For although God Gave unto Horses such excellent qualities at their Creation, now are they changed in their use and are become disobedient to man, and therefore must be subjected by Art.
—MICHAEL BARET, An Hiponomie (1618)
Moderator: Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to welcome you to the 2006 Kentucky Derby press conference featuring the connections to this year’s winning horse, the 2005 Eclipse American Champion Two-Year-Old Filly, Hellsmouth of Forge Run Farm. We’d like to introduce trainer Mack Snyder, owner Henry Forge, and jockey Reuben Bedford Walker III, a trio of horse racing’s finest. We’ll start with a few questions for Mack, a four-time Derby winner, two-time winner of the Breeder’s Cup, and all-around master of the three-year-old classics. Mack, can you say with confidence that Hellsmouth is the best horse you’ve ever brought to the Derby?
Mack: I sure as hell can.
Mod: She’s shown a lot of personality and quickly become a crowd favorite. Has she also become a Mack Snyder favorite?
Mack: Well, the love of my life is always the one in my bed.
Mod: Now, it’s a win but not a Derby record. Were you hoping for better speed today?
Mack: Records are nice, but time only matters in jail.
Mod: But can she take the Triple Crown? We’ve never seen a filly go all the way—Genuine Risk came closest—but then I think we can all agree we’ve never seen a filly quite like this one.
Mack: I’m standing here today to tell you this filly can and will go all the way. You can take that to the bank.
Mod: Now turning to the owner of Hellsmouth, a very familiar face in the racing world and one who’s been chasing a Derby win for more than two decades, Mr. Henry Forge. Henry, do you feel that despite last year’s injury, your filly can be ready for the Preakness in two weeks, then the grueling mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes?
There was no immediate reply. All eyes turned to Henry, sitting stiffly in his shirtsleeves before the black YumBrands!YumBrands!YumBrands! banner that rippled faintly in the breeze from a fan. That same breeze prickled the sweat on Henry’s forehead as he looked from one camera lens to the next, a sea of dark apertures narrowing on his face: age-freckled, quiet, haggard. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. Then he said, “As of today I am pulling Hellsmouth from racing.”
He wasn’t sure at first whether he had said the words aloud, because no one moved. The room pitched into a Quaker quiet. It was as though they were waiting for the joke to crack, but Henry didn’t even crack a smile. Beside him, Mack suddenly turned toward him, blooming pink, which turned to blustery red as his lips thinned. Then a single camera clicked, and the room came suddenly alive with the mad, syncopated clattering of a hundred cameras.
Mod: I … are you … I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understood you properly. Are you intending to pull Hellsmouth from Thoroughbred racing altogether, or…?
Mack: What? No, he’s— Hell no—he’s—
“Yes.”
The word was uttered and then another Yes followed on the first, but louder this time and more resolute. Yes and Yes. The flashes were blinding; Henry grimaced, unable to open his eyes against the onslaught. Yes, he was certain. When he earnestly tried to recall the force of the old passions and antipathies, he could not; he could barely remember them at all.
He opened his eyes and sought out Lou in the crowd; she had lifted Samuel out of his arms just before they’d taken their seats. He detected her on the fringe of the news conference, watching the event as it unfolded, alarm visible in her eyes. She shifted Samuel higher on her hip and—Samuel, yes, that child was the length and breadth of it now, the new world, his future, the whole future. His choice wasn’t shame now, it wasn’t even regret, though he had too many regrets to count; it was life.
It was rising in him—It—It could buoy him now, because it was no longer a chain. Henry came to his feet, knocking back his metal chair and pushing away the banquet table with a rough squawk, so that Mack and Reuben both scrambled backward, astonishment written in their every movement. Henry said, “I will contribute no more horses to this sport.”
Belatedly, Mack’s sense knocked back into place on his tongue. “Henry! Have you lost your goddamn mind?” But he was just biting air. Henry didn’t acknowledge him—was either unwilling or unable to hear him—amidst the sudden pandemonium that erupted in the room. Mack grabbed out wildly for his arm, but Henry slipped from the table, a gray figure flashing briefly before the YumBrands!YumBrands!YumBrands! banner before stepping directly into the press that swarmed around him.
Behind them all, abandoned, Reuben remained exactly where he sat, eyes unblinking with his fingers knotted at his anorectic chest as though the banquet table still remained beneath them. He blinked rapidly, trading the mask of victory for one of a different kind. “Don’t do it,” he said on the barest whisper of breath. “Don’t do it, old Paddy, or you’ll be sorry.”
Henry pressed into the frenzied crowd.
“Mr. Forge, what’s brought about this abrupt change of direction?”
“Have your personal losses this year had any bearing on this turnabout?”
“Mr. Forge, are you one hundred percent sure?”
The feet were thunderous, the flashes a lightning storm. There were many voices in the storm calling out his name, but they didn’t matter at all now, because there was no chaos in him any longer. He simply shouldered his way through them with a steadfast impassivity, his face a cipher. He walked straight to Lou and touched her elbow, and together they moved toward the door. Though her eyes were full of unasked questions, she didn’t say a word, only switched Samuel to the opposite hip and kept pace as Henry began to hurry now with the sudden lightness of his release. His denial was an assent, and it was total. He was sure he was doing the right thing, though it was the hardest thing. The sensation was deliciously unfamiliar. Was this finally joy?
They attained the cooler air of the outer hall and passed through the main double doors where the sky yawned empty of rain, where the soaked ground glittered, and the dusty smell of horseflesh was swamped by the damp breeze. In the distance, beyond the roiling press, straggling fans still walked the grounds, boisterous hats weaving through the parking lot, where drunks were draped like amorous ragdolls on tailgates. Henry knew somewhere, probably in the back of some van, the garland of red roses was beginning to brown. Time is a horse you never have to whip.
As they pushed through the turnstiles, Lou finally gripped his arm, saying, “Henry, are you really doing this?”
Henry’s mouth was empty as an urn. He kept walking in the direction of Barn 23.
Hellsmouth sensed them through the ground before she saw them. She’d been hotwalked and cooled out and was now done with her photos, all her showing out. Something was over. Her body was loose-limbed, sleepy, yet she wasn’t exhausted, only resting. She was drifting in and out of fleet dreams under the hands that dried and curried her, that rubbed cream into her hide and made her shine.
Suddenly, her ears straightened and swiveled. Her tail twitched minutely, then whipped, and in a single agitated movement, she swung her dark, articulate head across the chain at the gate of her stall, her lips risen fretfully over her teeth, her mouth working.
Henry Forge and the horse stood eye to eye. For a long moment, they breathed each other’s breath. Henry fought the urge to draw back away from the reality of what he saw, the reality of this horse, what he had not let himself see before. Hellsmouth was bold as life, but her brittle bones were no match for her power. The creative vitality of her gait, the tremendous heat of her racing engine fueled by her competitor’s blood, that fierce physical ambition, which was wholly natural to her and as inextricable as her limbs, would come at the expense of her life. She would break. A competitor like Hellsmouth could never stop of her own accord. She was not just unwilling but actually unable to save herself.
“Load her up,” Henry said.
Allmon, standing at the filly’s head, made no immediate move. He’d also sensed Henry’s approach, watched his whiteness intrude on the private warmth of the stall. Now his eyes were locked on Henry’s, but he wasn’t watching the realizations coalesce moment to moment in the man’s eyes; he saw the darker shadow of a man dangling in his pitch-black pupils. Allmon flushed with hate that rose like a cold fire from his feet to the very follicles of his hair.
“Load her up,” Henry said again. “I’m taking her home.”
But Mack was there first. “No, no, no, no, hold on!” He was shouldering his way through the press, which had gathered, bearing down on their small circle of man and beast. “Nobody’s going nowhere! Just hold on one fucking minute!”
“I said load her up!” The words erupted from Henry, startling Allmon from his hateful reverie. He realized quite suddenly what was being demanded of him and he stepped forward, his movements a rude assertion, eyes wide and lips parted for rebuttal, but Mack was on the warpath.
“Don’t do this, Henry,” the trainer said, grappling for Henry’s elbow. “Just calm down—”
Henry whirled on Mack, his face finally ablaze with all the passion absent ten minutes before. “I won’t race her anymore, Mack. You’ll break her!”
If Mack was looking for acquiescence, he wasn’t going to find it. He stepped into Henry, his bewilderment wrapped in rising anger and his hands working wildly, uselessly between them as if gesturing for words out of the charged air. “Nobody’s breaking anybody!” he spat. “She’s a goddamned racehorse! Let her do what she does best!”
“Not like this! Not this…!”
“Yes, yes—actually, fucking just like this!” Mack rejoindered, his head hobbyhorsing on his ruddy neck, his arms wide so the press nearest him could smell his sweat. “Henry, this horse was born to run! What the fuck are you talking about?”
Allmon looked from Mack to Henry, then back to Mack. Systolic waves of shock began to roll through his torso. It began to dawn on him what was happening here, what Forge was doing. This wasn’t the plan, this sure as hell wasn’t the deal, and if what seemed to be happening actually happened, then he had survived his fucking life, had scrambled and fought, for nothing. Nothing.
“She runs because we made her to run,” blurted Henry, “not because—”
“Made her to run…?” Mack snapped, sputtering like a jalopy. “Okay, Henry, okay, okay! Maybe because we”—he fumbled wildly, he couldn’t wrap his mind around the goddamned absurdity of the foreign words about to come out of his mouth—“because we made their nature, doesn’t make it any less their … what the fuck, Henry! What are you doing to me here?”
But Henry had turned his back on Mack, stonewalling him better than any ex-boyfriend ever had, and now the damn baby was whimpering behind him, and the press, those jackals, didn’t know where to look any more than Allmon did, and Mack’s eyes were apocalyptic as he tried to discover the final word, the persuasive knife that would slice straight through the insanity to the common fucking sense. “Henry Forge! Listen to me now! A filly like this—she’s a bullet out of a gun! You pulled the trigger three years ago and you cannot—LISTEN TO ME, YOU CANNOT STOP THE BULLET NOW! All you’ve got to do is just stand back! Stand back and let her happen, Henry.”
There was a long moment of silence as Allmon and the press leaned in, collective breath on hold.
“I’m asking you to load my horse,” said Henry, very steely and very quietly in Allmon’s direction.
Allmon, silent until this very moment, leveled Henry with a brute stare. “Over my dead body.” But the words were stronger than his hope and crumbled on his tongue like old tabby, because two things happened at once: he realized suddenly that his previous maneuvering was a farce, that his name on a dotted line was worth less than an afternoon’s dream, that it was always men like Forge who controlled everything in this world; then Lou stepped into his line of vision, baby in her arms. At first Allmon spared only a fleet glance for the way her right hand cradled the child’s head all sprung with plump curls that framed his wide-eyed face. But then he noted the soft darkness of the face. Blood stalled in Allmon’s veins. Instant recognition: loose curls and those eyes. He knew them from photographs of himself as a baby, photos that had disappeared along with everything else, thrown away by strangers when his mother died. His lips parted in shock, and his wide eyes slid back to Henry and locked in place like the old prison door.
Henry had been watching. They shared a long stare in which a hard reckoning began to unfold, and then Henry said, simply, “Yes.” Henry reached forward and slipped the reins from Allmon’s hand, but Allmon jerked his hand away as though Henry’s touch were a snake. The purity of his astonishment transformed his face into that of a child’s, the Allmon of a hundred years ago.
When Henry spoke again, his words were softer. “I’ll load her,” he said, and then he passed a cold, hard ring into Allmon’s trembling hand. His car keys. “Why don’t you bring my car to the farm tomorrow. I’ll do my best to explain.”
Without further ado, he left Allmon where he stood frozen and led the big girl out. Though her ears were plastered back and her lip curled, she strode purposefully from her confines, her head high as the cameras captured the cut of her balletic leg, the muscle showing stark from the day’s dehydration. She took all of Allmon’s breath with him as she went, and he fumbled without oxygen for the scraps of truth to form the whole. But the whole was hell. If this child was his, then Henry had lied to him for six months. If this child was his, then he had never been betrayed by Henrietta; in truth—in truth—the betrayal was all his own. He had used her like meat and then left her to rot. I am Mike Shaughnessy’s son after all. Suddenly, woodenly, he began to move in the direction of the baby, of the horse, of whatever remained of his broken and blasted life.
When Hell was tied and secure in the trailer, she lowered her head to gaze out the slide window at the cameras. She raised her lips at the press and stamped dreadfully. At pasture, on the track, or tied in an aluminum box, she knew she was the gift. And she knew they knew it too.
Henry turned to Lou and lifted Samuel out of her arms. “Thank you,” he said simply, then hauled himself into the Chevy’s bucket seat and looked at Mack and said, “We’re done here, Mack. You’re too hard on horses.”
Mack, who had charged after them, raised one red hand, as rough and cracked as an old, worn baseball glove, and pointed directly at Henry. “You listen to me good, Forge,” he said, then made a circling gesture at the press. “Listen, all you assholes. You think I’m hard on horses? You think I’m tough? Well, I’m the only one in this fucking place who knows what respect looks like! All you critics writing your shitbit reviews, you Monday morning quarterbacks that can’t even throw a spiral, you actually think it’s a virtue”—his lips trembled—“to coddle a great talent? To rein in the best of the very best? Listen to me, if you got the fire, then you burn! You don’t throw fucking ashes on it! You don’t tamp it out!” He pointed into the trailer at Hell, and she looked right at him with one black, half-wild eye. “It’s better to be great and break down than to never be great at all. She knows it, I know it, and anybody with any goddamn courage knows it. That filly’s got bigger balls than the rest of you put together!”
Henry settled Samuel on the seat beside him and inserted the key. Allmon pressed against the crowd—that is my son, that is my child—but try as he might he couldn’t get through the crush of press that surrounded the trailer like a security detail. Panic flooded him.
Mack stepped up to the driver-side door. Even as his head seemed to balloon visibly with a fury that threatened to burst his eyeballs, his voice was steady and hard. “Don’t do this, Henry,” he said. “Don’t you turn on that goddamn truck. Listen to what I’m saying. Listen to what that horse’s body is saying.”
The truck engine roared to life.
Mack punched at the air and took a single step forward. His voice was so loud, they damn near heard him on the other side of Churchill Downs. “You bring her back to me, Henry!” he yelled as the truck pulled out with the trailer. “Either she’s on my farm in one week for the Preakness, or I’m gonna come get that filly myself, and she’s going all the fucking way! Do you hear me, HENRY? ALL THE MOTHERFUCKING WAY!”
* * *
Henry sped eighty miles an hour down I-64. The Kentucky acres sweeping past, he was buffeted by wave after wave of realization. This horse—this life—was his patient, always had been, always would be. The soul was not an essence but a doctor. The salve was not medication or temporary rest or painkillers, but his action in the world under the aegis of his will. Yes. I, Henry Forge, swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea, and I take witness to all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following oath and agreement: I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts. If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all humanity and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my life.
Henry looked toward the bloodred sky of diminishing day and wondered whether there was forgiveness in it. Who was his doctor? Did he even deserve one? His eyes filled with tears and they turned the sky to a crimson wash, so it seemed he was peering through tears of blood. He would be home in an hour.
* * *
They were gone—the cameras, the press, the crowds. It was so quiet now you could almost hear the monarchs winging over the milkweed and wallflower and the pollen tumbling through the breeze. Allmon was squatting with his palms flat against the outside wall of the barn, the exit to nowhere within his sights, when he detected the distinct patter of a featherweight approach, fleet feet ferrying a man on the run. On those feet followed an unmistakable voice, a squeal on gravel with its faux jaunty no-care air: “I jumped in the seat and gave a little yell; the horses ran away, broke the wagon all to hell; sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn, never been so screwed since the day I was b— Allmon, as I live and breathe! Why so forlorn, my man?”
Allmon didn’t look up, he didn’t have to. His head remained bowed, as if the crumbled mulch between his feet required the whole of his concentration, but all he saw before him was his son’s face. “Go away,” he hissed. It was barely a whisper, but the force of hate in his words surprised even him. He couldn’t take any more today. He couldn’t take any more ever.
Reuben reared back. “What? Who? Me? What has dear Reuben done?”
Allmon came up unsteadily from his crouch, so he rose with the height and clumsy movement of a bear to turn heavily on Reuben. “Forge left. He took Hell and left.” There was more, but he couldn’t form the words.
Reuben’s mouth smiled slowly with a pained draw, and a single veiny hand drifted to his chest with cold, calculated surprise. “Withdrew her out from under this here jock?”
“Withdrew.” The word was disgusting, vile. It was violent. It smashed the whole of hope.
Reuben shook his head and whistled softly. “Jockey claims foul…”
Allmon practically spat words through rising grief. “Nobody’s running that horse again, not even you—the great Reuben Bedford Walker III!”
“Are you sure about that?” Reuben’s slaten eyes never wavered from Allmon’s face.
“I’m done!” And then Allmon forced the worst words. “He took my son!”
Reuben cocked his head. “Your what?”
“That motherfucker lied to me! He’s raising up my son!”
Now Reuben reared back cartoonishly with a surprise that even he couldn’t hide. “By Jove and Elegua…,” he whispered.
Allmon stretched his arms wide. “My fucking child! My child’s in his house! I’m standing here and all I got in my hand is the keys to his fucking car. I’m sick, I need money. I need my own child! And all I got after all this, all of it—is some keys.” He stared down at the keys, heavy as a heart in his hand. Yes, men like Forge had the keys to everything.
Reuben shook his head and regained his bearings; he leaned forward with narrowed, coy eyes. “Out of the saddle and into the dirt—thereby hangs but not ends a tale. Snatched swaddlings aside, what about the horse? Riddle me this—do you or do you not have a deal with Mr. Forge? Surely the deal still stands and the filly must race to the end of the season. Of course”—Reuben cleared his throat—“Mack would take the reins if Forge were to become … indisposed. All’s well that ends well, isn’t that what they say when there’s something rotten in Kentucky?”
Now the impossible highs and lows of the day had worn Allmon’s self-control to a bloody nub. His child’s face swam before his aching eyes. It was all he could do not to shake the jock right out of his simpleness; he wanted to pick up his scrawny 118-pound carcass and separate it from his chicken neck. “I made a deal with the devil!” He said it too loud and too slow, as if the jock were not only hard of hearing but stupid too. “No clause for withdrawing the horse! All I was supposed to do was keep her healthy, but nobody never said he couldn’t pull her. I got nothing. You hear me?” Then a sneaking thought: Forge lied, but I sold my child. My soul is as rotten as old fruit. He wanted to weep, but this was grief beyond weeping.
Reuben’s whole body grew utterly still, except for his fingertips, which twitched, and his eyes, which grew full of unfathomable things. With the speed of a striking snake, his arm swept through the crook of Allmon’s arm. The taller man was jerked from the barn wall with a hissing command and inhuman strength, which was the hard secret of the jock’s body: “Come along, my little wingnut. Come with me.” A mismatched pair; Reuben tugged him toward the border of a parking lot, away from prying eyes, but no one was watching them now, they were of no interest to anyone; no one cared now that the superhorse was gone.
When Reuben spoke again, his voice was winsome and savage in equal measure. “Now hear this,” he said. “The story’s not even over and you’re already telling it wrong! That’s the problem with you—you never learned to tell a story slant, never learned to tell your own. Why, not once have you wooed me with swashbuckling tales of your days on the streets, your adventures in prison! You’re too obedient by far, dragging your chains in resignation! Even when they’ve snatched your darling mtoto!” The jock shrugged and sighed. “But what can old Reuben do? Some are born to be kings, and some are content to be jewels on the king’s sleeve. Maybe it’s in the blood.”
Allmon didn’t listen with his old defended silence, his brooding brow shielding his eyes and overhanging his heart. He whirled to face the jock. “Why you always schooling me? I don’t need your fucking lectures! Do this, do that, talking nonsense. You don’t know shit about me!” But behind his words, he thought: Blood? My blood is poisoned. Momma gave me bad blood. A dying man wouldn’t drink my blood to save his own life.
Reuben reared back on his booted heel, the lines of his starved face like knife tracks down brown bread. “Is that right? I don’t know you? You think Reuben is a four-foot fool and ignorant as all that? Why, you’re transparent as glass! You’re nothing but a little nug of amber, and old Reuben can see clear through you to the other side!” He pressed his face up toward Allmon’s. “You think I don’t know the sobstory streets you grew up on? I smell government cheese on your breath, you got blisters on your thumbs from selling cut-rate crack! Concrete clefts in your eyes, bones broke by the police! Your daddy’s fled and your mama’s dead! You turned your back for one second and they stole your baby just like they always do! You think Reuben’s ignorant? Well, maybe you need to recognize just how much I recognize!”
Allmon was already talking over Reuben’s talk, features smeared with disgust and alarm. “That’s all you think I am? That’s it?”
Reuben waved a dismissive hand. “One man’s stereotype, another man’s award-winning performance. So you followed the script designed to mold you. They call you a brute born to a single mama, raised on welfare, sent to juvie, then prison, a man who walks out on his child and now shovels shit. Oh, you want their approval, but from now till eternity, they’ll feed you just enough scraps off their plate to keep you hanging around their knees with your tongue lolling out. You won’t starve to death, Allmon, but you’ll always be their bitch.”
Allmon roared, “I got nothing! All I’ve been doing, I’ve been trying to survive! The rules help them, not me! I didn’t make this world, but I got to survive in it! The game wasn’t designed for nobody but them to win!”
“Shhhh, I get it, I get it,” Reuben whispered, glancing over his shoulder to determine the limits of their privacy. Then with something that looked like compassion, he said, “You think I don’t understand the dreams you nurse in that big old coxcomb of yours? Think I don’t know you pissed your drawers the first time you laid eyes on these big old Kentucky mansions with their pretty horses running rounds? Their frosty girls and money-colored grass? Oh, but you didn’t just want the money, did you, my dear? Oh no—Allmon Shaughnessy wanted the dream!” Reuben searched for ammunition in Allmon’s distressed face. “The dream of the Deep. Dark. Southland.” He paused with the tip of his pink tongue between his teeth. “Well, has Reuben got the shock of a lifetime for you, Yankee Doodle Doo. Kentucky ain’t the Deep South; it’s the minstrel of the United States! Just a white nigger dandied up and trying to pass as an aristocrat! Haw!”
Allmon pressed a hand to his forehead as if to ward off the dim aura of a migraine. “I don’t even want to know what you’re talking about now.”
But Reuben was six feet tall and rising. There was no stopping him. “This land right here under your clumsy-ass feet? Why, this here’s the No-Man’s-Land, the Borderland, the Dark and Bloody Ground, the In-Between, the Slaughterhouse, the Wild Frontier—the original Nameless Place! But they won’t tell you that in school, no sirree!” Reuben spread his skinny arms as if to gather his powers. “See, back in the good ole cotton-picking days, all these plantations here—yes, my little almond, these plantations you so lust after—they grew corn to the eye and horses to the sky. Hickory-boned colts put cash in Kentucky coffers. But this here Commonwealth had a PR problem, didn’t they? The piss-yella Yanks were scared to death of our dark idyll, our low-down disordered hell! A hundred and twenty counties of bourbon and murder, thick with backward woodsmen and outlaws fond of affrays and fucking, an uncivilized land of barkers and daredevils and gunslingers, horse raiders and assassins, barn burners and Klansmen. A damnable district of dopers and dastardly deeds—whippings and murders and baleful butchery! Kaintuckee meant scrapings from the devil’s boot!” He yelped a sharp rebel yell.
“Why, there wasn’t one man in a hundred willing to brave our races for fear of getting shot, so they started building tracks in New Jersey and New York. Pimlico purses got plump, Saratoga got sass, and the races ran like a Longines. Now, the perfidious paddy jocks wanted their share of the take, because we brothers were the best, and they couldn’t gain a nose against us. So what do you think they did? Why, they staged a coup, of course, and blocked us from our own best game—they ousted us! Soon money was a river running north. Woe and lamentation! The Borderland went bust!”
Reuben leaned in. “So, what’s a sweet little state to do in the face of bad press?”
Allmon didn’t want to hear any more. He was growing increasingly ill with every word.
“Why, you spin, my little catfish. You spin like an ad man on Madison Avenue. Slap some columns on your farmhouse and paint it all white, get you some Spanish moss, rustle up an ancestral line and hire a noble Negro for a portrait, a sorry brother still bowing to the Lost Cause, scraping his bitchass snout on the ground. And marvels never cease! It works”—Reuben hissed and winked and drawled slow—“’cause don’t nobody know they history.”
A pinprick pierced the skin of Allmon’s mind. The Reverend was right; I never should have crossed that river.
Reuben crowed in delight. “Yes! The Confederacy rose again for the very first time! Everybody forgot the Dark and Bloody Ground wasn’t ever the Deep South at all, just a yellowbelly borderland of hellraisers and cowards. Most never fought for ole Jeff Davis a day in their lives! Kentucky didn’t secede till the war was over! But hang your stars and bars, muddle a mint julep, stick a lawn jockey on the drive, and everybody forgets what there is to forget! The revelation of reinvention—it’s the great white hope! The real American dream! Ain’t no fact in this world like a white man’s tall tale!”
Allmon stared down at the ground in wonder, the words transforming into fresh horrors in his mind. Reuben reached up one iron-rough hand and grasped his shoulder. It remained steady as he spoke, his voice now thick and heavy as a comfort. “But you didn’t know, my friend. For that old fiction, they got a man to sign away his life. Got him to sign away his baby boy.”
Allmon shook his head to stave it off, but a soul sickness was rising up and he couldn’t stop it. “I signed my name,” he whispered.
The jock waved away this objection with a brush of his other hand. “You need to unass that notion! Your black vernacular ass ain’t signed shit. X don’t mean nothing. Learn your history! White lies don’t add up to the truth! Your only choice was no choice!”
“I made a choice.” Allmon’s throat was full of shame, he was choking on it.
Reuben tossed up his hands in frustration. “No, goddammit—you keep telling the story all wrong! You think little sister had any choice when Massah sold her baby off the auction block at Cheapside, not seventy miles away from this here horse track? They call their madness logic, but that don’t make it logic! Your life or your child? You call that a choice? Why, it’s fuckery and perversion, the cant of the Kaintuckee! History, Allmon—learn your history!”
Allmon turned to him slowly like someone waking. “I know shit about them you don’t even know.”
“Then use it! Tell the tale! Throw open the doors of that prison!” The grip of the jock’s hand and grin grew monstrous. “Get loose and dark, get unruly and rank! Look at me—I’m black as a train and twice as fast, I’m gonna run you down with the new reality! The man that stole your child is the same man that killed your mother, the man that put you behind bars, that’s the same man that’s been stringing up the black brother since time immemorial. Think about that, Allmon! How you like them rotten apples? I picked them just for you.”
Allmon made an inhuman sound deep in his throat. Everything that had come before this moment was creating a bursting pressure in his chest.
Reuben raised one triumphant finger. “Let it penetrate your sticky ear! If that is not the truth, then they changed the definition of truth. What say you? Is it the truth?”
Allmon was dizzy with a swirling sensation, the muddy confluence of one will slipping into another.
“Tell me for the sake of that child! Yes or no?”
It shot out of him. “Yes!”
“Then cut your jesses and burst your bridle! That child belongs with its rightful owner!”
Mother and Momma. Her name was Marie.
Reuben’s whisper was harsh. “This is your time, Allmon…”
No, wait, wait, wait—
“Allmon…”
Allmon shook his head.
“Be a man.”
Allmon drew a harsh, sudden breath. Then he straightened up and turned an unblinking eye on Reuben. He stared disdain down his nose. “I don’t need you telling me what to do.”
Reuben blinked then and reached out to place a palm firmly on Allmon’s chest. “No,” he said, shaking his head as if weary. “You don’t. Your mind was made up before I turned the corner. I can see that now. You are the superior man in every way.”
Allmon shrugged off his hand. “I got to go.”
Reuben made a faint gesture toward Allmon’s hand. “And now you have the keys to the kingdom.”
Allmon said nothing in response. He had already turned away to scan the massive parking lot for the Forge Mercedes, a silver fish in a lurid sea of luxury cars. First he limped along on his aching joints, then he was running through the pain to get where he knew he had to go, where he was meant to go, where his child was being held hostage. Reuben watched him weave unsteadily between cars. He muttered, “A late response is still a great response.” Then he turned his back and thumped his chest once to clear the phlegm, realizing that the after-parties were elsewhere and soon to commence. He grinned.
* * *
Henry stared over the dash at the undulating expanse of Forge Run Farm, the filly behind him in her trailer, Samuel asleep on the bucket seat of the dually, content in the farm dust and the animal dander. With some shock, Henry realized that despite the uproar of the day, the farm—this world he had created—was still in his possession and nothing could change that. Here was the two-hundred-year-old house, which had been the dream of the first Samuel; here was the crumbling fence and the perpetual stream. Here was the overgrown orchard and the old barns converted and stocked with horseflesh he had bred.
It struck him as preposterous, impossible, that in short order his family would be exposed and naked to the world, that the taproot name, from which all their brief names had sprouted like a season’s leaves, would be ridiculed as some kind of fraud or, worse, would become synonymous with the way things fall apart, how autumn follows on every fulsome summer. Henry replayed his choices at the track, including his abrupt decision to bring Samuel and reveal him to his father. Allmon was a man he barely knew. Henry had imagined himself as stepping out of his family like a man emerging from shadow. But now on the firm ground of the farm, his resolve wavered, his old truculent defenses ever at the ready: if any crime had been committed, it was his father’s doing, not his own. Yes, Henry had lied stupidly, but he’d merely been a prisoner of another man’s ideas. His father had been the progenitor of hate and disunion, his father would have had half the world hanging from the boughs of a holly tree, his father was the one who—
His own thinking degenerated to white noise in his mind.
He could no longer convince his most faithful audience, himself.
Henry looked around helplessly, his old passions like vestigial organs. They couldn’t fill the vacuum created by the lost generation. It was breathtaking: Once his daughter had been a little girl on this very ground, her ring finger crooked, her legs bandy, her face configured by irreplaceable, unrepeatable bones. She had held her hands to her hips in a particular way. She had frowned like this, tilted her head like that. She had emerged as a singular mystery, sui generis, from the womb of the woman who had once been his wife—a woman with red lips he’d met on the track, a woman who had left after many, many arguments, none of which were more important than the gum on the bottom of his shoe. He still recalled the set of his young wife’s chin and how the iris of her eye soon turned the color of dissatisfaction. Now the little girl they had created was vanished. Her death was a marvel, a mystery, the ultimate school.
Henry raised a trembling hand to his brow as if shielding his eyes, though evening’s evanescent light streamed from a distant eternity behind the truck. His heart beat terribly. How could life be so boring and terrifying and exhilarating and confounding all at once? Its contradictions did not seem possible. He felt so old suddenly. Yes, he was old. But this was newly unobjectionable. Cut the throat of puer aeternus and bury him in a vacant chamber of Henry’s heart.
He watched with a kind of bland, uneventful horror as years of ambition swirled and washed rapidly down the drain.
My God, he had to get out of the truck or he was going to have a stroke, be laid down in the dust like his father had been that autumn day so many years ago. He eased his road-weary bones out into the dwindling warmth of the day. He needed the fresh breeze to clear his mind and strengthen his body. He needed his feet on the ground; he needed, most of all, to think.
So now there was nothing between him and the land. He saw that imminent change was all around him. The ragged and unattended orchard could be curated, its trees trimmed and grafted to produce a bounty of apples again. That could be enough to slake the thirst of a thousand people, and maybe it would. The breeding operation could be slowed, or halted—yes, even halted—and some of the paddocks returned to pasturage. After all, this was the finest growing land in the country outside of Iowa, and treasure troves of produce could be cropped. Even their new, relatively small garden could feed many more than Samuel and himself. Maybe, when all was said and done, he would return some of the land to its original wildness, something his daughter had seemed to value. Land needed no purpose after all. Land was an end in itself. Now to the barns—his excitement rose, he realized he could use them as they were. He could shelter and reschool retired Thoroughbreds. He had the permanent wealth to do so; racing had never been a moneymaking venture for him. Forge Run Farm could be a place of renewal and rest, where something old and broken could become fresh again. The very idea filled him with sober joy.
Hellsmouth interrupted his planning. She was stamping her impatience on the aluminum floor of the Turnbow, jutting her nose against the glass of the window. She swung her truculent head toward him when he pulled the ramp and unhitched the swinging door. She was here in this world as much as he was, and he would do well to remember it.
As he guided her out—and how good it felt in his shoulders, his hands, his whole being to handle his animal, the way it had felt when he was a younger man and racing was new to him, when the adventure of life was still largely to come—Hell seemed to have grown a hand on the journey. She loomed over him, her head swiveling on the tower of her neck, taking the farm in round. An uncontained shiver looped across her withers and under her girth. This was her old playground, and she recognized it, so she wouldn’t come placidly. She was barking like a seal, dancing up on springy legs that reminded Henry, not for the first time, of dark and knotty rose stems.
Good sense dictated that he install his champion in the foaling barn far from the wild stimulus of the fields, let her recalibrate to the freedom of the farm, a freedom near limitless against her life on the track. But she had other plans and pulled Henry across the brick chip lane to the old paddock where she had once nursed greedily, where she had gamboled as a weanling in the simple restraint of a nylon halter, where she had gazed across rumpled earth like the sides of green bells to the eastern mountains with their black interstitial valleys and glinting rivers. She knew this was where she belonged.
When Henry clipped her off the lead, Hell rocketed out into the field, her aluminum shoes blurring arcs that trampled timothy grass and tossed turf. Reaching the center of the paddock, she kicked out with the silliness of a goat, then jumped once and turned, her conformation showing out speed and stamina, the Remus and Romulus of her sport. She snorted, then gathered herself up and, with a triumphant leap, began to run. Henry reached for the top rail, suddenly terrified that she would drive herself through the fencing into the safety lane and reopen her chest or break her own bones. Instead, she cut savagely left at the first corner and traced a round in the falling light, beating a retrograde path, brightening in evening’s light and accelerating as she neared Henry like a heavenly body in egress. Her hooves reverberated into the roots of the trees.
Henry stepped away from the fence with his mind suddenly clear: If you closed every racetrack in the world, hung every bridle and threw open every paddock, horses would still race one another on the open plain. It was inevitable, undeniable, because their competition was innate. The greatest dreams of humans were nothing but clumsy machinations next to the natural ambition of animals.
Hell had barely slowed when Henry returned to the truck, where Samuel remained placidly asleep, exhausted by the excitement of the day. Henry drew up the bundled baby, but a question appeared suddenly in his mind, which had become like an empty room.
What if he had been born out on the tableland in a modest white farmhouse in Emerson, Nebraska, the child of landlocked Swedes, who told him, “This land will never make you rich. True wealth is in the hope for simple things. Son, work the land, dote on your children, and ease your elders into gentle deaths.”
Or, what if he had been born a fisherman in Mobile? What if he’d folded himself into his boat every morning and pressed out against the tide, trawling for tiny swimmers to feed to his neighbors, and did this every day for sixty years until his anonymous death, knowing nothing resembling worldly ambition, only the land and the sea and the land and the sea, and wanting nothing more?
But he, Henry Forge, had not been born into those lives. He had been born into this indelible life. This was his grandson against his chest and this was his diaper bag in his left hand. And this here was his kitchen door, which his father, that old colossus, had slammed again and again in frustration over the course of decades. Henry could not now bring himself to walk through that door, to reenter history. Not yet. Evening flooded everything. Final ruby light plunged across the pastures. It filled every corner of his senses. He had been favored by fate to live on this plot of land his entire life, as rooted as any plant. But for the plant there was no ambition, and so no madness into which it needed to descend to cut through the confusion of daily living, the crass noisemaking of everyday speech, the rapidity of time’s passage and its pseudolosses—what the human called its losses.
The flora and the simple fauna, they had no fathers, only genetic predecessors, and because they had no fathers, they had no stories, and because they had no stories, they didn’t suffer any notion of themselves. In the landscape behind his eye, Henry fashioned a prairie of purple coneflowers, lovely and indistinguishable. He imagined the absurdity of one flower asserting its singularity, its glory, yearning to stand a hard-won inch above its nearest neighbors, straining on its flimsy stalk, flailing its petals, whispering in a hoarse, pollen-choked voice, “Me! Me! Me!”
Ambition is a form of suicide if it kills the simple self.
He looked down into Samuel’s face. What do you know, Henry? His mind no longer howled with a grief that obscured fact; he had no more strength left to resist naked realization. There were galaxies in the body of every man and woman; Henrietta’s had gone unexplored. He had flung her life away before her death. And he had mistaken the black body for a beggar’s suit. Until today, until he had brought Samuel into the rain-washed open air of Churchill Downs, he had never rebelled against his father, not really.
What he knew could barely fill a teaspoon, and it looked mostly like hope: Samuel’s diaper would be dirty again shortly, he would wake once during the night, there would be a few more ear infections, then he would begin to crawl and come rounding along the el porch on a shiny red bicycle his grandfather had bought him, he would read many books full of useless information, then make love with a woman and have a child, succeed at something, fail at many more things, argue perhaps to the point of breaking with his own child, then stoop and shrivel and go slack on some hospice bed somewhere, his eyes wide with Lavinia’s disappointed wonder.
Still, Henry did not reach for the door. Though his body was exhausted—never more so—his mind was not fatigued. In his arms, Samuel was making the kittenish sounds of waking. In a minute or two, they would pitch headlong into a darkly blue night. But Henry’s race was not yet run. There was still something to be known, something that arrested his movement. His mind pressed forward, grappling for it; he could feel the ache of its muscular exertions.
He might be a fool, a climber, a dreamer, supremely guilty, maybe he was even evil, yet hadn’t he preserved the perfection of this land? Who else but the Forges and their ilk had done this, could do this? The poor of the earth were the tramplers of the earth, and that was the truth. Give them a beautiful thing and they would foul and wreck it. One last time, the old fire reasserted itself: Why should he, Henry, restrain himself? He was not the child of immigrants, not a fisherman, not a simple, unremarkable flower in a field. Look at what he had built; look at what he alone had made from the mud of his will and the mortar of his desire! If he was indeed a member of the animal kingdom—and he would grant that he shared something with the crude and base animal—why should he restrain himself when restraint was required of no other beast? The dogs rutted in the yard and the lions slaughtered the antelopes. The owl was as ruthless as the rattlesnake and so on and so on. Even the earth obeyed the demands of its nature: it snatched everything, absolutely everything, whether mountain or beast or daughter, back to its breast. Human beings alone were capable of greatness. Only they could even conceive of greatness. So he had stomped on necks, so he had used his daughter. He had grown rich in the wild capitalism of life! Those incapable of greatness despise greatness the most; theirs were the loudest voices denying its very possibility.
Father, we are uniquely capable of morality. We must be moral, because we can be moral.
He stood very still as the words settled like silt to the floor of his veins.
We can snatch from the air the abstractness of numbers, adding and subtracting and making logic from magic, and because we can, we do, and we must. We can build pyramids and sky-piercing towers, so we must. We can wrestle language from our grunting, so we must. We can map our physical mysteries with machines of our own making. We can classify the species of the earth, name every stone and streamlet. We can run a hundred miles, and we can walk on the face of the moon, so we must—and then we must go farther.
We can, from the chaos of existence, extract meanings, which do not exist. We can make ourselves philosophers and scientists and priests. We can construct our unnatural civilizations—we can, and therefore we must. To starve our genes is to honor our genes. With fear and loathing we can stand on the necks of our parents and refuse them. We can evolve from simple to complex. We can choose survival of the species over survival of the self. We can say no to nature and form a conspiracy of doves.
We are uniquely capable of morality, therefore we must be moral. That is our nature.
* * *
Across miles of time, I am coming for you, Henry Forge, and I am coming to settle for my son. I’m taking from you what’s not yours, what I had no earthly business giving away. My fingers are shanks, my arms are lead pipes, my head is a cinder block to your skull. My life is death.
It’s the bullpen for you, Henry Forge.
Let me tell it to you straight. Let me open your fucking ears until they bleed. I’m going to rip your eyelids away. In your fancy fucking car, I’ve got a story to tell.
The holding cell is this: dumb, dirty, sick, tired, evil, bored motherfuckers—forty of them shoved into a cell built for fifteen. I’m a kid among men. It’s crazy, terrifying loud, sound of a cranked-up soap opera with bad reception over the wailing honky-tonk singer on the guard’s radio, and there’s so much talk, high-pitched crank chatter, two dudes fighting and someone yelling nonstop at the guards, begging and pleading, then talking shit, then begging again, and somebody’s sick, the noise makes your head spin. And the smell! You try to breathe without using your nose so you don’t retch—it’s cigarettes, urine tang, BO smell, whole place like a barnyard and shit, oh my God, the shit. Only two things nonhuman in this crowded, sweaty hellhole, concrete benches and a stainless steel toilet clogged with shit. You got to go so bad, you don’t think you shit since Cincinnati, but you’re not about to do that in front of these people. You know what happens. You’ve heard all the talk, half the brothers in Northside had gone up inside. So you know. And they’re all watching. Big-ass black Gs with hooded eyes and tattooed arms like trees, and white, meth-addled motherfuckers, strung out with open sores and scabs all over and mean, you can tell, like raw pitbull mean, a few wore-out men smoking or muttering or coughing up spit, but all of them keeping an eye on you, because nobody here is white with money, so you’re the lowest on the totem pole, just a kid, someone says,
“Young.”
But you’re too scared to look at who said it. You stare straight ahead, stoic, try to look tough.
“Cigarette?” someone says, and squeezes in beside you.
“Naw.” You firm up your shoulder. You can’t accept nothing from no one. You can’t owe nobody nothing. But the guy isn’t leaning into you, isn’t pressing your space, isn’t trying to insinuate. You realize it’s some old dude, hopefully harmless. Maybe. But you don’t look him in the eye, you keep staring straight ahead, because you can’t trust yourself not to break down. Grief is blocking up every orifice—can’t shit, can’t piss, can’t cry, you wouldn’t be able to eat if there was anything to eat. Your mother is six days in the ground. Everything inside you is paralyzed.
“What they bring you in for?”
Grand theft auto, speeding, driving without a license, resisting arrest, possession of a controlled substance, there’s more but the words are all running together and it’s confusing, it’s like you’re trying to read left to right or something.
“You got previous arrests?”
“Yeah.”
The man nods. “They gonna send you up then.”
“I’m seventeen.” The words jet out, almost indignant. High with disbelief.
Dry laugh. Then he just says, “Well, they gonna send you to juvie first. But then, you going in. Me, I been in and out since I was twelve. Trust me, you be all right if you play. But hear me, Young: Niggahs always gonna try. Got to be on the awares. Fresh meat. Know what I’m saying?”
Stricken, you dare to glance at the man.
The man purses out his lower lip. “You gonna figure it all out, but you got to be wise like a serpent. You ain’t small but you ain’t big neither. You got a hard face, that’s good. That’ll get you mad respect if your fists as hard as your face. So when you get up in there, you gotta act a man. Get some cat in your stride. Straight up rough. No motherfucking hesitation. Don’t nobody care if you a teenager except the niggahs that aim to turn you out.”
Then the man settles into himself, crosses his arms over his chest, looking sleepy. He’s done, his wisdom imparted. But that’s it? There isn’t anything else? You turn and stare through the bars, but you’re just one of a dwindling many—they keep getting hauled off for their arraignments or let out on bail. You stare in desperation at the guards like maybe they’ll recognize you, see the little kid in you. But the guards are white, glassy-eyed, they’ve seen it all before, years and years of it. You all look alike. You aren’t Allmon anymore, Mike Shaughnessy’s son with the Reverend’s hands and Marie’s soft nature. You’re just a black boy neither big nor small with a fat nose and 3b hair, a body with no past and no future. A notevenreallywannabe thug. Nothing. Less than nothing.
When they close that rumbling thundering deadening door of steel bars, you’ve officially passed through the gates of hell.
Now, today, here in this car on this May evening, all you got is the memories flooding in … and pain. Can’t lie to yourself anymore. It’s here. It was always in you, Marie’s lost life making a wild wail of your joints and eyes. And you thought you had got control somehow—in this world where they murder mothers! But, Allmon, Marie got used and abused by Mike Shaughnessy just like Henrietta got used and abused by you—no, don’t think, can’t think. This isn’t even about that, it’s not even about your child, who got tricked out of your arms; this is about simple survival now! When Henry Forge takes away the future, he doesn’t just take away money, no, he takes away your chance to go to the doctor and say, “See I got this little problem, just a setback, but I know you got medicine for me. I know you can save me and you will save me. Because I got money now. That’s the key to survival in this country. I got money, so in this great nation that means I deserve to live.”
I’m talking to nobody at all, am I? No one in the living world is listening. They kill your most precious thing, then close their ears to you. But I’ll say it anyway:
The trial is in a plain, nondescript room, nothing fancy, some grooved paneling on the wall under fluorescent lights, an oak desk—you’re freaked out by how normal everything looks, how empty the room is, not like on TV—with a white guy behind that desk watching all impassive as the prosecutor argues and your attorney, who you never talked to before five minutes ago in the crowded hallway outside, counterargues, and you get on the stand for maybe four minutes and begin to haltingly describe what has happened to you, Northside, juvie, your momma, her dying—no, wait, I was something else before all that, I promise, the Reverend can back me up—but the man says, “If your list of infractions wasn’t so extensive, I might be moved by your story. But, frankly, I am not. In fact, I’m tired of it. For the life of me, I can’t see what distinguishes you from so many identical young men who parade through these chambers and ask for leniency, day after day, year after year, all with a sob story, all seemingly repentant but right back here in two months’ time if I let them go, all a burden on society—or, as in your case, a threat to society. If your experience in juvenile camp did nothing to curb your … enthusiasm for criminality, then I see zero call for leniency. I have no more patience for so-called kids like you. I’m sentencing you as an adult. You made your choice, Mr. Shaughnessy. You made all of your choices a long time ago.
“You are hereby remanded by the Kentucky Department of Corrections for the term of twelve years. Because you are seventeen, you will spend four months in a residential facility, then you will be transferred to Bracken. You will serve six years before being considered eligible for parole. May you be an example to others.”
Take it away. Clasp its ankles in manacles to hobble it. Place a chain around its waist. Now weave cuffs through the chain and secure its wrists in the cuffs. And drive it away just like you’re driving now.
Ice is breaking on the surface of the river. Allmon wants to hold all the floes together, reassemble the solidity and stolidity secured by the dead cold, but he can’t, it’s coming apart under him as he’s trying to cross with his son in his arms; he can hear it whining and moaning as it cracks. It’s because he’s running too hot with this disease his mother gave him, the disease maybe he gave to his son, the disease Marie was cursed to bear because of her black burden of a body, black as river as grave as starless sky
Allmon’s mouth is filling with water, but there’s still room for words.
The youth offender facility is: nothing really. Not scary, just boring, trifling, you’ve done this before. It’s like being a senior in high school; nobody fucks with you anymore, and it’s not as intense as you think it’s gonna be.
But the penitentiary is: Anarchy. Your worst fucking nightmare, only all day every day, 24/7, no escape. It’s not where they house men, it’s where they make animals. After they wash you down, delouse you, spread your cheeks and root around in your anus, they walk you for the first time along the tier of the main line to your cell, and all those eyes, black eyes brown eyes blue eyes, from the dayroom up the four dizzying floors, turn to watch you, and suddenly the rooster crows, the dogs start their barking, there’s sheep and screaming birds and yowling cats, the sound rises, shriek piling on shriek until it crescendos to pure madness and you’re more than halfway to panic. The sound of wild animals is so horrifying, your body would run away out of pure instinct if you didn’t have a guard right at your back. That cacophony is worse than the sound of your cell door closing the very first time, which is a casket closing.
Six years in a cage is six lifetimes.
Your body is eighteen years old
you say when your grizzled old cellie asks. Shakes his head ruefully, doesn’t say nothing, ignores you thank you god thank you god thank you god thank you
because you don’t even know what it means to look tough anymore. You don’t know what it means to act hard on the inside. Up is down and hell is on earth in this inverted world. For the first time you are thankful for your naturally unfriendly face—a tough face only a mother could love—but it’s small change next to these dudes six-five and up, cannon arms, cockstrong terrifying motherfucking extraterrestrial power in barely human form. You force yourself to look right at them, show them you’re not scared, but you’ve never been so scared in your life. Your time back in Northside when you ran with small-time thugs, that was just playacting. This is the worst, realest life.
That first night, you can’t sleep, think you’ll never sleep again, you’re just staring out in the dark and trying to stay alert. It’s not long before you hear some wicked sound across the way, across the open space on the opposing tier, scuffling or sobbing, gagging and retching, you have some idea and it’s making you sick, you’re sitting up on your mattress when a guard runs down the tier and shines his flashlight directly into the cell opposite yours and burned into your retina you see a big white monster fucking some skinny white dude up the ass, and there’s blood on this big man’s yanked-down drawers and his fat hand is wrenching open the mouth of the bottom, saliva glistening to the concrete floor, the man’s terrorized eyes looking like they’re going to fall out of their sockets. And now the animal cries are rising up the floors again, the jackals, the dogs, the crows. These two men—or one man and one animal—get hauled out by five guards, one sent to the hole, one sent limp as a rag to the infirmary. You think you’re gonna throw up, but you don’t, because you can’t.
You make a decision right there: That’s not gonna be you. You’re gonna survive. Whatever it takes. You’ll cut someone’s throat if you have to. So first thing, you make a shank out of a soda can by folding it and wrapping it around itself and stomping on it. You keep it in your trembling hand. Until the first shakedown, which is when they inevitably find it. They give you a pass this first time, seeing as you’re young and fresh, and they don’t send you to the hole. They’re barely out of the cell when you’re busy making another.
You do it right there in front of your bemused cellie, who says, “Ain’t got to worry about me, I ain’t gonna fuck with you.” It takes a few more days of unrelenting terror before you actually believe him, because he does in fact—thank you thank you thank you god—leave you alone. All he ever does is sit on his mattress and drink hooch. He works in the cafeteria and somehow manages to make potato wine without any actual potatoes. But he never seems drunk, just deflated as an old balloon. His cheeks sag down to his neck.
“How come that shit don’t make you sick?” you ask him.
“Been drinking it for years. Till I get out.”
“When you getting out? Where you gonna go to?”
“Heaven, dawg,” the man says. “Or hell. Either one better than this place.”
Yes. The forty-foot walls, cell blocks running the length of a football field, gun towers, razor wire, guards with their twelve-gauge shotguns who bang their flashlights on the bars all hours of the night, waking everybody up, plus the motion sensors and the shakedowns, the mad labyrinth of gangs and allegiances you can’t navigate because you’re nothing but a scrub fish. But none of that’s the worst of it.
You’re so used to thinking it’s the white man who fucks you that it’s just instinct to get under the wing of these black dudes. What your naïve ass doesn’t realize is they fuck down color lines here; mad-dog Aryans on scrawny white boys and blue-black brothers on black. How the hell were you supposed to know? So the first black dude who’s decent, who nods and says what up from a respectful distance in the cafeteria, is somebody you acknowledge once. Smile with one corner of your mouth while trying to look hard. Like that’s possible.
But no, Allmon, you’re an idiot, a fucking idiot a motherfucking idiot idiot IDIOT!!! That’s the same man who just grabs you two days later and throws you against a wall like you don’t weigh a thing—six feet and 185 pounds but you’re nothing, there’s always somebody bigger than you—and as your head cracks against the tile, he says, “Your cunt.” Doesn’t even have to finish the sentence. “Fuck you,” automatic out of your mouth. But just as quick he punches your windpipe with one hand, slams your temple with the other. And walks away as you sprawl down the wall. And people are just standing there watching it happen, watching you ragdoll. Which is worse than the insult, you know that instantly.
Life inside the migraine. You can’t go to the infirmary. You can’t snitch. You can’t confront him, he weighs like 275 pounds. You can’t go anywhere but back to your cell, where your cellie knows, ’cause that’s how it works here, everybody knows everything while it’s still happening. He sighs like he’s almost too tired to tell you anything, but finally says, “Talking shit ain’t gonna cut it. Just feathers against bullets. He still gonna turn you out.” And he points to the combination lock on your cell locker. “Put it in a sock,” he says very quietly, and makes a swinging and slamming motion like he’s bringing down a hammer.
You rear back. “That’s murder one! They’ll send me up for life.”
Your cellie shrugs. “You in the slaughterhouse now. Cut or get cut.”
So there it is. It’s not a matter you need to consider deeply. Your body’s going to go for the Hail Mary pass, and you know it, because to refuse to choose is also to choose. But here’s the thing: You know if you do it in front of people, you’re caught for sure. If you do it in private, that won’t send the right blood message. In the end, you just pray a message you do send is loud enough. Like the loudspeakers that holler at the prisoners all day, every day.
So, you carry it on you, two socks tied together around your waist under your khaki shirt, lock just hanging there like a big, cold eye. You figure out quick you can’t just go attack him in his cell while he’s napping because someone will see you do it—plus, he sleeps on a top bunk. Your only option is to get him in the shower. He likes to be the first one in the showers in the morning. So, very next day, when the unit’s still dark, he trundles down to the washroom, big, hulking beast in nothing but a snatch of towel, and you slip out of your cell as soon as you see him turn from the dayroom into the showers. You can’t follow him in there—the cameras that point at the sink catch the silhouette and sometimes the face of anyone who enters. You need a blind spot. So you have to wait out in the dark dayroom by the trash can, praying no one else follows and catches sight of you. But you don’t have to wait long, which is good because your terrifying reality is tightening like a noose around your neck, blocking air and blood and maybe your ability to act. You don’t even know if you can feel your arms anymore, but, sure enough, the body does what’s necessary. When that big motherfucker comes sauntering out of the shower, you step out of the shadows and bring a swift cracking blow to the back of his skull.
He drops straight down to the waxed floor, his cheekbone cracking audibly when he hits. You expect to feel an overwhelming urge to run, but you don’t. You’re steady and levelheaded, as if the first blow has strangely relaxed you. You raise your hand again. One more blow to the head would probably kill him. Hard blows to the body will put him out of commission and, if you’re lucky, get him transferred. You land swift, sickening blows to his back, wracking that metal against his backbone, because you want to paralyze him, not out of revenge, just good sense. Five or six blows and your internal sensor says that’s it—wrap it up. You fling the socks in a trash can and scoot back to your cell, draping the lock back on the locker. You slide right back in bed.
Your cellie is watching you, wide awake, just lying there. You can hear him breathing. You try to match your breath to his and pretty soon it’s almost back to normal and then the uproar comes and it’s crazy loud, so you run to the steel bars with him to peer out, and the two of you holler at the guards like everyone else, make all the mad animal sounds, and then you simmer down and act normal as can be all day, don’t change your body language or any of your habits—except in the cafeteria. When you walk in there, you straighten up and stroll with a new confidence through that fraught gauntlet, looking every single one of those men in the eye—every single motherfucking one—and see how more than a few nod at you? Feel how the air is changed and silent? That’s the sound of respect. Your ability to inspire fear is the only currency you will ever have in here.
And now you know how to survive.
Six years, six lifetimes.
You look around you sometimes at the living nightmare, at the blacks and the poor white trash so country they almost sound black, and you think somewhere out there it’s not like this. There’s black lawyers and professors and ambassadors and businessmen. Somewhere. But those are just words inside your mind and your mind is inside.
And even if those fancy blacks do exist, you fucking hate them anyway. You understand now why the Reverend used to rail against them. They don’t give a fuck about you any more than white folks do. In fact, they’re worse than white folks; they’re traitors. The way you walk, talk, spend your cash, rent-a-center house you live in, tricked out car you drive, your whole life—it all embarrasses the shit out of them. You are their living, breathing shame. They’re the ones who still call you nigger. The whites don’t have to anymore, because the state does it for them.
Who’s gonna change this world? Most of these inmates won’t ever get out. The ones that do, most of them will be back.
They grow failure here like flowers.
They say there’s gonna be a black president someday. Maybe. Or maybe just black skin. Either way, you won’t ever get to vote in Kentucky. Won’t have a place to live, ’cause you won’t qualify for Section Eight housing to get your feet on the ground, won’t ever serve on a jury to keep a brother out of jail, won’t ever get a good job once you X the little felony box, can’t legally carry a gun to keep some crazy racist from killing you, and there was never any protection against the cops to begin with.
Men like Forge can get away with anything. But you? It’s over—no money, no life, no hope. But that was always in the script, wasn’t it? That’s how they wrote it. If anyone has eyes, they can read it. It’s written in black blood on white paper.
No matter the crime, they sentence every single one of you to death.
* * *
There it is, the house. With its lower-story windows blazing, its upper stories loom like a grievous shadow on a foundation of pure light. Allmon abandons the Mercedes down at the foot of the drive near the road, the driver’s door wide and the alarm pinging softly. He moves across the lawn in the dark, but he isn’t headed for the house. His every move is deliberate and firm as he heads for the barns with his .45 in his hand—not just loaded but jacked with eight bullets at the ready. He’s come for his son, but he has other business first.
The night is as dark as the inside of a box, and the night watchman is nowhere to be seen; he must be with the other grooms at the Osbourne house on the far side of the bowl, raising silver mint julep cups in celebration. Half the state is either drunk on bourbon or sick on Derby pie. The rest are asleep in their beds, oblivious as ever.
With an unearthly strength born of determination, Allmon slides open the great door of the broodmare barn so that it bangs home with a deep, metallic sound. He passes inside, his breath whistling through his clenched teeth. Where is she? Where is the champion filly? He has come for Forge’s prized possession. They came for his long ago.
But my God, just look at this barn with its oaken stalls polished to a sheen, Forge’s purple silks like royal insignia painted on all the doors. The chaff drifts like confetti under ceiling fans, the very walls insulated with dollar bills. It’s sickening, a veritable temple of tack and flesh. Allmon stalks from one pristine stall to the next, but the filly is nowhere to be found. What he discovers: two prized breeders, Seconds Flat and Forge’s Fortune. The real moneymakers. They were separated from their foals months ago in the age-old game of Kentucky usage, the foals whinnying somewhere else, confused and alone in the dark.
Knowing what he now knows, the whole enterprise is as bold as sin.
Forge’s Fortune, nestled in her straw, is staring straight up at him with warm, curious eyes when he points the .45 at her forehead four inches above her eyes and with the simple draw of a finger delivers her. She droops without surprise or alarm or life onto the bed of hay on the stall floor, her beautiful skull perfectly intact, her limbs going gentle and limp beneath her.
But now Seconds Flat is panicking, rising up on her rear legs in the neighboring stall, whining in alarm, and suddenly Allmon’s hands begin to shake—he has always been the protector, that’s who he is, right, Momma?—he can barely recover his aim, can’t manage the target, especially with the mare rearing and her eyes rolling, but when she launches high for the third time with her forelegs cycling, he finds mercy and shoots through the soft velvet crook where her tongue rises against the soft palate, and then she’s choking and already bleeding out as she crumples onto her heavy quarters, slumping to the right and crashing her beautiful head against the oak of the stall.
But where is Henrietta—no, Hellsmouth! Where is Hellsmouth? A strangled sound emerges from Allmon’s chest, the sound of a distressed child, as he moves from the barn across the lane, but he presses it down until it disappears. Allmon doesn’t find her in the stallion barn, of course, only three yearling colts who swing their heads nervously as he moves out the back of their barn with his dreadful purpose. There are more mares, but eye for an eye, mother for mother is done. Now he has to find Hell. Allmon doesn’t want to kill her, only hurt her enough to free her. No one will use her again, not even him.
It’s when he moves out again into the moon-addled night, where the stars are slowly waking and stretching, that he sees her. She seems only slightly more real than the shadows around her, a flicker of blacker black in one of the paddocks. He knows it’s her; she’s unmistakable. Allmon is there in an instant, unlocking the gate and swinging it wide, stepping inside onto the soft carpet of pasture grass. He moves with unshakable resolve toward his decision, he can actually feel the revolving of the earth grating against the steadiness of his own body. But he realizes suddenly how light he must appear in the darkness, still wearing his gray Snyder Barns polo under the bright May moon with its mock shock face, how Hell is almost certainly watching him. No sooner does he realize this than he hears gladiator breath and her hooves on the ground, thudding a syncopation that coalesces to a duple rhythm, her war beat rising, rising until it’s almost upon him, and he raises a blindman’s pistol, committed, absolutely committed, but when he fires at her left leg, she keeps coming wounded or not, and he throws himself to the ground, so she thunders by him or over him, he doesn’t know which, but he feels the heavy, fluttering weight of her passage as powerful as anything he’s ever felt, and now she’s gone, beating her drum across the brick chip lane and down the manicured lawn until she finds the concrete of the road, where she beats her drum out into the wider, waiting world.
Shaken, Allmon picks himself up off the ground with bits of timothy grass clinging to his clothing, gun still in his hand. Everything’s all right, it’s all right, whether Hell is wounded or not. F is for failure but it’s not failure if she’s free, and now he’s halfway through his labors. He carefully eases the hammer forward and slides the piece into his pocket, moving out of the paddock with renewed focus, no trembling in his hands. He knows what he has to do. F is for felony, and felony is for fire. All he needs is an accelerant.
The sheds, the outbuildings, yes. He slips into the first and nudges the switch with a calloused thumb—no, this is hay storage, how could he have forgotten so quickly? It’s in the second, the one immediately next door, yes, here, the building with the mowers and the old Ford diesel truck and the gasoline along the wall in bright red plastic cans. He looks around with cold calculation for an old jar, a bottle, something—or this, an empty glass juice bottle flung into a recycling bin. He tears a rag from his own shirt, soaks it with gasoline, twisting and pressing it into the bottle, using one of his own shoelaces for a wick. Now, revolver in one ass pocket, bottle in the other, and a gas can in each hand, Allmon is on his way out the door, unrelenting passage through the night, back along the barns, toward the rear of the house. But before he reaches his destination, he’s suddenly stalled by a yawning sense of the unfamiliar, of something known once but now forgotten. The ground beneath him is spongy and forgiving, newly so. Didn’t there used to be a windbreak here? Confused, he stops in the garden by the slight movements of a ragged, sun-bleached scarecrow. He realizes he’s trampling new growth, all lined out in flowering order at his feet. Allmon stands in the perfectly arranged, greening rows. To his right he detects the familiar dark orchard, all the tender boughs swelling with potential. Something heavy hangs in the air like the scent of musk or myrrh. Summer is near.
Before him, the first story of the house spills a golden light so warm, he can almost feel it on his skin. It’s like a gold dessert cup, in which the rest of the house rests. He thinks, they’re so rich, they live their lives in that beautiful golden cup, but I never got to drink from that cup. All I ever got to drink was their spit.
The cool, seductive silence of the garden pulls him backward. Nothing bad can happen in this dark, amniotic space between bursts of sun. Do I have to go ahead, do I really have to go in there?
His mind reels back in time, fumbling for the moment when it all went askew, when his feet wandered from the path, when his world was wholly upended.
Why me, Reverend? Why now?
Because if they can’t see color in the night, you got to light up the dark.
Be not afraid.
When Allmon moves forward, his whole being is a prayer for strength. He places one gas can on the limestone steps and reaches out in the darkness for the knob on the back door.
Henry Forge, you are hereby sentenced to death.
He’s prepared to jigger the lock or break the glass, but it’s unlocked. Disgust overwhelms him. They’re so confident, so entitled, they steal your child and then leave their mansions unlocked. They’re so ignorant, they don’t realize they’re gambling even when they toss down the dice on the goddamn baize. He walks straight into the narrow back el of the kitchen, straight into the room where he first met Henrietta. He’s almost swamped by the memory of her against him, open under him, of her presence accepting him into her. They were as real as life together, as real as children. But he presses her back violently, just as he did in life. And she’s dead again.
The house is utterly still, even though the lights are on. They must be asleep upstairs, Henry Forge and Allmon’s son. He pours gas as he walks right up the slave staircase that rises narrowly to the second floor. He won’t bother with the attic. The second floor will rise up to kiss all the dry and dusty combustibles that lie just beneath the roof. Henry’s stored treasures will make for perfect kindling.
Everywhere, everywhere the markings of wealth appear as he begins his work, splashing gas onto the waxed hardwood floors, careful to avoid the wool rugs that won’t ignite as quickly. Big dressers to the ceilings and cabinets with lavish knickknacks hold no meaning for him, velvet drapes and old indigo coverlets, curvy cherry furniture that gleams dry but positively dances under gasoline. While one gas can waits impatiently in the hall, he enters every room with his revolver in hand, seeking that most precious antique, Henry Forge, and splashing gasoline everywhere he is not found. But he only encounters Henrietta in these private spaces. Here is a woman’s bedroom with silk blankets. Here is a child’s room, perhaps once her room, now their child’s—oh God, for a moment he can barely believe the child is truly his—but the crib is empty. A mobile dangles above it. He was once that child; so was she; they made one of two. Against rising anguish, Allmon splashes gas across the past and then takes care to pour extra in the bathrooms, where the acetone and mouthwash and rubbing alcohol will pop their bottles like little bombs. Burn down this world. Burn down what I did to her—
Pour it out, Allmon, don’t swallow it down anymore.
Pour it out so that light may shine in the darkness.
Bring me my child.
Allmon’s blood begins to boil over flames of regret and fury, and now he’s moving more quickly, jogging down the front staircase, and swinging around the carved newel with one can of gas remaining. He’s getting close, but so is she. She’s almost on him, and to his relief, he realizes he no longer has an out, or a choice. The moment has come. But he doesn’t find Henry in the foyer with the gas-splashed clock, or in the parlor with its two divans huddled together and begging to burn, or in the formal dining room with its damask chairs now dark with stains, or in the second sitting room, where Allmon rips the drapes from the windows and heaps them for a pyre. Now there is only one room left unexplored, the old back study by the kitchen, the office where Forge keeps the books and ledgers, where Allmon signed the deal, where the devil snatched his soul. The door is wide open. In his hastiness, Allmon had passed it on his walk up the back stairs. Now he stands silently at the threshold. Inside on the long Chesterfield, his body curled around the form of Allmon’s child, Henry Forge is asleep. A fan whirs. A bottle of bourbon rests on the desk.
Allmon steps into the room and raises the gun, but then realizes he hasn’t cocked it. He pulls the hammer back with the thumb of his free hand, there is an audible click, and Henry’s head rises from the pillow of his arm with a start. He turns confusedly toward the light in the doorway and sees the hard shadow standing there.
A startled, strangled sound escapes his lips.
“Get away from my child.”
It takes Henry a moment to realize that this dream is not a dream, so at first there’s only the relief of suspended time, wherein anything might happen, or nothing at all. The sheer unreality of it offers a brief chance at salvation. Then Allmon takes two steps into the room, aiming the gun at Henry’s head with the advantage of the light behind him. Henry can’t see the gun in the dark, but he knows it’s there. Instead of rising and following orders, he half slides and half tumbles to his knees beside the sofa, and with his back to Allmon reaches his arms around Samuel, who is startled out of sleep but not yet crying.
“Don’t hurt him!” Henry cries. Despite his age, his arms are like iron bands around the child. “Kill me—but don’t hurt him!”
Words won’t save you now, Henry Forge, the old language is dead.
Allmon’s voice is steady, steely. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Now get the fuck up.”
Suddenly Samuel is hauling air, shrieking up at the ceiling and flinging his chubby arms out to the sides, and Henry refuses to remove the shield of his body from his grandson.
Startled by the sound, a sudden rage threatens to shatter Allmon’s composure. He realizes he can’t handle the gun and the baby at the same time. “Pick him up!” he barks, suddenly confused. “Pick him up right now!”
It takes Henry a moment to realize he’s being offered a reprieve, then he clumsily sweeps Samuel against his chest, Samuel who is struggling in fright, pummeling the air with his fists, his eyes wide.
“Walk outside. Now!”
Henry does as he is told; he carries Samuel straight out of the study, straight through the blindingly bright kitchen and into the swallowing dark of the Kentucky night.
“Straight back!”
Henry moves as hastily as he can without dropping his grandson, stumbling back toward the garden with all of its geometric, fragrant rows, which he arranged in hope of a future. Its order seems an absurdity now.
Allmon looks wildly about, and when he sees the scarecrow, he points. “Right there, right there.” His body has instinctively led them to this place. “Put him down!” he orders.
“No.” It sounds like a one-word answer, but then Henry says, “You’ll have to kill me first.”
Now rage overtakes him. “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!” Allmon heads him with the butt of the gun, not hard enough to knock him out, just hard enough to bring the older man to his knees. Samuel spills out of his arms like a sack of kittens and rolls facedown in the dirt, screaming, and in the light that shines from the kitchen door, in the finely carved lineaments of Henry’s face, Allmon sees Henrietta staring up at him, blood trickling down one temple.
He rears back and gasps for air as Henry swoons, then reaches down and draws Samuel toward him, panic rising that he’s hurt his child. Samuel’s little white T-shirt separates from his diaper and twists up around his neck. His cries are ear-piercing, but he’s unhurt when Allmon lifts him from the dirt with his free hand, clutching him desperately against his abdomen so the child is struggling and flopping sideways and screaming as the soil on his face mixes with tears.
Still on his knees, Henry says, “Careful with his neck.”
Allmon turns on him, his eyes furious. “This is my son! You stole my son!” He can’t control the sound of anguish, which echoes across the fenced fields.
Though dazed and broken, Henry’s voice is almost absurdly calm, and from the calm emerges his eternal refrain, “He is my…” But he can’t finish; he chokes on it. New words rise with a will all their own, and he can’t withhold them. “I am sorry.” He feels their truth like another blow.
Allmon almost spits on him when he stares him down and blurts, “You ain’t sorry; you ain’t nothing!” But his son is struggling in his arms, and he doesn’t know how to do this, he’s never held a baby before. He lets Samuel slide awkwardly down his leg to drop unceremoniously to the ground again about six feet from Henry, upon whom Allmon now advances. His body is lethal, pure menace, and when Henry looks up at him, squinting through blood that oozes from a cut above his right eye, the fear on his face is clear as day.
The fear there startles Allmon, but his words are unrelenting. “Take off your belt!”
Henry does as he’s told, and Allmon snatches it out of his hands so it whips and snaps like a snake. His motions are growing wild now. If he can move quicker, stoke more anger, maybe he can stave off what’s rising, some change he senses. He shoves the older man backward, then kicks at him to get him moving, so Henry scrambles back until he runs into the old post on which the scarecrow hangs. Henry’s eyes are locked on Samuel as he’s bound to the post with his own belt.
It won’t hold, it’s not enough, so Allmon whips off his own belt and cinches it lower, around Henry’s abdomen. Now he’s tied like a beast for slaughter. Still, Henry’s eyes are on Samuel.
“I’m taking my child,” Allmon snarls, but it’s not until he returns to the baby, drawing him clumsily to his chest once again and moving away, that a sound rises up from Henry. It’s the sound of a mother howling, a woman wailing at the foot of the cross. The wail rises and encircles the farm, it grips Allmon’s head round. It travels the rolling pastures, wends through boughs of trees, swings over the old graves and the heads of the dark, startled horses. But Allmon has lived for so long, for more than six lifetimes, he thinks he can move steadily through it. He advances ten paces before he discovers he can go no farther and stops. He removes the bottle from his pocket and has to put the child down yet again. Henrietta’s child. He had a chance to learn love with her, but he destroyed it. He goes pale with the knowledge.
It’s too late, it can’t matter. He’s taking what’s his—his son and his revenge. When the lady publishes her book, the whole world will understand what this justice means. They’ll finally know. He fumbles for the lighter now. He knows the bottle will do its work and blow the house to kingdom come. There’s a steady breeze tonight to turn a smoky flame into a conflagration. Allmon winds up and lunges forward like a seasoned pitcher and hurls the bottle through the back door straight to the front wall of the kitchen, where it shatters and lands in bright bits on a spattering of gasoline. So it starts. A swift, softly blooming fire line races up the back staircase until it diverges at the landing, traveling into the separate rooms where the beds and sofas, each in their turn, ignite. From outside, it looks as if gentle, flickering lights have come on in every room. Presently, the drapes go up with a willowing motion as if the fire itself is waving for help. Not a moment later, the bathrooms burst open like fireworks.
With a sudden whooshing sound, the Forge house goes up in a blaze, and Samuel stops his crying where he lies on the grass, turning his wide, frightened eyes upward. But he’s not looking at the house, only at Allmon, because Allmon’s arms are burning where he’s been fumed by gasoline. In an instant, he’s on the ground gasping and rolling, lashing his arms against the cool, dewy grass, flailing like a crazy man or someone trying to make a baby laugh. Samuel stares at him in alarm, and when Allmon finally rises, gasping and moaning with his own fire extinguished, burned flesh hangs in white tatters from his forearms.
The house drowns out the wounded sounds coming from his mouth. He reaches down and hauls up Samuel, who screams again, wriggling and striking at him. He stares at his own child with burning eyes—burning from the fire or from his mother’s disease, he doesn’t know which.
Now the sweat on his face is mixed with tears. Henry’s howl still echoes in his ears, and Allmon’s head swoons with sudden flashing lights. Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him—hurt who?
Allmon stumbles sideways a few steps. What’s happening? Is this revenge? There was a plan, but he’s suddenly horribly confused and lost. He had a story to tell, but who will listen—really listen? Kill Henry Forge and they’ll say you’re just another black animal killing a white man. They always tell the same old white story.
But, Reverend, they made me a body!
He begins to sob from the center of his chest. He can’t feel the pain in his scorched arms any longer; it’s as though there’s ice packed against his skin. He looks down at Samuel, his life on the outside. Son. It’s a foreign word on his tongue with a meaning he’s straining to understand.
With a start he realizes that the flashing lights aren’t in his mind but on the road near the drive, and police will storm the property at any moment. He doesn’t have to glance over his shoulder to see them; he knows.
Momma, I can’t, I can’t. I won’t—
Allmon’s hand trembles, and the .45 wavers. The fire is building to an inferno behind him, striving for the stars, and already he can hear voices at the foot of the drive. He looks up confusedly at the night sky with its fishes, lions, serpents, and hunters. He knows they aren’t really there, they’re just make-believe, a story. But the story matters. A story lives forever, longer than anyone’s child.
Allmon’s tears stop.
The lady’s ending is up to him.
Justice is an ancient animal still taking shape in the sky. Draw it with her pen.
With a great, shuddering breath, he finally understands why he is there. They will either hang you from a tree or let you die on a couch or stick you in a prison to rot, but they will get you just the same. The world doesn’t love us. The Reverend says, When they render you a body, they won’t listen to words no more, so you got to let the body speak! Let it tell the terrible tale! Let them that have eyes see, and them that have ears hear!
The distance between Allmon and Henry is not so far; he covers it in a dozen strides to stare down at the bound man. At any moment, the police will surround him. He bends down and places Samuel carefully to the side like a treasure in the dewy grass. With the desperation of a drowning man, Henry strains toward the child but can’t reach him.
Allmon straightens up and says, “You can’t keep what ain’t yours, Forge. I won’t let you.” But Henry won’t look at him, only at Samuel.
The Reverend says, Pray with your every action and be not afraid.
“Look at me, Forge!” Allmon demands.
He raises the gun. Be not afraid be not afraid be not afraid be not afraid be not afraid be not afraid benotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbenotafraidbe—
“Look at me, Forge!” Allmon cries so his voice echoes through the night, and Henry finally looks up, his eyes wide.
Four bullets blast a staccato rainbow around Henry’s head—one for Marie, and one for the Reverend, one for Scipio, one for all the men and women who pace on the bottom of the river, their flesh eaten by fish, and the last is for
me, Allmon
the deserving and the broken, the guilty and the gift. I am a sinner. I broke love and sold my child to the highest bidder, but I will ransom his life and his son’s life with my own. Reverend, lay me down gently. Please ask Momma to forgive me. I forgive her. Dress my body in Sunday clothes and anoint my mouth. Let my life speak, then they will finally know me. I am not afraid any longer.
Allmon turned the gun on himself. He left nothing to chance.
* * *
In the dark, there was nothing but the fire. Henry thought he was dead. By all rights, he should have been. But there was a dead man before him, sprawled on the ground, his arms extended wide, palms open to the sky. Figures swarmed around them as night air rushed in from the west, feeding the inferno and all that was left of Henry’s home. The structure was disintegrating before his eyes, the joists giving way, the stories collapsing in great billowing bursts.
Samuel’s mouth was stretched wide with crying where he lay in the grass, but Henry could barely hear him, half-deafened by the pistol reports. An officer spied the child in the tall grass and raised him to her chest, stumbling back from the smoke and crying out, “Whose child is this? Whose child is this?” but Henry made no reply.
Then the earth began to shake as if Nature were banging her fists on plains and mountains. From his perch in the officer’s arms, Samuel abruptly stopped his crying and craned his neck around in curiosity and surprise. The fire brightened with a volley of fresh air. When Hellsmouth bloomed suddenly out of the dark, she was gleaming with sweat and bright red with reflected fire. Samuel screamed in delight as the filly galloped toward them and then sank onto her haunches and reared, her legs cycling as if to turn the very wheel of the sky. She was almost perfect. She was ready for more.