Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters; at the Ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of want of absolute perfection have not been observed.
—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species
Again, they came out of Albemarle and Fauquier and Orange with spinning wheels and flintlock rifles strapped to mules and mares, a cavalcade over the folded Blue Ridge and smoky Shenandoah, fording countless streams until they arrived at the disputatious Clinch with its currents of cuss and complaint, then slept their wolf-encircled sleep and resumed their trek along the path of empire until they reached the midmark block house, where behind them teased two roads back to Prince Edward and Carolina, where proper cabins awaited with dogtrots and puncheoned floors, also ordinaries and steepled chapels and girls in laced corsets, whom they forsook for Indian Country across Clinch Mountain, Big Moccasin Gap, Powell Mountain, seemingly minor foes before this power of great white mountains insurmountable but for a high gap, the Gateway, which led to more and more earth, more rived ridges and black recesses, and ultimately the Kentuck, where the Indians and wolves were rivals for scalps, where the pack animals began to droop and die with Pine Mountain finally in view, where the men ate without benefit of fire until they passed through the virgin forest, through the outlying knobs to meadows of herbage and buffalo grass under pigeons in their thunderous passage over the Rock Castle River, where they decided to walk to the caneland in the north, where they tamed the grassland and timbered the chestnut and hemlock, plucked stones out of the earth for fencing, fired soil to brick, raised up houses out of the old growth while their cattle cropped the meadows, and after they became rich as Boaz on the fatling land, built a church of blue ash on a windy upland slope and christened the place Cane Ridge, where, when the old century spilled into the trammeled new, sinners trickled down from Ohio, up from Tennessee, and from all over the new state, where preachers ascended platforms, proclaiming Christ to the conquerors, who had traded their buckskin and coon caps for brooches and prunella, capes and velvet mantles, all converted now, faces to the bloody soil, trading earth for sky as they once traded baubles for earth, forgiven surely their success, jerking and calling with abandon, unrestrained now, the crowds pulsing and babbling as if carousal could render fool’s fat from the hard bones of history—
No. The old language is dead, as is Henry’s daughter, who lies in that storied tabernacle built on the ridge, where the cane once grew thick. In the shadowy reserve of the room under the old slave gallery, Henry senses an astonishing light beyond the log structure with its surrounding stone shrine, but looks away from the open doors. He hasn’t been able to bear the light these last two weeks—two endless, unendurable weeks. The funeral was delayed, because Judith requested time to return from her home in Bavaria, and because the confounding, surviving infant—his daughter’s son, his own blood—required a week in incubation. But Henry waited, most of all, because his grief was beyond the capacity of his flesh.
Now he could hear them: all the people filing into the church, the clacking of smartly shined shoes; he could hear their averted eyes. Yes, it was right that they should come; he wanted every house to be present. Fill the pews, pay their dues! He managed one look around at the subdued figures, but their somber faces, even their expensive black garments all seemed an affront to the reality of death. The very fact of their living offended him.
Now the pastor’s gentle hand was on his shoulder, now they were on the casket, and Henry’s stony calm was swamped for a moment by panic—Don’t do this! Please don’t do this thing!—but the words just echoed in the hollow of his mind, which seemed now like nothing but an antechamber for death—and then the lid was raised. He heard Judith cry out behind him, a sound of despair and recrimination. He wanted to stand up and say I didn’t kill her, I wasn’t the father! But the child in him was not so sure.
God, look at her face. In two weeks death had made no inroads, done no damage at all. Man truly is the measure and maker of all things, Child Henry thought wildly. Even industrious death is no match for his craftiness! His daughter appeared perfect and untouched, her hair lustrous, some blush color enduring on her cheeks and lips. She’d even assumed a restless beauty in her two weeks of tiresome solitude, time spent wandering aimlessly over the dark, purling river and under the tree of dreams, as if at any moment, she would rise with her innate disdain and dismiss them all with a withering glance and a flick of her hand. Then she would look Henry deeply in the eye, and he would know that all this suffering had been unnecessary, just a sickening dream. And he would forget it. Yes. There could be no greater prize on earth than to forget one’s suffering.
Once the lid was raised and the fact of Henrietta’s death made indisputable, the pastor slowly ascended the three wooden steps to the dais and regarded the familiar, monied crowd with a solemn, mild eye, one that had learned calm in the face of disaster over the course of a long career. When he intoned quietly, “We have lost a member of the Paris community, Henrietta Forge, the daughter of Judith Schwebel and Henry Forge,” Henry started visibly in his pew. He retightened the fold of his hands.
“When I asked Henry how he wanted his daughter to be remembered, the first thing he said was that we should remember her as a good horsewoman.” The room smiled; it shifted and relaxed. “I’m told she was capable in the saddle, capable on the track, capable as the manager at Forge Run Farm. As Henry will be the first to tell you, his nickname for her from a very young age was Ruffian. Tough and strong in a very competitive business, she was a steady presence in the community, and her experience—though she was only twenty-nine—will be sorely missed.”
The man brought his hands together and gazed down at Henry and Judith, who sat directly behind him. “But Judith and Henry, she was more than that, wasn’t she? She was a wonderful daughter, a beloved child. I know with perfect confidence, speaking as a parent myself, that she was the principal joy of both your lives, that she didn’t just bring honor to you with her accomplishments, but that you were honored to discover who she was and to draw her out into the fullness of her life and unique being. You were honored by the miracle of being her parents.”
Don’t speak. Don’t say another word. Henry could hear Judith’s unmerited snuffling behind him; he could hear the sunlight outside banging brutally on the roof of the shrine, demanding entrance.
The pastor continued in his measured and steady way. “This is the worst grief we can bear as humans, the loss of a beloved child. It feels unendurable. I want you to know—I want you to hear it from me—that this crowd is here today to bear witness to your suffering. Their presence is a confirmation that while no one can be inside your grief, a thousand can walk along beside you. No one is asking you to bear this alone.
“Now, some will say that death is God’s will and when he takes us out of life, he delivers us to a better place. But as I’ve sat with others in their grief, I’ve come to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that death is the enemy, the opposite of everything good. It’s why I’m a Christian. To be a Christian is to be with others in Christ, the memory of what lives on. Do this in remembrance of me. Gather in remembrance of me. If there is one thing the unnaturalness and finality of death teaches us, it is that we were never meant to be alone; we can’t bear it. Our stories about life and death are meaningless if they aren’t shared. Community is what religious faith is all about. Believers are persistent, they refuse to forget. Without believers, the sacrifice of Jesus would have been forgotten, a lost relic of history, just a story of a wandering radical with a vision for the new kingdom. It was only the witness of the community through storytelling that transformed Jesus’ tragic death into Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. In their retelling, he was no longer a political dissident put to death by the state, but a hero. They used the language of meaning, because when someone extraordinary lives and dies, it’s not enough to recount the facts. The community and all succeeding generations need to tell a truth which transcends.”
Now the preacher looked gently but firmly at Henry, then at Judith, allowing them to shelter under his gaze. “So Judith and Henry, in the presence of Christ’s community, how do we begin to cope with the death of a beloved daughter? We have already been given the facts. Henrietta had a difficult labor that required general anesthesia when her son’s heartbeat began to falter. Under anesthesia, Henrietta experienced sudden cardiac arrest and passed away. Her child survived. These are the facts as they’ve been told to us.” He paused, leaned across the lectern with his arm outstretched so he appeared to be gathering something in the air over Henrietta’s coffin. “But her child survived. This is where we must let go of the facts and begin to tell the truth. Henrietta wasn’t the victim of a medical mistake, Henrietta didn’t have a defective heart, Henrietta wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time—don’t relegate her to that, which is what the materialists want us to do, all those trapped unwittingly in the prison of the physical world. They want you to call this an accident. But believe me when I tell you that if she’d wanted to, Henrietta could have continued on with a regular labor, even though it was threatening her son’s life. She could have waited longer before beginning anesthesia, or she could have refused it altogether. But she chose not to, even though she knew the risks. Instead, she said, “Quick. Quick.” Henry told me that; he was there with her in the operating room. Henrietta told the doctor, “Quick. Quick,” and when she said that—make no mistake about it—she forfeited her life for her child’s. She suffered mightily in Gethsemane, but when the soldiers came, she stood and said, “I am she.” As a result of that choice, we lost her in the physical world but see her transformed in the spiritual one, and we gained her beloved son, who now possesses the gift of life and more than that, the knowledge of his mother’s gift, which will form the foundation of his own life and self-understanding. A double blessing has been bestowed upon this new life, one that we can barely comprehend with our worldly minds. Isn’t love a mystery?”
The preacher leaned further into the room. “Judith and Henry, I know your hearts are broken. Sometimes it seems as though children are born to break their parents’ hearts. But Henrietta was a parent too”—his voice was barely a whisper—“and Henrietta’s heart just broke a little sooner. Isn’t love a miracle?”
Henry stared at him, stricken.
“Now, your daughter isn’t here today to hold her baby, and she won’t be able to watch him grow up, but I already know everything I need to know about what kind of parent Henrietta would have been, the parent she was. We call God the Father because, like a good father, there isn’t anything that God won’t do for his children. And if we are truly made in this image of God’s love, then, accordingly, there isn’t anything a parent won’t do for a child. Even accept death.”
Behind him, Judith was silent as the void. Her crying had stopped. Henry’s hands parted at the word “death” as if, perhaps, he might grasp hold of the thing and contain it, stop it, but his hands held nothing, less than nothing. His face twisted with confusion.
“Even accept death,” the preacher repeated. Then he looked up from Henrietta’s peaceful, final face, where he had been gazing. “Now, as a community, can we begin to retell the story of Henrietta’s death? Can we talk about the ultimate sacrifice she made, which shows us what love really is, love which requires nothing in return, love which promises nothing for the lover, but which gives everything to the beloved? Can we now stop talking about the terrible accident of her death and speak instead about her hero’s death? We, as a community, have the power to do that. We were the ones who knew Henrietta, and only we can rewrite the story to tell the truth.”
They were rising and singing. More words were spoken, but the only thing Henry understood was the too-awful truth that his only child was dead. When the mourners had filed out, when he had shaken three hundred hands, when he stood with Judith beside the silent remains of their daughter, there was finally that cold reckoning. The peace of her perfectly preserved body was false; she had never been placid in life. Makeup was visible on her pores; she had never worn it. He stared hard for her breath, thinking the agony of his effort might force oxygen into her lungs, but it wasn’t there.
The preacher placed his hand on the casket lid with a question in his eyes, but Henry could not answer it. His entire being was overwhelmed by grief. Suddenly into his mind came sapphirine skies, mineral-green streams, tilled soil, and endless vistas. The casket lid threatened the significance and integrity of the natural world itself. He began to shake visibly.
The preacher’s voice was low. “May I close the casket, Henry?” Henry could not say yes. How could he? His lips were frozen, his mind harrowed, his tongue paralyzed in his mouth. As the lid was gently lowered, it cast his darling daughter first into a shadow, which grew gradually deeper, then her features were eclipsed, inch by inch, until her physical form vanished forever, and the casket was locked. Henry realized with horror that he could not recover the key. There was no key to the world.
* * *
Far across the road, cattle moaned with longing for a night coming in fits and starts. The air was restless and the crickets thrummed. The hot, humid breath of October was lifting now from the ground, where it had boiled all day, rising to meet the cooler streams of air that hovered over it. Airs kissed and stratified, whitening and thinning as the sun slipped its moorings and sank to the bank of the earth. Its center was as orange as its umbral rim was black. The sky grew redder and redder as the sun turned an earthier orange and less brilliant. Above it, purling clouds showed terraced bands of dark against crimson, and the rungs spanned the breadth of the sky. They stacked one upon the next on and on above the sun until the highest bands stretched into interminable shadow, darkening as they reached the top of the bow of the sky, then drifting edgeless into the risen evening. Blackish blue emerged from the east and stretched over the house like an enormous wing extended in nightlong flight. But day was not done, it shook out its last rays, and as low clouds skimmed before the spent sun, the roaming, liberal light was shadowed and then returned like a lamp dampered and promptly relit. The westernmost rooms of the house registered this call and response—walls now flush with color, now dimmed, now returned to red, the orange overlaid with gray, molten color penetrating the sheers and staining the interiors. Walnut moldings and finials and frames were all cherry-lit like blown glass—
No. The old language is dead. Henrietta is dead.
Henry stood in his foyer alone. He had invited no one back for supper after the funeral; he couldn’t bear the thought of polite company, how everyone would invade her home, chatter in her living room, sit on her sofas and wing-back chairs, all while he stood there, listening to the relentless ticking of the tall clock in the hall. It was impossible.
When a hand reached out gently to grip his elbow, he turned slowly as though moving underwater. The nurse, whom he’d hired for these few weeks, was beside him, whispering in her gentle voice: “He fed right on schedule and slept until you walked in the door.”
He? Who? The child, wrapped tight in a blanket of lilac cotton, one creamed-coffee fist escaped to find the plush petals of his lips and wave smally in the air. He was fat and ancient-looking, smelling vaguely of sour milk and sweet, warm skin. Dark skin. Henry’s breath hitched. Beneath that brown, he could detect the sure set of his daughter’s brow, the shape of her eyes. This black child was like the living memory of her, but altered. Henry wanted nothing more than to push him away even as he pulled him close, his mind churning with the new reality.
Bearing the mewling child carefully away from his body, as if he were a fresh-baked loaf from the oven, Henry ascended the evening-strewn stairs. He peered down his own hall, which had once held his wealth but now only echoed his bankruptcy. He remembered purchasing the Oushak on the floor; had he really spent the precious moments of his life in a store purchasing a rug? And here was his daughter’s room, which had once been his and his father’s before him and before him NONONONONONOSTOP
Time, that old murderer, was now the room’s only occupant.
Henrietta’s beingness, her recency was lodged in every object; it permeated the air. Henry took dazed survey of his newly unfamiliar surroundings, and an old, confounding gear ground into motion: life would continue on somehow, but as long as Henry lived, rotary grief would come round again and again like a nail on a wheel.
He moved at a stuttering pace along Henrietta’s bookcases, tracing a single finger over the spines of books that had furnished her life—scriptures to which he had given no prior thought. Bartram, Lyell, The Birds of Kentucky, The Descent of Man, The Diversity of Life. He hesitated over a uniform row of black, unmarked spines, her old notebooks. He touched one lightly as if touching a relic, then slid it free. First arranging his sighing, squeaking grandson on the bed, Henry eased onto the bed beside him and read sentences at random:
Shy fish and bold fish; inborn temp; Journal of Fish Bio; Apr 2003. Are genes determinants, or are they merely expressed? Black box or …
For a long time, I thought I was nominally a body, really just Father’s idea, a meme produced by his brain. But no one can invent a human wholesale. Why else would we have invented a god? Being is too great for a single mind, because it did not emerge from a single mind. Mind itself is an epiphenomenon of changing nature and the contingencies of history. That’s why I don’t know if I am free, or to what degree I can experience freedom.
Having found the generation distance between A and B via a particular common ancestor, calculate that part of their relatedness for which that ancestor is responsible. To do this, multiply ½ by itself once for each step of the generation distance. —R. Dawkins
Am not the center of the universe. Am a speck of matter so minuscule as to be almost nothing—a no thing, less than a no thing, a space between subatomic particles, which have no name and are themselves divisible into infinity and forever vibrating.
Is there a difference between happiness and joy, and why can I feel neither?
The appearance of man is the last phenomenon. —Lyell
What strange creature had jotted down these notes? Henry held the notebook away from him in consternation as he disentangled the scratchy, idiosyncratic cursive of a girl pulled out of school just as her formal education had begun. Yes, it was Henrietta’s hand, but … who exactly was that?
He realized with a start that death and perfection could not both exist.
He gazed down at the baby. This child had killed his daughter, this dark thing, this emblem. The old hateful designation tried to return, but it was distorted by distance, wriggling in the heat of time. It still lived in Henry’s heart, but not in his mouth. This was his … grandson? God, how he wanted to hate him! Henry’s mind fumbled, and there was a panic born of loss and change. Was there some other word—a replacement—for the strangeness, the difference, the not Henry? He didn’t know. It occurred to him that it wasn’t really a problem of words.
For the first time in his life, questions yawned before him like open graves.
“Henry Forge! Henry Forge!”
His old man again, forever angry about something, yelling up from the foot of the stairs. Henry snatched up the sleepy baby and rushed to the landing, an argument already rising like a bruise on his teenaged lips, ready to shout or spit or draw his bow—
“Henry Forge!”
It was Ginnie Miller from across the road, no longer a redheaded child in pigtails but a woman well into middle age, standing with one foot planted on the first step and holding a foil-wrapped casserole in both hands. Her hair was all gray curls about her pink, farm-worn face, but her eyes were the same piercing blue of so many years ago. Without apology, as if it hadn’t been years since they last exchanged words, she announced, “Henry, I just let myself in when no one answered. My husband said I should leave you be since you’re probably exhausted, but when I heard there wouldn’t be people over after the funeral, I thought, that can’t be right. It’s not good for you to be locked up in this big house all alone. You need to keep your strength up what with— Ooooooh!” Her remonstration collapsed into a soft cry. She deposited the casserole on the second step and hurried up the steps with her arms outstretched. “Oh my goodness, here he is…!” She swept the chubby swaddling right out of Henry’s arms, gazed down rapturously, then cocked her head slightly. “Why … well, you’re not exactly what I was expecting, but…” A slightly perplexed smile wavered on her lips, then broadened: “Oh, aren’t you just the most perfect little man! So handsome—just look at him, Henry—isn’t he just perfect?” With a kiss to his downy forehead, Ginnie ferried him down the staircase and over her shoulder said, “What’s his name?”
Henry peered at her from deep within the geography of his shattered mind. He shook his head faintly.
“Well, there’s no rush, I suppose,” Ginnie said. “The right name will come when it comes. Until then, I simply can’t allow you to eat alone. In fact, why don’t we just go over to the house. Leave the casserole. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
Henry wanted to retreat—his whole body was an open wound without hope of a scab—but he lacked the strength or volition to withdraw; he allowed Ginnie to guide him through his own front hall, down the sloping lawn of his childhood, across the black ribbon road to the Miller property. He hadn’t set foot on their land since he was ten. God, had he once been a little boy with a father and a mother still alive? The years had flung themselves past him with stunning certitude and no mercy at all.
“Go right on in,” said Ginnie, bracing the screen door with her shoulder while snuggling the now sleeping child against her chest. Henry did as he was told and saw the inside of his neighbor’s house for the very first time: the low ceilings and thread-worn furniture, pleasantly tattered Persians on the floor, pictures plentiful and cheaply framed. Two Cardigan Corgis charged from an inner bedroom and circled their legs with frantic joy as room followed upon tight hallway upon room—all dark and comforting as a rabbit warren—until they emerged into a kitchen, which glowed with soft lights. At a kitchen table pressed to the wall, a tall man sat stooped over a disassembled radio, his long fingers sorting rivets and washers.
“Really, Roger? On Rosie’s tablecloth?”
The man glanced up, startled, then rose from his chair, standing nearly to the low ceiling at his full height. Whereas his wife’s gray hair sprung from her head with all the vim of a forsythia bush, his was nearly gone, showing only thin, sun-battered scalp. Behind his head hung an engraved slab of cherry wood, which read, Ruby Anniversary—Congratulations, Roger and Virginia! This was a man whom Henry had seen for many years passing in a red pickup truck, but whose name he had never known. He seemed quiet, though not exactly shy. “Mr. Forge,” he said, “may I offer my condolences.”
“Look, Roger, look,” said Ginnie, wading through Corgis and holding out the baby in her arms. “Tell me this isn’t the most darling thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life.”
Roger peered down his nose, considered the napping child, then the couple exchanged a long, signifying glance. With a voice so deep it had made dogs crouch and roll and whimper all his life, Roger said simply, “Very cute, indeed.”
“Here,” she said, passing the baby carefully into his arms, “I told Henry I couldn’t bear to leave him over there to eat alone, so I dragged him over. Neighbors should support one another, you know.” She glanced meaningfully at Roger, who met her gaze with barely arched brows. “Now, I intend to feed the man. It’s the very least we can do.”
“Certainly.” Roger cradled the child in the crook of his arm and swept the innards of the radio as well as a checkbook and bills and various pens off to the side of the table. With his free hand, he indicated the chair opposite. Then he and Henry sat while Roger rocked the child with the easy, practiced arms of a man who’d raised two children.
“Was your daughter married?” he asked with a glance down at the child.
“No,” Henry said, his voice barely a whisper.
“So, she was dating an African-American gentleman?”
Henry nodded dumbly; he didn’t know what to say.
“Well, it’s heartening to see the way times have changed,” Roger said, dandling the child. “The world used to be so ugly about these things. Even good folks … well, your father was a bit of a racist, wasn’t he, Ginnie?”
“Oh, Daddy was a good man,” Ginnie said, “but yeah, maybe a bit. Nothing too crazy.”
“My folks were Quakers,” said the man, turning his warm eyes on Henry and not waiting for his response. “They taught me that God made of one blood all peoples of the earth. My mother actually had a cross-stitch of that, which hung in our foyer. And they lived that verse. Especially my mother. She was a very politically active woman.”
Ginnie moved smartly about her kitchen until she returned with plates heaped, saying, “But my daddy was kind too, Roger. He was. He just had some backwards ideas. You can’t help the way you were raised.”
“Ah,” said Roger, and cocked his head, “but when you grow up, you have to take responsibility for your adult mind.”
“Well, anyway, enough about that,” Ginnie said, reaching out, “give me back that baby.” She situated herself at the corner of the table, where she could dandle the child with one arm and eat with her free hand.
Henry stared down at his plate piled high with beet salad and venison casserole, buttered sweet potatoes and rosemary bread still steaming from the oven. Ginnie had filled his glass with sweet tea. It occurred to him that he had not been hungry in a long, long time. Then hunger moved him, and he fell on his food like an animal, even though he felt it as a betrayal. His heart was broken, yet his body was ravenous. He ate and ate and ate. After some time, he sat swaying over the remains of stew and bread, his eyes glazing with tears that pricked like a thousand needles. He wanted to say something, but he could not release the clamp on his throat.
Roger stood to offer privacy and moved to the rear door, both dogs at his heels, and slipped a pack of American Spirits from his breast pocket. He wavered on the top step, about to move down onto the grass, but when his wife appeared not to notice, he remained where he stood and lit a cigarette.
Ginnie, who was planting kiss after kiss on the child’s sleepy forehead, said, “Why, I believe he has your nose. Yes, if I’m not mistaken, I believe so. Roger, I can see you standing right there. Don’t think I can’t.” Then she looked up at Henry with unvarnished delight. “You always did have a proud nose like the horses we used to have, those Walkers you sold Daddy back in the day.” She hefted up the child, who swooned with his lips pouted out. The sloped nose was indeed a miniature replica of Henry’s.
Ginnie gazed with unblinking eyes at Henry. “I do wish I had known Henrietta better. Perhaps I could have been … a better neighbor.”
Under her bright, direct gaze, Henry was silent. How miraculous that Henrietta could be spoken of and yet not exist. Remorse had become more real than she.
“I didn’t see her very often, but I always found her to be”—Ginnie seemed to be rooting about for the right word—“very interesting. And just look at her baby. What a treasure.” Flicking his half-smoked cigarette into a Folger’s can, Roger returned to the kitchen, gazing steeply over his wife’s shoulder at the child in her arms.
Ginnie waved one hand irritatedly. “Roger, you smell like cigarettes. Good Lord.” Then, turning to Henry, she said, “If you ever have some trouble with him, you just bring him over. Roger has a way with colicky babies.”
With a glint in his eye, Roger said, “I know when to be quiet.”
Ginnie made a dubious sound in her throat.
“Well,” Roger said, “I’m glad we had this … supper together. Neighbors should break bread together.”
Ginnie nodded firmly, while Roger settled himself back into his creaking Windsor. Stroking a Corgi on its head and gazing curiously at Henry, he said gently, “So, how’s that fine horse of yours doing, Mr. Forge?”
Henry, who had been absorbed in the mysterious face of his grandson, could only look up at Roger in astonishment, as if he couldn’t remember his own name or how he had come to be here. When he spoke, his words were rusty like the hinges on an old door. He whispered, “My horse?”
* * *
One little jockey in the hot tub; one little jockey on the phone.
One little jockey in the kitchen; one little jockey still at home.
One little jockey with his agent; one little jockey in the box.
One little jockey puking salad; and one little jockey—imp, raconteur, pissant, tricky truculent slick, Reuben Bedford Walker III of provenance unknown and character indeterminate, five feet three inches tall, 3 percent body fat, and 118 pounds—barreling out of the jockey room, his valet hollering at his back, in search of the animal only seen from a distance under other jocks, but what an animal!: sixteen exquisite hands at the withers, a deep barrel chest with iron shoulders, and a head of black chiseled marble cracked by a white chine blaze; black satin tail and legs that screamed RUN MOTHERFUCKER. She was a black, cresty-necked filly who bit handlers, broke jocks, and rammed in fractions like a new Secretariat, what Mack Snyder called his perfect thing, the kind of filly that got hotter and hotter until she burned up the Triple Crown and retired to the mommy track; wife, mother, and one-night stand all in one.
Reuben careened along the back stretch, that theater of quarrel and striving and hungover work, of labor white and brown and poor all over, of motormouth agents and trainers chewing out assistants, of milkshaking vets hauling gear bags—
“Heya, Reuben!”
“Why you back here? Ain’t you got a race?”
“Your valet’s looking for you!”
He acknowledged them with not so much as a flick of a hand, or a cock of a brow, but slipped the corner of Barn 23, the first of Mack Snyder’s four. Along the sun-dappled shed row above all the pillow talk muttered into equine ears, he could hear the big filly knickering her pleasure as she was combed.
“Hail, fine Ethiope!” cried the tiny man, and Allmon spun where he stood at the rear of the filly. In that most reliable of stage moves, he looked forward before looking down, and in the delay the jock had slipped under his arm like an otter in silks, crying, “What a balm for the old cryballs you are! A noble Ebon tires of these Caucasians with their corpsy skin and tea-stained hair, their awshucks and awdangs, their pallid faces—fucking tallow! Don’t get me started on the wetbacks. Oooooh…” His words whistled up the flue of awe: “Hellsmouth, as I live and breathe.”
Pure instinct caused Allmon to grab the man by his wiry arm and haul him hard round. Hellsmouth stirred sidewise as Allmon took stock of the man’s face: hard as a train with a tough jutting jaw like a grille. Lips curled churlish and coy under deep-set eyes with mini-Hells spangling in their depths. All muscle and barely more, he was eight feet packed into four, his sharp body sinewed by starvation and the sweat box.
“So intimate?” the jock snarled. “You don’t even know my name, soldier.”
“Get out,” said Allmon.
The man jerked back his arm. “Oh, you don’t get to tell Jimmy Winkfield to get out, no sirree. You don’t tell Isaac or Oliver to skedaddle!”
Someone tossed over a stall: “Don’t listen to that fucker, Allmon!”
The jock tossed right back: “Hush, vile and greasy interloper! You stink of river water and queso!”
From over the stall: “Listen, asshole—”
“Coital sludge! Slander not this ancient tongue! I am presently engaged in the business of horseflesh and perhaps other flesh, and your intrusion is an unforgivable offense!”
The little man whirled back to Allmon, his hard eyes aflirt as he thrust out rough rider’s hands. “Reuben Bedford Walker,” he said. “The Third, mind you. Not the first, a pederast, nor the second, a wife beater, in fact none of the priors, but in all likelihood the last. Until men grow pussies. Which, Lord have mercy, they might! It’s a fabulous new age. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Allmon Shaughnessy.”
Without a clear course of action, because the man’s voice was a wily wend of place and time, threading old centuries up through the chinks and fissures of newer ones, his words swift in one ear and then tangling in the disordered avenues of the other, Allmon took the hand up automatically, but it turned soft as a silk scarf caressing his inner wrist even as he was saying, “Where’d you get my name?”
Reuben grinned. “Don’t be so modest, little Almond. Everyone knows the prison kid with the good hands and the sorrowful face. Carrying a burden of mysterious origins! Nigh on a horse whisperer, they say, an old island conjurer, got the Nawlins voodoo touch, one of those old ’tation niggras—a natural! Where do you come from, and where have you been? We all want to know. You’re a curiosity, my man!”
As he pattered, the jock, dressed only in his silk breeches and a white tank, was squeezing past Allmon toward Hellsmouth, inspecting, mean dreaming, and counting coins.
“The fuck you think you’re doing?” said Allmon.
In his finest Tom, Reuben drawled, “Me and dis hoss here, we gone cut us a fine caper, Lawdy yes! I jess been beggin’ ole Massah Snyder, lemme leg up dis pony! And now I gone do it! So liff a poor niggra, son.”
Shapes were shifting in the man’s mouth. Allmon could only stare at him in alarm and distaste.
“Did you hear me, young man?” said the jock with a voice fresh, level, and boss. “Offer your superior a lift.”
“You fucking kidding me?” said Allmon, incredulous. “She broke the leg on her last jock in the gate at—”
“I am perfectly aware of Señor Alano’s miscalculations, believe you me.” Reuben’s voice devolved to hiss, “Now toss, Hoss.”
If he’d looked a grown man, Allmon would have bristled. If there’d been actual physical threat behind the words, he would have fought. But as it was, he knew this was the jock who’d missed the morning breeze because of a delay at the Los Angeles aiport. Not sure what else to do, he lifted the man onto Hellsmouth as if he were no more than a sack of cornmeal.
Now it was Hellsmouth’s turn to object. The two-year-old was already expert at shedding riders with a lightning-strike hump and dump. Now, true to form, she bristled and jumped like a goat, but the jock went nowhere at all, stuck like glue. When she went to rear, Allmon’s hands were quick at her mouth and her neck at the withers. Bracing the wide brain pan, he caught and calmed her, though her mouth continued to work suspiciously, snarling.
The jock leaned into those pinned-back ears. “Hush, my sweet little horseypie,” he whispered in a voice like chiffon, “you’re gonna win big for this here jock, or I’ll cut your throat cheek to jowl.”
Allmon reached up and dragged off the man who weighed no more than a girl, delivered him hard to his feet in the straw. “Get the fuck off my horse.”
“Your horse?” Reuben flickered his spiky lashes in astonishment, his hands on his bony hips. “Your horse? Don’t forget, Almond Joy, that three people make the money around here—Henry Forge, Mack Snyder … and Yours Truly. Your horse, my ass.” He reached out and pointed at Allmon’s face. “Mind your tongue, young man, saddle up in an hour, and let old Reuben show you how the doing gets done.”
* * *
Champagne Stakes, Belmont, October 2005, cloud-churning sky over an Indian summer, Mack marching at Allmon’s side, his lips blanched white with game-day strain, his cheeks ruddled as ever. The will to win rendered the man a permanent blustercuss, and Allmon had learned quickly to wrap himself back up in a shroud of silence. It was easy. He was cold, permanently cold since the day he left Forge Run Farm. He marveled at how easy it was to look like a statue again, one that didn’t look left or right. Except this statue had a mind, and it poked at him, whispering, She must be having that baby any minute. Your baby.
The day, the race, the horse. Hellsmouth was dancing up on her hoof tips, cresting her neck into a fulminating wave as she approached the other mounts in the emerald-green saddling paddock. “You got nothing,” Allmon muttered at them under his breath, knocking his mind into place. It was easy; the horses were an astonishment. Among the antic fillies and nerve-addled colts, there was charm and brio, founting talent and flaming speed. Skulls carved neat by nature, legs bred bold by owners, hides like autumn leaves. Here was the bay Wagnerian bass, the Carl Lewis sprinter, Sarah Bernhardt so divine, Solomon’s gold, and Tesio’s dream. But, listen, as sure as I write this, with Hell’s perfect limbs and her big motor, they were just whistling in the dark.
Diminutive even among his coevals, Reuben was ready and waiting, turning this way and that with his crop in his hand, a tightly muscled bundle of expectation, bright and beady-eyed as any peacock. But he ceased all motion when Hellsmouth appeared, his gaze trained on his mount with an unearthly concentration, mean mirth all absent.
Allmon couldn’t help himself. He said with a terse, dismissive gesture, “This new jock, I don’t like him.”
Mack said, “If I had to like any of you sombitches, I wouldn’t be in this line of work.” He pointed at Reuben. “That’s the best rider you’ll ever see on the skin of a horse, and don’t you forget it.” He raised a hand to the paddock judge, then stepped to Reuben, over whom he towered at five-ten, and, with one hand to Hell’s withers and his other slicing the air like a tomahawk, said: “Now do exactly how I said. Let her flop around out of the gate, that’s how she goes. She likes to eyeball ass for a bit. You can hit her around the curve, but don’t crop till you’re solid. DO NOT CROP UNTIL YOU’RE SOLID, REUBEN. You got a rocket here, a classic deep closer, understand me? Not until you’re solid.”
Reuben nodded once, his lips a firm line. Allmon saw none of the mean mirth he’d detected there earlier.
“Riders up!” The marching stopped, followed by a flurry of activity around each mount. Mack cupped his hands and tossed the jock onto Hell’s back, where he landed with practiced ease, hands snapping up the reins and gleaming boots cocked acey-deucey. Mack said, “I wish to hell you’d got up here for a morning gallop. She’s a handful. Tricky.”
Reuben leaned into Hell, nostrils widening as if inhaling the very stall-born essence of the horse. He said, “Oh, I’m trickier by half.”
Mack just ignored him. “Post assignment to good advantage. Four.”
The jock’s carved face finally cracked a brittle grin of surprise. “Four! ’Twas ever thus!”
“No time for superstition, Reuben,” Mack muttered, but his brows drew tight as if to secure his eyes against the explosive pressure of his nerves. “Just keep your head in the game, and don’t bring her back here without the mile.”
With a mock salute, Reuben said, “Me and little gal, we’ll make a mockery of their bestest efforts,” and Allmon led off horse and rider under the ivied clubhouse into the shadowy tunnel. At the far end, the track loomed like a handicapper’s heaven, lit by a sun just now punching through rarefying clouds and turning the hoof-churned track to silver. Allmon’s blood quickened, his stomach a fist of fear. One wrong step on that track, one hard bump, and his whole life would break down with the horse. He swallowed hard to keep his lunch from flipping.
As the first mount emerged from the tunnel, a terrifying rumble rushed slowly through the grandstand, gathering force as it went—the sound of a thousand ships shattering at once, louder than God—so the horses danced in distress, pulling left and right or cantering forward, with only Hellsmouth displaying no signs of alarm. She raised her head and worked her capricious mouth, taking the crowd in round. Vox populi vox Dei.
Against the roar and against orders, Allmon suddenly blurted, “Look, this horse, she’s got a sensitive mouth. See her talking around her bit? She’s always been like that, even when there’s nothing stressing her. Lay off her mouth much as you can.”
His lashes fluttering, Reuben leaned down with a hard note of surprise. “And hark! I did hear the prattling of the American youth.”
Allmon ignored him. “No need to crop her. Every jock’ll tell you the same thing—she runs hard when she wants to run and if you hit her, you just piss her off. She don’t need pain to run hard.”
A grin, but Reuben’s eyes narrowed to slats. “Where exactly are you from, little catfish?”
Allmon looked straight at Hell’s billet strap, said quietly, “Cincinnati.”
“Of course!” the jock said. “I can hear the river in your mouth! It sounds just like the South.”
“Cincinnati ain’t the South,” Allmon said briskly.
Reuben returned upright on his slip of a saddle and cackled to the crowd. “Not the South, folks! Not the South!” A slicing glance: “It’s all the South, son.”
Then he winked and with a flick of his hand, he and Hell were parading to the gate on the far backstretch, a stolid palomino pony leading the way. It was only when Allmon and Mack stood aside so the next horses could pass that, suddenly released from the severe focus the Thoroughbred required, Allmon realized something was amiss.
“Where’s Forge at?” he said. But he didn’t really want to know. The sight of the man elicited a surge of feeling so complicated, it didn’t have a name. And the thought of Henrietta was a one-two combo: desire and repulsion.
Mack, his eyes trained on the post parade, waited for the bleating of the bugler to quit. Then he placed his thick fists on his hips. He didn’t look back at Allmon when he said, “I track the man’s checks, not his whereabouts.”
Across the field, as mounts were slotted one by one into their stalls and while Reuben was drawing down his goggles, Hellsmouth skittered back with a violent shake of the head and a fractious cry. She wasn’t some bird content with its cage, some laboratory rat. She was one thousand pounds of propulsive muscle, suddenly shadowboxing the sky and scattering her handlers like pins. Reuben was quick, he poured himself across her neck and rode the bucker as ably as any ropey rodeo kid from Cody or Cheyenne. When the green-jacketed handlers regained their feet and dusted themselves off, they placed all hands on her ass and shoved her into the metal stall. The crewman held her head with both hands and smiled nervously at Reuben. “Now you’re in a tight spot,” he said.
Reuben ignored him, perched and ready for an emergency scramble to the side bars. The reins in a cross, he turned left and right, surveying the ranks: Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico; Colombia, Argentina, more Mexico. “Why, it’s a brown battle royale!” he muttered, then tucked his face against Hell’s neck, and the gate sprang.
Breaking from the four hole, Hell slopped and thrashed into the race like an overexcited dog, then settled straight away into a loopy, loping, embarrassing last. Even as the field began to jostle and strategize along the rail and the far outside, the filly couldn’t be bothered and expended no run at all. Hell was smoking in the ladies’ room and didn’t give a damn.
On the far side of the track, Mack placed a hand over his heart and muttered, “So help me Christ, this horse is gonna kill me.”
Heeding instruction, Reuben rode calm, rump high, head low, a silhouette of hardboiled patience. At the quarter-mile pole, Hell had overtaken only one contender—and that a mere matter of chance as a gray pulled up favoring a leg—and was just beginning to angle wide. Reuben clenched his crop, flipped his filthy goggles, and growled once, “Come on, sister woman.”
But Hell just rolled along on her lovely little pleasure cruise. The air was fine with the lushest of breezes, the waters glassy and dotted with befruited islands—
“Goddammit!” Mack hollered from the rail. “Fucking graze for all I care! I fucking bought this pasture for you, asshole!”
It was a fast half mile when the pack passed the pole at just over 0:45. Angelshare, a rangy Runnymede colt, led by two lengths on the inside as Hellsmouth eased her way into ninth along the rump of Play Some Music. Boomie Racz, the curly, blonde up-and-comer, stooped over Music and whipped him when she suddenly sensed Hell at her heels. She flipped her goggles and doubled down, straining for a path through the traffic.
Now the school of horses swung around the turn as if caught in a sweep net, Angelshare faltering off his pace for a moment as he changed leads and Scintilla charging to overtake him with Chief Contender hot as breath on his neck. Only now, as if realizing suddenly that she was hungry and food awaited, Hellsmouth began to stretch out under Reuben and reach for sunlight as she curved around the field. Wary and shrewd, Racz stayed so close that Play Some Music bumped Hellsmouth, shoulder against shoulder, not once but twice. Reuben snarled and shoved and battened down the hatches just as the group emptied into the stretch for the final quarter mile, the four leads now charging neck and neck.
Reuben was done waiting. With an electric strike, he flung back his crop, and with a single stinging lash made contact with the filly’s rump. Her muscles leaping beneath her skin, Hellsmouth exploded out of her gait with such vicious power, her first free stride made the previous three-quarters of a mile seem nothing but a lark. As she shot forward she bore in toward the rail and delivered one fast, teeth-rattling bump to Play Some Music. While Racz cropped and corrected her faltering bay, Hellsmouth drove to the wire with a stride so long and self-assured, so dazzlingly late, that the grandstand rose as a single entity, driven up by a surge of energy that seemed to come from the very center of the earth. Farmers three miles distant heard the cry when, fully extended with her limbs threatening the limits of form, Hell shot under the wire. Play Some Music followed in two solid lengths, but as the crowd threatened to deafen man and animal alike, Mack was already clutching his skull at the sidelines.
“Don’t fuck me, history!” he cried. “I’m too old for this!”
The inquiry sign began to flash.
“No! No! No! No!” His fists were uncorked grenades, the crazy in his eyes unleashed. “NoNoNoNONONONONONONONOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Reuben and Racz were off their mounts in a second, hustling, then running, and now sliding through the office door of the stewards, side by side, panting and pointing.
“He bumped me hard on the straight!”
“She bumped me twice in the turn!”
“We’ll watch again,” said the steward from the Jockey Club.
“We barely touched him on the turn!”
“I can’t prevent a lead switch!”
“Hold on,” said the steward from the Racing Association.
“It’s a miracle Hellsmouth even stayed up!”
“I couldn’t take down your filly with a bulldozer!”
“Ruling stands,” said the steward from the Gaming Commission.
Aboveground, the lights stopped flashing and the crowd lost its mind.
Which is how Reuben came to be photographed victorious atop Hellsmouth in the winner’s circle at Belmont, Allmon at her halter. In the photograph, Allmon looks taller than he is, chin high and proud, but eyes like dark wounds, peering through the camera, past the trainers, the jocks, the drunks, the bettors, the stoopers, the stewards, to a woman he can’t see, but whose details can’t be erased. He shakes his head, so the image is blurred.
“Just like 1972,” Mack mutters. “I thought history had us by the short hairs.”
Reuben puffs out his bird chest and stares down his nose. “I don’t repeat history,” he says, “I make history, and I’m never riding the bitch that easy again.”
* * *
There’s the front of the house, and there’s the backstretch, and never the twain shall meet. Allmon was no more than a migrant worker, no different from the Guatemalans and the Peruvians he groomed with, moving from track to track, following the racing season, following Mack. Like all the rest, he slept in unventilated cinder-block dorms with dingy, mold-streaked walls and sputtering lights, quarters where you couldn’t run an air conditioner, because the barns weren’t set up for the voltage, so you sweated in the swampy ninety-degree nights and watched the other grooms swoon and puke from the heat. You drew flies like any other animal. A couple of the skinnier guys ended up with dysentery. There were track doctors, but they basically dispensed Vicodin and sent you on your way, and unless you were dying, you didn’t get a day off. So you slept in your sweat, bought your food at the 7-Eleven or some Mexican dive, and you worked.
The filly was winning stakes races, but that didn’t change Allmon’s four o’clock mornings at the barn, going round on a carousel of tack and groom: bandage work, leg checks, scrubbing off poultice wrappings, taking temps and mucking, filling waterers and haynets, laying down fresh hay. He passed mounts to exercise riders, tidied the shed row, washed and groomed again, iced and rewrapped million-dollar legs. If it was race day, that meant rounds after lunch. Otherwise, the vets came in and doped the horses from their grab bag of steroids, then there was more schooling and walking and feeding, and when evening rolled around, Allmon draped them with blankets nicer than any he’d ever owned. For doing this, he made $350 a week, maybe a hundred extra when Hell placed. He spent his first paycheck on a sleeping bag and a .45 1911 automatic he bought off a guy at the track who used to be a marine, just something cheap he could keep close. You couldn’t trust anybody anywhere anytime; he knew that. Though sometimes he also knew in the subterranean passages of his heart that he was the least trustworthy of all.
“Hey, kid. Decent job today.” Mack was standing there in the stall door, arms folded across his chest, his white Stetson cocked back. Allmon looked up, startled, from where he’d been staring down at his own hands in mystification, lost in thought. He said the first words that came to mind: “My hands feel broke.” As soon as he said it, he wished he could reel the words back in.
“Your hands, huh?” Mack’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head. “Okay, listen. I’ve seen you doing your work around here for a couple months, and that’s real good. I mean it. So I’m gonna give you some advice, but don’t ask for it again.”
Allmon with side eye: “I ain’t even asked for it this time.”
“Which is why it’s amazing I’m giving it to you for free.” Mack cleared his throat. “Kid, you know what possum and pepper pot is?”
Allmon didn’t bother to shake his head.
“Of course not. See, I grew up in the mountains. Crapalachia. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and the only roses I ever saw were coffin roses. Never even heard of the Derby till I was thirteen. Somebody once said to me that if you weren’t born into money, you couldn’t ever be truly wealthy. Do you think I gave a fuck?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t give a fuck.”
“I didn’t give a fuck.” Mack recrossed his thick arms. “You ever wonder why horses like me?”
Allmon shook his head.
“They don’t, so don’t worry about it. There’s a lot of things in this world not worth worrying about.” Mack peered carefully at Allmon. “So, I noticed you don’t drink.”
“Nah.” Allmon shrugged. “Not really.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” Mack went on. “Every black old-timer I ever knew, and I knew a whole mess of them when I was coming up on the track, they could drink you under the fucking table. Well, go ahead and drink if you want. No law against.” He gestured out toward the broader barn. “You think I don’t know these banditos put tequila in their coffee every morning? You think I don’t know that? Only one rule.” Mack held up a single finger. “Don’t ever let a horse get hurt under your watch. Or I’ll make it my personal mission to put a bullet in your hide.”
Grown impatient, it was Allmon’s turn to interject. “See, you don’t know me,” he said. “Or you’d know I don’t intend to fuck up. Ain’t no horse gonna get hurt under my watch. I lost everything; I don’t intend to lose this.”
Mack was quiet a moment, took stock of him; he set his legs apart and appraised this young man who—goddammit—he had to admit, reminded him of his own younger, hungrier self. “What have you lost, kid? I know you were in Blackburn.”
Allmon lowered his chin; his eyes burned holes through Mack’s face. “I. Lost. Every. Thing.” And it was God’s own truth. There were tears at the back of his voice, the place where Henrietta’s name lived.
“Huh,” said Mack, nodding, and crossed his arms. “Well, let me tell you something. I’m nothing. I’m nobody. From nowhere. I’m not even going to tell you the name of the town I grew up in, because you’d think I was shitting you. Who the hell am I to be a millionaire five times over? In the hunter jumper world and all that fancy boondoggle bullshit, you can’t rise. But here—in this world, in the blood horse world? Sky’s the limit. We don’t care who you are. We don’t care if your daddy hit you, who raped you, who you sleep with, what prison you came from, understand? All you got to do is work. I want you to remember that.”
Allmon held wide his arms, affronted. “I been working since I was twelve. I know how to fucking work.”
“Well, then, here’s my advice.”
“I thought you just gave me your advi—”
“Number one!” Mack snapped. “Don’t smoke pot; it makes you stupid. Number two, cut your hair; they’re looking for reasons to hate you.”
Allmon sighed, swagging his head.
“And number three,” Mack bulled over his objection, “don’t ever loan out your sleeping bag.”
Allmon looked up, eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Crabs. Now get back to work. I’m not paying you to work your mouth.”
“Henry Forge, a lifelong devotee of racing and one of its steadiest breeders, is finally putting his name in lights with his big black filly, Hellsmouth, who trounced the field this October at the Juvenile Fillies Stakes. Close readers of Blood Horse will recognize the marks of her predecessors Hellcat and Hellbent, but even the most casual racing fan should detect the imprint of Secretariat. This horse is a living, breathing manifestation of the old adage: the best horses come out of the best horses.”
—Burrow, Blood Horse
Father has spent his life under a bright light in a narrow hallway, repeating names he memorized long ago. But I looked out the window, looking for the ideas that underwrote nature. The problem: what I really saw was my own imagination written onto the landscape of physical matter over time. Self on everything.
“In a long career as a track writer and as witness to some of the greatest horses this sport has ever seen, I can say with absolute certainty that this is the first horse that’s eclipsed the great Secretariat in my mind. And it’s a filly—if that don’t beat all.”
—Greeney, Racing Form
Then I met someone I wanted more than the idea of him, and I began to think: another also thinks. An equivalency began to assert itself. I sensed the enduring mutual affinities. But until that moment happens, it’s impossible for the mind to accept that the self is not the center of the universe, that the center is everywhere, that the universe is always expanding, that there is, in fact, no limit to the universe at all.
“The King is dead. Long live the Queen!”
—The New York Times
The movement of evolution is from simple to complex.
The queen knew what she was—something royal, a bold ruler—and she liked nothing better than to show out. On her early morning walks with Allmon, she would showboat among the riffraff, spinning her black tail and crow hopping on her perfectly turned hooves. She mugged for the cameras like her grandsire had done thirty years before, tossing her bull head and rippling her withers like a colt shot up on elephant juice. But Allmon knew she was clean; no one was sneaking in Regu-Mate or Equipoise, Lasix or milkshakes or anything beyond the standard regimen of anti-inflammatories. All the coltish conformation she displayed, the thick, bundled muscles of her quarters and the long, aggressive neck, was her treasure by birthright. Some fillies were just like that—better than the colts at their own game.
Henry. The sight of the man was a shock. Allmon reared back, not recognizing him at first, the way he leaned against Mack’s barn as if it were the only thing keeping him from toppling into his own grave. Allmon blinked, as if to clear his vision of a mirage. Where had all Henry’s physical beauty gone? His face was the color of old ashes, his once red-gold hair visibly thinner, and he had lost twenty pounds he couldn’t spare. He looked to all the world like a handicapper down all his profit, all his luck.
When Henry felt the weight of Allmon’s gaze, he straightened up, looking right at him. Then he pushed himself away from the barn wall, turned, and walked with visible effort through its rolling door.
Dread moves swift as blood through the body, from the heart to the distal extremities. For some months, the baby had existed only as a strange muscular tension that wrapped itself now and again around Allmon’s brain, but suddenly it was as present as the blood in his veins. Yes, it had surely been born by now. Sweat prickled at Allmon’s neck. He walked slowly toward the barn, a knocking in his chest. It was like the blow of a pick against an ice block.
Hell was rank for the lead, shouldering past Allmon into the barn, passing through golden streams of morning light, so chaff particles swam and eddied around her in a liquid rush. Henry watched his filly pass into her stall—his winning girl, his thousand-pound trophy. He could detect no flaw in her at all. She was perfection. A furious, wasting anger blew through him. How could that illusion be so enduring?
Henry looked at Allmon and cleared his throat. “My daughter died.”
Allmon came to a complete standstill, body and mind. Then he drew back with a stupid expression on his face.
Again: “A month ago, my daughter died. In childbirth. The child survived.”
The color drained visibly from Allmon’s face.
“The child is small but healthy.” Then he said hesitantly, as if he’d been asked a troubling question, “Some produce better than they run.”
Allmon searched Henry’s eyes, desperate to comprehend, yet desperate not to comprehend, now or ever. There was madness in the words. The edges of the world were crumbling off the map.
“This horse is all I have left,” Henry whispered suddenly, but even as he said this, he felt the falseness of it immediately. He also had his name, he had that.
The words helped Allmon recover himself, if only slightly. He leaned forward, his face jutting into Henry’s space. “You don’t even know what nothing is.”
A flash of a despondent grin.
Allmon didn’t even know how he found the strength to speak, it was like the devil swept up through his body to wag his tongue. “The deal still stands, old man. Don’t try to play me now.” But through the anger flashed an old, wilding, reckless sorrow: God’s finger touched her and she slept. It threatened to upend him; he was breathing in panic, not air.
Brief confusion slashed Henry’s grief-lean face. “Yes, the deal still stands. We will take this horse all the way. Give her the best possible care. Baby her, feed her by hand, sleep outside her stall, do whatever it takes. I don’t want another pair of hands on her. Protect her by any means necessary.” Allmon had some sense that his head was nodding, playing its part, nodding because there were all sorts of sabotage afoot in barns like sponging or slipping blistering agents into a horse’s mouth, agreeing because this was a conversation any two horsemen would have, but then the horror of the thing began to break forcibly through his thoughts, and he said, “The baby … it’s mine?”
Henry paused. He felt his father pulling on his right hand, his grandfather pulling on his left, dead weights both. He straightened up. “No,” he said suddenly, surprised as the words spun like silk from his mouth. “It’s not.”
Allmon drew back jerkily, a look of pure astonishment on his face. There was a rending of the temple cloth. In an instant, furious tears filled his eyes, and those tears turned to hate even before they touched his face. He could find no words as cutting as the betrayal that swamped him.
Henry stepped back, half turning to exit the stall, but confusion stayed him, as well as a complicated weight of regret that he immediately sensed would only grow, but he couldn’t correct. The child—the wrong color but the right blood—was his. His family.
“The child’s name is Samuel,” he said, surprising himself.
Then he left Allmon alone in the stall, Allmon who now had nothing in the world but a horse that didn’t belong to him. He took one step forward as if he intended to follow Henry and demand some different truth, an altered past. But he just sank to his knees in urine-soaked hay, a howl of grief and rage filling his mind. Fool! And he thought he had known loss!
* * *
Laurel Futurity, November 2005. The trees were bare, and like the leaves, the bright crowds were thick on the ground, turned out in their Saturday color jostling for position at the saddling paddock, where the grooms managed the mounts and the trainers sprang jocks. Henry stood among the Laurel Park spectators but they, as if by instinct, offered him a wide berth. He was an emaciated version of his old self, a hack among Arabians. A month along, his grief was still so fresh that no one could look at it. It traveled as a bright sparkling acid all along his capillary rivers; his skin was so thin, it shined right out of him, a gorgeous, harrowing thing. It was like the angels of old: it stunned everyone into silence, and they averted their eyes.
Only Reuben—a Currier & Ives on his pert Hell perch—stared openly.
“What ails the money man?” he whispered down his mount’s neck.
Allmon’s hands were visibly shaking as he struggled to adjust the bridling over the bridge of Hell’s velvet nose. Reuben peered at him with shrewd, hooded eyes. “Why, Allmon, you’re white as that bridle,” he said. “Perchance you’ve seen a ghost?”
Mack looked up from where he was adjusting Reuben’s stirrup higher. His eyes were narrow. “You and Henry have a chat?”
“Whatever do you mean? Is there a mystery afoot? Pray tell.” Reuben’s marionette head snapped back and forth from Mack to Allmon, its blunt jaw snapping.
Mack said, “Forge’s daughter died in childbirth. Lift your boot a second.”
Reuben’s eyes popped with delight, and he raised one rein-roughened finger to his lips. “One of their own died? Drama!” he whispered as they guided his mount out of the paddock, a man at each side. He leaned down and whispered into Allmon’s air. “I do believe this is what white folk call a Tragedy.” Allmon’s head was bowed as his hands trembled on the girth strap, so Reuben popped back on the saddle, swiveling in amusement. “Remember that time there was a big ole fire up at Garden State—remember that, old man? My, wasn’t that a big time.”
Mack grunted, his eyes trained ahead of him at the track where the sun threatened to warm the chill autumn day. “Be careful how early you rally, Reuben. She slowed up yesterday morning during exercise. Leave her some juice.” He tugged for the last time on the billet strap.
“Oh yes, Mr. Mack, those sure were the times,” Reuben said with a smile of sweet reminiscence. “Some kitchen critter lit up the place in the middle of a race, and that old wood grandstand, why, it went sky-high like a firework stand! Some folk died—oh, just workin’ folk, don’t let it trouble you none—but the take was still in the vault. Yes, indeed, Reuben’s purse was snug as a bug in a rug. Why, hello brute bettors, butchers all!” With a wave of his rough hand to the grandstand and his nose curled up in distaste, he was off with the lead pony, head high and shoulders square. Far along the curve they went, funneling one by one into the green and white clanking gate. When a green-jacketed handler secured the latch on the gate, he whistled in admiration at Hell and smiled up at Reuben. “You’re in tall cotton now, Reuben.”
“Cotton?” Reuben tucked into position, his eyes turned to sharp, side-slicing daggers. “Remember Fort Pillow, motherfucker.”
They exploded out of the gate like doves from a cote. Down the far stretch they flew, Hellsmouth flapping around at the rear, spending energy and spending time. Dragooned for the third time into this public humiliation, Reuben tucked his crop and let her drag her feet all the way to the quarter pole; he understood now she was just stalking her prey.
At the sloping curve, the bundled pack switched leads as one, shifting and settling out of their steady pace for a brief moment. A mount or two fell away or bore out. Reuben had been waiting lynx-eyed for the speed shift; tucked close to Hell’s withers, he staked a tenuous balance atop the brief irons and, with his silks billowing, flashed back the crop so it struck with a single, smart snap. Two things happened at once: Hellsmouth jetted forward with a locomotive force so sudden and propulsive that Reuben’s boots slipped the irons and he thumped onto her back with a jarring, graceless plop; and a shoe dislodged from the hoof of a bay colt ahead of them in traffic, so the aluminum ring flung threw the air like a boomerang, and just as Hell stretched low in her deepening forward lunge, it spun over her head and struck Reuben in the nose where he sat without irons on the filly’s back. In what the Laurel Park announcer would call “a testament to Walker’s athleticism and training and not impossible for competitors of this caliber” and what the backstretch would call “A GODDAMN FUCKING MIRACLE,” Reuben remained upright in the saddle, though his eyes rolled back to white, his head flopping grotesquely on his neck as the world went absent. Somehow his hands maintained their death grip on the reins and in less than two seconds, he was coming to, his feet reclaiming the irons by instinct, his bony rump risen high, his broken nose gushing blood down the front of his purple Forge silks. “Haw!” he cried woozily, and Hell responded to his fresh balance. She opened up beneath him, her stride extended to an almost magical length, so she was airborne a split second longer than any horse Reuben had ever ridden or the crowd had ever seen. She didn’t run at full stride, she leaped, her long body an airfoil. The horses around her—confounded colts under their desperate, whipping jocks—appeared to slow against her blistering speed, which only increased as she burned through the remaining pack, war-striped with Reuben’s blood and streaking over the line a full seven lengths ahead of the pack.
Pandemonium erupted as the rest of the field trickled under the wire. The crowds rose in a screaming burst and flash bulbs exploded, so Laurel Park was bright as a sun. Hellsmouth had barely broken a sweat under Reuben, who was busy recovering himself, swiping at his nose with his sleeve and neglecting even to raise a hand in victory. When they moved into the winner’s circle, he slapped away concerned hands, accepting only the silken houndstooth handkerchief of a competing owner, who said, “Well, there’s a broken nose and no doubt about it.”
Hermès silk was soaking up the crimson flow when Mack made it to his side and placed a steadying hand on his boot. Reuben leaned down, his eyes all business even as he fought a hard faint, his wide pupils black bottomless pots. “She look okay? She pull? Felt something funny at the wire.” He was slipping in a daze from the saddle.
Mack pushed him back upright with both hands. “She looked good, but it’s one hell of a picture you’re gonna take. You got goddamn mettle, Reuben, I’ll give you that.”
They were a strange admixture of animal and man: a gleaming thousand-pound horse topped by a bleeding bird of prey, stars whirling in his eyes, a trainer scowling under a white Stetson, and Allmon at Hell’s foamed mouth. His face conveyed not victory but a bleak abeyance, as if he didn’t know where he was, or how he came to be here. “Look here, look right here!” said the photographer with some impatience, because Allmon kept turning aside. He was looking for Henry Forge, who was nowhere to be seen.
Barely leaning, lest he faint and tumble into a heap of anorectic limbs, Reuben whispered from the catbird seat, “What do you say we have us a drink, soldier. Swap prison tales!”
Allmon shook his head faintly, his face whitewashed. “I don’t drink…,” he said, but the hesitation in his voice was plain.
“Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man. Smile for the camera, all and sundry!”
The eye of fame blinked and captured them.
* * *
“Sir, what can I get for you?”
Henry was staring past the stewardess, his gaze fixed on the fat, white cotton boll moon. It filled the whole of the opposite window, its planar seas and gradations clear in the rarefied heights of their flight. A jagged line was scribbled on its surface, a question that repeated itself again and again, scrawled in his daughter’s hand: Is there a difference between happiness and joy, and why can I feel neither?
“May I get you something to eat or drink?”
He should have been celebrating with Mack, holding court with the local news station, fielding questions from the Times and the Racing Form. He should have been telling Allmon the truth and setting the world back on its axis. Instead, he was returning to his grandchild as quickly as technology allowed. There was no time to waste. His life was caught in a war of attrition and Death was scattering his strongest troops: his singular focus and his old convictions.
“Sir, is there anything you need?”
Need? Yes, he needed to know that his grandson had eaten well, that he was sleeping in peace, that he would be kept safe from all the dangers of the world. To his own astonishment, his chest was full of the most blissful emptiness, wherein he discovered only one thing: Samuel. He realized this was love. It had nothing to do with his happiness, which was nonexistent. He wasn’t sure yet about joy.
* * *
In a Thunderbird the color of money, Reuben rolled them round to a shack way out in the deeps of Howard County, west of Clarksville, what might have been a speakeasy or a juke joint back in the day, but aslant now and barely standing, filled to busting with grooms, hotwalkers, and a few slumming jocks. Thick light streamed through frosty porthole windows and a general din pulsed the walls. When Reuben burst through the tavern door with Allmon at his heels, reluctant and wary as a deer, they were nearly thrown back by an odorous wall of rank armpits, sodden bar mats, urinal cakes, and unmopped floors. At the sight of Reuben’s wizened mask of abuse—grotesque purple nose and great slices of bruise beneath his eyes—all heads swiveled round. Then the room loosed a drunken roar, raising fists and pint glasses, and Reuben raised triumphant matador arms.
“Doo-dah!” he cried, sashaying into the crush of handshakes and shoulder slaps. He tossed back a sly whisper to Allmon, “Tap, tap, Endman. Give them what they think they want, but keep your eyeballs open.”
As expected, theirs were the only black faces in the room.
“How’s that nose, Reuben?”
“Nought but a scratch!” he said, squeezing his way toward a tiny four-top.
“Had it coming, Reuben! No broke bones in two years—”
“Them’s the wages!” He pointed an impossibly misshapen finger at the nearest barkeep. “Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses!” Allmon had barely found a chair when sloppy shots were slung before them. He eyed the glass, eyed Reuben’s dangerous grin, and, with the new reality snapping at his heels, drained it. What else was there to do? He felt smoke curl out of his nose. When the smoke cleared, there was only Henrietta’s face before him. Allmon bowed his head, breathless.
Reuben leaned across the table, the dim overhead lights casting mean shadows across his mangled face. “How are you liking our dirty business, prison kid?”
Allmon remained motionless, his eyes down. “On my way up.” The words were outside of him as if belonging to someone else. He suddenly wanted his own mind, and all of its life-roughened texture, to be shredded away. He wanted desperately to be drunk.
“On the house—congrats, Reuben!” The barkeep sloshed down a second round.
Shot glass to his puckered lip, Reuben said, “Well, tell me then—why dost thou bow thy head and wring thy hands thusly?”
Allmon looked up; he’d been unaware of the clustered knot of his fingers, how he kneaded them from the thick knuckle to the nail tip. There was a tiny fissure of anguish between his brows.
Reuben narrowed his sly eyes. “Do I detect a note of worry over the death of … hmmm … a little white gal, perhaps? I swear you went pale as a paddy earlier today! Was she your precious little fig? Did she catch your cock one day when she was out angling for exotic fish? You know how white girls love to gnaw on Negro dick now and agai—”
“To Reuben!” someone cried before Allmon could rise and separate Reuben’s head from his neck. Reuben smiled into the crowd with wide eyes and a feint of delighted surprise. But the smile was cut from cruel cloth.
A man stumbled into his side with a bear’s embrace. “Nobody can bring down this son of a bitch, not even a flying horseshoe and Boomie Racz! Toast! Toast!” And the cry was raised again, and now two grooms—Barney and Truss—slid into the other two empty seats with yet another round, but even as their glasses sparked empty beneath the tavern’s grimy lights, Reuben leaped to the seat of his chair and, with hands to his Pan hips, cried, “Toast? Why, sure! I’d like to take this opportunity to praise an old friend who holds me tight and never lets me go! Raise a glass to Jeff Davis—may he be set afloat on a boat without compass or rudder, then that any contents be swallowed by a shark, the shark by a whale, whale in the devil’s belly and the devil in hell, the gates locked and the keys lost, and further, may he be put in the north west corner with a south west wind blowing ashes in his eyes for all ETERNITY. Say aye if ye mean aye!”
“Aye!” Sloshing glasses punctured the smoky air above their heads. Reuben perused the scene with a sharp, slaten eye.
“Are you happy, Reuben? Your purse is getting fat!”
He grabbed at his cock. “It is!”
“Speech!”
He leaned down and pounded his fists once, twice on his table and rocketed upright. “Speech?” he cried. “Why, no soul wants to hear a speech tonight! Let’s play a game instead!” He swooped up his drink, threw it back, and the bar followed suit. With flint whimsy, Reuben hollered over the din: “Fellers and fellerettes, free shots for the winner of the interlocutor’s quiz!” He stomped about in a small circle on his chair as if it were a dirty shingle. “Tell this here jock, why are there no Thoroughbreds of ebon hue?” He gazed around, then tossed up his hands. “Black, you idiots, black!”
“There are!” called someone near the tap.
“Nyet! Not jet! Not one of you critters has seen a true black on the track!” And it was true; they hadn’t.
“I’ll drink it myself, then,” he snarled, and upended his shot. “All the pretty horses descend from the black, but interbreeding dilutes the majestic purity! Now the blackest black is merely muddy brown!” His chin crumpled under a swooping fishtail frown, but he winked at Allmon.
“Another!” someone yelled. “I ain’t drunk yet!”
“Yes, yes, let me amuse you, please,” Reuben hissed. Then, trumpeting through the tight embouchure of his lips: “Yokels! Riddle me this: How came I to be a tin soldier? Where are my esteemed brethren? Black predecessors once ruled this unruliest of sports!”
Proudly, as if coughing up a pearl, their neighbor slapped the table and blurted, “Jim Crow.”
A flap of a disdainful hand. “I see you know your minstrel show, but no, no, Paddy, no. Once upon a glorious time, we won every Derby, snatched every purse. But the vain rascals of the North conspired against the Sons of Ham. They staged a coup! And the Negro, once so dominant, was ousted! Why, Willie Sims himself had to grovel for a ride! Sorry, no shots for my dear friends … not tonight anyway!”
“Ahahahahahaw!” The room roared and they drank and Reuben glowered through snaky eyes, slipping down from his dais perch and plopping into his seat.
The room was full pickled, and Allmon too. Five shots in, there ensued a fabulous unraveling. As he sat marveling at the curiously dead weight of his tongue, thinking it a relief to be freed from memory, he was dragged up from the table by one elbow and yanked gracelessly again through the roiling, rowdy crowd. Reuben was a tiny man, but all muscle and trouble.
Back at the half-empty table, Truss shook his head and leaned blearily toward his companion. “Man, I get sick of that shit.”
“What?” said Barney.
“It’s always black this and black that,” said Truss. “Like bad shit didn’t happen to anybody else.”
Barney nodded. “I know. Things have changed.”
“I mean, there were white slaves too. People forget that.”
“Yeah, people totally forget that.” They clinked their glasses and sloshed whiskey.
The season ripped the door from Reuben’s hand, the wind as cold as Christmas. He and Allmon stumbled into a night of river-bottom black; yes—overhead the faint stars wobbled like the light of steamboats spied from below. Allmon looked at their vague and nameless number, his head beginning to spin on what remained of his sober sense. Ungoverned, his tongue blurted, “Eight years ago, I lost every … but I got a deal … I’m the devil.”
Half-distracted with machinations and manipulations, all manner of chaos on the tip of the rapscalliest tongue, Reuben swung round in the dark and peered hard at Allmon. “Come again, little nut? What business is this? Are we speaking of the pale lily and her get? Were you by any chance the sire?”
Allmon weaved and stumbled back against the aluminum siding of the building, huddling under the meager eave, burrowing into his jacket against the weather, against reality. He shook his head.
“But…” Reuben sidled. “You expected you were?”
To nod is to die. Allmon nodded.
Reuben hopped forward one step with utter delight. “The bitch! The lascivious cotton candy cunt!”
Allmon mumbled, “I signed papers … with Forge…” He wanted to stopper his mouth, stop talking, but was wholly unable.
Reuben inched closer, his voice careful, but his blinks rapid as a hummingbird’s wings. “You made a deal with the White Father? Of what nature, pray tell? Blackmail? Revenge?”
Allmon felt too sick to respond; he stared down at the ground, which could be a bed if he would only let his knees buckle.
Reuben winks at you: “Revenge it oughta be.”
When Allmon spoke, the world whirled. “Stay away—from the … Henrietta. Something wasn’t right between…”
Reuben leaned close. “Henrietta. This was the nubile Aryan?”
Allmon’s hands were a horror when they gripped his head. His hands nodded his head.
Reuben reared back, his eyes all astonishment and his breath blooming white in the gelid air. He made a sputtering noise of pure delight. “By God, Almond Joy’s got nuts! You’re a meddler and an entrepreneur—more enterprising than a soul might have guessed! See, my brother, you had a dream. First you rifled for it in the silver drawer, then you swallowed it down with a dry little cracker! Impressive, I’m sure.” He cocked his head. “Twilight striving notwithstanding…”
Anger suddenly doused grief and drunkenness. Allmon lurched around toward Reuben. “How come you can’t talk like a normal fucking human being? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Reuben waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I ain’t what I am—unlike you, so faithful and true, even in your conniving! But never mind, the hygiene of your heart is questionable, and I wholeheartedly approve! Did you study the art in prison, or did you come by it naturally like an atavic tic? From the dam or the sire, pray tell?”
Jesus. Jesus Christ, he was drunk. He—
“Use your words, soldier!”
“My momma died when—”
“Died! Of what? Tell Reuben! Was she murdered? How marvelous!”
“Lupus. Kind of like lupus … We ain’t had health insurance.”
“Murder, indeed! Give me every gruesome detail! And tell me all about prison while you’re at it! I’ll have no more of your wily reticence. I just love a good comedy.”
But even four sheets to the wind, Allmon wouldn’t go there. That’s where they tear out your heart and stuff you with newspaper and wood chips. No. He tried to stand tall against the aluminum siding, and when he inevitably began to tilt, Reuben was suddenly there like a post beam to prop him up with both hands. Allmon was sloppy and spitting as he spoke. He tried to dredge up something old, something sure, something that would tether him to life. “Ten years from now, look for me. I’m gonna make something of myself. You know what I’m saying? I’m making … me, there … this world, all these racist motherfuckers—”
“Their very lives do learn us hate,” Reuben chided, “but you’re behind the times, my friend. It’s no longer the man but his very house.”
“I’m gonna be standing in the front of the house—grandstand. You see the suits they wear? When’s the last time you saw a black dude with money—”
“Why, last time I gazed upon myself in a limpid pool.”
“I’m serious—”
“Yesterday, I’m sure.” There was flint about Reuben’s amusement.
“Well, not me!” Allmon cried suddenly, anguished. “Not you!”
Reuben reared back. “Not me? NOT ME?” Now he leaped away from Allmon’s side, so he nearly collapsed to the ground before he could catch himself, stumbling and clutching at the corrugated siding. Reuben pointed a finger in his startled face. “Mind now, young whippersnapper, I’m richer than Mansa Musa! I’m stronger than Shaka! Wise like the magi! The only irons near me are under my boots!”
“You ain’t nothing but a jock,” Allmon snarled.
Reuben’s wily face was distorted by mortal offense. “Nothing but a jock? I’m nothing you can even imagine, you fucking river rat! Not with your borrowed dreams! I am the Defender of Myself, wizard of the saddle, untutored genius, the first with the most!” He thumped his pony keg chest, strutting before Allmon. “You’ve never seen mischief like me! I subvert and invent! I never relent! I resist and supersede! Confabulate and fabricate! No one knows my name—or my history! Hallelujah and fuck you! I piss on family and order, I lie and I counterfeit! No mother made me, I bore my own damn self. I got a contraband brain and Napoleonic balls. Twenty-nine horses shot out from under me, and still I ride on. Can I get a goddamn Amen!”
“Amen!” came a shout.
Allmon tried to formulate a vicious reply, something to put the arrogant jock in his place, but he was suddenly riding wild waves of resentment and nausea. “Oh shit,” he gagged, and began to stumble forward, away from the building.
“Heavens to Betsy,” said Reuben mildly, stopping short as Allmon dropped to his knees, coughing at first, then retching the contents of his stomach into the dry winter grass.
Reuben blinked a few times, then edged over and leaned down. “Oh,” he sighed, patting Allmon absently on the back, his speech gone suddenly cool, “what am I going to do with you, my little wingnut? What am I going to do with you?” He looked out into the surrounding woods, which were pitch-black, laced with frost and punctuated with the yellow eyes of animals. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
* * *
Finally, Samuel in his arms. It was true that at first he had seen only his color—a dark shock, an intrusion. But day after day, the more he stared at this child, the more he found the old revulsion shifting. Dark, unformed flesh transformed to something more complex, more significant than a mere body, transformed into a structure yielded by human effort but sui generis in its construction, a product of ingenious architects. Look at the smooth stone of the forehead, the nave widest at the fat cheeks, the flying buttress nose, stained glass eyes. Admit it, Henry, you stand before a mystery, an immensity, and inside this building you will find something previously unnamed, something that until now you never wanted to know. Something other than yourself.
“Oh, just look how happy he is to see you, Henry! He certainly recognizes his grandpa.”
Henry blinked unsteadily in the warmth and glow of the Miller kitchen. Ginnie was preparing him a cup of peppermint tea as he cradled Samuel after his two days of travel, what had seemed like a two-year separation. How his life had changed in such little time. He was nearly stupefied by it, but it was there nonetheless, as plain as any other fact.
As she dropped a tea bag into a mug, Ginnie said, “Henry, you can leave Samuel with us anytime. It was wonderful having a baby in the house again—wasn’t it wonderful, Roger?” She turned to her husband.
“It was.” Roger nodded.
Uncomfortable color rose into Henry’s cheeks. “I … I can’t impose upon you more than I already have.” He turned to survey the room, possibly seek out Samuel’s overnight bag, but Ginnie just batted at his hand. “Oh, I’m not letting you run off just yet. You need to eat after traveling. Plus, I need someone to play checkers with. Roger has a three-game limit, and that just won’t suit.”
Henry noted the red and black game board on the kitchen table, its checkers scattered and glinting under the porcelain table lamp. “Checkers…,” he said blankly, as he shifted Samuel from his right to his left arm.
Ginnie cocked her head to one side. “Checkers,” she said slowly, then she and Roger exchanged a swift glance. She cleared her throat. “Do you … not know how to play?”
Henry stared very gravely at the board. “I don’t believe I do. My father started me off with chess.”
“Oh!” said Ginnie with a decisive nod of her head. “Well … it’s never too late to learn. Just sit yourself down right here.” She gestured him into one of the well-worn tavern chairs and went to swoop Samuel from his arms and into her own, but restrained herself; their reunion was something to see. Samuel’s face had turned bright at the sight of his grandfather, and now he cooed under his chin, busy pressing into Henry’s hollow cheeks with his soft, chubby hand. He was making a new sound that was very much like a laugh, his delight filling the room.
“Well,” Roger said, moving toward the hall, which led to the back recesses of the house, “I shall leave you to it. I’ll just be taking this tea with me to bed.”
“Why don’t you leave it out here,” Ginnie said with a wave of her hand, “and save me the trip of bringing it back. It’s not like you ever drink it.”
“I often drink it,” Roger corrected her.
Ginnie looked up. “Never once have you drunk your evening tea. Not once.”
Arc of a gray brow. “Woman, you do not know me.”
Ginnie snorted, but before she could utter a retort well honed from decades of use, Roger leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “Good night,” he said, and, “Good night, Henry. We enjoyed having Samuel. The Corgis especially. They love children.”
As he disappeared around the doorjamb, Ginnie called out, “Don’t forget to leave the hall light on. You always forget, and you know the night-light’s been burned out since forever.”
“I will not forget, woman.”
“Okay,” said Ginnie, then quietly so only Henry could hear: “He always forgets.” She settled back into her chair, scooping all the discs to the center of the board before she began to sort them with two fingers. “Henry, you’ll be black, and I’ll be red, the goal being to advance across the board, capture the other’s discs, and make it to the opposite side first.”
But Henry was barely listening. With Samuel cradled against his chest, he had turned to watch Roger’s retreat down the frame-lined hall to the back of the house. When he came slowly right, he said, “You seem to … suit each other very well.”
“Who? Me and Roger?” Ginnie looked at him in surprise, as though he had said the most absurdly obvious thing. Then she shrugged. “The annoyance of my days and the love of my life.”
Henry smiled sadly and clutched Samuel.
Ginnie noted that smile as she arranged the checkers and said, “Did you have a great love in your life, Henry? Someone who gave you a reason to live when the going got rough?”
The question startled him visibly. He blinked and then a chaos of feeling washed over his features, so that he didn’t know where to look—at the game board, around the room, or at the boy in his arms. Suddenly, Samuel yawned with all his might, and his entire body shook, including the fists he drew to his wobbling chin. Then he smiled.
“I just can’t wait,” Ginnie said softly, freeing Henry from the burden of answering, “to see who Samuel will grow up to be. I have a feeling he’s going to be extraordinary.” She glanced at Henry, lamplight in her eyes. “But then we all are, aren’t we, each in our own way?”
* * *
In the morning, Hellsmouth seemed healthy as—God, sorry—a horse, so they wrapped her limbs in white cotton traveling bandages, loaded her into the custom Turnbow, and headed for home. While she swayed, dreaming her bluegrass cockcrow crooktree dreams, Allmon’s companion smoked and chattered on for twelve hours straight. Trying not to puke, Allmon just leaned his tender head against the window and slept a liquor-thrummed sleep, his sleep the thinnest veil over the horror of the new reality. Not his? How was it possible? The way she had clung to him in their lovemaking—and it had been that, he knew it had. Or he had known. He drifted on waves of sleepy fright. He saw a baby’s chubby hands reaching out to grasp hills like tits that rose across a shimmering river, water waving like the flag of conquerors. The baby looked just like him.
Wake up! the Reverend whispered. Human love ain’t nothing but a halfway house, where we prepare our criminal nature for the love of God.
AMEN!
NO! His eyes snapped open. She had cheated, cuckolded him, lied through her thin, white-girl lips. Never forget.
The road had led them back to Kentucky and Mack’s training center, where Hellsmouth would overwinter in her own paddock, undapple her mottled black, and rest easy. The driver shifted down on the sunny side of the broodmare barn to unload their half-ton cargo, but Allmon never made it to the back of the trailer. He had only the briefest moment to note the dull ache in his hips and knees—surely the result of too much alcohol and lack of sleep or his fresh horror—before his legs collapsed and he slumped to the ground, appearing like a man who’d slipped out the door into a deep pool of water. The man came sputtering out of the driver’s side, hand tracing the nose of the truck as he doubled over with laughter, trying to wipe his eyes even as he was hauling Allmon to his feet. “Oh shit!” he cried, not even trying to rein in his amusement. “Oh shit, man! You all right?” But Allmon wasn’t laughing. Pain was poking mean fun in the joints of his legs and hands. There was the briefest moment when panic came bobbing up, but he tamped it down. You could not think of your life in time—or your mother’s. He took Hell’s lead and moved forward, his eye trained resolutely on the horizon beyond the barn, a vain trick to foreclose on the near.
But in the stall, he sensed it, a subtle but sure shift in the space, like a ghost in the room. He looked at Hell, at her mouth and into her vitreous globe eye, and pressed his aching, hungover hands to the flat plains of her jaw. Her pupils mere millimeters wider than placid; a whisper of too-warm heat drifted from her flanks. Suddenly, undeniably, she was idling high.
Allmon didn’t have to be told what to do; he limped, then ran, beelining past the farm manager, and barreled straight into Mack’s office. Mack was only a half hour home from Newark, leaning over his desk, peering at his winter colt list, when Allmon skidded across the threshold. Two words: “She’s off,” and Mack was barking like a Doberman into his cell, so not fifteen minutes later his eighteen-year home vet, Don Patrick, was striding down the shed row, chin tucked into his neck, gear bag in one hand, silver La Boit case in the other.
Mack was utterly useless before illness; he could do nothing but pace the row, sweating pungent sweat, muttering at his second-tier fillies, doing what he never, ever did: praying to the clerk of the course, the patron saint of the horse, and various other minor gods, Take any filly you want, but not this fucking one.
“Her temp’s a little high,” said Don. “She break funny up in Camden? Finish funny? Go off her feed?”
Allmon shook his head, confused.
“Nothing?”
Mack said, “Reuben said he felt something at the wire, but she touched cool and looked good.”
Don sighed. “They’re like cats, these horses. They’d rather die than let you know when they’re hurt. Let’s start with distal extremities, lower left first. Let’s just get some shots.”
Allmon was desperate for something to do; he couldn’t indulge in the luxury of Mack’s rabid pacing. He carefully stood his meal ticket in her stall, arranging her hooves in a position she had at least a prayer of holding. He stared at her in desperation as if she was the only thing separating him from the void—and she was.
Mack quit his pacing to struggle into the lead apron Don handed him. “Hold her still,” said the vet as he clicked open his case, sliding out the laptop.
“Mack, hold the plate.” Mack squatted down around her rear left pastern and balanced the radiographic plate on the hay-strewn row, while Don stage-managed the shot.
To Allmon’s eyes, the laptop screen showed nothing but the ghostly haze of the inside of the filly’s leg—her beautiful bones glowed in photographic reverse like the dream of a horse—but Don stared long and hard. He made a clicking sound in the back of his throat.
“Goddammit,” said Mack, “what?”
“One more round on this leg,” said Don cryptically, and then the gods or Saint Eligius or some other rough divinity coughed up a small curse. The second round of shots showed a soft, snowy dusting of white on the thick, clean cannon bone near the hinge of the fetlock joint.
“Hairline fracture,” said Don, nodding grimly.
Mack said, “Do I shit or go blind?”
The vet was already emailing the images over to a colleague at Rood & Riddle, and two minutes later he was conferring with her on his cell. When he snapped it shut, his brows were drawn together, and there was little room for doubt in his voice: “Okay, two months of stall rest. That’s the deal. I don’t want her to take a single step anywhere, not one—do you hear me?”
“I’m not new here,” Mack snapped.
“I’m saying not a single step, Mack,” Don said, holding up one work-roughened hand to preempt argument. “Yeah, I know, buddy. But to be frank, you’re lucky it’s not a splint bone problem. We all realize you’re sitting on a king’s ransom here, but don’t push your luck. Two months. Even that’s a gamble.”
Allmon turned toward his filly and looked in one grave, rheumy, bitter chocolate eye, then the other. I’m gambling with my whole life here, you motherfuckers, he thought. Then he imagined Henrietta, and his heart burned with grief and betrayal in equal measure. But not guilt: guilt was dying with every moment, as surely as she had.
“Two months!” Mack moaned, as if the words were just now piercing the concrete of his skull. The blood vessels in his eyes looked fit to burst.
Don Patrick sighed. “Listen, we got a problem that we can’t control, but what we can do is throw money at it. Let’s do green juices, everything organic, some acupuncture, massage, electromagnetic stimulation, read to her,” he said, looking at Allmon, “and give her some treats, sweet-talk her. Do it all.”
“Fuck horses,” said Mack. He puffed out his cheeks, looked up once at the rafters of the barn as if for help, but apparently the gods were all ate up with bullshit today. He exhaled roughly. “Okay, well, I’m gonna go deal with Henry. Right now. It’s not gonna be pretty. But okay.” And then he was gone as quickly as he’d come.
Don Patrick stood in his wake and sighed. He took stock of his patient. The filly was eccentric, sensitive, bold, petulant. A horse was a code of laws that few could read. On this one was written: Ultra.
“You know what?” he said suddenly. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and sometimes you just get a real good read on a horse. I’m gonna put her in an air cast. I’m not even going to bother with plaster of paris.”
“How come?” said Allmon. He could already feel Hell’s fresh unhappiness in the air, and it matched his own. He knew he’d have to be more angel than groom to tend the devil of her dissatisfaction.
Don smiled wearily. “Because damned if she won’t go in that stall and break her leg or worse trying to kick it off. When you’ve got a diva on your hands, it’s always better to face facts. This here’s a Scarlett, not a Melanie. And it’s nothing but trouble when you trap an ultra in the middle.”
* * *
It wasn’t something he was going to say over the phone, so he drove his blistering ass over to Forge Run Farm, rehearsing various ways of saying We’re fucked You’re fucked The filly’s fucked I’m fucked You’re fucked & Etc. He couldn’t remember—truly could not recall—the last time he’d been this angry, fury stoked in him like an August barn fire. It was a fury brought on by stifled tears, not that he even realized that. Mack didn’t do sad. He hadn’t even cried at his dear mother’s funeral, mostly because she’d looked better than she had in fifteen years. That mortician had been a wizard.
What he ended up saying, standing there in the Forge kitchen with his hat band-up in his hand, was very simple. “Hairline fracture on the cannon bone. Bad news but could be worse. That’s the deal.” He had made a straining, sideways gesture with his mouth. He could barely meet Henry’s eyes. He felt gutshot.
Henry reached out with both hands and clamped them on Mack’s shoulders. With the scorched-earth eyes of inconsolable loss, he said, “Fix my filly. Do whatever you have to do to fix her.”
Mack nodded hard. He figured it was all fucked and dandy, but he said, “We’re gonna rest her up. We’re gonna baby her—”
“Fix her. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do whatever it takes to run my girl in the Derby. You and I both know what she’s capable of.”
The air in the room stilled. Mack narrowed his eyes, slyly rooting around for permission. “Anything it takes?”
“Anything.” Henry said it as two implacable, final words.
“Goddamn right,” said Mack, and he popped his white, off-season Stetson back onto his graying head. “I’ll get your little girl up and running.”
* * *
Mack was looking for an excuse and it didn’t take him long to find it. One look at the kid made your own temperature go up. He was a walking fever—unsteady on his feet, his hands limp as rub rags; he was leaning into Hell like she was the support post and he was the sagging roof. Mack surveyed the situation with distaste, his lip curled, before he said, “I had no everloving idea black boys could turn pink. What in the name of God’s wrong with you?”
Allmon didn’t dare look up or the whole barn would swirl the drain. He still felt sideways with alcohol, but that didn’t make sense. It had been too long. “I’m off,” is all he said.
“Well, don’t lean on my goddamn broke horse, kid. If you’re sick, I don’t want you in here. They can catch what you got.” His voice was hard, but when Allmon turned his watery, febrile eyes on him, Mack didn’t look angry. “Get to a doctor. I can’t even believe I’m fucking saying it, but take a couple hours and go to a doctor.”
“I can’t afford it.” Allmon didn’t even have to ponder that.
“Well,” said Mack, and it bothered him a bit, the kid didn’t look right, but he wasn’t going to back down now. “Get out of here either way.”
Mack stood there in the stall and watched him limp off. Then he finished up the rub job with cursory movements and cogitated on the issue a bit more, took stock of the blue air cast around Hell’s leg. He scratched with some irritation at his three o’clock stubble. On the one hand, things were getting tighter around the track, and you could feel it gathering like a storm; there was railbird chatter about a congressional crackdown right around the corner. On the other hand, that was Later and this was Right Fucking Now. On a totally different hand, this stuff could shrink up ovaries and screw up estrus, but on another hand, that’s what long-term infertility insurance was for. On the fourth hand if you were counting: Hell was a filly; it wasn’t as if Mack was risking his share on some hot stud. But on the most important hand of all, while it wouldn’t make her run faster, it sure as shit would speed recovery, and recovery was half the game, especially for the Preakness. Besides, Hell didn’t need more speed; she’d already bested the best. There simply wasn’t another horse like her, and everybody knew it. But—goddammit—that’s exactly why Mack just stood there motionless with the syringe in his hand instead of jabbing it into her rump and pressing the plunger. He’d perfected the art of bulking his ponies way back when he was running quarter horses up in dusty, middle-grade Wyoming, his motto: What separates the best from the rest is the best don’t get caught. But the fact was he’d never seen a horse like this, at least not since 1973. She made him feel like a kid again, idealistic. He couldn’t help but want to see what she could do on her own, without any help. So, against his better judgment, feeling like someone entirely unlike Mack Snyder, he repocketed the syringe of Winstrol and stepped out of the stall.
* * *
A year ago, there would have been a winter to describe—a palace of ice, hoarse winds that wound white ribbons around the houses with strange gunslinger lightning at Christmas. But this was a new year. The winter was unusually cold. It snowed heavily. That’s all I can tell you.
* * *
In the dark heart of January, Henry was startled awake by a shrilling phone. Mack on the other end, his crude holler of triumph nearly indistinguishable from anger.
“Henry!” he barked. “Henry, we got it!”
Henry worked to draw his mind round. “Got what?”
“Eclipse Award! Two-Year-Old Filly!” The air was charged with his waiting, but when Henry didn’t speak, Mack barreled on. “Awards are in Beverly Hills on January twenty-second. I’ll be coming from Sarasota, so I’ll meet you there. It’ll be at the Wilshire Hotel. They make a damned good old-fashioned.”
Henry cleared his throat. “I won’t be there.”
Now it was Mack’s turn to be silent. He stopped pacing to peer mystified around his office, as though it had vanished before his eyes and he’d suddenly found himself in a bleak and barren wasteland.
“You’re staying home,” he snapped shortly. “You—why?”
“Samuel.”
“Samuel fucking who?”
“Samuel’s having recurrent ear infections and until that’s cleared up, his pediatrician advised that we not fly. He goes where I go. Period.”
Mack tried twice to speak and failed. He tried again. He sounded like a jalopy engine sputtering. “You’re staying home from the Eclipse Awards to take care of a baby?”
“Yes,” said Henry.
There was a silence as beautiful, delicate, and clean as Venetian glass. Then: “Okay!” Mack snapped. “Okay! We’ve worked for this for ten fucking years. Yes. WHAT???” And he flung down his cell phone with such force that the casing snapped and the battery went spinning out his office door like a small satellite careening out of orbit. Stalking to the row, he made a crazed, animalistic sound deep in his throat and grabbed his startled assistant trainer by the lapel so the young man flailed, thinking this was it, this was the moment when Mack would finally haul off and punch him in the fucking throat, but Mack just hollered, “Will someone please tell me where the fucking sane people live?!”
* * *
Which is not what he said into the cavernous ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel standing before thirteen hundred of the country’s wealthiest and most ambitious horse trainers and owners, circled by the track writers and videographers who recorded it all for posterity.
Mack stood in the glare of the evening’s lights, the whole fancy boondoggle sparkling in its black-tie finery, all those acquisitive eyes focused on him, his Zuni bolo tie suddenly feeling not unlike a noose. God, how he hated this primped-up bullshit, and he’d never forgive Henry for making him puke up a speech on his behalf, but Mack knew that horse better than anyone else, so he guessed he was the only other man for the job. He shifted at the podium, put those red, perma-chapped hands to the hips of his pressed jeans, and said, “Y’all know I’m no speech giver. I don’t care for talk if there’s horses to be trained and races to be run. But, it’s January, there’s nothing going, it’s the Eclipse Awards. I’ll talk for a spell.”
He sniffed hard, looked out at those expectant faces, all of whom had seen the filly run her races and knew what kind of extraordinary thing he was dealing with here. She was more than high-quality stock, more than good legs, more than brass lungs. She was hunger, and you couldn’t buy that.
He said, “I’ve been running horses since I was yay high, and I’ve been training them since I was twenty and a half. Let no man say that I don’t know a great horse when I see one. And by love of God and money, Hellsmouth is a great horse.”
There was rambunctious applause and hollering, but he just talked right over it. “This big black filly isn’t just the best horse I’ve ever trained. She’s the best goddamned racehorse I’ve ever seen. And she’s just getting started.” He paused. “That’s all.”
He stepped off the podium amidst the clapping and not a little eye rolling from those who’d rather have seen him shot than win another purse, and the genuine applause of the men and women he’d made rich. He shook a couple of hands on the way back to his table, where his drinking could be resumed, and he didn’t think, How the hell did some poor Letcher County kid end up here with the brightest and best, but: They ought to pay to eat the dirt under my boots. I turn the mill wheel. Blue-blood silver-spoon trust-fund bastards.
As if on cue, Stu Penderson, a Woodford County acquaintance of some forty years, clapped him abruptly on the back and said, “Where’s that old rascal Henry tonight?”
Mack scowled openly; he didn’t even try to hide his disgust. “You don’t want to know,” is all he said as he tugged loose his bolo tie and returned to his drink to suffer the rest of the banquet alone until he found some lonely desperado who would suffer him in turn.
* * *
I don’t care who you are—a breeder of champions, the scion of scions—a crying baby can bring you to your knees. Henry was snatched from sleep for the third time that night, prisoner to Samuel’s wailing. Nothing in the world could soothe him, not the whirring of a fan, no amount of sweet talk or pacing. He refused the bottle, he struggled righteously against a fresh diaper, he waved his fat arms in fury, and screamed over Henry’s lullabies as if to wake the world with his frustrations.
After an hour of it, Henry was nearly in tears himself, and there was nothing left to try but read from Henrietta’s notebooks, the soft roll of his reading voice serving as a balm, the words a communiqué from another world. Henry arranged Samuel, beet red and squalling, in the valley of his lap, then flipped through the pages. This was a shared habit of their mornings and nights, looking for something he hadn’t yet read. Here was a chart of worms in Kentucky soils, a diagram of the Cincinnati Arch, a quote about the men of Tierra del Fuego killing old women before dogs, because dogs are more useful. Finally, he found a fresh page and read over Samuel’s cries: “Gene Schwartz Jefferson Lecture, transcribed from Penn’s tape.”
The speech was scrawled in excerpts that covered a half dozen pages. Henry transformed the words into a parent’s singsong as he read: “‘I am a farmer and always have been. When I was born, this country supported thirty-two million farmers. My mother used the Farmer’s Almanac to teach me to read, and my father took me out in the fields before I was even able to walk and instructed me properly in the art of plantation. I was educated in the very best sense of the word.
“‘But something has gone amiss in the almost sixty years since I was born. Today, America has only four million farms. That is less than two percent of the population—less than two percent! Can you think of anything less significant than that? Yes, one percent, and it’s coming. We’re on a slippery slope to a postagricultural hell. The how and why of this turn of events is a painful story, and a portentous one if the best predictor of the future is the past.’”
The singsong lilt slipped from Henry’s voice. Samuel was hiccupping his way into calm, listening now with rapt attention, his wide, deep gaze locked on Henry’s face.
“‘… We live in a consumptive world, where we consume more food than we need, where animals are forced to consume our cast-off poisons and the bodies of their own species, where we use more of the world’s resources than is right, where we empower corporations, which consume the lives of their workers with all the blessings of our government, which grants them the same rights and recognitions historically reserved for humans by the Fourteenth Amendment—the amendment designed to guarantee slaves their status as human beings! This, my friends, is consumption. And if you will recall, consumption is an insidious disease, creating for much of its progress the illusion of increased vitality. It promises health, but it delivers death.
“‘We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, and we have suffered from that disastrous ideal ever since, this notion that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.
“‘In the 1700s, when we fought our war for supposed independence, we were actually securing our rightful dependence upon the land, upon each other, and upon our deepest religious impulses, which cannot be governed by a king, but only by mystical union with … We have always been trying to establish a mystical union with what is ultimately ineffable. This invisible reality leaves its mark everywhere; in friendship, intimacy, prayer without dogmatism, laughter, compassion. Camus said man’s only real choice is whether or not to commit suicide. I say when we choose not to commit suicide, our reasons for living divulge the meaning of life itself. They give voice to the ineffable. And all of those reasons for living point us toward community, rather than singularity and division.
“‘… These days, I’m often accused of being a moralist, but if this is a critique, if being called a moralist is now an insult, then it merely indicates how far we’ve fallen and how resolute and inflexible our relativism has become. Unlike many of you, I was born immediately after the Second World War. If the twentieth century was not a clarion call for humanity to awaken and choose sides, what could possibly wake us? It was a time for staking moral claims. Yet our sleepwalking culture persists in looking for the easy answer, waiting for someone to tell us what to think. I’m not here to tell you how and what to consume, what technologies to embrace or avoid, how to organize your communities, how to vote, how to live. America has many ills, but none greater than the refusal of so many to think long and hard, to think critically. We must learn to be choosers, not merely receivers; to be self-critical; to cast a suspicious eye on the powers that be, including one’s own unearned power. We want easy answers, but we must refuse them. The only true answer is to think.’”
Samuel was finally deeply asleep. He lay there, Henry’s right hand a warm cradle under his head, his breath coming in even passes and collecting around them both as a pocket of warmth. Looking down at him, Henry’s heart beat a complicated rhythm. He remembered suddenly his own daughter as a child, so flush with life, a life he had always assumed was indistinct from his. Yet, here he was holding her difference in his very hands even after her death. In life, he had held up her flesh only as a mirror. Now a complication was rising like bile; it was bitter with the first taste of regret.
Barely able to turn his gaze from Samuel’s face, Henry fumbled back through the leaves of the notebook, looking for something he had spied earlier. Yes, there it was: a Sandgap address for Penn, presumably the same one who owned the tape. An 859 telephone number. Under the number, scrawled in Henrietta’s impatient handwriting, he read the sentence again: The movement of evolution is from simple to complex.
* * *
Animalia—Chordata—Vertebrata—Aves—Passeriformes—Hirundinidae—Progne subis: In one of the many mysteries of spring, the purple martins, our loyal, royal swallows, return in pairs to their high nesting grounds in the hills of Kentucky. Here, their young fledge every year. They come in monogamous pairs as if a compass were guiding them, driven forward by a wild, inborn sense of the sun and the poles, a knowledge deep within the eye that has little to do with sight.
I was and am forever trapped not by Father, but by myself. Until I become a god or a bird. Irony is life’s central condition. A god experiences no limitations, which is why it cannot exist. Or if a god exists, you cannot experience it or think about it or know it, because it has no explicable border. What can’t be talked about is not worth talking about. That’s what I mean by irony.
She followed him everywhere, even as he traveled like one of those martins, drawn inexorably back to his place of origin. The farm he found—if you could call it that—was a humble copestone atop the outer fortifications of the mountains. A proper gentleman’s farm perhaps fifty years prior, the white farmhouse long shorn of its beauty, and the Lincoln log corncrib slumping to rot in the rocky soil. Of the numerous pastures fitted onto these high flats, fully half were unturned, and Henry soon saw why. A man—presumably the man he sought—was struggling in the right field with a plow and two thick-necked oxen. What old-time conceit was this? They seemed ghosts of the previous century, now stymied in the mud, the blade of the plow lodged in the late February muck, the oxen sunk to their fetlocks in the mire. One ox brayed heavily as if in warning when it spotted Henry’s car. Like an animal sensing danger, the driver remained very still for a moment, shielding his brow, then he raised one muddy hand in greeting, and Henry returned the gesture.
The man called out across the pasture, “Boots on the porch!”
There were old, weather-crackled LaCrosse hunters behind Henry on the warped porch boards. He slipped off his fine loafers and pressed his feet and wool trouser hems into the mud-caked boots. Then he trudged out into the early-spring fields, feeling foolish and vaguely abused. But this man had known his daughter.
The man had gray and black hair, thick as a barge rope and cinched by an elastic at the nape. Gray-green eyes and freckles, incongruous on a face so lined—lined less by age perhaps than a life spent outside hunting and drinking and doing this, tending to a thankless plot of land attached to a threadbare home. Couple of curs for company. A talent for home brew. An old truck, some pornography, some pot. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
Before Henry could introduce himself, the man pointed to the ground where the old moldboard plow was lodged and said, “Not much rain this week, but there’s this funny spot”—he gestured at the declivity where the field sloped gently like the sides of a French salad bowl—“and I forgot … it holds rain. I fill it every spring and harrow around it … but it sinks again every winter.” The man had something slow and untutored about him, or it seemed that way because of his measured speech, but he had wide, watchful eyes that took quiet notes on everything around him, even as his mouth was busy with something else.
Henry said, “You should have plowed in the fall.” It startled him that he remembered that; it had been over forty years since he’d last witnessed a laying-in.
“Had pneumonia,” the man said simply, then gestured at the coulter and share, wedged deep in the mud. “You guide these guys … and I can press the plow. Straight like an arrow now.”
Henry did as the man asked, standing at the shoulder of the enormous lead ox with one hand to its bridle, and when Penn gave a heaving, half-angry cry of encouragement in the plow lines, the oxen impended forward as one, and—twice, thrice, four times, they did this until the man’s voice was nearly wracked with calling “Git up!” and, with a sucking slosh and a spattering of fresh, clean mud, the plow moved forward and continued to trundle along the earth. Down the row they went, unfurling a slow wave of brown soil, the traces tinkling. Henry let loose the bridle of the lead ox and Penn drove the train with ease now that they had achieved level ground. Comparatively free, the oxen moved swiftly along and Henry watched as the chest of the earth was sliced open. The exposed earth wriggled with life: Lumbricus terrestris, Narceus americanus, Procellio scaber, Armadillidium nasatum, Talpa europaea, Walckenaeria acuminata, and all the Kingdom Monera and all the Kingdom Protista. His daughter knew them all by heart. These bottom-feeder servants would now feast on the remains of the supposedly higher plants.
When they cleared the last forty yards of the row, Penn called “Gee!” and the team made the lumbrous turn onto the next unriven row; they moved as the Greeks had written their language. But Penn pressed back with the full weight of his body, crying, “Whoa!” which Henry mirrored instinctively with a soft “Whoa,” and the whole rattling configuration came to a halt.
It was only now, with the leggy oxen resting idle in their harnesses, that Henry could take a proper look at them. They stood to his chest, their enormous white bulk—solid and stolid as if carved from marble yet radiating heat—brockled thick with black. Upon closer inspection, one ox’s black was more like midnight blue with white showing through like fat stars. Their long backs were plain with white but without the black that peppered their blockish heads. Their points too were black. They were animals of distinct stature, boasting a heavy, bulky dignity even as ropy mucus strings spooled from their nostrils and eager flies pestered them. Henry had never seen anything quite like them before.
“Randall Linebacks,” Penn said, approaching the blue and patting it where the yoke beam pressed into the heavy flesh of the neck. “America’s rarest breed. Colonial cattle. They came out of a closed herd up in Vermont. I got these two, because … I can’t work on tractors. And I can’t afford a tractor. Repairs are too expensive.”
As if in response, one ox lowed and stamped and rubbed with irritation against the curves of the oxbow.
Penn swiped at his sweaty face with his sleeve, but just smeared warrior lines of sweat and soil. He said, “They weren’t worth a damn when I got them here … Barely plow trained. This one especially, Boss”—he pointed to the steer with the blue buckling—“was just ornery. Every time I’d say gee, he went left. Every time I said haw, he’d go right … I could have got more done with a team of fainting goats.” He indicated with one hand. “That black one’s Taurus. She named them.”
Henry said nothing. He just listened.
Penn shoved his hands in his pockets and fixed Henry with an unblinking stare. “Thanks for calling me. I wouldn’t have known … Sometimes she just didn’t show up here for a long time.”
Henry nodded once.
Then Penn said, “I loved your daughter,” and the man’s forthright declaration startled Henry into looking into his broad face. Dappled spring sun was playing with shadow there like fleetings of emotion. The man said simply, “I really did.”
It seemed Henry could actually feel the spinning of the earth as he said, “And did she love you?”
“Eh, you know,” the man said with a dismissive shake of his weather-roughened hands, then, “Let me tie up these guys … I’ll show you a place she liked.”
With some effort he led the oxen to a line of old chestnut fencing that separated a fallow pasture from the clodded soil they had just turned. Using the plow lines, he secured the pair to the upper plank, which they sniffed and tongued with their ropy, inquisitive tongues, turning the wood dark with saliva.
Penn patted a sloping haunch and then they were off along the northern edge of the unturned field. At one point, without stopping, Penn grasped up a small rock from the soil and flung it out as far as he could into the field, the way a boy hurls a stone into a river to savor the violence in his own arms. He said, “I trusted Henrietta. She wasn’t always nice, you know? You can’t really trust anybody who wants to please you all the time— Hey, arrowhead.”
This time he stooped and grasped up a slate-gray chipped piece of flint, ancient and smooth-sided but still miraculously sharp. He handed it to Henry.
“Maybe she was kind of messed up. I don’t know. No offense. I went in the marines when I was still a kid, and I came out just … Most people probably aren’t worth much till they’re messed up. But I could be wrong about that.”
The pair passed a black, sagging tobacco barn, a sink like a meteor hole, and trees skirted by bushes. There came a rustling in the depths of one thicket, then a dog leaped onto the path, bounding toward them with his tongue a loll and his tail a banner over his back. Penn patted the dog and pointed up ahead of them where spindly trees clung to a rocky outcropping. “Your daughter liked this spot. Jack, stay. Stay.”
Henry stepped carefully onto the rock outcropping and stood very still, gazing straight ahead into the bliss or abyss, feeling his feet on the earth even as his forehead penetrated porous clouds. The green earth sprawled before him, but it seemed more like mockery than beauty. He felt dizzy and barely rooted as all of space went sheering past his body with a horrifying velocity, which he’d not understood before. He sensed it now because grief had rent the beautiful fabric of his former self. He could hear time whistling through the hollows of his bones. Grief had sucked out all the marrow.
Henry swayed precipitously, so Penn reached quickly for the point of his elbow, then placed one steadying arm around his shoulders. They stood side by side like father and son, one just approaching old age and one middle-aged, both staring into open space.
Penn cleared his throat. “But me,” he said, as though the conversation had not stopped. “I just like to stand here and think. Standing up high like this, I feel like I can … like up here, you can see everything. It’s the big view, you know. I feel lucky to have it. But what are you gonna do with a view like this? That’s the question.”
It felt like a dare, a challenge between men, regardless of how gently, how thoughtfully it was proffered. Henry shrugged off Penn’s protective arm and stepped out to where the rock and soil crumbled away and looked down over the careening edge. He looked and looked and looked. But in the interstices of the rock formations, in the distant canopy of the trees, in the land, he saw nothing, not even history. The entire natural world was composed of dirt and its senseless inhabitants. His frustration mounted to agony.
He whirled around, his face stricken, and he cried, “What did my daughter think of?”
Instinctively, Penn grasped Henry’s forearms and pulled him in toward him, asking sharply, “What? Here?”
“Yes!”
If Penn found the question odd, he didn’t show it. He continued to grasp Henry’s forearms as he considered this very seriously. Then his face brightened with remembrance and he said, “She thought of you. I remember now. She thought of your family name.”
* * *
The fevers came and with them the dreams, so once the stars began their sardonic winking, he was rolling in her arms once more, his hips cracking against her coffin box, the lily-white baby hard as a bomb between them, then she was crying his name, which his dead mother had given him, or it was the sliver moon catcalling through the prison bars, and he was moaning himself awake in the jittery space between fever and wakefulness, thoroughly confused and baptized in sweat. He lay with dry eyes pressed to the crook of his arm, riding the tides of Hell’s night breathing, the sound of her entrapment, his own: Get me out of this nightmare.
But there was something on the scent of harvested hay this early morning, a sharp, strange tune adrift on the barely moving air. He knew the source before his eyes could discover it in the dark—the little jock perched on a farrier’s stool, an unlit cigar tilting jaunty from his lips, his hands patting a rhythm on his thigh.
“Reuben,” Allmon said confusedly, the dream of alarm still in his mouth. He sensed the great shadow of Hell’s head as it swung, curious, over the door.
“Fret not,” said the jock, crossing his wiry legs. “I was just a-wandering through on my way to Hialeah, thought I’d say hello to the Barbary horse and the Cincinnati Kid—and here I find you just a-moaning and a-crying in your sleep, a right sorry sight to be sure.” Reuben scooted his stool closer, his eyes shining in the moonlight. “What ails you, my little nut? There’s a rattle in your chest and a tear in your eye.”
Allmon’s tongue was thick, a grotesque muscle suddenly unfamiliar in his mouth. It required all of his energy just to mutter, “You got something for pain?”
“Do I have anything for pain!” Reuben chuckled. “I am La Pharmacie du Quartier Hoss, but, why should I share with you? I came by my contraband honestly. Anyway”—a pinch of a grin—“are you not by your own admission a confidence man of great renown? Surely you have your own pick-me-ups?”
Allmon just groaned in frustration, one hand a hard lace over his forehead.
“No?” Reuben turned his head practically on its side. “Forsooth! What kind of deal did you strike with the old boss man, anyway?”
“No money till the end of the season.”
Reuben’s voice was low and without game. “How much exactly?”
Allmon told him.
Reuben crowed. “I wipe my ass with that!” Then he fairly tripped coming off his stool and stood tall, which wasn’t tall at all, barely a child’s height under Hell’s chin. He held his arms wide, and Hell knocked her teeth once in irritation. “That’s your infamous deal? That’s what they taught you in the cement tower? No cash on the barrelhead, and gain all a gamble—on a persnickety bitch with a monster-truck ass, but toothpick bones and a bad attitude?”
“She’s going all the way, and you know it,” Allmon snapped, because she had to, and she would. For a moment he looked up at her towering darkness in the night, her breadth and height. He felt that for all his lifelong striving and desperation, he had nothing comparable to her enormous, innate power. All he had was his biography running through his veins, a biography that consisted of a single word: Want.
Reuben sighed. “Well, you’ve upset the apple cart, Allmon, yes indeed, and made yourself a wen on the scalp of a founding father.” His voice grew cold as he sidled over. “But you’re like the hillbilly who kills Old Master for forty swampy acres and a half-starved mule. Was that your biggest, baddest, blackest, ballsiest dream?” He looked down his nose in disdain.
“You don’t know nothing.” The words emerged as a deep, furious growl.
Reuben wagged his finger. “Nothing? You sure? I see the pink in your cheeks! The limp in your gait! Something tells me you’ve got the flushing disease—a precious gift from your mama, perhaps?”
“You best back the fuck up.” This time the growl was deeper, crueler. But rough words couldn’t erase a knowing that was very deep like bones at the bottom of the river. The movement of the river passes through their hollows, leaving them undisturbed, witnessed only by bottom dwellers. But Allmon hadn’t reached the bottom yet.
“Admit it,” Reuben hissed. “I know what I know! Yet here you are waiting for money like some brother on a street corner begging for change, when—ye gods!—time itself is the only currency! You ain’t earned your black badge, Boy Scout! Sitting here like a goddamn naïf!”
Allmon actually made a move to rise, but he was so woolly and woozy with fever, Reuben required only a hand to his shoulder to press him back down on his cot. “Busy playing the horse’s mammy,” he continued, “thinking you got years to eat and ages to shit! You need a better dream, young man, one that won’t fester, that won’t start to stink.”
Allmon slapped his hand away. “I lost everything! My momma died, my granddad! My…” He paused, whipsawed by the hellish feeling that consumed him at the thought of Henrietta. It had been sickeningly hard to learn any delight. And now delight had become the mother of rage. He held his arms out to either side. “They sent me up for trying to survive! For trying to make my way through their white fucking maze. You understand what I’m saying? They made it a crime for anybody to survive in the world they made!”
“So, why hasn’t your suffering schooled you? Because you won’t tell the tale, that’s why! You’re too busy trying to shit out prison instead of digesting it, letting it make you stronger! You got to build your blood, son!”
“I ain’t your fucking son and my life ain’t your business,” Allmon snapped.
Reuben sighed. “Really, why must Queen Reuben come and do the dirty labor for the hesitant, lumbering Sons of Ham? Good thing Reuben’s a practiced critter! Good thing he always has a stump speech at the ready!”
With gutting purpose, Reuben peered into Allmon’s bleary, feverish eyes, and the groom sensed suddenly that the little man before him had changed not merely in demeanor but more fundamentally in appearance, having grown so that he was staring down at him, a man on stilt legs his tongue had constructed. Here was not the grinning jock of jokes and jabs but the calm, cold preacher on the circuit, cruel as God. It silenced whatever retort was forming on Allmon’s lips.
Reuben said: “Now listen and listen good because I’ll only say it once: I am the devil’s midwife, the Messiah come in shape no bigger than a black man’s fist in the face of the Kentucky colonel man. Drawn darker than a stub of burnt cork, he straddles the black brain as it sleeps awake. His silks are sound from the pickers’ jubilee; the fine helmet of the overseer’s skull; reins from the braids of white bitch bitties; black boots from the flays of baying backwater hounds; his crop right snatched from the Southern whipping hand, its handle fashioned from fingers that when felled, grabbled up Mississippi mud like velvet cake.”
“What in the holy fuck,” said Allmon, his anger stalling.
“Shhhhh,” hissed Reuben, slipping closer with a finger to Allmon’s lips. “He speeds upon a filly dark as lampblack made by some master behind hell’s white fences, time out of mind the measure of all things. And on this destrier he gallops night by night through Jim Crow’s brain, so he stills his pattering feet; so Brudder Bones and Tambo cease their infernal noise; over Miss Lucy Long’s lips, those flaps of deceit that divest blackest words of their very meaning and whitewash thuggery with hijink cheer. Sometimes he gallops over Zip Coon’s brow and then naked, Zip stands like a new man born of rage. And sometimes he comes with the great black book, bedeviling the black pastor, who, pilfering the plate, forgets the kingdom’s to be had on earth as in heaven. Sometimes he rides like a dull knife over a soldier’s neck and then he dreams of cutting fancy throats; of manacles, chains, whips, and iron collars; of ocean five miles deep. Awake, Reuben whispers in his ear, at which he starts and wakes and, imagining he is going somewhere anon, sleeps again.”
Allmon shook his head. “You need to recognize you’re crazy.”
Reuben just batted away his words. “You are the benighted soldier that plaits the manes of horses even in the night, mere servant of the pale king’s tresses which once untangled some reparation bodes. You are the one, when daughters lie on their backs, who frightens, fucks, and forces them to bear, making them mules strapped to their heavy carriage. It is you—”
“Fuck you.”
Reuben rose abruptly. “I speak of your ambition, which is the heap of a moving bowel, bleached white at the core as Dinah Roe. Horseshit has trampled old memory, which woos even now the black bosom of the North, but you, being angry, stiffen your resolve and turn your face to the fruit-swinging South.”
Allmon laid an arm over his face, pressed a hand to one ear. He couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or awake. Maybe he’d never emerged from sleep at all.
Reuben just leaned down and whispered his conspiracy: “I hope too early, for my mind imagines some marvels soon hanging from those boughs, shall perfectly begin this late, aggravated date with Reuben’s stump speech, and expire the term of some regnant lives, closed in a white breast, in some show of consequence or fate. But the devil or Christ that steers the course, direct his sail. On sleeping soldier!”
And then, laughing, Reuben hauled up his duffel bag, which was nearly as large as he was, and left, waiting until he was safely outside the dusty confines of the barn to light his Cuban cigar.
* * *
Even after six weeks of incarceration on limited rations and no exercise at all, the filly’s self-possession was total, unwavering, and irritating as all get-out. She snapped at anyone fool enough to walk down her shed row, butted her head against her stall wall, and snarled out her window at each passing February day. This horse knew who she was—and she’d had more than enough.
“Oh, fuck it,” Mack said, tired to death of his role as martinet. “Get this peccary head off her lead and into a porta-paddock. No more handwalking, no more coddling. I can’t take this crap anymore.”
She trained one wicked eye on Allmon when he entered the stall, but she didn’t bite. Still, Allmon managed her head, through which coursed a high, almost electric energy. She was a hurricane in a black barrel.
“Goddamn,” said Mack as he eased down slowly to a squat beside her, careful not to make a sudden movement. “Goddamn if I’m not a little bit scared of this filly. That’s a first.”
But the long, knobby leg was cool, and Allmon limped alongside Hell to a paddock constructed on the back of Mack’s broodmare barn, where a sun the color of old lemons was shrinking the snow. The instant she felt the bite of the February air, Hell’s nose rode high like a schooner on waves, and she began to skitter and dance to an old, unheard tune. Her tail snapped and her eyes shined with the bliss of the cold.
“Turn her loose,” said Mack.
“Really?” said Allmon, pausing at the paddock gate.
“Can’t never could,” said Mack, flanked by two assistants. Then he reached forward and unclipped the shank to turn Hell loose.
For a long moment, she stood perfectly still in the paddock, her black mane waving and twisting in the squirrely wind, her nostrils wide as the world, her ears pricked forward toward something far beyond the confines of the paddock.
“My God,” one of the assistants whispered. “Her legs are magnificent.” The filly’s ears swiveled back, then without so much as a tinge of hesitation denoting pain, she sank into those magnificent legs, her rump a boss of rippling muscle, and leaped forward like a deer from her quarters. Two strides and Mack was beginning to yell; three more and, without altering her speed or veering, Hell crashed chest-first into the metal rim of the pen, sending ripples of shock along its length until it bent under her force. She stumbled heavily against the resistance as if startled, then jerked away and spun around toward her handlers, her eyes lined with high white. Lips furled back nearly to her tattoo, she cried out a wild, shrill, enraged sound that pinned them all, except for Mack, who had flung his hat from his head and raced into the paddock, hollering, “She’s gonna charge! She’s gonna break her legs!” Allmon didn’t know whether it was an honest escape or merely to exercise her natural strength, but he was there inside of two seconds, ready when she leaped forward again, strings of saliva swooping from her bared teeth, her breath a wind shear against his face. She feinted left, then dodged right, but they had her circled. Allmon snatched hold of her halter and drew her head savagely around where he could gain a proper hold. Only then did he see the jagged wound that had opened across her breast, the thin marbled fat exposed beneath. With a start, he realized that Hell—competitor, champion, beauty, his future—was raw meat.
They managed two lunging steps forward with Allmon at the halter, whispering and cajoling and petting her with his voice. But Hell didn’t want sweet nothings; in a flash she traced a swift circle with her head and butted him with the long, blunt ridge of her nose. She sent him sprawling elbows akimbo into the dirt.
Allmon cried out, more from surprise than pain as Mack scrambled to restore a hold on the halter. She’d never snapped at Allmon before, never once tried to best him. Now he rose to his feet, his face twisted up with swift, furious offense.
It took the strength of seven to wrestle Hell back to her stall.
While Mack went sprinting for his cell phone, she stood there with her head high, blood running tracks down her front legs, squaring eyeball to eyeball with Allmon, who stood safely on the other side of the stall door. They both shook with grievance.
“Is that how it’s gonna be?” he hissed. “I’m the enemy now?”
She raised her lip.
“Well, then this is what you get!” He gestured with a lashing motion at the hay, the dim light, the stall, knowing full well that until the day she quit racing, when they retired her from the track and began forcing select stallions on her, that long-awaited moment when he, Allmon, would make a real life for himself with one of her foals, she would never experience a moment of freedom again.
* * *
Copied into the fourth notebook, from K. Aubere’s Limitless Variation and the Advent of Life:
For a billion years, there was little, only the brownish green scum of the seas. Nothing but basalt rock existed on a land deprived of oxygen and blasted by ozone. In the waters, life was a thin, primitive, fragile sheet. Single-celled, prokaryotic organisms clung to one another like magnetic bits of thread, accreting and forming these microbial mats. Photosynthetic organisms crowded to the top, striving for light, while their buried peers split the weaker sulfide bonds to survive.
But the wheel of the world was spinning, the mats mutating and diversifying, spreading throughout the seas. In a blink of the earth’s basalt eye, eukaryotic organisms emerged, algae-like with their organelles, tiny harbingers of complexity. Tissues and organs soon followed.
540 million years ago, Nature reached down, took up all her organisms, and cast them like dice. Invertebrate life tumbled throughout the seas, and in wild radiations, the ocean phyla appeared in startling profusion. Soon, the algae blossomed into plants, which marched out of the waters onto temperate land and blanketed the terrain from sea to sea with vegetation. Tiny animals then emerged to burrow and tunnel through earth’s undiscovered soils. The world was redolent with new bodies.
But why the sudden and dizzying acceleration of life in the Cambrian? Why then and not before? For 4 billion years, the rate of expansion had been placid, steady. The fossil record is slim, the cupboard nearly bare.
Freedom. Oxygen levels rose in the Cambrian, there was a cooling of the earth’s simmer, followed by a sudden, sigmoidal rise. In land’s abundant light, single-celled life strengthened and augmented, occupying new adaptive roles. The first land plants became coal forests that grew taller with each generation. The denizens of the seas grew to an inch, then a foot, then a meter in the form of terrifying fishes that established suzerainties in the depths. Extinctions shook the dynasties of the earth, cutting down classes and orders—though the phyla never vanished. They simply regathered their troops and when the Age of Reptiles began, dinosaurs thundered over carpets of insects and beetles, flowers and ferns. Mammals broke the trees and cut blazes, and then the apes appeared, and the ape men eventually stood up. They spread out from the bowl of Africa to Europe and Asia with crude tools in their hands and eyes evolved to gaze ahead at the horizon. But then Homo emerged out of the family Hominidae, and brought with him that very late and crude invention, the human brain. The rest, as they say, is history.
* * *
She wasn’t green anymore, she was seasoned, and she was enormous. The turf writers flocked around her at Gulfstream—Todd Greeney from the Racing Form, Jeff Burrow of Blood Horse, and all the rest. Mack hated the press; as far as he was concerned, fielding a single question was an unforgivable waste of his daylight, but the track management had requested it—hell, they’d all but demanded the press conference, so here he was, every pugnacious, impatient, hypertensive, contemptuous ounce of him. While Hellsmouth stood at attention with Allmon at her chin, Mack barked out her numbers in a blunt staccato:
“Height: 16 hands, ¾ inches.
“Point of shoulder to point of shoulder: 16 inches.
“Girth: 74 inches.
“Withers to point of shoulder: 28 inches.
“Elbow to ground: 37½ inches.
“Point of shoulder to point of hip: 46 inches.
“Point of hip to point of hock: 40 inches.
“Point of hip to buttock: 24 inches.
“Poll to withers: 40 inches.
“Buttock to ground: 53½ inches.
“Point of shoulder to buttock: 68 inches.
“Circumference of cannon under knee: 8¼ inches.
“Point of hip to point of hip: 25 inches—she’s got a big ass.
“All right, now you know the numbers. Clearly, she’s huge.”
Greeney squinted, tilted his head, and said, “Mack, you’ve waited for the Florida Derby to race her. It’s pretty clear you’re going straight for races that offer you a hundred points and not messing around with smaller stakes. Why are you getting such a late start? Is there something we don’t know? You’re not exactly known for being conservative.”
Mack reached up and touched the pale brim of his hat, forming a brief shield over his features, then he squared up and stared down his interlocutor as though an epithet had been hurled in the general direction of his mother. “First off, I’m a registered Republican, and I’m conservative as fuck. Second, there’s nothing wrong with my filly. She’s a hundred percent. Actually, this filly’s two hundred percent.”
“Then why’d you—”
“Because,” Mack said, his lips thin, “I’ve got nothing to prove. I know where she’s headed.”
“Is she breaking from the gate any better?”
Mack grimaced. “No, that’s still a shit show.”
A writer from the Herald said, “She’s still running from behind?”
“Listen, yeah,” Mack said, then sighed, hands to his hips. “What you guys don’t understand about women is a lot. Smart women, they get bored easy. This one here, she’s so much better than the rest, she has to manufacture her own challenge. If she didn’t come from behind, she’d fall asleep on her own goddamn feet.”
Greeney again: “But do you feel she’s gotten enough conditioning to come back with the kind of performance she was capable of last year? We’ve all watched a lot of juveniles burn out in their third year. You think she’ll be ready without warm-ups?”
Mack’s patience was about sapped. He jutted out a blunt finger into the air in front of his chest with all the cocked force of a small revolver. “This filly just burned up five furlongs in fifty-eight and a half,” he spat. “You could cut off one of her goddamn legs and she’d still run faster than that bowlegged hack Angelshare.”
Greeney was shaking his head, a grin twitching about his lips. “Can I quote you on that?”
“Go ahead and quote me. I think we all know I’m not gonna die of natural causes.”
They broke up laughing.
But one voice pierced the laughter. “Yeah, I’m not buying it.” It was Jeff Burrow, tipping his ball cap up from the springy mass of his graying brown hair. He’d worked the track for thirty years, and there were numerous things he was afraid of, including his semper fi father-in-law and butterflies, but Mack Snyder was not on that list. “Let’s stop beating around the bush. You’re hard on horses, everybody knows it. Your filly’s big as a boat, that’s great, it’s impressive. But she skipped all the spring prep races, and now you bring her to Florida with a busted-up chest. How do you know you’re not setting her up to be another Ruffian?”
Mack started at the reference. Everyone could see the war on Mack’s face as he struggled to manage dueling armies of blustercuss and knickertwist. His normal raw porcine pink bloomed to a beefy red. He stepped toward Burrow with that finger still extended and the safety off, but, as if on cue, in a massive show of bravado, Hellsmouth sank into her heavily muscled quarters and reared high, rolling her hooves above the heads of the gathered men. Without a beat, Allmon scrambled to manage her.
Mack laughed a gravelly laugh and turned his pointing finger toward his horse. “How do I know? I know because I’m in love with her. And I never loved anybody that didn’t know how to fight.”
* * *
She was frothing in the post parade and fractious in the gate, whinnying for free rein and snarling at the bars of the five slip. Reuben eased his bones off the rails and situated himself on her back, snugging up his knees and fixing tight his goggles. He pressed the red crop under his arm, licked his lips, and surveyed the dirt track before him. He’d been waiting all winter like Hell’s war wife and here they were, reunited at the edge of a triumphant future. Hell had been crushing furlongs—absolutely demolishing them—in her morning workouts all week. She’d drawn the faithful railbirds with their cameras at dawn; she’d made the chief clocker stutter with excitement. Now she was tossing her black braids, banging her rump once against the rear door. She was more than ready, she was bursting out of her skin.
“Come out,” Reuben whispered, staring through the crack in the gate. “Come out for blood.” Now the jocks balanced their mounts. The sun was streaming light so loud they could hear it like a banging drum. When the burn of expectation mounted to out-and-out pain, the bell shrilled, and the gate clattered wide. An earthquake cracked through the stands, and the Florida Derby was on.
In a move that made the announcers shout, Hell broke clean as new glass beneath Reuben. She sheared out so suddenly without her usual sink and bob that he had to snatch manically at the roots of her braids and tuck hard to remain aboard. Was it only yesterday morning that she’d shambled out of the gate with her old loose-limbed stride? This was altogether new, how she plunged past the charging field inside of three paces, long before the first turn. Gone was her adolescent chop and her early wastrel furloughs. In their place a deep and powerful lunging had asserted itself. With every stride, she reached further forward, her nose piercing the air with a fresh and dreadful aggression. It was as if a new horse were unfurling under Reuben; he recovered his wits, doubled down upon her, one ear thrilling to the warrior report of her hooves.
The crowd didn’t wait for the turn, they rose in a jolt at the ⅞ pole, every eye locked on the charging filly as she took possession of the field. She was too strong to be pretty, but she had something in her new maturity far better than beauty: dignity. The colts all felt her occult energy; they sensed it like a shadow tilting over them and dropped away as if they’d slowed up, though in reality they only charged the harder. As the stunned field wound out of the turn and into the straightaway, never once did Reuben think to raise his crop to tap her on a shoulder or quarter. Hell was riding a wave of her own power and needed no spur to draw the first four lengths between her and Angelshare, which was when Reuben first became aware of the unearthly roll of sound ripping across the grandstand. “The devil’s on his long black train,” he muttered as four lengths turned to seven. Seven to ten, and her wave began to crest and unfurl with unmitigated strength. She was pulling further away and the words of the announcer were unclear, but Reuben knew the man was yelling. Poured across her back, he spared a thought to reserve her—go easy on that delicate bone—but he didn’t or he couldn’t as she rolled out her most destructive, punishing stride, now extending sixteen lengths from Angelshare and closing in on Secretariat’s coppery ghost, so she was practically on his tail when she rolled thunderously under the wire twenty lengths ahead. She had slain the colts and flung dirt in their eyes, but her victory and Reuben’s wild yell and the shattering cries of the crowd didn’t alter her course; she continued to accelerate past the wire, her sweat unbroken, her huge heart untested. Reuben cawed and whooped and finally had to stand in the irons, hauling savagely on the reins. Hell whinnied and jerked her neck, arguing strenuously against her restraints, but finally, with an angry cry and a churlish toss of the head, she eased to a hard gallop. Now Stop the Music, poor fool, pulled up alongside her in his cooldown loop. Hell turned to him, her lips curled, her eyes like globes of a newly charted world. As the cameras rolled, she snaked out and bit the gelding savagely on the tender flesh of his ear. Both jocks cried out, wrestling for space, until Hell finally galloped away, a spring in her step and blood in her mouth. The season was on.
* * *
Old-timers were rooted to their seats that day. Tip-sheet hawkers gaped and the railbird kids were half-cracked with joy. The seasoned press? Some shed tears they’d held in reserve since 1973. Greeney, hunched over his laptop with his Racing Form deadline like a hand pressing on his chicken-fried, middle-aged heart, typed a sentence with stubby fingers, then erased it, typed, dragged, typed, erased. Finally, tapping his electronic cigarette against the black rim of his laptop, he could find nothing to declaim but this: They said it was an impossibility to rediscover the speed and poise of runners past. They said the golden age of racing was over and gone, the sport nothing but a relic from a forgotten time. But Hellsmouth, the unbeatable filly bred by Henry Forge of Paris, Kentucky, trounced the field here today at the Besilu Stables Florida Derby. The big girl did it by a towering twenty lengths at 1:44, destroying the standing record of 1:46⅘. To all the lucky fans who witnessed this historic Gulfstream race, one thing was perfectly clear. Hellsmouth didn’t win because of Forge’s brilliant breeding choices; she didn’t win because of Snyder’s unusually strict racing regimen or because she finally broke from the gate like a world-class athlete. No, reader, this horse won because she’s a monster. My eyes are on the Triple Crown, and my money’s on Hellsmouth. The superhorse is back.
* * *
No sooner was she crowned with laurels, no sooner was her name in lights, than she went hot. When Allmon’s hand first touched her leg, he couldn’t tell whether it was his own high fever or hers. But no—she was a burning stove compared to him. In an instant, Allmon’s heart was lodged in his throat, and sweat prickled at the corners through his eyes. His hands fumbled again at her leg, but no doubt about it now: she was swollen along the old injury.
Two minutes later Mack was careening into the stall, his cell in his hand, steam pluming from his ears, his white-man lips gone even thinner. Another two minutes and Jameson was there, that old vet, that administrator of milkshakes and cobra venom, of steroids and Equipoise. He and Mack conferred, they rubbed their stubbly jaws with lined hands, their hooded eyes met, and they nodded. Then Jameson, who had advised his multitude of like-minded hacks in other barns, who then churned out similar prescriptions like monkeys at typewriters, reached into his gear bag and produced a syringe. Allmon stood there, eyes wide, not sure yet what he was watching.
Sensing his hesitation, Jameson looked up from where he was tapping the syringe. “It’s just painkiller,” he said. “We should all be so lucky.”
There was a tiny, sharp moment, like the head of a pin, when Allmon felt an almost insuperable urge to reach out and stay the man’s hands, and thought: Not this way. If she’s hurting, don’t run her. But then the pin dropped, and the whole of his history rose up and his eyes grew hard. Yes, it’s better to not feel. Absolutely. Then Jameson jabbed the syringe into Hell’s warm flank, rubbed the spot with a practiced, calloused hand, and grinned a knowing grin. Allmon couldn’t return the smile, too busy strangling the voice that asked, Is this really what you want? To crouch in the shadow of that tree and divvy up her earthly possessions: her bridle, saddle, her blanket, and her whale’s heart? Is this really what you want?
* * *
Jeff Burrow had only one simple question: “Is she sore, Mack?”
Mack said, “Nope.”
Burrow said, “Well, that’s interesting, because your hotwalker said she was limping.”
Mack said, “Thanks for the tip. I’ll fire my hotwalker.”
Burrow said, “You gonna keep her nominated for the Derby?”
Mack said, “What do you think?”
Burrow said, “I think she might—might—make it through the Derby, but from what I hear Jesus doesn’t hand out Derby wins like party favors. Even for those who pray at the altar of cortisone and Winstrol.”
Mack sniffed hard, scrunched up his eyes. He put his thick hands on his Wranglered hips. He had a backcountry bon mot just waiting there on the tip of his tongue, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was, “Fuck you, Jeff. On behalf of my horse, who has more talent in her hoof than your entire family tree. One hundred thousand fucking percent fuck you.”
* * *
A wild desire had overcome Henry Forge, as strong and strident as the surges of spring. The hard labor of winter was done, and the sun was beginning to ripen the world. When March winds were winding up and early daffodils punctured the fluorescent soil, Henry could contain the urge no longer and called Penn, who said, “Yeah, I’ve been a little covered up, but this is good timing. Now’s sort of the sweet spot.”
He drove up on a Saturday afternoon, his rust-scabbed Toyota coughing exhaust up the long Forge drive. The closer he drew, the slower he drove, eyes widening behind the wheel as he absorbed the patrician heights of the house, the barns bright like snow blindness, stark equine silhouettes in the distance where the land swept down into a bowl bisected by a stream. Holy shit, he thought, taking it all in. She really did come from money.
He found Henry waiting there as still as a cenotaph on the el porch as if he’d been standing there the whole day, or possibly his whole life. At first, Penn was struck by the similarity again between this father and the woman he had known—the slim, elegant frame, the coppery hair. Then he noticed the child in Henry’s arms. From his erect perch against Henry’s chest, the boy sported all the wide, bright-eyed curiosity of a seal. He was fine, fat, and waving his chunky arms at the sunshine in obvious delight. Penn didn’t care one way or another about babies, and yet … this was Henrietta’s child, all that was left of her. She had died bringing him into the world. Should he hate it? Perhaps. But when he approached and the child laughed at him for no reason that any grown man could grasp, Penn smiled. He couldn’t quite muster a laugh.
The two men met again, and they shook hands properly this time. Then, in silent, mutual agreement, they walked southward, Henry on the el porch and Penn along a tended bed of eager, nodding daffodils. When he reached the banister, Henry lowered Samuel so he could stand his slippered feet against the wood and said, “This is the space I described on the phone.” Then he bent to kiss Samuel’s curly head and, at the same time, pointed out toward the apple orchard and the slim clearing between the last budding trees and old windbreak, forty years in its growing, durable now as any chestnut fencing.
Penn stood there with his hands on his thick hips, chewing his lip and taking measure this way and that. He said, “Well, if you want to grow your own food like how we talked about, you’ve got plenty of room.”
“I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided I’d like to do more than that. Feed more than us.”
“Really?” said Penn, dubious, looking around and wondering, How many folks could there be to feed? Forge didn’t seem like the type who wanted to start a CSA or something.
“And flowers,” Henry said.
“Flowers? Sure, well, it’s March, I could … maybe lay in some pansies if you want.”
“What else?” Samuel raised a sudden squall, so Henry drew him back to his chest, where he was nestled easily, his little cherub’s face turned into his grandfather’s chest.
“Well…,” Penn said, studying the idea for a moment. “You could maybe transplant in viola, some Lenten rose. But most early flowers … they’re bulbs, you know. You plant them in the fall when everything’s going to seed. Now in a month … I could lay in just about anything you want. Make a real flower garden.”
“Yes, I want a field of flowers. My grandson will like that.”
Penn smiled, but he was silent as he looked on the pair. There was something he didn’t quite trust about the older man. Not that he was a bad guy necessarily … just not fully formed or something. Did he want to grow a garden, or did he want to be the kind of guy who grew a garden?
Eh, what did it matter? Penn shrugged in his mind. He was watchful and methodical, the guardian of his own opinions, of which he had more than a few, but ultimately he would help out anyone in need. It’s how his dumb ass got sent to war.
“And I’d like to prepare additional space for next year.” Henry stepped down off the porch, so that he stood shoulder to shoulder with Penn. “Put marigolds and petunias in after the freeze.”
The younger man’s head ticked to the left. “Sure,” he said, “but if that’s what you want, you’re gonna need more room. What’s with these bushes?” He gestured to his right.
“That’s a windbreak.”
“Well, it’s in the way. You need it?”
Henry hefted his grandson higher onto his chest and, brow crumpled, watched as the boy busily gummed his own fist. He smelled like sunlight and the warm, particular, inimitable scent, which was his own person. His eyes were bright and impossibly untroubled. “Perhaps not,” Henry said softly.
“But you’ll need a backhoe.”
“I have a backhoe.”
“Well,” said Penn with a smile, shaking his head slightly. “All right. Show me where the backhoe’s at.”
So, they worked together, he and Penn. First Henry laid out a checkered tablecloth upon which Samuel rolled and made his froggish motions in the sun, a shaker clutched in his hands. One eye to Samuel, Henry helmed a rototiller that chewed its lurching way through the tender lawn, as Penn, perched on the sun-busted seat of the backhoe, began to extract the edges of—
—my God, I get so tired sometimes, I can’t tell you how it was. I try to cut to the pith with the blade of my life, but it’s a dull blade from a common kitchen. My people came out of the mountains to Ohio; my grandfather was born in a tent near the oil wells, and my parents were poor. I’m not beautiful or clever; all I can offer is the brief portrait of a spring’s plantation, the smell of the sweat of labor, the color of a child’s eye, and sometimes not even that. What can you do? You can’t pray for yourself. The gods disallow it—
“Hey! Henry!” Penn had ground the backhoe to a halt and was twisted back and around with one hand gripping the bucket seat, the other on the wheel. “What is this? You want it out?”
Henry left his post at the rototiller and picked his way along the fresh soil until he rounded the edge of the remaining windbreak. There the thing jutted out of the earth like an arrow pointing to the sky. For a moment, Henry could not configure the object in his mind, could make no sense of its height, its brown hue, the wood patina like rot. Then, when memory finally slid home and he realized it was the old whipping post, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t blink. Time rolled back his eyelids and pinned them to his skull.
He whispered something barely intelligible.
“What?” said Penn, leaning down. “You want it out…?”
Henry drew in one tremble of breath, made a roundabout gesture with one hand. When Penn just shook his head in confusion, Henry raised his voice. “Leave it there,” he said. “Make a scarecrow of it.”
Penn grinned slowly, then nodded. “For the garden. Right. Yeah. We can dress it up in some of your old clothes or something.” Then righting himself on the seat of the backhoe, he brought the engine back to life and managed to uproot the rest of the tangled thicket without disturbing the post where it remained, leaning like an old ruin, dark and scarred, a remnant of centuries-old hickory and hurt.
But Henry could not continue in his work. He turned his back on the post and walked the freshly fertile ground to Samuel, who was now gnawing fistfuls of fresh grass. As Henry plucked grass from his lips, the child began to whimper and then wail in outrage. Henry lowered himself to his knees, grasping the child’s crabby face in his hands and looking down at him with bright sadness and satisfaction. Again, he reckoned with the full enormity of the change in himself. The change was a disturbance and more: a deeper, astonishing resolution. For a moment, in the golden almost-liquid beauty of the afternoon, he felt that his daughter had finally fallen silent. Her mouth was shut, the ink in her notebooks dry. His grief felt less like the crushing of his chest and more like the memory of the crushing. Was the worst of his pain over? Was that possible?
Henry walked to the kitchen to make a gold rush for two: bourbon with lemon and honey over ice. He passed the site of the original kitchen fifteen yards from the house, a kitchen that was razed when they filled in the old ice well. He had been seven then, just a kit in the yard, his mother a minx. He passed a hand over his eyes, weary and wary of his old mind.
As he arranged two icy tumblers on an old silver tray, a gem Lavinia had bought at auction in Nashville on a horse-buying trip, the landline shrilled. His hand jerked, and a tumbler shattered to shards in the white ceramic basin of the sink.
When he grasped up the receiver, the voice—firmly lodged in the nose and unmistakably northeastern—said: “Mr. Forge? Hello, I’m so glad to have reached you. I’m the assistant to M. J. Deane. I’d like to congratulate you on your amazing horse.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I’m sure you’re getting more interview requests than you can field, but my employer would very much like to interview you for a book on Kentucky history and horse racing. Would you be at all interested in participating?”
Henry was silent for a moment, trawling through the recesses. The name flicked at the edges of familiarity.
Into the silence the woman said, “Deane writes mysteries, but also general nonfiction. Perhaps you have read some of the books, or at least seen them around. Or articles in The New Yorker. On cuisine, mostly.”
The food articles—yes, that rang a bell. And, of course, he realized now, he’d seen the books in airports. With one careful hand, he reached down to arrange the glass shards, which littered the sink. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I believe we can work something out.”
The assistant said, “Wonderful. Well, an interview on the morning of the Derby would be perfect, if that’s not too much to ask. I’m sure that will be a crazy day for you, but we figured there’s no harm in asking.”
“The morning of the Derby?” It was an odd, even improbable request. He hesitated. But this wasn’t a journalist from a local paper or even the Times; this was something more intriguing, potentially more durable. A book featuring the Forge name. It stirred him. “Yes,” he said slowly, “that might be possible.”
“Will you be in Louisville or in Paris that morning, sir?”
He was startled to discover that he had no ready answer. Of course, he should be in Louisville—for the parties, the glad-handing, the carousing that would precede the running of the race. And yet … he gazed out the window, his heart a tuning fork tuned to Samuel. He watched his tiny grandchild on his fat belly, grasping again at bunches of grass; he was like a foundling who had arrived with a message for change from the deep underworld, a note passed to him from his daughter. So she was not silent after all. A knowing pressed up into the space where his heart had been knocking about uselessly for so long. It was both a blessing and an affliction. Relaxation flooded his body as if his old, worn organs were being replaced with an emptiness that was not terrifying but delicious. Into the emptiness wended a pride—yes, he was proud of everything he had accomplished, his farm and his horse, his new feelings for his grandchild, how he was transforming the family name. His smile was broad when he said, “Yes, I will be right here at Forge Run Farm on the morning of the Derby.”
* * *
Ever the good doer, Hellsmouth downed three quarts of oats and snatched at two proffered carrots on the morning of the Wood Memorial. She traced her rounds and lay heavily down in the stall to rise knuckering four times—nothing out of the ordinary, her usual race-day routine. But as Allmon stood there at the stall door watching her rise like a black wave for the fourth time to level him with the watery burn of her lucent eyes, what he found was only a flat, uninviting darkness, interminable night sky between stars that had flamed out; in the place of her personality, there was nothing.
His own body was on fire in every joint, his hands woolly and too warm as he slipped into the stall, patted from the bunched shoulder to the coronet of the hoof. He was nearly disabled by fatigue but could tell the leg seemed good and cold; they’d drawn out the heat with an old-time poultice of bran, Epsom salts, and clay. Now painkillers coursed along her ropy veins, pulsing through each chamber of her overlarge heart, sloping down her gaskins, softening the tips of her ears.
Though something was rubbing her soul against the grain, all he said as he stared into those altered eyes was a dull, blunt, “You’ll be fine.”
When Mack turned down the row, Allmon made a sharp, beckoning gesture and said under his breath, as though the filly could hear and understand, “She’s not happy.”
“Who the hell is?” Mack snapped, but he squatted and turned his own hands down the length of the leg. “She’s cold,” he said from his stoop. “I’m getting nothing here.” He leaned back on his haunches then, braced on one ruddy hand in the hay and peering up along the steep, sloped band of her nose. He sighed. “Give her some scotch. That’ll turn her up.”
Tucked behind posts draped with saddle blankets and a row of black velvety riding helmets, a smoky bottle of Caol Ila was kept on a shelf for just such a purpose. But when Allmon poured the scotch into the trembling scoop of his palm, which seemed so hot it would boil the liquor away, Hell just swung her head wide, and the tinkling of her stall bridle, very faint, was like Christmas sleigh bells without cheer.
“You’ll be fine,” he said again, but he didn’t know whether he was talking to himself or the horse. All he knew was he didn’t believe it.
Then Reuben; he sensed it in the saddling paddock when he was hoisted onto her gleaming back. Slipping his boots into the irons, he stopped suddenly as though listening for the faint beating of his own heart, then stooped in the irons, gazing bug-eyed down both sides of Hell’s long face as she stared straight ahead, blinking sedately and swishing her tail once. He detected the pulse in her articulated runner’s veins, then turned to Mack, his eyes narrowed. “What ails my black beauty?”
“She’s cold,” said Mack, but his brow was puckered. “She walked easy. You saw her.”
Fraction by fraction, Reuben eased down, reassuming his wary spot on the saddle. “Oh girl, this ain’t the time,” he whispered. The diaphragm of his eyes constricted, so the nervous colts and that worser animal—the ungovernable crowd—faded to a blur. He said nary a mischievous word as Allmon led them away. Reuben looked nowhere but down, his eyes bending pencils of light as they emerged from the tunnel, so he took in only the shortest field—Hell’s tented ears, and the gathering and releasing of her shoulders with each step. She came along sure, she came steady, but she wasn’t a horse who was born to just come along.
Reuben’s mouth was dry with determination, his hands clamped on the reins, his heart slowing: visions of paralysis, of death on the track under half-ton horses, his spalled flesh ground into the very fibers of the racing world. But then he straightened up. Whatever. His horse wasn’t right, that was for sure, but one minute on a half-well Hell was worth ten years on these other hacks. His grin bared his teeth.
The bell clanged, and for a moment, fresh out of the gate, all concern seemed unfounded: Hellsmouth rocketed from post position, instantly strong and upright; she broke with stomach-flipping loft in her three-year-old stride, her newly elongated signature. Inside of four strides, she separated herself from the field just as the bettors had banked on, as the oddsmakers had predicted. She was the fulfillment of every Saturday promise—inevitability itself—so the stands didn’t wait for her to roll into that first turn; they rose headily, drunkenly in advance of their sure thing, their cries rolling out across the infield like thunder before the storm. At the sound of their jubilation, Reuben, already tight with the hope of victory and plastered over her withers, twitched the crop back and delivered a perfunctory tap to Hell’s flanks just as they angled into the turn. Now the rude truth reasserted itself. Hell took the crop with a gathering of her muscle and a straining of the head, but her body delivered no burst of speed. She didn’t advance through the turn as she always did, the filly braggart who could walk on water as lesser horses slipped under the waves, the filly who rolled effortlessly around a curve on the strength of personality alone. And not only did she take the crop without a surge, but when she switched leads on her bruiser’s legs, she faltered. The tectonics shifted.
Stop the Music pressed past Angelshare and Loop de Loop, crabbing out of the curve so his bulky ass moved up on Hell’s right shoulder. Another second into the straight, and there commenced a violent bumping and jolting as the other colts circled their wagons, boxing in Hellsmouth, so Reuben was forced to wield the whip again to spur her into any possible pocket, real or imagined. He snapped her flanks, then he bashed her flanks, calling out encouragement and demand, the crop suddenly electric as any cattle prod, but though she tried and tried, she couldn’t advance. Neither left nor right, the colts left her no avenue. Now her effort became an ugly thing to see; blood spurted from her nostrils despite the Lasix, the proud flesh on her chest pulsed white against her black.
“Haw, little bitch! Bring it home!”
How she strained and lunged under Reuben on the straightaway, slinging saliva back onto his shoulders and face, digging deeper than deep, but her pace was a sickening diminuendo, a single discordant instrument in the orchestra. When the wire approached, despite the desperation in her limbs and the agonized shearing of her lungs, there was nothing left to muster. She came in third after Stop the Music, her archrival, and Possum, a fat-nosed allowance horse born on a Tuscaloosa farm with a plastic spoon in his mouth, a colt with no fashion in his pedigree whatsoever, not a single placer in his line.
* * *
Jeff Burrow: Well, the 2006 season is no longer a done deal, a fixed race between perfection and a middling field. The almighty Hellsmouth, a filly all but guaranteed to wrap up the Derby in a rose-red ribbon, is no longer a sure thing. Horses lose every day in this sport, but there was something different in the air after Hell’s defeat on Saturday. Her loss seems to have peeled back the layers to reveal an unspoken truth just under the surface of this testosterone-fueled industry. Hellsmouth has never been just another equine athlete. In a sport overrun with huge colts and powerhouse geldings, she’s a filly, and a tremendous one at that, and that makes her unique. If, despite this loss, she manages to conquer the Derby’s mile and a quarter, it won’t just be a win for Hellsmouth, but a testament to the power and potential of her sex in the sport. In a world that downplays the accomplishments of women at every possible turn, a great female athlete is representative, whether she likes it or not. They change their sport and public opinion. So when May sixth rolls around, let’s not forget the much larger truth at play on the dirt track at Churchill Downs: this big filly runs for all fillies, and the distinction still matters.
* * *
Henry jabbed at the remote control in a daze. He rewound the DVR again and again, Samuel gnawing sloppily on a teething toy at his side, oblivious to what had just occurred. The last time Henry had felt such stupefaction, they had heaped dirt on his daughter’s casket. With this race, he’d been so close to the maximal, he’d felt victory was already accomplished. Now the vagaries of chance circled round him once again, chirping and pecking at the pebbles under his feet, their musty wings unsettling the dust and leaving him to shift with apprehension. Hell’s perfect record was broken. Someone help Henry: If Hellsmouth is not his perfect thing, then what exactly is she? What if she isn’t his at all, or worse, not a thing at all? What if she—
* * *
Did you see her body tumbling from orbit, all out of order? Call it a loss if you want, but did you notice how, like something breaking apart upon reentry, she grew even brighter as she came apart?
This many times my heartbeat
16¾ 16 74 28 37½ 46 40 24 40 53½ 68 8¼ 25
an ungoverned thing,
when I end circles,
there is a remove like sleep but
I am still the center
I am worse
I am undivided
* * *
I’m sorry, I know you want more and there is more and you deserve it, but this is all I have. I’m a beggar. I was pitched out of my mother onto a dirt floor, and all I was given at birth was two fistfuls of language.
* * *
HawHaw! cries the half-cocked jock. Y’all think I’m down for the count, this little coyote? Why, my filly’s tricky, there’s gunpowder on her breath! Your story’s a bore, your limits my delight! You set out your words like the farmer sets out his traps! But my eye is keen and my sense is uncommon; I watch the other kits get snatched up in your traps. They wail and moan and gnash their foxy teeth. They chew off their own limbs for freedom, the fools! But me? I’m mind, I’m wind! I’m wise, little girl, you can’t fathom me! I turn tables, debunk, redefine, and rout. I slip your constraints and shit on your traps! While you tipple your applejack and tap out your tale, I feign, fib, fabulate— How now, I climax revenge! Contradict, appall, instruct, assassinate! I rise like a raven from the black of your page. I’ll strip the very meat off your aching hands, little scribbler!
* * *
Mack: Okay, everybody calm the fuck down. I never wasted a minute of my life on worry and neither has that goddamn horse. Buy your burgoo, place your bets, and watch her do what she does. Jesus Christ almighty— Enough.
* * *
The tall-case clock announced noon.
The writer didn’t come to the kitchen door as Henry had instructed, but parked at the front entrance of the house and knocked on the front door shining with spar varnish and crested by high mullion glass, cut to fit perfectly two hundred years before. Through the rilled sidelights, Henry detected a figure. When he drew open the door, a black woman stood there.
She was short as a child but held herself with a military erectness. Her face was plain, severe, falsified neither by smile nor makeup. Perhaps seventy, perhaps more, she cut an unforgiving figure—gray hair scraped back into a tight bun, cheekbones made for cutting glass. Her shapeless gray silk blouse was buttoned to the neck and tucked into an equally shapeless black skirt that fell without a hint of sensuality to her calves. On her feet: black orthopedic shoes with fat soles. She looked like a nun.
“You are M. J. Deane?” Henry said, a soft suspicion that looked very much like humor wrinkling his brow.
“I am.” Two little words, but all of the South.
“I’m Henry Forge.”
She looked steadily at Henry with eyes so dark it was impossible to determine where the pupil ended and the iris began. When they shook hands, the woman’s hand was cool, dry, and weathered as an old cornhusk—but firm, almost too strong. The intensity of her gaze bordered on the familiar.
“I’m afraid I have only one hour,” said Henry. “I’ll need to get to Louisville as I believe I mentioned to your assistant.”
“Hellsmouth,” the woman said slowly, her voice low and throaty with age. “I have followed your little horse very closely.”
“It’s been a good racing season. Two good racing years.” Even as Henry smiled, sweat sprung prickly across his back and under his arms. Outside, there was an urgent, early heat. His May dams drowsed with foals in thick shade, the tack already sprouted mold, the pawpaws were coming on. Kentucky was overripe and it was only the sixth of May.
The little woman moved past Henry, a large purse swinging from her arthritic fingers by glossy straps, a purse that even he, who knew nothing of fashion, recognized as an artifact of tremendous luxury. The boxy satchel—perhaps alligator—was secured by a small gold latch and stamped with its provenance in gold letters too small for him to read.
The woman stepped smartly into the parlor, then paused at the coffee table set for tea that separated the two Chippendale camelbacks. She took slow survey of the room, especially the Aubusson beneath her feet, its dun, gray, and tawny Gallic medallion edged with aubergine like bloodlines running through its pale arrangement. Then she lowered herself onto the divan.
“What’s that?” she said abruptly, pointing with a knobby finger above the hearth.
“Columbia jays,” Henry said, but looking at her, not the print. “Audubon, first folio. I bought it in Philadelphia and brought it back to Kentucky.”
“Is it a real one?”
Henry was almost too distracted to be offended. He was realizing suddenly that she’d walked ahead of him into the parlor prior to any invitation. He suffered a strange and phantom sense of displacement, as if he had suddenly walked out of his own story and into someone else’s.
He didn’t serve her. He merely gestured at the tea service, which she also ignored, the exquisite purse now perched on her knees with all the stately presence of a sleek black cat.
Henry said, “So you’ve written books on horse racing…?”
“No, I have not,” said the woman. “I spent my life writing mysteries. And I made a king’s fortune doing it. Then, one day I decided it was time to write nonfiction.” She looked at him evenly, coolly. “It was time to tell the truth.”
Outside the willows and the lilies and the buck roses were drooping in the voluptuous air. Henry said, “And where does your family come from?”
A cocked brow. “They come from here. But I would not call this place my home.”
Jarred by a distinct sense of unease, Henry crossed his arms. “And why is it that you publish under your initials?”
Now the woman stared directly into his eyes. “’Cause I ain’t nobody’s business.” The drawl, the slide into dialect, caused his hair to stand on end.
Henry said very slowly, very clearly, “You came to talk to me about horses and the racing life. Well, now you’re here.”
“I never said that.”
“Your assistant told me—”
“Henry Forge,” she said, and she cocked her head ever so slightly, “do you not remember me?”
Henry sat back into a moment of silence. From somewhere distant came the quiet inflection of hooves passing along the earth, then nothing. The woman smiled a smile that became colder as it grew, the shape of hate nursed over the course of a long and difficult life. Then she said: “Your father, John Henry Forge, was responsible for the death of Filip Dunbar; I know this because you told me yourself on the morning of January second, 1954. Filip was the lover of your mother, Lavinia. I know this because I saw them with my own eyes. You could never be convicted of anything in a bodyless crime; I realize that. It was your father who committed the crime. But I have the power to ruin the Forge name. That I can most certainly do. And I suspect for you that would be an end more permanent than actual death.”
Time distended to the point of bursting, and nothing made a sound. The clock yawned. The drapes stilled in midbillow. The tea leaves settled in the pot. Nothing moved except Henry’s blood, which was older than time and could only be called by one name, a surname, which was a useless thing really, signifying nothing, a word that began with force in your ancestor’s lungs and died with a curl of the tongue behind your teeth.
The words did not register at first. Henry peered at her as though her very person were impossible. “MJ…?” he uttered.
“Maryleen Jesse Deane,” she said.
The name shot through him, but Henry gathered himself, refused it, said evenly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Maryleen just lowered her chin, leveling him with a stare. “I plan to publish a book in August, just in time for the Belmont. I intend to tell the real story of your family, of this house, of Kentucky. I intend to tell the truth.”
As if finally realizing the import of her words, Henry leaned forward suddenly. “Do you actually believe that you can piggyback on our fame and libel my family because a man who worked here once disappeared under mysterious circumstances? A man who was the town drunk, someone my father and grandfather had always supported?”
“The truth, I said.” Her voice was steely.
Henry’s own voice grew low. “Then I will take you for all you’re worth.”
“You could come after my money,” the writer hissed, leaning forward too, “but you wouldn’t know how to get at my worth.”
Suddenly, teetering on an edge, Henry pressed a palm to his chest, his face wrenched: “I lost my daughter this past fall. Do you understand that my daughter died, and here you come…” But instantly, he wanted to reel the cheap words back into his private heart; for the first time in memory, he was swamped by shame.
The woman slowly shrugged, her face cold. “I am the bill collector.”
Trembling, Henry said very quietly, “Get out,” but it was too late, she had already risen, and he could see the pleasure on her face as she stood there eyeing him, calm hands gripping her purse.
So the words erupted from him again, coming not from him but through him, rolling down the endless corridors of time and memory. “Get out of my house!”
But no sooner had the woman turned away from the davenport than she nearly collided with Ginnie Miller, who appeared suddenly in the doorway, Samuel hauled up against her shoulder and her face a portrait of alarm. “We were in the kitchen and I heard hollering—what’s going on in here?”
“This woman was just leaving,” Henry said stonily, his hand still over his heart.
But Maryleen couldn’t move, much less leave. She stood frozen in place where she had turned, her face suddenly still, like a sheet smoothed, her eyes newly wide. A single finger drifted like a leaf slowly falling up to graze the air around Samuel’s cheek, as he twisted round on Ginnie’s chest to gaze, alarmed, at the ancient face hovering near his. “Whose child is this?” Maryleen said wonderingly.
Henry was silent.
The woman’s eyes turned to Henry again, confused, wary. “This—this is your child?”
Ginnie answered for him. “This is Henry’s grandson. He’s the son of—” And then she stopped abruptly, sensing she had perhaps said too much. She glanced worriedly at Henry.
Henry drew himself to his full height. “I am raising my grandson,” he said simply.
“Oh!” the writer cried, her composure pierced, and Samuel started, so Ginnie retreated into the hallway with a protective arm wrapped around him, her eyes all suspicion. Maryleen whirled around with a strange smile of bewilderment on her face. “Is this true?” she said, and then the air whistled out of her lungs. She inspected Henry’s guarded face. “It is! Lord God! The truth really is stranger than fiction!” Then a laugh erupted from her tiny frame, a howl pinned between outrage and hilarity. Samuel began to cry.
“A black baby!” Maryleen cried. “Henry Forge has a black grandbaby! And here I come— Oh, maybe my daddy was right, that old religious fool. There’s no such thing as earthly justice! No such possible thing— Forgive me, Daddy! You were right! I think I understand you now!” She was barely able to get out the words, laughing uproariously and turning back to the child who was staring at her in frank fear, his little mouth opening to cry, interrupted only by the bellowing of his grandfather, a sound he had never heard and would never hear again from him, the voice of pure rage:
“GET OUT OF MY HOME!”
The woman’s laugh died slowly on her lips, her eyes once again impenetrable. She held up her hand as though swearing on the Bible.
“You may believe you can still order me away,” she said, carefully enunciating each word. “But this time I leave on my own terms.” Without haste, she walked along the richly appointed hallway and out the front door, the luxurious purse swinging from her right hand. She left the door standing wide open.
* * *
Henry was very late. He grasped up Samuel, this thorough innocent, who was now smiling as if his earlier tears had served no purpose at all but to wash his face clean. Henry had meant to leave him for the day with Ginnie, but now he couldn’t remember why, couldn’t imagine any other course of action. He would bring him. Henry stumbled down the el porch and into the firecracker sunlight, requiring a moment to remember where he had parked his own car alongside his own home, then half ran toward it, guided only by the need to get Samuel into that car, because the car led to the future, and the future was the safe house where he could escape his old self—the Henry of his youth, the Henry of even one year ago, the Henry of grief. And guilt.
The world existed before you, Henry Forge. Open your eyes.
Drive across Kentucky on the waning strength of your old self. Look at Paris, barely changed from the Paris of your youth. It’s still your father’s town and your father’s father’s town, and the Paris–Lexington Road is still a billion-dollar byway, the homes exquisite baubles designed to impress, a gorgeous necklace on the white neck of the state. The child in this car was disinherited from these holdings long ago, though his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather built this place with all the strength of his body. Your strength was never strength at all but bantam posturing over shame. Hate has always coursed through your line like a mutant gene.
And here’s Lexington—once the perfect Southern woman, modest, discreet, and not very large—with her masses packed and huddled into her cinched inches, ringed by a lush green skirt, a pleasure garden for pampered horses and wealthy men. Sit up straight and peer beyond the colonnaded mansions with their mile-long lawns, beyond the words your father said over and over and over again. Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact.
A flash of panic lit Henry’s wilding mind—what was he doing, what on earth was he doing? He should turn around, drive the child home and hide him away, but he could not. This was his blood, his line.
A reckoning was coming.
Henry, who built this state?
Quick! Quick! Henrietta said.
Why, the help, Father, the servants, the bondsmen, the chattel, that species of property, those dark machines in the fields, who came through the Cumberland Gap from Fauquier, Fairfax, and Albemarle, or from Forts Pitt and Duquesne down the Ohio into Virginia’s pretty annex. They climbed the hills in iron chains, a premonition of the Cheapside coffle gangs to come; they felled trees and laid foundations under the eager eyes of rifles; they molded and fired red clay bricks and half slept on the ground or thin shuck mattresses. In a life of relentless labor with no hope of recompense, they plowed the karst fields and pastures, cut teepees of hemp, burned shives, cured tobacco, carded wool and dyed cloth, hauled salt, slopped hogs, cut back briar, tended gardens, cooked vittles, dried herbs, cured ham, dragged ice, polished silver, tended fire, wove baskets, caught babies, nursed them and rocked them, plaited hair, roached hair, beat rugs, brewed beer, stilled whiskey, pickled and preserved, made soap, worked leather, wove duck and fustian, darned socks, cobbled shoes, planed cabinets, fired iron, molded tools, picked worms, milked cows, raised barns, shoveled manure, skinned deer and slaughtered goats, drove the cattle from field to market, and, yes, managed the horses.
Henry’s eyes snapped to the rearview again. Samuel’s face had grown dreamy with a trace of spittle along his voluminous cheek. His eyes cast round once, focus drifting, followed by a shuttering of the lids in untroubled sleep. Henry said his name out loud to test the reality of the present time, because she was there—not beneath the color of the child’s face but in it, her bones building his bones moment to moment, the fullness of her face fleshing his. Her blood coursing through him.
Henry, you spread your daughter’s legs the way you split a tree to build a house. Was it worth it?
Suddenly, slowly, the line began to slowly flow backward like the Ohio, which reversed course after the great earthquake so many years ago. He couldn’t fight it and in an instant, Henry’s being was overfull; he began to drown with the new knowing. The earth was like a great king, and all the various beings in the world were only component parts of that majestic body. Henry had always imagined himself to be the king, but he was only the left hand, which had—in its madness—reached across and severed the right hand, thinking it would grow his station. And yet here he was bleeding out into endless space and time, because—Henry, now you know—the man who destroys another destroys himself. That is the taste of her blood in your mouth.
But, isn’t it true that the great slay cheap morality in their quest?
That small minds spend lifetimes setting limits on their betters?
Now, the old language slips again through the fissures of time: There’s shame hidden in the walls of the family house, Henry, so we will take it apart, dismantle the entire structure. Fling the shingles from the roof and crumble the old stacked chimneys, all eight. Strip out the pipery and haul out the case goods, the sideboards, the sugar chests and chesterfields, the old Jackson press; yank the moldings and the millwork down, hammer out the mantels and unhinge the doors from their sills, slide out their glinting windows. Now loosen the bricks from their old arrangements and toss them down in a heap where the cabins once stood, until there is nothing left but the cagework of the old homeplace, a chestnut skeleton of exposed raftery with nothing to stave off the frigid northern wind that comes rushing through in the form of a nameless, fire-blackened woman with singed wings striated under her gusseted corset under her tattered moiré gown under her gentleman’s banyan of obscene color, who from a rotting reticule at her elbow withdraws an old promissory note and gives it a wild shake. The serpents of her dark hair sidle and weave, the irises of her eyes irrupted by arterial blood.
Take the note, Henry, take it and see that it’s more than a promissory note, it’s a page ripped from a ledger written in the language that begat him begat him begat him begat him begat you begat her begat Samuel
What do you know?
that old man
Who?
Forge.
that Edward Cooper Forge
walked the parlor, tears soaking his mustache and beard, his mind routed by grief. By turns, his hands clutched at his broad forehead, or were clasped trembling at his chest or hung slack at his side. They were now utterly useless, despite their dexterity and strength. He paced his rounds like a sick horse, round and round, the chestnut boards creaking and crying—no, that was the child upstairs wailing in Lessandra’s spent arms. He gazed blearily up at the ceiling of the parlor, through it to the woman with her weak womb. One alive in sixteen years! So little to show. The nature of life was to take, take, take until it ruined you. Everything you built, everything you made, even your children, was sure to be ripped from you. Life is not a durable good.
The nature of nature is to kill.
He hadn’t stood still for more than a minute since the boy died. His Barnabas. Barnabas Monroe Forge. Shock of thick blond hair and quick laugh. But a boy of action who lacks caution and doesn’t always think—son, didn’t I tell you to use your head? Never use a rifle as a tool! A firearm is only for shooting! But then your damn fool beloved son is chasing rabbits in the snow, their tiny madcap prints veering left and right in the pearly-eye blinding white until the worthless animal disappears into a rotting log without escape on the other side, so dear excited unthinking beloved son crouches and rams the butt of the rifle into the hollow log to flush a creature with not enough meat to feed a girl child, and the rifle discharges, and sixteen years is dead, its heart blown out in the snow.
Edward clamped his eyes as if to break them, organs that serve only one purpose: to make a grown, aging man cry. He could not tell his grief from his rage, together they seemed far larger than his physical body, larger than his home. The word “please” had died on his lips. No, he could no longer pray or his neck would break from the strain. How he had prayed to the God of Eternal Uselessness, raise up my son, because he cannot be dead! He must be only sleeping! Raise up my son, because the infant may not survive the winter and neither my wife! Raise up my son, because I obeyed your laws all my life and was like the good servant, not burying my talents but raising children and stewarding the property I was given. Raise up my son, I have cried over his wet, cold face! But God was silent, because God did not exist any longer. God was alive only until he was shot in the heart in the snow, and now it is the third day and still he has not risen.
It was clear that Death wrote the rules of life and a man was a fool—a callow youth—until he acknowledged it. But Edward’s will musters against this ultimatum. Man spent himself in a war against the processes of entropy and, yes, it was a useless endeavor but to cede was to capitulate, to be a coward. It was to write Death a blank check.
He stops his pacing, his eyes suddenly bright. He has alighted upon something permanent. The only light in the darkness is life and more of It.
He snatches up the murderous rifle, which has lain on the floor for three days under the coffin box and its black silk drape—this thing whose propulsive force is stronger than even his own son’s life, and not a minute later, Edward is in the cold yard in nothing but his black trousers and white poplin shirt, his breath huffing out in vaporous blooms as he crosses the attenuated lines of window light crossing to the cabins. The constellations are blurs overhead as he bursts through the door of the first cabin. The family of seven who are huddled before the fire at first stare up in mute alarm until they see the rifle at his side, gleaming like a scythe, then they scatter to the shadows along the dark walls.
His one word explodes into their dark and quiet space: Phebe.
For a long, agonized moment, no one moves or even dares to breathe. Then into the cocked silence, out of the shadows, the girl called Phebe creeps forward, half-bent by fear like a crone. She moves forward, her eyes locked on the rifle.
Come.
Come now!
Marster! Her mother jets forward out of the swallowing shadows, her arms out. What you gone—
He raises the rifle and the shadows consume the mother, and the young girl proceeds out of the silence and into the night. She’s upright now as if quiet obedience will save her from whatever unknown fate awaits, eyes moving neither left nor right. Across the barren, bone-rattling yard they go, and into a cabin, where three likewise sit round the hearth fire with their yams and cornpone and heated chicory. There is the sound of throaty laughter, of some story reaching its conclusion. Then all three men stand abruptly when Edward storms through the door, the girl stumbling beside him, her bewildered fear now turning to dread.
Benjohn there, his strongest and most beautiful. Edward says breed to this gal, and the other two creep first to the edges and then on out the door, looking at each other but not bothering with useless words. Benjohn saying, Marster, I’s fixing to marry my gal Libby the next week over Drummer farm; you done gave permission two months ago, but Edward says, Increase my stock. The man only shies up into his shoulders, shaking his head, so Edward says, For every pickaninny you give me, I will reward you with dollars, then the rifle says NOW, and the girl is shivering on her hands and knees with her woolen skirt over her shoulders, then they are hunched and pressed together, and Edward is pushing her forehead into the dirt with his own hands to raise her haunches high for the take. Her tears mingle with the dirt. Edward says, Give me a buck, and then he is off to fetch Mim and Sarah while Benjohn recuperates in astonishment. The girl flees to her cabin as the others come, their eyes round with fear but not suspecting, and then again and again with his buck Prince because Benjohn is spent, then Edward himself is at his maximum with his own blood risen up into his feverish head, so he leaves the last two bred and clutching each other not in love on the cold, packed ground. At first he is merely walking, the rifle resting on his shoulder, but then he is running across the yard toward the house all lit up for the deceased—no, for the mourning—and he charges through the kitchen door, so that Prissey nearly drops the roaster with its hulk of turkey no one will bother to eat tonight. Edward twists up her wrists in his left hand, the rifle clattering down, yanking her from her task but not up the stairs where Lessandra, withered dry by milk and tears, is suckling a colicky, perhaps dying infant son, his own, but into the cornmeal and spice smell of his own pantry, where she is saying no no no no please no; Prissey, your beauty has saved you, I would never breed you to a nigger. Marster, you just undone! I am undone. Give me back myself. No. Give me back to me. No! Prissey, I have owned you sixteen years and never touched a hair on your head, been nothing but a loving master. I have offered you protection from the world and treated you as a favorite, better than I would have a daughter. But now, give me back to me. Spread your dark legs, Prissey, spread your dark hair, split your dark open, the center of you suckle me, give me back now what I have lost. Pinned against the butcher block, with her skirts shoved high, the sweat of terror and her day’s labor and sorrow commingling, he breaks the tight prefloration and demands what there is, bruising the skin of her thighs and rattling her teeth until what’s left of his life convulses into hers, and then he is weeping openly, crying like a wounded animal, and she sighs, which to him sounds like pleasure. With eyes to the sky, which is just a low ceiling, she reaches around his bulk and, with all the weary resignation, which seems the lone inheritance of woman, she comforts him.
* * *
Pain is an alien being in your being. You think: How did this other life get inside me? This isn’t a stubbed toe, or indigestion, or the vigorous ache of a fever that rattles your bones but then passes in a week. No, you can’t kid yourself any longer; this is permanent, this is disease. Somewhere in these last few weeks, knowledge has pressed itself through the cracks of Allmon’s concrete heart, and now it can’t be routed out, neither the knowledge nor the disease. The world took everything from you, then found more to take, and now it’s going to invade your entire body, crowding your insides and diminishing what was once you until all that’s left will be the memory of how it once felt to live as a self without pain in the body you possessed—or you thought you possessed—as a long-ago child. A child who still had a mother. Marie.
“Young man.”
Allmon started and looked up from where he was wrapping Hell’s leg with what strength was left in his wrecked hands. A small woman had appeared on the other side of the stall chain; she stood utterly upright with a stern, martial formality, a black handbag gripped in a hand that looked more like old, creased iron than flesh. Her eyes were strangely heated when she said, “You are the groom of Hellsmouth? You work for Henry Forge?”
If it had been a white person, he would have said, Who wants to know? But to her, he just said, “Yeah.” And then he rose up slowly, a flicker of hurt on his face that appeared almost like anticipatory grief, as though the executioner had finally come. He took a hesitant step forward.
“Oh, young man.” The woman lowered her chin fractionally and smiled up at him without smiling. “Do I have a story for you.”
* * *
Allmon stumbled from the barn on inflamed hips and crumbling knees, desperate for air without chaff and mites, desperate for the cool remnants of the afternoon’s light rain. Through his tangled, terrible, scorched mind he could see the horses crisscrossing the Downs, dark and rangy and terrifically strong, stark as ink stains in the mist. A sudden resentment rose for the freshness of their young, ignorant lives, and he looked down at his own blasted body with a wholly different wonder. Prison had broken him and though he’d patched his pieces together, the mortar was crumbling.
He thought of Henrietta, but he pushed her away. She hadn’t taken his life, but she’d taken his fucking dignity. She was a cheap trick, a white slap, another humiliation to endure. He hated her.
Given a chance, these white motherfuckers will always take your black life. Always.
He began to stumble along after one of the sauntering colts, as though it offered escape, but there was no escape, not from the sick story he had just heard. Forgetting wouldn’t work this time. You tried to close your ears to time, but it was louder than ten thousand horses thundering across the plains. Time told stories that busted your eardrums and made them bleed. The Forges had murdered a man, the woman had said. Of course they had. Of course! He felt the righteousness of his vindication like a sun in his chest; it transformed and shined light on the guilt that had been torturing him. He had always known what the Forges were, but in Henrietta’s deceiving arms, he’d allowed himself to ignore it! Of course, he’d known; he’d spent his whole life on the run from a fucking lynch mob.
Allmon felt the vibration of the swelling crowds before he could see them and veered away from the track toward the parking lot, but the crowds were there too, chattering and smiling and moving along in their finely cut suits, outrageous hats on display. Smug, self-satisfied, like they had actually earned their wealth honestly and not by standing on the necks of others. Allmon stopped at a gate, breathless. None of them even noticed him in his stained polo and manure-caked boots. He was a bland, brown, weathered rock, and they were a gorgeous stream flowing past.
Allmon’s features were wrenched by a wrathful pain so pure, so ultimate, it was like the heat off a stove, so hot it was icy. He couldn’t tell any longer whether it was pain of the body or of the spirit. He fished in his pocket for his Vicodin, and the tablets jangled there like chalky coins.
You got the flushing disease?
He needed a doctor; he knew that. But these disunited states had turned the complex math of a human life into the simplest number: You got enough money for insurance? Insurance cost what he made in two weeks, and they made you pay a five-thousand-dollar deductible before you got any help. Then you could only go to certain doctors or you had to pay even more … He knew the fucking rigamarole. He knew.
This world breaks your bones, and some breaks are permanent.
He turned back toward all the barns, which were laid out all orderly like graves behind the track. Hellsmouth was waiting; the Derby was only minutes away. The critical importance of the race only grew in his mind. Everything—his whole life—hinged on it.
Oh God, he suddenly prayed with every pain-ridden fiber of his being, knowing full well God was Momma, because when he prayed to him now, all he could see was her face in his mind, her nose, which was his own, and her wide smile, her chestnut eyes, the face of her youth, which was his infancy, the face he had loved above every face on the earth—even more than the Reverend. The Reverend! He was there too, the hammer of his preaching, the unrelenting ground of his living. He hadn’t thought of the man in years, because he’d left them, and Allmon had never forgiven him for that. Now they were the prayer, the entirety of his breath and blood: Please, God, let this horse win. Let me finally get on the outside. Winning is justice—my salvation and revenge.
* * *
The twin spires of Churchill Downs loomed overhead, their flags snapping with the brisk violence of the weather. There had been a heavy rain and now the day turned astonishing in its beauty, the clouds all piled and red-tipped like a sun-shot mountain range inverted, streaming red and gold in every direction. Under that play of light, all the minuscule players—the jocks, the trainers, the grooms, the fans, the horses—made their moves. When the human world is rotted away like an old walnut, that light will remain.
Henry had left the diaper bag in the car along with the stroller folded in the trunk, his suit jacket crumpled on the passenger seat. The ground was still wet, puddles everywhere, and it looked as though it might start raining again at any moment. Henry barely noticed. He simply held Samuel, the child sound asleep with his cheek on Henry’s shoulder.
Twenty minutes to post. Where in this carnival was Hellsmouth, his darling destrier, brightest and best, his black beauty hopped up on painkillers, his glory runner, model of the reliability of heritability, his once perfect thing? Where was his daughter?
Natural selection isn’t everything. We still don’t understand the principles of organization. The mystery is intact.
I am not a meme but a mutation.
Life is a chain of affinities.
Nature hath made of one blood—
In his mind, he cried out, Why are you torturing me, daughter?
I’m not torturing you—I’m at peace. Why are you torturing yourself?
“Henry.”
“Henry!”
He whirled before his mind came round, his eyes confused and slow to discover a resting place: Louisa, his home vet, standing in front of him in the milling crowd, her face so easy and calm, as though life weren’t a madhouse. Was it possible that anyone could actually be as untroubled as she appeared to be? At her side was her young daughter—maybe twelve and slender as a stalk—clinging to her side in a childish way, her limbs entangled jealously with her mother’s, who managed her gently, one arm wrapped in a protective gesture over her shoulder. The girl’s hair fell in a glassy brown sheet to her lower back as she gazed up at Henry in curiosity.
“Whose baby is that?” she inquired.
But Henry didn’t hear. His dilated pupils took in too much light; it caused everything to grow distorted and overbright. “You talked to my daughter,” he said to Lou. “You talked to her the day she died.”
Lou’s gaze was steady, level. “Yes, I did. She came to see me, and we talked for a good while. I often think of you and your grandson and wonder how you’re doing. I’m sure it’s been very hard for you over at the farm. I’ve been over a few times, but never—”
Her compassion was Confederate money. “Tell me what you said to her that day.”
“What I said?” Lou’s eyes assumed a distant look and her lower lip pressed out slightly as she turned her mind back to that autumn day. “She had come to see me, kind of a surprise visit.”
“What did she come to see you about? I need to know.”
Lou looked pensively at the ground as her daughter bumped gently, rhythmically against her side. Then Lou stopped the girl by holding her shoulders with both hands and, looking up with the light of remembrance on her face, said, “I had mentioned to her once that the horse was the remnant of an evolutionary failure, and she wanted to know what I meant by that. We talked for a while about the pregnancy and—”
“An evolutionary failure?”
“Well, yes,” Lou said, clearing her throat. “It’s really the first thing you learn when you study evolution in school, that Equidae was an empire—a huge family—in the animal kingdom, but most of its branches disappeared and its descendants died out until all that was left was equus: the horse, ass, the zebra, the—”
“Evolution is a ladder,” whispered Henry, “a ladder to a perfect thing.”
“Actually, no, not really.” Lou shook her head quizzically, so her hair fell lopsided out of its graying bun. “It’s not a ladder. It’s more like … a bush.” She raised her hands to mold a fulsome round in the empty air. “Think of it as a branching bush. A great, endlessly diversifying bush that gets stronger with each new branch, each new variation.”
Henry stared at her without moving a muscle. Samuel chirped near his ear, slowly waking from his sleep. Henry’s mind was filled with the memory of Henrietta, his child, his responsibility. His eyes filled with tears.
Then Lou said suddenly, as if his gaze were a question to be answered, “Henry, you should know that it was not a—a heavy day. I mean, I remember Henrietta laughing. And she seemed very ready for birth.”
“Henry!”
Henry’s head snapped round in the direction of the voice, a man calling for him in the midst of the crowd. “Henry Forge!”
“Where is he?” Henry said.
“Who? Henry?” Lou reached for him with one hand.
But Henry was already moving away, his body an automaton maneuvering his spirit through the crowd. Samuel wriggled, reaching up with one hand for Henry’s right ear. His grandfather’s ears were his favorite new toys.
“Henry!” Yes, he knew that voice—knew it like he knew the inside of his own mouth. He was peering around all the Derby hats, their absurd heights and ostentation impeding his clear view.
“Henry!” The voice was insistent, implacable, eternal.
And there he was, a shadow in the crowd.
Henry reared back suddenly, wanting to reverse course and disappear.
No, Father, my lessons are over and done.
Tell me, Henry, is man the measure of all things?
Father, I don’t want to play this game anymore—I can’t!
I am the pruner and you are the vine.
No, you are the tyrant!
Henry, you don’t understand—
That’s where you’re wrong, Father! I do understand! Man may be the measure of all things, but no single man can be, because there’s no such thing as a single man. Now I know you cannot kill a tyrant—he wrapped his arms tightly around Samuel—because the man who kills a tyrant becomes a killer and a tyrant. And that, Father, is why they call it the wheel.
* * *
Henry stands in the crowd, utterly still and sure. He finally knows what he is going to do, what has been rising in him like water set to burst its dam; surety overflows. He will pull Hellsmouth from the Derby and end it right here, right now. There are no bodies, only beings. That truth is the child in his arms, whom he will reveal to Allmon. The truth will not roll back time, but it will make the future. He turns around and begins to run with Samuel in his arms. He finds no argument in his heart.
* * *
But it’s too late. Reuben has already swung up onto Hell’s saddle, his hands like money clips on the reins. The sky begins to churn and drum with approaching thunder.
Henry cries, This is my Regret!
Allmon’s stomach is in his throat as he leads the fearless filly through the tunnel and out onto the churned turf. When he lets go of the shank, the eyes of the crowd pass from him. As if he doesn’t exist.
The Reverend says, Who shall uphold the cause of the needy? When shall the fatherless say Amen?
By the time Henry reaches the grandstand, when he finds a sightline, it’s too late. Hellsmouth is nearly through the post parade with a palomino pony at her head and a vulture on her back.
The horses are in the gate.
The starting gun is cocked.
Wait, wait, stop their mouths and still their minds. Unseat the jocks, unsaddle the mounts, loosen the shanks, rewind the walkers. Once again and with care: In the green paddock stand the glossy blacks, bays, grays, and roans. In the bright and bustling paddock, it’s May. Circling, the horses nod and pass, nod and pass. Listen closely and every sound is sovereign in its kingdom, the chains clinking, saddles creaking like winches, hooves knocking dully at the door of eternity, cries of hup!hup!hup!
The bright silk jocks are cardinals, jays, purple martins, blackbirds. Process, progress, mercenary plumage along the gray brick walk. Firing hearts scatter buckshot beats to delicate wrists, behind emaciated knees, along bony insteps. The youngest jock leans over the embankment of his horse and vomits into the dirt as they pass through the tunnel. On its axis, the grandstand tilts and the bettors tumble to the fore of the house—gripping the rails and vying for a view of the beasts as they emerge.
The horses pass along the gate like lanterns shining, lanterns that bathe the watcher as they pass one by one, dark lanterns swaying on their chains housing bold, interminable light; bright, brief lanterns in a round processing, swaying, passing one by one into the damping gate.
Motionless and massive, they stand.
Suddenly the bell rings, the gates are sprung, the sky hurls invective rain, and the horses unfurl their colors before the crowd. They move through the gray veil of rain, gathering speed, charging on brittle bones, swinging as a single body around the track, shod hooves spattering mud. The mud is inside of everywhere—mud slung under saddles, in the eyes of the horses, caking the goggles of the jocks, which are stripped again and again and again. The wind whips the group from behind, pressing them to greater speeds but in the downpour, so they run sloppily, jostling and bumping and sliding, crossing the track with their lungs bursting and their nostrils bloody. When one horse begins to pull away, it’s colorless from the mud, as if the earth itself has risen up and begun to run, and the crowd can’t tell which it is. With each amplifying stride, it drives free from the pack, first its nose, then its withers, its rippling quarters. The animal accelerates without seeming to labor, as if the agony of racing were nothing but a game. Now the crowd rises without knowing which horse it rises for, each indistinguishable from the other. One length becomes five becomes eleven becomes sixteen. The crowd is screaming in abandon with arms raised; their faces are glazed with rain, their hats are ruined. They’re roaring for the anonymous gladiator as it crosses under the wire at twenty lengths, all four hooves free from the ground, its tail streaming behind it like a muddy flag. Now the field follows in a brown bundle, and the first horse is hauled up to a gallop, the jock standing in the irons. It’s Reuben Bedford Walker III pummeling the sky with his fists, while under him Hellsmouth spins like a weathervane, wet earth fanning out from under her hooves like seeds from a sower’s hand.
* * *
Mack was screaming himself hoarse. He hated the Derby—hated all the hats and the cheesedick celebrities, hated the dilettantes, the brutal distance, the field thick with worthless runners, and he really hated that his most prominent owner—the increasingly witless and unreliable Henry Forge—had not shown up to the prerace press conference, nor the morning workouts on the most important day of his entire life as an owner, and was now refusing to pick up his fucking phone. He hated to an almost biblical degree that he had to call any owner twenty times—it made him feel like a lovesick straight chasing a skirt.
The whole Derby rigamarole was a bullshit sham and a shitshow, except for this, this, THIS. And THIS is why he was screaming, his suit jacket threatening to rip at the seams as he reached his triumphant arms over his head, his mouth hollering gibberish, his Stetson behind him on the ground, band up and collecting rain. And now once again—still hollering like a bear—he was snatching the cell phone out of his jacket pocket and dialing Henry’s number, his eyes bugging. Turning hard right and then hard left, he spat, “Where in the everloving fuck is Henry Forge?!”
Allmon was weeping openly, limping toward Hell on the dirt track as fast as his legs could carry him. She was victorious, unbroken, and covered head to toe in mud, but he would always know her amidst the field of pretenders. His scream sounded more like a war cry than delight. He caught her fast while Reuben was still standing in the irons, pumping his fists and screaming for glory. Barely able to control his hands as the blood of victory flowed through him, Allmon drew her round in a fast circle to bank her fires, then haltered her on the saturated carpet of grass. He would live, he would live, he could feel himself growing into a new being as Hell’s eyes rolled with her unspent energy. Filthy and carved with proud flesh, she was an unholy mess, as battered as an old pot, but still shimmering with beauty when two men appeared with the leaden blanket of bloodred roses. She skittered once to the right as they approached, blowing air with bubbles of blood. Then Reuben sat down on the saddle and with his help, they draped the forty-pound garland of Freedom roses across her back. Instantly Hellsmouth stilled, then she bowed slightly as if surprised by the weight of the thing, then stamped her front hooves and hopped once to show that the weight was nothing—nothing at all. There are some animals that crumple under victory, but she wasn’t one of them. She trampled the geraniums when Allmon led her into the winner’s circle.
The whole of this wet Saturday had spilled into the circle—Mack and his assistant trainers, old friends of the Forges, the mayor of Paris, the governor himself. They were flocked by blue vests, the press circling the circle, cameras perched at the wing blade. But there was a rumbling among them, some confusion, some pointing. Reuben clutched his bouquet of sixty roses and turned to them with a brilliant grin. “Wherefore the wait, y’all?” he said.
They were waiting on Henry Forge.
Mack, his dripping Stetson returned to his head, made a rolling gesture with his hands, snapping, “Take the picture, take the damn picture.” Allmon corralled what strength he had left in his body and stood tall. He could feel Hell’s explosive breath on his shoulder and droplets of her blood on his polo. He felt like he would never die. The circle exploded in artificial light.
And then it was over, just like that. Allmon led the dancing filly away to the hermetic world of the backstretch, and everyone else trouped onto the pagoda and stood behind the rail, which, glossed with rain, shined like white ice under an emergent, hesitant sun.
One last time, Mack checked his cell phone. “Motherfucker,” he snapped, and when Bob Costas shot a hard, inquiring glance in his direction, he just glowered and tucked his chin. Arms crossed to contain his bunched fists, Mack was fairly rippling with irritation. But was so blissed he could hardly stand up straight.
The chairman of Churchill Downs was saying something Mack didn’t give a shit about—HE HAD WON HIS FILLY HAD WON—then the governor turned to Mack with the trophy in his hands and had damn near unrolled his entire speech before he blurted, “Where’s Mr. Forge?”
Mack’s lips blanched against each other for a second, then: “Don’t believe I’ve seen him in the neighborhood.”
“No winning owner has ever missed a Derby that I can recall,” said Costas. “This would be an unusual first in the history of the sport.”
In front of the crowd, in front of God and a live television audience, Mack reached out and wrestled the cold, beringed trophy out of the governor’s startled hands and said, “Well, it’s hard as hell to find good help these days.”
* * *
They don’t even know who he is. He’s not leaping up as a victor on Millionaires Row or spilling a julep down his shirtfront, he’s not roaring beside an overpriced trainer like an Achaean in Troy. No one reaches out to pump his hand or clap his back. He’s nothing but a common spectator on the ground floor of the grandstand—behind all the celebrants, back where they sell burgoo and beer on tap. He’s standing on a bed of torn gambling stubs, and there’s gum on the bottom of his expensive shoe. He’s struggling to cover the ears of a smiling baby, but his eyes are trained on the horse, now being led back into the tunnel, the monster filly that has left the crowd delirious. Someday they will tell their grandchildren they were there the day the big girl won. They will say how they knew it was her, even though they all looked alike, how strong she was, how she danced at the finish and spun like a weathervane. They will make a legend of her simple runner’s life. They won’t understand that she was racing on a prayer of a leg. They won’t know that painkillers were coursing through her gladiator’s blood. And they won’t understand what happened next. They’ll think Henry was an idiot or a madman. But the madness had all come before.
New knowledge is sunflower honey on the tongue.
And so began the third and final movement of Henry Forge’s life.