The Sport of Kings (62 page)

 

INTERLUDE IV

One day, after he had whipped up a batch of ocean and scattered stars and a sun for light, the Great Big God of Pine Mountain made a man. He wasn't the smartest creature on the mountain or even the strongest, but he was a hard worker and he did what he was told. The God said, “Name all these animals here,” and the man named the red fox and the bobcat and the mountain vole and so on and so forth. Then the God said, “Have at these plants,” and the man named the hickory tree and the nettle and the wheat berry and the God was impressed. He said, “You're not half as dumb as you look. I hope you like having power over all these plants and animals just as I like having power over you. All I ask is that you not eat the pawpaws. I don't want you to get too big for your britches, and I don't want you to sass me.”

The man obeyed the Great Big God of Pine Mountain, though after a time the God could see that the man was out of sorts: he mumbled to himself a good deal and appeared disgruntled, and coitus with goats grew tiresome. It was clear the man was lonely.

So the God of Pine Mountain laid the man down on the loam and fed him corn liquor, so he would fall asleep, and then he rooted around in his chest until there was a great crack. He removed a white and bloodied rib. From this he fashioned a woman. When the man awoke, he saw that her eyes were bright, her breasts were heavy, and that between her thighs was a thatch of unruly, scratchy hairs. All of this sparked his interest. In fact, the man felt a lurch in his loins when he gazed upon her and his mouth was dry when he said, “Whatever you do, don't eat the pawpaws. If there's one thing we can't stand around here, it's a uppity woman.”

So for a time they walked hand in hand on the springtime side of the mountain and they were happy as far as it went, but the man could not escape the feeling that something was missing from inside of him. He was sure that the God had stolen something from him while he was drunk and had hidden it in the woman, so one day he laid the woman down on the grass and pinned her there, so that he could better and deeper seek for his spare part within her. But no matter how he rooted—and he did it more and more often with less and less patience—he could not find what he was missing. And the woman, who at first wound herself around him in surprise and gratitude, became confused and weary of his mean pressing, which made a depression of her in the grass like a grave. So she snuck away and wandered around the slopes of Pine Mountain. She beat blazes in the pastures with her bare feet, she swam in the mountain streams, she petted the animals and named the stars. Eventually, she stumbled upon the pawpaw stand.

Now, out of a blackberry patch came a wily rabbit wearing a woolen jacket and crisp pantaloons, though the woman didn't know what those were, because she'd never seen any before. She stared at the rabbit in frank alarm when he spoke: “How do, missy?”

She couldn't remember if the man and the God allowed her to speak to strangers, so she only nodded.

“Oh Lord,” said the smartly dressed little rabbit with a sigh, “I sure wish I could reach me some of them pawpaws up there. God played a mean old nasty trick when he made me this short.”

The woman looked down at him with concern. It was true; he was a right midge, even as far as rabbits went.

The wily rabbit began to cry big, fat crocodile tears. “All I want”—he sobbed, glancing at her out of the corners of his eyes—“all I want … is a little pleasure.”

The woman's heart swelled with compassion. Surely, it could not be wrong to soothe the suffering of such a tiny, unusual creature? She plucked a pawpaw from the branch and handed it to the rabbit, who gobbled half of its yellow fruit immediately. Then he held the rest up for her to try, tears still wet on his fuzzy cheeks. “Eat with me, gal.”

“Oh, I can't,” she said. “I'm not allowed.”

“Who says?”

“The Great Big God of Pine Mountain.”

The rabbit looked at her and said, plain as day, “But your God is a tyrant.” Then the woman saw the simple truth of the statement and ate the rest of the pawpaw, seeds and all. It filled her with delight, a delight that she immediately wanted to share. So she plucked a second pawpaw from the branch and went in search of the man.

When she found him, the man suspected what the fruit might be, but it smelled so sweet—like raspberry and pear and honey all in one—that he ate it without asking any questions. Then a strange thing happened. Clouds the color of hearth ashes rolled in from the east, and a new, chilly breeze blew over their heads. The God, who had been busy with his whiskey stills, marched down the mountainside and his voice rolled out like thunder. “What in creation have you done?”

The man turned on the woman. “It's the woman's fault! She ruined our good thing!” he cried.

“You didn't have to listen to her!” said the God. “I left you in charge!”

“Well, you made the bitch,” muttered the man.

“Yes, it's true, it's true! It's all my fault and only mine!” cried the woman, who, like her many daughters to come, drank down blame's poison like clear mountain water. Then she began to cry, but she cried so hard it caused her skin to wrinkle, and the first gray hair of worry sprouted from her head, which the man noted with disgust and alarm. He decided he had never loved her.

But the God just shook his head wearily. “One rule…,” he said. “I gave you one goddamn arbitrary rule but apparently it was one too many. Your eating of the fruit is so vile, so unthinkably evil, you're no longer worth the manure under my brogans. So get out. Go on and get off my mountain.”

Stricken, they prepared to leave, though there was little to take with them. The man was so ashamed of himself that he could no longer look at the body of the woman, so he killed his first animal, a cow, and covered the woman with its hide. He also covered himself in case he got cold on the journey. Then he led the woman across the cooling fields of Pine Mountain, while all the animals trailed behind them in curiosity and dismay, the chipmunks and the black bears and the deer alike. Soon the man stood on the edge of the future and he saw it was a broken and desert place. There were screwworms in the corn and weevils in the cotton. Kudzu choked the trees and the tobacco fields were cracked with drought. Even the light, which fell on the wasted land, was like weak beer. The man shook his fist and cried out, “I don't deserve this fate!” But the God of Pine Mountain was already busy in his barns and he didn't hear, or didn't care. Either way, he would ignore them for the rest of time and leave them to their own devices.

The man was really angry now and looked behind him, realizing he would need a better companion than the woman if he ever hoped to find his way back here. Clearly, the woman could not be trusted. Without hesitation, the man stepped up to the tallest, strongest animal he could find—a horse—and grabbed it by a hank of its mane. Then with resolute steps, he led the woman off the verdant slopes of Pine Mountain, and the wide-eyed horse, bewildered by dislocation, followed behind.

 

5

HELLSMOUTH

Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee's own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters; at the Ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of want of absolute perfection have not been observed.

—
CHARLES DARWIN,
On the Origin of Species

Again, they came out of Albemarle and Fauquier and Orange with spinning wheels and flintlock rifles strapped to mules and mares, a cavalcade over the folded Blue Ridge and smoky Shenandoah, fording countless streams until they arrived at the disputatious Clinch with its currents of cuss and complaint, then slept their wolf-encircled sleep and resumed their trek along the path of empire until they reached the midmark block house, where behind them teased two roads back to Prince Edward and Carolina, where proper cabins awaited with dogtrots and puncheoned floors, also ordinaries and steepled chapels and girls in laced corsets, whom they forsook for Indian Country across Clinch Mountain, Big Moccasin Gap, Powell Mountain, seemingly minor foes before this power of great white mountains insurmountable but for a high gap, the Gateway, which led to more and more earth, more rived ridges and black recesses, and ultimately the Kentuck, where the Indians and wolves were rivals for scalps, where the pack animals began to droop and die with Pine Mountain finally in view, where the men ate without benefit of fire until they passed through the virgin forest, through the outlying knobs to meadows of herbage and buffalo grass under pigeons in their thunderous passage over the Rock Castle River, where they decided to walk to the caneland in the north, where they tamed the grassland and timbered the chestnut and hemlock, plucked stones out of the earth for fencing, fired soil to brick, raised up houses out of the old growth while their cattle cropped the meadows, and after they became rich as Boaz on the fatling land, built a church of blue ash on a windy upland slope and christened the place Cane Ridge, where, when the old century spilled into the trammeled new, sinners trickled down from Ohio, up from Tennessee, and from all over the new state, where preachers ascended platforms, proclaiming Christ to the conquerors, who had traded their buckskin and coon caps for brooches and prunella, capes and velvet mantles, all converted now, faces to the bloody soil, trading earth for sky as they once traded baubles for earth, forgiven surely their success, jerking and calling with abandon, unrestrained now, the crowds pulsing and babbling as if carousal could render fool's fat from the hard bones of history—

No. The old language is dead, as is Henry's daughter, who lies in that storied tabernacle built on the ridge, where the cane once grew thick. In the shadowy reserve of the room under the old slave gallery, Henry senses an astonishing light beyond the log structure with its surrounding stone shrine, but looks away from the open doors. He hasn't been able to bear the light these last two weeks—two endless, unendurable weeks. The funeral was delayed, because Judith requested time to return from her home in Bavaria, and because the confounding, surviving infant—his daughter's son, his own blood—required a week in incubation. But Henry waited, most of all, because his grief was beyond the capacity of his flesh.

Now he could hear them: all the people filing into the church, the clacking of smartly shined shoes; he could hear their averted eyes. Yes, it was right that they should come; he wanted every house to be present. Fill the pews, pay their dues! He managed one look around at the subdued figures, but their somber faces, even their expensive black garments all seemed an affront to the reality of death. The very fact of their living offended him.

Now the pastor's gentle hand was on his shoulder, now they were on the casket, and Henry's stony calm was swamped for a moment by panic—
Don't do this! Please don't do this thing!
—but the words just echoed in the hollow of his mind, which seemed now like nothing but an antechamber for death—and then the lid was raised. He heard Judith cry out behind him, a sound of despair and recrimination. He wanted to stand up and say I didn't kill her, I wasn't the father! But the child in him was not so sure.

God, look at her face. In two weeks death had made no inroads, done no damage at all. Man truly is the measure and maker of all things, Child Henry thought wildly. Even industrious death is no match for his craftiness! His daughter appeared perfect and untouched, her hair lustrous, some blush color enduring on her cheeks and lips. She'd even assumed a restless beauty in her two weeks of tiresome solitude, time spent wandering aimlessly over the dark, purling river and under the tree of dreams, as if at any moment, she would rise with her innate disdain and dismiss them all with a withering glance and a flick of her hand. Then she would look Henry deeply in the eye, and he would know that all this suffering had been unnecessary, just a sickening dream. And he would forget it. Yes. There could be no greater prize on earth than to forget one's suffering.

Once the lid was raised and the fact of Henrietta's death made indisputable, the pastor slowly ascended the three wooden steps to the dais and regarded the familiar, monied crowd with a solemn, mild eye, one that had learned calm in the face of disaster over the course of a long career. When he intoned quietly, “We have lost a member of the Paris community, Henrietta Forge, the daughter of Judith Schwebel and Henry Forge,” Henry started visibly in his pew. He retightened the fold of his hands.

“When I asked Henry how he wanted his daughter to be remembered, the first thing he said was that we should remember her as a good horsewoman.” The room smiled; it shifted and relaxed. “I'm told she was capable in the saddle, capable on the track, capable as the manager at Forge Run Farm. As Henry will be the first to tell you, his nickname for her from a very young age was Ruffian. Tough and strong in a very competitive business, she was a steady presence in the community, and her experience—though she was only twenty-nine—will be sorely missed.”

The man brought his hands together and gazed down at Henry and Judith, who sat directly behind him. “But Judith and Henry, she was more than that, wasn't she? She was a wonderful daughter, a beloved child. I know with perfect confidence, speaking as a parent myself, that she was the principal joy of both your lives, that she didn't just bring honor to you with her accomplishments, but that you were honored to discover who she was and to draw her out into the fullness of her life and unique being. You were honored by the miracle of being her parents.”