C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Allmon shook his head to stave it off, but a soul sickness was rising up and he couldn’t stop it. “I signed my name,” he whispered.

The jock waved away this objection with a brush of his other hand. “You need to unass that notion! Your black vernacular ass ain’t signed shit. X don’t mean nothing. Learn your history! White lies don’t add up to the truth! Your only choice was no choice!”

“I made a choice.” Allmon’s throat was full of shame, he was choking on it.

Reuben tossed up his hands in frustration. “No, goddammit — you keep telling the story all wrong! You think little sister had any choice when Massah sold her baby off the auction block at Cheapside, not seventy miles away from this here horse track? They call their madness logic, but that don’t make it logic! Your life or your child? You call that a choice? Why, it’s fuckery and perversion, the cant of the Kaintuckee! History, Allmon — learn your history!”

Allmon turned to him slowly like someone waking. “I know shit about them you don’t even know.”

“Then use it! Tell the tale! Throw open the doors of that prison!” The grip of the jock’s hand and grin grew monstrous. “Get loose and dark, get unruly and rank! Look at me — I’m black as a train and twice as fast, I’m gonna run you down with the new reality! The man that stole your child is the same man that killed your mother, the man that put you behind bars, that’s the same man that’s been stringing up the black brother since time immemorial. Think about that, Allmon! How you like them rotten apples? I picked them just for you.”

Allmon made an inhuman sound deep in his throat. Everything that had come before this moment was creating a bursting pressure in his chest.

Reuben raised one triumphant finger. “Let it penetrate your sticky ear! If that is not the truth, then they changed the definition of truth. What say you? Is it the truth?”

Allmon was dizzy with a swirling sensation, the muddy confluence of one will slipping into another.

“Tell me for the sake of that child! Yes or no?”

It shot out of him. “Yes!”

“Then cut your jesses and burst your bridle! That child belongs with its rightful owner!”

Mother and Momma. Her name was Marie.

Reuben’s whisper was harsh. “This is your time, Allmon…”

No, wait, wait, wait—

“Allmon…”

Allmon shook his head.

“Be a man.”

Allmon drew a harsh, sudden breath. Then he straightened up and turned an unblinking eye on Reuben. He stared disdain down his nose. “I don’t need you telling me what to do.”

Reuben blinked then and reached out to place a palm firmly on Allmon’s chest. “No,” he said, shaking his head as if weary. “You don’t. Your mind was made up before I turned the corner. I can see that now. You are the superior man in every way.”

Allmon shrugged off his hand. “I got to go.”

Reuben made a faint gesture toward Allmon’s hand. “And now you have the keys to the kingdom.”

Allmon said nothing in response. He had already turned away to scan the massive parking lot for the Forge Mercedes, a silver fish in a lurid sea of luxury cars. First he limped along on his aching joints, then he was running through the pain to get where he knew he had to go, where he was meant to go, where his child was being held hostage. Reuben watched him weave unsteadily between cars. He muttered, “A late response is still a great response.” Then he turned his back and thumped his chest once to clear the phlegm, realizing that the after-parties were elsewhere and soon to commence. He grinned.

* * *

Henry stared over the dash at the undulating expanse of Forge Run Farm, the filly behind him in her trailer, Samuel asleep on the bucket seat of the dually, content in the farm dust and the animal dander. With some shock, Henry realized that despite the uproar of the day, the farm — this world he had created — was still in his possession and nothing could change that. Here was the two-hundred-year-old house, which had been the dream of the first Samuel; here was the crumbling fence and the perpetual stream. Here was the overgrown orchard and the old barns converted and stocked with horseflesh he had bred.

It struck him as preposterous, impossible, that in short order his family would be exposed and naked to the world, that the taproot name, from which all their brief names had sprouted like a season’s leaves, would be ridiculed as some kind of fraud or, worse, would become synonymous with the way things fall apart, how autumn follows on every fulsome summer. Henry replayed his choices at the track, including his abrupt decision to bring Samuel and reveal him to his father. Allmon was a man he barely knew. Henry had imagined himself as stepping out of his family like a man emerging from shadow. But now on the firm ground of the farm, his resolve wavered, his old truculent defenses ever at the ready: if any crime had been committed, it was his father’s doing, not his own. Yes, Henry had lied stupidly, but he’d merely been a prisoner of another man’s ideas. His father had been the progenitor of hate and disunion, his father would have had half the world hanging from the boughs of a holly tree, his father was the one who—

His own thinking degenerated to white noise in his mind.

He could no longer convince his most faithful audience, himself.

Henry looked around helplessly, his old passions like vestigial organs. They couldn’t fill the vacuum created by the lost generation. It was breathtaking: Once his daughter had been a little girl on this very ground, her ring finger crooked, her legs bandy, her face configured by irreplaceable, unrepeatable bones. She had held her hands to her hips in a particular way. She had frowned like this, tilted her head like that. She had emerged as a singular mystery, sui generis, from the womb of the woman who had once been his wife — a woman with red lips he’d met on the track, a woman who had left after many, many arguments, none of which were more important than the gum on the bottom of his shoe. He still recalled the set of his young wife’s chin and how the iris of her eye soon turned the color of dissatisfaction. Now the little girl they had created was vanished. Her death was a marvel, a mystery, the ultimate school.

Henry raised a trembling hand to his brow as if shielding his eyes, though evening’s evanescent light streamed from a distant eternity behind the truck. His heart beat terribly. How could life be so boring and terrifying and exhilarating and confounding all at once? Its contradictions did not seem possible. He felt so old suddenly. Yes, he was old. But this was newly unobjectionable. Cut the throat of puer aeternus and bury him in a vacant chamber of Henry’s heart.

He watched with a kind of bland, uneventful horror as years of ambition swirled and washed rapidly down the drain.

My God, he had to get out of the truck or he was going to have a stroke, be laid down in the dust like his father had been that autumn day so many years ago. He eased his road-weary bones out into the dwindling warmth of the day. He needed the fresh breeze to clear his mind and strengthen his body. He needed his feet on the ground; he needed, most of all, to think.

So now there was nothing between him and the land. He saw that imminent change was all around him. The ragged and unattended orchard could be curated, its trees trimmed and grafted to produce a bounty of apples again. That could be enough to slake the thirst of a thousand people, and maybe it would. The breeding operation could be slowed, or halted — yes, even halted — and some of the paddocks returned to pasturage. After all, this was the finest growing land in the country outside of Iowa, and treasure troves of produce could be cropped. Even their new, relatively small garden could feed many more than Samuel and himself. Maybe, when all was said and done, he would return some of the land to its original wildness, something his daughter had seemed to value. Land needed no purpose after all. Land was an end in itself. Now to the barns — his excitement rose, he realized he could use them as they were. He could shelter and reschool retired Thoroughbreds. He had the permanent wealth to do so; racing had never been a moneymaking venture for him. Forge Run Farm could be a place of renewal and rest, where something old and broken could become fresh again. The very idea filled him with sober joy.