She was right. They waited, but the only thing Henry could hear was the untaxed rhythm of her breath. There was nothing out there; even the horses were silent.
“I have to say,” Loretta said, staring at his face in the dark, “you really don’t look like you get enough sleep.”
Henry sighed. “Well, I read a lot,” he said. “I have plans.”
“Plans for what?”
Henry was silent for a moment, finding his cousin lacking in seriousness and unworthy of his private, curated thoughts, but under the spell of this new relaxation, he went on. “Nobody knows this, so you need to keep it a secret, but someday I’m going to turn Forge Run Farm into a Thoroughbred operation.” He tried to ape the calm of an adult, but his eagerness pressed through. “All this corn farming is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a waste of this farm’s potential, a waste of this family’s legacy! Do you know how long we’ve been here? I mean, you’re in Florida now, it’s almost like you’re not part of the family anymore—”
“Hey,” Loretta said, but listlessly, and he barreled on. “This is what happens when you get complacent, when you don’t have the courage to dream big or grab the opportunities that are right before you. I mean, Tennessee Walkers? Give me a break. This is Kentucky — this land is destined for Thoroughbreds.”
“Thoroughbreds again,” Loretta sighed, and rolled her eyes.
Henry bullied her down with a rising voice. “You’re all the same! None of you know how to think big! I can’t stand the way Father’s running this place! It makes me crazy! We’re like runners in the middle of the pack. Why even compete, what’s the point? Run out front or quit.”
Loretta shrugged and rolled up to a sitting position to check the buttons on her blouse.
“Hey, where’s my headband?” she said suddenly, and turned over on her hands and knees, scouring the hay, but Henry didn’t move. He just spoke to her back.
“Everybody thinks there’s so much chance involved in horse racing, but that’s not how I see it. It’s about controlled usage of every resource. ‘Chance’ is a word ignorant men use when they don’t know how to plan and take calculated risks. Life is ten percent chance and ninety percent willpower and intelligence. Think of—”
“There it is,” Loretta said, and she returned the checkered band to her hair.
“—Signorina and Chaleureux. Their meeting on the road might have been chance, but the breeding of Signorinetta was anything but. A great breeder has to know when to seize the opportunity to get the dam’s heart.”
“Shhhhhh!” Loretta said, and she sprang suddenly up from the hay, tipped forward on her toes with her hands out to her sides in the attitude of a startled dancer.
Henry lost his thought in an instant and flung himself up, fumbling in the dark to secure his clothing. Loretta was raking wildly at her hair, all the gold straw drifting around her shoulders when the door opened.
They were confronted with a man’s embarrassed face for only a moment before they tumbled out, Henry fairly flying down the row, but Loretta stopping suddenly and saying, “Hey, you’re not Filip.”
Henry was light-blind with one foot out the barn door when he realized she wasn’t following. He said “Loretta!” hard, as if he were her father.
“Who are you?” Loretta said, gazing up with consternation into the white man’s face.
“Uh,” the man said quietly, looking anywhere but at the door the two had exited from, “I’m Robert Forester.”
“Where’s Filip?”
“Loretta!” said Henry sharply again.
“I reckon he don’t work here no more,” said the man with a shrug.
“Well, that’s odd,” said Loretta. “He’d been with this family since forever.” Baffled, she turned and walked slowly out of the barn into the now harsh light of the risen sun. She looked at Henry and said, “Why on earth would you let Filip go? He was my favorite.”
“I never could stand that nigger,” Henry said.
Now it was Loretta’s turn to rear back. “I get the feeling you can’t stand anyone! And don’t say nigger. It makes you sound like a bumpkin.”
“And you sound like a nigger lover.”
“Oh, I’m just a lover,” Loretta said airily. “I don’t even see color. I’m beyond all that.”
Henry scowled at her, and she said, “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”
Then she spotted their fathers now on the porch, still in conversation, John Henry’s back rimrod straight with his strict dignity, which never altered. Loretta grasped Henry’s elbow suddenly, so that he almost stumbled over his own shoes. She whispered, “Don’t tell about … okay?”
“You really do think I’m an idiot,” he snapped.
“Ha!” She laughed, tossing the fall of her hair over one shoulder. “I think you’re pure as the driven snow!” And she flounced on ahead of him toward the house.
* * *
“Henry Forge!”
No. He wouldn’t go. He was stacking boxes for his mother in the attic, where the family history lay organized and covered in sheets under the roof, where birds roosted as if on thin black soil, calling as his father was calling.
“Henry Forge!”
Who died and made me your slave? His insolence was a physical delight.
“Do not make me find you! Now!”
It still owned him. It. His lace-ups clapped the servants’ stairs, one after the other; they beat out the steady rhythm of John Henry. His only disobedience was his desultory pace.
His father was standing at the rear door off the kitchen, his pale blue striped sleeves rolled up over his freckled biceps, the short red hairs glinting there. By now, the hair on his head was completely gray. It always startled.
“What took you so long?” he said, turning to open the door to the backyard, where the morning was rioting in the dew and sparking off the crisp grass and the hedges. “Come along.”
As Henry descended the limestone steps off the back door, half-blinded by the acid light, his father picked up clippers and a saw from the ground. He said, “Fetch a ladder, please.”
“What for?” The words slipped off his truculent tongue before he could stop them. Even now, at the threshold of his adult life, he was just a little boy asking for answers from a man who wouldn’t answer.
But this time John Henry replied. “We’re cutting mistletoe from one of the trees. Apparently, if you want a job done correctly, you can’t hire men who are too busy rolling their own damn cigarettes to do any work. You have to do it yourself.”
By the time Henry had found the twenty-foot ladder in one of the old cabins, his father was a solitary figure in the orchard. Henry followed after him as best he could, clumsily balancing the shaky length of the ladder on two pinched palms. Before him, the wild fecundity of the orchard bloomed in the light wind that sluiced gently through the avenues of trees. The wind seemed to come directly from the sun, a perfect globe of red risen confidently out of the laden boughs. That globe commanded all the life of the garden, the many million blades of grass, the thick stalks of the trees with their secret rings, the gradations of green flourishing off the dark limbs and in their shadows, and the red, hanging apples.
John Henry stopped before one tree, about twenty deep, where the house couldn’t be seen and where the privacy was nearly primordial. He pointed upward. “Mistletoe,” he said. “Poison,” he added.
At first, Henry could detect nothing but bright fruit and limitless green punctured by the sun, but then, squinting, he discerned there, among the healthy branches, a smattering of pale seeds like tiny pearl onions or white trinkets clustered in a bush of hardy leaves. It had the look of a wildly disordered bird’s nest. The tree branch was suffering under the leaching plant, which drained its natural strength. With care, Henry positioned the ladder next to the blighted branch.