The Sport of Kings (76 page)

Take the note, Henry, take it and see that it's more than a promissory note, it's a page ripped from a ledger written in the language that begat him begat him begat him begat him begat you begat her begat Samuel

What do you know?

that old man

Who?

Forge.

that Edward Cooper Forge

walked the parlor, tears soaking his mustache and beard, his mind routed by grief. By turns, his hands clutched at his broad forehead, or were clasped trembling at his chest or hung slack at his side. They were now utterly useless, despite their dexterity and strength. He paced his rounds like a sick horse, round and round, the chestnut boards creaking and crying—no, that was the child upstairs wailing in Lessandra's spent arms. He gazed blearily up at the ceiling of the parlor, through it to the woman with her weak womb. One alive in sixteen years! So little to show. The nature of life was to take, take, take until it ruined you. Everything you built, everything you made, even your children, was sure to be ripped from you. Life is not a durable good.

The nature of nature is to kill.

He hadn't stood still for more than a minute since the boy died. His Barnabas. Barnabas Monroe Forge. Shock of thick blond hair and quick laugh. But a boy of action who lacks caution and doesn't always think—son, didn't I tell you to use your head? Never use a rifle as a tool! A firearm is only for shooting! But then your damn fool beloved son is chasing rabbits in the snow, their tiny madcap prints veering left and right in the pearly-eye blinding white until the worthless animal disappears into a rotting log without escape on the other side, so dear excited unthinking beloved son crouches and rams the butt of the rifle into the hollow log to flush a creature with not enough meat to feed a girl child, and the rifle discharges, and sixteen years is dead, its heart blown out in the snow.

Edward clamped his eyes as if to break them, organs that serve only one purpose: to make a grown, aging man cry. He could not tell his grief from his rage, together they seemed far larger than his physical body, larger than his home. The word “please” had died on his lips. No, he could no longer pray or his neck would break from the strain. How he had prayed to the God of Eternal Uselessness, raise up my son, because he cannot be dead! He must be only sleeping! Raise up my son, because the infant may not survive the winter and neither my wife! Raise up my son, because I obeyed your laws all my life and was like the good servant, not burying my talents but raising children and stewarding the property I was given. Raise up my son, I have cried over his wet, cold face! But God was silent, because God did not exist any longer. God was alive only until he was shot in the heart in the snow, and now it is the third day and still he has not risen.

It was clear that Death wrote the rules of life and a man was a fool—a callow youth—until he acknowledged it. But Edward's will musters against this ultimatum. Man spent himself in a war against the processes of entropy and, yes, it was a useless endeavor but to cede was to capitulate, to be a coward. It was to write Death a blank check.

He stops his pacing, his eyes suddenly bright. He has alighted upon something permanent. The only light in the darkness is life and more of It.

He snatches up the murderous rifle, which has lain on the floor for three days under the coffin box and its black silk drape—this thing whose propulsive force is stronger than even his own son's life, and not a minute later, Edward is in the cold yard in nothing but his black trousers and white poplin shirt, his breath huffing out in vaporous blooms as he crosses the attenuated lines of window light crossing to the cabins. The constellations are blurs overhead as he bursts through the door of the first cabin. The family of seven who are huddled before the fire at first stare up in mute alarm until they see the rifle at his side, gleaming like a scythe, then they scatter to the shadows along the dark walls.

His one word explodes into their dark and quiet space: Phebe.

For a long, agonized moment, no one moves or even dares to breathe. Then into the cocked silence, out of the shadows, the girl called Phebe creeps forward, half-bent by fear like a crone. She moves forward, her eyes locked on the rifle.

Come.

Come now!

Marster! Her mother jets forward out of the swallowing shadows, her arms out. What you gone—

He raises the rifle and the shadows consume the mother, and the young girl proceeds out of the silence and into the night. She's upright now as if quiet obedience will save her from whatever unknown fate awaits, eyes moving neither left nor right. Across the barren, bone-rattling yard they go, and into a cabin, where three likewise sit round the hearth fire with their yams and cornpone and heated chicory. There is the sound of throaty laughter, of some story reaching its conclusion. Then all three men stand abruptly when Edward storms through the door, the girl stumbling beside him, her bewildered fear now turning to dread.

Benjohn there, his strongest and most beautiful. Edward says breed to this gal, and the other two creep first to the edges and then on out the door, looking at each other but not bothering with useless words. Benjohn saying, Marster, I's fixing to marry my gal Libby the next week over Drummer farm; you done gave permission two months ago, but Edward says, Increase my stock. The man only shies up into his shoulders, shaking his head, so Edward says, For every pickaninny you give me, I will reward you with dollars, then the rifle says NOW, and the girl is shivering on her hands and knees with her woolen skirt over her shoulders, then they are hunched and pressed together, and Edward is pushing her forehead into the dirt with his own hands to raise her haunches high for the take. Her tears mingle with the dirt. Edward says, Give me a buck, and then he is off to fetch Mim and Sarah while Benjohn recuperates in astonishment. The girl flees to her cabin as the others come, their eyes round with fear but not suspecting, and then again and again with his buck Prince because Benjohn is spent, then Edward himself is at his maximum with his own blood risen up into his feverish head, so he leaves the last two bred and clutching each other not in love on the cold, packed ground. At first he is merely walking, the rifle resting on his shoulder, but then he is running across the yard toward the house all lit up for the deceased—no, for the mourning—and he charges through the kitchen door, so that Prissey nearly drops the roaster with its hulk of turkey no one will bother to eat tonight. Edward twists up her wrists in his left hand, the rifle clattering down, yanking her from her task but not up the stairs where Lessandra, withered dry by milk and tears, is suckling a colicky, perhaps dying infant son, his own, but into the cornmeal and spice smell of his own pantry, where she is saying no no no no please no; Prissey, your beauty has saved you, I would never breed you to a nigger. Marster, you just undone! I am undone. Give me back myself. No. Give me back to me. No! Prissey, I have owned you sixteen years and never touched a hair on your head, been nothing but a loving master. I have offered you protection from the world and treated you as a favorite, better than I would have a daughter. But now, give me back to me. Spread your dark legs, Prissey, spread your dark hair, split your dark open, the center of you suckle me, give me back now what I have lost. Pinned against the butcher block, with her skirts shoved high, the sweat of terror and her day's labor and sorrow commingling, he breaks the tight prefloration and demands what there is, bruising the skin of her thighs and rattling her teeth until what's left of his life convulses into hers, and then he is weeping openly, crying like a wounded animal, and she sighs, which to him sounds like pleasure. With eyes to the sky, which is just a low ceiling, she reaches around his bulk and, with all the weary resignation, which seems the lone inheritance of woman, she comforts him.

*   *   *

Pain is an alien being in your being. You think: How did this other life get inside me? This isn't a stubbed toe, or indigestion, or the vigorous ache of a fever that rattles your bones but then passes in a week. No, you can't kid yourself any longer; this is permanent, this is disease. Somewhere in these last few weeks, knowledge has pressed itself through the cracks of Allmon's concrete heart, and now it can't be routed out, neither the knowledge nor the disease. The world took everything from you, then found more to take, and now it's going to invade your entire body, crowding your insides and diminishing what was once you until all that's left will be the memory of how it once felt to live as a self without pain in the body you possessed—or you thought you possessed—as a long-ago child. A child who still had a mother. Marie.

“Young man.”

Allmon started and looked up from where he was wrapping Hell's leg with what strength was left in his wrecked hands. A small woman had appeared on the other side of the stall chain; she stood utterly upright with a stern, martial formality, a black handbag gripped in a hand that looked more like old, creased iron than flesh. Her eyes were strangely heated when she said, “You are the groom of Hellsmouth? You work for Henry Forge?”

If it had been a white person, he would have said, Who wants to know? But to her, he just said, “Yeah.” And then he rose up slowly, a flicker of hurt on his face that appeared almost like anticipatory grief, as though the executioner had finally come. He took a hesitant step forward.

“Oh, young man.” The woman lowered her chin fractionally and smiled up at him without smiling. “Do I have a story for you.”

*   *   *

Allmon stumbled from the barn on inflamed hips and crumbling knees, desperate for air without chaff and mites, desperate for the cool remnants of the afternoon's light rain. Through his tangled, terrible, scorched mind he could see the horses crisscrossing the Downs, dark and rangy and terrifically strong, stark as ink stains in the mist. A sudden resentment rose for the freshness of their young, ignorant lives, and he looked down at his own blasted body with a wholly different wonder. Prison had broken him and though he'd patched his pieces together, the mortar was crumbling.

He thought of Henrietta, but he pushed her away. She hadn't taken his life, but she'd taken his fucking dignity. She was a cheap trick, a white slap, another humiliation to endure. He hated her.

Given a chance, these white motherfuckers will always take your black life. Always.

He began to stumble along after one of the sauntering colts, as though it offered escape, but there was no escape, not from the sick story he had just heard. Forgetting wouldn't work this time. You tried to close your ears to time, but it was louder than ten thousand horses thundering across the plains. Time told stories that busted your eardrums and made them bleed. The Forges had murdered a man, the woman had said. Of course they had. Of course! He felt the righteousness of his vindication like a sun in his chest; it transformed and shined light on the guilt that had been torturing him. He had always known what the Forges were, but in Henrietta's deceiving arms, he'd allowed himself to ignore it! Of course, he'd known; he'd spent his whole life on the run from a fucking lynch mob.

Allmon felt the vibration of the swelling crowds before he could see them and veered away from the track toward the parking lot, but the crowds were there too, chattering and smiling and moving along in their finely cut suits, outrageous hats on display. Smug, self-satisfied, like they had actually earned their wealth honestly and not by standing on the necks of others. Allmon stopped at a gate, breathless. None of them even noticed him in his stained polo and manure-caked boots. He was a bland, brown, weathered rock, and they were a gorgeous stream flowing past.

Allmon's features were wrenched by a wrathful pain so pure, so ultimate, it was like the heat off a stove, so hot it was icy. He couldn't tell any longer whether it was pain of the body or of the spirit. He fished in his pocket for his Vicodin, and the tablets jangled there like chalky coins.

You got the flushing disease?

He needed a doctor; he knew that. But these disunited states had turned the complex math of a human life into the simplest number: You got enough money for insurance? Insurance cost what he made in two weeks, and they made you pay a five-thousand-dollar deductible before you got any help. Then you could only go to certain doctors or you had to pay even more … He knew the fucking rigamarole.
He knew.

This world breaks your bones, and some breaks are permanent.

He turned back toward all the barns, which were laid out all orderly like graves behind the track. Hellsmouth was waiting; the Derby was only minutes away. The critical importance of the race only grew in his mind. Everything—his whole life—hinged on it.

Oh God, he suddenly prayed with every pain-ridden fiber of his being, knowing full well God was Momma, because when he prayed to him now, all he could see was her face in his mind, her nose, which was his own, and her wide smile, her chestnut eyes, the face of her youth, which was his infancy, the face he had loved above every face on the earth—even more than the Reverend. The Reverend! He was there too, the hammer of his preaching, the unrelenting ground of his living. He hadn't thought of the man in years, because he'd left them, and Allmon had never forgiven him for that. Now they were the prayer, the entirety of his breath and blood: Please, God, let this horse win. Let me finally get on the outside. Winning is justice—my salvation and revenge.

*   *   *

The twin spires of Churchill Downs loomed overhead, their flags snapping with the brisk violence of the weather. There had been a heavy rain and now the day turned astonishing in its beauty, the clouds all piled and red-tipped like a sun-shot mountain range inverted, streaming red and gold in every direction. Under that play of light, all the minuscule players—the jocks, the trainers, the grooms, the fans, the horses—made their moves. When the human world is rotted away like an old walnut, that light will remain.