Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

I remember looking out past the audience and what did I see?

I saw what looked like a giant white horse. I then turned to my father. He was nodding, slow-motion-like, in a dream, and I heard it say again, “Do it now.”

Like it was yesterday, I can see the horse, right out there in front of me, coming through the back wall of the theater. By the lobby doors and under the balcony; the rider wore a golden crown. I blinked, standing out there onstage. I shook my head, lowered my arms, and then I saw what it really was: a huge painted mural of a great white horse. I hadn’t noticed it before — because it was too big? I don’t know. But it was actually back there and beyond the audience, gallop-frozen, on a heavenly burst of cloud luster. I touched the action figure in my pocket, and thought of the tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back, the large horselike creatures that walk reared back on their hind legs, and I pretended the horse was real. It was big, and beautiful, and painted so painstakingly, and its eyes were the glassy kind that stared right back and looked alive. The horse was looking right at me, and it would come hurtling through the wall at any moment. The plaster would crackle and shatter, gushing white powder on the carpet.

I heard it again: “Do it now.” So I spoke.

My parents were sitting there in the front row, their mouths partly open, just looking, and wondering what in the world had come over their boy. The elders and the servant brothers were side-stage, now, and calling me over. But I couldn’t hear them. I looked out at the faces, of friends, and family, and strangers mostly, and of Issy. I don’t like to think about Issy anymore. Waving from his balcony seat, sort of haltingly.

Time slowed.

A cool and clear muffle of silence in the hall, and I could feel a sort of velvety veil about to be lifted. I looked at my notes. They had dropped to the floor. Were my parents angry? Was I in trouble? I saw them as if through thick glass, or deep water, and I couldn’t hear or touch anything outside my head at all. I was standing at the edge of a high cliff, and I looked at my notes on the floor … Was I shouting just now? I think I was shouting. And then the audience exploded with applause. I heard everything, I saw everything, and I felt every texture in the hall for a long moment. I was every last body all at once, and I drank in the applause like it was a large cup of RC Cola. Mom and Dad stood from their seats, and they were clapping. All four thousand people, and they loved me — they loved me! I’d even dropped my notes on the floor, and they loved me. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say next, and so I did what just came naturally: I recited scripture. And then I went off script completely, swept away in a rush of something new, some new me; maybe God did grant me sight, a revelation. A glimpse of what waits for this world.

He showed me a horse.

And I gave them what they wanted, what we all wanted: I gave them a date. I gave them what no one else would give them — or would they? I’ve often wondered, since then, if some other sermon had to be changed that day because of me and my big mouth. I gave them the day and the hour of the End. It would be twenty years more before I was wrong.

But at that moment I was the Josiah, king of the four thousand Christians, God’s mouthpiece. It was like filling up with every bit of light and heat that had ever passed through my body. I was Blake’s Great Revelation Angel, glorious and towering. Of course, I didn’t think it at the time, only later on, like when I first saw that illustration in a coffee-table art book, but my God, that’s just how I felt. I figured everything would be different. School would be different. And I figured if I bowed they would just keep on clapping. So with a small stiff arm at my waist, I bowed. The audience answered again! Another swell of applause! Which did what but just make me hungrier. I can still see that kid from way out here, through all this stuff we think of as time, the small and early spirit-hungry version of me — stepping out from behind the microphone and, boy, just look at him bow. No, he curtseys. Like it’s his grand opening night, like it’s his coronation. He curtseys, and the audience can’t help themselves. Some people actually lose themselves in laughter, in appreciation, an ovation, and maybe some in their enthusiasm actually tarnish the dignity of the whole affair because let’s not forget this is supposed to be worship, a serious business, God’s business, but then again, who are we kidding: the kid is good. Curtseying, for crying out loud! Now raising a hand like No, thank you . Little me waves to the back, like some visiting ambassador. Remembering the scene sent me reeling, feeling every little thing all at once.

I thought of looking out there at my mother’s face, the face of my lovely and still alive mother. Hands folded at her mouth, eyes teary with pride. My father nodding his head, My boy … The elder brothers from the side of the stage whispering: “Hey, psst, hey, time to leave the stage…”

I looked at Mom, and I took in a very deep breath. I concentrated on that small thing that lives way inside (I have tried this since and failed miserably): the tiny, invisible, indestructible point — but sometimes it fills up a room and touches its head to the ceiling; how big a horse would I need, if a heavenly horse came riding and rearing from back in the aisles? Come the final day, come Armageddon, the blood will flow and fill the streets, high as God’s holy horses, the elder brothers waving me over …

Wait a second now: Whose blood?

I literally asked myself this question. This I remember more clearly than anything because it was the question that pulled me down to earth. I’d recited this scripture how many times without thinking? How many things are like this in life? Whose blood? My good mother would one day slip and swim through whose wet blood? The applause started dying away …

And then my mother nudged with her chin, a throw of her chin, like Go on, sweetie, go ahead. And Dad looking like, Hey, it’s gotta end sometime …

I looked around the theater, one more time.

My mother would wade through a river of whose dead blood exactly? Red blood? Real blood? I looked up at the sky, at the cosmic ceiling, at the butter-yellow moon, and I don’t know how I’d missed it! Even from way down there, onstage, I could plainly see it. Across the moon was a jagged line like a lightning bolt, a crack in the painted plaster probably not even wide enough for a finger. But if that moon were real, the crack would have been a canyon twenty miles wide. The ceiling was just a ceiling.

Does this make any kind of sense? Pictures of planets don’t make planets, Josiah! The sky was painted prettily, yes. We were in a theater! In Queens! The trash bags were piled out front by the sidewalk, and the soda trucks were driving by in the street, and there was a whole world of warm-blooded people out there who had not an inkling of our blood-spilling talk inside. I actually played the phrase in my head several times in the following days: “The ceiling is really a ceiling.”

I sat there in the back of Abdullah’s cab, and thought of my father and how many different fathers we all have, of how many I’d had. All of them Gill, but different. There was the father I had when I was a kid, and I wanted nothing more than for him to be present with me in the world, for him to stop acting like I had something to give him, and to momentarily put aside his worship for a game of checkers. There was the father who argued with my mother, who soon insisted that church worship was no longer enough, and he wanted more worship at home. There was the father who eventually refused church altogether — but never God — when Mom got sick; and if already Dad was in a boat all his own — and he very much was — Mom’s getting sick made him pull up the gangplank. There was the father who frightened me, who prayed for hours, on his knees, facing a wall, who I believe at least one time deliberately hurt himself; I was young and so I can’t recall when for sure, but I remember finding him on his knees, in the garage, and slamming his thighs with a large yellow phone book, again, and again, and again; Mom rushed in, took me away, and shut the door behind us. There was my deliberate insomniac of a father, the man who paced, back and forth, in the kitchen, in the garage, on the sidewalk, who stayed up for days sometimes, refusing sleep, showing increasing signs of what I see now was temporary dementia. Mom would tell me not to worry and just leave him be. That my father was praying. One night, I was maybe nine or probably ten, it was three or four in the morning, I heard the early insects, and someone talking in our backyard. I went downstairs and looked out the kitchen window. I saw him pacing, talking to himself. I slowly opened the door, very slowly. I heard him repeating scripture like a mantra: “And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from the Earth, and the top of it reached up to Heaven, and the angels were climbing up and down. And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from Earth, and…” This made me afraid, and feel lost, unprotected. Except then I realized, as my eyes got used to the darkness, that my mother was sitting there in front of me, right at my feet, on the top porch step. She didn’t turn around. She said, “Go to bed, love.”