C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Allmon looked up, eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Crabs. Now get back to work. I’m not paying you to work your mouth.”

“Henry Forge, a lifelong devotee of racing and one of its steadiest breeders, is finally putting his name in lights with his big black filly, Hellsmouth, who trounced the field this October at the Juvenile Fillies Stakes. Close readers of Blood Horse will recognize the marks of her predecessors Hellcat and Hellbent, but even the most casual racing fan should detect the imprint of Secretariat. This horse is a living, breathing manifestation of the old adage: the best horses come out of the best horses.”

— Burrow, Blood Horse

Father has spent his life under a bright light in a narrow hallway, repeating names he memorized long ago. But I looked out the window, looking for the ideas that underwrote nature. The problem: what I really saw was my own imagination written onto the landscape of physical matter over time. Self on everything.

“In a long career as a track writer and as witness to some of the greatest horses this sport has ever seen, I can say with absolute certainty that this is the first horse that’s eclipsed the great Secretariat in my mind. And it’s a filly — if that don’t beat all.”

— Greeney, Racing Form

Then I met someone I wanted more than the idea of him, and I began to think: another also thinks. An equivalency began to assert itself. I sensed the enduring mutual affinities. But until that moment happens, it’s impossible for the mind to accept that the self is not the center of the universe, that the center is everywhere, that the universe is always expanding, that there is, in fact, no limit to the universe at all.

“The King is dead. Long live the Queen!”

— The New York Times

The movement of evolution is from simple to complex.

The queen knew what she was — something royal, a bold ruler — and she liked nothing better than to show out. On her early morning walks with Allmon, she would showboat among the riffraff, spinning her black tail and crow hopping on her perfectly turned hooves. She mugged for the cameras like her grandsire had done thirty years before, tossing her bull head and rippling her withers like a colt shot up on elephant juice. But Allmon knew she was clean; no one was sneaking in Regu-Mate or Equipoise, Lasix or milkshakes or anything beyond the standard regimen of anti-inflammatories. All the coltish conformation she displayed, the thick, bundled muscles of her quarters and the long, aggressive neck, was her treasure by birthright. Some fillies were just like that — better than the colts at their own game.

Henry. The sight of the man was a shock. Allmon reared back, not recognizing him at first, the way he leaned against Mack’s barn as if it were the only thing keeping him from toppling into his own grave. Allmon blinked, as if to clear his vision of a mirage. Where had all Henry’s physical beauty gone? His face was the color of old ashes, his once red-gold hair visibly thinner, and he had lost twenty pounds he couldn’t spare. He looked to all the world like a handicapper down all his profit, all his luck.

When Henry felt the weight of Allmon’s gaze, he straightened up, looking right at him. Then he pushed himself away from the barn wall, turned, and walked with visible effort through its rolling door.

Dread moves swift as blood through the body, from the heart to the distal extremities. For some months, the baby had existed only as a strange muscular tension that wrapped itself now and again around Allmon’s brain, but suddenly it was as present as the blood in his veins. Yes, it had surely been born by now. Sweat prickled at Allmon’s neck. He walked slowly toward the barn, a knocking in his chest. It was like the blow of a pick against an ice block.

Hell was rank for the lead, shouldering past Allmon into the barn, passing through golden streams of morning light, so chaff particles swam and eddied around her in a liquid rush. Henry watched his filly pass into her stall — his winning girl, his thousand-pound trophy. He could detect no flaw in her at all. She was perfection. A furious, wasting anger blew through him. How could that illusion be so enduring?

Henry looked at Allmon and cleared his throat. “My daughter died.”

Allmon came to a complete standstill, body and mind. Then he drew back with a stupid expression on his face.

Again: “A month ago, my daughter died. In childbirth. The child survived.”

The color drained visibly from Allmon’s face.

“The child is small but healthy.” Then he said hesitantly, as if he’d been asked a troubling question, “Some produce better than they run.”

Allmon searched Henry’s eyes, desperate to comprehend, yet desperate not to comprehend, now or ever. There was madness in the words. The edges of the world were crumbling off the map.

“This horse is all I have left,” Henry whispered suddenly, but even as he said this, he felt the falseness of it immediately. He also had his name, he had that.

The words helped Allmon recover himself, if only slightly. He leaned forward, his face jutting into Henry’s space. “You don’t even know what nothing is.”

A flash of a despondent grin.

Allmon didn’t even know how he found the strength to speak, it was like the devil swept up through his body to wag his tongue. “The deal still stands, old man. Don’t try to play me now.” But through the anger flashed an old, wilding, reckless sorrow: God’s finger touched her and she slept. It threatened to upend him; he was breathing in panic, not air.

Brief confusion slashed Henry’s grief-lean face. “Yes, the deal still stands. We will take this horse all the way. Give her the best possible care. Baby her, feed her by hand, sleep outside her stall, do whatever it takes. I don’t want another pair of hands on her. Protect her by any means necessary.” Allmon had some sense that his head was nodding, playing its part, nodding because there were all sorts of sabotage afoot in barns like sponging or slipping blistering agents into a horse’s mouth, agreeing because this was a conversation any two horsemen would have, but then the horror of the thing began to break forcibly through his thoughts, and he said, “The baby … it’s mine?”

Henry paused. He felt his father pulling on his right hand, his grandfather pulling on his left, dead weights both. He straightened up. “No,” he said suddenly, surprised as the words spun like silk from his mouth. “It’s not.”

Allmon drew back jerkily, a look of pure astonishment on his face. There was a rending of the temple cloth. In an instant, furious tears filled his eyes, and those tears turned to hate even before they touched his face. He could find no words as cutting as the betrayal that swamped him.

Henry stepped back, half turning to exit the stall, but confusion stayed him, as well as a complicated weight of regret that he immediately sensed would only grow, but he couldn’t correct. The child — the wrong color but the right blood — was his. His family.

“The child’s name is Samuel,” he said, surprising himself.

Then he left Allmon alone in the stall, Allmon who now had nothing in the world but a horse that didn’t belong to him. He took one step forward as if he intended to follow Henry and demand some different truth, an altered past. But he just sank to his knees in urine-soaked hay, a howl of grief and rage filling his mind. Fool! And he thought he had known loss!

* * *

Laurel Futurity, November 2005. The trees were bare, and like the leaves, the bright crowds were thick on the ground, turned out in their Saturday color jostling for position at the saddling paddock, where the grooms managed the mounts and the trainers sprang jocks. Henry stood among the Laurel Park spectators but they, as if by instinct, offered him a wide berth. He was an emaciated version of his old self, a hack among Arabians. A month along, his grief was still so fresh that no one could look at it. It traveled as a bright sparkling acid all along his capillary rivers; his skin was so thin, it shined right out of him, a gorgeous, harrowing thing. It was like the angels of old: it stunned everyone into silence, and they averted their eyes.