C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Henry’s eyes snapped to the rearview again. Samuel’s face had grown dreamy with a trace of spittle along his voluminous cheek. His eyes cast round once, focus drifting, followed by a shuttering of the lids in untroubled sleep. Henry said his name out loud to test the reality of the present time, because she was there — not beneath the color of the child’s face but in it, her bones building his bones moment to moment, the fullness of her face fleshing his. Her blood coursing through him.

Henry, you spread your daughter’s legs the way you split a tree to build a house. Was it worth it?

Suddenly, slowly, the line began to slowly flow backward like the Ohio, which reversed course after the great earthquake so many years ago. He couldn’t fight it and in an instant, Henry’s being was overfull; he began to drown with the new knowing. The earth was like a great king, and all the various beings in the world were only component parts of that majestic body. Henry had always imagined himself to be the king, but he was only the left hand, which had — in its madness — reached across and severed the right hand, thinking it would grow his station. And yet here he was bleeding out into endless space and time, because — Henry, now you know — the man who destroys another destroys himself. That is the taste of her blood in your mouth.

But, isn’t it true that the great slay cheap morality in their quest?

That small minds spend lifetimes setting limits on their betters?

Now, the old language slips again through the fissures of time: There’s shame hidden in the walls of the family house, Henry, so we will take it apart, dismantle the entire structure. Fling the shingles from the roof and crumble the old stacked chimneys, all eight. Strip out the pipery and haul out the case goods, the sideboards, the sugar chests and chesterfields, the old Jackson press; yank the moldings and the millwork down, hammer out the mantels and unhinge the doors from their sills, slide out their glinting windows. Now loosen the bricks from their old arrangements and toss them down in a heap where the cabins once stood, until there is nothing left but the cagework of the old homeplace, a chestnut skeleton of exposed raftery with nothing to stave off the frigid northern wind that comes rushing through in the form of a nameless, fire-blackened woman with singed wings striated under her gusseted corset under her tattered moiré gown under her gentleman’s banyan of obscene color, who from a rotting reticule at her elbow withdraws an old promissory note and gives it a wild shake. The serpents of her dark hair sidle and weave, the irises of her eyes irrupted by arterial blood.

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.