C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“If you’ve got a fever, I don’t want you near me. Make your mama tend you.”

“Mother isn’t here. Father sent her away to Florida.”

Maryleen raised a hand. “That’s not my business. Go on back to bed. I need to fetch eggs. Filip didn’t fetch them for me this morning.” She scooped up a yellow ware bowl, actually glad now that the chore hadn’t been done, as it gave her a chance to escape this strange troll of a boy, but he said, “Filip isn’t here anymore.”

It wasn’t just the words, but the way he said them — so deliberately, like something memorized and carefully recited to an audience of one. It made Maryleen stop with her hand on the brass knob of the door with just enough time to note the cool oval shape, how similar it was to an egg only nowhere near as fragile, before her mind reared up. That thing that had been waiting like a stalking cat ready to spring had sprung.

“Oh,” she said, her voice oddly cool, disembodied from her beating chest. “Where’s he working now?”

His voice wavered, hesitant. “I don’t believe he’s working anywhere anymore, Maryleen.”

The way he said her name filled her with dread. She stepped out the door without another word, clutching the bowl to her belly and walking a few paces, then half running through the dark toward the chicken coops behind the horse barn. Her breath was coming in shallow draws and her face was flushed. She kneeled on shaky legs and reached around blindly in the coop, pushing hens aside impatiently, so they winged about and complained, and she dropped two eggs in her haste, one chicken escaping the hutch, so it required a minute to wrestle it back in. Six eggs in the bowl now, and she was walking back to the house, because she didn’t know what else to do. In lieu of proper thought, her legs just ferried her back, the minions of habit. The morning was still dark as the inside of a stove, the sun a long way off.

Thank God the boy was no longer in the kitchen when she returned. She placed the bowl on the butcher block, just as Filip would have done, and without further hesitation tiptoed as quickly as she could to the black phone, where it hung in the hallway. She couldn’t call her mother; her white folk didn’t rise until seven. Anyway, her mother would have told her if she’d known something. Her father’s preacher? No — Miss Martin, her old Home Economics teacher, the woman who had taught her everything she knew about cooking. Miss Martin would be awake; she woke every morning at four thirty for her morning prayers.

The phone was answered swiftly after two rings. There was that reliable, gracious voice with its precise elocution. “Good morning,” it said. “This is Ella Martin speaking.”

“Miss Martin!” Maryleen rasped with a hand curved around the receiver. “It’s Maryleen!”

“Yes, Maryleen. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. What are you doing calli—”

“Where’s Filip?” Maryleen interrupted. Into the tiniest hint of a pause, Maryleen whispered, “Filip Dunbar.”

“I know the Filip to whom you’re referring,” said Miss Ella. “Maryleen, he ran off over a week ago, just up and went. Left Susah on her own, which some might argue is for the best. They’d been having a lot of trouble recently from what I hear. My goodness, child, surely you didn’t call me at this hour to gossip with an old woman.”

“Oh God.”

“Maryleen.” The voice was curving into a question when Maryleen abruptly hung up the phone and stood there in the dark, her mind sorting and measuring, but knowing she was way too late to the equation. The final numbers had already been calculated by others.

“Who were you talking to, Maryleen?”

Despite the alarm that sent her body rimrod straight, despite the fact that she would whip around and see him standing there like a ghost in the shadows of the hall, her first acid thought was “with whom .”

“My mama,” she lied, her answer formulated before she even turned. There was a frightening stillness in Henry’s form, and his face was set in shadows, so she couldn’t know exactly what it held. She was sweating now, and her charged breath was audible.

“Today’s my shopping day,” she said uselessly into the silence, but he didn’t respond.

Then she snapped, her voice keening upward from a barely suppressed panic, “Go ask your father how I’m supposed to get to the grocery without a driver!”

“He’s not awake.”

“Go!” she cried.

For a second, he looked as though he was about to go do just that, but he didn’t. He said, “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Her mind reeled. The last time she’d been in the house, only ten days prior, she could have told him to drink lye and somehow, by virtue of her bandsaw personality or her seniority or just her evil eye, she could have gotten him to do it. But whatever power she had held in her hand at the end of December, he was holding in his hands now in this hallway, in this new year. Wearing a thin mask of frustration over rising fear, she shouldered roughly past him, stalked down the hall to the kitchen, trying her best to appear angered by his eavesdropping.

But he followed her. He stood watching as she banged copper and tin pots around mindlessly. She wasn’t a cryer, but the first droplets of grief and fear were wringing from the winepress of her mind.

“I can’t cook with you staring at me like that,” she finally hissed over her shoulder.

“Maryleen,” he said. “Do you think we all eventually get the punishment we deserve?”

“What?” she snapped.

“I mean, if God doesn’t exist, then he can’t punish anyone. I guess we have to do it ourselves,” he said. “See, man actually is the measure of all things. Man wrote all the books, so he’s the measure even if he says he isn’t. We invented God to tell us to do what we already wanted to do. That’s what I think.”

“Punishment? You mean men? What?” She had no idea what he was talking about, what he was trying to riddle out to her, but her body made its own interpretation, a trace of cold wending its way down from between her shoulder blades to her tailbone, and the sudden feeling that she had to pee.

“I heard you say Filip did something,” he said quietly, and the sound of his voice was the thing that frightened her most of all, the queer way he sounded like a little boy when he said it. When she turned, his eyes were enormous and febrile, and she couldn’t stop the words as they rose up from her very belly, passing through the esophagus constricted by fear and then through the ashes in her mouth: “What have you done?”

He reared back, a look of injury on his face. When he spoke, she could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “Nothing. I was trying to do the right thing. All I want is to grow up.”

“I said”—she hissed—“what have you done.”

“I didn’t do anything! I just told Father what you said.”

Maryleen’s brow crumpled up in bewilderment. “What I said?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

She stared at him without a word, waiting.

“You said Filip touched Mother. I heard you.”

She gasped. “Oh my God.”

“Maryleen—”

Her finger was trembling when it punctuated the air between them. “You are evil.”

Sudden rage blasted through him like fire. “No, I’m not! He touched Mother!”

Maryleen’s eyes grew impossibly wide. “He touched your whore mother,” she said, and then leaned so far over the butcher block, she was practically lying on it to yell into his face, “BECAUSE SHE WANTED IT!”

Henry reached out and swept the bowl with its eggs onto the floor, fury undoing what was left of his reserve. “Get out of my house, Maryleen!” he screamed. “Get out now!”