C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“I want to tell you a secret!” Henry said. “A secret that not even my daughter knows.” The room leaned forward, smiling. “It may surprise you to hear that as a young man I was disinherited by my father.”

Disconcerted laughter thinned to a trickle, then ceased. Glasses half-raised were lowered. Henrietta sat up straight in her chair and tried to rally her focus.

Henry’s gaze was steady on the room. “As you probably know, my father, John Henry, was a man of rigid principle, unbending in ways I couldn’t understand when I was a young man. But what did I know? I was just a callow youth. When I looked out over our corn farm, I saw a pathetic, conservative misuse of land. When my father imagined a horse farm, he saw nothing but ostentation; he thought his son would forget where he had come from, where his allegiance ought to lie.”

Henry folded his arms across his chest. “So we were at odds, you see, my father and I. I detected in him a failure of nerve, a fear of risk, and he thought my plans were beneath his dignity. Our dignity. Dignity that — like yours — was purchased at high cost over many generations. In short, he feared a reversal of hard-earned fortune in every sense of that word.

“My father was right, of course,” he said, smiling into the shocked silence, smiling at Henrietta. “But please don’t misunderstand me; I was right too. I’ll get to that in a moment.

“My father, the man we are here celebrating tonight, saw my rebellion as a threat to something far more important than me: our family. That he was mistaken is now of no consequence. The important thing is that he would do anything to protect the family name, to protect the women in our house, to maintain the land, to store up honor for his children and their children. He understood that our lives are really lived in the minds of others. Their good opinion is worth more than gold. So, the most important thing — the critical component of my father’s character — is a seeming paradox I didn’t understand then, but understand now. He loved his family more than he loved his own child.”

Henrietta choked down what was left in her tumbler, and it was instantly refilled.

“Now, my uncle never wanted to farm, and he returned the land to me. He understood what my father couldn’t understand: that my plans for the land were no threat to the family name or fortune. And that’s why my rebellion was never wrong. Because it furthered the cause of the family. And I know that’s something that everyone here tonight can understand, because there’s true-blue blood running through the heart of the Bluegrass, and that’s been the case for two hundred and fifty years. We built this state brick by brick, and we saved it twenty times over from the riffraff that would unthinkingly tear it down. Why, families like all of ours are the only reason we’re not … Mississippi!”

Laughter erupted in the room, brightened by the high, sharp overtones of relief. “We were the Old South and, unlike most of our sister states, we still are!” Henry raised his glass. “So let’s drink to John Henry!”

The room exploded, but when he turned to Henrietta, his gaze was a kill shot.

“And let’s drink to Henrietta Forge. I want you all to look at her, how beautiful she is tonight. If you ever want to see the pride of my life, look at her. I’ve done everything for this precious woman and, as far as I’m concerned, she’s the crowning glory of the family. She’s never done me wrong, and I know beyond the darkest shadow of a doubt that she never will. Because she knows what my father knew. She’s more like him than she can even know.”

The room turned to look at her.

“Henrietta, I’m drinking to you, my Ruffian,” her father said. “We’re all drinking to you.”

She raised her fourth glass.

“To you!”

She hesitated.

“To you!” they said as a single organism.

She quaffed the shot, her eyes stinging. The hideous pink of the curtains swam before her. She tried to hang on to Allmon’s name as a bouy, but it was slipping out of her grasp.

“And let’s drink to Hellsmouth, my favorite racehorse.” Without taking his eyes from Henrietta, he said, “A fine example of controlled usage, of taking great chances with breeding. We’re going all the way with this one!”

The waiter was behind her, reaching around her, so she could smell the rank odor of his underarms, and even before he was done pouring, she was raising the tumbler again, they were all raising their glasses to Hellsmouth, the promise of Forge Run Farm, of Henry. A quintet was tuned, and now their chords were flushing the diners from their velvet seats to take the parquet dance floor, which was too small for their numbers, but they crowded there anyway, glasses in hand. It was much too much of too much — dancers filmed with sweat, low, guttural laughter, the stridency of some woman’s voice too loud for the environs, shoved here by a body and there by another, until her father was wrapping her up in his arms and swept her down a slim corridor between bodies, so the fishtail hem of Henrietta’s dress flared, and they were eye to eye.

As they turned on the floor, Henry breathed in the bourbon on her breath, strong enough to make a man drunk. He gripped her drinking hand and raised the tumbler to her lips.

He said, “Henrietta, young people think life is just a game. A sport.”

She tried desperately to focus her disobedient eyes on the buttons of his collar.

“But you’re smarter than that.”

The scooping of his vowels was broad as a river. They all talked like this, she realized with a start, as if life were happening in slow motion, their words a hundred years behind the times. She wanted to put her hand to her hot forehead, but she couldn’t, because it was raising her drink to her lips. He was.

“I love you, Henrietta.”

She was nauseous. She was revolving on the axis of him.

“But I also love perfection.”

She nodded slowly, his due.

He drew her tighter than a bow. “And perfection is worth every risk.”

* * *

The knock came when she was half stumbling out of her dress, her hair fallen around her shoulders and her mascara smeared from rubbing. She turned clumsily in her drunkenness, gripping the bedstead to remain upright.

“Knock, knock.” His voice, that old familiar, almost her own.

The ceramic knob turned and when the door opened, it creaked on its ancient hinges.

“Knock, knock,” he said quietly, all eyes.

She turned half-naked in the dim light.

“Come in, Daddy.”

* * *

Success: wealth, status, fame; involves the attainment of the worldly good only insofar as these attainments ensure the survival of selfish genes; autologous continuation; not merely survival but increasing complexity, including larger cranium or diminishment of dangerous vestigial organs, such as appendix; dependent upon genetically mutant transitional forms; see evolution of theropods & Etc for evidence of speciation and other deviations from ancestral forms; dependent in ancient thought upon the leniency of the gods and the mastering of fate; or, predestination generally requiring a supernatural agent (i.e., fate as a spindle, around which Clotho, Lachesis & Atropos wind an individual’s thread, analogous to fate as the spindle in the cell); archaic : the good or bad outcome of an undertaking.

* * *

Now Henry was like a teenaged boy, bouncing on his heels, his strength renewed by a bold new diet. He was seeking out the groom, the antiphonal calling of mares and foals ringing over his head like church bells, celebrating the hour. He smiled. The other groom was late to the church, entirely too late.

Their regular farrier, a mustachioed man with hair the color of a chestnut roan, was exiting his Nissan and moving in the direction of the stallion barn.