“That right?” Filip said, and a dry laugh scraped out of his burleyed throat. The boy could not make out the meaning of that laugh.
“Step up,” he said, and Henry did.
Number six, If you live, you gamble. A necessary evil.
Swung up by Filip’s strength and his own leap, he scrambled his way onto the man’s lap, straddling the withers. The short, wide neck of the horse shuddered and trembled under him like a dreaming dog. From where he sat, he could see straight down over her black cob and nose to her broad velvetine nostrils.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Not yet. I’m going to roll me a cigarette first. Hold this,” said Filip, who drew a foil packet out of the breast pocket of his plaid shirt. “Huh, I ain’t got no papers,” Filip said, patting his pocket. “Want to ride to the store with me?”
“Sure,” Henry said, pressing tiny drops of blood from his knees into the bay’s neck. He painted them in with one finger and they disappeared into the body of the horse, which was red as deep as wine.
Filip gathered the reins, and Martha White backstepped and squared the fence.
“Up on her now,” said Filip, and when the horse sprang from its quarters, the boy clutched up high on her neck in alarm as the man inclined toward the boy’s back, and they sailed the fence.
“Don’t take me by the house!” cried Henry.
Filip reined hard to the left, and the mare switched back, so they followed a faint trace around the far side of the cornfield along the grassy farrow that separated the plants from the fencing. Henry could just see over the tops of the corn, which reached to his own chest and over the bobbing head of the horse. The tufted tops were plumed and entirely still save for one roaming breeze that grazed the surface like an invisible hand, meandering down from the house to the tobacco basin behind them. To their left ran the zigzagging split rail fence and in its shadow, the remnants of its predecessor. Built seventy years before, the fence had rotted down until it was subsumed by grass and soil. Now it showed only a faint sidewinding mound behind the younger fence.
Henry patted the mane of the horse. “Make her walk fancy,” he said.
Filip clicked twice and adjusted the reins and set the mare to a running walk, so her front legs appeared to labor, reaching and pulling the unbent back legs that boldly followed, her head rising and falling like the head of a hobbyhorse. The natural urge to run pressed hard against her stiff limbs, and in that dynamic tension her back neither rose nor fell, so her riders glided forward on her restraint as if on the top of a smooth-running locomotive. Henry leaned back against the wall of Filip’s chest.
“Does her head hurt?” said Henry, noting the jerky treadling of her head before him.
“Nah.”
“Does she want to run?”
“She ain’t never said.”
“She’s like a machine.”
“Huh.”
Number seven, Living beings are just complex machines.
They rode on in silence to where the creek discoursed about the southern edges of the property, forming cutbanks and small sandy half-submerged shoals amidst weeds and tall grasses and cane. Broad-trunked walnut and alder sprang up from the creek bed to shade it and to form a secret lane of the rocky waterway.
“Let’s jump the fence and ride down in the water so they can’t see us,” said Henry.
Filip said nothing.
Henry twisted his neck to find the man’s face. “Do it,” he said.
“Martha White don’t want to get her feet wet.”
The end of the field was approaching, the house loomed.
“I don’t want to go to the store anymore,” Henry whined just as, with a sudden gripping motion, Filip slapped the reins hard, his arms fitting over the boy’s like a brace over muslin.
“No!” But the Walker was bearing down into a gallop and the boy, unprepared, bounced painfully against the protruding pommel as they swerved hard around the corn’s edge to where his father waited on the far side. Henry cried out, struggling as the horse pulled up before John Henry, neck extended and ears flattened away from the kicking, flailing passenger on her withers.
John Henry stepped to the horse, his lips pressed together so they looked like pale scars.
“You tricked me!” Henry cried, twisting around in the saddle to strike Filip with the point of his elbow but baring his neck as he did, so his father snatched him off the saddle by the ruff of his shirt like a runt puppy, and he hung there, suspended, making a strangling noise, his hands grappling up for his father’s hands. He was dropped unceremoniously as the bay skittered to one side, sweeping Filip away.
“Nigger!” Henry cried.
“Be still!” said John Henry.
Number eight, Niggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggerniggernig
Filip reined toward the stables, and the mare sauntered away slow and sinuous, and though Henry’s eyes were filling with tears and he could barely see, his mind scrambled for an association, the horse was like, the horse was like: something, someone, he couldn’t name how it moved away on its widemold hips, ass dimpling with sinuous inlaid muscle, though he knew it was feminine, yes: it moved like a woman from the rear.
His father yanked him up, his hands an old story.
“I didn’t do it!” Henry cried, but his mouth formed words he was not really thinking, his mind having been startled by the strange family of things.
“Up!”
He would not up; he made himself be dragged, forgetting the horse now, forgetting Filip’s lying, begging until his voice rose so high that his words destructed into a bleating cry.
Father dragged son across a broad swath of grass to the post by the old cabins, all the while unfastening his black belt with one hand. He struggled to cinch it around his son, but the boy puffed out his belly like a horse tricking a girth strap loose. John Henry just turned him around, face to the post, so all the air expelled in a woof.
“Undo that belt and believe me you will regret it,” John Henry warned. The boy’s hands sagged at his sides without any more fight, and his head fell forward, cheek scraping the post. He cried without moving.
John Henry placed one hand firmly on his son’s crown. “Do you realize you might have died today? The foolish thing you did … I’m going to let you stand here a while and think about what that would have done to your mother.”
Henry said nothing.
“When I come back I’m going to whip you,” his father said, “but not until you’ve had a chance to stand here and think. Do not touch that goddamn buckle, boy.”
“But I didn’t do it,” Henry parleyed.
John Henry narrowed his eyes and said with thorny quiet, “You’re a liar, and that makes you an embarrassment to me.”
The boy went to cry or speak.
“I gave you that mouth. I’ll tell you when to open it.”
He puckered his lips in a tiny sphincter of sorrow, and then his father was gone.
The scotched and furrowed pole had stood for more years than the boy could count. It was half as tall and nearly as thick as a man, long debarked and burnished by the years, its length seasoned by tears and blood and weather, but oh what did it matter, he was strapped like a pig to a spit, but he didn’t do it, he didn’t go onto the Miller property, where the bull stood with its
Number nine, Man shall rule over all the animals of the earth.
head turned away, utterly still, as if sleeping on its feet the way a horse does, not moving an inch — not for Henry’s creeping along the tall grass, not for his striking of the match — until the firecracker burst with a pop and a scream. Then the bull took one startled step forward and slumped stiffly to the ground, its chest seizing and its back legs twitching like electric wires, breath hissing out of its lungs like air escaping a tire.