The Sport of Kings (29 page)

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

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

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

Do you understand me?

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

*   *   *

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

“Allmon Shaughnessy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Three years.”

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

“I'm good,” he said simply.

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

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

He shrugged.

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

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

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

“It's a vocational program,” he said.

“Vocational program…”

“Yeah.” His voice was husky. “Yes.”

“Where? In Kentucky?”

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

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

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

“Where are you from?” she said.

“Cincinnati.”

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said.

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

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

“How do you mean?” she said.

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

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

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

“All of this.”

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

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

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

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

 

INTERLUDE II

La belle rivière
: the Great, the Sparkling, the White; coursing along the path of the ancient Teays, the child of Pleistocene glaciers and a thousand forgotten creeks run dry, formed in perpetuity by the confluence of two prattling streams, ancient predecessors of the Kentucky and Licking—maternal and paternal themes in the long tale of how the river became dream, conduit, divide, pawn, baptismal font, gate, graveyard, and snake slithering under a shelf of limestone and shale, where just now a boy is held aloft by his beautiful father, who points and says, “Look!” and the boy looks, and what he will remember later is not just the river like a snake but also the city crowding it, and what a city! A queen rising on seven hills over her Tiber, ringed hills forming the circlet of a crown. A jagged cityscape of limestone and brick and glass with a bright nightless burn. The buildings never shut their brilliant eyes to the river where not so long ago, a teeming white mass came floating down to topple trees between the Great and Little Miamis and garrison pike-forts and sling tart, poison arrows at the wegiwas, those brown beehives up in flames. What freedom to rename the named! Losantiville, or Rome, or Cincinnatus after that noble man who would not stay in Rome, but returned home to his plow on the grange. In his stead, they crowned themselves and an American queen was born, one free of Continental dreams, the first to climb off the king's cock. Visionaries and confidence men alike launched down
la belle rivière
in droves. Lawyers and stevedores and sawyers and preachers and masons and Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and all the rest; the pious came with the venal, the wealthy with aspiring merchants, and the poor came by the thousands as well, passing women lap to lap on flatboats crammed with china, bedsteads, chests, and hogs to the gunnels that dipped and threatened to tip as they rounded broad bends in the river, curving down through the Territory to the Miami Purchase with its terraced bottoms and towering heights. More green than will ever be seen again, and the chance—now forgotten—to peer straight down through the pellucid Ohio, so sunshot and numinous and strange, it was like peering into bright time itself, right into the eyes of an engorged staring catfish not of this age but of millennia before, darting momentarily through a dream no Boston or Philadelphia could offer. Sooty, city-ravaged fingers dip into the cool river water, then the fish darts off and is disappeared forever, and the Kaintuck at the pole cries “Coming! Coming nigh!” and there she is, the city—fat, pale, concupiscent, a white intrusion into the billowing green. The newcomers drive all their pigs into her. The swine befoul her and roam wild into the seven hills and beyond, where they breed: doubling, trebling, making a second city of swine. On the low banks of the river, blocks south of the new brick residences, the citizens build their first abattoir and in the years to come rangy drovers will drive tributaries of pigs down off the shale hills and out of surrounding valleys, make fat rivers of flesh in the streets so wealthy women will refuse to leave their homes for all the shit. The drovers come hollering and the pigs, thousands upon many thousands of them, squeal in pink and brown and black waves until they reach the muddy river embankment, where they surge around carts, wagons, barrels, and horses only to be beaten and funneled stiff-legged onto a wooden ramp that runs up the full four stories of the meat house. Whacked steadily from behind by the drovers' staves, each wave of squealing hogs pushes the hogs ahead of them to the slaughter, scrambling and pressing up the stinking ramp made slippery with green shit. Now the first hogs smell base blood over excrement, but are forced ahead into the shadows of that first and last chamber. A bloody-aproned man moves in menace at their far reaches; then one animal is gripped at the pastern above the cloven hoof and dragged, screaming, its left leg clasped in metal, now hauled up by a pulley with a shattering cry, its own weight ripping ball joint from socket so it hangs distorted at the thick hip, screeching its final confession, eyes bulging wide as its neck is sliced and blood jets from its jaw and runs into its eyes. Unable to pass through the slit trachea, the air whistles uselessly. The pig jerks madly and is soon drained pale, eyes bald of life. Now the next one and on and on. All hanging in a line, swaying side to side along the pulley as their bodies are opened, showing waved lines of rib and vertebrae like the keys of a warped piano, the heads sawn off. Now to the disassembly: a drop onto the table, then quick mechanical thudding, the fall of cleavers, the flinging of component parts—hock, shoulder, loin. In sixty seconds, the hog is gone and meat is made, the dumb passage of life.