Stanley Elkin: George Mills

“This stuff?” one of the miners said, holding out a palmful of salt. “Those emperors really like this? All it does is make me thirsty.”

“They’ve different digestive systems,” the merchant explained. “Water makes them thirsty. Keep digging.”

“We’re lucky, I guess,” one permanently stooped salt farmer said. “We’re bent down over a gold mine here.”

“Look,” said Guillalume, “isn’t that — It’s so dark I can’t tell really, but it looks rather like—”

“It is,” Mills said excitedly, “it’s Mills’s horse. Good old Mills’s horse,” he said, rushing up to pet it, “but where’s Guillalume’s horse, huh boy? And what have they done to you, fella?” He had to jog along beside the horse as he petted it and said these things, for it had been hooked up to a sort of subterranean merry-go-round, four horses forming a crude equine flywheel.

The merchant took them on a tour of the mine, proudly explaining the operation. The horses they’d seen dragged heavy spokes which were attached to a thick central post, one end of which was planted in the floor of the mine in a wooden pot. At the ceiling, hanging from supporting wooden struts, was a similar pot. The horses had been linked to these devices by complicated harnesses, great leather hames, hame tugs, traces run through bellybands, hip straps, breeching. The spokes ended in great shovel-like blades which rubbed along the sides of the mine, scraping flinders of salt from the walls. Adjusting the length of the spokes made it possible to make deeper and deeper incisions into the salt walls. A pit boss watching over the shower of salt judged when it was about to become critical and gave the order to clear the chamber. Then the scaffolding and struts were removed and the horses and men retreated into a heavily reinforced area. There they stood by while wreckers rushed in with mallets and pitchforks to bring down the chamber they had been working just moments before. A priest made a short prayer over the heavy drifts of salt, and the pit boss called in new gangs to harvest it. Meanwhile, in other parts of the mine, the farmers would be shaping new chambers and setting up new scaffolding. Then the horses were reintroduced and the process began all over again. It took about five weeks for a cycle to complete itself. There were, the merchant explained, approximately four complete shifts of men — chamber shapers, carpenters, wreckers, harvesters, salt carriers, pit bosses and horse talkers — on duty throughout the vast complex of the mine.

The merchant showed them — the mine employed a full-time cartographer — one of his maps. What they saw was astonishing — a nexus of honeycombs, larger, more elaborate than the greatest castle, salted cones and salted tunnels, salted chambers, salted halls, moats, amphitheaters, salted playgrounds, salted shafts. And, in black on the map, the great salt ruins where the delicate, saline architecture had collapsed, myocardial infarcts of salt.

“Best place to dig,” the merchant said.

“But wouldn’t there be—”

“Oh yes sure. Good yields. Many bushels. Bumper crops. Salt ruins best place to dig.”

“But where it’s collapsed, the salt, under all that—”

“Down there under? Oh sure yeah. The farmer boys. Tch-tch. But preserved. Looking good like new.”

Mills was a horse talker. So was Guillalume. (The barbarian they had seen was actually a pit boss. It had been he who’d discovered and stolen their horses. The merchant, hearing the pit boss’s description of the horses and the markings on their saddles, had determined that the men would have to be stolen as well. “Need,” he’d said, “people who can talk to them.”)

Mills was always thirsty now. Talking to his horse, coaxing him along the orbit of the salt carousel, his tongue flecked with salt dust, his throat burned raw with the dry pebbles, gagging and talking baby talk, horse talk, nonsense, philosophy. He did not know what the other horse talkers told their beasts — the merchant was disinterested; it made him drowsy, he said, to listen; he did not like, he said, to stay long in the farm — because they spoke in what Mills did not even know was Polish, and in addition to his constant thirst, to the annoyance caused him by his great raw burning and wounded mouth, to his stinging eyes and smarting, salt-oiled skin like the sticky, greasy glaze of ocean bathers, there was the problem of finding things to say to it, of saying them, getting them out through the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat and mouth. And in the mitigated light, watery, milky as the hour before sunrise save where the torches, igniting salt, exploded into a showerwork of sparkler ferocity, white as temperature. But mostly the talk, what to say.

“Well, Mills’s horse, here we go again. Round and round, hey, old fellow? No, no, can’t balk, lad. We’re in this together. Got to pull your weight. It’s all teamwork here. Can’t let them other fellows’ horses catch us shirking. That’s it, that’s the way.

“It’s hard times, Mills’s horse, I’ll give you that, but we’ve seen better, what? Oh, but wasn’t it lovely getting here though, doing them countries, eating the fruits and choice cuts, the good cheeses and grand breads and everything shipshape in the posh weather! But all good things come to an end, they say, and it’s hard to keep the splendid up. So perhaps we’re for it now.

“What I think, my view of it, is they’ll keep us only as long as you pull your weight. These salt farmers don’t seem very good Christians to me, Mills’s horse, old fella, old boy. Awful bloody blokes they be. And their women — whoo. Can’t get near ’em. Smell as bad as the wreckers. Saucy strumpets though, I think. Ah, the wenches, Mills’s horse, oh the crumpet, ah the birds!

“But they’ve no manners, hereabouts, nor a bit of breeding. I showed them my handshakes, displayed my salutes. Water off a duck’s back, Mills’s courser. — No no, dray it, dray it, old shaft horse, pull it, old pony. That pit boss has eyes like a peacock’s tail. That’s it, that’s it. — Not like with Nancy, not like with Joan. They appreciated a bit of culture now and again. It wasn’t all dicky in the furry. There was respect, foreplay, handshakes and salutes.

“I’ll tell you a thing about females, old cob. Hey! Hey! Keep moving, old goer. Raft it, old jade. Trant it, punch, trant it! Caddy and fetch it, old four-foot and nag-pad, keep on, old cinchfarm, or they’ll turn you to tack. (Good Lord, Mills’s horse, you’re carrying me more than ever you did when I was only your rider.) What was I on about then? Oh — the women.

“All that gynecic crowd. Oh, the splendor and Orient glory — the fine, fair furniture of flesh. Prone, how like the Persian’s couch — the flufféd pillows of their breasts, the long, soft bolster of their thighs, their pink hips curving like the tiding sea. And their hair — oh, their hair, Mills’s horse — sable, gold, bay and wine like all the point-blank brights of heraldry, more potent than the ensigns, guidons, jacks and pennons of inspirate loyalty! Seated, how like the fabric’d thrones of kings and potentates, ease coiled in their laps like springs! The odalisque miracle of those candied cabinets, the smoked, spiked licorice of the cunts and the chewy charming sweetmeat of the ass. — Keep going, keep going, old sleigh-pull! — Their fumed groins like a perfect delta in geography, the salty hollows of their underarms and the perfect upholstery of their frictioned genitals. Oh, oh. (Hold up, hold up old grasschew!) How fashioned to function, how molded to use. Perfect and practiced as a ball. They say He made them from a rib. ’Tis proof of alchemy then and there’s juice in stones and soup in straw.