C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Oh,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head and said nothing. Then when his eyes cleared, he saw Henry standing in the door of the el porch, holding a glass of what looked like bourbon or iced tea in his hand, and he wasn’t doing a thing but standing there on the porch, but an odd thing happened. Old Barlow’s stomach suddenly twisted up, and he suffered such a pained sense of misgiving, one that was so strong and so foreign to him that he would tell his wife of it later and she would say, “Maybe Jesus wanted you to say something to that poor little girl.”

He stopped the truck abruptly, far shy of its destination beside the el porch. It stuttered on the idle. He didn’t turn to Henrietta; his eyes were locked on the figure of her father, and it was true, something else seemed to have his tongue, something had had it all day, he couldn’t own it anymore, he felt like crying. “How old are you, Henrietta?”

“Almost fourteen.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s almost grown. It’s old enough to have a boyfriend.”

“Okay,” she said quietly.

He said, “Plenty old to start thinking about what you want. Someday you’ll have a family.”

Growing embarrassed, she shifted. “But what if I don’t want to have a family?” she said.

Now he turned and looked at her and she was amazed to see tears in his eyes. “Sometimes…,” he said, “sometimes you don’t even want the thing that you got to have in this life. That you absolutely for the sake of everything got to have. And only from the other side, you see it saved you. You get me?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Well,” he sighed, and laughed suddenly, and it was as if he were clearing cobwebs away from the tiny room of their conversation. “Yeah, I reckon not. I don’t know I get me either. I’m having a funny day. It’s my retiring day.”

“Your what? You’re retiring? You’re going away?”

“Yeah. I’m going home to my wife. Just the other side of Paris, though. Almost to Middleburg.”

“Oh.” Henrietta looked down at her lap. She too felt the stare of her father from the porch and when she looked up, his posture had not changed — his lean against the porch frame remained exactly the same — but his body was angry, somehow she knew that.

“Barlow,” she said, “can I come visit you?”

“Honeypie, you can come visit old Barlow and Deena anytime you want.”

She leaned over then. She pressed her lips to his old cheek, and the wrinkles felt like old leather against the soft skin of her lips.

“Daddy’s waiting,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess he is.”

* * *

She tried to hold herself apart, though she hadn’t seen him in nearly a month. She didn’t know why. She thought it was because he was angry.

He said, “You go away and, I swear to God, the world falls apart.”

She stared up at him, into the blistering reproval of his face. It almost snatched her breath away, the flush of emotion she saw there like a port-wine stain covering his too-familiar face. She could only whisper, “It’s not my fault Secretariat died.”

“I didn’t say it was your fault,” he snapped.

“Then why are you blaming me?”

“Why three weeks away and not a year? Three years! Anything Judith says—”

“Well, Mother wanted … But you agreed!”

“I never agreed! Your mother thinks she can just—”

Now she looked through him, her ears blunting his words, the tiny whorls cinched tight. Mute, stony, intransigent, cold, stonewalling. For the first time ever, he was refused entry, and he saw the change, the quiet mutiny, and it shocked him.

“Henrietta,” he said, and he reached out and grabbed the girl by the shoulders and pulled her to him. As soon as he touched her, she felt against her will just how long she’d been gone, and she hugged him back as if she would break him and was overcome with homesickness, though now she was finally home. Home at last. She did not look up, did not look down, but her face was pressed directly into his chest so that she could not breathe, feeling his hands against her back like irons. When he was like this, when his face was like this, she’d rather be against him than gazing upon him. But eventually she had to breathe and she turned her face up. He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, and his lips were parted and her lips were parted too, because she was dying for air.

* * *

Child, it’s simple, really, in the broad, inexorable scheme of biological diversity, and its oft-assumed corollary the pursuit of perfection: blame the isolating trait. The Forges, once a distinct subspecies, are quickly becoming a closed gene pool with a natural history all their own. You didn’t ask to be a part of this taxonomic unit, yet here you are, little redheaded rosebud, ransacked Ruffian, Daddy’s little girl. Once upon a time you might have interbred with another subspecies, meandering from the fold, discovering the strange scents of bodies on the verge of a foreign range. But bred long enough, a subspecies becomes a species in its own right, possessed of its distinct mark, the isolating trait. Soon you will begin to emit a sour smell; soon the other animals will recognize your difference, show you their tails, and race away. But don’t blame your father, even if he is the author of your isolation; he too is a reservoir of genes he didn’t request. He too is a machine designed for survival.

“Henrietta!”

She was not asleep, had not even closed her eyes, and she was moving the moment he called her name, rising even as the word was echoing down the halls. She slipped down the back stairs with her sheets clenched around her like pale cerements, her face drained of color.

He was in the back study, his tan face perfectly calm. He was the same, always the same, his face like a banquet table all grandly arrayed, full of every good thing. She wondered for a moment whether she was mad, her memory faulty.

“Come here, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for the right time and now is that time … I want to show you what’s going to be yours — now that your mother has decided to consort with a German Jew.”

Henry began sorting through the stacks of files and paper on his desk, tugging out a few documents and handing them in her direction. She took her future in her hands just as the heaters kicked on with a monitory rattle. The house breathed in her stead.

“Is this your will?” The calm sound of her voice surprised her. It seemed to come from a distance, from a body other than her own.

He looked up at her over the silver rim of his reading glasses. “In a few years, when you turn eighteen, I’ll revise the will and you’ll be named my sole heir in the event of my death. You’ll have power of attorney if I were ever to become disabled. And these,” he said, reaching for another file, “are current copies of the insurance paperwork for the horses.”

There were policies for mortality, prospective foal and first season infertility cover paperwork, fire/lightning and transportation insurance, general liability. The premiums ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 each. She calculated the number of mares, stallions, and foals on the farm.

“You have to pay this every year?” she said quietly, stunned.

“That’s only the first half,” he said. “This is the house.”

The stack of papers he handed her was as thick as a dictionary and just as heavy. She had to rest it on the leather top of the desk, which she discovered, as she began to flip through the documents, was made in seventeenth-century Italy of mahogany with secondary veneered rosettes in the shape of pinwheels across its front apron, its appraisal value $150,000. She’d never even looked at it before, not really.