C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

The man touched his forehead briefly, and his face twisted. “Makes you appreciate beef,” he said. “They don’t make no trouble. The worst bull ain’t nothing but a breeze next to a stallion.”

Henry turned new eyes back to the harassed horse, where she stood in sudden, stark relief from her surroundings like a black horse in a snowy field. Her head was long and dished, so the nose tip rose with a pert slope to its bony protrusion, the nostrils stretching wide, cupping air. Her lips were risen off the broad, faintly humorous teeth, already browned at the dog-eared meeting of enamel at pink gums. The teeth clacked like rocks brought together when she snapped. Without realizing, Henry had leaned his head into the pen.

“Back up now,” said the man beside him, pulling him bodily from the planks. The filly passed them, but some of her fire was banking, Henry could see that. Her head wagged, lower and lower, her tempo and temper flagging. Then she stopped entirely with just a faint weave in the line of her neck, as though she were a blade of grass moving slightly in the wind.

“Here she comes now,” said the man. The man called Duncan approached the horse, his upper body angled slightly out as if listening to a distant sound the horse could not hear, all the while looping up his line. The animal feinted as if to skitter to the side, but remained where she was, blowing and chewing. Now the man unhooked the line and let it drop and untethered the other looped line from the horse’s back, holding it in his hand.

“How come she’s roped up like that?” said Henry.

“Shhh,” said his companion, and held up a stubby finger for silence.

Duncan called out lowly without turning, “Floyd, I think we’re ready for some more sacking.” His voice was flat and barely inflected, not sliding up and down like Kentucky talk. Henry guessed he was from Iowa or Kansas or some other unlucky place without hills.

Floyd called out, “I believe so, yes.”

Duncan remained for a moment at the horse’s side, passing a slow and gentle hand along her quivering flanks and up her neck, charming her skin into stillness. Her breath came in short, wary bursts under his hand, but she stood planted. Then Duncan backed slowly to the middle of the pen, stooped, and brought up what looked like a drying line with dark laundry attached. The horse blinked quickly, and her tail snapped. Then Duncan lunged in, drawing taut her loose line in his right hand and sailing out the cloth line with the other, so the cotton rags snapped and fluttered like terrible black birds across her back, and she squealed and lunged forward, her ears plastered to her head and her eyes rolling. When she burst from her quarters, the man jerked her rigging and in a single motion her head was drawn savagely toward her tail, her right front leg was cinched to her surcingled belly, and she crashed all eight hundred pounds onto her rib cage in the dust, which plumed around her. She thrashed and cried and rolled away from the winging birds, then the man was there, snatching the fluttering cloths away and slacking her line, so she could rise to blow and clatter along the planks, her muscles leaping under her skin. But he stayed right with her, returning the furiously flapping line to her back, and she shot out again, an awful sound emerging from her mouth like the squeal from a tortured cat, a heart-shredding sound, but every present heart was pointed, an arrow toward its target. Henry could barely breathe as he watched the horse being chased and overpowered, forced into a submission it couldn’t know was permanent. He watched as the filly was rigged tight and rolled to the ground again, where it suffered the birds again, only to jerkily rise, then fall again, and roll again, the man now risking his own limbs to pin hers down, overpowering her briefly before stepping off and allowing her to rise — shaking visibly — to her full height. She was sacked again and again and again until finally, when Duncan lashed her sweaty back, her will followed on her weariness, and she moaned pitifully through her downcast eyes and staggered forward a single step, but did not leap or lunge or fall. The sound she made was unmistakably broken; even Henry’s virgin ears could hear that.

“Oh my God,” Henry said, turning breathless to Floyd. “Does he ride her now? Can I ride her when he’s done?”

The man turned to him with a bemused smile, his arms crossed over his chest. “How many years on you, son?”

“Sixteen,” said Henry.

The man laughed. “She’d serve you spiral cut for Sunday supper.”

“No, no, I can ride! I know how to ride!” He failed to mention he’d never ridden anything but the Walkers, who were gentle and placid as kine. “Please!” he said. “I’m begging you!”

“Naw, naw, naw,” the man said, waving a dismissive hand at him. “Shit. You think you can ride that ?”

“Fuck yes,” he said, testing it out, and found it smarted his tongue only a little.

“Whoo!” The man laughed. “Don’t let Duncan hear you talk like that. That man’s a follower of Jesus Christ and then some.”

“We’re all Christians,” said Henry, his eye swerving back to the horse, who stood breathing hard, finally allowing the breaker to stroke her, huge eyes cast groundward in search of a self spalled to bits on the round pen floor.

“Some of us is Christian like you’s sixteen. Get on now, you got your show.”

“No, really!”

“Get,” said the man, tested.

“I’m Henry Forge,” the boy said suddenly.

Another bemused glance. “Honey, I know it. You got the stamp of your daddy all over you. Now get.”

“But—”

“Get now!” Floyd swung out loosely with feigned scorn at the boy, and Henry could do nothing but move off. The horse spared no eye for him as he retreated. He had never before felt so young or useless as he did in this moment, spurned from the Osbourne house, spurned from the events of the round pen. Why was the province of grown men such a secret place? Adults were always misreading his youth for an ignorance he only needed an opportunity to disprove. He glanced back at the horse, at her head hung low and her black mane fallen over her face, obscuring her bloodshot eyes. Floyd offered only the neglect of his back. Adults were nothing but schoolyard bullies — they made you beg for small favors, his father most of all! It was only your mother who gave freely — gave her whole entire life to Henry Forge, Henry Forge, I am! He felt his strength rising. Why on earth shouldn’t he ride a horse like that — or own a horse like that? He’d seen the ruling strength of the breaker’s body, how dominant it was — a man like more than a man — and how quickly the larger, braver thing succumbed to the one who refused to alter his path, the one who offered no concessions. A man and a horse were a perfect pair. Henry was nearly wild with excitement now, stalking around the shrubbery that bordered the house, kicking out at the grassed lawn in exuberant frustration, his mind in a tangle. Finally, he threw himself on the porch, looking out over the frontage road to the drab cattle farm on the other side, and waited there with hammering impatience for his mother, only occasionally hearing the sound of someone crying out and cursing somewhere in the house above him.

* * *

His first memory was of the last hand harvest. The men came from town during the first week of September, a dozen or more, the same who had been coming for years. They swarmed the acreage, hats tugged low, corn knives flashing like mirror shards. He’d been so young — he couldn’t remember how young, but no longer in diapers — that he’d chased along after those men, finding himself at Filip’s side as he waded into the forest of plants. Filip counted the corn hills as he walked, and the boy chimed beneath him onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight until they arrived at the center, where Filip gathered and tied four middle stalks to a coping vault. Then he stooped and bladed the surrounding stalks, circling and circling from one corn hill to its neighbor and leaning them on the foddershock. By the onset of noon, the shock looked like a fat teepee. Henry did his own work, sawing on a stalk with a butter knife, until Filip came and stood over the boy, casting him into a sudden shadow that stilled his play. Henry could smell the astringent odor of Filip’s armpits as he bent and gripped the fibrous trunks, chopping and carrying them away, leaving the boy in a bald patch of sun.