C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

She prodded Henry with one finger to his back.

“Mrs. Osbourne?” he called, all hesitation as he tiptoed into the room, his mother a brief shadow trailing behind him. A great thump distressed the floorboards of the upstairs and sent tiny tailings of dust spiraling down.

“Mrs. Osbourne!” he called louder now, but again no reply. His mother tugged at his shirt in inquiry, but Henry shrugged her off, pointing upward.

They had just reached the broad newel of the staircase when a voice barely muffled by its distance from the pair cried out, “Betsy! Betsy! Please, I’m fucking begging you— Fuck!” And then the voice unleashed a stream of obscenities that Lavinia could not hear, but which caused Henry’s jaw to drop.

“Open this door, you fucking bitch!”

Henry grabbed at his mother’s thinly veined arms, but she just patted his hand off her arm, smiling and climbing upward with her picnic basket before her.

At the end of the second-story hall, Mrs. Osbourne rested on a ladderback chair in front of a closed door. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and both palms to her lined forehead. Behind the closed door, the voice of Mr. Osbourne rumbled forth, words distending into an agonized cry. When the body of the door rejolted against its jamb, Mrs. Osbourne reared up with a start and saw Henry’s mother with her picnic basket. She stared open-mouthed for a moment, then she cried, “Oh, Lavinia, the boy!” and she rose with a start from the chair, flapping her hands like small, useless, exhausted wings. “My husband’s coming down off the morphine — he made me lock him in that room and promise not to let him out until he’s clean! Oh Lord, get the boy out of here!”

Lavinia only looked at her in alarm and confusion, but Henry was already backing up on his own, angling behind his mother like a much younger child.

“Oh, please!” Mrs. Osbourne cried, her voice almost overpowering her husband’s agonized complaints. “It’s not fit!”

Lavinia turned, bewildered.

Mr. Osbourne’s in there— he pointed —saying bad things , then hollered, “I’m going, I’m going!” and all but threw himself down the stairs, leaping three at time, one finger to the balustrade. He raced straight to the kitchen in the back, where a rear door opened to the newly fallow fields. But when he reached the door, he lingered suddenly with his hand on the knob, his heart pounding like a burglar’s, one ear cocked for Dean Osbourne screaming fuckfuckfuck as if it were the refrain to an obscene song. The raw, unleashed sound of it thrilled him. Then it occurred to him that Mrs. Osbourne would be waiting for the banging sound of his departure, so he yanked open the door and slammed it after him with a glass-rattling clap.

His mind was startled by the absence of tobacco. Without its leafy spread, the land seemed strangely naked, a shorn sheep, all sinew with the bones of its conformation laid bare. The nearest barn was emptied of tobacco, its doors flung wide to reveal an interior newly outfitted with windowed stalls, ones Henry knew were for horses. A paned cupola had been erected on the slant roof, the black boards all painted white with kelly trim. Beyond the barn stretched young green pasture grass carefully squared but not yet fenced, so it beckoned like a park lawn or a pleasure garden. He walked toward it.

Short, abrupt calls from the far side of the barn. Henry turned the corner and saw, situated out of view from the main house, a new round pen. Two men worked there, one standing outside the fence, a boot and both elbows resting on the planking, the other standing in the center, driving a rangy red horse in frantic circles round the pen with a rope line. The horse lurched and kicked, its eyes rolling like marbles in its head. It was oddly rigged in a harness of rope, the likes of which Henry had never seen. The constraint circled the neck, the girth, looped beneath the switching tail to circle the foreleg on one side, but it served no purpose that he could see, its remaining length looped and tethered to itself, draped along the shoulder. The horse charged around the pen regardless of its awkward corseting, fretting and stamping and blowing air, clearly terrified of the thin man who stood quietly in the center. Neither man saw the boy approach, but the horse did, one eyeball trained on him as it made a dust-raising round.

The man leaning on the fence caught the flash of eye and turned. He squinted without a hat, but the broad, overhanging brows made a hat almost unnecessary.

“We’re working here, kid,” the man said.

Henry made a backward motion, but kept one hand on the pine plank, nailed between two posts made from telephone poles. The man eyed him sideways but didn’t shoo him off again.

“You ever seen a horse broke?” the man finally said after a minute of silence.

“No.” Henry’s eyes were pinned to the place where the horse ran, head low and ears flat, in the pen.

“Well, you got you a front row seat,” the man said.

“What kind of horse is that?”

“That’s a Thoroughbred — a filly. Mr. Osbourne nickel-and-dimed her off some lady what let her go to seed in a oat field. She ain’t had no idea what this horse is worth. You’re looking at the next Regret. Wait and see if she ain’t. Look at them sticks.”

Henry saw nothing like potential in the horse. The filly was immature, stringy, and loose-limbed, with parts that seemed hastily cobbled together. Her long, ungainly legs might have belonged to a moose rather than a horse. Her ears swiveled wildly on a head slightly large for her short, slender neck, which snaked now in a fearful, colicky gesture as she slowed and edged along a far portion of the fencing. Henry didn’t know a horse could move its neck that way, as if it were a boneless thing.

The filly trained one moony eye on the man in the center of the pen. He took a single step forward, and she stopped the waving of her neck, blinking warily.

“Aw, see,” said the man, “she’s just showing out. She’s fixing to quit here in a minute. Giving us the devil ’fore we set her straight. Oh, shit,” he said, and ducked his head into his own neck as the filly charged the center man, her ears flat, her mouth snapping like a turtle’s, neck extending straight out from her body. But the man lined her back to the edge of the pen, where she continued her fretful circling, and, beside Henry, the man laughed an uneasy laugh.

“She looks crazy,” said Henry.

“We like to died loading her in the trailer.”

“Maybe you can get your money back?”

“Naw, Duncan’s the best. Tame a lion, that boy could. And that horse don’t look like it, but she’s coming around.”

“You’ve been doing this all day?” Henry marveled.

“Shit, son,” the man said. “The whole everloving week.”

“So, this is how it’s done…,” Henry wondered, shading his eyes with one hand to cut the midday sun.

“Nah, not hardly,” said the man, brushing a bit of chaff from his lip. “Not if you’re lucky. You raise ’em up right and gentle ’em, then you ain’t got to do all this, but some skirt leaves ’em out in a field, and they ain’t never been rubbed and rode, then you got to whip the devil out of ’em. And them’s the worst,” he said, pointing. “Ain’t never seen a human hand. You whup ’em and saddle ’em, but you can’t turn your back less they backslide and when they do that, they whup you heaven high and valley low. She’s a nasty one, but I seen worse. I done worked the breeding shed up at Castleraine Farms and this stallion one time — a stallion is just bad as sin, you got to eyeball ’em every second you got ’em on a lead. This stallion was fixing to pop this mare and his handler — I knowed him two years ’fore this happened — his handler gone to push his shoulder to situate him, and the mare kicked out just a real little bit, so the stallion, he, uh, toppled out sort of, and lost his foot and fell out and, Lord, I ain’t never seen a horse get so riled. And what he done, he turned and bitten the throat off that handler. Jack Houghton. Never forget that name. He come from England, and they done return shipped him in two parts. Head and the rest of him. All was left of his neck was the spiny part, and that got bitten too.”