C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Why not?” Henrietta said. “Did she get in an accident?”

“No,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “She’s fine. She stayed in Lexington.”

“Why?” she said, and as a ghost of suspicion flitted in her eyes, Henry thought, she’s nothing like her mother; there’s so much of me in her.

“Well,” he said, “your mother…” Then he paused and waited for something to come into his mind and when it didn’t appear, he winced and hurried on. “Your mother has an apartment in Lexington, where she might want to stay sometimes.”

“But she’s coming home.” The words seesawed between question and insistence.

Henry looked down into that worried face and his mouth struggled momentarily as he redirected his words. “Soon,” he said, and brighter: “Soon!” But his own smile was alloyed by hesitation. She pressed her face into the flat of his belly, and he heard her mumble, “Good.”

Outside, there was the sound of the first trailer rumbling down the lane with a frightened stallion kicking inside.

“Where are the horses going?” she said, her voice muffled.

“To a training center just until the creek settles. We don’t want it to rise and carry them away.”

In her mind, the black and brown horses were swept off in the raging current of Forge Run, open-mouthed and screaming shrilly in the frothing stream, their eyes rolling in terror and their bodies battling in slow motion against forces stronger, much stronger, than themselves.

“No,” she said. “Please keep them all safe, Daddy.”

* * *

The storm continued for three days without abating. The creek flashed out of its margins, spilling over half the paddocks and into the stallion barn, though it was sandbagged and wrapped to three feet in heavy plastic. Hay and straw floated out on the rising tide and swirled in a gray mass that soaked the earth. The sky was sodden and tiresome, the earth was sodden and tiresome. Henrietta watched it all from the kitchen and from her parents’ room as she waited for the phone to ring.

When the rain finally stopped, the clouds thinned and were wicked from the drying sky as quickly as they had come, and the creek began to fall back with a sigh into its banks, leaving behind little pluvial courses like open veins in the soil. Henrietta ventured out in her mother’s polka-dotted galoshes and explored the paddocks that oozed water with each step. She stood on the edge of the creek, where it continued to shrink back as if newly shy absent the blustering weather. She could not move about freely without slipping and sliding, so she just stood there and stared, and in her silence and in her fixity was some hint of a pained dawning. There was a change coming, and its germinal moments arrived not when she lay in her bed with panic in her breast, but here as she stood staring dully at the surface of a creek too muddy to see into, too dull to divulge its contents or reflect back anything of the world — not even her own face. She glanced back at the house, wondering whether she would hear the phone ringing down here.

She wandered down in the direction of the road where the rain-sickened creek was still engorged, swirling around the lower line of the old stone fence. A few of the limestone slabs, craggy and cut thin, had tumbled into the water and then either settled into the soil or slipped back into the current, where they lay camouflaged with their neighbors on the streambed. On the western, Perry side of the stream, the gray hands of the water had pushed the fence until a portion toppled over fully intact onto its side, as neatly fallen as it had previously stood for over a century. Henrietta labored on the Forge side for a few minutes, returning limestone chunks to their spots in the wall and reordering the top vertical stones, so they were stacked together again in a line like books or a row of neolithic dinner plates.

“Miss Henrietta!” a voice called to her, and she straightened up abruptly with a hand shading her brow. There were some few straggling clouds now, but the atmosphere was thick with the moisture of the storm and the light seemed to come dully from everywhere and nowhere. Henrietta saw their neighbor, Ginnie Miller, plump and redheaded, waving one arm above her head and calling, “Miss Henrietta!”

Henrietta remained where she was on her side of their fence, affectless and staring.

“Come here, child,” said Mrs. Miller with a beckoning gesture. Ginnie was the youngest of the Miller siblings, but had married a man named Marley, so she was Ginnie Marley. Her husband was quiet and when he drove past them on the road, he lifted only two fingers from the wheel by way of greeting. As if his lack of a first name rendered the marriage null and void, everyone still called her Mrs. Miller, though Henrietta could not recall her father referring to the woman at all.

Henrietta crossed the wet road and stood next to this woman she’d only seen from a distance. She was winded, as though coming from a dance, and her hair, slightly gray with voluminous curls puffed up from her face, resembled petals framing the rosy heart of a flower. It was the ruddy face of a life lived outdoors, her cheeks red as if sunburned, though it was only the middle of spring.

“My goodness,” the woman said, “you’re just a little slip. I guess it runs in the women of your family.” She was leaning down slightly, and Henrietta saw her eyes were the color of dark chocolate. She said, “Well, I need your help. A couple of my cows got past my water gap, and my husband just took both my girls back to college. I need you to help me guide them back along the road. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Henrietta said.

“Then let’s you and me go get us some beeves.”

Henrietta followed her down the road away from the Miller drive, along the cow pasture, which spread to the west, inclining mildly to a hillock about a half mile away. A concrete waterer had been poured there, topping the rise like a crown on a grassy head. Black-and-white cattle were scattered about here and there, lowing a deep and dolorous sound.

They passed the spot where Forge Run ran dark-complected and swollen through a galvanized culvert under the road, running its course along the Miller property. The water gap was just two steel hoods from old cars chained across the creek to form a primitive stanch. One of the hoods still bore traces of its original red paint like old blood. On the far side of the artificial barrier, she saw the bulky figures of two black-and-white Holsteins steeping placidly in the muddy water. The water rose up past their hocks, but no further. They stood there appearing drowsy and mild until the two figures approached, then they bawled in tandem.

“How did they get out?” asked Henrietta.

“Well, when the water all rose up, the water gap went so”—Mrs. Miller raised her flattened palms so they were parallel to the ground—“and they just sort of squeezed on through and went about their merry way.”

“They didn’t get very far,” said Henrietta.

“I think they used up all their fighting spirit just getting through the water gap.”

They stopped at the top of the bank and looked down at the cows.

“Hello, my pretties,” said Mrs. Miller, and then turned to Henrietta. “So, here’s the plan. I’m gonna go on in there and move them up your way, and I just need you to head them off down the road toward the house.”

“Okay.”

“So set your legs apart like you mean business. Now, don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Henrietta snorted. She set her legs apart like a sawhorse.

Mrs. Miller waded on into the creek upstream of the cows and the water plashed around her legs and filled up her green galoshes as little eddies spooled grayly away from her. The cows eyed her warily and were already making their first lurching motions toward the bank when the woman came up behind them, shooing. They jolted forward with real force, fat harlequins clambering out of the water, which shook in coffee droplets from their shining black limbs. They were clumsy on the rocky bank, slipping and lunging, their quarters jolting under the skin as they climbed.