Read Online The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan - Free Book Online Page A

her Shakespeare, her Dickens, her Dunbar and Hughes) and then her teacher, Miss Martin, had invited her home after school every day for two months to teach her more recipes and to talk to her, probably because she was a lonely woman getting on in years. Miss Martin had even taken her in for a whole summer when Maryleen’s mother was staying nights at her employer’s, because there was a child there that had cancer. It ended up dying in August, but Maryleen wasn’t sorry about that, because she had spent the best summer of her life at Miss Martin’s. She learned to make beef tenderloin with horseradish butter and fried chicken brined in Coke; also chicken divan, citrus Cornish hens, the best sweet pickle relish ever, chowchow, peach cobbler, derby pie, and bread pudding with whiskey sauce. It was during that baking and cooking, when Miss Martin’s conversation dwindled from current events to gossip to occasional rumination to companionable silence, that Maryleen’s mind became suddenly, startlingly free, and she realized it was here she could make her home, in this deep quiet, regardless of whether it was in some white folks’ house or in her parents’ home, where her father did nothing but read his Bible and ignore her, and her mother was sleeping every moment she wasn’t working. Silence was freedom.
    Which was why she hated this particular week of … involvement. There was the picking of the apples, which was hard physical work. Then there was the peeling and the piecrust making, the sorting, then the mashing in an enormous old sugar kettle that—she’d bet fifty dollars if anyone actually cared—probably dated from slavery days. Then the boiling of lids and jars, the canning, the sealing, then sauce making, cider making, which meant the addition of crab apples, which she was allergic to, so her eyes swelled up just from looking at them, and everyone said, “Oh, Maryleen, dear, have you been crying?” to which she yearned to reply, “Oh, Massah, yes, I’s just cryin’ thinkin’ ’bout where I’m a go affa Emancipation—oh!” But tongues were for biting. You just did what you had to do to get them out of your hair, which was help them, which was what she was doing today. They had spent the morning hours up and down like spiders on the ladders plucking Foxwhelp from the branches, so she would be able to start the cider in the morning. She had already gotten Filip to drive her to the A&P to purchase the sugar and nutmeg she’d ordered for the cider, and now they were trundling baskets from the orchard to the kitchen, and she was sweating so much that she couldn’t stand the smell of herself. The day was unseasonably hot for November, a put-chipped-ice-in-your-tub-water kind of hot. And she was already irritated enough with the woman helping and Filip and the boy underfoot. If she’d had eight arms, she would have done the whole thing herself and let that be the end of it. But here she was with the white boy tagging after her—well, he wasn’t a boy anymore, he was a teenager and not that far behind her in age, maybe five or six years. He was less talkative than he had been even just recently, but he still had plenty of irritating things to say, going on and on about the head of a horse, and wasn’t it like the Sistine Chapel, just a marvel of architecture, and he was explaining in detail what the Chapel was (as if she didn’t know!), and she was being very careful not to roll her eyes unless her back was to the boy—teenager. And there was his mother, picking apples in heels. Low heels, but heels. When Jesus comes back, everyone will be changed, that’s what her father always said. He could not get his ass back here soon enough.
    Somehow, during the heat and bustle of the day, she managed to shake them all. She’d gone round front to sit with a glass of tea and then, upon returning to the