4

THE SURVIVAL MACHINE

What god requires a sacrifice of every man, woman, and child three times a day?

—YORUBA RIDDLE

Breathe.

Her graying hair was wrapped in a messy bun, her coffee was black and hot, her gear bag packed with syringes, tail bandages, Therapogen, and thermometers as always, but the truth? Lou didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t just because leaving her husband’s side at four in the morning was akin to leaving the warmth and safety of the womb. She couldn’t shake the dream she’d woken from with a start: the numinous horse, off-white as a shell’s nacre, the way it opened its sickeningly lopsided mouth and emitted a hellish sound like the shriek of an old steamboat calliope, that failed music designed to replace church bells in Cincinnati. And then to be woken by the girl’s voice—the Forge daughter, now the farm manager for her father, his right hand. Flat, affectless voice, cold like a stone you couldn’t warm even if you tossed it in a fire. She’d called to say Seconds Flat had been streaming milk down her legs for two days and was agitated now, though she’d shaped up nicely over the last week. The girl—no, the woman, she was probably twenty-five—was smart and not prone to drama; if a 4:00 a.m. phone call was necessary, then Lou was needed directly.

Be in your center. As she drove, Lou welcomed the dark morning into her lungs and thanked the world for this offing day with the old meditative habits: witness, gratitude, devotion, coffee. But deep down, she knew she was just dragging her heart along like an old can on a string. There was a dread in her belly, and her body never lied, just as an animal’s body never lied. It had nothing to do with a difficult parturition, which could leave everyone exhausted and heartbroken if an animal was lost, and everything to do with where she was going. As her husband—a man who’d lost his filter many years ago—liked to say: Those Forges are motherfucking nuts.

Breathe.

She switched on her brights outside of Paris, casting the rural world into cameratic relief. The old fenced oaks made strange figural silhouettes, a stray horse caught her headlights with globular luminescent eyes, the colorless January frost gleamed—and she breathed in the peace, this dark reservoir of quiet free to those who worked third shift and poor souls like her, who worked any and all shifts every day. But her peace was brief; she was slowing down along Forge Run Creek and the turnoff. She used to come here as a shy teenager with her father, the famously irascible and opinionated Doc Jenkins. Back then, everyone had called her Lulu or Baby Lou. When she’d announced at the age of fifteen that she intended to become a vet, her father was at first dismissive, then disbelieving, then truly angry. “Women don’t have what it takes to be veterinarians!” he’d yelled, and then listed her faults—too sensitive, too quick to tears—none of which she could deny and none of which deterred her. He’d forgotten that she was also stubborn, practical, and taught by five older brothers to move directly into a headwind. When her emaciated little mother, worn half to death by rearing six children and smoking two packs of Burleys a day, had pulled her aside and in her exhausted way said, “Do whatever you want to do, Louisa, but don’t tell your father I said so,” they were kind but wasted words. Lou’s mind was already made up.

Vet school at Cornell had solidified her character as much as it had her understanding of anatomy and chemistry. She wasn’t stoic by nature or tough, couldn’t joke about awful things to lighten a room the way men so often did to blunt their feelings, and everything from dissection to pinching her first foal had moved and frightened her to the limits of her endurance. But she loved animals, and she’d learned another secret from growing up around her brothers: jump in first; the water’s only cold for a few seconds. She had done just that, immersing herself in experience and developing a calm appended of self-assurance, which made her the envy of everyone she worked with. She was the clearest thinker, the quickest diagnostician, the steadiest hand, the eye in any veterinary storm. And if anyone had asked her the secret to her success, it was simple: feel your fear but don’t give it any undue respect.

Breathe and be awake.

Forge Run Farm spread darkly before her now as she parked her F250 under the coping of the broodmare barn. Like a muted invitation, yellow light seeped from the door and window fittings. She slipped between the sliding doors with a cursory “I’m here,” shedding her green Carhartt jacket and scrubbing up to the biceps at the work sink, while the Forge girl was managing Seconds Flat. The mare had backed her rump against the stall wall, and Lou was about to warn them when she saw how Henry Forge stood at the girl’s side, marginally too close, one hand on the neck of the agitated horse and one low on his daughter’s opposite hip, so they were touching ankle to shoulder like a sewn seam.

Lou turned back to the sink, startled, and gazed down unseeing as the water rushed over her cracked and weathered hands. She blinked a half dozen times. She only turned again when she heard—or felt—Henry’s approach. His face, a face so beautiful it was made for movies, was taut with worry and fatigue. He said, “Her water bag broke as you were driving over. She had three hard contractions and then nothing. We got her up, and we’ve kept her there.”

Now this was something other than mere agitation, this was not a pregnancy gone too long, this was indeed a reason to hurry. Lou darted past Henry, the moment of that strange touch already forgotten, angling toward the stall where the oak partition had been removed for the foaling. There, the musky bloom of animal odor was cut by the astringency of antiseptic. Without apology or explanation, Lou took hold of the headstall from Henrietta and drew the mare forward into the space away from the wall that could interrupt the extension of a tiny foreleg.

“Bring that foal out at any cost,” Henry said from beyond the other side of the stall. “I’d rather lose the mare than the foal.”

Lou’s brow wrinkled: a foal is not a dividend. If you need a durable investment, get a dog or a cow. A horse, like a cat, is delicate. A horse is just four legs and a will to die.

Breathe.

Seconds Flat came forward, febrile sweat beading where her stomach bossed out, kicking up a bit with her front legs at her own foundering labor. With a gentle and confident touch that belied the race against time and dwindling oxygen, Lou drew the massive dam down onto her stout belly, then rolled her onto her side, so her legs stiffed out in a porcine manner. A moment later, Lou was crouched at the rear of the horse, drawing the wrapped tail aside and reaching in past the vulvar lips. There she felt the slippery gray sac that contained the foal. The problem was immediately apparent and simple—well, simple if the foal was still alive—the leading hoof was wedged tight like a support beam against the roof of the birth canal. With care, Lou slit the opalescent sac with her gear scissors, then cupped that sharp little hoof with her hand and waited. There was the briefest of pauses, then an involuntary movement as the leg realigned itself, then a contraction pressed in from all sides, wringing the foal so it inched forward. It was clear now it was still alive, but Lou reported nothing from the deep privacy of concentration. When the bony nose appeared, she curled the sac away from the nostril. A healthy little blue tongue protruded. Another contraction and the foal slid forward, wet and dark with a marmoreal gleam, its sculpted head draped down motionless into the straw, fluid streaming from the nostrils. No one dared breathe until it jerked once and inhaled raggedly. Lou continued to roll back the sac until the foal was free—discrete, sound, and separated from its mother save for the long, pulsing rope of umbilical cord.

While Seconds Flat remained prone, the filly blinked and pawed forward, struggling to acclimate to the pungent, chilly world of the barn. She gathered her spindly legs, situating them beneath her girth, and sloped up to a stand, her surprised hind legs following unsteadily on her fore. After an awkward, lurching step, she discovered her balance and stood before them.

All around, sharp indrawn breaths.

Even with moony newborn eyes and soaked with amniotic fluid, the stark, crystalline beauty of the animal was clear. She had a fine head with a sharply dished nose and an intelligent, curious face. A coat of miscegenated depth, neither black nor brown with a white marking between her eyes—not a star, almost an aborted stripe, a slash of white like a fissure. Her new body was large and muscular for a foal, the legs straight and strong and full of run. On each pastern a skinny low sock was visible, a mere striping of white above the coronet, so her hooves appeared rimed with ice. She observed them with preternaturally alert eyes.

“My God,” said Henry, startled. “She’s gorgeous.”

He reached over then and touched the small of his daughter’s back—that too-intimate touch again. Lou saw it from the corner of her eye, but only stared down hard at the foal, a sense of unease rising like gall, but she reminded herself that the intimacy of other families was not something she understood, their lives so separate they might as well be distinct species. Her own family was something of a black Irish carnival. I do not understand what I do not understand. It was a thing she often said when her husband was itching for a fight. It irritated him to no end, but it was the truest thing she could say. Lou, how can you reconcile eating meat with all your veterinary work? I love animals and I love myself, but I didn’t invent the circle of life. I do not understand what I do not understand. Lou, how can you trust your husband since he’s an ex-addict—aren’t you always worried about a relapse? I love my husband and that’s that. I do not understand what I do not understand. Lou, how can you spend so much time around Dad, that pain-in-the-ass son of a bitch never shuts up! I love Dad. If I didn’t talk to assholes, there’d be no one left to talk to. I do not understand what I do not understand.

From a conserve of strength always remarkable in an animal after parturition, Seconds Flat was rising, the placenta ejecting in a stringing mass down onto the straw, that draped gray membrane inlaid with calcareous white strands. Intact and breathing well with the process of ejection complete, her life would return to normal soon. Lou planned to give the new mother a week of involution and repair before her first postnatal uterine exam. But for now her work here was done and, and with a disquiet urging her on, Lou was eager to get off Forge land.

She shrugged into her coat and slipped out the door with only the quietest goodbye, then paused in the emergent morning when she saw a black man walking a mare across the brick chip lane about fifty feet away. Surprise arrested her movement. In her entire life—forty-three years—she’d never seen a black person on these premises—never a farrier, never a visiting groom, certainly not a Forge employee. She was staring openly when Henrietta strode purposefully from the barn, headed in the direction of that man. She nearly ran into Lou.

The warmth of the birthing chamber behind them, Lou could feel the chill radiating off the girl—like an impersonal dislike for everyone and everything—no less real for being unspoken. But Henrietta surprised her by saying, “I want to thank you on behalf of my father. He’s disappointed it’s not a colt, but I think even he realizes this is an extraordinary filly. She’s an evolutionary gem.”

Lou cleared her throat and surprised her back. “Actually, horses are the product of an evolutionary failure.”

“My father’s— Wait, what?”

Looking at the surprise on the young woman’s face, Lou said gently, “Horses may be the most beautiful animals on earth, but— Hold on.” Her cell phone was buzzing in her pocket with a text that read Come back to bed. Those people are craaaaaazy … and with haste, she said, “I’m going to head out, Henrietta,” then she checked the lock on her Bowie slide-in and yanked open the door of her Toyota.

Breathe.

For a moment, she thought the better of leaving so abruptly—after all, this was a girl whose mother had all but abandoned her as a child—and turned back, but Henrietta was already striding away under the screaking of morning birds, moving in the direction of the distant stallion barn, or perhaps the man Lou had seen, momentarily passing the amber doorway where Henry was staring, enraptured, at the perfect foal being gentled by its exhausted dam, all while the sun rose with a pitiless red and the shuttle rattled across the ancient loom and, somewhere, Maryleen sharpened her pencil to a knife’s point and began to write.

*   *   *

It’s 1945 and the farm is an old man, and the old man is a babe in arms. It’s 1950 and the servants are stealing the silver, his mother riding easy on a trotter; 1973 and the Old Man is a downed timber in a casket; 1976 and She is the seed flowering once again; 1980 and the Old Man is a husk, nothing but a rotted memory, and you’re running the show. Now it’s 2003, and what has really changed? Black is priapic drive, confidence man, skin-shifting fright, hellion, killy on a hook and his daughter is biting.

Henry stared at the filly before him, all pert and innocent on stalk legs borrowed from a dam and sire of the same line, a tight constellation of traits to be passed along in due order—perhaps only four short years. Henry’s whole life, every breath of his lungs, every firing of every synapse, was a wordless plea for an enormous heart. This shock of a filly was the horse he’d waited for for sixty-one years. She was inbred to perfection, and he knew it with his whole body. And yet where was his daughter, his right hand? He stalked to the sliding barn door and stood at the edge of a feeble white morning.

Rage simply erupted from him. “Henrietta!”

The early light was silent.

He could hear his life echoing emptily around the farm.

Maybe little girls think their fathers don’t notice when their hearts raise a cold shoulder. Or maybe—trickle of cognition—maybe it was meant to be noticed. His own reckless young self cast a shadow across the clear vision of a backward glance. That was the game of youth, wasn’t it—murdering one’s father? At first, the horses, like any weapon, are mere handmaidens to the battle; only later, in the maturity of open war, is the weapon transformed into an art itself. From the lowest calling to the highest. But Henrietta’s was a ridiculous game, not even a battle. And he could beat her at it; after all, he had played it before and knew all the tricks. Some men win women with animal brawn, but the fittest is the smartest, the wiliest. Odysseus with his craft and his cock in his hand. A father was born for himself, and his son was himself in perpetuity, et alii. The First Cause was existence itself, and the body made morality a servant of survival. He knew how to play on her weakness for his name’s sake, and he knew her weakness because he had made it himself.

“Henrietta!”

*   *   *

It was the smell of him that had slain her.

The first day he’d shown up for work, she’d noticed it as she led him to the stallion barn where he would groom. A cutting scent of his body so strong that at first she found it almost distasteful, like sun-ripened sweat on the body too long, until it wended past her nostrils into her lungs and turned to a strange distraction. Then it moved along the corridors of her mind to rooms deeper than thinking: indisputable. It made promises that her whole body responded to with assent.

She was seeking him out in the stallion barn, where he would be mucking stalls in the cool of the morning. She went ostensibly to tell him about the foal, but in all honesty, she couldn’t help it, she felt she had no choice, her body was ferrying her there, the selfish hum of the blood rising in pitch. She wanted to open his exotic mouth and press herself into it, to discover what he was naked. But braided into a moment’s fantasy of entanglement, painfully expressed in her breasts and between her legs, resided a subtle, old confusion.

“Henrietta!”

Goddammit. The oaken barn shrank to the size of a bird’s cage. Henry Forge, father and keeper. She paused at the door and sighed. What did she know? That the horse has true and false and floating ribs. That it has 205 bones in its body, the chestnuts on the backs of the limbs being remnants of the ancient horse alive in the modern; that, like a human, the horse sweats when it’s nervous. That I am as trapped as any Thoroughbred.

She walked back across the gentle sloping lane, alongside the apple orchard, past the rear outbuildings, the old whipping post hidden, a hand clapped over its mouth in the thicket, into the broodmare barn.

The tableau remained as she’d left it—potentate presiding over his horse. The filly was dewy and uncertain as she suckled at the heavy teat of Seconds Flat. An evolutionary failure? Is that what Lou had said? But, God, look at the thing! This foal was a golden mean: a straight nose with bold nostrils, curious eyes, a deep chest with a short back and elegant through the fores and gaskins. Henrietta’s irritation evaporated in an instant.

She said, “God, that’s a beautiful foal. Totally black.”

Watching her, Henry said, “Seal brown.”

“No, it’s black.”

“Daughter, I wonder if you’re color-blind.”

Winter was in residence: “Maybe I am.”

“Come here,” Henry said abruptly.

She didn’t move.

“Come here.” And without waiting for her response, he drew her to his side and kissed her hard on the cheekbone, and she thought, Coals are black, but when lit they shine bright as roses. You taught me that.

*   *   *

Allmon lived for the daylight. For four months, he’d shivered nights alone in a back room of the old Osbourne house on the far side of the bowl, barely able to close his eyes, the night still something to be survived. Every night was the first time you walked along the tier of your unit, peering terrified into your cell with its skinny steel bed and steel toilet attached to a steel sink. There’s a little window that doesn’t open out and next door a big swinging dick on the top bunk jacking off under fluorescent light. You still want to sleep on the concrete under your bunk, anus to the wall, a shank fashioned from a Coke can in your right hand—stopstopstopstopstopstop

Don’t forget to forget what they made you do.

His mind clamored for space, but his body hated it. His body wanted three walls and a door that couldn’t be locked. The day they transferred him out of Bracken into the open world of minimum security, where he could see the trees and the grass, it made his mouth go dry. His first insane instinct was to get back into the pen with the loudspeakers and screaming, the beatings, the hole, the labyrinth of gangs, all the hustlers, even the Aryans, the murderers, the thoroughgoing motherfuckers of every conceivable stripe. For one mad moment, he’d seriously thought about how he could deliberately fuck up and get sent back in. It didn’t make any sense, but it had been many years since anything made sense. They forced your hand, turned you into a man your own mother wouldn’t recognize. The walking dead.

So he quit sleeping alone in the back room at the Osbourne house, took his sleeping bag up to the stallion barn, and bedded down in the tack room under a peg rack of saddle blankets, surrounded by the stamping snorting urinating sound of animals. It reminded him of minimum, where fifteen men slept in one room. He stayed there, because he needed his rest. More: he needed his wits if he was going to plunge his hands into the white world, if he was going to learn to draw up their rivers of wealth and drink it, like he’d seen a crazy nigger in the pen do—slit the throat of a white dude and opened wide his mouth to catch the blood spurting from his artery. He could think of that now without shuddering, because

There were stars overhead, but he wasn’t looking up.

There were graves under his feet, but he wasn’t looking down.

The mask looks straight ahead. Don’t forget to forget.

He spent those first months in prison rearranging the components of his face so it looked like a man’s and could not cry any longer, then the body froze to match his face, hardened by the cold that comes when grief itself dies. His body survived that first year inside, but that brought no relief, because the mind was still alive and spawning thoughts like cockroaches. Real survival is learning to misremember disremember unremember everything as you follow orders, scramble, bargain, fight. Especially fight. Survive by any means necessary and just deal with the shame, because they left you no other choice. So what if your own heart bled out over time? Eventually, when they sent him across state to minimum, emotion was nothing but a long-dead sensation of a long-dead body. Then they told him that he could rub horses, pull himself up by his bootstraps, distinguish himself, play the sport of kings. He wasn’t naïve or romantic, he saw through it pretty quickly: horse is just a different kind of drug, horse is heroin. See, the rich hustle too, but they think their gambling is just a game without real consequence. He, however, would go in with his eyes open. So he read everything he could get his hands on, he studied hard, and then they selected him, because he alone knew the difference between hot and cold horses, snaffle and spoon bits, the Byerley Turk and Godolphin Arabian. He knew the meaning of prey animal.

The first day of his life was February 14: They led them all out to the barns in pairs like animals to the ark, the old cooled-down hats and Allmon, the youngest, now twenty-two. A white man was standing there, an ex-trainer, with a massive chestnut on a lead, a reschooled Thoroughbred. The man’s words were the first words of Allmon’s life:

“Happy Valentine’s Day, gentlemen, and welcome to the first day of Thoroughbred boot camp. If you’ve made it into this program, that means your correctional officers, as well as the committee of the Groom Program, believe you’ve shown potential and enthusiasm for this line of work. You’re one of the chosen. Let me be very clear: We don’t care what you did to get incarcerated. We only care how you’ve conducted yourself inside thus far. You will be released from Blackburn in about six months, and, in order to prepare you, the next half year of your lives will be devoted to everything equus—their history, grooming, and feeding, their care on and off the track, basic vet science.

“Gentlemen, the hundred horses in this program come from all over the country; we have claimers who’ve put on two hundred pounds since they arrived, we have your second-tier racers that were made to run on broken knees and bowed tendons, we have some graded stakes winners, whose names you’ll be familiar with if you read the Racing Form. The one thing they all have in common is they were purchased out of the auction bin, headed for slaughter. About a hundred thousand horses are slaughtered in this country every year. They breed Thoroughbreds to the tune of thirty thousand a year, so for every stakes winner there might be two hundred draggers who get shipped off to the meat house when they can’t earn their keep on the track. What happens is they slam a four-inch nail into their foreheads to knock them out, then they hoist them up by a rear leg and cut their throats, bleed them out. I want you to keep that in mind while you work with these horses—you’re here in a life-saving capacity. Being a groom is a special vocation. The breeders are breeding bigger horses on weaker legs, the owners rarely live around the horses and most are in it for the money or the bragging rights, the trainers and the vets are shooting them up with drugs and running them injured, and the jockeys are making big bucks on their backs. You’ll hear all of them say they love horses, but as far as I’m concerned, the only ones who earn the right to say that are the grooms. You feed a horse, you brush a horse, you pet a horse, then you can say you love it. We have an old saying in this sport: Treat your horse as your friend, not as your slave. That’s what I’m talking about. Now come on up here and meet your first horse.”

Allmon, when you walked up to that gelding, your heart was banging in your ear, sweat streamed into your eye, your hands were shaking in front of God (the great nothing) and everybody when you grazed the horse on his muzzle, just barely. Then, digging deep for whatever boldness you possessed—the thing that got you through—you placed both palms on the flats of that long face. The horse jerked smally, as if startled, then released a long, ruffled breath and lowered its head like it was bowing to you.

And the trainer said, “Well, hey, kid. That’s a nice touch you got there.”

Inch by inch, day by day, you learned to master your fear of the animal. First you took up the currycomb and rubbed the horse from the massive shoulder around, tracing circles and trying not to leap out of your skin the first time you passed the rump of the horse with its jackhammer legs. You used the dandy brush to raise whirlings of dust and swipe the fields from its hide. Then you took a girl’s brush to the mane and tail, a dollop of ShowSheen, and a braid. You learned to scrape deep into the hooves with a question pick and to bathe the horses with a soapless wash to preserve the skin’s oils, to dab balm on hock scratches and check teeth between dental exams. You wrapped swollen fetlocks in blue bandage and disinfected tools in antiseptic. Then, finally, they were hoisting you up on the animals; you, a city kid from a forgotten life, now a horseman. More than that, they were calling you a groom, even calling you gifted, telling you what you could have if only you wanted it bad enough. Which you did. You were a man apart, not like these others, who were just looking for the simple and steady. The future came and wrenched open your eyes when you were just a kid, and once your broken eyes healed, the only thing you could see was: horse.

On the last day, three weeks before your release, that trainer—the one who’d been watching you for six months, took you aside and said, “Allmon, you continue to impress me. You’ve got good hands, some real talent. What do you intend to use it for?”

You say, “Do my thing.” It’s nobody’s fucking business how you intend yourself.

But he says, “I’ve got a feeling you’re looking for more than that. You feel like you’ve got something to prove?”

Quiet and steely a moment. Then you turn on him, on that white man who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know who you are, what you’re capable of. Whatever’s in your eyes must burn too bright, because the man rears back a little. “Yeah, I got something to prove. I ain’t asked to be here, but here I am. And now I aim to play the man’s game better than he can play it. I aim to make something of myself.”

The trainer doesn’t say anything for a moment, just looks at you, very quiet and evaluating. Then: “So I’m going to offer you some advice. As someone who was inside.”

This time it’s you who rears back, open surprise written on your face.

The man lowers his chin, eyes unblinking. When he speaks, his voice is harsh but low and not unkind. “Allmon, whatever you had to do to get by inside—leave it inside. Don’t ever breathe a word of it to anyone. Accept that you have to be a devil to fight the devil in hell. But you’re not in hell anymore, kid. You’re in Kentucky. They’re already going to call you nigger; don’t give them a reason to call you devil too.”

You’re still trying to comprehend how this slight man survived inside, then you comprehend his words, let them sink like a rock into your stomach. You nod finally. “Yeah.” And exhale audibly. “Yeah.”

The air clears, the man smiles almost ruefully. “So, you’ve got real talent. I take it you want to be on a good farm under someone with real ambition, not just some dilettante.”

“That’s right.” Gladiator words, but shame enflames your cheek; you have no idea what dilettante means.

“Well, I know just the place. Forge Run Farm is hiring. Their star is on the rise.”

Now that—that—is what you wanted to hear.

*   *   *

Because Memory is a faculty of Mind, and Mind is what most consider the man.

Which is why the wandering radical said, Die unto yourself. Love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life.

And why the acolyte went to the master and said, my mind is troubling me, and the master said, I can fix it if you will just hand me your mind, but when the acolyte went to give him his mind, he couldn’t find it and was enlightened. But that night, when he lay down to sleep, the acolyte felt a great love for his mother, and he lost his enlightenment, and said good riddance, got up the next morning and went to market.

Because the path—well, it’s as difficult to find the words as it is the path.

*   *   *

The foal knew nothing but milk and play. It lolled and scratched its new ear with the soft bundle of its leaf-layered foot, it flung itself through timothy grass in fits of exuberance, darting beside its dam and nipping at her long tail and forelegs. It knickered its fresh song at everything.

But it wouldn’t let Henry come near.

When he approached, the foal first stood warily apart, its ears pert and sharp as two attenuated thorns, and when he reached out his hand in the gesture of every man who ever offered an animal food and then tamed it, it sprung loose from its trance, spindly spider legs carrying it away. Then, as if aware of a new game, it would slow and turn at the center of the paddock and watch Henry with a kind of evil delight. It stood there, so fine and full of itself, it robbed Henry of his breath.

So: “Henrietta!”

That seemed to be the refrain of his living these days. It’s what made the world go round—men chasing women. He was always chasing his.

He stalked the shed row, empty now, the broodmare band all turned out in the southern paddock, tracing maternal circles around their foals. The stalls were redolent with the musk of horseflesh and sunlight heating once-living grasses and old, oiled leather. The place was quiet, no grooms, no business, no daughter.

“Henri—”

They came face-to-face, he and the man who’d been haunting his barn these four months. They’d never spoken; he was the cause of a row such as there’d never been before in the Forge house. Henry would be the first to say he was no longer imprisoned by the hotblood hate he’d felt in his youth, but he objected to this new world of unequal opportunity, a man hired being a man unfireable. In his father’s time, under the old dominion …

“Where’s my daughter?”

“I’m Allmon Shaughnessy.”

Henry simply turned from that tough face, all overhanging brow and unblinking eye, and hollered “Henrietta!” under the open blue sky. Allmon used the moment to size him up. The rich tan, feathery copper brows, box jaw. A blue linen shirt casually wrinkled, a brown leather jacket, belted khakis. Wearing good clothes around animals. Like money was water and there was an unlimited supply.

“What do you need?” Allmon said, an edge in his voice that scraped at Henry’s patience.

“I don’t need your help,” was the acid response. “I’ve got a jumpy foal I need haltered—I’m looking for my daughter.”

He stalked off in the direction of the broodmare barn, but his heart was galling his throat. He couldn’t stand the man’s city voice. It was as though his daughter had taken a marker and drawn a black line down the center of his farm.

He didn’t find her, and when he came rounding back along the side of the broodmare barn again, his tongue curling her name in his mouth, he stopped abruptly. At first, he thought that the man was hurting his foal, cinching her in a stranglehold. But then his disconcerted mind knocked right, and he realized Allmon was cradling her in his arms as if just waiting for the bridler. Textbook.

“I got your foal,” Allmon said needlessly. Slowly, Henry slipped back into the paddock, the bridle dangling at his side. His eyes were on the man’s enormous hands, which caged the gangly foal without any gentling whatsoever, just even pressure, so the foal was easy, quiescent.

Henry’s eyes narrowed. “Have you ever worked with foals?”

Allmon shook his head.

“Well, they’re infants, not just tiny horses.” Now Henry stepped in, so there ensued a small contest of bodies and their shadows tangled, but Allmon did not retreat, maintaining his hold on the horse and taking the bridle right out of Henry’s hand. “I got this.”

“You need two sets of hands.”

“I got this.”

And he did. He let loose the foal, but instead of running it stood still, a soft, volitionless statue. Allmon slipped the nylon straps over the long, narrow bones of the nose, under the velvetine jaw, and secured the buckle behind the skull. The filly stood, curious, and after the cinch was checked with the width of one finger, it shook its head as if to test the permanence of its new restraint, and then sprang off, its mane snapping like a flag in the breeze.

Allmon straightened up, his face unmistakably triumphant, almost smug. Henry crossed his own shaking arms over his chest and said, his voice slung low with anger, “I want you to look at that horse, young man.”

He turned slowly, casually with a kind of cool disregard in his body, but he turned nonetheless.

“That horse you’re looking at is two hundred and fifty years old.”

Allmon’s brow contracted, and Henry went on. “That horse came over the Wilderness Road when it was a death trail, it broke the ground you’re standing on, it built that house I live in, and it bred itself. It’s entitled—do you understand me—entitled to exist in its own flesh, because of its history. And if you ever so much as look at my two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old horse again without my permission, you can kiss this job goodbye. Do you understand me?”

If he was looking for fear, for a cowed spirit, Henry didn’t find it. There was only a deepening concentration, as though the man was memorizing his words for some purpose invisible to Henry.

That made his voice pitch up with irritation. “Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, sure.” Insouciant.

Henry’s voice was steely. “Let me be very clear. My daughter hired you. I would not have. I’m not interested in having convicts on my property.”

No change on that stoic face.

Now Henry smiled a hard smile. His words were clipped, surly. “Why are you even here anyway? What do you want?”

With an almost imperceptible tilt of the head, as if he was honestly surprised by the question, Allmon said, “I want what you got.”

Henry’s scornful smile died. He drew himself up to his full height and said, “All my life, I’ve made my name. It’s the most valuable thing I have.”

“And I got the rest of my life to make mine.”

Without a pause: “You can’t make a name from nothing.”

And just like that Henry was walking away on his money legs in his money shoes, and Allmon just stood there watching him go. Behind them, the filly shook her head again and again, trying to ascertain the nature of a halter.

*   *   *

He damn near lost his head in a rookie grooming accident, but it got him exactly where he needed to be. He’d been picking Acheron’s left rear hoof when the bay gelding—usually calm to the point of soporific—stamped his hoof free and swung his belly weight into Allmon, knocking him so hard against the stall wall, he saw stars for the first time since he was a kid. He didn’t even register the cry that erupted from him as his own until he felt the unmistakable swill of blood tracing down his temple, seeping warm and wet into the neck of his polo.

In the next instant he was crabbing instinctively out of harm’s way, scrambling into the aisle, when he felt hands at the neck of his shirt, and Henrietta was hauling him up as if he were nothing more than a plank board she was raising. He wasn’t a lightweight; she had crazy strength for a slim woman.

“Can you walk?”

He turned, but her face was distorted by his fun-house pupils. He took one wobbly, wasted step.

“Let’s go outside,” she said, “and get some fresh air. Try not to bleed on everything.”

She had one arm wrapped around his shoulder as she led him out of the barn into the shocking, undiluted light of day. Allmon could barely open his eyes against it. When they didn’t stop immediately, when he sensed their general trajectory toward the white farm truck, which was parked in the precipitous noon shadow of a barn wall, he began to resist.

“Let’s get you to the hospital,” Henrietta said.

Allmon didn’t reply; he just wrenched his arm out of her hands and shoved his back against the barn wall, inadvertently knocking his head against the boards. The air went out of him in a surprised puff.

“Whoa,” Henrietta said, watching as Allmon sank down against the spiky grain of the wall, breathing hard, blood still trickling. He squashed bright splashes of marigold beneath him as he sank into the mulch.

“No, no, no, no way,” he said.

“You really should.” Henrietta curbed her tongue and didn’t say, It’s more for our protection than yours. She said it through the distraction of the sharp smell of his sweat and the muskier underlying message of his body.

“No!”

The word burst from him, as hard and abrupt as a bark, but it was the unexpected look on his face that truly surprised her—ferocious, but with some mysterious, angry passion. There was no arguing with it. So, perplexed, Henrietta sank down on her haunches and took his face in her hands. When he tried to pull away, she snapped, “Stop.” Then, gentler: “You’ve got a pretty deep scrape. I think either Acheron hit your nose or you bumped it on the wall. Either way, you’ll have a black eye tomorrow.”

He made a dismissive face.

“Well, you need to stop the bleeding.”

She made a move as if to rise, but he wrenched his polo up in his fist and pressed it as a bundle to the side of his head. The skin of his belly was exposed to the cool air and in a moment he was covered in goose flesh.

Henrietta was unsure what to do then, half-risen, but then settled beside him in the mulch with her forearms resting on her knees and her fingers shredding the delicate lace of a fern’s leaf. For some time, they simply sat there in the sunlight until she said, “Are you tired of us yet?”

“Who?” he muttered.

“Southerners.”

He was kind of dizzy; he had no idea what she was talking about. His disordered breathing had just begun to settle into its regular rhythm.

“We’re incredibly annoying,” she said, watching as one of their colts was led out of his paddock by a long-term employee. “If you can listen to our tall tales for more than fifteen minutes, you’re a saint. But it’s all just rocksalt and nails.” She looked at Allmon sideways. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: we’re just an insecure species in a vanishing ecosystem. A conquered nation. The only power a Southerner really has is to never forgive and never forget. It’s not worth much.”

Allmon closed his eyes to stave off nausea, which Henrietta saw only as a dark listening, a quiet absorption that fed something in her.

“Honestly, though?” she said. “I think Northerners are worse than Southerners. They think they’re better than us because they survive the world’s shittiest weather and they’re convinced of the religious retardation of the South. They’re ignorant but arrogant. Southerners, on the other hand, know perfectly well they’re ignorant; the problem is they’re proud of it.” She cleared her throat. “My mom had the right idea—she just left the country.” Henrietta looked down; there was much more than an ocean between them now after all these years. Monthly phone calls were the height and breadth of it.

If she wasn’t going to stop, he might as well get something out of it. Allmon said, “When’d your father get this place?”

She sighed, capping her head with her hands and looking out wearily at a paddock. “A long, long, long time ago.”

Carefully, he said, “What’s he like?”

She looked at him with irritation. She didn’t want to talk about her father.

“Ask me why I do what I do,” she said suddenly.

“What do you mean?” He tried to turn his head, but pain swamped him and he cringed. He maintained the pressure of the polo to his temple.

“Why do you think I do what I do?”

Allmon didn’t have to hesitate. “’Cause you got family.”

“It’s less noble than that,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe it’s because my father didn’t want me to go to college, and my mother left me here to my own devices, and I don’t know how to do anything else.” Another sigh and then she said, “So have you figured out that my dad’s a huge racist?”

Allmon reared back slightly, almost laughed from a whole different kind of discomfort.

She shrugged. “He’s from a different generation. We’re not all like that.”

It took every bit of his strength and self-control for Allmon not to roll his eyes. Oh man, white girls and their … His mind paused. He leveled a long, considering glance at the house. This information felt like a little key in his pocket.

He was quiet so long, it was as if he’d forgotten Henrietta. She chewed on her pink lip, her face querulous. Then she looked in the opposite direction, away from the fences and horses, toward the generative east and the earth that lay rumpled there like something discarded. She said cryptically, “It used to be wild here. And green.”

Green, exactly! His first day on the farm rolled around again like a bright white horse on a carousel: the green had hurt his eyes like it was hurting them now; everything was lime and kelly and forest, with trees and grass and streams in every direction, just so much … green. These folks—people like her—could walk out into all that green anytime they wanted because they owned it. Green was white.

“Are you feeling much pain?” she said, then she reached out and, in a gesture that felt unfamiliar to both of them, gently touched his shoulder.

He surprised her by laughing abruptly. Not just a chuckle, but a laugh that transformed from a cough to a rough sound that rolled out of the center of him. His shoulders shook and tears sprang suddenly to his eyes.

“What?” she said warily.

“You think this is pain?” he said. “Shit. Let me tell you, when I was in two months, I saw a man get killed right beside me. Like far away as you are. We was—were walking down the hall to the yard and some dudes were coming back and this brother in front of me reached out with a shank and just sliced this other dude’s belly open. Like left to right and up. Opened up his belly and his guts came out.”

“Jesus,” said Henrietta in a whisper.

Allmon didn’t even notice. “Your guts ain’t red like you think they’ll be. They’re gray. And not big.”

Then two things happened at once: he realized Henrietta was staring at him with a gaze as bright as a shadeless bulb, and he remembered his vow to never breathe a word of his life inside. He clamped his eyes shut and she said, much to his surprise, “Your life has been hard.”

Set against the backdrop of his existence, it was absurd undertalk and should have made him angry, but it didn’t. It was just simple, true. When she reached forward and lifted the polo away from the cut to check the bleeding, he didn’t open his eyes, but he didn’t resist. She said, “Do you know who Darwin was?”

Now he opened his eyes and looked at her sharply from the side.

“Right, sorry.” She cleared her throat. “Well, there’s this story about Darwin that’s always stuck in my mind. You know, he came up with the theory of evolution in part because of finches he studied from the Galápagos Islands. But when he first got to Chatham Island, it was really more a disappointment than anything. It looked to him like … a furnace, like a geological furnace. It looked stripped of life; there was ash on the air and it was inhabited mostly by lizards. But it was in a place that first struck him as a hell on earth that he found the key to the best idea anyone ever though up. He found the key to life.”

Allmon was listening carefully, but Henrietta suddenly shrugged and looked away, as if she too had divulged something a little too personal and now felt rather foolish.

“It looks like you’ve stopped bleeding,” she said suddenly. “You can get a clean shirt in the office. If you need to take an early day, that’s fine.” Then she rose and was moving abruptly away into the sweet, Southern glamour of the property—barns like summer blacktop, coins glittering in the streams, and, of course, the house: solitary, steeped in morning light, proud, and perfect. A thing built to last. How he burned to go inside.

“Hey!” Allmon called out, sitting up straighter, the sudden movement striking his nose and forehead like a fresh blow.

Henrietta turned and lowered her head. “What?”

“You should come back and talk to me sometime. You got interesting things to say. I appreciate that.” And he smiled the first smile she’d ever seen on his face, however unsettling.

*   *   *

He made a point to watch her from across the fields, from the far end of the barn, from the next stall. And when she turned to look, he didn’t turn away.

*   *   *

Lou had come again with her quiet hands and reassuring voice, checking the articulate muscles of the foal’s neck, palpating her velvet jaw, walking watchful circles, probing the recesses of her mouth back to the slick muscles of the jaw. But there was nothing to be found except the undeniable fact of excellence; the foal was exceptionally fine. The mouth problem was not a problem at all, just a tic.

And yet Henry was uneasy. He called Henrietta down after Lou left, fretting and insisting that she see it herself.

He said, “Her dentition is perfect, her bite is good. But look.”

Henrietta watched as the foal, now almost ninety days old, turned aside, fixing them squarely in the big globe of her brown eye, then tossed her head with her mouth working. Her lips curled out and back twice, then fluttered loosely, almost comically on the breath.

“Good God,” she said, “is she grinding her teeth? Is she in pain? These inbred horses—”

“No, no. Lou said she’s just working her lips and jaw.”

“So she’s just mouthy.”

“I don’t like it,” Henry said, folding his arms across his chest. “And I don’t like that she still doesn’t have a name.”

A small smile grew on Henrietta’s face. “Why, Henry Forge, maybe she’s trying to talk to you.”

“She needs a good name. She’s going to be a beast.”

“I wonder what she’s saying…”

“Bold Ruler was tough and Nasrullah was wild, so—”

“Oh!” Henrietta said, laughing.

She’s out of Hellcat by Secretariat

Out of Seconds Flat by Second Chance

She speaks just like Xanthus, Achilles’ charger

This is Hellsmouth, Father

“Let’s name her Hellsmouth.”

*   *   *

Henrietta didn’t wait very long; it was nature. It was the epithelium, dark with melanin, stretched taut over the soft architecture of muscles, striated and smooth, the fine wiring of the nervous system firing north and south, east and west; it was all that living bone, full of mineral and marrow and run through with red coal seams; bones stacked neatly to craft his six feet; the golden eye under the ledge of his brow under the strong vault of his cranium, its twenty-two bones so neatly placed they seemed arranged by hand; it was the curvy stack of the spinal column, the aborted wings of the scapula, the sharp clavicles and the belling ribs; the long fall of the arms; the hands and the feet, each a bony masterpiece of locomotion wrapped for travel in four muscular layers; the long pinnate muscles along the tibia, the strong bunching along the thigh; it was the basin of the pelvis, false and true, and the organs of generation, conducted by muscles and ligaments and fibers, the hanging scrotum, the vesicles, the prostate and Cowper’s glands; and the sheathed root of the penis, the defiant, erectile body, the tender extremity with its timeless tunnel back to the seminal testes with their millions upon millions waiting in the dark.

She found him seated on an old mustard bench in the tack room, the bare bulb above him directing bright light onto his body but carving drastic, obscuring shadows onto his face. Tack was spread in all directions on old saddle blankets. A gallon of thick conditioner lay open and Allmon reached his hands into it, scooped out the white grease, and then worked it into the old bridles and saddles, their hides thirsty from neglect.

She saw him start when she upended an empty meal bucket to sit opposite him as he worked over the noseband of a bridle. He glanced at her askance and saw her scorched earth eyes. She seemed to burn at a higher temperature than everyone else. It made sweat prickle on his neck.

“You done working?” He’d saved up interesting things to tell her, but he couldn’t find any of them now. His confidence seesawed.

“Yes,” she said. He nodded slowly, intent on his project, but her gaze was just steady, unrelenting, and she saw it clear as day when his breathing grew uneven.

“Tell me something,” she said.

He waited, the muscles of his shoulders bunched so tight his hands felt numb. Some premonition pinched the nerves along his broad back. He’d been looking for an in; was this it?

“You’ve spent some time with my father by now. What do you think he wants the most?”

It wasn’t what he was expecting. He looked up quizzically as if she’d just offered up a riddle.

“Tell me as someone who’s only just met him. Does he want a legacy, a family, a … what?”

Allmon actually stopped what he was doing and considered what she was asking. His voice was very quiet when he said, “A legacy. He wants folks to remember he was like a great man.”

Henrietta sighed. “Why do men care about that so much—to the extent where they’re willing to breed horses to their own siblings, their own mother?”

“You take the risk,” Allmon said, “because a legacy is forever. They can take everything else away from you.”

Henrietta’s smile was small, barely a crack under her flushed cheeks. “That’s where you’re wrong. They can take your legacy too. There’s nothing permanent in this world.”

He stiffened up, wanted to say, You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you don’t know how much those words weigh, but before he’d even decided to keep his mouth shut, she had risen with some impatience and stood close to him under the light. “Do you know what I want?”

A sidelong glance at the door, and she looked too, checking to see whether anyone was there. Only a vacancy, so she stepped over some of the tack toward him.

She said, “People spend their lifetimes pursuing things that don’t even really give them pleasure in the end—just the admiration of strangers. I think that’s a fucking waste.”

He glanced up, startled, but she was sinking down onto her haunches before him and staring into the shadows where his eyes were recessed, inaccessible. The shadows excited her terribly. She said, “There are three things I like the most about fucking. I like the first moment, when you push your cock in and I can feel everything—everything—intensely. Men like to say that women don’t have much sensation, but that’s not true. That’s just a lie they tell themselves.”

Allmon’s hands had come to a standstill on the leather as if soldered there. She could tell he was hardly breathing, and there was the faintest trembling along his neck.

“Give me that,” she said, taking up the bridle. Then she rose and in a moment had turned and settled herself backward on his lap, nestling his legs between hers and settling in against his groin. She laid the leather aside and said, “The second thing I like is to fuck like this.” And she rocked back into him just barely, listening for the sure-inevitable-easy-math-look-ma-no-hands sharp intake of his breath. He was inert under her as if all his nerves were severed. “I like this because I can feel the big ridge on the head of your cock against the front. When I do it like this”—now she was rocking against him with aching slowness—“I can build up until you’re begging me, you’re fucking begging me to fuck you harder, and you’re trying to get deeper, but I keep fucking you shallowly just like this, even though you’re begging me, begging me to fuck you deeper, and this”—she grasped up his hands, forcing them up her shirt to where her elastic bra could be simply pushed aside—“you have to fucking grab my nipples; no, grab them, that’s what I like—grab me harder”—and she placed her fingers over his and forced them down hard around her nipples, rocking harder when she said—“and then when I come on your cock, I’ll finally let you fuck me really deep, but only when I say so.”

She leaned back into him fully then, wound her neck against his, so she could smell him, so that natural-order home scent of him filled her nostrils, and her breathing was rough when she said, “That’s what I like.”

And then she was off him in an instant, adjusting her bra and pulling down her T-shirt, turning abruptly and handing him the bridle, which he took up numbly, confusedly in one hand.

“But I’m discovering there’s a third thing I like,” she said, “and that’s waiting for it. But trust me when I say I don’t like to wait too long. What is it you want, Allmon?”

He was hard, so it wasn’t entirely a lie when he looked straight into her eyes and said, “You.”

*   *   *

Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.

So there is thought, which is ought and should and will. It’s a great mill wheel spinning in the mind, all the minutiae of the world swept along in the millrace, plundered and broken by the wheel, detritus to drift away. The wheel spins and spins and spins, going nowhere, despite ceaseless activity.

The amygdala is the seat of elemental emotion. Shaped like an almond, it lies behind the smooth skin of the forehead, the cranium, the rapid eyes. When sensing threat, the amygdala stimulates a cascade of hormones for flight or fight. In a thousandth of a second, this is done.

But before the action, before the clamor and heat of the fight, there is a pause. The body freezes, the slower neocortex not yet aware of danger. In the pause, the body gathers its energies, prepares itself. As of yet, there is no action. But this quiet state is only temporary.

There is also love, which looks like hunger but is not. The fewer words said about it, the better. Language is the charnel house of man.

*   *   *

Allmon crept into the dark stall. He waited until the nightman had fired up the 250, gassed the thing once for good measure, and the lights had fallen away into the black pit of the bowl before rising on its other side near the old manager’s house.

Why are you here? Henry had asked.

Allmon touched the animal on its soft, bony head, found the tufted tip of its ears, its subtle sway back and rough tail. Then, careful not to hug on the delicate neck, he bent over and simply wrapped his arms around the chest and rump like he had that first bridling day. He took care not to burden her with any of his weight. This hurt his back, but the animal was warm and passed its heat along without grudge. Then it grew curious and wended its neck back toward him. He felt the warm shallows of breath against his side. In and out, in and out, and for a few moments he didn’t realize the press and lull was in him too, that it too was rising, rising steadily until the wave overcame itself and, with crushing force, swamped him. Suddenly he was drowning in the old grief again: he would give anything—anything—to have his momma back for two minutes, one minute, even thirty seconds! Anything! They could cut off his fucking legs if it meant he could hold her hand just one more time! Nothing was anything without her. He was a drowned man.

Then, restoring some of the sand under his feet, the wave receded as he had long ago learned it would, and he straightened up slowly, ancient tears in his eyes, but not on his face. Why was he here? To grasp the very things that had been stolen from him, the things he wasn’t allowed to touch.

*   *   *

So you go on working your job, the old life and all of its emotions packed carefully away, trying to keep yourself steady, because the girl’s coming back, the redhead, the thin-lipped girl, some kind of future. There’s something about her, something interesting, but to do this right, you need to be hard in every sense of the word. You’ve got something she wants, she’s got something you want. You prepare yourself with carnal thoughts, which slip from your brain pan in bubbles. You see that from the top of the room where you take your ease, watching your body below rise up from its sleeping bag, which smells of your own distinct months-long musk. She swivels those little hips through the door, the boss girl, the employer, the owner’s baby girl. You don’t know exactly how to do this, but you’re going to do it, definitely yes. That girl is a door.

A harsh whisper: “Where’s your father at?”

The white girl just shrugs, like she’s slipping a weight off her shoulder. “I’m not my father’s keeper.”

Then she forms a noose of her arms and slips it over his head, drawing his body near. From way up there, his breath catches as he leans down, watching very carefully. He wants to see this, how a man and a woman do this. He kissed some girls as a kid, but he was shy and stupid. This is what a real kiss looks like. It makes sounds that discomfit, but it fascinates. Until she slips her hand down the front of his night drawers and he concentrates up there, wills his life to life—really, now is the time, really (!), but no matter how she touches it, it remains soft and cute as a mole. Then the breeder, the enthusiast, the appraiser really goes to work on him, and his mind could explode with the force of his effort; he’s a man; he’s supposed to leave coins in her purse, cream in her cup, diamonds in her ring. She raises his hand to her breast, but her body is so cold to him, he wants to snatch his hand back. Maybe it’s the way his body jolts or maybe because it’s been too many minutes now, but her snowy papery white face, which had been peering so intently into his, proceeds through a string of subtly drawn transformations, from confusion to vague disbelief to consternation and now flaring indignation. When he says, dully, “I don’t know why I…,” she peers at him. “Is this always a problem for you?” “Naw, I just … it’s not my fault, I don’t know.” She draws back her hand, real offense on her face. “Are you saying it’s me? Are you gay or something?”

She doesn’t know the history in his words, what that means to a man like him. His arms, his defenders, his weapons just reached out and pushed her back into the chaffy wood of the tack wall, and the wind went all out of her in an audible woof. From up there, hissing: Don’t hurt the woman, the house, the horse, your chances. Then the little white woman was up in his face, her words whipping him. “You know what the problem is with people like you?” she spat. “Self-pity. It’s always someone else’s fault.”

“People like me?” he said, rearing back, incredulous. “Like what—like black? Well, you know what’s wrong with people like you? You’re all spoiled inbred racist motherfuckers, but you don’t even know it! You’re so blind, you can’t tell when the person standing in front of you is half-white! Which I am!”

She scoffed. “I’m sorry, but if you don’t look white, you’re not white. At least in the real fucking world.”

You know what rage is like? It’s like a fire that blooms from your feet to the crown of your head in an instant. He knew what rage could do—she had no idea. He lowered his head like a bull and stared her down. When he intoned, “Fuck you,” it wasn’t a roar, it wasn’t chaos, it was a deep, mortal hatred that rolled up from the center of him. Unmistakable. It caused her to shrink back like physical violence never would have, her face suddenly stripped of its anger and recast with fear. Regret was instant on his tongue. “Shit!” He said, “Henrietta,” and reached out for her, because he needed this in a thousand different ways. But it was too late. She’d already turned on her heel, a complicated roil of feeling growing like sickness in her stomach, alongside a determination not to touch him again. And she didn’t, not for many months.

*   *   *

It was summer on the wheel again, and Henrietta and Allmon were tasked with driving a pair of two-year-olds to the training center the day before the yearling sale. It was a wet Friday morning with continual, sourceless mist obscuring the lineaments of the buildings, so that the horses and grooms and riders seemed to traverse here and there behind a damp and billowing veil. They were quiet as librarians in the haze, shushed by the soft weather. This was a sly rain, never hard, yet insinuating itself until everything was saturated. The sideways, gossamer weather made continual inroads against the indoors—moisture seeping through dykes of hay to dampen the earthen floors, concrete slickened and made dangerous, tiny runnels steering around bits of straw and manure toward cracks in the doors and stall walls. The grooms shivered in their work, though the day was not cold. The horses smelled like wet dogs.

Outside, the world was a headlong green, a green that weighted the trees, the leaves heavy on the boughs like mossy green coins gathered dangling and dripping in suspended nets. It called to mind Irish days Henrietta had seen when she traveled to Coolmore Stud on prospecting trips with her father. Everyone spoke of the incomparable green of Ireland, but it was no more green than Kentucky. It was a color to crack the code of life.

When they reached the center, Allmon unloaded the fillies one by one, he and Henrietta speaking no unnecessary words. They had long maintained a terse working space in which nothing warm grew—glances dropped before eyes met, conversation withered on the vine. If Henrietta’s desire wasn’t dead, it was dormant, and familiarity had dulled the sharp edges of their history.

She waited for Allmon beside the truck until the mist began to form fat droplets that threatened a downpour. Just as she was stepping onto the runner, about to swing herself up into the driver’s seat to restart the engine, a hesitant voice caught her. “Miss Forge?”

She turned and eyed a slim man of indeterminate age, his face marked and lined by a lifetime of working with horses in the elements. Raffish blond hair fell forward over thick brows but did nothing to obscure the nervousness in his worried eyes.

“Yes?” she said sharply.

“I, uh—I…” He edged forward into her airspace. “I’m wondering if I might could show you something. I’m Tony. I’ve worked with some of your horses.”

“What do you want to show me?”

He shoved his hands down into his jean pockets then and indicated with his head. “On the other side of the training center. It’ll only take a second.”

“The other side of the—” she said. “What is this? I’m busy.”

Allmon’s voice interrupted them. “What’s going on?”

“Oh.” Tony looked surprised, discomfited by this other presence. His eyes swung between the two of them, hesitating briefly, but then he continued on down the path he had chosen. “Listen,” he said. “I got to tell somebody who can do something about this … situation. A woman, you know.”

Henrietta found herself pinned by the severity of this man’s gaze amidst the bustle and business all around them. “Well…” She glanced briefly at Allmon, who shrugged blankly. “I guess,” she said, “but we only have a minute.”

He nodded. “Meet me at the utility entrance on Rand Road in ten minutes.”

Two minutes later, they were idling on the far side of the training center, eyeing culverts converted to streambeds choked with hairy grasses and leaves. A heavy mist moved slowly forward and back as if the air itself were breathing. Light escaped the clouds and found the wet on everything and sparked off each blade of grass. Just as Allmon was beginning to shift around impatiently in the silence, the man appeared, his face flush with color, his pant legs soaked from running across the acreage. He stood there huffing while Henrietta cut her engine and Allmon slipped from the passenger seat with his brows raised.

Tony popped his ball cap once and wiped his forehead. “I got to show y’all a horse.”

Henrietta made a face. “A horse?”

“A beat horse.”

“Do what?” said Allmon. The hair prickled at the back of his neck.

The man nodded. “You know that new trainer under Mack? That dude they brought out from California with the horn-rimmed glasses? Well, he beat the shit out of a horse yesterday. Tiny Tim. We couldn’t get him to work the gate and he was biting all the handlers. Well, this dude fucking took this bat thing and beat the everloving shit out of him. Cracked him over his head, right between his eyes. I saw it myself, I mean I was standing right there, just standing there. I guess I was in shock, you know?”

Incredulous, Henrietta said nothing, so the man gestured toward Allmon, who started forward immediately, and the three of them moved toward the outbuildings on the rear of the property.

“It was nuts,” the man continued. “The dude bit his ears when he went down.”

“What?” Henrietta laughed an awkward, disembodied laugh, and Allmon cut her a hard look. The laugh made him sick to his stomach.

“You don’t know that old trick? To get a colicky horse to stand up? You tug on their ears. Well, he bit him.”

Now they were standing at the side of a small white stone stable Henrietta and Allmon had never seen before, far beyond the concentric dirt tracks of the training center, past the hay and grain storage. It was clearly never used, with ragged sheets of old white paint peeling from the grimy stone walls and soggy, blackened hay scattered down the aisle. Tony made an abrupt, rotating turn on his heel, glancing furtively in all directions, then led them into the dank and shadowy barn. It smelled of old, wet wood and housed four stalls, three unoccupied. The fourth contained the horse. Quietly, carefully, they approached. At the sound of their feet, the massive creature whined and struggled to press his enormous, quivering bulk into the far corner of the stall. His rear legs bent as if he were trying to force himself into a box half his size. He appeared ready to sink down into the straw.

The man beside them pointed at him needlessly, uselessly.

Henrietta couldn’t see the front of the horse, only the trembling croup, the trembling legs, the trembling sides. Later, in memory, even his hooves would tremble, chattering like teeth. It seemed like something other than an animal, a wretched, discordant orchestra of fear.

Allmon leaped back, stricken, his forearm horizontal to his face, so his mouth was contained in the crook of his elbow. “Oh shit,” he whispered. He’d seen worse, he’d seen … No, no, no, no—

Henrietta remained rooted where she stood. “Hey,” she said very gently, low on the breath, so for a moment the horse stilled and drew his head round from the corner, seeking after the soft, womanish sound. But when he saw their figures, he rejolted and cowered with such force that his nose struck the wall. In the brief moment he was turned, the bleak wreckage of his face was revealed—the torn ears, broken lips, the lids of his eyes swollen like old black fruit with bright broken blood vessels around fathomless pupils. Everywhere his flesh was covered by a patchwork of black stitches.

“Oh my fucking God,” said Allmon.

Henrietta just stood still, rooted.

“Yeah,” the man said, exhaling. “Yeah. I just stood there and watched, you know? I can’t get it out of my head.”

Allmon was recovering from the surprise of the animal, slowly lowering the shield of his arm and pointing at the crude crazy-quilt stitching. “Some vet did this shit?”

The man just shook his head ruefully. “On-site vet did that. They brought him back here, ’cause this part of the center doesn’t ever get inspected. Three hundred and seven stitches.”

“That horse ain’t gonna live,” said Allmon.

“He won’t.”

“This is someone’s investment,” Henrietta hissed. “Does Mack know about this?”

“Nah, he’s barely here during racing season.” The man pressed his lips together, as if he wanted to keep further words from escaping his own mouth. They had not been standing there even a full minute in pained, horrified silence, staring at the croup of the ruined horse, when they suddenly heard the sound of men’s voices approaching. Allmon instinctively grasped Henrietta’s arm, and they sprinted out the opening of the barn through which they’d come. To escape from sight, they ducked behind a holly windbreak and, nearly snow-blinded by the light, ran half-stooped back in the direction of the Chevy.

When they achieved the far side of the truck, the man said, “Hold up,” and sank down on his haunches, fumbling for a cigarette out of his rear pocket. It was smashed and flat, but it lit. For a moment he said nothing while Henrietta stood over him hauling air. But there was electricity in Allmon’s limbs; he couldn’t keep still. You stand still, you remember things you can’t afford to remember. He paced back and forth in front of the truck, muttering, “Shit, shit, shit.” Don’t forget to forget.

Tony remained crouched by their truck, gnomelike, one hand ferrying the shaking cigarette and the other shielding his eyes from the light.

“Man,” he said finally, “it’s a fucked-up situation.”

Henrietta had no response.

Tony looked up at her: “I knew I had to show someone who could do something about it.”

She looked at him sharply. “What can I do? I don’t have any power.”

Allmon abruptly stopped his pacing by the truck and turned to look at her.

Tony stood up, openly surprised. “People like you are the only ones with any power around here. I’m worth less than a fucking boy Friday. So is he.” He gestured at Allmon.

“You were the witness to this,” Henrietta said, “not me.”

“Me? Listen, lady, I don’t have the freedom to risk my job. This is all I know how to do. I got kids to think about.”

She shook her head, obstinate. “You’re the one here with a story to tell.”

The man just stared at her in wonderment. Then the wonderment turned to disgust, and he looked at Allmon, raising his arms in a hopeless, disbelieving gesture.

“Listen—” said Henrietta, but he interrupted her.

“I’ve done what I can fucking do.” He spoke with such open scorn that she had to fight the urge to shrink. Then he walked away from them both, kicking at the ground as he went; birds were aloft in a flurry. He didn’t bother to duck his head now, stalking along the holly back in the direction of the training center and moving his head with expostulations that she couldn’t hear. Not knowing what to say or do, Henrietta just got in the truck and reached numbly for the gas. She realized then that she was utterly chilled from the mist; the only heat she could feel was the spot on her arm he had touched. Allmon.

He had stopped pacing but was still outside the truck, his back to her, staring out at the pastureland without seeing it at all. What had started as a kind of panic at the sight of the horse had become a hard, dark bud in his chest. What he knew beyond any doubt: people like the Forges deserved whatever the fuck was coming to them. No mercy. The world would go up in flames before it cracked their white shell. That knowledge was akin to hate. So he was thoroughly surprised when he turned around to yank open the truck door and—maybe it was the light shining on her red hair or the way she looked at him, suddenly quizzical and unsure of her own decision—he felt something inside him lean precipitously toward her. It made no sense. He was so taken aback, he stood there motionless for a moment. Then he met her eyes for the first time in a long time, and when he climbed into the truck, he did so with the sinking sensation of someone moving slowly into deeper water.

*   *   *

For a while—he could admit it—he’d been worried. Every time he turned around the man was there, standing too close to his daughter as they leaned against a barn, swinging fifty-pound bags of feed together, riding side by side when Henrietta drove him back to the Osbourne end of the property, his golden eyes always on the house. The temptation to speak up had been great, but he curbed the desire. He was circumspect, smart; he knew his daughter well. He was working out how to newly reframe an old law when … it stopped. Sure and sudden as a summer storm; one minute she was glued to the man’s side and the next she was back in the house, writing in her notebooks, driving off to Lexington or God knows where, but nowhere near the man with the hungry eyes.

And like a barn cat, Allmon was everywhere. Even here—brown like a bay, Henry thought—at the yearling sale in the Keeneland pavilion. There were occasional glimpses of him in the parade of horses brought to the auction block, where the auctioneer presided ten feet high on his dais, flanked by his relay men, whispering and pointing, their eyes trained on the proceedings below. The auctionable flesh emerged stage right, passed to the black ringman in his coat and tie, the yearling striding to the center with a hip number trembling on its quarter, eyes bobbling with fear; there was occasionally some churlish rearing and shitting, then stage left, leaving the black sweep—black like roofing cement—to his job with a broom and pan. Henry and Mack sat in their place in the amphitheater, wedged between a sheik and a drunk County Kildare man whose brogue was so thick as to be unintelligible. The rabble and much of the press were sequestered in the rear atrium, peering in through the glass at the money.

Henry sat up as his yearling Deep Spring emerged onto the plank boards of the auction block, passed by Allmon to the jacketed handler, the bidding set to begin.

A flash of annoyance: there was that age-old black man’s stance, something he never could abide. Physiognomy is truth! The form was avoidant and resentful, shoulders rolled in as if to shield a secret, but the secret was insouciance and unceasing rebuff. Allmon had an ability unique to his kind: to affront without saying a word.

Mack leaned over. “Who’s your groom?”

Henry crossed his arms on his chest. “Allmon Shaughnessy.”

“Well, there’s your black Irish. Any good?”

And there precisely was the rub: “Better than good. Great with my stallions.” He couldn’t say otherwise.

“Where’d you get him?”

“From wherever they grow America’s criminals.”

Henry laughed but Mack didn’t smile. His eye twitched.

“Blackburn, apparently,” Henry continued. “Henrietta hired him.”

“Well,” said Mack, shrugging, “I got nothing against a man with a past. I don’t give a damn what you’ve done in your life, I don’t care what color you are—black or brown or illegal or whatever. I’ve had a few kids from over there.”

Henry raised a brow. “From where? Blackburn?”

“Yeah. They train up good grooms,” Mack said with another shrug. “How’s your filly?”

Henry broke into a radiant grin. “Amazing. Better and better by the day.”

“Well, if this kid is as good as you say, assign him to her. Send him to me when Hellsmouth is ready. I don’t mind the prison kids. They know how to fucking work.”

The light of new thought roosted in Henry’s eyes.

“You’re up,” Mack said with a nod in the direction of the dais.

The bidspotters paced slowly here and there, eyes sweeping over the sea of trainers, bloodstock agents, sheiks, and local hands. Henry stared hard across the lot of them. A flap here, a wave there and the bids rose, the spotters’ heads swiveling like the heads of owls, the patter of the auctioneer rising until the last umpish “Hiyah!” when Deep Spring sold for $200,000. The ringman led the jittery yearling away to the left, one gloved hand on the lead shank, the other on the deep neck of the colt. When the left door opened, Henry leaned forward, actually passing a hand before his eyes with some irritation as if shooing away gadflies and barely cognizant of the sale—yes, yes, there he was, grasping the lead shank, the man. Allmon Shaughnessy. Interloper, user, everywhere at once, brown as river mud.

*   *   *

She couldn’t stop thinking about the beaten colt. A phantasm, a shivering grotesque cramped in the corner of her eye, he vanished every time she turned to confront him. Again and again it happened, stoking her pulse, but each time it was some other dark horse from the sea of endless horseflesh: ripe but untested, ungainly but salable and all fresh for the auction—somewhere among them a sales topper, an avatar of free forward motion. Vets darted from one exam to the next, trainers stood like lighthouses in a fog of tobacco smoke at the glass doors, their watches flashing as they scratched out hip numbers. Henrietta put her own free hand to her forehead, feeling slightly unbalanced. The way that horse had turned to her voice in its stall with its black, burst-fruit eyes. Slashes across the atlas bone. She knew the velvet of a horse’s muzzle was as tender as the flesh of a woman’s inner thigh.

Allmon emerged as a solitary figure in the crowd, Deep Spring at his heels. Henrietta slowed. She was having trouble remembering how she had once spat at him from the catbird seat and put him in his place. What she remembered was the way he had grasped her arm at the training center, the surety and heat of that hold. Now she stopped altogether, staring: My God, his body was perfection. She had been avoiding it, but there was no escape. He was a mathematical proof of hard beauty, symmetrical and proportioned for perpetuation. The expressive organs of the face—the full lips and golden eyes—occupied an even third of his face between the smooth forehead, the wide expanse of jaw. The height of his head equaled the size of his hands, which now grasped the lead shank of Deep Spring. The strong length of his chest to the top of that head, the hair of which he now kept shaved to show the smart, round lineaments of the well-turned skull, was a quarter of his body, exactly the width of his chest to the crook of his arm and so also the diameter of his head. His body abounded in architectural relationships: From the knee to the ground equaled his forearms to the tips of his fingers. He stood eight heads high. His foot too was as long as his forearm, articulated now by the effort of managing an irritated horse, and, she knew, nestled in these symmetries, the foci of perfection: the cock and navel, the old compass points.

Her genes rattled stupidly, purposefully, when his eyes met hers.

They traded Deliria for Deep Spring. Her hand brushed his, or his hers, action and reception indecipherable. She could feel the wordless animal in her. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t really wanted her once. She still wanted him.

“Go well?” she said coolly.

Allmon nodded. “Two hundred grand.” They spoke in the measured, level tones of the unsure.

“To whom?” Her words mattered no more to her than the fleeting of distant bats. When Deep Spring tugged against his lead, she barely noticed.

Allmon shrugged. “Some Irish guy.” And then he seemed to realize that Henrietta was looking at him, that the temperature had changed, and looking up, he was confronted by an intensity in her face that caused him to step back right into Deliria’s shoulder.

A voice shattered their moment of public privacy. “Henrietta Forge!”

Allmon slipped away in an instant, his heart banging an abrading rhythm, as Henrietta peered under the arched neck of Deep Spring. She noted first the dusty Justins, dark jeans, a Wildcats jacket, then the blowsy face and rosaeic nose, the wondering eyes so wide that they showed white around the edges of the brown irises.

“Henrietta Forge? I believe it is you,” the man said. “You’re older, but I’ll be darned if you don’t look almost the same.” The man had rounded the front end of Deep Spring and stood gazing at her with a kind of helpless pleasure, shaking his friendly head in disbelief.

“I…,” she stalled.

“Dan Barlow,” he said, sticking out his hand.

“Barlow—”

“Jamie Barlow? My dad was your all’s farm manager from back in ’73 until—”

“Oh my God!” Henrietta cried, her eyes widening. “Old Barlow!”

“Yeah, that was my dad.”

“Oh!” Her gasp was quick and involuntary, the tiniest spear piercing the brittle veneer between past and present. One hand rose trembling to cover her lips as she took in the look of this man, stout and sure like his father, but redder and thicker about the middle. “Oh, how is your father? Tell me how he is,” she said, her words like a plea.

A mild surprise registered, and the man shifted his considerable weight. He passed a hand down his satiny jacket front. “Well, Dad passed back in ’93. Uh, he, you know, he didn’t last too long after Mother went, which was, shoot, back in … well, that was in early ’92, I reckon. I’m so sorry you didn’t know. I called your dad myself to give him the news.”

Old Barlow was dead? Her eyes filled with fast, unbidden tears. The man had always called her his strange bird, his funny valentine. He had looked at her as though she were the most interesting and precious person in the world. And never once had he told her who to be.

Now his son said, “That happens a lot, you know. One passes and the other can’t hang on too long. Dad always relied on Mother to keep him on the path. Maybe a little too much. Lost his spark a bit when she went. I think he didn’t have as much purpose without her.”

“I never visited him,” Henrietta said. “After he retired. I told him that I would.” Guilty tears threatened to spill down her face.

There was surprise on the man’s face again. He observed her tears. “Well, now,” he said, and inched closer and, with the awkward kindness of an aging bachelor farmer, slumped his heavy hand down on her shoulder and patted her stiffly but gently. “You were just a kid, just a little girl. You had no cause to worry about visiting an old man like that. Besides, Dad’s last couple years weren’t pretty. He wouldn’t have wanted you to see him that way.”

Henrietta couldn’t speak at all, so he just patted her shoulder again and went on, “Dad sure did care for you, though,” but then his own voice caught, and they looked at each other, bewildered by the density of emotion building in the midst of the Keeneland crowd. “Yes, he cared for you very much. I remember he always said if he had a daughter, he’d want one just like you. Said you were smarter than he was when you were still in elementary school. He always did admire a smart woman. That’s why he married Mother.”

Tears slipped raggedly down Henrietta’s unguarded face. Her voice, when it emerged, sounded young. “Do you”—she said—“do you think he forgave me?”

“For what, honey?”

“For forgetting…”

The man, anticipating the gravity of her reply, had leaned in to offer her his good ear, but now he faced her squarely and said, “You got nothing to worry about. Dad was good with horses, but he was even better with people. He was a very loving man. I never saw him hurt a fly.”

“Yes, but do you think he forgave me?”

The man’s brow was furrowed, and he said, “Why, I believe forgiveness and love are the same thing. Don’t you?”

*   *   *

Partially awake: soft and gray as old ashes, doves bob on the windowsill, warbled faintly by the rilled glass, so their contours flex and bell beyond their actual shape. They touch beaks as if kissing and their elegant heads merge, partially distorted. She’s barely aware of watching them until one dove taps the glass with its slate beak, and the sound carries, as well as the sounds of the woken world.

Mourning doves mate for life; she’s seen evidence of it herself. One day when she was fourteen years old, she discovered a dead dove on her morning walk. A mess of chine and feather and chalky eyewhite, the thing had been done in by a prowling cat or some other predator. Above, on a phone line that swooped along the edge of the property, a gray dove cooed, very much alive. She thought nothing of it; there were birds everywhere. But the next morning, the violent bed of feathers remained, and the perched dove cooed overhead—and the next morning and the next, that bird sang its persistent, increasingly dreadful song. It remained there above the disappearing body of its mate for three whole months until only a beak remained and all other bones had long been carried away. For all she knew, it remained there still. She had learned not to look.

If Jamie Barlow, that good and kind man, was dead, then truly every other being would also die. Death must be real and not just some story people told.

An old vase—a family antique—had been tottering on its rim for a long time. Now it finally broke.

She didn’t make herself pretty; she never had any interest in anything like that. She just went to him. She found him exactly where she knew he would be in the stallion barn, mucking and grooming, cleaning up someone else’s mess. At first, he was unaware and moved with the ease of the unobserved, and then, some near-dormant animal sense alerted him, and he turned with the smallest of starts. He looked at her, then beyond her, through the drawn sliders of the barn door toward the house, which was enormous, almost overpowering the constraints of the aperture.

“Can we start over?” she asked, but at first he didn’t take a step toward her, because if he moved, he would no longer see the house. But when she tugged on his hand, he followed.

She saw how his pupils were big, voluptuous. She was on her knees before him in the hay, the smell of tack stronger than the smell of two people with their blood rising. He stared down at her, almost repelled as she took him in her mouth. What he felt most keenly was the cold air on his buttocks. Denuded in the almost dark, he shivered. He didn’t want her to see his body, but he dissolved into the shadows of the room, and he could only know himself to be where her hands traced. She was moving on him, as if trying to suck up the very source of his male life while he leaned against the door, straining against into away from her, then sinking down, and she was shimmying out of her jeans, opening and widening.

Shocked by his own nudity, he felt—was—inexpert and extremely cold.

“God, you have a beautiful body,” she said. It made him cringe, because she thought it was a compliment.

Then he was falling into her and again and again, entirely unsure, and there was almost no pleasure in it, only imperative, the body driving toward its denouement. The anxiety of it snuffed any pleasure. He didn’t know how to do this, and yet somehow he did. It was the most natural thing in the world.

She was under him and she remained under him, receiving him without a sound, as if she was curious or amazed, ushering him into her with an undulating tight that made him make sounds like a low song, sung just for her, rising in tempo and volume with each refrain of desire or need or force until he drove into her as if he would break her, the smacking sounds alarming him as much as they turned him on, and then he was done, hunched over her and sweating, his arms trembling with rageful exhaustion and confusion.

She held him tight until he withdrew, and only then did she make a sound, one long, low, lonesome moan, which sounded more like desire than any sound he had made.

He couldn’t move; he remained hunched over her, catching his breath for a stunned and exhausted time, inadvertently letting her look at him. He only escaped her gaze when he eventually returned to the workers’ quarters on the far side of the property, submerged himself in a tub of water, and covered his face with his hands. Then he was too tired to beat back an insistent memory and recalled someone saying to him somewhere sometime long ago: “Son, the common language of God and man is morality.”

*   *   *

It’s an old story, how on a late summer evening, Daniel Boone was out with a friend hunting deer at the edge of a farmer’s field. They were shining the eyes—which is to say, his friend was carrying a flaming pine torch as he rode along on his horse, directing the light at the forest and its thickets, and attracting the shining eyes of all the species within. As the horseman moved slowly along, Boone followed behind on his mount, his rifle at the ready, trained on the shadows in the woods.

Suddenly, Boone saw a pair of bright eyes. He made a quick motion for his friend to stop, then slipped silently from his saddle. He trained his firearm on the spot where he had seen the animal, steadied himself, and prepared to take the shot. But something stayed his hand—a too-long moment of hesitation, suspicion, or some strange intuition. He withdrew his finger from the trigger and pointed the rifle at the ground.

Soon there was a rustling in the thicket. When the deer emerged, it was wearing a dress. There stood the neighbor’s blonde daughter, Rebecca, in plain sight of her would-be murderer. She was beautiful. They were soon married, of course.

*   *   *

So there were trysts, but the trysts were preceded by words, which at first sounded to Allmon like some old song-and-dance routine directed by overheated white girls who needed you to shuck and jive before they’d moan and writhe beneath you, asking you to pump the pump of you until you spilled your come. The first few times he was always watching from up in the rafters— What the fuck are you doing in a barn, Allmon Shaughnessy, son of Mike Shaughnessy, lothario, Irish agnate, collector, and disregarder of children, you fucking half-white fuck?

This was supposed to be what a man lived for—sex machine. So why could you only feel it in one little spot, the head of your dick, while all the rest of you was tied up in old rope. God forbid that rope begin to fray or loosen—holy shit, then his whole life would come spilling out of the shape of him; he would start to feel forbidden things in his body, like the kisses she began to press against his neck, or the touch that was maybe not just desire but something softer than that. Or the look in her eyes, which was softening too, more with each encounter. No. NO. He wasn’t fucking her, he was fucking through her keyhole into the house on the other side.

“Tell me where you come from,” she said.

How can I tell you? No one ever told me.

“What were you like as a child?”

Ugly.

“What’s your mother like?”

A tisket a tasket, a gray and glossy casket.

Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me

Shut upShut upSHUTUP!!!!!!

The real questions were his, shining around him like a whitened, heated aura, and he tried to hang on to them with what remained of his dwindling reserve: How much is that house worth, how much are you worth? How come you think you deserve all this when I don’t? I had a white father too, but nobody’s handing me shit. How much do you think I need to buy one good mare and one share of the best stud? What were you doing the year I turned seventeen? How much do you think I’m ever gonna tell you about my life inside? Nothing, that’s how much. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Because you deserve nothing.

But it was as if she wanted to eat even his silence. She grasped hold of his empty answers, invited them into her, begging him for pleasure or perhaps something else that had begun in the shape of pleasure but was swiftly outgrowing it. She was moving steadily over him, asking and asking and asking to be let loose from the awful hames that constricted her, and then she was coming with great cries and convulsions into openness without care for who heard or knew. She wanted it all—the heavy, burdened brow, his face like a secret, his dark, long chest with its trembling inhalations, his cock, the contours of which she could draw with her tongue. And sometimes as she was moving over him, Allmon’s body betrayed him and he was suddenly lost, swimming in the new space that opened up between two bodies but that aroused a terror even stronger than desire—he was losing his purchase on his old resentments, and he couldn’t relearn his resistance. Something was growing in him too. In desperation, he tried one last trick: he learned to play the old, instinctive game of postcoital sleep, so that when she resumed her questions, finally asking, “What was it like in prison, Allmon?” his only reply was silence, and when she turned her head to inquire again, he was asleep, his chest so still, it appeared he was dead.

*   *   *

But he couldn’t last; he broke. She came to him one morning at seven, an hour set brazenly in the light; he realized she had walked straight across the property, abandoning any need for privacy, his or hers. She had always been so secretive before, and yet here she came, tugging off her clothes in the daylight, naked before she was even on his bed.

“Allmon,” she said, and that too struck him as a new curiosity, the way she said his name. It was big and round like a dipper that could hold him. When he looked at her face, he saw what looked like wonder or the joy of discovery, something as bold as the morning light itself. It jarred him; he looked away. But she reached with both hands and turned his face toward her, so he could see her as she undressed him. It was so clear that she was taking joy in this—in him—but that was too much, almost repugnant. He tried to turn away, but then she climbed over him and pressed him into her. She was entirely concentrated, her body so open, they were soon one strong rhythm, and he felt he was becoming her or maybe the other way around. Then she was pulling him over her, and it was Allmon who was making sounds now, release pressing up through reluctance, some kind of desperate song as she was saying please, please, please like the only thing she wanted in this world was for him to come inside her with nothing between them, and the rise and fall was coming—but it wasn’t orgasm this time, it was the other wave, the great worst wave from forever ago, suffocating and dreadful, about to crest over him now, and he was off her in an instant, hunched over and dry heaving beside her, his body wracked.

“My God,” Henrietta said, too surprised at first to move, jerked from the sex and the warmth into the cold. Then she recovered herself and reached out for him, but Allmon extended one forearm and pushed her back, shaking his head like a wounded bear.

“No,” he choked, swallowing hard, struggling to hold himself in.

“Allmon.” Henrietta’s voice was soft—that change had come once they started having sex; it was a woman’s voice like he had never heard before. “Allmon, what’s wrong?”

He just shook his head, back and forth, back and forth, hunched. Henrietta lay there on her side and observed him for a moment, the only thing he would allow her to do. She took her time considering all the confounding details of his downcast face, then said, “Allmon, tell me why you’re not free with me.”

It was so unexpected, so absurd, he laughed from his hunched position—but it was an ugly sound, like a bark. Wholly dismissive.

“What?” she said, but not rearing back.

When words came, they were as cutting as any knife blade: “White people—!” he blurted.

“White people what?”

He was ready—even wanted—her words to be sharp too, but they weren’t, and when he looked over quickly at her face, it remained open, curious. He didn’t know whether to believe in the openness he saw there, or whether it was some kind of trick.

“Y’all don’t get it. You really don’t,” he muttered, hate now beginning to stanch his tears.

“Get what?” she said. “I don’t understand you.”

When he spoke, he spat. “No, you don’t!” His words were launched arrows. “Y’all fuck up our lives for fucking hundreds of years and then tell us we aren’t free? What the fuck! Can you even hear yourself?”

Henrietta didn’t defend herself, and he didn’t know what to do if he couldn’t get her to fight, to hate him back. So he waved his hand abruptly, confusion suddenly present, regret tannic like blood in his mouth. “I don’t even know if I mean you anymore,” he said, but he did, because she was like a white pebble on a white beach that ran all the way around the world, containing all the oceans she had seen and he hadn’t.

Henrietta’s touch interrupted the roiling of his mind. Something was moving in her, emerging out of shadow into consciousness. She was seeing the real Allmon, and she knew it. Her hand was light when it stroked the hard slope of his shoulder, then tugged insistently at his arm.

“Tell me about prison,” she said, but her words were salt in that wound.

He didn’t even hesitate. “No. That ain’t never gonna happen.”

“Why not? Don’t you trust me?”

He shook his head. “I can’t trust myself.”

“Trust yourself to what?”

Still looking at the ground, he said very deliberately, “If I said my life out loud, I don’t know what I’d do. So don’t push me.”

She didn’t. When she did finally speak again, she said simply, “Allmon, I just don’t want you to be unfree with me.”

He made a hateful, smirking face.

“What’s the most unfree thing about you?”

He half laughed, still dismissive, but wouldn’t look at her face. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about. Forget it. Seriously.”

“Allmon, what’s still holding you prisoner?”

The blood rushed to his face. It came so fast, he felt dizzy. He shook his head, looking at the ground.

“Tell me. Please,” she said, and only held him more firmly when he tried to pull back from her hand on his arm.

“Fuck,” he said, blinking. His voice was thick.

“Tell me.”

Suddenly, he rocked back on his heels, naked there beside her, his arms raised. He looked furious when he pounded once at his chest, a single thud. “Hurt!” he roared, like she had caused it.

Henrietta wasn’t afraid of his anger but was totally confused. “Hurt? Like physical pain?”

He shook his head angrily.

“Grief?”

He nodded violently then, his neck straining, his eyes feeling wild like they didn’t know where to look. He tried once, tried again. “My momma, my life—” he choked out.

“What?”

“Died!”

Henrietta rose onto her elbow, her brow wrinkled. “Your mother died?”

He didn’t move for a moment, a wave of utter self-disgust wrenching his heart. Then he blurted, “Fuck!” like he’d made some awful mistake, and he spat a little when he said that, so he lowered his head in embarrassment, and then as if his bowed head were granting permission, he began to cry, first with a strange, strangled sound and then huge sobs. Henrietta was off the mattress in an instant like an animal taking flight; she grabbed at Allmon, half in alarm, half in affection, but that only made it worse.

He was losing control, the reins slipping his grasp. He was almost incoherent when he spoke through the tears that flooded his cheeks. “I don’t know … why you even want to be with me. They broke me. I’m fucked up. Prison fucks you up. I can’t tell you what I did … I’m broke.”

Her arms were around him like iron bands, but they didn’t feel like a constraint when she said, “I don’t think you see what I see.”

He couldn’t stop the horrible, stupid words as they began to run as furiously as the tears. “Why? I’m poor. I’m fucking ugly. They used to call me old-man Allmon. All anyone sees is black. I wish I was smarter … had money. I’m just average, you know.” He laughed bitterly and made a downward sweeping gesture toward his lap. “I didn’t get nothing good in this life. I didn’t get nothing that lasts. Prison killed me. You’re fucking a dead man.”

What Henrietta said next shocked her, because she once believed its very opposite, but she recognized the truth of it as soon as it was on her tongue. “It’s not the body I want; it’s the man. And that man is not dead.”

Allmon shook violently once as though he might cry forever, but then he stopped suddenly and laughed a rueful laugh of total humiliation, and was finally silent. When Henrietta heard that laugh, however minor the key, she scooted back onto the mattress on her back with her arms open. “Lie down with me,” she said.

Allmon looked toward her once, warily, wishing to escape. He was horrified to the marrow of his bones that he had cried in front of her.

“Come here,” she said again, and patted the mattress.

Gingerly, reluctantly, like he was testing broken bones that had only recently begun to knit, he rolled onto his side next to her. Everything hurt.

Henrietta placed her head next to his on the pillow, twined one leg over his, and held him fast until she felt certain he wasn’t going to roll away or get up.

“What’s the best thing you can think of?” she said.

He was surprised by the question but responded with surety. “The river.”

“The Ohio River?”

Allmon nodded, and in his exhaustion closed his bloodshot eyes to savor a private vision. “Because my momma … I know she’s on the other side. It’s like she’s alive and just waiting for me to come home.” His words drifted away. Quietly, he said, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. What’s the best thing you can think of?”

Henrietta’s face, as always, was serious. “Don’t you know?”

“What?” He turned finally to look at her, quizzical.

“You,” she said. “You’re the best thing I can think of. I feel like the real me when I’m with you, and I’ve been waiting my whole life for that.”

*   *   *

He’s asleep, and she isn’t going to wake him. She’s leaving, but it’s impossible to return to the house, impossible ever to return to her old self. There’s a new spirit transplanted into the old, worn body. So, she wanders away across the grounds, which are her father’s, through a brand-new morning under a brand-new sun. Born out of his grief, which he planted in her with his words, she can feel ecstasy growing.

The truth? His nakedness—the nakedness of his heart—is her first happiness.

The world is busy rearranging its terrors and its joys, and something in her quickens. She’s aware of herself, perhaps for the first time, as constantly varying, no longer separate from nature, no longer the watcher.

She feels like a woman—or like more, like she herself is the spring, which once seemed like something outside of her: force and violence, charging the barren landscape and murdering winter, beholden to nothing—certainly no human or animal. Spring comes as a reconnoitering scout, a first slip of green peeking from the very bough tips of the oaks, barely there at all, just a weighted abeyance. Winter is damaged but still dreadful and full of poison ice and useless powder; every human heart senses that brief lull; it’s only a first flirtation, but they’re raw with expectation, impatient after the long revolution of the year. They let their stoves and hearths go cold. They turn their animals loose as a prayerful incantation. Then the air fills with a natural heat as if from many bodies crowding close. The birds trill early and through the night. The hours quicken in their clocks, then a late March blooms gulfstream heat, then the lead goose returns with its followers, and suddenly, the season emerges, an influx of green overlaying the old, dead architecture and breaking through fading, whitened scars. The green comes up and out, like a river that’s been running under everything, rising, swirling, and pressing out of every living thing in wet, ripe presence, so the gushing river is in everything and covering everything—in the vasculature, the buds, the bark, the veins, the teeth, the tendons, the marrow. Up and out and over. This green burns the human eye. She isn’t adornment; she doesn’t care what you think of her beauty. This isn’t a gift; it would burn you if you held it. She’s brilliance without intellect, mother without love, a lover with two differently colored eyes: comfort and disaster. She destroys animals in their birthing, she floods the world, makes youth hasten out of itself, ripens everything to rot, she makes the graves warm.

This and more: viburnum in the yards, pungent as an ovulating woman, pink labial pistils, the leaf bottom shaped like a heart; fresh sun knocking down every shadow; the overeager daffodils, early every time; infantry grasses storming animal blazes and human paths; the lilac buds of the redbuds; pendant racemes of black locust; sumac’s lip-red fruit; mosses on bleachy bones; mosses on the hunched river stones; mosses on man’s abandoned hunting huts; also the drone of carpenter bees; bobbing nine-pin tails of deer; red-hooded woodpecker alighting; all the small animal bodies bathing in the sweetgrass; the green foliage glazed with yellow; new life in the old ossuaries; there’s the frog in the muddy shallows, gripping a twig with one splayed hand and floating loose and easy in the shallow waters; tiny penile head of the turtle poked from the depths of the pond, auras of water rippling from his briefly borne movements; turkeys in their heavy, improbable flight; crickets; gnats; flies.

Everything comes from everything and nothing escapes commonality. I am building a house already built, you are bearing a child already born. Everything comes from everything: a single cell out of another single cell; the cherry tree blossoms from the boughs; the hunter’s aim from his arm; the rivers from tributaries from streams from falls from springs from wells; the Christ thorns out of the honey locust; a word from an ancient word, this book from many books; the tiny black bears out of their durable mothers tumbling from dark lairs; eightieth-generation wild crab abloom again and again and again; your hand out of your father’s; firstborn out of firstborn out of firstborn out of; the weeping willows and the heart leaf, the Carolina, the silky, the upland, the sandbar willows; every tart berry; our work, which disappears; our mothers’ whispers, which disappear; every Thoroughbred; every violet; every kindling twig, bone out of bone; also the heat light-borne, the pollen airborne, the rabbits soft and crickets all angles and the glossy snakes from their slithering, inexhaustible mothers, freshly terrible. When you die, you will contribute your bones like alms. More and more is the only law.

Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much—the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin? I say there’s no such thing—any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever-expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words; ten thousand books, all the world’s dictionaries and there would never be enough; we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night sky, the flakes of snow common and heartbreaking; before the steady rocking of a man and a woman, the earthworm’s curling, the leopard killing the mongoose killing the rat over the ant in its workmanlike machinations, the anonymous womb that knit the anonymous, the endless configurations of cloud, before the heron, the tern, the sparrow, and the wily peacock too, the peacock turning and splaying his designs, each particular shimmering feather a universe invested with its own black sun, demanding, Look before you die, Look—Don’t turn away for fear you’ll go blind; the dark comes down soon enough. Until then, burn!

*   *   *

It sounded like a bad joke, how Mack came from a place called Holler—too backwards to even have a proper goddamned name. Way out in Letcher County past Whitesburg under a ridge as tall as any New York skyscraper. Holler. I mean, goddamn. Holler for help was more like it. Too far in to get penicillin when you were sick or to get out when your daddy was drunk and tumbling down Jericho. He came from a family where almost nobody gave a damn if you didn’t go to school, where you were eight the first time you got sick on spruce moonshine. Excepting his dear mother, who loved all her children gay or straight or green, his clan was full of shrew-faced mamaws that ruled the roost and men so cowed they could have been cattle. A stereotype of a stereotype, that was Holler. Even the word was arsenic on his tongue. Of course, it wasn’t politically correct now to talk about the mountains that way—a bunch of self-righteous cockroaches would crawl through the Internet and infest your inbox, call you a traitor to the ones you left behind. But that was all a song and dance to look better for the Yankees, and Mack liked Yankees about as much as he did mountains. Sure, people liked to wax romantic about down home, about places like Holler or Crine or Sundown—Mama’s cooking and eighty-seven-verse ballads and awshucks I ain’t knowed we was poor, that whole whitewash—but they only indulged it once they’d got out. Then they’d forget about the beatings, everybody dying too young from drugs and car crashes on mountain roads, the hellfire, the damnation, the everloving ignorance. Sentimental memories were just a way of apologizing for being the kind of asshole who escapes. And escape Mack had.

He was pretty sure they’d flung him up on a nag straight out of the womb. Just a spraddle-legged little fucker on the back of a bow-back mare, taking jam and pork cuts to his cousins over in the next holler, fetching mail in Holler proper for Mother and Daddy, making himself a general nuisance by egging on anyone with a horse or a mule to race down the length of Big Hammer Holler, from Mine no. 11 down to the cluster of Union graves at the far end (his clan ran Jefferson, opposition to most of the county, which just figured). He was always sneaking up on somebody’s horse, riding hogs for fun, telling folks he tamed a deer and rode it too, which was bullshit of course, but the story got so big, so reckless, he couldn’t remember if he’d rode the thing or just told the tale. Didn’t matter. It made him a minor legend, so somebody had actually heard of him on the Alabama Circuit when he went down there begging to ride—a fourteen-year-old with cannonballs in his Wranglers. But he conquered that rinky-dink show pretty fast and then headed west with a boyfriend who only made it as far as Peoria before Mack left him on the side of the road, and then he rode quarter horses in Wyoming until he got thrown hard and was busted up for three solid months. That’s when he switched over to training, which was a natural progression, seeing as he was constitutionally incapable of getting along with people, much less taking orders from them. Soon enough he tore the Old West a new asshole and got bored again, ended up back in Kentucky. Of all places. Eating where he used to shit, he supposed, but he never went back to the mountains. He stayed in Lexington with his scratchy, undiluted Letcher County accent, and when people called him a hillbilly, he flexed his wrist under his Rolex and curled his toes in his custom Lucchese boots and thought, You have no fucking idea.

Mack slowed down for nothing but whiskey and his dear mother, whom he’d brought up to a Lexington retirement home pretty much the instant his daddy died, and just now he was charging at his customary speed through Henry’s stallion barn, looking for the manager’s office. Henry had said he would be there first thing in the morning. They were planning to roll through footage together, debate the new prospects for Seconds Flat, talk about siblings going to stud. He didn’t do it like this for everyone; he was in the enviable position of choosing whom to work with so closely, but few were as driven as Forge. Henry was a man who never called it “the game,” and Mack appreciated that. If you were born in Letcher County, you knew that nothing involving more than fifty bucks was a game.

He heard the sounds before they registered, but hell, it was February and every horse he encountered was cock-addled or in estrus, and his poor brain was echoing with the sounds of breeding or grooms talking about breeding or his own thoughts on breeding, so he didn’t realize what it was until he saw it, though he certainly should have; his body already knew. He heard that sound of someone moaning low, and the slapping of skin that made his dick move before his brain could get involved. He only stood there at the office door for maybe two seconds—the fools left it cracked! Or maybe they got off on that, who knows—but it seemed just shy of an eternity: the black guy moving over a white woman who had turned her face away, but whose hair was unmistakable as she moaned and gripped the groom’s buttocks, so it stood out in his mind later with all the startling, upending stark of a photographic negative. It was only when he had stepped smartly and immediately away, when he was marching off to the house, realizing Henry had meant that office, that he understood exactly what he’d seen.

At the far end of the shed row, he laughed once, a harsh, surprised sound. Mack wasn’t a cruel man—well, he’d been accused of cruelty by a couple of employees, but mostly he was just impatient—but, more to the point, he appreciated a good joke. Especially at another man’s expense. A wealthy man? One who paid him to be the best, all the while thinking he was a step above on the ladder? He felt a twinge of compunction when he thought of those kids just having their suds-in-the-bucket fun … But yeah, this was pretty goddamn irresistible.

Which is why he was grinning over Henry’s head when he stepped into the house office, why he could barely tuck away that grin as they watched the seven prospect videos, and why he ended up saying something, even though he really knew he shouldn’t, even though he felt a tiny twinge of almost-regret.

It didn’t stop him. He was a risk taker, just like Henry Forge. “Tell me again the name of that black kid you got working for you, Henry.”

“Allmon. Why?” said Henry from where he was switching off the DVD player and straightening up to see him out.

Mack tapped his Stetson against his thigh and torqued up his lip. “Well”—the world in the pause—“I know you watch your investments, Henry.” The words were just barely weighted with the drag of meaning, but Henry looked at him sharply.

Henry paused before he spoke. “That’s right.”

“And you no doubt got big plans for your daughter.”

This time, Henry didn’t answer, just looked, and Mack played it easy, played it cool. He knew how to handle a whipsaw. “I can see how you’ve been grooming her to take over this operation. She’s a talented lady, for sure. But things sure can go wrong in a hustle. All sorts of things. A girl headed for the big time can end up hauling coal. It’s a crazy world.”

The meaning settled and the sclera of Henry’s eye brightened with blood. He said, lowly, “And you speak from experience? You’ve seen that sort of thing happen, I assume?”

They were standing at the side door to the el porch now, looking out over the acreage, which men like Henry were handed on silver platters at birth. Mack said, all casual, “Yeah, sure. I’ve seen it myself. It’s just a reality of life how even the best-laid plans can get fucked. Funny how that can happen.” Then he popped his hat back on his head and said, “It sure is funny.”

*   *   *

“Henrietta!”

Henry made a hard knot of his Burberry tie and dragged a comb through his silvery hair, but his pugilist hands trembled in the mirror; there was disturbance beneath the water.

“Henrietta!”

Careful, Henry. The overeager go out in the first round, and the obdurate are softened by something other than hard blows. Night was encroaching and Kentucky was folding in on itself and, with it, untold possibilities for a man who couldn’t manage himself.

“I’m right here.” Henrietta was just outside the door of the bedroom, standing before the hall mirror in a red silk dress he’d bought her seven years ago for a Derby run—the year Hellcat finished second. He remembered the race; he remembered the red dress.

“You look beautiful, daughter.”

Henrietta smiled, not turning from the mirror as she clipped her grandmother’s pearls to the lobes of her ears. But Henry could see her eyes were too alive and elsewhere—the look of a woman only recently visiting foreign countries, her mind not yet returned home.

“Where have you been?” he said easily.

She stiffened, the old steel in her eyes again. “What am I—a child?” she said.

A cock of the head, a curb of the mind’s tongue. It was Henry’s turn to say nothing.

As she pinned up her hair, Henry stepped in and kissed the back of her neck. But his gall rose: from her shoulders drifted the heated smell of woman, that wandering sex; it was a noisome stench. “Your grandfather would be very proud of you,” he said, and watched as her glance stalled, seemed to catch the waft of meaning almost after it had drifted past. She shifted in her low heels, adjusted the dangerous bodice.

“Are you ready?” she said.

He was ready.

Across the black expanse of farm, across the farrow winter-world of Bourbon County in January, across town, the old Tavern blazed. The centuries-old building, a gray limestone structure as pale in the night as the adjacent courthouse, built by pioneer hands and maintained by Old Dominion faith, stood festooned with stringed white bulbs and garlands. A round, hyperfecund moon loomed over her slate rooftop, and the stars were all dimmed before the overbright, nettling lights of Paris.

The old tavern door was manned by a wizened groom in age-old livery, bowing at the waist as he ushered them into the dark, cramped space of the low-ceilinged foyer. A single sconce twinkled. With his hand at her back, Henry steered his daughter through a narrow hall toward snapping candlelight and high, sharp chatter, voices like breaking glass. They descended three stone steps into a small banquet room.

Now they all turned as one, forty or fifty heads as a single body, conversation halting, all eyes on the lamplit pair. Henrietta clutched once at her bodice, sensing the almost irresistible draw of the passage behind them, the aloneness it offered, but Henry stepped smartly into the room ahead of her, a childish grin of delight on his face.

A smartly dressed woman of sixty disengaged herself from the crowd, setting aside her glass and reaching for Henry with both hands. Her eyes were rimmed with blue kohl and her feathered blonde hair reached improbable heights in all directions. Her long bejeweled earrings swung to and fro, snatching the light as she turned to the small crowd, crying, “The guests of honor!”

Henrietta barely heard the cheer that followed. She’d been here before, but never at night, never when the scarlet walls were turned to swampy blood by flickering lamps and candles, clashing with the swagging salmon drapes. The woman was speaking into her face with boozy breath when someone pressed a chilled tumbler of bourbon into her hand. She took the thing as a shot.

“To the memory of John Henry, that Old Regular sonofabitch!” came a rallying cry, and she knew there were no strangers here. These white, warm faces, pink with alcohol, all possessed surnames that had struggled over the Wilderness Road to this bloody ground, naming it Paris after other trodden and trammeled wildernesses. Kentucky had folded all their lives together into a tight braid.

Look at them all raising glasses to her munificent grandfather, her ambitious father—panegyrics for the living and the dead. The bourbon Henrietta was drinking was florid and complex, but she tasted only confusion. She had lain under Allmon just this afternoon, cursing with want and wanting his need. She was in love, but maybe she was also hopelessly naïve. She blinked. Did she actually think that love offered some kind of escape? There is kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. You could step out of your heels, walk backward along the hall, recede from their collective gaze, but you could never escape the category of your birth and all the morphological categories which precede it.

The garish mouth of the woman cried, “Come on, y’all! Dinner awaits!” and they were ushered to their tables, where gold flatware, crystal goblets, and old china sparked under the low lights. The woman raised a glass and knocked the tines of a fork against its faceted side. “We are here to celebrate the new Genealogical Museum of Central Kentucky”—applause all around—“funded in large part by a towering donation from the Forge family in the name of John Henry, whom we all remember as a treasured member of the community, deceased now more than thirty years. We wouldn’t be—we couldn’t be—who we are without men like John Henry and Henry Forge, men who preserve our past and guide us into a future where the past still matters. The Forge family is one of the crown jewels of the Bluegrass and, though they probably would have preferred to give anonymously, we just couldn’t let them do that. We want to polish the jewels of our hometown. Now give a big Kentucky thank-you to Henry and Henrietta Forge! Join me in raising a toast!”

One long swig of bourbon and Henrietta’s tongue was dry and bleached as a bone. There was raucous cheering and faces were speaking at her, but all she could think was: God, we all look alike, as if they’d crawled from the birth canal of the same remote ancestor. Love was an in-house project. When Judith had left, it was almost as if she’d never existed. Her bloodline offered no lifeline.

They launched into the repast: encrusted scallops with a mango spice reduction, roasted parmesan asparagus, local greens with raspberry vinaigrette and crème brûlée.

“Drink up,” her father said, and she did. Her third.

Through the warbled glass at her nose, she watched Henry assume his stance at the lectern, his drink wobbling in his hand. Or was it her eyes that wobbled in their sockets? Another swig would answer.

“I want to tell you a secret!” Henry said. “A secret that not even my daughter knows.” The room leaned forward, smiling. “It may surprise you to hear that as a young man I was disinherited by my father.”

Disconcerted laughter thinned to a trickle, then ceased. Glasses half-raised were lowered. Henrietta sat up straight in her chair and tried to rally her focus.

Henry’s gaze was steady on the room. “As you probably know, my father, John Henry, was a man of rigid principle, unbending in ways I couldn’t understand when I was a young man. But what did I know? I was just a callow youth. When I looked out over our corn farm, I saw a pathetic, conservative misuse of land. When my father imagined a horse farm, he saw nothing but ostentation; he thought his son would forget where he had come from, where his allegiance ought to lie.”

Henry folded his arms across his chest. “So we were at odds, you see, my father and I. I detected in him a failure of nerve, a fear of risk, and he thought my plans were beneath his dignity. Our dignity. Dignity that—like yours—was purchased at high cost over many generations. In short, he feared a reversal of hard-earned fortune in every sense of that word.

“My father was right, of course,” he said, smiling into the shocked silence, smiling at Henrietta. “But please don’t misunderstand me; I was right too. I’ll get to that in a moment.

“My father, the man we are here celebrating tonight, saw my rebellion as a threat to something far more important than me: our family. That he was mistaken is now of no consequence. The important thing is that he would do anything to protect the family name, to protect the women in our house, to maintain the land, to store up honor for his children and their children. He understood that our lives are really lived in the minds of others. Their good opinion is worth more than gold. So, the most important thing—the critical component of my father’s character—is a seeming paradox I didn’t understand then, but understand now. He loved his family more than he loved his own child.”

Henrietta choked down what was left in her tumbler, and it was instantly refilled.

“Now, my uncle never wanted to farm, and he returned the land to me. He understood what my father couldn’t understand: that my plans for the land were no threat to the family name or fortune. And that’s why my rebellion was never wrong. Because it furthered the cause of the family. And I know that’s something that everyone here tonight can understand, because there’s true-blue blood running through the heart of the Bluegrass, and that’s been the case for two hundred and fifty years. We built this state brick by brick, and we saved it twenty times over from the riffraff that would unthinkingly tear it down. Why, families like all of ours are the only reason we’re not … Mississippi!”

Laughter erupted in the room, brightened by the high, sharp overtones of relief. “We were the Old South and, unlike most of our sister states, we still are!” Henry raised his glass. “So let’s drink to John Henry!”

The room exploded, but when he turned to Henrietta, his gaze was a kill shot.

“And let’s drink to Henrietta Forge. I want you all to look at her, how beautiful she is tonight. If you ever want to see the pride of my life, look at her. I’ve done everything for this precious woman and, as far as I’m concerned, she’s the crowning glory of the family. She’s never done me wrong, and I know beyond the darkest shadow of a doubt that she never will. Because she knows what my father knew. She’s more like him than she can even know.”

The room turned to look at her.

“Henrietta, I’m drinking to you, my Ruffian,” her father said. “We’re all drinking to you.”

She raised her fourth glass.

“To you!”

She hesitated.

“To you!” they said as a single organism.

She quaffed the shot, her eyes stinging. The hideous pink of the curtains swam before her. She tried to hang on to Allmon’s name as a bouy, but it was slipping out of her grasp.

“And let’s drink to Hellsmouth, my favorite racehorse.” Without taking his eyes from Henrietta, he said, “A fine example of controlled usage, of taking great chances with breeding. We’re going all the way with this one!”

The waiter was behind her, reaching around her, so she could smell the rank odor of his underarms, and even before he was done pouring, she was raising the tumbler again, they were all raising their glasses to Hellsmouth, the promise of Forge Run Farm, of Henry. A quintet was tuned, and now their chords were flushing the diners from their velvet seats to take the parquet dance floor, which was too small for their numbers, but they crowded there anyway, glasses in hand. It was much too much of too much—dancers filmed with sweat, low, guttural laughter, the stridency of some woman’s voice too loud for the environs, shoved here by a body and there by another, until her father was wrapping her up in his arms and swept her down a slim corridor between bodies, so the fishtail hem of Henrietta’s dress flared, and they were eye to eye.

As they turned on the floor, Henry breathed in the bourbon on her breath, strong enough to make a man drunk. He gripped her drinking hand and raised the tumbler to her lips.

He said, “Henrietta, young people think life is just a game. A sport.”

She tried desperately to focus her disobedient eyes on the buttons of his collar.

“But you’re smarter than that.”

The scooping of his vowels was broad as a river. They all talked like this, she realized with a start, as if life were happening in slow motion, their words a hundred years behind the times. She wanted to put her hand to her hot forehead, but she couldn’t, because it was raising her drink to her lips. He was.

“I love you, Henrietta.”

She was nauseous. She was revolving on the axis of him.

“But I also love perfection.”

She nodded slowly, his due.

He drew her tighter than a bow. “And perfection is worth every risk.”

*   *   *

The knock came when she was half stumbling out of her dress, her hair fallen around her shoulders and her mascara smeared from rubbing. She turned clumsily in her drunkenness, gripping the bedstead to remain upright.

“Knock, knock.” His voice, that old familiar, almost her own.

The ceramic knob turned and when the door opened, it creaked on its ancient hinges.

“Knock, knock,” he said quietly, all eyes.

She turned half-naked in the dim light.

“Come in, Daddy.”

*   *   *

Success: wealth, status, fame; involves the attainment of the worldly good only insofar as these attainments ensure the survival of selfish genes; autologous continuation; not merely survival but increasing complexity, including larger cranium or diminishment of dangerous vestigial organs, such as appendix; dependent upon genetically mutant transitional forms; see evolution of theropods & Etc for evidence of speciation and other deviations from ancestral forms; dependent in ancient thought upon the leniency of the gods and the mastering of fate; or, predestination generally requiring a supernatural agent (i.e., fate as a spindle, around which Clotho, Lachesis & Atropos wind an individual’s thread, analogous to fate as the spindle in the cell); archaic: the good or bad outcome of an undertaking.

*   *   *

Now Henry was like a teenaged boy, bouncing on his heels, his strength renewed by a bold new diet. He was seeking out the groom, the antiphonal calling of mares and foals ringing over his head like church bells, celebrating the hour. He smiled. The other groom was late to the church, entirely too late.

Their regular farrier, a mustachioed man with hair the color of a chestnut roan, was exiting his Nissan and moving in the direction of the stallion barn.

“Have you seen Allmon?” Henry asked.

The man raised his darkly red brows. “Which one’s Allmon?”

“Stallion groom. Black.”

The man shook his head. “Not yet, but I’m headed up there directly.”

“Well, when you do see him, tell him to come meet me in the back office. I’ll be expecting him.”

Now, Allmon’s waiting had long turned to dread. When the farrier relayed the message in his disinterested tone, he remained rooted in his spot for a long time, bent over a grain bin in midmotion, barely breathing until black speckled at the edges of his vision. Electric alarm had shot through him—what should have been excitement, what should have been the gambler’s triumph at holding an ace hand, stalled when he flipped the card and found it was a portrait of the boss man’s daughter. He felt … sick. He turned and faced the tack room and could not make himself move for the longest time.

But he did move. He started before indecision could freeze him again. After all, you got your foot in when you got your cock in. That was the whole point, right? Yes. Exactly. He gained momentum as he moved across the yard.

Then, for the first time since that day he was hired by the woman who was now his lover, his first and only, he was standing in the kitchen of the big house. High coffered ceilings, brass fittings, white molded cornice, glimmering appliances, sienna tile floor, all laid-back, rich. But he found that he couldn’t associate Henrietta with it anymore, not exactly. She had been some stony figurine initially, something glossy and cold, but now she was a personal warmth that enveloped him in his room, the hair that washed over his face when she was rocking over him, the— He had to stop thinking. Jesus Christ.

A wide hall paraded out of the kitchen toward the front, western half of the house, but as if he’d been there before, Allmon turned instinctively to a narrow perpendicular corridor, which ran alongside a staircase to the dark second floor. At first, he stood quietly at the door, able to stare in for a moment at Henry sitting at his desk and absorb the principled beauty of the man. Henry glowed in the fall of sunlight streaming through the double six-panes, the drapes drawn away as if to purposely frame him. He was golden as the calf at Mount Sinai. If the light had been lower, if the hair had been darker, it could have been Allmon’s own beautiful father, but Henry was thicker, redder.

“Come in,” Henry said without looking up from his paperwork. “Come in and sit down.”

Allmon hesitated, feeling something good twining into his dread—yes, what he initially wanted was about to happen—and the future before him. He entered and sat.

“I’ve been mulling over a conundrum,” Henry said when he finally looked up. “But I think I’ve solved it.”

Allmon held his power in his mouth, his chin slightly lowered, eyes unblinking.

Henry muttered softly, “What to do with Allmon … What to do with the stallion groom.”

Allmon couldn’t move an inch, lest he betray something.

Henry said, “I asked you once what you were here for and now I know. There’s nothing new under the sun. And I’ll hand it to you—you’ve maneuvered your way in in a manner of speaking. But let’s be clear: I’m not going to tolerate you near my daughter any longer.”

Now Allmon’s mouth slid open like a fish for the bait, but Henry was there first: “I’m no fool. I know I can’t make you stay away from her. But I can offer a proposition that I doubt you’ll refuse, and that could be to our mutual benefit.”

Allmon had to drag the words forcibly out of his closing heart. “Like what?”

“I have an extraordinary horse,” Henry said. “I know it like I’ve never known anything before in my entire life. I’ve been doing this since I was half your age, and, believe me, I know I’m right. What I propose to do is send you with Hellsmouth to Mack’s training facility, let you oversee her conditioning. I’m saying I want you to be her personal groom. You’ll have a groom’s pay, but I have a contract here promising you five percent of the purse in her third year, payable upon her retirement. After the third year, you’ll get your payout, and then you move on. End of story.”

“No,” Allmon said abruptly. “No deal.” And as soon as he said it, he felt sudden, yawning relief, like there was still a way out of the madness. He could walk right out the door. But in reality, he could only fool himself for a brief moment. With a finality like fate, he knew they would work a deal. It felt beyond his control.

Henry sat back in his chair, incredulity smudging the veneer from his beauty. “Please don’t try to tell me you’re in love with my daughter. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Allmon leaned forward suddenly toward the desk, his face shining with purpose. “Ten percent of earnings.”

“Ten percent! For a groom? You’re lucky Mack will pay you three-fifty a week!”

“You think I intend to do this my whole life?” Allmon hissed, and now words began to roll out with momentum, words that had been trapped in him for far too long. “You think I ain’t got a vision? What do you care about the money? It’s not why you do this! I want two of her foals—fifth year and sixth year and a breeding share every season for five years on your best stallion when he goes to stud. That’s what I want. What you got?”

Henry struggled for composure as he took in the sight of this youth practically foaming at the mouth for the same things he’d spent a lifetime striving to achieve. His derision was plain. “Why am I not surprised that you want a handout?”

Allmon stood up from his chair, his height seesawing the room. He glared at Henry, his blood thick: On my seventh day in I saw this white dude stomp this black dude, and his jaw folded under his boot like you fold a piece of paper, his tongue sticking out like a dead dog’s tongue. One of his eyes was lying on the floor attached by the root. He didn’t die right away; it took him five days. You really think what I want is a handout?

What he said: “You need to learn what reparations means.”

Henry was visibly startled. “Sit down!”

Allmon took a single step back toward the door, reaching blindly for the knob. Again, he suffered the wild sensation that he could simply walk out, that this would collapse like a house of cards, that he could go back to his room and life would continue on. But no. That’s not what was going to happen.

“Sit down or there’s no deal at all!” Henry barked.

Very slowly, Allmon laid down his bluff and returned to his seat, but he said, quietly, wondering at his own ability to play this cool and contained part, “You got no idea this horse is gonna make it…”

Henry nodded curtly and waved his hand. “It’s a gamble. But given the stakes, it’s one I’m willing to make.”

Allmon curled his hands into fists and waited.

Henry went on, “All right, I will offer you ten percent of earnings—listen to me—only payable at her retirement at the close of her third year. What I’m saying is you have to keep her healthy through the end of the Triple Crown or you get nothing at all. Nothing. You hear me? And then you’ll get two of her foals and two stud shares. Take it or leave it, I will not negotiate further. But be warned—all of this is contingent upon no more contact with my daughter. I mean not one sideways word between the two of you. If you agree, you’ll be employed by Mack Snyder from now on.”

Allmon didn’t need cash in his hand; horses were banks. “Deal.”

Henry sat back. “Excellent.”

“Where do I sign? We’re signing, right? No deal if I don’t sign.” He sounded eager, naïve, ridiculous.

Henry cringed at the thought of this man and his daughter. “Sign Monday morning in this office at nine o’clock.”

Then Allmon was moving out of the room, a light beginning to show in his mind, and there was a brief, triumphant elation. But then he realized how quiet his chest was, as if his heart had stopped beating, and he paused at the door and looked back with his hand on the knob. He said quietly, “You really hate me this much?”

“Hate you?” Henry said without looking up, his attention returned to the papers in front of him. “I don’t even remember your name.”

*   *   *

There is an old story of the seven hills. A great lion lived there, and he ate up other animals every day to build his strength. So the animals banded together and sent a representative, who said, “It’s not good for a great lion such as yourself to waste energy on catching food. In exchange for eating only one of us a day, we will send you your food for dinner.”

“Fine,” said the lion, “but let’s begin now.”

They did as he bid them, and they sent an antelope the first day. On the second day, they sent a goat. But the animals were all worried, because they knew it would soon be their turn.

One day it was the hare’s turn to be sacrificed. But before he went to the lion, he walked down to the river and rolled in the mud. He was filthy when he appeared before the lion.

“I’m not going to eat you!” cried the lion. “You’re dirty!”

“Oh, I did not come to be eaten,” said the hare. “I was bringing you a hare, but a great lion came, wrestled with me, and snatched it out of my arms.”

The lion was astonished. “Is there another great lion roaming my seven hills?”

“Yes,” said the muddy hare, “and if you will follow, I will show him to you.”

So he led the lion out of his lair and across the savanna to the site of a deep well. The hare pointed down into its narrow depths.

“Look!” said the hare. “The lion is there and also the hare!”

The lion looked and saw that this was indeed so. Forthwith, he jumped into the well and

*   *   *

It began with one bad glass of wine she was served at a fund-raiser on Main Street, a wine so corked or old that it tasted not like berry or oak but only astringent, like sake, so she held out her glass and chided the server: You offered me the dregs?

Then, two days later, she stopped at Windy Corner for lunch, and no sooner had the screen door slammed behind her than the scent—stench—of barbecued pork came rolling over her like a rogue wave. Her body had ushered her away in immediate, instinctive retreat, and she’d stood on their porch before God and Thoroughbreds until her stomach settled, and she’d been able to return inside and eat, but not the pork.

Chicken. Which is what she was vomiting down the side of the 250 in twenty minutes’ time, sickness wracking her with such suddenness and force, she had no time to pull over and could barely slow down before she was retching out the window, the truck wobbling madly between the lanes until she floored the brakes and came to rest like a shoaled boat between the road and a ditch carved by a shallow creek. Now she was scrambling from the seat, vomiting onto the tarred road; now she was leaning on the hood, expelling what felt like the insides of her insides; now she came to rest on her hands and knees on the road as the hard reckoning finally struck home.

There are no new stories, only new generations. Her nipples hurt. Her head was light and unfamiliar, unfocused, and she had been recently lain low by fatigue. For the whole of this past week, she’d been moving through her life as if under the influence of some ominous, waking sleep. She’d thought it was a result of not seeing Allmon, who’d been strangely absent all week, but then the wine had tasted bad and now—

A truck carrying an elderly couple pulled alongside her and almost before they could roll down the window, before they could say in wobbling, age-softened voices, Are you all right? Can we help you, miss? she was howling like an animal from her hands and knees, “Go away!”

Then she was pulling herself up onto unsteady legs, one hand to her clammy cheek, one hand to the white hood for what little support it could offer. She could smell her foul breath. The deepest kind of surprise flooded her, the age-old surprise of alien life, of life uninvited. She stared up at the sky, but it was unforgiving, as if even it had triumphed over her. The sun beat her face. For a moment, the defeat was gilded with excitement. She thought of Allmon, and her chest opened. Except: nothing was so simple. There was entrapment. Invaded by life, because you were born into a body with breasts and a uterus and the curse of fertility. She’d always thought pleasure was a simple thing to be had, like a meal or a conversation. She had been wrong.

She shook her head, she moaned out loud. The father … who could say? She pressed both of her palms to her enflamed cheeks. “Oh,” she said into the emptiness of her predicament, and stumbled unseeing toward the little stream, barely book-deep, walking straight through it to the white fence on the other side, disregardful of the bracing water discovering the seams of her boots. She draped her body against the upper planks of the fence, staring into the pasture in front of her.

She pressed a hand to the flat terrain of her belly, mindful of the pained irony, the flatness there a coy contradiction of the changes taking place. It left her mind spinning. Sneaky thought: Wasn’t it inevitable? The body making the body … Hadn’t this been destined to occur from the moment she had pulled Allmon over her for the first time, at first desiring him, but then desiring to give herself away with increasing fervor, day after day, week after week? But the father. Oh God. With an intensity that surprised her, she wished suddenly for her mother, for her counsel. But Judith was far away—had been far away for many years now, and the distance was more than physical.

The most tiresome question of all presented itself: What now?

She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision. All her life, she had trained her eye upon this, the natural world, the land she was surveying over the top plank of a fence. The numbness of shock was wearing off, and she gathered some tattered remnants of ordered thought. Because she didn’t know who the father was, her immediate impulse was to get rid of it. What on earth had come over her? She’d lost herself to some urge or some forgetting; she thought she was in love … she’d been preventing this very scenario for more than a decade, and here she had simply failed. Or. Or, she couldn’t help but think, the biological destiny of the organism is to reproduce, and she had not even mentioned a condom to Allmon and then let him lie over her; she didn’t even come half the time, and it hadn’t mattered, because … yes, just like Allmon, she wasn’t free. And then with her father, because … She shuddered. She knew with absolute certainty that there was no animal on earth less free than herself. But the question remained: What was her duty? Well, she had always said her duty was to Henry, and from that duty, she had excused herself only for pleasure. With some surprise, she realized that she had never indulged the question of what her duty to others might be. At another time, the question would have been merely an abstraction, but now the radical force of life was imposing itself, and she couldn’t suffer any sophistry. She wanted desperately to think this emergent thing was not life—and she would have argued it vehemently at one time—but now it would be only a conceit of the intellect. She knew it with her mother’s mind and an older, ancient, original mind, which was maybe the same thing. This was stupid, blunt-force life. Only women—not science—knew how the species reproduced: the next life nothing new at all but an undulation, a spillover from the abundance of the last. The earth and its living were not created in seven days by some sky god; the earth was an eternal birth canal, mediating energy in surge after surge of transmuting life. The question was not when does life begin, but does life ever end? To have not seen it before was to have lived under a veil of illusion. She didn’t want this knowledge or this change. She wanted to be left alone. Yet her want was nothing but a speck of cloud, because here it was, her estrogen rising, her progesterone rising, her uterus distending, life bending and molding her to its will, as she had always been bent to someone else’s will. They were two prisoners trapped in one body, two wills diametrically opposed. The irony was bare and bitter and unavoidable: she was a woman, so she was a slave to life. Never before had she understood the brutal actuality of life in a body she didn’t choose. She stared hard across the rise of the pasture to where a cluster of bay horses stood like statues in a grassy museum. What was her duty? Now she thought of the mountains, the prairies blanketing the earth, which she loved; she thought of mustangs in the wild and fields of bison carcasses like shed snakeskins, useless on the plains; of dull Galápagos finches and kiwis in cages; of pinhead barnacles splayed on a table in Downe, their sex organs poked and pinched; and she thought of the last tiny passenger pigeon with its foreign burden, the way it perished in bizarre servitude. She thought finally of herself. What was her wish for this endlessly replicating, wild world? That it be left alone. So what was her duty to this being and its natural wild? She realized there was no duty, only choice, and choice was the heaviest burden. Duty was for priests and other fools. So, what would she choose? She would revoke her will and permit it to be. Her shoulders slumped, her lips parting in stupefaction. The war of organic beings might do its part later, but for her there was a conflict of interest, and she was in no position to judge. She must recuse herself. Then she was on her knees again, clutching the fence post and vomiting.

*   *   *

Allmon. The word wound round a whole new, gut-wrenching desire, because the whole of life had changed in a day. Pale as paper and eyes full of unshed tears, Henrietta half ran to the stallion barn. She was almost desperate to see his face—or more, to feel the full length of his body against hers, not for sex, but for something more important: assent.

But there was no man, no lover, no father of her child in the barn. Not even the scent of him. God, that scent had been such a drug! It had caused her to strip herself bare, spread herself, and grasp tight the arrow. For a brief, wild moment, Henrietta felt undone by panic. Women invited death when they let men inside their bodies! Why did they do it? Love couldn’t possibly be worth it. All those dark morning meetings and the harmony she heard in their twined cries … that music was nothing but a meaningless ditty finches were singing from the tree of life.

And yet she wanted the whole of him more than she wanted air.

She saw the bedazzling horse before she saw Allmon—the pert power there was in the yearling’s body, gleaming like new silk, spirit unbroken despite the halter. Then she realized the filly was being guided toward a waiting trailer by Allmon’s hand.

“What are you doing?” she said, her voice sharp, her predicament suddenly secondary; Hell was still months shy of transfer to Mack’s training barns.

Allmon swung round with a guilty start, the lead shank swagging loose. He registered the pale face, the bold, fearless, almost otherworldly gaze, and nearly lost his sense of place, of time. Then he drew a curtain of reserve down across his own face, so Henrietta could read nothing there.

“Heading out,” he said cryptically.

Henrietta reared back in surprise. “What do you mean? You and Hell?”

“We’re going to the training center.” Allmon glanced nervously at the groom manning the truck; he could see the man’s concerned eyes trained on them in the side view.

“What?” Henrietta said, her voice rising against her will. “What are you talking about? I didn’t arrange for this.” She reached out now to grasp hold of the lead shank, but Allmon only redoubled his grasp and made his shoulder into a kind of blunt wall she couldn’t pass. Henrietta gasped audibly.

He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “I’m her groom now. I’m going with her.”

Stunned, Henrietta stared at his impassive, reserved, stony face. That withholding suddenly struck her as the worst thing she’d ever seen. “Why? You work here. Here. With me.”

He turned his face away from her.

She pressed forward. “Who authorized this? What on earth is this about?”

Against the closing of his throat, Allmon said three simple words: “Ask your father.”

Henrietta stood there with a bewildered look on her face, trying to configure it in her mind. Then she reached forward, and with the strength of both hands grasped Allmon’s face and forced it toward her, so her gaze was inescapable. He might have come apart, might have yielded, but Hellsmouth skittered to the side, sensing wild woman’s energy loosed all around her like snakes coiling and weaving for a strike.

“I’m pregnant,” Henrietta said.

For a hundredth of a second, she saw pure, unadulterated wonder in Allmon’s eyes before he used his forearm like a cudgel to push her back or to push himself away, and blurted, “No, no, you ain’t, no.”

“What?” she said, stricken, the shock worse than any physical blow.

He was shaking his head, looking confused, then belligerent, then confused again. “No, my whole … I’m broke. No way … It’s too late.” He wasn’t making any sense.

“What’s too late?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?” she cried.

“It’s too late,” he said very simply, hopelessly.

Henrietta stared at him in absolute silence, as if he’d transformed before her eyes from something familiar to something ghastly. Then disbelief at his response loosened her hand, and she reached forward and slapped the left side of his face.

Now the driver, who’d been sitting nervously with his hand perched on the latch, came rounding out of the cab, crying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa there!” and Hell skittered and neighed, straining against the shank, her tender neck wrenched by her own attempted flight, so Allmon was forced to step off to the side with her. The driver stood to the other side with his hands up, unsure what to do now that he was there, his wary face an apology.

“I am pregnant with your child!”

He’d been desperate, looking for an out, something immediate, something sure. When he found it, a grotesque calm flooded him. He turned to her with one brow arched. “How do I even know it’s mine?”

“Holy shit,” said the driver, eyes wide, trying to look nowhere at all while reaching blindly for the lead shank.

Now her screws came loose, the nails clattered to the ground, the joints that held her joists weakened, and she fell upon Allmon’s person, beating his chest, his shoulders, reaching for his face, which he tried uselessly to shield with his one free hand. But the driver was scooping her up, banding her with work-strong arms and caging her.

She screamed, “You know what you are, Allmon Shaughnessy? You know what you are? A stereotype! Are you really going to walk away? You want to live your life like a goddamn fucking stereotype? Fuck you!” Then invective and senseless wounds flowing out her mouth and then that one vile word, coined long ago and wielded like a white man’s axe, so the groom holding her lifted her bodily from the ground, yelling over her, “Jesus Christ, lady! Hold up! Shut up! Just shut up!”

But Allmon didn’t respond visibly to the word; he crawled behind the hard wall of that old, familiar, stoic face, and her words hit that wall seemingly without a bruise. “You got what you wanted,” he said, but very quietly. To his own ears it sounded unsure.

“What? No!” Henrietta cried, “No, I didn’t!”

Allmon began to rush now. He guided Hellsmouth into her trailer, and when Henrietta realized there was nothing left except the small, intransigent life in her, which she would be growing alone, the fight went out of her, and she sagged back against the chest of the driver and said, “Why?” The question small, sad, girlish.

Allmon’s hands were shaking when he tied the horse, and he could barely get air into his lungs. But he had made his decision. No one had ever offered him any quarter, and he didn’t have any to offer. He turned to Henrietta, and though he couldn’t meet her eyes, he was honest with her once again like he’d never been with another person. “’Cause I’m out to win.”

Bewildered and exhausted, she said, “What could you possibly have to win?”

Allmon was done tying Hell. The trailer was closed, and he was walking to the cab on legs he couldn’t feel. He didn’t look over his shoulder when he offered up that old chestnut, which suddenly tasted rotten in his mouth: “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

*   *   *

Father, Father, Father—

She gathered herself up, her skeleton clattering painfully under her skin. She stumbled into the house, her lungs on fire and her tongue burning.

He was there, of course: Father and Lover. He was always there. He had given birth to this house, given birth to history. He had given birth to her.

She leaned against the kitchen door, her face blighted by pain. “I’m pregnant,” she choked.

“Good,” he said, and enfolded her in his arms—old man, still strong, still life giving, guiding, knowing, encroaching, forcing.

Her tongue was scooped out, the empty place filling with tears.

He said, “I’ll take care of you just like I’ve always taken care of you.”

She was beginning to cry. The Forge endurance was cold comfort, no comfort at all.

“Calm down now,” he said.

“I hate him.”

“Calm down, or you’ll hurt the baby.” And he laid a sunspotted hand over her flat belly.

She flung his hand away and stepped back, unsteady on her feet, nearly hissing as she spoke, “You better pray it’s not yours—don’t you know old seed produces weak plants?”

*   *   *

Now Henrietta finally cried. She cried as she had not even cried as a young girl when her mother left. She cried with such passion that she could barely manage the old slave staircase that led to the upper hall, at one point sagging like a broken, discarded doll against the banister, then sinking to her knees on the landing and sobbing in utter, encompassing sorrow. Until this moment, there had been some kind of hope that love would be requited like a priceless gift returned to the giver. But now that shadow hope was dead in the daylight while the fetus went about its triumphant business, not giving a damn. Her wails rang through the house, that colossus trophy waste dream cenotaph bore. She couldn’t find the strength to rise; she crawled pathetically on her hands and knees into her bedroom. But at the sight of her highboy, her old notebooks, her tattered books—remnants of the old life—the constriction of her clothing was too much. She tore her tank top over her head, she wrestled out of her jeans as if they were on fire, finally rising to get out of her underwear and socks and stumbling into her blindingly white bathroom naked.

She gripped the very real, very cold ceramic of the bathroom sink, but could not bring herself to look in the mirror. What now? Her actions were a mystery; she was a mystery. With anguish, she sensed that time’s blood had been merely passing through her seemingly discrete existence, her temporary form, and that when she was gone, time’s blood would flow dispassionately on. She was beginning to think she had spent her time badly.

Remember the old books, Henrietta? She recalled the private education of her youth, the one sought by her own insistent will, not the one forced upon her by her father. Think. Perhaps the very point of education was to discover the world beyond the self. Think, think, think … God, how she struggled to rope her discursive, selfish thoughts.

Her mind began to unfold like a late-summer blossom.

Within her, life was busy with its divisions and multiplications. But she knew that the machine, with its supposedly higher mathematics, only manufactured mystery. The principles of organization were still cloaked in darkness. She contained so much—so much, in fact, that she couldn’t contain it at all. How was it possible to live so many years in a body, not knowing yourself to be a small everything? She had been so busy consuming without digesting, absorbing what she wanted and shitting out the rest, too numb to see that her hair was streams, her bones stones, her breath humid weather, her heart soil, her veins endless waterways that coursed through the earth she walked upon. She should have spent more time looking not at the earth but at herself. Maybe she had known this once, but something, someone had driven her to bed on her back, where she could see only four white walls and a low white ceiling. Then somehow, she’d worked a self-deluding magic, deciding she had always wanted pleasure above all things, and had gone about it as men said you should, with abandon, never asking whether abandon was the mother of satisfaction. Who enjoys sex more? Why, Teresias, I say it’s the woman! Nine times more.

A little bit of strength returned, and she looked down out the window at the grassy paddocks with their horses, her father’s bucolic charms. Yes, she had been with men of all shapes and sizes, easing onto them, sliding with a timeless force, an urgency not even her own but nature’s, nature who she had always felt held a gun to her head. The men were reduced under her body to hard statuary, marble men with marble cocks until she was coming and in that nothing, the bliss of absolutelynothingandnoplace, where her father could not exist or ever have her, it didn’t matter what they were. That had seemed so easy. Yes, back then—was it only weeks ago? Twenty lifetimes ago?—back in the halcyon days of her ignorance, her monthly period had been only a nuisance. Her pussy like something she had invented—sui generis. There’s no business like my business! But, pregnancy shattered that illusion like so much cheap mercury glass. What differentiates man from animal is deferral of appetite. And here was the real silver that turned the blood blue: Each menstrual period was a bright reminder, a clotted remainder, a libation to the gods on behalf of every child unborn, those quietly waiting in the hidden place where the waiting gather. Woman was a tensile thing stretched taut between generations. So no fucking was casual and, further, there was no such thing as a free body in this world, our occasional choices laughably, infinitesimally rare. Each was born squalling and covered in blood with a bill coming due in her clenched hand, her tiny ovaries constellated with potential life, floating there in the warm, watery dark. The world, in fact, existed. She thought a woman’s body was then and now and forever beholden to an invisible First Cause—the unknown, unchosen, brute mistress, the goddess—yoked to it like a dumb, intractable mule, wrestling uselessly for freedom to the point of shredding its stubborn neck and letting its own blood in a vain effort to free itself, too ignorant to even know its name in the world: mule. A mule is not a hemlock is not a hame is not an ear of corn or a shot of bourbon, but a manifestation of fact called species: Equus mulus, a hybrid of the genus Equus of the tribus Equinii of the subfamilia Equinae of the familia Equidae, possessed of neither the sixty-two chromosomes of its ass father or the sixty-four of its horse dam, but a strange sixty-three, damned to a life of physical obligation through no fault of its own—a life of unmerited suffering, doomed once in a while to produce a little foal.

And yet … this was not exactly right. She was mired in self-pity, her conscience moving and wrestling within her like the baby soon would. She wasn’t crying now; she was dry-eyed. There was some poison in the pie; she wanted the treacly sweet of determinism with its aftertaste of martyrdom, but that came at too high a cost. Easy answers required a death of the mind. Yes, thinking was hard physical labor and nowhere near as pleasurable as sex, so she had abandoned it long ago. That was the pitiless truth. All the distractions of workaday life were so much easier than thinking, because thinking’s consequence—belief—made unceasing and terrible demands. It spoiled every pleasure. Yet, to live with half a mind, lobotomized in the peerless world, was to be a dead woman walking.

What she finally knew was shocking, even ugly in its power, but it brooked no equivocation. She took the leather strap between her teeth and sensed that she would survive the sawing off of an old, diseased limb. All of her life she had imagined herself a slave to a body she hadn’t acquired by choice, but this was only half the truth. Nature had never overridden her will. The gene is not the judge, only the court reporter. Or further: The gene is the prisoner trapped in an organism, which can reason and plan. She, Henrietta, had made many, many choices. Her body was female, but she was never a slave. Never that. She had only imagined herself so.

*   *   *

And now, poor Henry—the victory should have been his! This was the triumphant first month in the busy factory of his daughter’s womb. Yet he couldn’t discover an easy satisfaction. He listened to Henrietta’s animal howls on the stairs, and his ears bloomed with home blood. A worrisome worm wriggled: What if the child was, in fact, not his? An unfamiliar, seizing sensation took up residence around his organs. He realized it was simple fear. What if it was not Henrietta but Henry himself who was under harness and curb? No, no, no—he knew that the great machinery of life, the mechanical divisions in her wailing wall, the water sac and the placenta emerging as globs of cell and the splashing of three translucent layers, had been set in motion by himself alone. His daughter was manufacturing not her own fresh, originating dawn horse, and certainly not a dark Barb, but a pure Thoroughbred, the line of which could be traced back generation by generation through the age-old stud book.

*   *   *

So in the second month our Kentucky Colonel is soothed. It’s surely emerging, the tiny, twinging child: come, apple seed, tiny globular thing, shiny as mail and newly recognizable—ancestor in egress; a simple fish, then a tadpole, which crowns and rears, reptilian eyes engorging, then the smallest horse. It makes imperceptible movements full of meaning. Its heart beats time on Henry’s drum. It will fill the frame of hope.

*   *   *

In the third month, fact asserts itself through the flexing wall of Henrietta’s belly. But Henrietta herself is now marked by a strange and preternatural calm, a deep silence roosting in her bones. It’s like the glassy calm that surrounds a ship on a windless day, and her lassitude is worse than her previous anguish. What does she know that Henry doesn’t? What secret is she keeping in that growing belly? Does she actually think she’s growing a brand-new thing that will burst into life’s bright pavilion? Warm blood doesn’t spring from cold, nor bronze from gold—

Henrietta: Oh, come on, the Thoroughbred was a late hybridization, a mongrelization. That’s why they’re so strong.

Henry: The breed is genetically pure.

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

Henry: Blood will always tell.

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

Henry: Purity builds the empire.

Henrietta: They made the world modern!

*   *   *

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

*   *   *

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

*   *   *

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

NO. Stop, Henry. STOP STOP STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

I do not understand what I do not understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This answer came quickly. “Five weeks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you know that I don’t?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you felt crampy…?”

Henrietta nodded weakly.

“For how long?”

“Three days.”

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

Henrietta said, “University of Kentucky.”

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

“I’m not afraid,” said Henrietta.

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

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

Lou thought to soothe her, wanted to say: Don’t worry. My mother filled my head with all sorts of fears—how she bled, how she was cut and couldn’t feel pleasure properly afterwards, and how her last, which was me, had led to a hysterectomy. But all Lou said was, “Hang in there, sweetheart. It’s worth it. I ended up with a child I love more than I love myself. She’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

They were some way down the Paris–Lexington Road when Henrietta was once again clenched over her belly, deep in communion with this emergent, wrestling thing. She lost her sense of travel, of Lou at her side. Her baby argued viciously with her body, and she grimaced in complicated pain over it. When the baby’s demands eased, she laid her damp head on the headrest and looked out at the virginal white barns, the cupolas with their vanes pirouetting in an insistent wind, the horses with tangled manes fallen over bulbous eyes. History like floodwaters swamped them to the pupils. The stone walls began to totter and disintegrate even as she looked; the karst caved into sinks and ponds, and she laughed again through the pain, atop the pain, in the face of what was to come.

She saw Kentucky as a land of country contentments, rolling like an ocean in the sights of a ten-gun brig. The ocean reveals the most distant, dazzling islands to honest ships only after strenuous searching—by that worst journey, which is the ascetic’s choice. A midshipman’s boat is a cell, and a cell is the mind’s spyglass. You are a measurer of the winter farrow and summer effulgence and everything in between: girl turned fearless sailor. When you grow up and become a mother, never forget the delightful, early days of discovery. Remember the green, milky constancy of the ocean, the sturdy ship of your body with unsuckled breasts masthead to the wind, how you spied green, glossy life on basalt shores, how birds trilled the infinities for you. Remember how you journeyed in your body across the world only to discover that you were the original uncharted topography.

Disconcerted by Henrietta’s laughter, Lou said, “Are you breathing? Are you keeping your breath deep and even?”

“Yes,” with irritation now, “yes!” She was breathing out the last of the Old Dominion air her father had blown into her lungs and looking past the farthest row of white plank fencing: the rolling bluegrass has turned to bottle-green waves, and she can see ten volcanic islands rising in the wriggling heat. This is fresh, unknown land and so beautiful, though the islands appear to be divided, barren, and lava-scarred below the hanging clouds and above, ensconced in the damp humor of the heights, crudely efflorescent with life. As they draw near the first mass of land, she can see, amidst the many black conicals, reptiles hissing and dull-colored birds who care no more for her than they do for the great tortoises.

My God, the great tortoises! Heavy, lumbering giants. The second island is striated with crisscrossing blazes that the ponderous beasts have cut across the sloping green hillsides. Tiring of succulents in the fire-pit districts, the tortoises travel day and night for water, their crepey heads thrust before them up the precipitous slopes until they discover the springs where their kin are just now returning, moving with the stolid gait of those obedient to nature. They pass one another as they’ve passed before and will pass again. Now, the newly arrived slip into the crystalline pool past their heavy-lidded eyeballs to drink and drink and drink.

Henrietta’s guts reached around her lower back and wrenched hard. The grip was so strong, so quick on the last that Lou, who had been watching the dash clock, said, “That was awfully fast.” Henrietta’s answer was silence, because it was too strong for words. Now there was no doubt in Lou’s mind: The child wanted out. And soon.

Lou’s voice was calm but urgent. “Henrietta, I think you may have been in labor for the last couple days. You may be active right now. Promise me that if you feel the urge to push, you’re going to resist. Okay? We’re almost there, so just hang on.”

Henrietta wasn’t listening. The sea of volcanic islands came to an abrupt end, and the city flashed before her with its gaudy distractions—aluminum siding, pocked roofing, garish billboards, trash aflutter in the streets. Yet, there were still snatches of green grass under the vivid noon. Century-old trees with ancient memory. And there, perched on roofs and wires, arcing over the truck, commenting upon the sprawling growth of the city, were the daring little perspicacious finches, dull but quick, at first darting at the corner of her eye, then everywhere she looked congregating on porches and porticoes, strutting for worms and berries, swooping on the wing, staring black-eyed into the truck. They were of a family, yet they varied enormously, thirteen species all peculiar to the various neighborhoods of the city. Amazing how tame they are, how unafraid, so this one—with its abrupt tail and modest beak; Geospiza parvula, so tiny and pert—alights on her hand, and after observing it a while in curiosity and admiration, Henrietta snuffs its life with a single blow. Now she opens its chest with the obstetrician’s scalpel, while all its kin crowd around, perching on the hood of the truck, the ashtray, on her shoulders, observing with beady curiosity as she makes her careful incisions. The feathery flesh is spread, showing the small veiny networks and coiled viscera. The finches chatter with great vivacity, their talk overwhelming the honking horns, the squealing tires, the radios, as she cracks open the fragile rib cage and exposes the organ of animation. Like a wet treasure, here is the mystery. It’s too hot to touch with her hands. Now she realizes that along with its endlessly varying kin, the dead bird is still singing, its throat pulsing with blood and sound, and that the song is for her.

She lays the carcass down and is fully persuaded. Hadn’t she always been like a ripe fruit even when life was hell? It was perhaps true that she had never been happy, but happiness was a cheap, ephemeral thing brought on by novelty or chance; happiness was a trinket from a fair; inevitably the fair moved on, and the trinket was broken, stolen, or lost. Only joy abided. It was like blood, and as long as blood flowed, joy flowed, intrinsic to the organism. She looked at the wild and abundant world, the new and old species forever mutating, the violent sun and its cool hanger-on the moon, which she knew remained in the sky uncaring whether seen or unseen. She had joy. If you carry a hardy pagan god in you, no parent or enemy can kill it. She realized with surprised relief that someday in the distant future when this day of great pain was long past, they could raise a monument over her bleaching bones that read: Accomplished.

And that was her last thought before the work of her body engulfed her and this time would not let go. In the midst of that overriding pain, hands were trying to ease her out of the truck—were they at the hospital already?—yet she couldn’t uncurl, her body wouldn’t allow it, so they brought a gurney and now Henry was before her, his beloved face twisted with worry the way her guts were twisted.

“I’m here, I’m here,” he said as they eased her onto the gurney. They were wheeling her now, Henry trotting along at her head, listening to her moan, “It won’t stop.”

“Your contractions won’t stop?” But her answer was an animal’s panting and groaning, her hands a knobby lace over her distended belly. Henry saw how her hands were distorted with swelling. In these last weeks, her skin had been scorched by itching. Her belly, too big for her slim frame, was bursting like a late-season watermelon. It stretched so taut that raw fissures opened, and he was sick with guilt. In the unnaturally aseptic light of the hospital corridors, he was stricken with the memory of when they had first handed her to him swaddled in a pink cotton blanket. This is mine? he had thought. I made this miracle happen?

In the birthing room, the questions came furiously: Were you having contractions for the last few days? Mild ones? Are you sure your water didn’t break? Bloody show? Is the father on his way?

But Henrietta remained clamped in the vise of her pain, sweat tracking down her red, brutalized face—and bland tears too—as the contraction refused to release her. Pain was a hideous symphony, every note sounding at once, and it didn’t matter if every pitch was labored, slaved over, overwrought, caressed, or hated. I don’t care whether you can detect the fruits of my labor! I can’t hide anything, birth is breaking all of me. Sounds emerged from the deepest part of her.

Henry’s face was close to hers, almost against hers, almost kissing her cheek, saying, “The doctor’s here,” and then the man was gently prying apart her clamped legs.

“Should it be this hard?” she cried out in bewilderment. “Should it be this hard?”

“Goddammit,” hissed Henry. “Give her something!”

The doctor dispensed his obfuscations: “Dilated to five, but hypertonic uterus.” Henrietta interrupted: “I’m peeing.” The seep of warmth turning instantly cool in the mortuary chill of the room.

The doctor placed a gloved hand on her knee. “Miss Forge, your water just broke. I’m concerned, because there’s too much blood in your fluid, and you’re just starting to spike a fever, which we want to contain. Your uterus is hyperstimulated; that’s why you’re not coming down off these contractions. We’re not going to use an epidural, because—”

Henry’s eyes were wild and he gripped the plastic edge of the bed rail. “Why on earth?”

A nurse’s voice then and a whirling from the periphery: “Flat strip—”

“What is that? What is that?” Panic made its own contractions on Henry’s heart.

The doctor remained maddeningly calm. “It means there’s minimal variability in the fetal heart rate. I suspect abruption. This is something that requires immediate intervention. But there’s no need to panic.” He turned to Henrietta. “Miss Forge, we’ll need to give you general anesthesia, because I’m concerned about your baby and need to expedite the delivery. Placement of a spinal will just take too long. We’re going to move you into the pre-op room now.”

To a nurse, he said, “I want Miss Forge hooked up as well as the baby.”

Henrietta nodded weakly with a face that looked like doubt but was all pain. Why were they breaking into her private world? She was busy with her hurting, which was immutable and constant, pain breathing in, pain breathing out, pain eclipsing her mind.

Her eyes were glassy, and they were instantly moving again, the ceiling passing her, this must be the operating room; she knew because she recognized the many-bulbed lamps like blinding, wide-mouthed carp. Her father’s face—comfort, intrusion, her everything—interrupted the light. Someone said, “Sir, you can’t be in here,” and yet he remained. Henrietta’s eyes focused suddenly with a consternation so savage that Henry felt her pain move all along the length of his body like a lightning strike. For a brief moment, she abandoned her struggle. She said, “You never loved me.”

All he could do was stare at the garrulous shock of red on her cheeks. He struggled for language. “How can you say that?” he whispered. “Everything I’ve ever done is for you.”

“Lou said…” Her words drifted, evanesced, vanished into pain.

“What?” he said. “Lou the vet? What did she say?”

She could hear someone speaking to her father, but she was sunk down into her body again, any words elongated into wails by the pain wracking her, pressing her with the weight of oceans and mountains. Her face grew hideously pale, even her eyes appeared blanched. The relentless contractions were reshaping her into something foreign and alone.

The tenor of the room changed. She had no words now, all of herself concentrating on this pain. Language was done. The anesthesiologist was wrestling with the IV catheter as she made deep, guttural wounded sounds. But under it all she felt—far beneath the wretched pain and the fear—a deep and primitive excitement. It came from her bedrock self. Soon her child would appear, and everything would begin again.

In the first miracle, the universe created itself out of nothing. So there is always hope.

When the anesthesiologist moved in with the oxygen mask, she gripped his arm to stay him. Her voice was barely recognizable now, chafed and roughened by labor. She gestured, rolling her hand, so her father leaned in, and she laid her hand against his beautiful, weathered, beloved cheek. “Father…”

“What, darling?”

She grinned an ugly grin. “Every animal knows more than we do.”

“Someone get him out of here,” said the anesthesiologist, but Henrietta was already drawing her hand back to her chest, and because she needed to release the burden, she said, “Quick. Quick!”

The mask was fitted to her face, and she drew deeply from its clean breath. Perfect. Her eyes were washed with calm, it was effacing her now. Henry could see she was still speaking under the mask, but he couldn’t hear her words. He leaned in as though they were still conversing, but then her mouth stopped moving, and they only looked at each other gently before she closed her eyes.

Then she was drifting, the anesthesia washing in like a low and lovely tide. The lines on her brow eased and her mind softened, and her hands were very comfortably arranged like weights under her breasts. A wave came and she sensed it pulling her in deep, like an undertow, but it was pleasant and she didn’t mind. She smiled. She felt as though she were saying words, but it was more like dreaming in her mouth. They were going to free the child from her any moment, and she was so grateful. The child needed to be free. Deep in the water she could see a light, and that seemed no contradiction at all, only a curiosity. It was marvelous.

“Flatline!” The nurse’s voice, a crashing cymbal. “The mother has flatlined!”

There was a bustling in the world that Henry didn’t understand, and someone was gripping him by both shoulders, trying to pull him from the room, but, suddenly realizing, he flung them off with a ferocious strength, unable to take his eyes from his daughter’s face, which was changing and emptying as a room is emptied. The change was subtle but sure; all the minute and incessant activity of life ceased suddenly. Some old bitterness slid from her as her muscles went slack and her lips parted without emotion or word. There was nothing there. Henry could not move, he remained where he stood, gazing upon her in horror until horror was replaced by a grief so entire, so absolute, that he could think of no other option but to die himself, to lie down next to his daughter’s body and end entirely and perhaps would have tried, except they were yelling, were placing the paddles on his daughter’s naked chest as a new doctor labored and tried to break the hold of death with useless and violent electricity, so her dead, absented body convulsed violently, horribly again and again until the truth was called a fact: she was dead, and the obstetrician, who had labored on her behalf while they strove mightily with her body, held a brand-new baby aloft and in a voice strained with shock said, “He’s alive. He’s perfect. He’s perfect.” The words—so impossible—broke through the brilliant white light of Henry’s horror. He turned in confusion, having forgotten a child was being born, and with convulsive, confused motions, he moved down the side of the bed where the exhausted body of his daughter was exposed, where he could smell the private blood of her belly, where her lifeless limbs were slack. The nurses were an agitated stream rushing past him toward something he had left behind, and again someone was trying to wrestle him away, but again he shook them off with unnatural strength. His daughter was gone; she would never speak again. He barely sensed the tumult and noise now as he turned to the child. At first he recoiled, his mind rearing like a frightened horse. Then, with shaking hands, Henry drew the tiny, perfectly formed brown baby to his chest and looked in astonishment at the only family he had left.