Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Have I told you of their faces? I’ve eyes, nose, mouth and lips, the same consanguineous skin stretched cross the same kinned, reciprocate bones and appendage, the same androgynous flaps and trenches, planes and ovals, and yet I am without beauty, am not beautiful. What differentiates us then? It’s not hue or texture. It isn’t the cant of the bones or the slow, lifelong settle of the skin and skull. It isn’t the smile — men smile — or the postures of shyness over their akimbo bearing. There is, I think, some meter in the faces of women, the iambs, anapests and dactyls of arrangement that female their expressions and lend them the look of children even when they’re old, that takes, I mean, the fierceness out and moderates the anger and toys the grief. Yes, it must be that, something like that, beauty that seditions their emotions and turns even fright to ornament and pain to grace. Keep moving, keep moving.”

And on like that. Sometimes telling him not only the story of his life but the story of their lives together since they left what neither of them knew was England. Or making up stories, singing him songs, telling him jokes. He recited special horse prayers and even tried to imitate the harshly consonanted jabber of the horse talker behind him or the horse talker in front. There came a time when he could think of nothing more to say. Then he remembered his mother’s recipes and relayed them to the horse. He counted — Guillalume had taught him to count to 127—for the beast. And sometimes even described what the horse was doing.

“You’re taking a shit. You’re peeing on top of the other horse’s shit.”

Or he’d groan, imitate belches, farts, pretend to moan, laugh, whinny.

And then he went blank and fell silent. Mills’s horse refused to move. The furious pit boss raged at Mills. Mills called for the merchant to translate his reply.

“Says lose tongue,” Mills had the merchant explain.

The pit boss, unimpressed, had the merchant warn Mills that he’d better say something to get the horse moving again. Mills, insulted, attempted to justify himself to the merchant.

“Ask him how he’d like to have nothing but a fucking horse to talk to all day? Tell him that this particular fucking horse wasn’t too fucking bright to begin with or we wouldn’t fucking be here in the fucking first place, would we? Tell him how I give the nag my best stuff, and all he fucking does by way of polite conversation is shit and piss on the fucking salt!”

That night he spoke to Guillalume about it in the long wooden barracks they shared with the other horse talkers.

“What do you talk about?”

“Talk about?”

“With Guillalume’s horse. To get him to move. To keep his spirits up while he goes round and round in circles pulling the two-ton goddamn tree trunk.”

“His spirits?”

“What do you tell him?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing at all. He knows what he has to do and he does it. I think he likes it rather.”

That night he had a dream and next morning, not knowing — as he had not known about horses or picnics or what a crusade was or the language he had been hearing for two months now without understanding a word — that he had just invented psychiatry, he began to tell Mills’s horse about it, speaking easily, effortlessly. “You weren’t there, Mills’s horse,” he said, “you never saw this — this was my dream and what happened, too — but once, when I was a small boy, there was a rider hurt. And he must have been an important man — from the castle — because the others, the knights, their squires, were very concerned, frightened. Because by ordinary they were a bung and lively lot, always laughing and passing off jokes when a fellow had fallen, even when he’d been hurt more than this one was, this fellow who’d only had the wind knocked out and was a bit silly, not even bad limping, mind, but light-headed and reeling about like someone mixed up.” Mills looked across at the animal, which seemed to like, be actually interested in, what he was saying, so easily did he move in his harness, almost too easily. Mills had to increase his pace to keep up with him. “Well then,” he said breathlessly, “like I was saying, they were very alarmed like and called in the men from the stable to pull off his armor for him and other men to support him back to the castle. And I was there and this great knight saw me and says, ‘You, boy, fetch Sir Guy’s lance and come along,’ and we all went up to the castle together. And you know, Mills’s horse, that was the first time and the last time too that I’d ever been there, though I could see it sometimes from the stables in winter when the leaves were down.

“And my heart was pounding then, I tell you, though I never thought they’d take me inside, imagining that they’d leave me behind this side the drawbridge. And when we got to the moat I must actually have stopped, balked, because one of the sirs turned and said, ‘Hurry, boy, hurry. You’re Sir Guy’s spear carrier now. You must keep up.’ Oh, Mills’s horse, I was dreadful ashamed, stinking as I did of stable — no offense, old plop dropper — and we went in through the great crosshatched gates with their dark iron spikes at the top like aces of spades, and in the courtyard there was pages and heralds no older than myself but dressed like face cards, and retinues all milling about, and maids and ladies-in-waiting, counselors and even an astrologer in a cone hat. It was lovely lively, Mills’s horse. Like Fair Day it was. There was jugglers with balls and acrobats four men high — ever so cunning, ever so deft. There was musicians and peacocks and archers with arrows. All this in the courtyard, all this in the air.

“Then seeing Sir Guy, a jester come limping, mocking his manner, joking his pain. A knight kicked his arse and another set his bells ringing, punching his head. And we went on together, up to the castle, leaving the life.

“And all I could think was: If it’s this way outside what order of prosper must go on indoors?

“It was like the inside of a well — this is still the dream and still what happened, too — the scut-wake contrariety of the world. Not gay but murk, not glister but the subfusc verso of the year. Oh, they had good pieces about — mahogany, oak — all the thick woods bloody as meat and marbled with grain. There was musical instrument on the muniment floors like a luggage, and a hearth so wide and deep they could have burned villages in it. I was a boy then — understand this — I was a boy then as I’d never been a boy before, I think, growing as I had with the ordinary and nothing to pitch my wonder at I mean. There was a quartered arms above that great fireplace and all I could do, no matter they nudged me, was stare at the escutcheon, the bright shield mysterious to me as the position of the stars, one who only having heard of honor suddenly confronted with it — oh, the knights used to jabber of it enough, but it was just chatter, just shoptalk — staring up at Honor’s manifest lares and penates glowing like primary color on the very shape of Honor. It was illegible to me of course, the chiefs and bases, the dexters and sinisters, fess points and nombrils, no more meaningful to me than the symbols on the wizard’s cone or the precedence of picture cards. But I knew what it was. I knew. Document, credential, pedigree, warrant. The curriculum vitae of Honor — its probative ordinates and abscissas, scaled and calibrate as weights and measures. All aristocracy’s home movies. An eye-opener to the kid from shit. The history of my master’s master’s family stamped like a veronica on the blazoned crest. (And oh, Mills’s horse, the dyes, the dyes! No such colors in Nature or life. No sky so blue nor blood so red nor grass so green; the lineage repudiate to Nature, candescent even in the measly taper’d dark, the fuels they burned the oils of unicorns or the sweet fierce heroic burning breath of the gilded rampant animals themselves perhaps!)