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—
Henry detected his cousin Loretta among them.
When the new cook, Paulette, called for supper, the girls all dropped their mallets and sprang across the lawn, calling “Henry! Henry! Henry!” as they angled past him toward the house, waving and sparking white and all redheaded in their bowtied dresses. Lavinia, on a step of the el porch, ushered them inside, touching each on the shoulder as they went by in a bright wash, blessing them as they went, but her eyes were on her son, on whom Loretta was advancing like a gay shadow. Henry turned to her, reinforcing his face against her prettiness, which he couldn’t remember having seen before. It changed the temperature of his skin.
“Oh my gosh,” Loretta said, “what happened to you?” It was a statement, not a question, but Henry looked down at himself as if his shirt were fouled or his zipper undone. His face returned to hers, wary.
She was watching him as if she knew something he didn’t, smiling from one side of her pretty mouth as an older person might smile at a child, and propping her white, heart-shaped glasses on the crown of her head. Her eyes were green, disarming, bold. Like his, but more adult, even he could see that.
“You’re gorgeous,” Loretta said.
If he didn’t move, his eyes started somewhat in their sockets, and he fought the urge to turn his head away from the soft blow of her compliment. Instead, he blushed so badly his face burned. Then he did allow his eyes to escape from hers, but they only turned awkwardly down toward the mother-of-pearl buttons on her blouse.
She laughed then, but the sound was young, and so much sweeter and less sophisticated than her speaking voice that he was able to look into her eyes again.
“God, how did you get to be so good-looking?” she said, and she grabbed his elbow, guiding him toward the house. Henry snuck a peek in the direction of his mother, but she was gone, watching them now from a window in the dining room that he couldn’t see. Henry and Loretta advanced on the house slowly; she owned him by the time they had walked ten paces.
“You could be in movies, I’m not kidding,” she said. “Aunt Lavinia is pretty, but your dad, not so much. So what happened to you?”
He was still blushing as he eyed the exquisite slope of her coral-colored lips. His mind was fumbling for something to say when she said, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Do you still have horses?”
She laughed. “Liar.”
“No,” he said, “I have a girlfriend. I was just curious if you still have horses.”
Arm in arm they went and she rolled her eyes and sighed, but said, “A couple.”
“Yeah, but real horses.”
“Yes, real horses,” she said. “I still compete.”
Now it was his turn to roll his eyes. “I meant Thoroughbred horses.”
Loretta withdrew her hand suddenly from his elbow. “Yes, we have horses. Real horses. Yes, some of them are Thoroughbreds. Mother and I do dressage. You know that. What’s your point?”
Henry’s laugh was a foil for a secret, and for a moment their ages seesawed.
“What’s that laugh supposed to mean?” she said.
“Nothing.” He shrugged, turned up his shoulders a bit, allowing a small insouciant smile to play around the corners of his mouth.
Loretta stopped walking altogether. He stopped to look back at her.