C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“I do,” said Henry. “I wouldn’t want to waste my father’s money.” An attempted smile of his own.

“Your father said he’s been tutoring you himself in Latin thus far. That’s very impressive.”

“Well, he began studying Latin when he was five. We were one of the first families to come over the Wilderness Road. We’re quite wealthy.”

“Young man,” the tutor said abruptly, “you look exhausted. Do you get enough sleep?”

“Yes. I really think my father’s pronunciation could be better, though.” Henry leaned forward again. “I want my education to be very heavy on the classics — not that I won’t study math and science; I’ll study all of it. I intend to be excellent at everything I set my mind to, but what I want most is to be heavy on the classics. I want to be a classicist. I’ve already memorized most of the details of classical mythology. But I’d really like to start with On Horsemanship .”

“All right, all right,” said the tutor, holding up a hand. “I do, of course, have a curriculum for you based on your previous schooling and tutoring. But if your heart is set on it, then I suppose we can begin with On Horsemanship . What is extant, at least. If that’s your … inclination, I certainly don’t see the harm in it. Though I’m not sure I see the value either.”

“When can we start?”

The man didn’t answer immediately, but lowered his head ever so slightly, so that he gave the impression he was gazing at Henry over invisible eyeglasses. “Wouldn’t you like to know my name first?”

“My name’s Henry.”

“Yes, I know that. My name is Gerald Price. Of Trenton, New Jersey.”

“When do we start?”

The man shrugged with a barely audible sigh. “We begin now, I suppose.”

And so his true education began. They studied this appraisal of animals for hours and when the older man left, the student remained exactly where he had begun the day. He grammared and translated and conjugated and declined, then read well into the night in his bed by flashlight and many nights thereafter, making penciled notes in composition books and memorizing Xenophon to the word, so he would never forget that for soundness of foot a thick horn is far better than a thin. Again, it is important to notice whether the hoofs are high both before and behind, or flat to the ground; for a high hoof keeps the “frog,” as it is called, well off the ground; whereas a low hoof treads equally with the stoutest and softest part of the foot alike, the gait resembling that of a bandy-legged man. “You may tell a good foot clearly by the ring,” says Simon happily; for the hollow hoof rings like a cymbal against the solid earth.

And the boy paid keen attention to the assemblage of a horse’s body, particularly the shoulder blades, or arms, these if thick and muscular present a stronger and handsomer appearance, just as in the case of a human being. Again, a comparatively broad chest is better alike for strength and beauty, and better adapted to carry the legs well asunder, so that they will not overlap and interfere with one another … Again, the neck should not be set on dropping forward from the chest, like a boar’s, but, like that of a game-cock rather, it should shoot upwards to the crest, and be slack along the curvature; whilst the head should be bony and the jawbone small. In this way the neck will be well in front of the rider, and the eye will command what lies before the horse’s feet. A horse, moreover, of this build, however spirited, will be least capable of overmastering the rider, since it is not by arching but by stretching out his neck and head that a horse endeavors to assert his power.

Henry sketched his plans, made lists and calculations. He shaped a horse out of the dark clay of his mind, and it crept forth into the light of expectation: first its destrier head, then its massive barrel chest. From the turned hooves to the cut of the knife-tip ears, its body was designed for forward motion. Bred light, but heavily motored. Flexible, intelligent, full of force and fire, towering in height — not the servant of the Moirai but their trampler — this was a horse that made good on horseness. Tough enough for war, but more beautiful than any woman and even more necessary.

Every morning the tutor greeted the madder-eyed insomniac, saying, “Tell me what you know,” and Henry stood before him, maniacal with fatigue, but inlit with consuming desire:

I know that a horse is better than corn, and that a man is better than a horse, and that a boy is better than a man, because he has not become his father yet.

Tell me what you know .

That this farm is just a sleight of land — a play at restraint! But the joke is on John Henry, not Jacob Ellison or Moses Cooper or William Iver or Richmond Cooper or Edward—

Tell me what you know.

That I am a Kentuckian first, a Virginian second, a Christian third. I am the refinement of Samuel’s seed. I am a man made for my time, not my father’s or his father’s. I know that a city untended weakens and falls. Troy will fall, Rome will fall, any great city will fall without a show of strength.

Tell me —

I know that when the Liberators killed Caesar, they stabbed him right through the heart.

* * *

A tall and beautiful Henry had just turned sixteen when his cousins made their yearly weeklong visit. They traversed the shimmering Florida byways in the late summer heat, and when they finally stumbled from their Chevrolet onto the Forge lawn, they were sweating like miniature prizefighters, throwing themselves into Lavinia’s waiting arms. John Henry was cordial at her side, but their increasingly distracted son was nowhere to be seen. Henry had bicycled into Paris, his Saturday habit now, to pore over books in the public library. There he studied the principles of legacy. He spread out his books of pedigree charts, breeding formulas, family trees that branched crookedly back to the Godolphin Arabian, the Darley Arabian, Byerley Turk. Once he carefully ripped a page from an old encyclopedia, so that he could bring home the Turk, all greyhound head and legs like rose stems. The picture hid gamely under his mattress, waiting for the time when it would finally centerpiece a wall — when Henry was eighteen and matriculated at Sewanee alongside the sons of the South.

Today, he made his scrupulous notes on mare stamping, the intractable tendency of the female to raft her features over the weaker male and mold her get in her image. It was a tenuous and risky task to breed when male strength was infinitely subject to the savvier, prepotent female. Henry was just now learning how to linebreed and inbreed a horse to a desired constitution, delving back to the same female ancestor on both sides, so that the lines rhymed and the foals showed a dam’s taproot strengths without being dominated by her. A large heart came through the dam; one could trace its passage from foal to granddam and beyond; it stoked the chests of all descendants, it fueled limbs across finish lines and into winner’s circles. The heart was the thing — and how to get it.

Henry cycled back to the house in the amber afternoon with borrowed books crammed into his rucksack, a cap tilted across his brow. He’d nearly run over his youngest cousin in diapers before he remembered that the family had arrived today, that he’d been expected back well before the supper hour. He dropped his bike in the gravel, so the wheels spun with a useless rattle, and lifted the first child he saw to his chest, a small human shield against the remonstration sure to come. But his father was engrossed in conversation with his brother, a man with dark red hair just beginning to gray and the easy, open face of a younger brother. Never close, they were as different as spring and autumn. Beyond them, the girls played croquet—