The Sport of Kings Read online

  Number ten, I’ve hated you since I was in my mother! Sic semper tyrannis!

  “I am not guilty!”

  John Henry raised the crop and struck his son.

  * * *

  Far across the road, cattle moaned with longing for a night coming in fits and starts. The air was restless and the crickets thrummed. The hot, humid breath of August was lifting now from the ground, where it had boiled all day, rising to meet the cooler streams of air that hovered over it. Airs kissed and stratified, whitening and thinning as the sun slipped its moorings and sank to the bank of the earth. Its center was as orange as its umbral rim was black. The sky grew redder and redder as the sun turned an earthier orange and less brilliant. Above it, purling clouds showed terraced bands of dark against crimson, and the rungs spanned the breadth of the sky. They stacked one upon the next on and on above the sun until the highest bands stretched into interminable shadow, darkening as they reached the top of the bow of the sky, then drifting edgeless into the risen evening. Blackish blue emerged from the east and stretched over the house like an enormous wing extended in nightlong flight. But day was not done, it shook out its last rays, and as low clouds skimmed before the spent sun, the roaming, liberal light was shadowed and then returned like a lamp dampered and promptly relit. The westernmost rooms of the house registered this call and response—walls now flush with color, now dimmed, now returned to red, the orange overlaid with gray, molten color penetrating the sheers and staining the interiors. Walnut moldings and finials and frames were all cherry-lit like blown glass. Now there was a slight breeze, the curtains moved, the sun sank to a sliver, and in the last light bats swarmed the eaves, fleet and barely weighted and screeching smally. Somewhere, an animal called for its mate. A scale tipped. Then it was dark.

  The boy lay on his stomach in his bed. He wasn’t sure if he’d been sleeping or not. The light no longer played against the thin film of his eyelids, and his mother had returned. When she tugged the lamp cord, the room flooded with warm light. Henry made a small petulant sound, turning his face to the black window. When she didn’t reach out to him, he turned back to see a slender finger wagging in gentle reprimand. His mother wore a pale dressing gown belted tight under her small breasts, and the curls on her blonde head had retired to limp strands in the heat.

  Henry only eyed her sullenly.

  Inclining her head to one side and staring intently with wide dark brown eyes, she raised her hands palms up at her shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Henry mumbled.

  She bent further to see his mouth. Her brows drew in, folding the pale skin between them, her gaze swallowing him.

  Talk, she signed.

  No talk, he signed back with the hand that lay curled by his chin, the gestures terse and incomplete, more like flicking than signing.

  She scooted forward off the chair and lay down on her side, a sylph, so he had to hold himself back from falling into her. He found the scent of faded perfume and talcum powder and something on her breath he could not identify, but it was not unpleasant, like graham crackers or creamed coffee. She touched the nape of his neck and the top of his back, but not lower, where crisscrossing wales had risen along his waist and lower still, where split raw flesh like a red rope followed the crack of his bottom.

  You could have died, she signed with a sad and clownish face, then made her hands flip and die on the mattress.

  He shrugged, staring resolutely at the mattress, refusing her. The silk of her dressing gown rippled and washed as she breathed her loud, awkward breaths, the material falling like water from her crested hip to a pool on her inner thigh.

  You don’t care about me, she signed, and fingered the track of an invisible tear from the inside corner of her eye to her lip.

  He shrugged. “Father says I talk too much.”

  She shook her head against the mattress, a pin curl bobbling loose across her penciled brow.

  “He says my mouth is my Achilles heel.”

  Am I not pretty enough to talk to? she signed, her eyes sparkling, her lip thumbed out.

  “Talk with Father if you want to talk,” he whined, and his aim was true. Her face evened slightly of expression, a white cloth ironed. But when Henry saw the sudden stony and monkish reserve that marred her face, he conceded. His father had only learned the simplest signs.

  He signed, Okay.

  She brightened, but before a word was shaped by her hands, he began to cry raggedly. “It hurts.”

  Nodding, one toe whispering in nylon over his instep, her hand caressing the air above the broken and welted skin, where each thewing lash had landed. The whole of his body was concentrated in the concave of his back and between the cheeks of his bottom, where the painful lines his father had drawn all swelled together in a hot rosette. The pain rose and fell in a syncopation against his breath and the regular beat of his blood. He would not be able to shit without pain for two months.

  “He hurt me,” he cried softly. His mother scooted against him now, all silk to his pain. She kissed him on the nose.

  Darling boy, she signed, Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you.

  “I hate him,” he said, tears flooding his eyes.

  She pursed her lips. She signed, Blood waters the vine.

  “When I have children, I’ll never be mean to them,” he spat. “Never.” But when he tried to imagine his children, his only reference was himself. There would simply be more of him, and then he would assume his position in the line his father spoke of, that concatenation formed in the begotten past, one that wouldn’t end with him. It.

  He wanted to think about It, but he was so tired and the aspirin was working, and his mind kept slewing free, then knocking to rights again with a jolt, and always his mother was there, gazing on him with eyes as deep and dark as mouths. He drifted and sensed her gentle touch on the lines and curves of his face—the ridge brow that would soon emerge from its soft recess, the jaw that would widen like his father’s under fine cheekbones, a proud nose, all markers of those men residing in him, forming rings in his bones, rings in the family tree: John Henry by Jacob Ellison Forge out of Emmylade Sturgiss, and Jacob by Moses Cooper Forge out of Florence Elizabeth Hardin, and Moses by William Iver Forge out of Clara Hix Southers, and William by Richmond Cooper Forge out of Florence Beatrice Todd, and Richmond by Edward Cooper Forge out of Lessandra Dear Dixon, and Edward by Samuel Henry Forge out of Susanna Lewellyn Mason, and it was Samuel Forge who had come through the Gap in the old time in the old language:

  He was raised up on the graded slopes of Virginia, where the Forge clan had resided a hundred years on a piedmont tobacco farm, far east of the mysterious, canopied wildernesses. But the Old Dominion was too small, too tame for a man like Samuel Forge, and Virginia was fighting for a freedom already hemmed and hedgerowed, so he thought his hands empty despite his wealth, and his restless eye turned to the wooded West. He set out for that expanse, leaving behind for now the woman who had borne his son, Edward, taking with him only a Narragansett Pacer he had raised from a colt and a bondsman he had bought for $350 on Richmond’s Wall Street, younger than himself but stronger, fine-speaking, and useful. The black rode a stock roan with feathering over its thick draft pasterns and followed behind, his flintlock rifle strapped along his leftside flap. They crossed the bucolic piedmont, heading west along well-worn roads, over the first blue ridges that wrinkled and buckled up from the rocky flats, until the wide roads narrowed and sparsed to a trace like a roughspun thread through the wilds. The cultivated world of Virginia dimmed to a hum, then fell silent, replaced by the ungoverned noise of hardwood forest. Beyond those first beckoning ridges with their white mist over black deciduous interiors was the promise of infinite land. Forge and his slave both settled into their saddles and checked their rifles. Beyond the last fort they encountered a few starveacre farms with straggling corn patches and children outfitted in woolen rags like worn poppets with yarn hair, unschooled heads atop churchless bodies. A half day beyond these, they
encountered a pack of dogs run off from slaughtered families in distant cabins, the dogs now roaming the trace as the bison once had, shaggy and grinning. An acrid sliver of cooking smoke here or there. The sound of chopping wood far beyond the steep escarpments of trees and rocky soil. One day they rode beneath a parrot escaped from its filigreed past, perched now on a chestnut limb, counting one, two, three. Then nothing, nothing but an ever-narrowing passageway through interminable wilderness. They rode on, the black behind the white, neither speaking. The road grew rough as it went sidewinding up the ridges of rock, wet with lichen and moss, and down into notches narrow and dank as graves, the wood and many generations of leaves rotting there as midden. They rode on. Upon besting the highest ridges, the great dissected plateau extended before them, long ridges baring strata of the earth, endless green and blue and gray under the augmenting sky. When the valleys sometimes widened for rills and rivers, the land blossomed bright in sunlight and thronged with birds. There the men would rest and water the horses and then ford the rivers, the last ferry having been many waterways ago.

  They took to sleeping on opposite sides of the same tree, their backs to the bark, half-awake even in their deepest slumber. The slave spared one eye for Cherokee and Forge an eye for Shawnee. And every morning they resumed their westward trek, sometimes leading the horses along by their bridles, sometimes mounted and poured flat over the saddles to evade the low raftery of trees. They climbed and weaved and scrambled and hacked, their senses alert for natives. When they had struggled their way through the worst of the trace and were within hope of the valley called Powell’s, a man without a horse came staggering out of a crook in the path, and they stood their own horses in amazement as the man took no notice of them at all, but walked past with a torn burlap satchel and a dressing knife, staring straight ahead with wild eyes and murmuring child’s talk as he went. Forge tightened the grip on his rifle and spurred on, but the bondsman turned and watched until the man was out of sight, and a long time after.

  They came to the Gap in the afternoon, easily traversing the six level miles before it and watching the vast pinnacle loom to their right, the shallower ridge to the left and the low curtsy between. They found a stream and a cave in that open land, and they passed as quickly as possible, and though they did not see any natives, the natives saw them. They rode through the saddle passage and into the hot and humid hills that redoubled their pleating on the far side, so the trail rose and fell with maddening redundancy with no reprieve for days, and their fear was like pain. A horse was snakebit while foraging, and they bled the horse and waited three long days until he finally took the bit again. Then they continued and the next day found a scalped dog in a field of fiddle ferns, a hound. They buried it beneath a sepulchre of geodes and for another week saw no other signs of travelers, only bear, wolf, fox, and rabbit, and at night heard the womanly cries of wildcats.

  Finally the land eased, calmed, and they walked in expansive sunlight through a glade. Approaching the crest of one of the last great hills, Forge stopped and gazed back over the fraught land they’d traveled, where in a year’s time he would bring his belongings, his will the windlass by which all the packhorses and the children and the slaves and the mules would be hauled across the mountains. On this last big hill, Forge finally spied the knobs that announced the end of the mountains, and they made for them.

  Beyond the knobs, they discovered a transylvanic broadening of the land, where it rolled out its high shale hills and sloped to a distant river they could not see but expected. Forge stopped on this high meadow and reached down, scraping the soil with his finger, his heart stalling at the thin yellow soil reminiscent of clay. His slave said nothing; there was still a ways to go before they reached their destination. Forge remounted and slipped his feet into the irons that had borne him across two hundred miles of agony, and shortly they arrived at the river that snaked three hundred feet below its upper limestone cliffs. They wondered at the sheer drop and then clambered down the palisades, the horses shying and sinking into their quarters as the trail sank, the day and the heat fading. They passed the exposed musculature of the plateau’s rockbed, loose limestone shedding where cleft plates had formed the canyon; the horses stumbled on these shed innards as they walked the barely hewn path, blowing air and straining. At the cool base of the canyon, they swam the green river and remounted the ramparts on the far side. When they finally regained the summer day far above the river, they had passed the last great impediment west of the mountains, and their destination was closing. They were in Lexington by nightfall of the next day.

  But there was a bustling at this outpost and cabins with yards neatly set, and women walked there in chattering pairs on land already parceled and named, so spurred by dissatisfaction, Forge set out northeastward, and they rode quickly on the level forest with its occasional meadows of clover. They saw no one, though they followed a faint path broken largely by hooves. Soon, the underbrush grew denser all around until they dismounted and were forced to reblaze the trail.

  They crossed streams thick with fish and passed through groves of maple and black ash and finally came to a river they had heard of, though they veered south from the settlements there. They passed an outlying chimneyless cabin by a stream, where a man named Stoner offered them black bread and cream, and then there was nothing more that spoke of enclosure or obligation or entrapment or civilization. Forge’s blood rose and in a few hours’ time, they came upon a gently wending stream that fed a long brake of cane, ideal for battening cattle, with a broad swath of level land to the north. The two men rode east along the prattling tongue of the stream until it slipped deep beneath black lips to an aquifer mouth. In another half mile the even land sloped gradually down to another stream and rose again in the far distance. The men dismounted at the curb of this vast bowl. Their overrun horses stared straight ahead beside them, wasted, their eyes enormous in the shrunken frames of their heads.

  Forge raised one hand to his sunburned brow and gazed out over the vast tract of land. Then he turned to the man beside him, nodding and smiling. “This is the land I’ve waited a lifetime to find,” he said.

  The slave, who was called Ben but named Dembe by a mother he could not remember, did not need to shield his eyes as he gazed out over the woodland with its streamlets and springs gushing lustily through the dark bedrock.

  “A bit karsty,” he said. “Perhaps we should turn back.”

  Forge threw back his head and laughed, then he bent at the waist and snared the lush rye grasses in his hands, reminded once again of why he had brought his favorite slave instead of one of his younger brothers—to properly scout a land only dreamed of, to protect Forge’s life at the expense of his own, and to amuse him.

  * * *

  A rough, three-bayed cabin was erected next to the stream that came to be known as Forge Run. This remained the dwelling of Samuel Forge for seven years, then became a cabin for slaves when a team of English masons built a new stone house with two stories, as many staircases, gable-end chimneys, and paned windows. But this house shivered thirty years later when the earthquake made the pit silos collapse like old drifts, when Forge Run splashed out of its shallow banks, covering the corn and standing the startled cattle in six inches of slate water, so they bawled down in alarm at their vanished pasterns. When the water withdrew, the left side of the stone house had settled strangely with one shoulder slumped, and it was soon leveled, and the settler’s cabin too. The new Forge home was built two hundred yards north of the stream, a house formed from thousands of pounds of red brick fired by slaves on the land, who packed clay and fired kilns for months. When it was complete, the new house was hardier than its stone predecessor, with a black tile roof and a protruding el porch on its southern side that gazed out over the fields and the creek. Its interior moldings were stained dark, the walls dun, scarlet, and robin’s-egg blue with double-hung windows on all sides, and small ellipse fanlights along the eaves. The sun rose from across the bowl every mornin
g and sparked its many windows, then peered down from high angles all afternoon, so that the house did not appear like a house at all but only a pitch stain on the green fields, and then in the evening, a wide, red, optimistic face. This house stood without complaint through the abandonment of corn for hemp, the building of stone fences by Irish masons, the arrival of neighboring families, the War when Morgan’s men camped alongside the creek and requisitioned all the cattle and horses, then the eventual reintroduction of corn, the selling of many of the original three thousand acres, and the getting up and dying of seven generations. In this house, Henry Forge was born and raised.

  The wheals on his back soon faded to a faintly risen road map of pink, then white, then disappeared altogether. He never once placed a foot in the Miller bull yard again, but settled his debt for the bull’s life with a year of remunerative labor in the milking shed. He spent the crisp September mornings in the tie-stall barn, where the dung stench crowded out the clean air as smoke fills a burning room. God, he hated the cows with everything in him. He shuddered when he first gripped the swollen teats, extruding streams of warm milk that whined in the bottom of a tin bucket. He refused to rest his cheek on the hide of the cow as the farmer’s three girls did while they milked, but craned his neck to the side to keep from brushing against the distressing mass of the animal. He endured this indignity every day.

  On a September afternoon, when the calves’ seventy days of nursing were through, it was finally time for weaning. The youngest Miller showed him how it was done—a girl of seven with violently red hair, a face mottled with freckles, and knees as fat as pickle jars. She stuck her little fingers into the mouth of a skinny black calf and looked up at Henry, her own mouth a small O of delight. “This is my favorite part,” she said. “I wish I could stick my whole arm in there.” She motioned with her free hand for him to do the same. His calf took his fingers into its urgent mouth, and Henry fought the desire to snatch his hand back, but let it stay, worked and pulled by that alien, suckling muscle.