Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Tell them,” Mills commanded. He folded his arms across his chest.

And that’s when he saw it.

“Jesus!” he said.

“Jesus!” the merchant translated.

“No,” Greatest Grandfather said fearfully. “Have them dismount. Tell them good-by.” Not taking his eyes off them — they wouldn’t have seen anyway, they weren’t looking, they were watching Mills’s horse — he backed slowly away. “Stand still, Mills’s horse”—because he knew nothing about horses, not even enough to say “Whoa”—”stop while I mount you.” But the horse continued to go round him, turning circles which were identical in circumference to the circles he had turned in the mine. Mills ceased talking and Mills’s horse stopped in its orbit and Mills got on. “Let’s go,” he said. “Straight lines only, Mills’s horse. Follow the merchant, fellow. Follow Guillalume’s horse.” And guided him with the reins, pulling the bit roughly whenever the animal started into one of its turns. To keep him moving Mills chatted amiably, mindlessly. “Well, that’s it, folks,” he said, “bye-bye. God’s instrument tells you ‘so long.’ God’s instrument’s instrument — tell them, merchant — asks you to abide here and pray a while. Pray and fast four days. Amen and thank you, Jesus.”

“You mean you didn’t know? ” Guillalume asked him later.

“I didn’t,” Mills said, “I didn’t truly. Bloody goddamn horse worshippers. And that one says there’s no infidels.”

So he gave them the Word. (And, indirectly, ultimately, invented dressage too who knew nothing about horses, inventing haute école for them and the principle of the pony ride.) The Word changing as they worked their way backward across not only geography but culture as well. Telling them not only and not even always out of self-defense, but for hospitality, three squares and a kip for himself and his companions, spouting Jesus for their entertainment as he might, if he’d had a good voice, sung them songs. In Russia he told them, in Romania, in Bulgaria. In Greece and in Turkey. And doing them miracles out of their small store of salt. Changing fresh water to sea water in jugs which he permitted them to dip into their own sweet lakes and running rivers, elsewhere pressing the salt onto their very tongues, a mumbo-jumbo of condimental transubstantiation.

Saying “I shall make you the salt of the earth.” Or demonstrating its emetic properties, swallowing any poison they wished to give him and coming back to life before their eyes. Telling sailors along the Aegean and on the Ionian and Adriatic and Mediterranean and ports of call up and down the Atlantic.

And that was the First Crusade.

And then they were in England again, and then in Northumbria, and the other crusade was over too now, ended, the one Guillalume’s brothers, who had gone to Palestine after all, had gone on, to be killed by the infidels the merchant did not believe in, and now Guillalume was the eldest brother and, in another year, would be the lord of the manor himself, and Mills was back in the stables because it would not do for one so high placed to have as a retainer a man who knew nothing of horses.

Louise lay beside him, her flannel nightshirt bunched beneath her chin. The nightshirt was baby blue with tiny clusters of gray flowers and smelled of caked Vicks and cold steam from the dehumidifier. Her fingers probed her breasts, stroking, handling boluses of flesh, sifting tit like a cancer miner or a broad in pornography.

“All clear?” George asked as she lowered the nightshirt, yanking it down under her backside and consecutively rolled hips.

“When you bite me,” she asked, “do you ever feel anything hard?”

“When I bite?”

“When you take them in your mouth. Do you feel anything hard?”

“I spit it out.”

“Someday I’m going to find something.”

“Well,” he said, “you’ll be catching it early.”

“I spotted again. It wasn’t much. A little pink on the toilet paper.”

Louise got out of bed and put on her house slippers. She smiled and raised the nightshirt. She pulled it over her head. She drew the shades and turned on all the lights, even the one in the closet.

“I have to tell you something,” George Mills said.

Television had taught him. Edward R. Murrow had shown him their living rooms and studies, the long, set-tabled dining rooms of the famous. Commercials had given him an idea of the all-electric kitchens of the median-incomed, the tile-floor-and-microwave-oven-blessed, their digital-fired radios waking them to music. He knew the lawns of the middle class, their power mowers leaning like sporting goods against their cyclone fences, their chemical logs like delivered newspapers, their upright mailboxes like tin bread.

“I used to want,” he’d told Laglichio’s driver, “to live in a tract house and hear airplanes over my head. I wanted hammocks between my trees and a pool you assemble like a toy.”

They had four hundred dollars in savings.

“I’m poor,” he’d said. “In a couple of years I’ll have my silver wedding anniversary. I’m white as a president and poor as a stone.”

“They give to the niggers.”

“Nah,” he’d said, “the niggers got less than I got. I’m just poor. You’re a kid, you’re still young, you’ll be in the teamsters one day. You know what it means to be poor in this country? I take it personally. I’ve been poor all my life. I’ve always been poor and so have my people — Millses go back to the First Crusade — and I don’t understand being poor. We’ve always been respectable and always been poor. Like some disease only Jews get, or women in mountainous country.”

“You got a car. You got a house.”

“A ’63 Buick Special. A bungalow.”

He worked for Laglichio, carrying the furniture and possessions of the evicted.

Usually they had no place to go. Laglichio had a warehouse. The furniture was taken there. Laglichio charged eight dollars a day for storage. Anything not called for in sixty days was Laglichio’s to dispose of. It turned up in resale shops, was sold off for junk or in lots at “estate” sales. The newer stuff, appliances, stereos, the TV’s, went into hock. Laglichio had a contract with the city. He got a hundred and fifty dollars for each move, half of which was paid by a municipal agency, half by the evicted tenant. Laglichio demanded payment up front. It was rare that a tenant had the cash, and Laglichio refused to put anything into his truck until the owner signed a release assigning his property to Laglichio should he be unable to repay all of Laglichio’s claims against him — the seventy-five dollars he owed for the move, the eight-dollar-a-day storage fee — after the sixty-day grace period. He worked with sheriff’s deputies. He had the protection of the police at each eviction. He paid Mills one hundred and eighty dollars a week.

“You’re free to make a new start now,” Mills might explain to one of these dispossessed folks. “Look at it that way.” Sometimes he would be sitting outlandishly on the very sofa he had just carried down into the street when he said this.

“New start? To do which? Sleep in the street?”

“Nah,” he’d say. “Without all this — this hardware.” He indicated the intermingled rooms of furniture exposed on the pavement, a kitchen range beside a bed, a recliner in front of an open refrigerator, tall standing lamps next to nightstands or potted in washtubs.

“Shit.”

“I mean it. Footloose. Fancy-free. Not tied down by possessions.” He did mean it. He hated his own things, their chintz and walnut weight. But of course he understood their tears and arguments and nodded amiably when they disagreed. “I’m Laglichio’s nice guy,” he’d confide. “I understand. I’m poor myself. I’m Laglichio’s public relations.”