Jesse Ball: The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

— A woman who has just smothered the man with whom she slept. The disarray of her clothing. Her steps, back and forth in that tiny room. Light is beginning by the window, intending to cross slowly as it always has done. If the woman were to scream, and someone, anyone, were to come to her assistance, how much could she hope for from such a person? Might they help her to hide her crime? Might they take advantage of her in this, her weakness? If she should sigh and toss her pretty head, and pass through the town in crinoline, gold glittering on her thumbs and ankles, why, who could tell her different? Who could say, “You may not do this that you have done.” For life is its own excuse, its wake the shed gray, the unbearable touch of the harshest wool.

One man said: I refuse to be seen with such a person!

He spoke of you.

I wonder what you did, unknowingly, to make him hate you so. I wonder who else, unknowingly, you have made enemies of, on this and other days. And of them, who will wait in the wings of your moving theatre, trembling and grinning, anticipating a later scene or act?

A wealthy man went walking one day, on the grounds of his great estate. He walked in familiar places, admiring first this view, then that. He ranged farther from the manse until, as the sky began to darken, he realized he was walking in a region of his lands where he had never been. Through a veil of trees, he saw a tiny cottage; in the window were lighted candles which seemed to welcome him.

Such a man, such an estate, such a cottage (near and yet impossibly removed from all else, come to only at dark and in confusion) — out of this what is possible? What is not?

The man approached the cottage and with the boldness of a landowner stamped his feet loudly upon the doorstep and knocked upon the door.

It was a moment before anything happened, but when things began, it seemed they happened all at once. The door flew open — behind it was a man, in face and manner identical to the landowner. With a sneer and a shout, he drove an iron poker straight through the wealthy man’s chest, and with a second roar withdrew it, stepping forward to catch the body as it fell. Discarding the poker, he pulled the body back into the house, drawing shut the door in one clean motion. Not even a cry had escaped the landowner’s mouth. Door shut, the cottage stood again in silence, its windows candlelit, the season pressing in on all sides. It is possible, the candles seemed to say, that a double may stay in hiding at your heel for decades, and that one day you may come upon him. A man may not resist his double.

Late in the evening, a landowner who had been out walking returned, and advanced up the tree-lined carriage drive before his elegant house. He paused repeatedly, as if to admire each thing, each object of his vision as though all were new to him. At the door he was greeted by a servant, who took his coat and led him to table, where his wife and children awaited him. Servants saw to his every need.

Do not come near when flood waters are rising. It was in foolishness that our hearts were overthrown, and it will be in haste that our lives end. A set of toys, laid out on some inarticulate floor, will be like causes in a causeless time. Ask why, as if in doubt. Doubt is a glorious luxury, and one upon which we base all our hopes. Upon a silver field, motley hunters have speared a boar. The composition shakes and trembles, as wind moves from object to comparison.

In the book she wrote down things that were surely true and things that were surely false. Nothing was subject to interpretation — this was the necessary wrong, with great freedom the result. She wrote, a man has hurriedly leapt from coveted position, and found surfeit of disaster, then stopped, looking out an open window to where two boys were piling rocks. Upon those of our own breath, we heap the hardest, heaviest stone. A knock came then, with a letter pushed beneath the door. She took it to the bed, and drawing her knees up to her chest, read the letter spread out before her on the bed.

My dear, my darling,

I have been told by those who now

manage my affairs, that I may never

see you again. would that it were not

so, and yet it seems maybe that we

may each accomplish what we need to

best in the other’s absence.

I remain, yours,

X

She rocked back and forth with drawn features, and sobbed once. Yet soon she was again at the window, where she wrote: Those men who are false to those they love have a hell set aside solely for their kind. In it, they must stab themselves for a glimpse of beauty, at which they expire and wake, left only to stab themselves again. With a smile, she closed the book and locked it in her desk. Then she ran nimbly to the door and down the stairs, throwing a light shawl about her slender shoulders, for the wind then came often and without warning from the north.

Once, a man went to a fortune-teller to have his fortune told. He went through his city to the district where such business is conducted. He crossed a small courtyard, and was admitted to her private chamber. She said, “You will die in the spring of the year, and crying of gulls will muffle voices that may come through the wall from another room.” The man was undone.

He begged of her to tell him what year it would be, yet she refused. Finally, he asked, “Is fortune-telling true? Have you told me the truth? Or do lies make your fortune?” To this she replied, “It is not not-true.

And when I lie, it is because a fortune is too grim to be told, and then it itself bears the burden of the lie.”

Thus, in the spring of each year, the man laid out his best clothing, and went about as though bereaved, and each summer, he sang and spent great sums of money, as if to do so was nothing and of no consequence.

sleight of hand was so fast that even the flourished points of his tricks could not be seen. He would pull coins from behind people’s ears, but the audience would see neither the hand as it hid the coin, nor the hand as it took the coin away. His art was too great. The best of his tricks, to circle the globe in less than a second, impressed no one, as he, for reasons of his own, would always end up precisely where he had been standing before. “He’s a fraud!” they chanted. And they were right, in a way. Someone else would have had to come along and teach the audience to see, before they could ever appreciate this dancing of a human hand upon a second hand.

A heavy wooden staff is presented as a gift. In 7 of 9 possible worlds, it is a stern staff, some length of thickly carved wood, a strength to the traveler. In the 8th world, separate, it acts and speaks upon its own, casting a moving shadow, bending its long neck beneath a canopy of leaves. We may not name it there, for there it names itself. And in the 9th, that farthest of far places?

Questions of the 9th remain unanswered, for statement there is nothing but swiftness of motion.

In the midst of a terrible storm, a carriage comes thundering down a narrow drive, and pulls up at the entrance to a large mansion. The carriage doors are thrown open and a man with a haughty, powerful bearing exits the carriage and goes to the house. Hours pass. The storm is a brutal call from an angry host, and the tree line flails upon the near hills; the mud churns, pounded by the water’s ceaseless assault. Still the carriage driver waits, trembling. He wants to rub the horses with a soft blanket, but he cannot, for the mud about their hooves is too deep now for him to stand in. In fact, the carriage has now sunk so that only half of its wheels rise out of the mud. The horses are curiously dead, slumped in their harness, unmoving. Soon the mud will cover them. Then and only then will he knock upon the house’s great door. He will not speak when the door is answered, but will simply point, dumbfounded, at the carriage as it sinks from sight.