“Well, honeypie, she broke down,” said Barlow.

“But doing what she loved most,” Henry interjected.

Barlow grinned. “Blessed are they who run in circles, for they shall be called big wheels.”

Staring at his new filly, Henry said, “For the great, death dies.”

Henrietta sighed and looked up at Barlow, who was gazing down on her with a curious expression on his face. Smiling ruefully, he hoisted her off the plank fence and into his arms, so she was enveloped in the physical warmth of a grown person. She looked over his shoulder in the direction of the green expanse of the bowl with its promise of free play, and because Henry caught her longing glance and it worried something in his mind, he reached down and rapped gently on her head. “Knock, knock,” he said. “Are you there?” She nodded, and with her feet returned to the fields of Henry’s confidence, she did as she was told, taking her pencil from behind her ear and writing down six potential names for each foal, names that they would then send to the Jockey Club for consideration. Their first choice for Hellbent’s foal was Hellcat and in a few months’ time, they learned the name had been accepted.

*   *   *

Henrietta would remember the storms that came two years later in the spring of her tenth year, not because the farm was so altered, which it was, but because her mother did not come home. Around dinnertime the sky grew flavid and discontent and earth colors seeped up from the soil into the atmosphere, where clouds gathered, mossed with the green cast of tornado-laden storms. A siren wailed in town, the sound bowing in and out as the gaping mouth turned to the four corners of the county. Everywhere horses pranced with their ears up to catch the rising wind, barn cats skulked for shelter, cows bellowed in alarm. The trees shook and flung their glossy leaves into the changing light and the sun, a useless and retiring thing, slinked away. The farm was swallowed into the dark of the storm and it was terribly still, then the silence was staved in by a mighty crack and the rain began to fall. In their stalls, the horses cried. Lightning forked across the sky and inflected downward to the earth, where it lashed its electric tongue on trees and housetops and cupolas and lit the rolling eyes of the animals and the entire achromatic world.

In her bed, Henrietta listened to the storm as it battered the house, its soughing sounds like the moaning of many anguished people. She watched the water cascade from the coping inches above her window and nursed a seed of panic for her mother, who had not yet appeared. Tears gathered in the girl’s green eyes. She strained for the sound of the phone ringing for as long as she was able, but being young and tired, she was asleep before she knew it, and then it was morning and the rain was gently washing the brick skin of the house and its windows. She ran into her parents’ room, but neither one was there. From their window gazing down, she could see their three resident stallions being led, frantic with nerves, into waiting trailers. Down beyond the white barn, the stream was wildly gray and belling out of its banks, sweeping fronds into its current, where they waved like tangled hair. She spotted her father and the figure of Barlow. She flung off her nightclothes, leaving them in the hall as she ran back to her own room, where she struggled into jeans and a sweater, racing downstairs even as she was dressing. She was cramming her feet into boots and looking for a rain jacket when Henry came stomping into the kitchen. She flung herself at him, taking him by surprise and knocking him back against the door he had just shut. It was like embracing a tree in a rainstorm, but she didn’t care. She was instantly wet through by the outdoors he had brought in with him.

“Henrietta, honey,” he said with surprise.

“Where’s Mother?” she said. “Did Mother come home?” There were tears in her voice that startled him. He blinked rapidly as she stared up into his face.

“Your mother is fine,” he said slowly, carefully. “She just couldn’t come home last night.”

“Why not?” Henrietta said. “Did she get in an accident?”

“No,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “She’s fine. She stayed in Lexington.”

“Why?” she said, and as a ghost of suspicion flitted in her eyes, Henry thought, she’s nothing like her mother; there’s so much of me in her.

“Well,” he said, “your mother…” Then he paused and waited for something to come into his mind and when it didn’t appear, he winced and hurried on. “Your mother has an apartment in Lexington, where she might want to stay sometimes.”

“But she’s coming home.” The words seesawed between question and insistence.

Henry looked down into that worried face and his mouth struggled momentarily as he redirected his words. “Soon,” he said, and brighter: “Soon!” But his own smile was alloyed by hesitation. She pressed her face into the flat of his belly, and he heard her mumble, “Good.”

Outside, there was the sound of the first trailer rumbling down the lane with a frightened stallion kicking inside.

“Where are the horses going?” she said, her voice muffled.

“To a training center just until the creek settles. We don’t want it to rise and carry them away.”

In her mind, the black and brown horses were swept off in the raging current of Forge Run, open-mouthed and screaming shrilly in the frothing stream, their eyes rolling in terror and their bodies battling in slow motion against forces stronger, much stronger, than themselves.

“No,” she said. “Please keep them all safe, Daddy.”

*   *   *

The storm continued for three days without abating. The creek flashed out of its margins, spilling over half the paddocks and into the stallion barn, though it was sandbagged and wrapped to three feet in heavy plastic. Hay and straw floated out on the rising tide and swirled in a gray mass that soaked the earth. The sky was sodden and tiresome, the earth was sodden and tiresome. Henrietta watched it all from the kitchen and from her parents’ room as she waited for the phone to ring.

When the rain finally stopped, the clouds thinned and were wicked from the drying sky as quickly as they had come, and the creek began to fall back with a sigh into its banks, leaving behind little pluvial courses like open veins in the soil. Henrietta ventured out in her mother’s polka-dotted galoshes and explored the paddocks that oozed water with each step. She stood on the edge of the creek, where it continued to shrink back as if newly shy absent the blustering weather. She could not move about freely without slipping and sliding, so she just stood there and stared, and in her silence and in her fixity was some hint of a pained dawning. There was a change coming, and its germinal moments arrived not when she lay in her bed with panic in her breast, but here as she stood staring dully at the surface of a creek too muddy to see into, too dull to divulge its contents or reflect back anything of the world—not even her own face. She glanced back at the house, wondering whether she would hear the phone ringing down here.

She wandered down in the direction of the road where the rain-sickened creek was still engorged, swirling around the lower line of the old stone fence. A few of the limestone slabs, craggy and cut thin, had tumbled into the water and then either settled into the soil or slipped back into the current, where they lay camouflaged with their neighbors on the streambed. On the western, Perry side of the stream, the gray hands of the water had pushed the fence until a portion toppled over fully intact onto its side, as neatly fallen as it had previously stood for over a century. Henrietta labored on the Forge side for a few minutes, returning limestone chunks to their spots in the wall and reordering the top vertical stones, so they were stacked together again in a line like books or a row of neolithic dinner plates.

“Miss Henrietta!” a voice called to her, and she straightened up abruptly with a hand shading her brow. There were some few straggling clouds now, but the atmosphere was thick with the moisture of the storm and the light seemed to come dully from everywhere and nowhere. Henrietta saw their neighbor, Ginnie Miller, plump and redheaded, waving one arm above her head and calling, “Miss Henrietta!”

Henrietta remained where she was on her side of their fence, affectless and staring.

“Come here, child,” said Mrs. Miller with a beckoning gesture. Ginnie was the youngest of the Miller siblings, but had married a man named Marley, so she was Ginnie Marley. Her husband was quiet and when he drove past them on the road, he lifted only two fingers from the wheel by way of greeting. As if his lack of a first name rendered the marriage null and void, everyone still called her Mrs. Miller, though Henrietta could not recall her father referring to the woman at all.

Henrietta crossed the wet road and stood next to this woman she’d only seen from a distance. She was winded, as though coming from a dance, and her hair, slightly gray with voluminous curls puffed up from her face, resembled petals framing the rosy heart of a flower. It was the ruddy face of a life lived outdoors, her cheeks red as if sunburned, though it was only the middle of spring.

“My goodness,” the woman said, “you’re just a little slip. I guess it runs in the women of your family.” She was leaning down slightly, and Henrietta saw her eyes were the color of dark chocolate. She said, “Well, I need your help. A couple of my cows got past my water gap, and my husband just took both my girls back to college. I need you to help me guide them back along the road. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Henrietta said.

“Then let’s you and me go get us some beeves.”

Henrietta followed her down the road away from the Miller drive, along the cow pasture, which spread to the west, inclining mildly to a hillock about a half mile away. A concrete waterer had been poured there, topping the rise like a crown on a grassy head. Black-and-white cattle were scattered about here and there, lowing a deep and dolorous sound.

They passed the spot where Forge Run ran dark-complected and swollen through a galvanized culvert under the road, running its course along the Miller property. The water gap was just two steel hoods from old cars chained across the creek to form a primitive stanch. One of the hoods still bore traces of its original red paint like old blood. On the far side of the artificial barrier, she saw the bulky figures of two black-and-white Holsteins steeping placidly in the muddy water. The water rose up past their hocks, but no further. They stood there appearing drowsy and mild until the two figures approached, then they bawled in tandem.

“How did they get out?” asked Henrietta.

“Well, when the water all rose up, the water gap went so”—Mrs. Miller raised her flattened palms so they were parallel to the ground—“and they just sort of squeezed on through and went about their merry way.”

“They didn’t get very far,” said Henrietta.

“I think they used up all their fighting spirit just getting through the water gap.”

They stopped at the top of the bank and looked down at the cows.

“Hello, my pretties,” said Mrs. Miller, and then turned to Henrietta. “So, here’s the plan. I’m gonna go on in there and move them up your way, and I just need you to head them off down the road toward the house.”

“Okay.”

“So set your legs apart like you mean business. Now, don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Henrietta snorted. She set her legs apart like a sawhorse.

Mrs. Miller waded on into the creek upstream of the cows and the water plashed around her legs and filled up her green galoshes as little eddies spooled grayly away from her. The cows eyed her warily and were already making their first lurching motions toward the bank when the woman came up behind them, shooing. They jolted forward with real force, fat harlequins clambering out of the water, which shook in coffee droplets from their shining black limbs. They were clumsy on the rocky bank, slipping and lunging, their quarters jolting under the skin as they climbed.

“Just direct them,” Mrs. Miller called, and Henrietta faced them down with her arms spread.

“No sudden motions now.”

Henrietta made subtle pointing hand gestures as if they were wet airplanes being directed on tarmac, and they went easily as directed, trotting heavily, but veering for the middle of the road. Mrs. Miller came scrambling out of the creek, wet to above her knees, and moved on past Henrietta in a hustle to the first cow that was heading Forge-ward.

“Don’t let them get in the road now,” she said over her shoulder. “I want you between that cow and the car. I can afford to lose neighbors, but not cattle.”

“Okay,” said Henrietta.

She looked over her shoulder. “Honey, I’m kidding.”

Henrietta walked beside the second cow with both her hands out toward its flank. It moved steadily along as though it were a wholly unremarkable event to walk on the wrong side of its pasture fence with the larger body of the herd gathering now as a congregation to watch. Mrs. Miller kept casting over her shoulder to check on their progress. As the Forge paddocks came into view, she said, “Guess there’s a lot to keep a girl busy on a horse farm, huh?”

“I guess.”

“What does a girl like you like to do?” she said.

Henrietta shrugged, a strange new mood was on her; the rains and her mother’s absence had brought it on. “Study diagrams.”

Ginnie reared back. “Diagrams! Of what?”

“Animals and plants. The history of their evolution. That sort of thing.”

The woman hooted and looked back over her shoulder again with a different expression on her face, as though just discovering a different child in Henrietta’s place, one who deserved a second glance. “Is that right,” she said.

Encouraged, Henrietta said, “Did you know there are fifty thousand species of trees? That number’s going down. They come in five shapes—round, conical, spreading— What’s that?”

Mrs. Miller turned to see that Henrietta was pointing at the cursive M on the cow’s rump.

“That’s a brand.”

“What’s a brand?”

“We burn our family letter into them so if they ever get out like today, everybody will know they’re ours and bring them back to us. Just like puppies.”

“You brand puppies?”

“No, honey,” said Mrs. Miller.

They were now approaching the squat Miller bungalow, where begonia pots hung in bursts of color from the scalloped porch trim and the flower beds stood pert in a wealth of watered soil.

“Run ahead and unlock the gate,” said Mrs. Miller, and Henrietta did as she was told, pulling the pin and springing the gate, so the woman could pass on through with the two cows just as the herd was beginning to gather in a mass around the sojourners. With the cows captured, they stopped and watched the reunion, their forearms resting on the top steel rung like two old cowpokes, the older barely taller than the younger.

From this place, Henrietta had a new and clear vision of their home across the road and the black stallion barn atop the rise. Their stone fence was trim and neatly kept except where it had been rearranged by the swollen stream. The Millers’ fence was crumbled and tumbled out of its original form along its length, limestone lying everywhere in heaps.

“Our fence is prettier than yours,” Henrietta said.

Mrs. Miller snorted once and shook her head. “A good-looking fence is not high on my list of priorities. In my opinion, some people mind a little too much about how a place looks and not enough about how it runs.” She looked very pointedly at the girl, but Henrietta was looking across the road to their fields, the grass mowed just so, the fences white as cotton bolls.

“Good looks are an evolutionary mark of health,” she said. “That matters when it comes to mating. I read that.”

Ginnie cocked her head. “Based on my cows, I’m gonna say that’s probably not the whole story. In fact, that sounds like something a man would say to a woman just to get the upper hand. Both of my daughters are dating right now, and they’re running into all sorts of foolishness like that.” Ginnie leaned down and grasped one of her galoshes by the shank and gave it a tug. It came off with a sucking sound and brown water poured out in a stream like old tea from a kettle stroop. Her socks were gray and sodden. Then she said, “You know, I used to have a big old crush on your daddy when I was about your age.”

“Really?” said the girl. “Did he want to marry you?”

Ginnie laughed again. “If he did, he had a poor way of showing it,” she said. “But things turn out the way they should. Just think, if I’d married your daddy, then I never could have married the man who holds the Guinness World Record for the least words ever spoken in a marriage.”

Henrietta’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Honey, I’m kidding,” she said. “But you know,” she went on suddenly, turning toward the girl with a level gaze. “Mind how you grow up. Strive to be a good egg. You’re gonna have to watch yourself. You’re kind of swimming upstream if you know what I mean, which you probably don’t.”

Henrietta just stared at her blankly. Then Mrs. Miller reached down, took her time removing her other rain boot as she gripped the gate with her free hand, and said, “I’ll tell you another secret.”

“What?”

“Your daddy tried to buy us out. Twice.”

Henrietta’s eyebrows rose up in little arcs of surprise. “He wanted your cows?”

“Well, I don’t expect that was the attraction, no,” Mrs. Miller said. “But he wouldn’t offer anywhere close to what this place is worth. My own daddy wasn’t very fond of your daddy, truth be told. He’d have sooner sold it … Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you that.” She sighed, struggling her feet back into her floppy boots.

“Why?”

She turned a mild, considering eye on the girl. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know. I suppose it’s just the truth when it’s all said and done.” Then she said, “How old are you?”

“Almost ten.”

“That’s why. You’re just a little slip. You’re too young for the workings of the world. The world can be a pretty crappy place. Just have a good time being a little girl.” She sighed.

“I like your cows,” said Henrietta.

Ginnie Miller actually blushed a bit when she smiled. “Well, they’re not Cardigan Corgis, but … yes,” she said. “I’m very fond of them myself. I really can’t eat beef anymore. I think I’d consider eating my husband before one of my herd. That was a joke.” Then she cleared her throat and said, “You know, sometimes the apple falls pretty far from the tree. And if it’s really brave, when it grows up, it can get up and walk over to another orchard. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“No, I suppose not.” She smiled, and Henrietta realized suddenly the hour was late, and her father would be wondering where she was, so she moved toward the wet black ribbon of the road and the house beyond. Then Ginnie called out, “Henrietta Forge, did you have fun today?”

Henrietta didn’t even have to hesitate; she turned and, walking backward, she called, “Yes, I did!”

*   *   *

She lay there on the davenport in the front parlor by the phone, her hands still smelling of the damp outdoors, but resolved not to move until the call came. No one bothered her, her father still out with the horses and the cleaning lady polishing and vacuuming around her. When the phone rang in the early evening, she had only to reach over her own head without rising to grasp the receiver. It was her mother.

“I’ve been missing you,” Judith said in a voice too gentle.

“You have an apartment in Lexington now?” Henrietta blurted. “But you still live here, right?”

“Is that what your father told you?”

“He said he wants you to come back home right now.”

There was silence on the line.

“When are you coming home?”

“Well,” her mother said, and sighed. “I think I’ll come out to the farm tomorrow.”

“Why can’t you come right now?”

“I’ll come tomorrow, darling.”

But her mother didn’t come the next day. She came the day after that, and she arrived wearing a dress Henrietta had never seen before, her hair cut in a glassy blonde bob, and with a pained twinge the girl struggled with a strange, phantom sensation that Judith had been gone not three days but three years. She was altered like a heap of coins melted down and newly minted into a foreign currency. When they hugged, her mother’s arms were painfully thin, but maybe they had always been so? Henrietta heard a kissing sound above her head but did not feel the press of lips anywhere.

Her mother said, “You look good, Henrietta.” Even her voice was music playing in another room. “Why don’t we go out to the porch?”

“Where’s Daddy? I want him to come too.” Henrietta managed to turn herself halfway around, looking wildly behind her without letting go of her mother.

“I’m not really sure.” That old, barely suppressed irritation was audible.

“Daddy!” she called out into the house, and she felt her mother flinch as the word came echoing back.

“Henrietta!” Judith snapped, and then softer: “Your father’s not here right now.”

“Where is he?”

“He didn’t want to be here for this.”

Now it was Henrietta’s turn to be silent. She stared mutely at her mother, and where the older woman expected to see confusion, there was only a dark kind of withholding, which was new. The girl let go of the hem of her mother’s jacket, which she had wrenched up into the sweaty heart of her fist. Judith smoothed it down and Henrietta saw her manicure was the color of a ripe raspberry. She used to bite her nails, but that was different now too.

“Let’s go out to the porch,” Judith said. “I always hated the inside of this house.”

“Well, I like it.”

“You don’t even know what you like yet,” her mother said. “This house is like living in another time. And not a good one.”

They went out and they sat on the porch swing, but Henrietta’s legs were not long enough to reach the wood planks, so she was forced into a lulling motion by her mother. She clung to the chain for balance but it was rusted. It left visceral stains on her palm.

For a long time Judith just swung them in silence and her face appeared undisturbed, as if she were alone in the world with her thoughts, as if she never had any intention to speak at all.

“Well, I don’t have an apartment in Lexington is the first thing,” she finally began.

“Then Daddy lied.” Henrietta stared straight ahead at the road and the Millers’ property, her face devoid of feeling.

“Let’s do this nice and easy, Henrietta,” Judith said.

“Where’s your apartment?”

“Well, I don’t have an apartment, not exactly. The thing is I’ve met someone. Someone I really love and who really loves me.”

“Daddy loves you,” Henrietta said abruptly against the swift and sudden closing of her throat.

“Daddy loves you,” said Judith while looking down at her shoes, her yellow heels. She turned a foot this way and that, as if admiring the motions of her own ankles, but her face was downcast and carved close at the cheek. “Listen, Henrietta, I could be angry and, believe me, I have every right to be, but … frankly, I’m too young to waste all my good years. I’m not going to sit around here the way your grandmother did, waiting for death to end my awful marriage. God, that poor woman. I’m sure she went slowly insane here. We’re trained from childhood to behave like dogs who sit and stay and wait for scraps.” She looked up suddenly. “Everyone has to find a way to be happy. When I was a girl, I always, always wanted to get married. I was so naïve I thought that if a man married you, then that actually meant he loved you, not just that he wanted something from your body. The reality is you never really know a man until he marries you and thinks he’s got you trapped. Then you find out if you really are his prize, or just his prize heifer.”

She sighed. “What’s funny is I used to model wedding dresses. I mean, for God’s sake—that was my niche! I was only high fashion when I starved myself, but I couldn’t keep that up. But I actually liked catalog work. I thought it was fun. And now, I mean, look at me. My stomach is ruined. I’ve just finally woken up, and I want nothing more than happiness. I don’t care if it comes in an imperfect package. I don’t care where I have to go to find it. It just … Henrietta, it has nothing to do with you.”

“Nothing to do with me,” the girl echoed flatly.

“Nothing at all. I promise.” Judith sighed and looked out over the sloping lawn and the frontage road. Softly, she said, “I was really so happy when I was a little girl. There has to be a way back, there has to be. Or else what’s the point of all this … of life?” She sighed again. “The truth is men aren’t interested in your happiness; they’ll make you think that’s the case, they’ll treat you really great for a while and make all sorts of promises and give you all their attention, but they all reach a point where they can’t pretend anymore. They’re just selfish animals, and in the end, animals can’t hide their nature.”

“But you’re happy here with me,” insisted Henrietta, her words reaching out with both hands.

Her mother fished around in her pocketbook and removed a black book with blank pages. “Look. I bought you a journal. Since I won’t be here for you to tell them to, you can record all your most precious thoughts here.” She set the book on Henrietta’s knees and smiled sadly. “I know this probably isn’t … adequate, but … God, there’s really no good option here.” She smiled sadly.

“You’re smiling,” Henrietta pressed, ignoring the book.

“I’m smiling, sweetheart, because the man I’ve met is really wonderful,” Judith said. “He actually loves me for who I am, not for what I can give him, not for how I look on his arm. He’s involved in horses too, so he and your father have a lot in common. And he has sons. See? You’ll have brothers now like you’ve always wanted. The only thing is … he lives most of the year in a town called Donaueschingen.”

Henrietta looked at her blankly.

“It’s in Germany,” her mother said.

Still there was no response.

“That’s across the ocean. Do you know where Germany is?”

Henrietta knew the DNA of a bacterium contained hundreds of millions of nucleotides; that horses and humans had the humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges in common; that Mendel’s pea plants held all the secrets of genetics; she knew where Germany was. But instead of answering, she looked out across the road where only two days prior, she and Mrs. Miller had led the cows back into the pasture. That pleasure was already beginning to rot, and there was no way to reconstitute it into joy, not even through memory. She would have to find a new pleasure altogether.

Watching a dawning realization on her daughter’s face, Judith reached over to grasp her hand, but Henrietta jumped up from the swing, not slapping away her mother’s hands as they reached toward her and not casting a hateful glance over her shoulder, just leaving with the black notebook clutched to her chest. She let the front screen door slam behind her as she went into the house, going nowhere in particular, but very quickly.

“Henrietta,” her mother called, then gave chase, so the girl heard those staccato cracks on the wood floors, a sound that somehow seemed to perfectly match the woman herself. The sound caught her in the kitchen. Judith gripped her shoulders from behind and then, with real force, turned her around and pulled her to her body. The girl felt her shivering with a sorrow that came in little waves. Then Judith reached down and took her face tightly in her pale, skinny hands.

“Henrietta, this isn’t selfishness—”

“Please don’t go.”

“—it’s survival.”

“Stay,” Henrietta whispered.

Her mother’s eyes bored into her. “Can you even remember the good times?”

Henrietta’s mind fumbled for the right answer.

“See?” came her mother’s strained but triumphant whisper. “Neither can I.”

*   *   *

“Henrietta!”

“Henrietta!”

He found her slumping down the stairs from the attic, where she’d spent hours curled on an old linen-draped divan, surrounded by the boxed and labeled artifacts of her ancestors’ lives. They stank of mothballs and of lives extinguished.

His grip on her shoulders stopped her short. “Henrietta, have you been in the attic? I’ve been looking everywhere.”

She tried to look him in the face, but it was too much to bear. There was a strange, fresh exuberance there, something overly bright, a mania impelled by grief. It was like a door swinging open wildly on one hinge.

“Mom went away?” was all she could choke out. Downstairs, as if in affirmation, the tall clock chimed for two.

Now, Henrietta, see how you are swept against your father, the air crushed from your lungs? Head torqued to the side, you are confronted with a yellow wall and two portraits of men who bear your noble nose, the fine cut of your cheekbones, your eternal eyes. Every corner of the house is filled with the purpose of your father’s life. Which is … you … or a horse.

“Please make Mom stay,” Henrietta blurted.

“I can’t.” She felt his exhalation on the top of her head.

“Why not?”

It took him an eon to reply. “I take responsibility for this, Henrietta,” and once again with both hands to her shoulders, he drew back to peer into her wrenched face. “In so many respects, I chose poorly. I was so … It reminds me of something my father once said—a damaged beauty is the only kind of beauty capable of gratitude. But when I met your mother, I was too young and easily impressed by her … conformation to really understand the truth in what my father said. To be honest, I probably didn’t believe him.” He laughed wryly. “If I’d been wise like Boone … do you remember me telling you how Boone chose Rebecca?”

Now it was Henrietta who pulled away; she didn’t want a story, a history, a textbook.

Henry hooked a finger under the strong bone of her jaw and raised her chin. “When he decided to court her, he took her out to an orchard, where they could sit in the grass and get to know each other. While they sat there talking, Boone started to toss his knife into the ground, blade first. But this wasn’t just absent-minded fiddling. He was testing Rebecca to see how she would react. Again and again, he drove the knife into the ground closer and closer until it was in the fabric of her skirt and almost slicing her thigh. Rebecca saw what he was doing, but she didn’t run, she didn’t tell him to stop, she never even said a word. And that’s how Boone knew he had found the right woman. A woman who doesn’t flinch is one in a million.”

Henrietta stared straight at the pearl buttons on his shirt, bewildered and barely listening. I am a hybrid seed. A parent form has disappeared from the record. She tried to translate this into a configuration another person would understand. “I want my whole entire family,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“You and I are family,” Henry said with too much force. “Blood and treasure. Listen to me, Henrietta. I created this world with my own two hands, and I am going to leave it all to you—the acreage, the buildings, the horses, everything. It’s lying in trust for you, because you are my real family. And when you have children, all of this will be theirs in turn. Everything you need is already in this house.” That old music again, his dark, fathomless pupils a spinning record, playing the old refrain, playing It.

“Tell me your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s name,” he said, staring into her eyes.

“Daddy—”

“Tell me.”

“Samuel Forge.”

“Samuel Henry Forge and Edward Cooper Forge and Richmond Cooper Forge and William Iver Forge and Moses Cooper Forge and Jacob Ellison Forge and your grandfather, John Henry Forge, and me, Henry Forge. And now you. You. You—”

“I know,” she said to interrupt him, her mouth trembling. “But I’m a girl.”

“Well, then you won’t be like any other girl,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “I won’t let you.”

*   *   *

She needed a girl to stand behind her in the looking glass, to part her reddish hair down the middle and scrape it over her ears into a bun coiled through with black ribbon and covered with a square of black lace; to ease her grieving limbs into white cotton drawers and a long chemise; to snap her stockings into garters and cinch up a corset until it was too tight for her to draw breath, much less cry; to secure the caging crinoline; to tug over her head a dress of flat black, strangling at the neck but with sleeves like church bells; to slip her feet into black boots so she could totter here and there, tapping out unspoken grief on the plank floors in the long-lost code of broken women; but she didn’t have twenty yards of black Parisian cotton or a veil or a colored girl, and, alas, people would say this wasn’t a death, just a divorce, but they were all mistaken, because it was a difference of degree, not of kind. The pain was almost the same. And because she didn’t have that girl to rail against, to beat about the head and shoulders, because there was no one weaker, she flung her black bonnet against the walls of her mind and clattered about like a drunkard and wailed at the vaporous absent bitches hate sonofabitchspoilevilrottenfuckfuckniggers, because there was no one else around smaller and weaker than she was—

For example:

Class, what is the capital of Kentucky?

Frankfort.

And who works hardest for Kentucky’s economy?

Horses.

And who built our world-famous limestone fences?

Niggers.

Mrs. Garrett, after her face righted itself, spun Henrietta out of the classroom like a top, spun her round so quick she felt bile rising in her throat, standing there unsteady in the nauseating green hallway—green as a swimming pool—her head swooning back against the cool tiles as her teacher towered over her, leaning in so close that Henrietta could smell the tuna from lunch on her breath as she said, “There is only one appropriate word for a black person that begins with an n, and it has one g, not two. Young lady, do you understand what I’m saying?”

“A river in Africa?” the girl said.

Mrs. Garrett just stared at her for a moment with an anger so righteous and consuming, it was almost erotic, peering first into one pupil and then the other, as if trying to discover which eye was the source of this evil. She said, “First of all, the walls were built by Irish stonemasons. Second of all, if I had one black student, I’d be marching you back in there to apologize. But seeing as there are none, I’m sending you home straightaway, because I’ve had enough of your attitude. Believe me when I say that I’ll be speaking with your parents.”

“Incorrect usage,” Henrietta said.

“Excuse me, what did you say?”

“You used the plural instead of the singular. I’ll be speaking to your parents, Mrs. Garrett.” She was spun forthwith to the principal’s office, where her singular was called on the telephone, and then spun again out to the broad concrete steps of the school, where she rested dazed and relieved, like a prisoner suddenly released from years of hard, useless detail. She preferred to sit out here alone. Almost as soon as her mother had left, she’d decided that she would no longer tolerate humans, especially the barely bipedal variety by which she was surrounded: their relentless chatter, the strong smell of their bodies, their dumb games. She classified them far, far down in the family of tailless primates. School had long been a matter of sitting blandly for the duration, eyes locked on the proceedings with your mind flatlined, maybe rereading your textbooks for typos and collation errors. She’d begun to spend her time in the bathroom, picking at her nails or counting the holes in the pegboard ceiling there. She’d gone so frequently and stayed so long that Mrs. Garrett had finally called the farm with a concern that she needed to be examined. She was sent to a urologist at the University of Kentucky who, after numerous tests and return visits, was the first to simply ask why she went to the bathroom so often, to which she replied, “To be by myself.”

“Right, but you’re peeing a lot,” he said.

“No.”

“You’re not urinating?”

“No.”

“You’re going to the bathroom to be alone, but not to urinate?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus!” he’d snapped, and dropped his clipboard down on the examining table beside her, then rubbed his eyes for a long while without bothering to take his glasses off. “This is why I’m not a pediatrician,” he said through his hands. “I don’t speak childese.”

“Me neither,” she said. He took his hands away from his eyes and looked at her in consternation, and then, fifteen minutes later, her father was driving her home along Richmond Road, saying, “I don’t understand what just happened here,” and Henrietta said, “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Now she sat very still on the school steps, motionless as a dial casting time’s shadow. She was waiting for her remaining parent, her immediate genetic antecedent, the Forge who had forged her, but it was old Barlow who showed up in one of the rattling farm trucks—a white 250 with a toolbox in the bed, shedding farm chaff in a swarm as it braked before her. Barlow reached over and popped open the passenger door, his wizened face etched with concern.

“You sick, honeypie? Your daddy sent me up to fetch you.”

Henrietta just shook her head and crawled up beside him as he lit a cigarette and pulled out of the school’s drive. They were silent as they passed the glassed storefronts of Paris, the antebellum homes with American flags snapping smartly from porch roofs. Through the glass of the windshield, through the bitter brown lacework of the trees, the sun meted out an autumnal afternoon, weakening even as they watched.

She turned to Barlow. “Who built the stone fences?”

“Boy, um … the Irish, maybe? I think I heard that before.”

“Are you Irish?” she said.

“I don’t really know, darlin’, I’m just a country mutt.”

As they passed the courthouse, on the other side of the road, the familiar sight of three old black men on rickety metal chairs. They sat there every day shaded by their Kangol caps, cigars and folded newspapers in hand, paling of white hair on their cheeks. One glanced at her briefly as she passed, but in another instant, the dark round of his face was gone.

She turned a speculative and careful eye on Barlow. “Did you know n-i-g-g-e-r is a bad word?” she asked.

“You ever hear me say it?” said Barlow.

“No.”

“There you go. Guess I knew it then.”

“Yeah, but who decided that?” she pressed.

“God did…,” he said, flipping his cigarette butt out his open window. “God hath made of one blood all peoples of the earth.”

“There are four different kinds of blood,” she said. “It’s a medical fact.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”

She expected no further response, and she didn’t get one. Barlow just nodded with a considering face and drove easily beside her. He was a man who had stayed married forty years and raised four bullheaded boys by holding tight the gunnels and steadying the boat. He was content with his holdings and not inclined to fight.

They drove for a time behind a truck loaded with tawny, bundled tobacco, the cured and withered leaves making small, abrupt motions in the breeze like yellow hands waving. The flatbed turned into the low redbrick tobacco warehouse on East Main, where Henrietta could see, stacked and heaped in golden sheaves, the harvest prepared for auction. The dead plants were even more beautiful than plants in the field—crisp, sculptural, turned by curing to the brown of baked bread. For the first time in weeks, something stirred in her as she gazed at what had to be tobacco’s heaven.

“Why don’t we grow any tobacco?” she asked.

“Kinda slow out of the starting gate,” was Barlow’s dry reply as he rooted around in his breast pocket for another cigarette. As always, he got the small smile he was aiming for. But then Henrietta shifted wearily and Barlow turned to her and said, “You wanna tell old Barlow what happened at school today?” but she just shook her head, staring out the window.

As they pulled into their own drive, she said, “I hate school.” She stomped once on her book bag, where it lay in a heap on the floorboard of the truck, and she crossed her arms. Acid tears smarted her eyes.

Barlow cocked his head and said, “I liked it so much I stayed all the way to the eighth grade. Come on.” He eased out of the truck, careful on his feet, which were arthritic, a far cry from the day he first went to work on a farm as a spry ten-year-old boy Friday. But Henrietta remained where she was, watching him with a sullen expression. Barlow circled around to her side of the truck, unlatched her door, and drew it wide.

“Come on, honeypie,” he said.

“Carry me,” she said sullenly, laying her head back in a faint manner on the headrest.

“Huh—do what?” An eyebrow cocked with amusement.

“Carry me.”

“You’re too heavy—why, you’re practically a grown woman!” He laughed.

“I’m nine.”

“Well.”

“Carry me.” She pulled herself up by the plastic ceiling handle and stood balancing on her toes on the side of the runner, her face turned down to his, because he wasn’t very tall. “Come on,” she whined softly, and he made a mock roll of his eyes and shook his head, but said, “Fetch your satchel then.” She yanked it up in one hand, and Barlow gripped her under her skinny knees and shoulders and raised her up. She was lighter than a newborn foal. Henrietta wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. The expression of spoiled petulance on her face settled into something like sadness. She jostled against his chest with each step, and her book bag struck him lightly on the back a few times before she let it drop to the ground behind him. He didn’t notice. He just said, “You are one funny valentine.”

*   *   *

Of course Henry fielded the phone call, and of course it flung him into a rage, and of course his daughter came home with a hangdog droop and eyes like dull brads. What rage it aroused in him! This was his child—his child—the fruit of his loins, the hope of his age, the apple of his eye, and his own. She’d never been as much child as other children were, already possessed of a natural disregard. There was something aristocratic about her, and since her mother’s departure, she’d become even chillier and less soft. She broke the mold, and Henry knew it. She didn’t like the commonality of school, she didn’t like to mix. Her spirit didn’t rhyme with the spirit of lesser animals.

Hadn’t his own education, prior to his tutoring, been a waste? Even at Sewanee, he’d had to fight for the relevance of his education to his true life as a horseman. Formal education had always seemed a war of attrition designed to starve him of his own history and bring his culture to its knees. But the farm was a whole round world, and Henrietta was a product of that world—she’d one day take ownership of it. It was his bounden duty to reverse the effects of her miseducation.

He placed a hand on each slumping shoulder and said, “Look at me, Henrietta.” He noted the wrinkle of worry between her red brows, the lashes made by tears into little black spikes. He said, “Were they very hard on you today?”

She nodded once.

“Tell me who built our fences,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. Who built the stone fences?”

“The … Irish?”

“No, goddammit, our slaves. The impolite, inconvenient truth, but there it is.”

“I said a bad word.”

“You got a bad education! Consider yourself withdrawn.”

She reared back. “What?”

“Henrietta, you’ve suffered the misfortune of being born into an age of political correctness, when a polite lie is the truth, and the truth is anathema. The simple reality is what no one dares to say: Blacks are inferior and it’s always been that way. It’s a genetic reality. People police words to avoid grappling with reality.”

“Daddy, I don’t think—”

“Henrietta, listen to me. Consider this your first

Lesson

Is a horse a blank slate? Is each animal sprung from the forehead of Zeus? Is a foal a patented invention? No, the horse is a house we build from the finest materials of the previous generations. How can we accomplish this with any reliability? Because biology is destiny, that’s why. Gold from gold, and brass from brass. Secretariat wasn’t born from a hack and a knacker; he was from Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, winning horses from long and respectable lines. Secretariat never had the option to be slow. Speed and stamina are heritable. The animal bred true.

Oh, I can see the objection in your eyes that a horse isn’t a human. Fine. But the human is just as subject to his biology by fate. Now, I’m not going to bore you with the histories of the polygenists and craniometrists, but I will tell you that Morton’s skulls are a fact; the White brain is bigger than the Black brain. This should appeal to your little scientific mind. Just as musical skill and athletic prowess are inheritable, so is intelligence. How could it be otherwise? The average African IQ is 70; the average White is 100. And that’s a fact even the Marxists can’t avoid! You can find exceptions, but the exceptions don’t disprove the rule. And how did racial difference develop in the first place? Think about it, Henrietta. The human populations that headed north contended with difficult weather and living conditions that demanded the development of higher intelligence and organized societies in order to survive. Those left near the equator could get away with investing no attention in their innumerable children, and ignoring social development. The laxity of the elements created a species of indolence, and what no one will say out loud is that Blacks were decreed different by nature. The ascendance of certain races is, in fact, proof of the wisdom of nature. You don’t have to be a madman to acknowledge the obvious.

I’m going to tell you what my father told me: throughout the history of this country, we have saved an inferior people from themselves, and now that they’ve won everything they clamored for, they can’t manage their own freedoms. They’re the kings and queens of dissolution. They’re ruled by base instincts, but lasciviousness is so intrinsic to their nature, most don’t even see it as abnormal anymore. Look at our cities—Black women can’t keep their legs shut, and they’ve run the country down with their endlessly multiplying, uneducated spawn. They still live off the White man’s money, only now they don’t even have the protection they once enjoyed on a plantation or in a small town. They get to live like rats in their projects, because they don’t possess the genetic wherewithal to make anything productive of their lives. They’re seemingly incapable of the abstract thought required to plan for the future or even to detect a suitable mate. It’s not 1860, but rest assured, there still has to be a White man making sure they get enough to eat and that they have a roof over their heads. The reality is White men saved Black people in this country. They saved them from themselves.

The most painful irony is that Blacks clamored for a freedom that can never be. So long as they are bound to bodies bequeathed to them by their ancestors, they can never taste true freedom. They’re enslaved by their own materiality, and no White man anywhere has the power to free them from that.

*   *   *

Over her drowsy head, the daily war of morning ensued: dews rose, shrugging off their sleep and skimming briefly over the fields in the shifting dark. After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armored sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering, to earth’s antipodal edge. Now the lingering armies of dew turned to mist, mustering over the great house and muffling the voices of animals. The sun cast great handfuls of heated light, looting what was left of shadow, and the dew dispersed, not retreating toward night but fleeing in all directions.

Henrietta shambled down from the upstairs at six thirty, pouring the cup of coffee her father now allowed her to drink and turning into the study where he waited. There, the books were spread wide before him, so it appeared he had been sitting, waiting here for his student all night. He gestured toward the black Windsor chair beside the desk. Her education was under way:

They began with the classics, working through The Iliad for the third time in Henrietta’s life, and soon thereafter Xenophon and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; then science through the esotery of pedigree charts and animal husbandry and the variables of genetic inheritance; mathematics through word problems exploring the numerical influence of a mare if she appeared four times in a foal’s chart; but also by working with Beyer’s numbers, then the basics of handicapping. Anatomy was equine form, and soon she could parse the elastic maze of musculature, which through endless acts of flexion, extension, and adduction made the horse an animal of tremendous power and speed, and drew men to race it. History was the tale of the Greeks, their branched and ill-fated houses; and also the dynasties of speed and conformation—the lines of the Darley Arabian and his Eclipse, Sir Archie, Sir Gallahad III, War Admiral, Native Dancer, Danzig. The families branched and then their limbs curled back again to their source as bloodhorses were bred back into their own lines, so the families grew deep and redundant with inbreeding, their limbs twisted. For Henry, recalling his own earliest years in study, these recounted histories were so long and tangled; they became confused in his mind, all houses the names of myth, so the horses became indistinguishable from the Greeks and the Greeks from the horses, or the horses became attendant somehow to the fall of the houses, like night-bred furies saddled by fate and ferrying black messages from the gods to men and back again. He often confused their names and misspoke, but his daughter could intuit his meaning. Through it all Henrietta asked no questions, said no unnecessary words, eyes strict on the page, listening, absorbing, memorizing. The first four hours of the day were spent side by side in this manner, heads bent, poised between past and future. There were no breaks until her coffee dried in the mug’s white well, and then it was dinnertime. What she could not manage to learn in these four hours of the morning—what she did not learn of the rest of the world—she did not learn at all, and a year passed.

On many days, she shadowed her father on the grounds as he consulted with Barlow, called his bloodstock agent, his lawyers, read the Racing Form, and made his travel plans around the racing season. He sent her off with one of the female grooms, who taught her the duties of the broodmare barn, how to muck the stalls and change hay, how to lave the horses and pick their hooves, to detect when the mares turned temperamental in estrus. Henrietta often accompanied Henry to Keeneland to watch Forge horses in their early-morning workouts, the animals wheeling in and out of the cool mist, their breath blooming. The pair made an odd couple of railbirds: the man tall, thin, and talkative, the girl tall, thin, and quiet, both sipping coffee from paper cups. The girl held a silver stopwatch in her free hand and soon knew the horses by their gaits, the track speed by the report of hooves, the trainers by their curses, the jocks by the curve of their spines as they bowed over their mounts, and a year passed.

She took thrice-weekly riding lessons on the other side of Paris; this was something her father demanded. The other girls arrived with their hair scraped back into neat tails, their high boots shined to a gloss. Henrietta’s boots were caked with old, dry manure the color of mastic. She was deeply tan to the others’ schoolkept pallor. She lasted there only four months, by then a rider equal to her instructor, a seeming natural with no fear of the animal, but no discernible love either. She rode as though she were walking, the horse like the ground beneath her feet, and another year passed.

Only Henrietta’s nights were her own. During these hours, while lying in bed perusing the old books, she discovered the ultimate luxury, which was solitude. She tried her best to like the poetry that her father admired, but the Greeks bored her, and, besides, that was all part of her morning lessons. She tried the poems from an anthology she found and liked some, especially those that made no claims, strove for nothing but the revelation of a small, beautiful thing—a vase or a blackbird. But she read no novels, finding them a waste of time. She resisted how they worked on her, asking her to suffer on someone’s behalf. If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn’t speak with the limited tongue of sense. Her father taught her that.

What roused her to an almost pained interest, what caused her to copy down long passages into her notebooks and stay awake into the night, her mind running like a stallion on a track, was the mystery of the earth’s composition and all of its inhabitants. She devoured the books that had belonged to her great-great-in-aeternum-grandfathers—atlas volumes, topographical maps, weathered pamphlets from the Geological Survey, the tomes of Lamarck and Darwin and Lyell; also physiographic diagrams, strata illustrations, and expedition records, which together told the brute story of geology, how it grew continents and plant populations, gave them life and dug their graves. She slowly discerned that Kentucky was a strange and abundant place, half-mad with a restless and protean geology, secreted away under a cloak of limestone and swaying seas of timothy and bluegrass. She came to believe that the earth longed to be known. So she pressed one ear to the lip of its mouth, listening to tales that babbled up from its karsty throat, from jagged fissures in the sandstone hills, gurgling streambeds and salt licks. She learned how the primordial state had formed itself from the mystery of swirling sedimentary detritus under Paleozoic seas: sandstone out of inky silt and sand; clay and black shale from viscous mud that settled like a pitch lime on the Devonian beds before millennial tides rolled back and forth; also layers of friable igneous rock, bits of charred matter that traveled from the hot center of the earth; gravel and nameless shards scrabbled together into conglomerates; delicate, fluted shells forming sleek, packed limestone that made up the thickest strata, four hundred million years old and counting. Casket-gray and underscoring half the state, the preterite limestone founded the old Mississippian plateau with their faulted escarpments and the steep barrowing knobs, which Samuel Forge had spied as he stood with Ben at the verge of what would be Madison County, surveying the thin soils of the Outer Bluegrass, which was itself cinched tight by a belt of Eden Shale. It was in the core of the Bluegrass that limestone, sandstone, dolomite, and shale were pressed together like the layers of an earthen cake, until a massive upwarping formed the Cincinnati Arch, where the young, thin stones were soon eroded by ferocious winds, and the limestone found itself naked before the elements, runnelled and pocked by water until it had transformed itself into karst, a tumulous landscape of sinking streams, sinkholes, caves, and soil so wildly fecund that men lost their religion for a share. It was a rolling dreamscape, a heaven for the raising of crops and horses—better than the modest farmland of the Pennyroyal plains, the coalfields, and Western embayment, which sloped down to the alluvial foreshores of the Mississippi River.

In the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest mountains on earth, a different tale was told. There, organic matter had compressed into bituminous coal. Five hundred million years before Henrietta was born, those mountains extended all the way down into the extraterrestrial deserts of West Texas, pressed into being by the clashing of two young continents, which closed the Iapetus Ocean—an ocean so old it gave birth to the Atlantic—thrusting the abyssal plains and all their doomed marine life into the air like an offering for the gods. As the mountains rose and heaved and eroded, generations of saplings tumbled into the swamps, and hairy grasses too, seed coats, stamens, involute gondola leaves, chips of bark, white and chocolate roots, mosses mixed with stringy vines, hardy stamens, and even the gentle, primordial flower beds in the height of their flowerage fell too soon like the mayflies, dropping their leaves and tumbling into the self-heating morass, which, under the slurried sediment of Mesozoic seas, turned all the fallen vegetal world to rich, flammable peat. But the peat was covered and itself compressed and, with a mountain atop it, vanquishing its air, was tamped and starved into coal, thin, glossy, striate seams of carbon between dingy Pennsylvanian stones, thin, dark pages in a long, long book—

You can close a book, which she did. But then she would just lie there charged, apprehensive, electric, confused. She knew that men extracted coal and sometimes died in the mining. She wondered at their deaths. Was it childish to ask why? How many mountains had been uprooted to light a home like hers? And all the churches dotting the state? Fathers felled the world their children were supposed to live in, Tantalus eternally slaughtering his Pelops. Was it worth it? Was this farm worth it? Was the human nothing but a machine that extracted coal from the hills and horses from the fields? Civilization stood at the ready with its answers, but she bypassed those answers for a deeper, stranger question: What was the earth itself? This teeming, generative thing, which forced human life in a hothouse, only to turn that life like compost back into the soil. She was thirteen, but geological time was 4.6 billion years old. She had just gotten her period, only to discover there was nothing fixed in the geographical world. Even the poles moved. She discovered in her a deep, deep dread, but it wasn’t like a horse, you couldn’t just assign it a name. You had to discover its name. She suffered from the realization that others had been asking these questions long, long before her, but to no avail. The old books all agree: God is a terror.

*   *   *

On Valentine’s Day when she was thirteen, Henrietta saw her first mare bred.

That morning, Henry had called over to Claiborne and spoken with a manager. He said, “My mare is due to be covered on Thursday.”

“Yes, sir, we’ve got Hellcat on the books, and Big Red’s in good form.”

“I’d like to be there.”

“You’re welcome to bring her up, but—”

“I’d like to be in the shed.”

There was a polite and cursory silence on the line. “Mr. Forge, all due respect, we don’t permit owners in the breeding shed for safety reasons. I’m sure you understand. But everything will be videotaped, and you’ve got her insured to the hilt. You know we’ve got your interests in mind at all times.”

“Regardless, I’d like to be there, and I’d like to bring my daughter, who’s—”

“You— What? Your daughter?”

“My daughter is involved in our operation and I’d like—”

The curt laugh severed his sentence, followed by two words: “Mr. Forge.”

“If I can speak with Mr. Hancock, then—”

“Now, Mr. Forge.” The voice was louder, parental. “If you want to chat with Mr. Hancock, that’s fine. But I’m telling you right now you’ll get a no that’ll break the sound barrier. So let’s just get your mare up here to get her covered, and with a little luck and godspeed, we can meet your daughter at the Derby in three years’ time.”

Henrietta had never seen her father so angry, not even when her mother left. He was stiff-necked with fury when he steered her, one hard hand on her shoulder, out the kitchen door and toward their small black breeding shed, erected a quarter mile back from the broodmare barn.

“Where are we going?” she asked, craning her neck to see him, hot coffee splashing out onto the tender flesh of her hand.

His only answer was, “Those assholes have no right—no right—to tell me how to handle my own property, or what I should allow my daughter to see.”

“Who? Who did that?”

By way of answer, he drew up short and pulled her round, leaning abruptly at the waist so they stood eye to inherited eye. He tipped her chin up with one finger. “Breeding is the heart of this business and you are the heart of my operation,” he said. “You need to know how this business is run. I have no tolerance for these idiots and their ideas of what’s age-appropriate. I reject their shame—I reject it unequivocally. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she said, drawing back slightly.

“Henrietta, listen to me,” he said. “The sex act is an amoral action of the body designed by nature to perpetuate the species. It should be harnessed and controlled for that purpose, not because it’s shameful. It’s not morally different from shitting or eating. What’s perverse is our attachment of religious mores to a simple, biological act! Be very careful, Henrietta,” he said, suddenly straightening. “The world is trying to turn you into a stupid, conventional woman. Don’t let it happen.”

“Okay,” she said, bewildered, because she didn’t recognize this strange and lofty tone, John Henry having died a long time before she was born. But she did as she was told; in an instant she rejected this thing, this shame she knew nothing about. She wouldn’t become that woman. But a new thought occurred to her: “Daddy, why don’t you ever have a girlfriend?”

The question took Henry by surprise. He looked around him suddenly at the brisk morning, considering the question. “Most men throw away their sperm on inferior women. An orgasm is a cheap thing; you can get one for free.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “But a wise man harnesses his energies and expels them in a manner designed to improve his line, not dilute it. That’s how I got you. Your mother, for all her faults, was a damn fine piece of property.”

Henrietta stared at the ground in consternation. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I was reading about linebreeding, and I read that it can produce weak horses, that incest—”

Henry waved his hand, dismissing the thought. “They overstate the case. Yes, you sometimes produce a genetically weak animal from inbreeding and linebreeding, but there’s no surer way to hit the jackpot. Breeding a line back to its own line can produce the perfect horse—and that’s worth every risk.”

“Okay,” she said softly, her face flushed. “Evolution by artificial selection. Darwin on pigeons.” But in her deepest mind, she asked: Who are you?

In the barn, three grooms were waiting beside a large, thick-legged mare with an ass as broad as the stern of a boat and a tail that swished gently. The men barely looked up as Henry strode into the barn, but all reared back in a collective startle when they noticed Henrietta following behind, her ponytail swinging. One blond man named Jonathan, who held the shank of the mare, actually hauled himself up on the withers of the placid creature to gaze wide-eyed at Henrietta. He said, “What the hell?”

“Good morning, gentlemen.” Henry’s voice was brisk.

“What’s she doing here?” Jonathan demanded, pointing accusingly with one hand and coming around the horse now with the shank still gripped in his fist. The brown-eyed mare turned too, peering through the tangled mass of her cob as if to see to whom he referred.

“My daughter will be joining us this morning.”

One of the other grooms spoke up now—Henrietta knew him only by the name Sandy—ducking his curly red head in a tentative, preemptive apology, saying, “Yeah, I don’t know, Mr. Forge—”

“That’s dangerous!” Jonathan barked, and passed off the shank to the third, silent man standing nearby, who stared resolutely at the ground as the tension in the room rose. Jonathan came at Henry with a wash of wondering disbelief on his face. His gaze slashed briefly through Henrietta, who snugged up instinctively against her father’s side. But that thing—that shame—she rejected. Her chin jutted out.

“This is no place for a girl!” Jonathan said with open disgust. “It’s barely a place for a grown man! Jesus Christ, you can’t ask us to do this thing in front of a kid.” He stood there with his hands on his hips, staring up at her father in a way Henrietta had never seen another man do. For an instant, she couldn’t breathe, afraid the confrontation would come to blows, or, worse, that her father would step down.

But Henry stepped forward instead, his voice steely, low, and final: “If any man is uncomfortable with the situation, he can leave my employ. Now.”

There was a heavy, hateful silence in the barn. Henrietta sensed rather than saw the other two men look at each other for a very, very long moment, speaking to each other with their eyes in the manner of the long married. Jonathan continued to stare at Henry with such force that Henrietta thought she could detect the spidery red veins brightening on the sclera of his eye. Then he took a single step backward without once breaking his stare, peeled off his old gloves, rough as gunny, and tossed them onto the wood chips at Henry’s feet. Then he snatched the Forge Run cap off his head and flung it at the barn wall behind Henry’s head with such ferocity that her father flinched, and Henrietta stepped aside, her heart banging. Then he stalked out of the barn in the direction of the equipment shed without another word.

“Jonathan!” Sandy called after him, “Jonathan! Hey!” and the mare tried to turn again.

But Jonathan was gone, and as Henry walked in their direction, Sandy shook his head and said in a voice barely audible, “Oh, man.” The other groom just continued to stare at the floor, mute as the mare.

“Forget about him,” Henry said. “I expect you boys to do your job and that’s all. If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.” Sandy nodded twice, three times, but the other groom said nothing at all and just stood there with his lower lip sucked in and his brow wrinkled.

Henry took up the lead shank out of the man’s hand, saying, “I’ve got her. Now, Henrietta, I want you up against the barn wall, and be ready to run out of here if something goes wrong.”

“What goes wrong?” she said quickly.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said. “But Magic Man has never done this before. It’s a test run. Just be ready to run back to the house if he gets rough. He’ll be here any second.”

And he was. The enormous bay stallion rounded the wall of the breeding shed between his two handlers, his tremendous bulk eclipsing much of the early sunlight and casting the shed into abrupt shadow. As soon as the pliant musk of estrus reached his nostrils, he sank into his quarters, the muscles of his flanks trembling spasmodically, the phallus beginning to protrude from its sheath. His dished head traced small circles in the air as he eyed the mare. She, in turn, twisted away from the trammel of the lead shank to find him, her nostrils widening as her hooves danced on the tanbark floor. Henrietta pressed herself against the yellow padded wall. This is when the stallion handlers spotted her.

“What the fuck!” one of them said, and no apology followed on the curse.

The man nearest her turned now, craning his neck awkwardly, never unaware of the thirteen-hundred-pound hormonal creature barely managed at his side. He was a short, black-haired Irishman, maybe thirty. He rarely spoke, never smiled. He looked at her and his lips parted. “Jaysis,” he said softly. And then he did something she’d never seen him do before; he laughed. And his eyes glittered over her from top to toe with the brevity of a lightning strike before Magic Man cried and Henry said, “Don’t mind my daughter. Let’s get this done.”

“I can’t do this in front of a girl!” the other man said in an echo of Jonathan’s words, but when no response came and the horse moved forward between them, the matter was settled by necessity. Henry and the other men situated the mare before Magic Man as she began to chomp and jerk for the shank. But even as a handler tightened the twitch about her lips to wrench them up, forcing her into a churlish cry, her legs moved apart and her bright vulva pulsed like two clapping hands, as if she panged, despite rough handling, for the sire. Magic Man simply stood behind her, dancing in confusion. He crouched involuntarily again and again, but couldn’t manage the lurch, and he went nowhere.

Sandy laughed awkwardly, his red brows ridden up. “This fool”—a dismissive gesture at the awkward stallion—“he don’t know what end is … up.” His eyes cut briefly to Henrietta, who was staring directly at him, so he blushed with painful ferocity to the roots of his bright hair, and the other mare groom, the one who had not spoken at all, turned away completely now, so that all she could see was the blank wall of his back.

The black-haired Irishman said, “Come on, my boy, let’s get cracking—nowish,” and he smacked Magic Man once on the rear so the stallion reared high over the whinnying mare and took two steps, and because the Irishman guided his phallus with one hand, he managed to penetrate her. The underlying mare immediately stilled her irritations. The stallion thrust once, then again, but seemed to carom off her rear the second time, so he fell out on all four feet, shaking his head, his tongue protruding stupidly, his head wobbling at her side.

“Watch she doesn’t kick!” someone cried.

“She ain’t never kicked,” said Sandy in reply, though he’d made certain her ankles were padded heavily with blue tape.

“Ah, no, ah, no,” said the Irishman with another smack, and Magic Man stood again and remounted, and the men steadied him square on her back so he was rafted up over her properly, his neck bowed like a dark sea creature over a smaller boat. This time, the Irishman circled to the stallion’s rear and pushed heavily on his flanks with each massive thrust, so that the horse pressed boldly into her and bit savagely at her ears, while she accepted him placidly, braced on her sturdy legs. Then in a moment it was done. The stallion convulsed and his tail spun once. The mare hung her head and he rested his terrible, crushing weight on her back. He wound his neck against hers, rubbing and sniffing. He licked her half-drawn eyelid.

There was an embarrassed silence in the shed. Without a word, the handlers pulled on Magic Man, so he fell back from the mare onto firm ground again but stumbled awkwardly there, the handlers dancing back a pace to steady him. A great tremble reversed, like water flowing backward, from his shanks up the ridge of his back along the bow of the neck to his head. Even his lips shook as his head swung in an arc of surprise in the direction of the mare’s broad flanks. But she didn’t even look back. Henrietta saw how she shifted her weight, her body slow and easy, the stallion’s presence useless to her now—as good as forgotten. Sandy slipped the padding from her delicate ankles, and she tossed the hank of bang out of her eyes. Magic Man took a single step toward her, but his legs shook visibly, and his handlers again rushed in to cradle both sides of his wide belly in the event of a faint. When he settled, the lead shank drew him forcibly from the mare, and though he cried out once with a plaintive, bewildered whine, he went. The whole thing took three, maybe four minutes.

The silent mare groom checked the shank’s attachment, then managed to turn her toward the exit.

“That went nicely,” said Henry as he crossed to his daughter and wrapped a damp arm around her shoulder. “See what I told you? Nothing but mechanics.”

Sandy eyed the two of them, then sidewound to the wall and gathered up Jonathan’s gloves and cap, which still lay there. “If it goes all right…,” he said softly, as if to no one. Then he pressed his lips together.

Henry turned to him. “Tell Jonathan I don’t want to see him around here anymore. And that’s final.”

Sandy shrugged. “Okay.” He twisted the ball cap in his hand.

The other man, the one who had not yet spoken and was now leading the mare out, made a chuffing sound just shy of a laugh. They all looked at him. His words were said directly to Sandy but aimed elsewhere. “That boy won’t be around to tell it to twice. Trust me. He’s got three daughters.” Then he cleared his throat, stepped out of the shed, and led the mare into the unimpeded daylight of the early afternoon.

*   *   *

In her notebook Henrietta wrote:

Living bodies are machines programmed by genes that have survived. R. Dawkins

Life is synthetic. It gathers its raw materials from everything that has already existed.

There are maybe 8 million species. Homo sapiens have found and classified 1 percent.

can’t classify chaos

*   *   *

Just as the sexless card of girlhood was trumped by budding breasts and widening hips, just as the organism was to be overburdened by the arrival of the future and all its implications (menarche, coition, gravidity, parturition), Judith, in a moment of intuition, perhaps charged by memories of her own development and the bittersweet advance of adolescence, called for her daughter. It was time to go to Germany.

Henrietta would leave with Henry’s demands ringing in her ears—don’t become tiresome like your mother; remember that excellence is a habit of action—and ten pounds of books in her suitcase. She selected with care from the old library; there were two pamphlets from the Geological Survey, the dog-eared Bartram, Beagle, as well as the oldest copy of Seneca they possessed. When she held this last crumbling tome in her hand, marveling over the ragged sheer of its cut pages, her gaze fell upon the long black line of bound books. The ledgers. They extended from the Long Knives to the present day; her father still made notes in them. She drew one away from its neighbors, looking inside for evidence of a previous time etched in loping words on vellum. She glanced back at the library door as if caught in the act of … she didn’t know what, some venal thing. The ledgers contained mostly lists and mathematical figurings, and yet something about the names and figures, the uniformity of the books—their titleless secrecy—drew her private mind close round. She discovered on one page the draft of what looked like a will scrawled in a curly, filigreed script.

The page read:

Forge Will: 23 September, 1827

Appraisal of Estate of Edward Cooper Forge, aged 54 years

One negro Man named Yearlye, $900

One negro Boy named Denis, $600

One negro Man named Benjohn, $1000

One negro Man named Scipio, $1000

One negro woman named Prissey, $500

One negro girl named Senna, $350

One negro woman named Phebe, $300

One negro Boy named Adam, $700

One negro Boy named Akin, $700

One negro Boy named Corey, $700

One negro Man named Prince Sr., $400

One crippled negro girl named Tilla, $100

In event of wife Lessandra Dear Dixon’s good health, the negro woman Prissey shall be returned to Stowne Farm of Fayette County, Kentucky, site of birth, along with son, Scipio, and his increase.

In event of wife Lessandra Dear Dixon’s decease, the negro woman Prissey shall bequeath to Richmond Cooper Forge with son, Scipio, and his increase shall remain at Forge Farm.

Beneath the names on the page, the ledger listed furniture: a walnut secretary purchased in Lexington, as well as a Hepplewhite cherry cupboard from Nashville. Then the page ended midappraisal, and there was nothing on the back of the page when she turned it, only the shadowy stamp of the words in reverse. She made a hasty copy of the page in her notebook.

By then the heat of the thing was threatening to scorch her fingers. What to do with this remnant of another century still hot enough to burn? Put it away. Which is exactly what she did. The names, whispering repeatedly out of the flames, were dampered by the closing book and then the black ledger was returned to the shelf, where she would soon forget about it entirely, this page from the history her family had made.

*   *   *

The whole thing had cast Jamie Barlow into a blue mood of remembrance—close kin to melancholy, but not exactly the same thing. Good grooms leaving the farm, Big Red being put down, the girl off in some foreign place for almost three weeks like she was finally grown and gone away for good. Then Mr. Forge’s foul mood while she was away. But especially the horse’s death. It sank his boat a bit, poked a hole in it at least. And being in the airport too, that turned up things he’d not thought of in a long while, of all those times he flew with the horses, though he’d always preferred to drive them. Those turboprops made him kind of uneasy, he wanted a little more plane between him and the ground. And, anyhow, he liked staying up all night with a thermos of coffee and a road map, the trailer thumping along behind the dually, the horses swaying in their sleep, off to Saratoga or Churchill Downs or back to the farm or wherever. But today was his last day—who would have thought Big Red would sign off on the very same day? He didn’t know whether that was an omen or what. He hitched his jeans, sat in one of the plastic airport seats, eyed the arrivals from Cincinnati. He took his hat from his head but neglected to run his fingers through his hair, so it suckered to his skull except for a gray ring that sprung up in a wave all the way around. He sighed. When a horse like that passes on … when you see all the best things go before you do … well, there’s a selfish part of you that wants to go first. He thought of Deena and then those old eyes sought out a flock of young girls prancing by with their high behinds and their ponytails swinging. It was a good enough day to retire, but it was odd. Off the farm, fetching the girl and all, not even rubbing the horses, not stomping the dirt. Deena was going to pass before him. In a million years, he would not have thought that would be so. He had smoked a lot of years, also drank quite a bit when he was young. He shifted, rolled his eyes around once like they were sore in their sockets, moved his hat from the empty seat on his right to the empty seat on his left. Ovarian cancer wrapped around the colon, stage IV with six months to live, the doctor said, and she’d reached out, hand on the doctor’s forearm the way Jamie had seen her do a thousand times with the boys to keep them peaceable, and saying, “It must be very hard for you to have to tell people these things.” Well. All in all, he’d been lucky, really lucky. And luck was all it ever was. Of the four girls, he’d asked the one with the biggest tits to dance, and it just so happened she was plucky and smart—always had been smarter than him. Helped bring his reading up to speed, so he could take the high school equivalency test, which, actually, he never bothered to do. But that was no matter at all. You rub horses, what do you need tests for? He nodded his gray head in unwitting pantomime of conversation. He didn’t even particularly like horses, he was just good with them. When the McCourys took him in, they’d always said, Send the Barlow boy, he’s able with a hoss, he don’t need no saddle nor string, the hosses is sweet on him. And all that. But you didn’t have to like a horse, just be good to it. Same with people. Here he’d been working for Mr. Forge for twenty years and he couldn’t say he cared for him, he just worked for him, and if there was one thing a person could say about Barlow, he was true. Loyal like no coon dog you ever had. With a will to work and the strength of a wheel hoss. He didn’t need good pay and didn’t ask for it when he deserved it, nobody got it anyway. All he needed was some old routine he was good at. You liked it or you didn’t, sometimes it rained, sometimes it poured—either way, you worked. You went on home for the things you liked. He liked Deena. He’d been a rough boy, he’d put sin to shame, and that was the truth. His parents had made him that way and that wasn’t an excuse the way young people always liked to make excuses nowadays, that was just the God’s honest truth. But Deena had changed him. He would have been ashamed to cuss or act big in front of her, the way he’d done before. At first he could barely say a word in her presence, just trying to refigure how to be, like learning to toddle and walk all over again, so he let her take the lead. Because he knew this: a good woman was sure to rub her goodness off on you if you let her, but there wasn’t enough angels in heaven to protect you if you rubbed your badness off on her. She’d turn it on you, she’d take up what was left of your own life and beat you with it, and an angry woman could do a sight more damage than any angry man he’d ever met. They used psychology on you. Deena had also brought him to Jesus, or at least in the vicinity, and made him want to learn and to be better and kind of chipper in his way. It got so he sometimes thought he’d always been good, always looked on the bright side, but no, that was her. And tough enough too. Here was a woman that got thrown from a horse onto her side and all she said was, “No, no, I’m all right, just let me soak in Epsom salts!” She’d refused to go to the doctor. She walked into the house on his arm and got all sunk down in the tub and it wasn’t until she passed out in the water that he finally took her to the hospital, where they said her leg was broken in two places. She wasn’t a crier, not really, not the sentimental type, though she was warm. It was Barlow who was the crier. Except when Deena went through the change, when she skipped her first month, she’d cried then. Four boys survived to be good men, religious men—except for one hellraiser just now in the process of coming around—and here she was crying, because she never got a girl of her own to raise up. She’d said some hard things that day, things that he would probably never forget. But she was a good person. He laced his sunspotted hands over his belly, closed his eyes. He thought of her on that long-ago day at the dance in her blue skirt and white blouse. Deena in the blue skirt and the white blouse was pretty much the chorus of his life. He recalled the little sweat stains he saw when he twirled her, how hard that had turned his dial. Someone had said once that you wanted a girl who could get good and wet and he’d had no idea what that meant at the time, he’d been so ignorant, but when he saw those stains under her arms, he went a little crazy on the inside. They sparked off each other the whole night at that dance. She wouldn’t let him do it to her until they were engaged, but when she’d finally let him, Lord, he’d taken no prisoners that night. Like a dog on a bone, he worked every angle he could think of. At one point, there had been so many arms and legs and whatnots pointing in so many different directions, it seemed like there were more than two people in that bed. “What are you trying to do to me?” she’d said, and she had laughed at him, and though a woman’s laugh could wreck a man, it wasn’t like that. Deena laughing was a good thing. It meant you were on your way, and sure enough, they were.

Barlow looked up, found the arrivals sign, checked his watch again. He stood now, but he didn’t spring up; he weighted his knees first before his hips followed and his chest found its center. It was time to retire, whether or not Deena was ill. His arthritis was a misery.

He saw the girl then; she emerged from the tunnel gripping a backpack and a yellow blanket he’d not seen before, something she must have got from a stewardess on the plane. He watched how she scanned the crowd of people, and realized she was a lot skinnier now than she’d been when she left, just skin and bone. Everyone passed her as she stood there like a lone rock in a stream. She would be looking for Mr. Forge, he thought, so he raised one arm, the arm that wouldn’t open all the way anymore after it took a kick, and she saw him and for a second looked disappointed, and old as he was, about-to-retire-seen-it-all-tried-it-all-survived-it-all as he was, it hurt his feelings just a little bit. He had to smile at himself and when she saw him smile, she half ran to him and stood before him, looking like the mostly grown thing that she was, though still curveless as a boy and probably always would be, poor thing, and she tucked her chin and leaned her head into his chest. She didn’t hug anybody full body anymore. It was a mystifying and sad thing to watch little girls grow up.

“Hey, darlin’,” he said.

“Hi.” She gazed up into his face. “Your hair looks funny. Where’s Daddy?”

“Well, he planned on picking you up, but … he’s kinda under the weather.” He looked over her head as he ran his fingers through his hair and he saw the open mouth of the tunnel that led back to the plane, thought maybe there was a chance he would never be on a plane again. It wasn’t the worst thing he could think of.

“Is he sick?”

“Well, no, he ain’t ill exactly. He’s in a foul mood is all. He got some bad news. Everybody got some bad news today.” He didn’t say that he’d seen Mr. Forge blow up, or tell her some of the things he’d said, the whole emotion of the business embarrassed him when you got right down to it. But maybe he just couldn’t understand, maybe he just never cared for horses that way, what did he know? He was a pretty simple guy.

“What bad news?”

“Big Red expired today—Secretariat expired.”

Henrietta’s eyes grew wide. “What? How?” The horse had only been nineteen.

“Laminitis. It just started to rot up his leg and they had to put him down today.”

“Oh shit,” she said.

“Well, no need for slang,” he said. Then: “Yeah, he made a real good horse with that one.” He was undertalking, of course; the horse had been the best thing he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d seen some marvelous horseflesh in his time.

She said, “I guess Daddy’s really upset?”

“Aw, kind of. He’ll be fine. Thought I’d better pick you up, though.” He smiled.

She sighed then, and he patted her on the shoulder. They made their way to the baggage claim and they were standing side by side when she said, suddenly, “I guess it’s a good thing Hellcat’s pregnant.”

“Suppose so.”

“But what if it’s a filly? Daddy’s praying for a colt.”

“Well,” said Barlow, and then he said something he wouldn’t normally have ever said, seeing as it might read as criticism. “Your daddy ought not to pray for a thing like that. With people sick and dying and all. You ought to be happy with whatever life gives you.” But then he thought immediately of Deena, of her crying on that day fifteen days ago, and he thought, Well, I’m probably wrong, you also ought not to cast stones at your employer, even if it is your last day on the job.

“Daddy has to have a colt,” Henrietta insisted. “If he doesn’t, he’ll never leave me alone about it.”

“How come’s that?”

“Oh,” she said, “when Daddy gets worked up, he gets mad if I spend too much time away from him. You know, taking walks and reading science stuff or whatever.”

“Well, it’s your life,” Barlow said suddenly before he could stop himself, his tongue apparently just doing whatever it wanted today.

“I guess…,” Henrietta said slowly.

“Honey, you just go on and do what you want. You can grow on up to be anything you want to be.” Now he actually laughed out loud for a moment, and then he coughed so that she turned to watch him strangely. Lord Jesus, he thought, shut my mouth. Barlow the evangelist. I’m getting old and sassy. Time to retire, indeed.

“I’m like Zeno’s arrow,” she said.

“You’re too smart for me,” Barlow said, shaking his head, and then the older man put his arm around her and looked as though he were helping this younger girl through the airport to the truck, as if she were the doddering one with the ruined hips and knees and not he.

As they left the airport, they both gazed out at Keeneland as they passed, at the vast green pastures, the tracks, the fences, the shattering blue of the sky overhead. Cars streamed from the acreage following the afternoon races.

“I’m missing the fall meet,” Henrietta said, but Barlow didn’t reply, concentrating on reaching 64 to avoid the city, the traffic, and all the changes that had occurred there in his lifetime, things he didn’t care to see today. He cleared his throat, pictured again that big, beautiful red horse, dead now, and then shook his head. He was like a fish today, like a fish that kept getting reeled back in. He’d get cleaned and cooked soon enough.

The girl beside him closed her eyes and seemed to sleep and he looked over at her occasionally and he thought kind thoughts about her and he drove her most of the way home in silence.

When they reached the farside outskirts of Paris, she yawned and stretched and opened her eyes.

Old Barlow said, “I ever tell you about the best night of my life?”

“I don’t think so.” She yawned again.

“Well,” he said, and he paused, because the onset of the memory felt good. And also because he thought, Well, my wedding night ought to have been the best night of my life or the births of the boys, and those were almost the best, but this was really the best, and that was just the truth. “Well,” he said, “when I was about your age, I was still living with the McCourys, they raised me up. My folks weren’t dead, but the McCourys raised me. Kind of complicated, but never mind that. Anyhow, one night, one summer night, they had to get thirty head of cattle to Mount Sterling to sell at the market there. They lived just a couple miles from your all’s place. So me and one of the older boys, we saddled up two horses—they had quarter horses—and we drove that thirty head of beef to Mount Sterling. It took us from just after sundown till morning.” Then Barlow paused.

“Did something fun happen?” Henrietta said.

He looked over at her in surprise and slowed just slightly, downshifting as he tried to think. It sounded like almost nothing when he put words to it. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I guess what I’m saying is … Well, the moon was pretty full, so it was light and it was the summertime, so it felt pretty nice out. And those cattle didn’t give us any trouble at all. The other boy rode along the middle and I brought up the rear and we ran them right up the middle of the road. Nobody passed us the whole night. I guess it was kind of like breaking the rules. It felt pretty good.”

“Did somebody pick you up when you got there?” Henrietta asked politely.

“Nope, I guess we just rode on back. It didn’t take too long without the cattle.”

“You must have been tired.”

“I suppose so. I don’t really remember that part.”

They were pulling into the drive, and he was downshifting in earnest now and the horses were gazing at them and old Barlow thought, here I come for the last time. He looked over the spread of the farm, where he had spent the last twenty years of his adult life. Now he would go home to his wife, who was passing.

“Oh,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head and said nothing. Then when his eyes cleared, he saw Henry standing in the door of the el porch, holding a glass of what looked like bourbon or iced tea in his hand, and he wasn’t doing a thing but standing there on the porch, but an odd thing happened. Old Barlow’s stomach suddenly twisted up, and he suffered such a pained sense of misgiving, one that was so strong and so foreign to him that he would tell his wife of it later and she would say, “Maybe Jesus wanted you to say something to that poor little girl.”

He stopped the truck abruptly, far shy of its destination beside the el porch. It stuttered on the idle. He didn’t turn to Henrietta; his eyes were locked on the figure of her father, and it was true, something else seemed to have his tongue, something had had it all day, he couldn’t own it anymore, he felt like crying. “How old are you, Henrietta?”

“Almost fourteen.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s almost grown. It’s old enough to have a boyfriend.”

“Okay,” she said quietly.

He said, “Plenty old to start thinking about what you want. Someday you’ll have a family.”

Growing embarrassed, she shifted. “But what if I don’t want to have a family?” she said.

Now he turned and looked at her and she was amazed to see tears in his eyes. “Sometimes…,” he said, “sometimes you don’t even want the thing that you got to have in this life. That you absolutely for the sake of everything got to have. And only from the other side, you see it saved you. You get me?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Well,” he sighed, and laughed suddenly, and it was as if he were clearing cobwebs away from the tiny room of their conversation. “Yeah, I reckon not. I don’t know I get me either. I’m having a funny day. It’s my retiring day.”

“Your what? You’re retiring? You’re going away?”

“Yeah. I’m going home to my wife. Just the other side of Paris, though. Almost to Middleburg.”

“Oh.” Henrietta looked down at her lap. She too felt the stare of her father from the porch and when she looked up, his posture had not changed—his lean against the porch frame remained exactly the same—but his body was angry, somehow she knew that.

“Barlow,” she said, “can I come visit you?”

“Honeypie, you can come visit old Barlow and Deena anytime you want.”

She leaned over then. She pressed her lips to his old cheek, and the wrinkles felt like old leather against the soft skin of her lips.

“Daddy’s waiting,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess he is.”

*   *   *

She tried to hold herself apart, though she hadn’t seen him in nearly a month. She didn’t know why. She thought it was because he was angry.

He said, “You go away and, I swear to God, the world falls apart.”

She stared up at him, into the blistering reproval of his face. It almost snatched her breath away, the flush of emotion she saw there like a port-wine stain covering his too-familiar face. She could only whisper, “It’s not my fault Secretariat died.”

“I didn’t say it was your fault,” he snapped.

“Then why are you blaming me?”

“Why three weeks away and not a year? Three years! Anything Judith says—”

“Well, Mother wanted … But you agreed!”

“I never agreed! Your mother thinks she can just—”

Now she looked through him, her ears blunting his words, the tiny whorls cinched tight. Mute, stony, intransigent, cold, stonewalling. For the first time ever, he was refused entry, and he saw the change, the quiet mutiny, and it shocked him.

“Henrietta,” he said, and he reached out and grabbed the girl by the shoulders and pulled her to him. As soon as he touched her, she felt against her will just how long she’d been gone, and she hugged him back as if she would break him and was overcome with homesickness, though now she was finally home. Home at last. She did not look up, did not look down, but her face was pressed directly into his chest so that she could not breathe, feeling his hands against her back like irons. When he was like this, when his face was like this, she’d rather be against him than gazing upon him. But eventually she had to breathe and she turned her face up. He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, and his lips were parted and her lips were parted too, because she was dying for air.

*   *   *

Child, it’s simple, really, in the broad, inexorable scheme of biological diversity, and its oft-assumed corollary the pursuit of perfection: blame the isolating trait. The Forges, once a distinct subspecies, are quickly becoming a closed gene pool with a natural history all their own. You didn’t ask to be a part of this taxonomic unit, yet here you are, little redheaded rosebud, ransacked Ruffian, Daddy’s little girl. Once upon a time you might have interbred with another subspecies, meandering from the fold, discovering the strange scents of bodies on the verge of a foreign range. But bred long enough, a subspecies becomes a species in its own right, possessed of its distinct mark, the isolating trait. Soon you will begin to emit a sour smell; soon the other animals will recognize your difference, show you their tails, and race away. But don’t blame your father, even if he is the author of your isolation; he too is a reservoir of genes he didn’t request. He too is a machine designed for survival.

“Henrietta!”

She was not asleep, had not even closed her eyes, and she was moving the moment he called her name, rising even as the word was echoing down the halls. She slipped down the back stairs with her sheets clenched around her like pale cerements, her face drained of color.

He was in the back study, his tan face perfectly calm. He was the same, always the same, his face like a banquet table all grandly arrayed, full of every good thing. She wondered for a moment whether she was mad, her memory faulty.

“Come here, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for the right time and now is that time … I want to show you what’s going to be yours—now that your mother has decided to consort with a German Jew.”

Henry began sorting through the stacks of files and paper on his desk, tugging out a few documents and handing them in her direction. She took her future in her hands just as the heaters kicked on with a monitory rattle. The house breathed in her stead.

“Is this your will?” The calm sound of her voice surprised her. It seemed to come from a distance, from a body other than her own.

He looked up at her over the silver rim of his reading glasses. “In a few years, when you turn eighteen, I’ll revise the will and you’ll be named my sole heir in the event of my death. You’ll have power of attorney if I were ever to become disabled. And these,” he said, reaching for another file, “are current copies of the insurance paperwork for the horses.”

There were policies for mortality, prospective foal and first season infertility cover paperwork, fire/lightning and transportation insurance, general liability. The premiums ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 each. She calculated the number of mares, stallions, and foals on the farm.

“You have to pay this every year?” she said quietly, stunned.

“That’s only the first half,” he said. “This is the house.”

The stack of papers he handed her was as thick as a dictionary and just as heavy. She had to rest it on the leather top of the desk, which she discovered, as she began to flip through the documents, was made in seventeenth-century Italy of mahogany with secondary veneered rosettes in the shape of pinwheels across its front apron, its appraisal value $150,000. She’d never even looked at it before, not really.

“The leather has been replaced, and that’s impacted the value. But it’s an unusual piece for the house. Almost everything we have is American and English,” he said.

She read on. Here was the leggy chest of drawers in her bedroom, beneath which she had once played as a toddler, no longer a toy but a mahogany highboy of Boston provenance, worth $20,000 at the time of its appraisal eight years prior, worn jeans and underwear now stuffed to overflowing in its drawers. Her bedside table from the 1780s, New Haven. She flipped through the pages of abundance, of surfeit, that reached into every corner of the house, so that the sideboards—all six—were found not just in the dining room but in the hallways upstairs, one even in a guest bedroom, where it housed linens in its burled drawers, plus a dozen old Boston piecrust tables in various rooms, six more beds than people, Georgian secretaries and Regency chairs, lyre tables, mahogany-veneered butler’s desks, a Sheraton chest of drawers with carved acanthus leaf columns and turned leonine feet, there were Empire lounges with velvet upholstery, two she had not ever lain on because they were in the attic, alabaster lamps, black marble lamps, a thousand first editions in the two libraries, Wedgwood pottery, mirrors from Philadelphia and London, claw-footed tubs, English brass flowerpots, three sets of Spode china, none used in her lifetime, and four Kentucky sugar chests, together worth over $40,000. Four sugar chests? Her mind balked. She could only think of the one in the living room with Nelson County bourbons tucked into its planed wells. She had no idea where in the great expanse of the house the others might be. Her eyes had overlooked them, overlooked all of this, because they had simply always been here like the lay of the land or the fact of her father.

Henry was watching her carefully as she read, watching the mysterious, obscure movements of her face. “This is your inheritance,” he said carefully. “I’ve saved this for you. I was aggressive with the investments and reversed the retrenchment of my father. Our money dates from at least the Revolution. It’s survived five wars and untold market crashes. I hope I’m making clear the kind of obligation you’ll be taking on. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said in a whisper.

“Henrietta, sometimes what looks like a big risk is actually controlled usage,” he said. “It’s what I’ve striven for all my life. Orient all your internal resources to amplify your external resources. You walk the tipping point between disaster and perfection. Everything—I mean everything—is used for a greater purpose. Do you understand?”

But this time Henrietta was looking down at a page again, her eyes widening. She said, “Oh my God.”

The old print of two blue birds—had she ever imagined its worth? She turned and walked from the room, rushing through the hall, where she became suddenly and sharply aware of the ivory-inlaid sideboards, the sconces twinkling like unlit, dusky brown diamonds, the Aubusson runners damping the sounds of her passage to the parlor, so she was indistinguishable to the ear from any Forge who had come before. She felt her way to the light switch and, when she flipped it, realized how it brought to life a half dozen lamps and sconces simultaneously, so the room was bathed in the rosy ambient haze of a constructed evening. The parlor was perfection, curated like a museum, its complexity distilled and severely fine. She stopped before the print, where it had hung over the burgundy davenport for as long as she could remember. Columbia jays perched on a dead branch, both heads downcast in naïve ignorance of their own charm, oblivious to their dark martial crests and blue velvet coattails. The beauty of their blue pained the eye. Had the painter copied this pair from life or from death? Perhaps he had killed the birds for his picture. That sort of thing was done sometimes; people killed the very thing they professed to love. And maybe, just maybe—though Henrietta would only think this many years later, when she was pregnant with her child—the painter had imagined his own creation to be more beautiful than creation as he found it. Why, she thought now, could no one leave a thing alone?

“I found this in Philadelphia for twenty-five thousand dollars. First edition. A Kentucky original belongs in Kentucky, don’t you think?”

She didn’t turn, only felt the smallness of the two of them in the overriding catholic luxury of the house.

“This is yours,” he said again, and then she turned and, perhaps for the first time, really looked at him.

*   *   *

In her notebook she wrote:

You think you’re so smart, but you’re wrong. You’re antediluvian. You’re proud to be a Megatherium but, Father, a dinosaur is still a dinosaur. You’re propagating the wrong memes, and the wrong ones parasitize the mind as well as the right ones.

—“Race” is a word, and someone made up the word. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is also a word.

—Racial categories are inconsistent, because what they measure is inconsistent. What’s inconsistent isn’t really real in any categorical sense.

—See, traits don’t have distinct boundaries. There are gradations of every trait, including skin tone. Genes flow the way a glacier melts. Slowly.

—Racial groups aren’t homogenous at all; 85 percent of variation occurs within any ethnic group.

—IQ? Men and women have different cranial capacities with no correlating IQ difference. Everybody’s known this forever.

—The anthropologists beat the eugenicists a long time ago. Supposedly immutable traits are malleable under the forces of environment. “Genes have given away most of their sovereignty.” E. O. Wilson

—Difference is real, but the issue isn’t racial difference. We’re talking about tiny genetic differences created by transmutation under the limits of geography and climate. The limits change constantly, so the descriptors change constantly. Agassiz actually called blacks and whites separate species! Static definitions aren’t useful.

Father, did you know they used to think there were only two kingdoms of life? Plantae and Animalia. They actually reduced the whole wide world to two. Then it started to look more complicated, and they decided there should be five kingdoms. They split Plantae into three additional groups: Monera, so bacteria and algae were together, Protista for eukaryotes, and another for the Fungi.

They used to think the big divisions occurred only between the higher plants and animals and everything else. But the closer you look, the more you see that big divisions occur between every two beings. It’s an ontogeny/phylogeny problem. There are visible differences, but even more we can’t see down at the chromosomal level, and every new life contains mutations—so the potential is always there for more. There should be 6 billion kingdoms on earth.

*   *   *

Two weeks after she returned from Germany she gave herself to the Irishman, and he took her. She didn’t have to do much to make it happen. She simply followed him around the broodmare barn and gazed at him unblinkingly until he couldn’t help but notice, and finally he curled his finger at her, and she followed him around a corner into the feed room. He kissed her breasts a little, told her she had a good body, and then lay down on her and did it to her that way. She said nothing at all. He lay on her afterward, bent awkwardly at the waist with his jeans pooled foolishly around his work boots, and then he had smiled at her—only the second smile she had ever seen on his face. But she recoiled from that smile. She was already renovating the act in her mind—how it could be different, better, how she wouldn’t let anyone do it to her quite like that again. And she didn’t. When the Irishman came to her the next time with his knowing grin and his game eyes, she stared right through him and began to walk away, and when he caught at her sleeve, she said, without explanation, “Just leave me alone.”

She tried it with other grooms, the ones who did not shy away from the unexpected advances of their employer’s underage daughter. The few who accepted seemed doubly aroused by their own illicit desire and fear. These were the ones she had to battle against—they tried to pin her under their demanding, oblivious weight—to climb atop. She figured out quickly to take what she could get, because these men would offer her no pleasure of their own accord. She had no way of knowing that these men were the least worth having, the gates of their inhibition irreparably broken, any native compassion trampled by baser instincts. She didn’t know how to want something better. Nothing mattered beyond the landscape of their hard, alien bodies, which she slid over, around. When she moved on them like that, she discovered that the old way of making herself feel good could be moved inward to some dark place that no one could see and no one had ever named for her. What had been up front and tinny and immediate was now shuddering and agonizingly deep. A birthing in. It was the only thing that was hers alone and it required no thought, and so she became addicted to it. But she had to have a man to do it. She had to have a man to bear down on.

*   *   *

She dutifully called her mother every other Sunday. When Judith picked up the receiver, before Henrietta could say anything more than “It’s me,” her mother would burst into tears in a manner uncharacteristic but increasingly frequent. Her voice was urgent across the transcontinental air, the trackless air.

Judith: Oh, Henrietta, was I wrong to leave? Tell me your father’s good to you.

Henrietta: I guess.

Judith: You guess? God, he better be. Sometimes I feel I should have fought for custody, but I never could have won against him. Sometimes I …

Henrietta: What?

Judith: I—I don’t know … I don’t know what I think. I guess I … it just seems like men aren’t interested in knowing women. Even the decent ones. Everything is lonely after the excitement. Do you ever get lonely?

Henrietta: Not really.

Oh, Mommy …

Judith: Even though I’m not there?

Henrietta: No. I have Daddy. I guess I miss old Barlow.

Judith: Oh.

Henrietta: Don’t cry, Mother.

Mommy, there’s nothing here at all.

Judith: It’s just … Why do you have to lose everything to understand just a little? I feel so powerless, like nothing ever really changes. You just trade one thing for the next thing, and it ends up being exactly the same thing. Whatever you do, Henrietta, don’t grow up. I swear, they’ve rigged the whole game so women can’t win. I don’t know why they hate us so much.

Henrietta: I don’t think I get to choose anything, Mom.

Judith: I wish you didn’t know that yet.

Henrietta: Can’t you come back?

Judith: Do you know I love you even though I’m all the way over here?

Then why did you leave me in this black breach?

Henrietta: I have to go now.

There are people ahead of us and people behind us, but there’s no one else at all in the breach.

Judith: Oh, honey. They should have named me Regret, just like the goddamn horse.

*   *   *

She withdrew from the house and began to take long walks to be away from people. She wandered down the road past the Miller property where the curious, bellwethering cows streamed in her direction, following until they could follow no further, stopped short by the perimeter fencing. A coal-eyed, affectless crowd. She wondered what they would say to her if they could open their closed throats, what they would ask.

She discovered that 150 acres had been placed on the market a mile down the road. The property boasted two creeks and a white mansion on a slight rise of land like a white pillar on a plinth, near analog to the Forge land, though this house was even grander, and the land did not depress to a bowl behind the house. The family had left for Florida without waiting for a buyer. In their wake, winter had come. Every morning she hiked up the driveway, huffing frigid air in her exertions until she made her way to a frosted wall at the rear of the mansion where she could spy through the windows the gleaming glassed cabinetry of a white kitchen with its white tiles, where dusty boot marks remained from the movers who had last walked there. She would lean against the outside wall, pull her woolen hat low over her ears, stuff her winter-crimsoned hands into her parka pockets. Then, perfectly still in the freeze, she paid the land mind. The old pastures were deadened by winter—she liked that the season had no scruples, it swept out most of the life to be found there, leaving only spare, hardy, scavenging birds and some winter hares that foraged. The spent grasses waved, and the sky impoverished of clouds sent cold, furious, wasted breezes, far colder than the resting air, to toss the weeds, which were brittle and arthritic. Some days they appeared candied with light snow. She could remain a long time against that frozen wall, not moving, part of the motionless winter statuary that included the stolid trees, the black fencing now white, and the barns, only closing her eyes when the winds came in a flurry. Many hours would be spent in this manner.

But by late April, the “For Sale” sign had been taken down, and one of the abandoned pastures had sprung up a mass of rye as tall as her hips. Still there were no people to be seen. She went wading into the pastures and was soon wet with dew, as wet as a wader in the sea. With her jeans heavy and suckered to her thighs, she could watch morning rise. The fringed rye shook and shimmied, its braided feather tips strung with beads of lit dew glazed white like the hides of those long-gone winter hares. The sky conducted, its windy arms swept low as waves of rye moved in a rustling choral. At this particular hour between first light and the sun’s emergence, the birds didn’t sing, they screamed for morning, as if the wait itself did some kind of violence to them. Then when the sun began to grow a crescent on the horizon, the birds were calm and easy again and began to call for mates now that the first matter, the matter of survival, was settled. The world was renewing itself and it sustained the birds with their small fears and sustained the girl who stood motionless, chilled to the bone and watchful.

Then one morning Henrietta arrived in the early hours to find two white SUVs parked in the driveway of the mansion behind a moving van. And two days later, when she chanced by with her father, she saw that the front paddocks had been mowed and horses installed, horses that turned to watch with dark, extinguished eyes as she passed.

*   *   *

On a mild winter night in 1990, Hellcat gave birth to a foal. It was not a colt but a gentle, bug-eyed filly that Henry, in his initial disappointment, could not bring himself to name. Henrietta called her Seconds Flat, in honor of her sire, Secretariat, and, hopefully—pray gods and goddesses—her propulsive, thundering, unbeatable speed.

*   *   *

The life of the racehorse unfolds: first there is the bright newness of the suckling, all dawn-eyed and gawky with legs too long for the body. Seconds Flat was even more awkward than most, her legs just brown crutches she stumbled upon, suggesting a height she would not ultimately deliver. As a weanling, she was still tethered to Hellcat, but haltered and handled now and beginning to explore the limits of her paddock. In the blink of a breeder’s eye, she was turned out in a fresh field with the other motherless foals, skittish and afraid, tracing bereft circles in the grass and gentling to human hands, turning yearling under the watchful eye of her handlers, settling into tender legs and attaining slowly a hint of the conformation of her sire. She was still small with a lady’s legs and a trimmer waist, but possessed his sharp head, the same steely, intelligent eyes, and a haughtiness that made her bite. The grooms knew to be wary of her, and when, as an eighteen-month-old, she was shipped to a trainer’s farm to begin the process of saddling and bridling, they remained circumspect, careful. One man forgot and nearly lost two fingers, but he never forgot again. Her life in training there was a regular one—a pattern of feed and water and stall work, walking in circles, learning to bear the saddle pad and the corset of the surcingle. She snapped and whined when a man lay like a sack across her back for the first time. She fought against the bit as well but ultimately took it, and when the saddle came again, this time with a man atop it, she bucked, emitted a piercing cry that made the other horses dance with anxiety, but then took that too, as they all would, each in their turn. They were broken now and learning to canter on the outdoor track, then jogging singly, sprinting in packs, and the filly began to show the long reach of her inheritance—the balance, self-assurance, stamina accruing like money in the bank.

The second year in a Thoroughbred’s life, the watershed year, begins quietly. Seconds Flat was released to pasture to gain weight. The stem of her neck elongated, the buds of her eyes brightened, then she surprised them all by not growing taller but filling out with a sprinter’s cabbagey, bunched muscles. As the weather turned and her winter coat began to shed, she returned to the track for conditioning. She galloped hobby-horse miles and dropped her winter fat, so dappling sprung up on her hide like sunflung shadows. She learned to slice through mere slivers of air that separated horse from horse in a pack, and to hold her power in reserve, then finish with decisive strength. But she was a young gladiator with one terrific weakness: she balked at the starting gate. She would rear and buck and snap as four men forced her from behind into the padded enclosure. Once inside the panic box, she shook and whined until they led her out again and back around. The pushing, crying, and straining was repeated until finally, when they were all exhausted, man and horse equally, her resistance failed and she managed herself at the exhausted brink of terror just long enough to qualify, then leaped clean from the gate at the bang of the bell and was issued her gate card. She was gleaming, muscled, dappled, fearsome, and terrified; she was ready to race.

And race she did. They never did discover the distance her pedigree promised, and she remained clumsy if propulsive out of the gate, but grew to be a terror in the half mile with the speed of a young colt, a jetter, a fast-twitch bitch, as Henrietta liked to say. Never as elegant as her sire, she chopped the air with her forelegs like an overeager dog, so that Henry would cover his head with his Racing Form, his cheeks bright red, but she won—four first-place wins in her juvenile year, and as many seconds. By the spring of her third year, her Derby year, she had no more fear of turf flung into her eyes or slippage on wet dirt tracks; what tremblings had existed the year before had been burned from her in the refining fire of competition. Her speed was only increasing. The Derby was in sight for Henry Forge.

*   *   *

Henrietta, at nineteen, could remember the names of every horse she’d ever seen place. From enduring stars like Silver Charm, Unbridled, and Thunder Gulch to those who shined brightly in a single classic, then fell away swiftly from the public eye, they were all locked in her memory. It wasn’t love or passion, but the taxonomical principle of her mind at work.

It was life between the races, the quotidian details of a horsewoman’s day that had become indistinguishable, save the strange or startling detail. She recalled one day in the saddling enclosure when a horse reared in fright and fell backward, breaking its own skull, so its blood unfurled like a red flag on the brick—it was euthanized on the spot, its tongue bitten in half between its clamped teeth; there was the man she’d had sex with in a private bathroom upstairs, only to find out he was an old friend of her father’s and in the Assembly, no less; the day she’d been overcome with food poisoning on the back stretch and run to kneel behind a stable, vomiting into the dirt when a tiny Peruvian jockey known only as Minnie Ball rounded the corner and found her. He’d held up an apologetic hand and said, “No problem. Me also. I do this also.”

And, of course, she remembered all of the Derbys, though like most in the business, she was interested in the results and impatient with the festivities, which rankled like overeating store-bought cake on a full stomach, all sickly sweet layers of drunkenness, celebrity, and overexposure of every kind. She wasn’t one to mingle in Millionaires Row, watching men shake hands and clap each other on the back, standing dutifully beside her father in their hermetically sealed box. She spent some of the afternoon checking in on Seconds Flat on the backstretch, then braving the crowds at the betting arcade and the food stands, where bettors jostled cheek to jowl and the offense of hot burgoo, sweat, and treacly perfume was undercut only by the persistent and oddly comforting odor of manure. The celebrities were mostly up top in the grandstand; down here the mildly monied pressed against one another in a crush, their cheer tinged always with the tang of violence—and the drive to perpetuate the species. Nowhere else outside a Nevada brothel could you see so many bosoms on display down to the edge of puckering areolas. Coral and red lips and chalk-white manicures, precipitous candy-colored pumps. Men with their penguin chests puffed, strutting dandy before the women, purchasing wine and Cokes and waving stubs and pretending to a knowledge cribbed quick for the first Saturday in May. At the Derby, every male was an expert, so long as there was a female in the room.

Without really intending it, Henrietta wound up near the rail with the other onlookers. She realized suddenly it was almost four thirty, and the Turf Classic was complete with the winner in the circle. She ought to make her way back into the interior of the marvelously white grandstand—white spires looming over white porticos and white pillars under white clouds—and over to the saddling paddock, where, under the Longines clock, the little jocks would come lining out from their official portrait to be tossed onto their mounts at the call: “Riders up!” But it was too late.

the sun shines bright on my old kentucky home tis summer the darkies are gay the corn tops ripe and the meadows in the bloom and the birds make music all the day the young folks roll on the little cabin floor all merry all happy and bright by and by hard times comes a-knocking at my door then my old kentucky home good night

The rising roar of the crowd was a 747 engine on the ascent. The horses, including a nervy, prancing Seconds Flat, were emerging from the tunnel with their lead ponies and silked riders, some skittering in fright, some perking before the attention. Henrietta made a quick decision—if she left now to return to the box where her father waited, she would likely miss the race. So, she remained where she stood, hands on the rail, eyes locked on Seconds Flat, their tough, gritty, game, and slightly ridiculous girl. Even at a walking pace, her inelegant gait was clear; any amateur eye could detect it. She danced and overstrode on skinny scapes, a seeming galoot amidst nobility with only a smart head and big ass to show for herself. She still careened from the gate like a drunk, but she was loaded with talent and ran hungry; once balanced, she was all head drive and forward motion. And one thing was certain: she was a hell of a closer.

the head must bow and the back will have to bend wherever the darky may go a few more days and the trouble all will end in the field where the sugar canes may grow a few more days for to tote the weary load no matter twill never be light a few more days till we totter on the road then my old kentucky home good night

The postparade took its perennial course counterclockwise to the green gate on the backstretch, where the crew forced jittery horse after fractious horse into their coin slots. The jocks, starved and sweated down to weight, were perched with their goggles strapped six deep, crops in hand. Blood coursed quick for both man and animal, but time crawled, then slagged, then stopped. No one breathed.

The bell rang, and the gate clanged wide.

The crowd glassed the field in a single motion. Seconds Flat launched herself with furor from the gate, but as always, she moved more sky than earth, more the ungainly deer than an elegant Thoroughbred. She corrected quickly under the seething ministrations of her jock, who locked on her mouth and piloted her forward. They settled into a solid, unremarkable sixth when Henrietta, who had no binoculars because she’d never meant to stand at the rail in the first place, lost her in the mix of bays and ruddle reds attenuating to a shifting line on the backstretch. The track was slick with earlier rain, and the muck soon transformed the horses to dun and the jocks to gingerbread men—their cornflower, scarlet, and sienna silks splattered until identical—as they tore goggle after goggle from their browning faces, half-blind as their mounts jostled and edged neck to neck around the precipitous turn.

The second horse, Major General, running hard at the lead’s shoulder, didn’t go down on the curve, where he bore along under the eightfold drag of centrifugal force, straining the tiny, countless fractures he’d sustained from running too much as a juvenile, unable to heal because the heart heals first, then striated muscle, then bone, and bone only if the training regimen allows. Instead, he went down on the straightaway when, with an arrow’s unerring attack, he began to stretch out of the pack, his nose edging toward the distant wire, his mane a flag snapping in his jock’s joyous face. When he had barely gained a head, his cannon bone fractured through the flesh with a resounding snap!, his right hoof flopping suddenly behind in a gruesome, dismissive backhand to the field. His bulk toppled hideously onto his outstretched neck, which broke without a snap!, tossing his jock forward like a child from a bike, too stunned to protect himself as the two horses directly behind tripped on the fallen horse and went down themselves, one with a fractured skull, one with a shattered shoulder, the latter screaming for the four minutes before all three could be euthanized with a syringe to the jugular.

“Oh!” cried the man beside Henrietta, his beer sloshing over the lip of its cup. “They totaled the car! It’s a fucking smashup!”

A fourth colt careened wildly to the outside and pulled up in front of the whitened faces of the shocked railbirds, who only now, as the full meaning of the snap! registered, began to groan as if they and not the horses had sustained the injuries. Seconds Flat, sixth at the turn and still accelerating where her peers stumbled or veered over the prone, stunned bodies of the fallen, simply used her natural, instinctive chop to leap over them—horses and jockeys all—more like a champion jumper than Secretariat’s get.

Still accelerating, she passed second under the wire.

“It’s nothing short of a miracle these three jockeys are alive,” Henrietta heard the announcer cry. With broken arms and ribs and concussions, they crawled like toddlers back to their mounts, one of which had now sprung up on three legs to hobble frantically about, head jerking manically, so saliva was slung around its neck like a necklace, but two of which could not move at all save the stunned thumping of a tail. Two of the jocks sat in the mess of churned mud, crying like children over their broken horses where they lay, listening as the colt with the injured shoulder screamed.

Henrietta watched with her hand over her mouth as a screen was erected around the horses.

The track ambulance spun up, followed shortly by the vet’s truck with its mobile clinic, and three horse ambulances. A hundred thousand strong and mostly drunk, the grandstand waited in muted, tipply shock as one entered willingly, confused, and white-eyed into the ambulance, the other two euthanized and winched even before the weeping owners could say—still out of breath from racing down from their air-conditioned boxes—“Do the right thing.”

Only when a door slammed for the third time did Henrietta turn abruptly away from the rail. She had to find her father, who had surely left the box by now to find Seconds Flat. He would be furious, she knew; a second-place finish was a deep disappointment under the best of conditions, but with the best in the field down, it amounted to nothing at all. It added not one letter to the family name. Where was her father? Hands clutching his skull, no doubt, and cursing his fate.

*   *   *

“Slow down, Henrietta.”

He felt like an invalid with his daughter on his arm this way, all but held upright as they walked from the barn on the backstretch, where Seconds Flat, uninjured but to Henry’s eye a wasted thing, was now being washed and hotwalked, and where the jockey had gripped his arm, saying, “She just flew, Mr. Forge! She flew over them like an eagle!” and where their trainer met them with not the proper solemnity but smiles of relief that they’d been spared—and second place!—though the man soon fell into a faltering silence when confronted with Henry, who looked out at the horseflesh all around them and, for one gaping moment, could not determine what he looked upon, or his place in it. His hopes were dashed, and his accrued wealth amounted to nothing. He gazed in wonder at his daughter beside him, at that chilly mantle she assumed at all times. She wore it so well, like some kind of birthright, cold in any weather. It was a strange thing to admire in your own child, to watch her perfect what you could not, that regal indifference.

Henrietta was guiding him past the stiles that demarcated the backstretch when he caught sight of a man he had been introduced to once. Akers, or Akins, his blasted mind could not remember which, but this man, this charlatan with what looked like a prostitute at his side, made his money from electronics stores and chicken restaurants, this man had a Derby winner in his stable. This man’s stallion covered every game mare in North America for six months and then was flown south in late summer to cover the other half of the known world. It was ludicrous, preposterous, proof that life favored idiot strivers. It sickened him what stupid men could achieve in this life.

“Mr. Forge, hold up a minute.”

They were in the parking lot now, trying to find both their Mercedes in a lot of silver Mercedes. He was slow to turn, though he recognized the voice immediately. Mack Snyder. He’d seen him a hundred times on television, and occasionally in person from a distance. On any other day, he would have drawn himself up to his fullest, most self-assured height. Today, he looked like a man peering out from beneath a cowl.

The man came on, smiling slightly in a pinched way, but the smile didn’t suit, like too-tight Sunday clothes on a roughneck. His shirt was damped through the armpits with sweat, and a bolo tie swung with an orange Zuni cabochon. He was a stocky man with a perpetually sunburned neck and hard, unkind hands pinched by two signet rings. When he held out one hand, Henry noted they were hard and calloused, but his nails were evenly clipped and perfectly clean.

“Mack Snyder,” the man said. Or the Hillbilly Horseman, as Bob Costas had dubbed him during his first Derby—and the sobriquet had stuck. If he’d shed some of the Letcher County syntax, his vowels were still broad enough to swim in. That roughcut voice rose and fell like the head of a rocking horse.

Henrietta touched her hand to Henry’s upper arm, a protective gesture.

“Good to meet you,” said Henry.

“You’re just the man I want to talk to,” Mack said, and for a moment he set his thin lips together, hard, as if he was hesitating, as if he was the kind of man who hesitated. “Listen,” he said, “I would congratulate you, but I’d bet you aren’t the type who takes kindly to congratulations on a second-place finish.”

“Ha,” said Henry tiredly. Mack held up his hand as if to forestall further response. “Let me just say this: your filly ran a good race against the boys, and that’s in spite of a hard bump and a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Always interesting when a girl doesn’t know her place.”

Henry stood there listening, but he was beginning to focus with as much energy as absolute fatigue allowed. He waited.

Mack said: “She spends her energy, though. She’s missing that smart gait her dam had, but you can see the resemblance once she settles in.” He nodded once, hard, agreeing with himself.

Henry cocked his head to one side. “You remember Hellcat?”

“Damn right, I don’t ever forget a horse. Not a bad choice for Secretariat. Unconventional, sure, but not bad.”

“That’s what I always said.”

The man nodded again. “The race didn’t go your way—it didn’t go anybody’s way—but I think you got a strong filly worth working with.”

“Yes.” A soft grin of resurrection spread on Henry’s face; he breathed in, almost imperceptibly.

Now Mack took a single step forward toward him, his shoulder effectively angling Henrietta from their conversation, though she stood mere inches away. He lowered his voice slightly. His attempt at small talk was over, the air was charged.

“Mr. Forge,” he said quietly, “do you know how big Secretariat’s heart was?”

Henry nodded, but Mack continued. He spread his red hands for emphasis: “Twenty-two goddamn pounds.”

“What?” Henrietta said. She had never heard such a thing. It was hard to believe.

“And whose side does a monster heart like that come down through?”

Henry nodded again slowly, the light of recognition kindling in his eyes.

“That’s right,” Mack said quietly, firmly. “Down the female line. I believe you’re understanding me now, but let me be real straight. If there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s I’m a straight shooter. I live a fast life and you don’t want me for a best friend, but I am the man you want when you need plain speaking.” Snyder turned suddenly and positioned himself squarely in front of Henry again. Henry could smell the sweat of the man, but was pinned by the intensity of those eyes and the hands that rounded before him as if the man were holding a crystal ball between them. He said, “What these folks—what all these folks—are doing wrong is a result of one thing: failure of nerve. They get their piece of Secretariat, and they go fishing around in other lines trying to improve what was already perfect in the first place. They’re milking tits on a bull. What do you think Danzig is bringing to the table, or Nearco? Nothing, that’s what. You can’t better what’s already perfect, you can only water it down. Are you following where I’m leading?”

“I believe so—”

The man was not done: “It’s a failure of nerve. Let me cut to the chase—if the old boy were alive today, we’d breed her right back to him. Seeing as that’s not possible, we do the next best thing. We wait for the half brother with the best distance, maybe even a colt with a little Hellbent in the line if we can get it, and then we breed the best to the best. But we don’t hope for the best like the rest of these yokels—we just wait three years, ’cause we know we got our ace in the hole.”

“Yes,” said Henry slowly. “Yes, I understand you.”

Mack fished a card out of his breast pocket. He handed it to Henry, his eyes slashing through Henrietta once before he said, “Call me or don’t. It’s your choice. But this is the most I’ll ever bend your ear. I don’t talk, I just get the job done. I cost more than that guy you’re working with now, but I believe my record shows I can return dollars on your pennies.”

“I will consider what you’re saying,” said Henry, though already the reserve of ambition was replenishing, almost as if the day had never happened. His hopes, like healthy horses, were scrambling to their feet.

“Well, I wouldn’t expect less. But you ought to know there’s a reason I’m approaching you, and it’s not just because you got a very fine filly, which you do. Frankly, I think you’ve got balls.” He didn’t apologize for his language, but tilted his head in Henrietta’s direction. “I’m just telling the truth.”

They shook hands, and then the man was moving off as abruptly as he had come. Henrietta watched as he moved into the swarm of people, a contrary figure pushing against the bright, well-heeled crowd as it departed. Every single one of them instinctively stepped aside and made a path for him.

Henry was quiet, considering. “You know, maybe this is just what we need right now.”

For a moment, Henrietta was tactful. “They say he’s hard on horses.”

“Trainers are butchers,” he said. “You just have to find the best one. But what do you think of him in particular?”

She watched the punchy figure disappearing now into the crowd. She thought of Seconds Flat, the way she had been as a foal, gentle as a harp. She remembered her tender mouth before the cold rolled steel of the snaffle bit, and the sight of broken horses on the track. She said, barely stifling the anger in her voice, “I think he’s a fucking hillbilly.”

*   *   *

She drove east toward home, toward the fulsome springtime mountains, but even their ancient presence wouldn’t be enough today, because—my God, now that she was alone, she could let loose the wail in her mind—everyone seemed out to break the world. It wasn’t just horses that humanity was destroying, but everything they chanced to lay eyes upon—even the world’s oldest mountains, which were just now appearing on the horizon. What comfort could be found in them today? Humans were reducing those hills to slag. They’d been hellbent on destruction almost from the time of their arrival, tunneling deep into the mountain walls or sloping in at the surface or downshafting like wellers in search of black water, because the old country had wanted chugging trains in all directions and delicate, filmy cages for tungsten filament. They called for the farmer and hunter and drew them to rickety, newborn towns with promises of canned food and a wife in white cotton; the promise of promise itself. So down trappers and diggers and spraggers, down drivers and mules that brayed in their underground stables, their cries echoing hoarsely in the bord-and-pillar chambers that the blasts and the timbermen built. Down vein after slit vein, down into night, down into blackness without recourse, down where they chipped and picked for decades before the next generation arrived with their rotating drums and toothed bits to chip the coal; then the shearing longwall machines, which collapsed the mine shaft as they moved. Those early miners emerged from the driftmouth, black as coal and poor as dirt. Desperation breeds dreams, and dreams trade for desperation in the company store, no tab. The only cash in town is a man’s life.

Calm yourself, Henrietta, is what her father would say. You are expected at home.

But, after what she’d seen today, she didn’t want to see any foals fresh in their fields, didn’t want to watch them run their rounds, didn’t want to press repeat. Right at this moment with the mountains before her, she couldn’t quite figure how she and her father were any different from the kings of coal who sent miners underground, who underpaid and overworked them, who sentenced them to suffer from black damp, white damp, after damp, stink damp, fire damp, and necrotic lungs and basic want. Miners who died when the roofs failed over them, having long forgotten their native terror of the underground. The bosses got those men coming and going, because aboveground it’s death by a thousand cuts as the slag finds streams, the mine tailings drain acid to aquifers, dams break and slurry spills in black apocalyptic floods, and the men drink it and the women cook with it and the children play in it. And the country just flies high over Kentucky as they travel coast to coast, tracing the same route Henrietta and her father took when they bought horses. Kentucky looks like nothing to the coastal eye, just anonymous mountains that subside and slump into a thousand depressions over countless coal-black bodies, the men and the animals alike, both infinitessimally small from the sky, the black bodies of men and animal bodies, the body called mine, or man’s, mines, men—

You are expected at home, Henrietta.

She thought suddenly of sporting plants, how their tiny offshoot buds assume a character so different from their parent plant, emerging as a genetic anomaly from a shared root family. They occur rarely in nature, because—it seemed to her then—all the busy machines of evolution conspired for similarity. Sameness is safe. Sameness is survival itself.

Suddenly, Henrietta cranked the wheel to the right and with a savage kick to the gas singed blacker marks onto the black interstate. The whining engine overpowered thought as she sped down 75, passing cars and trucks and horse trailers and the vast farms with their overwrought houses, which seemed to wriggle and wave luridly in their ostentation. She had half a mind to drive down to the old town of Berea and hike in the foothills of the springtime Appalachians—that was a beauty without thumbprints, where the mountains were not blasted, there the spring grass would be punching up like knife blades through the soil—but ten minutes later, after darting erratically through the interstate traffic, she exited on a whim at Man O’ War. To her shock, she discovered that the old Hamburg Place stud farm, where so many extraordinary horses—Nancy Hanks; Plaudit; Lady Sterling, dam of Sir Barton—were buried, was being leveled and graded. She hadn’t been here in ages. How was this possible? The farm was an institution, a monument to the sport that had not built the town but had made it matter. A low string of buildings, what appeared to be an outdoor shopping mall, was being erected over that fertile bluegrass soil, now degrassed and drained. She idled the car at the edge of the construction site, watching the enormous mechanical birds swooping for soil and spitting it out again—detritus now—in red, cloddy heaps behind the rising structures. The birds flying lazily, searching for prey, swinging low on the steel wing and snatching. She thought soon all the land would sound like nothing, and no one would know it had once made sounds, that small civilizations had thrived in the grass. It would never register with life again. And what was coming? Concrete. Glassed fronts and sale signs and cash registers. And with it all, people in a torrential surge, carnivorous men and women looking to smear their skin with colors and creams, to bleach their hair, to shave their hides, to cinch themselves breathless in order to think themselves beautiful. The idea of it redoubled her horror at the day and its losses. But the indignation was easily banked by resignation. What was the point in mourning what couldn’t be stopped? And it truly was unstoppable, the swollen stream of humanity’s consumption, strong enough to take the old horses’ bones—animals so perfect they had become things of myth—and displace them forever, God knows where. No, wait, right there, hidden in trees, at the edge of a Walmart parking lot.

They should have just barbecued Secretariat, because no one ever really gave a fuck. Cry with joy when he crosses the line, then eat him. There were no more true believers.

She didn’t know what to do. How best to forget a day like this? Henrietta reversed and peeled out of the lot, heading downtown toward the stunted high-rises of this provincial town, a city that first repelled Northern aggression and then strengthened itself on a genteel aggression, smiling on its own smallness and petty prettiness. She felt herself to be nearly in a mania. Out of nowhere, clattering hail fell and, jarred, she watched the tiny balls of ice pop and bounce on the ground and percuss on the steel hood and roof of the car. She lifted her foot off the gas, aware she had been speeding; she was no longer in Paris, where she could always say, “I’m Henrietta Forge,” where a policeman might peer into her face, note the resemblance, maybe grin and tease her as though she were nothing but a troublesome child.

On the far side of downtown, she found a parking spot by the Ledger, one of the older horse pubs. She had changed out of her dress in Louisville, resumed her uniform of button-up smudged with the grime of horses, her worn boots caked with fulvous dirt, her clothes and her ponytail slightly damp from the weather. She stood in the front of the bar, surveying.

“Can I get you something to drink, miss?”

Yes, they could get her something to drink. Yes, she was thirsty. On the first Saturday in May, the Commonwealth got drunk early and stayed that way until Monday morning. With a beer, she walked the bar with cold purpose, inspecting the men who remained there. In a side room, she noted the old careworn men weighted on their pool sticks as if they were crutches, a small huddle of men in suits doing business, horse business she knew from their Irish brogues. She spun on her heel, returned to the main room. She spotted a blond man at the bar. Broad shoulders, nearly bald. He smiled at her sleepily and nodded once. He had seen her come in, and she had seen him see her.

She walked directly up to him, stood there a moment. “What are you doing?” she said.

“What—me?” He smiled, but the smile failed at his blue eyes as if he’d encountered a trick question. “I’m drinking?” He tried to sound cocksure, even mocking, so taken aback was he by her approach. She did not respond. In a moment, he had unstartled himself, and his smile gained its ground. He said, more seriously, lower, “What are you doing?”

She registered the wavering in his face, the play at confidence. It tested her patience. Why did men always make this play for boldness? They came off like little children pretending to be grown. Why bother lying to a woman, who could read an expression before it formed, and know its source and its source’s source?

She said, “Let’s go somewhere.”

His eyes widened in honest surprise. “Really?” Then he held up his left hand, where a little gold band winked.

She just shrugged. It all seemed like bad acting.

And that was all it took, it was that easy. He started off his stool but headed in the opposite direction of the front door.

“I’m parked out back,” he said. “I work in the kitchen.”

She followed him through the single swinging door, through a grimy kitchen where a line cook peered out from under the warmers to watch in surprise as they passed, and then out the back doors, where they stood in a two-hundred-year-old alley where the bricks had worn down to nothing from wagon wheels and horse hooves and the heels of the forgotten who once traversed there. Rain was falling heavily now, painting red on the brick, weaving small rivulets around the crumbling geometry of the bricks.

The man held a hand to his brow and peered at her heatedly. “Where to?” he said.

“Your car,” she said. The rain fell down her cheeks.

He skipped toward his car, but as he was reaching his keys to the driver’s-side door, she peered down the dank alley once and back at the door to the bar’s kitchen, and then she said, “No! In the back!” The rain killed any echoes.

So he climbed, almost bashfully, into the backseat, fumbling with a condom he pulled from his wallet, and she climbed in, wet, beside him and stripped her jeans off one leg and undid the zipper on his, and then in another moment she climbed on top of him. He was gasping under her. She braced her forearm against his sternum. He told her to take her top off. She didn’t, and he couldn’t get to her in the tight space crammed with milk crates and old clothes. She said, “Don’t come, don’t come.” Already the fury was easing. He grabbed at her where he could. “Don’t come,” she said. When the lightning flashed, she could see his face with startling clarity. The rain drummed on the roof of the car. It reminded her of something she couldn’t name, but it was better that way. If you haven’t named it, you haven’t killed it yet.

*   *   *

She became a familiar sight at the Ledger, McCarthy’s, Second Wind, the Hare & the Hound, Breakers. A skinny woman with her reddish hair pulled back and a too-direct gaze. She came in for one drink and one man and tried to make it a simple transaction. The men obliged, not because she was pretty—she was handsome at best—but because they were willing to be had and, for once, here was a woman willing to take them without fuss. What more is there to say about those years? She could shoot and her aim was sure. She was after pleasure. What is pleasure? It is not the opposite of pain.

At first, she sought out beautiful men, thinking that beauty would naturally make for more pleasure, but she found a thing of beauty was a joy for not very long. These were the kinds of men who loved to take off their clothes, who loved their own arms and abdomens sculpted by exercise. They wanted her to watch them, and they composed their male faces sternly for her admiration, but she didn’t want to watch them, she wasn’t there to admire. The point of fucking was to crush the pearl, not polish it. But they polished and polished, and then she understood—they thought they were the pearl!

She learned to stay away from the men who talked too much, who asked her all the polite and proper questions that men ask women, questions they thought she wanted to answer, which she did not. They pretended interest in her private mind, a thing too many women squandered on unworthy men, seeming to think their inner lives no more valuable than a penny. She wouldn’t divulge it. These were the ones who drew her to them softly and gazed at her in the warm, bland imitation of romance, the ones who tried to nestle dutifully against her later, as if they actually preferred this farce of intimacy to drinking alone in their apartments, free to look down at wet city streets as pleasantly empty as themselves, as happily deserted.

She avoided the artistic types with their self-congratulation, their misapprehension of their own strangeness, their pride in their small arts, and their disdain for the world, which looked plainly like fear. These men, thinking themselves so unusual, were often the most predictable, the first to ask her why she had no husband and no children. They thought her older than she was, the lines of summers past already lining her face. At first bold and brash, they scuttled back into their shells after the last quiver of orgasm, afraid to be netted. Not so strange, not so different after all.

When she tired of the search, she would stay at home for a period of weeks. But by midcycle, she was dying, wasting on the inside, a slave to her body. She could not spend an easy evening reading, and shaken by her desire out of that cashmere life, she would head to the city. She had to find a man, and she decided she wanted a big man—a black man. She didn’t care if there was pain; more pain meant less feeling, and that was fine with her; less feeling in the cunt, less feeling in the heart.

But in the end, she settled for any good body, willing but unremarkable men who wouldn’t bother her later. Some shy with the erotic poverty of young men, some older and beaten down in spirit like cuffed dogs. Their age didn’t matter when she was in search of something a man hid from you until the very last moment when, while straddling them, you could feel your own cruel power rising up in you stronger than any orgasm, the power to sentence a man to shame, the power the judge holds over the cocksure criminal—no, better yet: the power to judge the judge.

*   *   *

She had only one friend during those years, a man she met in a bar. She’d driven to McCarthy’s one night when she was twenty-three and ordered a whiskey while standing at the register, taking quick stock of the men in the room. It was a Wednesday night, there were no women in the half-lit place, and voices were murmurous and low. What men were there were mostly playing pool, smoking and eyeing her through the dimming slat of drunkenness. A shot was missed, and a ball went clattering across the barroom floor. There was only one man at the wooden bar, hunched over his Budweiser, taking occasional sips. His black-and-gray hair was gathered back in a ponytail the width of a horse’s tail, and it hung down to within inches of his waist, as thick at the bottom as it was at the band. He was dressed like anyone else in jeans and an old T-shirt, but he was taller and thicker, she could see that, despite his poor posture. When she sat down on the stool beside him, he turned and looked her plainly in the face, then turned away again without a word. He could have been thirty-five, he could have been fifty, his face wasn’t telling.

The bartender said, “Penn, you need another?” and the man nodded.

When she didn’t turn away and he felt her staring, he turned again and she noticed now the very tan skin, the heavy, dark brows, the broad nose. But once again, he turned away with no expression at all. When he peered a third time, with one eyebrow arched, she said, “Hi,” smiling only slightly—as if she needed something from him, and the smile was for politeness’ sake, which it was.

A long pause in which nothing transpired on that neutral face, then he said softly, “Hi.”

She stared at him without blinking, her small smile not budging, but just as he turned back to his drink, no puzzlement or awareness or anything showing on his mute and impassive face, she said, “Why don’t I come home with you.” It was not a question.

He sighed, and without looking up from the twinkling amber of his beer bottle, he shook his head slowly and said, “Listen…” His voice trailed.

“What?” Her face revealed only careful curiosity, still polite.

“I…” He took a long breath and looked straight into her eyes now. “You want to come home with me…,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, the smile slipping now, replaced by her true face, which was not friendly, just plain.

“Listen,” he said, “the truth is, I don’t think I … can handle a forward lady tonight.”

“Oh,” she said abruptly, and sat back on her stool, looking directly ahead of her at the wall, which was a mirror so she was looking at herself. She felt him turn likewise to the front. She was mildly affronted, but not enough to move. She’d never thought of herself as forward, only direct, the type of person who knew what she wanted—but then what exactly was the difference? Inside her mouth, she bit her tongue lightly. The man had a strange voice, like he had learned English as a second language. Low and flat and uninflected, like Native American voices she had heard. After a minute or so had passed, she said, without looking at him, “Are you Indian?”

A long pause. “Um, a Melungeon, I guess.”

“What’s that?”

“Poor man’s Spaniard.”

“Sounds greasy,” she said, and he laughed. But she didn’t turn to him again, and he didn’t turn to her. She finished her whiskey, and when the bartender looked at her with his brows raised, she just made a defeated face.

But she was watching her neighbor from the corner of her eye, and each time he reached for the neck of his beer, she detected a foul cut along the inside of his hand, extending across the palm to the vale between his thumb and index finger.

“What did you do to your hand?” she asked into the silence.

“I was seeding bluegrass and got cut,” he said slowly. She realized that he probably always spoke this slowly, as if feeling his way forward in the dark toward each word. It didn’t seem an effect of the alcohol. He would have sounded simple, except that his voice was careful and thoughtful.

“You cut yourself on the machine?” she asked, and now she turned to him fully, because she was honestly curious. She couldn’t picture how he’d done it.

“No,” he said, and paused, so for a moment she didn’t think he was going to answer at all. Then he looked at her, and his eyes were very dark brown, and he said, “I’ve got a hand seeder.”

“It must be very old,” she said, frowning.

“Yes.”

“Why on earth would you use a hand seeder?” she asked.

“The machine doesn’t work so good. You get too much plant in with your seed.” He swiveled slightly on the stool and made an upward sweeping motion with his injured hand like he was scooping something up. “With the seeder, you just get the pure seed.”

“And there’s a market for this…?” she said.

“Pity for it anyway.”

Now it was her turn to laugh. Then she said softly, as if to herself, “Seems like we ought to have old tools like that around.”

“Farm girl?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“But rich.”

She blinked in surprise. “I guess so,” she said. “So what?”

“So nothing.” He turned back to the bar and drained his drink, knocking the bottle back down to the wood. He looked at her and with that not unkind, expressionless face, he sighed and said, “You can come to my place if you want.”

“Okay,” she said. She hadn’t brought her pride along with her.

“But I live all the way down in Jackson County.”

“I don’t care,” she said with a shrug, and there was such an inadvertent tone of despondency in her voice that she didn’t hear but he couldn’t miss, that he instinctively offered her his hand to help her off the stool.

*   *   *

In the morning she awoke on an old mattress on the floor with the warm sun striking her full across the face. In an instant, her heart was roused to panic. Somehow she had fallen asleep and slept through the night, a mishap she’d never made before. She always, always went home to her father. An extraordinarily heavy arm was now flung across her midsection. She slid sideways along the sheets to free herself, heart pounding. She snatched up her clothes and escaped to the living room with a thought to dressing in private away from this stranger still sleeping. Through the sun-silty windows dressed in faded patchwork, she saw pastures of cows and what looked like a lone goose wandering open-beaked through the yard under an enormous pass of sky, strenuously blue. The house around her was a musty old inherited thing, and while it was not clean, it was tidy. Everything looked to have been found in a garage sale or secondhand shop, except for the bookshelves, which she saw, upon closer inspection, were planed by hand. They had not been further sanded down, so the hard hairs of wood sprang up spikily from the natural grain. On these shelves, poetry books were lined and stacked. The uppermost spines grazed the ceiling. She forgot herself and was reaching to pull a volume from the shelf when a voice called, “Lady, what are you doing in there?”

She turned at the sound, irritated that the man had woken. In an instant, she remembered the expression on his face when they’d had sex—not surprise exactly, but a pleasant mystification, as if he couldn’t quite figure how he’d ended up in such a pleasant spot. He had been a gentle man; she was not accustomed to that.

She walked back to the bedroom door, stepping into her jeans on the way and tugging her shirt hurriedly down across her chest.

“You’re dressed,” he said.

“I have to go home. I slept late.”

He sat up very quickly but he didn’t say anything, just looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“Are you married?”

“No!” she said. “But I have to go.”

“Why are you going? I could make you some breakfast.”

She didn’t answer, she just turned to walk through the door again, pausing momentarily to tuck her shirt into her jeans. There were photos and magazine clippings taped to the gray plastered wall by the light switch. Photos of a black-haired couple from the 1950s. A series of yellowed shots of a coal train passing by the photographer, the images shaky and ghostly blurred. A few photographs looked to have been taken in a desert setting. The young man in the photograph had short black hair and a military uniform. There were no lines on his face, but it was unmistakably the same man she’d just spent the night with—twenty years and twenty pounds ago. The same distinctly broad nose that reminded her somehow of her neighbor Ginnie Miller. Vaguely leonine.

“What made you go in the army?” she asked suddenly.

After a pause, during which it sounded as if he might not reply at all, he said, “I was a marine.”

“Why’d you enlist?”

“I was dumb,” he said flatly.

“I’m serious.”

“I am too.” She glanced at him. He sighed and laid a meaty forearm over his forehead, so he couldn’t see anything but his own self-made darkness. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s just what you did around here. I think I had a hero complex when I was a kid.”

She’d forgotten her need to leave. She stood there in wrinkled clothes with her arms hanging at her sides, so that she looked not so different—he would have seen if he’d looked—from a freshly woken child.

“Like…,” he said, and sighed again but with some irritation this time audible in the breath. “You grow up reading comic books and things, and you think you know what a hero is … that you have to save everybody … but then you grow up and you find yourself killing people just to follow orders. It’s like growing up means you cross some invisible line where all the rules get totally reversed. I guess that sounds sort of weird to say out loud … but it seemed original to me when I thought it.”

Henrietta was about to interject when he went on, “The worst thing, though, is killing’s not actually as hard as you think it’s going to be…” He made a quick trigger motion without taking his forearm from his eyes. “You think you’re going to be all messed up about it, but … I don’t know. They diagnosed me with PTSD. But sometimes, I almost feel like…”

“What?”

“I don’t know … I always get the feeling they want you to be more tore up than you really are, so people can feel okay around you. Nobody wants to know that it wasn’t actually that hard.”

She came to, realized the time. She said, “I do have to go.”

“Was it something I said,” he sighed, but she was already out the door.

Henrietta felt only dread at the thought of what Henry would say, but when she stepped from the porch, she’d seen the vast unfurling of Madison County to the west where the mountains dropped breathlessly away. Against her will, she walked past a stagnant-looking cattle pond, where cane sprouted up and cattails wagged in the smart morning wind as it raced toward the cliff like water at the edge of a waterfall. Her hair flew into her face. She passed an old tobacco barn, but there were no tobacco fields up here that she could see. A few spare, dark cattle. A deep, karsty sink that looked like a drained pond with boulders in its belly. The farm was situated at the top of such a precipitous drop that the earth seemed to penetrate the sky here. The clouds were as close as viewing gauze, and there was a frighteningly swift wind. She passed away from man-made markers, she passed trees that in their cliff clutching had over time grown wary and bent, as if the spiraling wind spoke through them of how precarious it is to live, cliff or no, how one day all the winds might by fate or chance converge in one place, maybe even this place, and send them all tumbling roots over fingertips, because the world was full of faceless, random happenings; or the love affair of earth and sky would end and the rain, their congress, would also end, so all the green family of life would starve and shrivel, their roots contracting and withering so that all the bodies would fall, senseless, cliff or no. So the trees bowed to the cliff’s lip, which also spoke. Henrietta could hear that. She approached the lip, felt the sickening lurch of open space. She edged gingerly onto a rock outcropping like a dais in a church with the annular remains of old trees petrified onto its ancient face. At this edge she peered over, her hair streaming ahead of her as if some part of her wanted to jump. Everything fell away, and the sky rode down a thousand feet like the falcon dropping. No ease here, toeing the crystalline seam of firmity and nothing. And the sense came, intuited perhaps for the first time, that the earth itself was predatory, inbuilt with dangers, and it suddenly made sense why people wanted to pave it and smother it and sell it to render it the simple past. Maybe they saw the beauty, maybe they could look out here to the west and admire the old knobs, the soft, bosomy remnants of the mountains, so lush in the soothing sunshine, but their genetic memory was far-reaching and wise and avenging. They knew the beauty of the earth rendered a fugue state, and while they gazed in blissful wonder, forgetting their own names and the names of their children, they froze in the Arctic chill and died of pustulent boils and rotting diseases, and sometimes they drowned or burned like bugs under glass or died of exposure, and some fell. So tamp the earth, burn the earth, pave the earth with abandon. Of course they did. Of course they would. It was their only revenge upon this wild, heartless theater.

She practically leaped away from the edge, stumbling back into a headwind toward the farmhouse, where the man was waiting for her in only a pair of orange bulldog boxers, each of his limbs trying to wrap around another limb for warmth. His eyes were half-lidded against the risen sun, his hair long down his back. He held a cup of coffee in his hand.

He said, “My grandmother had a horse once that ran itself off that cliff … She said it was in love with a cow. They sent the cow off for butchering, and the horse was so … upset, I guess, it ran itself off the cliff. Or at least that’s what my grandmother said.”

“Where am I?” she said.

“Jackson County.”

She made an irritated face.

“Big Hill,” he said. “Go out to the right and drive down Big Hill, and you’ll be in Madison County, and you just follow 421 up to Richmond and catch the bypass to 75.”

She gasped and turned once again toward the cow pond and the cliff’s edge that she had just left. “We’re in Big Hill? Where Daniel Boone…?”

“Yeah,” he said. “This was it. Sight of the promised land … last hurrah of the mountains.”

“My forefather walked this,” she said urgently, unable to turn her eyes from the view of the knobs and expansion of the Bluegrass out of the Wilderness Road. This view was the original splendor, the boundless promise, that thing left alone. Only the sky was more singular.

“Samuel Forge walked this,” she said. “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Penn said, looking at her curiously. “I recognize that name.”

*   *   *

In Lavinia’s last days, when the cancer in her breast had reduced her muscles to rope and her mind to ash, she was too weak to raise her hands. She could say nothing, only lie there, looking hugely at the ceiling with bone-dry eyes. Henry sat by her side day after day with her foundling hands in his, and it seemed to him that the whittled contours of her once elastic face were begging for something—Henry thought forgiveness, but in actuality relief. But soon, vacancy took up occupancy in those forever features. Her feet grew icy at the toes, the instep, the heel. Her cheeks and lips were packed with lead. Her son touched her brow, unable to look away from the horrifying inevitable. Again and again, he signed to her, but little darknesses intruded like the flickering in a silent film, until finally her lids fell and would not raise up again when she wished to see her son one last time. There was total dark. She died with her lips parted and her brow creased as if she had been expecting something more.

And of all the minutiae of his younger life, that is what he remembered most. His mother had died looking not at him, her son, her accomplishment, but into the well of herself at something. And that something was emptiness. He had felt its sucking draw. And felt it now.

Where in the hell was his daughter? He was flying out to Saratoga with Mack in two hours and he needed her to conduct interviews in his stead. But she hadn’t come home, and here he was panicking like an orphaned child.

And then she was there, his dear, duplicitous mother, his first love—no, Henrietta, his troublesome, guileful girl, padding in on the balls of her feet as if she wouldn’t be detected at nine thirty in the morning, as if she hadn’t been missed, as if she wasn’t one-half of his own damn self.

The cool air of morning accompanied her, and it was a good thing. His insides were like kindling threatening to ignite. Any number of battles were lost by the man who lost his cool.

His voice was level when he said “Henrietta.” She whirled with a gasp, took in the sight of her father in the disheveled clothes of yesterday, his face marred by a complicated fatigue. His graying hair fell forward into awful eyes, where tiny bright roads of blood traveled the curves of his sclera.

“Where were you?”

“I was alone,” she said abruptly.

A warning: “Henrietta, you can’t just hell around…”

“A-lone!” she snapped as two words, and then raised a hand to her own lips as if startled by their rebellion. After coming atop last night’s man, after teetering at the edge of the allowable world and staring down its heights, something had changed. The old poets knew all along: the wilderness has an awful tongue, which teaches doubt.

Henry just smiled down at her, trying to appear easy and loose, though his shaking hands belied his calm. He said, “My little Ruffian, all alone in the big, bad world.” He smiled tightly. “Are you too old for one last lesson?”

God! Was there really no escape? She looked up toward the ceiling as if perceiving many people through those storied floors, the Forge quorum pacing, observing, advising, alive. They were as real as scars on old wood. With a sigh, she said, “Sure, Daddy.” But her mind asked, Am I not a grown woman?

Lesson

You aren’t like them, my little Ruffian. You’d like to think you can find real companions out there, but you can’t. You’d like to think you can discover a mate, but you can’t do that either. You imagine you’ll be understood by people less intelligent than you are, because you don’t actually believe they’re less intelligent, but they are and, believe me, they don’t understand you; they’re incapable. Gold attracts gold. A natural aristocracy exists.

You should be proud of your position. Do you think history was actually made by ordinary men? History is made by the highly particularized, the ones who are intractable, stubborn, relentless. Men who are willing to become something other than their fathers. Yes, I know you’re a woman, but you’re a man in mind. They are the ones willing to risk everything, even their own sanity, maybe necessarily their own sanity, to achieve greatness, and greatness is absolutely and always contingent upon individuality. Are you listening?

I don’t know where you go, with whom you spend your time, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you understand that this notion of community life—this ridiculous, sentimentalized idea of a commonwealth, whatever you want to call it—is bankrupt. The ugly truth is that, despite the philosophical spoutings of a few founding fathers, men aren’t created equal, not even close. So a community of equals isn’t possible. A good sentence meant more to Jefferson than the truth. That’s the definition of an aesthete!

Ask yourself this: How many kinds of genius are there in the world? I’ll tell you: two. The first assimilates, because it lacks the willpower to stand on its own in isolation. It understands that the world will spare exceptional people, but only if they feign normalcy, live unremarkable lives, and don’t threaten anyone with their difference. Of course, most of the time the masses have no idea they’re even being condescended to; they’re so ignorant, they don’t even recognize genius when it’s in their midst. The second kind of genius understands all of this, but is so extreme in its unique intelligence that it couldn’t assimilate even if it wanted to. It’s a born outlier. An individual is not necessarily a genius, but every genius is an individual.

If you remember nothing else I ever tell you, remember this: you must be completely yourself in order to achieve greatness, but you may have to lose yourself entirely in the process. That’s the paradox I’m willing to endure not just for my ideals, but for you.

For Henry so loved the horse that he gave his only begotten daughter, so that whosoever believeth in perfection shall have everlasting life, which is fame among men.

Fine. Go ahead and laugh. But do you understand me when I say that the community will offer you comfort and friendship, but in turn you have to give the community your very life?

Do you understand me?

Force of habit prised Henrietta’s teeth apart: “I do.”

*   *   *

It’s strange. One day you’re a child of six with the taste of grass in your mouth, and the next you appear an adult with your father’s face on your face but a child’s heart in your chest, however stupefied, however late to waking. You can’t decide whether to climb back onto his lap or crack the black letters of your name. No one in the world speaks to you but he, father and king. Because there never was a world beyond the white plank fencing, not really, just a quick, brutish struggle for existence. So you run in circles on your tiny allowance of earth, a species artificially selected and fenced, and open your horse mouth to say, This is the kingdom come and it is his, I am his, I become his, Regnum meum est, I become It.

*   *   *

The three men arrived one after the other in the sunny late morning. All three smelled of tobacco, bore cheerful, local faces, and were reasonably capable with a horse, good workers with solid records from decent farms. But by noon, with the interviews complete, Henrietta had to employ some effort to distinguish among them. Which had been at Three Chimneys with Silver Charm? Which had been at Clairborne for two years? She was exhausted, her thinking a moil, and she was flipping back through the résumés at the kitchen table when footsteps approached on the cupped planks of the el porch. They stopped and a low voice, an unmistakably black voice, said, “I’m here for a interview.”

With a swiftness that looked distinctly like alarm, she turned to face the man who was just a dark outline, featureless against the day as startlingly bright as shattered crystal behind him.

Blinking rapidly against the light, she said, “Come in.”

When the man stepped slowly into the kitchen, she saw first the middle brown of his skin, and the surprise of it registered, stumbling on the heels of that low voice. Then she could look at nothing but his face, which surprised her with its burden of deep seriousness. Or perhaps something different—anger? Stopping as he did directly beneath the hanging light, his eyes were shadowed under the ledge of his heavy brow.

“You are?” she said, embarrassed by the hesitation in her voice. She cleared her throat.

“Allmon Shaughnessy.”

With an abrupt motion, she fanned the résumés with her fingertips, as if for some purpose he would be unable to detect. With a name like Shaughnessy, she’d been expecting an Irishman. As she stared down in consternation, she caught him sneaking a glance around the room as if he couldn’t resist its luxury, its stamp of wealth. But he did resist. He appeared to catch himself, and with the tiniest start of his head looked at her instead. When she reached out to shake, his hand was slick with sweat. That also surprised her.

“I’m Henrietta Forge,” she said. “Thanks for coming out.”

His heavy brows drew together, and he looked almost comically from side to side, as if for someone else.

“My father’s out of the state on business today,” she said, and as she looked at his skull-cropped hair, his shirt not buttoned to the top, that dark face, she couldn’t help but think, And that is a good thing for you, my friend.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, gesturing toward a kitchen chair. As he sat, she took quick, momentary stock of his body. He was perhaps her height or taller, boxy through the shoulder, the rest of his form hard to detect under the voluminous cut of his clothing. He was neither thin nor thick, and she would have found him an unremarkable thing and not noticeable in a crowd, except for the severe and unfriendly cut of his cheekbones jutting from the grieved hollows of his cheeks, sharp enough to cut glass. They sapped the possibility of softness from the rest of his face.

“Which position are you applying for?” she asked.

He placed his oversized hands on his knees and breathed deep once and said, “Night watchman, or stallion barn. Either one, both. I never worked with yearlings. I’m good with tough animals, the mean ones. I’m good with stallions.”

“Either, both?” She had to laugh. “If we were to offer you both positions, you’d be working around the clock. We’re not trying to kill anyone.”

Now it was his turn to clear his throat and shift in his chair. As he did, her first sense of the body proper—his shape, his fitness—emerged from behind the shield of clothing. She could detect it without her eyes ever really leaving his face, and, as if he sensed this, his own eyes found the soft middle distance between their knees.

“Well,” Henrietta said, “we don’t need any stallion grooms at present. Though if we hired you and my father liked you”—her mind laughed at this, and it sparked something in her, so a tiny light was lit—“you certainly could be moved to stallions when a position opens. We have a normal turnover.”

He nodded once, curt, without looking up. He was three feet away from her in the chair, but the distance seemed great. The quiet grew heavier and more distinct.

Though the information was right before her, she said, “And how long have you been working with horses?”

“Three years.”

“That’s not terribly long. What do you have to recommend you beyond your limited experience?”

“I’m good,” he said simply.

The briefest smile from her. But he remained serious, intent, unaltered, muted. Still refusing her direct access to his eyes.

“That’s very confident of you,” she said.

He shrugged.

“Well,” she said. “It says here that you were with Blackburn the entire three years.”

He shifted again in his seat. She saw one foot in a black gym shoe press down on the toe of its brother.

“Blackburn…,” she said. “I don’t believe I’m familiar with that operation.”

“It’s a vocational program,” he said.

“Vocational program…”

“Yeah.” His voice was husky. “Yes.”

“Where? In Kentucky?”

“Lexington,” he said. “Blackburn Penitentiary.” He looked up now from where he had been staring with a gaze so direct and penetrating, she had to resist the urge to lean back.

“Oh,” she said quickly. “So why were you there?”

“I am not obligated to divulge that information,” he said, his voice so formal suddenly, it was clearly something he had memorized. When Henrietta’s eyebrows rose in disdain, disdain he sensed before her face even changed, because that change in register is felt more than seen, he suddenly blurted, “Give me a chance. I’m good with horses. Really good.” He brought a large hand down over his knee with a hard, deliberate motion, and she saw something both plaintive and coiled in him, something that she would not ever be able to precisely name but that her body misnamed: erotic.

“Where are you from?” she said.

“Cincinnati.”

“I’m sorry,” she said as a joke, but when he did not smile in response, she said: “Interesting topography up there. A lot of Ordovician outcrops … Well, anyway, welcome to the Commonwealth.”

But even as she spoke, she thought, Has there ever been a black man in this kitchen before? In their house? Some memory was rattling around in her mind, but it wouldn’t stand still. She thought of her tall, copper-headed father with his linen shirts, his bourbon, his horses. She thought, What paradox are you willing to live for greatness? She looked at this man, at the breadth of his shoulders, the size of his hands, the face annealed and hardened. She fought the urge to smile but couldn’t check herself. While the cat’s away …

She sat up straight suddenly and said, “All of your references are from Blackburn?”

“Yes,” he said.

“If I call them, what will they say about you?”

He didn’t have to consider. He said, quietly and quickly, “He won’t ever give up.”

“How do you mean?” she said.

Looking up now and speaking louder: “He’s got drive. He knows how to work hard for what he wants, and he won’t stop. He won’t ever stop till he gets what he wants.”

“And what exactly is it you want? A job on a horse farm?”

He paused for a moment, then made an obscure gesture with his hands held palms up, as if to hold something broad and round. Like an orange or something bigger, a globe.

“All of this.”

“And these people will vouch that you’re a whiz with horses?”

“I’m the best.” He seemed to make some effort to restrain his hands as he said it.

Henrietta looked at him quizzically. “And how do you know that?”

For the first time, there was a hint of a sly, playful grin on his grave face. “’Cause I’ve seen the rest. And they got nothing on me.” She couldn’t help but smile. And then she surprised herself: she reached out suddenly, impulsively, to take his hand in hers and without knowing what she intended, her body carried her into the contract and instead of saying, “You’re hired,” she simply said, “Yes.”