He and Joseph drove out to her place and found the horse pacing a corral, a long jagged gash on its chest dangling a piece of hide shaped like an envelope flap, an animal tormented, driven half-mad by pain and relentless clouds of flies. Joseph was ready to bet his father was going to get killed trying to catch this crazy horse. To start with, it tried to escape, clambered up six feet of fence rails, grunting and pawing, toppled over on its hind quarters, and collapsed in a whirl of slashing legs. Then it scrambled to its feet and came straight at his father, squealing, wriggling, kicking, teeth bared. His father broke the charge, made the horse veer away at the last possible second by flogging it across the face and eyes with the stock whip he carried. Joseph, clinging to the fence, begged and shouted at his father to come out of there, leave that horse be, but he wouldn’t listen. Around and around the corral the two went, horse and man. The dust hung in the lowering evening light like a fine, golden powder. As it settled on his father’s clothes and hair it turned from gold to grey, turning him into a ghost.
At last his father lassoed the horse and snubbed him down as tight as he could to a post. Next he fashioned himself a makeshift twitch out of a bit of rope and stick and performed the dangerous sleight of hand of slipping the loop on the horse’s nose and cranking it up like a tourniquet. The horse braced itself on widely splayed legs, mad eyes rolling, strong yellow teeth bared, slobber slopping off its bottom lip. But now his father had the son of a bitch, had him good. When he called Joseph to come and take the twitch, the boy came with no more protest than if God Almighty himself had ordered him out from behind the fence of poplar poles to keep a jug-headed man-killer squeezed into submission with a twist of hemp and dry wood. He was safe because his father was near, patiently sponging Creolin into the raw mouth of the laceration, painstakingly picking slivers and dirt from the butcher-flesh. His father was there talking quietly and matter-of-factly to both horse and boy. “Now when I pull this splinter loose, look out. Get set. He’s going to breathe fire. Aren’t you going to breathe fire, you no-nuts son of a bitch?” Nothing could go amiss or awry with his father there, speaking so calmly.
The wound was clean, there was nothing left to do but stitch the cut. Fishing through shirt pockets his father began to swear. Somehow his needle and thread had gone missing and he would have to borrow what he needed from the woman. Joseph was to hold the horse until he got back. “He won’t be going anywheres on you if you keep that twitch tight. Just keep the twitch tight,” his father reiterated and was gone before the boy could manufacture an excuse why he shouldn’t leave him.
Over his shoulder, Joseph watched his father amble to the house, knock, and disappear into the porch when the door was answered. He turned back to the horse. The wound was bleeding, dripping slow, fat drops of blood into the dust. It was like watching the second hand of a clock. He counted the drops, watched three hundred fall. Three hundred drops equalled five minutes. Five minutes ought to be enough time to scare up a needle and thread. He glanced nervously toward the house to see if his father was returning. There was no sign of him. The boy swayed with panic. What was keeping him? Where was his father? How long was he supposed to stand holding this horse? He imagined the sun setting, his father still missing and night falling, alone with this glassy-eyed, devil horse, both rooted to this spot of ground by a twitch. Joseph’s palms were slick with sweat. He thought of the stick slipping in his hands, the sudden blur of unwinding. The unwinding and springing of the fear twisted up inside him and the fear twisted up on a stick.
He began to count the drops of blood again. He would count another three hundred before he permitted himself to look again to see if his father was coming. Five minutes more. There were flies gathering at the growing puddle of black blood thickening on the ground. There were flies on Joseph. He could feel them crawling in his ears and at the corners of his eyes. He didn’t dare swat them, he might lose his grip on the stick. One slip and that crazy horse might get him.
“Hurry up,” he said aloud and the horse laid back its ears at the sound of his voice, changing the shape of its head, giving it a snake’s sleekness. “Hurry up, please,” he said. He was still counting in his head, the numbers very loud. He got mixed up. Started counting flies, not tears of blood. He began over. Once again three hundred. He looked back at the dead calm of the yard soaked in evening light; everything motionless except for the swallows swooping and flitting above the peaked roof of the house. In the final flight of these birds before the coming darkness he experienced his own desertion. There was no logic to it, except the logic of association. Somehow he understood he would never be his father. It was that simple. He could never be a man like his father. The realization left him bereft, made him cry.
He was still crying when he heard the scrape of boots on the fence rails. His father wanted to know what had happened. Joseph couldn’t explain. When his father came nearer and repeated the question, Joseph smelled the whisky on his breath. Now he felt entitled to his anger at his father’s failure to understand.
“You been drinking!” he said. The shrillness of his voice was a clue, if not an explanation.
“She gave me a drink,” his father said. “I had to have a drink for coming out. She wouldn’t have it any other way.” He couldn’t figure what was behind this. “I was only gone fifteen minutes,” he said. “Did he come at you? Take a jump? Scare you? Is that it? I told you to hold him tight.”
“Tell me another one. Fifteen minutes,” Joseph said sullenly, trying to rub the tears on his cheek into the shoulder of his shirt.
“Okay, twenty minutes,” said his father. “At the outside.” He threaded the needle and set about stitching the wound. The light was failing, he didn’t have much time. Each time the needle penetrated the skin, the horse shivered, its hide rippled with a life of its own.
“You ought to think,” said Joseph.
“Think about what?” said his father. “You tell me what to think about and I’ll think about it.”
“Just think.” Think about me, he meant.
“Wait until you’re my age,” his father said. “Then you’ll know what thinking is.”
Think about what’d happen if I let go of this stick. Joseph watched the poised needle. You’d be sorry then.
His father tied the thread in a neat surgical knot. He had a book of knots at home, there wasn’t one he didn’t know.
“Turn him loose,” he said to the boy. His father was getting angry. What was he supposed to apologize for? “And another thing,” he added, “just so you know who calls the shots in this outfit – get yourself ready for another fifteen-minute wait because the lady asked me in for another drink and I’m going to have it.”
Joseph refused to go into the house with his father.
“Pout if you want,” his father said. “It’s no skin off my ass.”
Joseph prowled around the house, chucking handfuls of gravel up under the eaves to drive the swallows out of their nests and into bursts of edgy flight to test the truth of his earlier feeling. He continued doing this until his father came roaring and raving outside, shouting enough was enough, he’d had all he could stand of this carry-on. Show some respect for other people’s property or he’d get the worst jeezly licking of his life.
Another taboo broken.
After France’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the humiliated nation cried out for revenge, for a saviour. The eyes of Frenchmen turned to the handsome General Georges Boulanger, The Man on Horseback. No one knew that The Man on Horseback had only learned to ride, to cut such a captivating figure, by the most diligent application. Boulanger after all was an infantry man, not a cavalry officer full of careless dash and daring. His riding school was an abandoned chapel which stood beside his house. Each morning at six o’clock the General would spur his horse through the doorway of the chapel and commence bouncing about in the sacral, coloured morning light falling through the stained-glass windows. The General was not
a stupid man. Although he frequently toppled off his horse and took many embarrassing tumbles, he was careful to see to it that there were no witnesses to his hilarious accidents. His mistakes were made in private.
General Boulanger had an infallible sense of publicity. Everyone remembers the names of the horses of truly great generals. Alexander the Great and Bucephalus, Napoleon and the white stallion Marengo, General Lee and Traveller, Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrel. But no general owed as much to a horse as General Boulanger did to Tunis. The General did not choose his horse himself, he left the choice of his mount to an expert, someone who knew his business. The man who picked Tunis for the General chose well. Tunis was a beautiful black which gleamed in the sunshine. Despite being a considerable age, the horse looked strong and had a striking carriage. He moved and pranced elegantly, with great elan, with great presence. Perhaps most important for a general who had only recently become an equestrian, sitting on Tunis was as comfortable as sitting in his own armchair beside his own fire. The horse’s disposition was tested by trumpeting bugles in his ear and discharging rifle volleys under his nose. The animal didn’t turn a hair, didn’t startle. There would be no unfortunate and mortifying surprises for The Man on Horseback.
On July 14, 1886, the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, General Boulanger introduced Tunis to the public in a military review at Longchamps. By three o’clock in the afternoon a crowd of one hundred thousand had gathered on the field to view the parade. Gunfire and military tunes announced the arrival of a squad of spahis followed by fifteen generals, hundreds of officers and the military attachés of all the embassies. When they had passed, a solitary figure made his entrance on a black horse; General Boulanger garbed in turquoise dolman with gold epaulettes, pink trousers and black boots.
The crowd went wild. Cries of Vive Boulanger! drowned out the weak smattering of applause which greeted those dowdy, drab politicians, the Prime Minister and the President of France. While those two fussily took their seats in the presidential box, General Boulanger and Tunis capered about the field looking strenuously military, the eyes of the crowd fastened adoringly upon them.
When the review began, many of the common soldiers broke protocol by saluting General Boulanger rather than the President of the Republic. Thousands of voices thundered “Vive Boulanger!” again and again. As the last troops departed, the hysterical crowd burst through the police and onto the field, men shouting frantically, women weeping. Only with the greatest reluctance did the overwhelming mob permit their darling to canter off on his beautiful black horse. For hours, like jilted brides and forsaken bridegrooms, they wandered about Longchamps, disconsolate. That night every restaurant and café in Paris was full, the streets were jammed with people shouting for Boulanger.
The striking figure he had cut on Tunis insured Boulanger’s popularity and led to a ubiquitous celebrity. Over three hundred popular songs were composed in his honour. Photographs of his striking features sold out issues of eight hundred thousand. There were pottery statuettes of the General and cheap clay pipes with their bowls fashioned in the likeness of The Man on Horseback. You could scrub yourself with Boulanger soap and eat your dinner from a Boulanger plate. His office in the Ministry of War was flooded with letters from the women of France offering their bodies to him with fervent, erotic patriotism. France gave its heart to Boulanger, but Boulanger’s was pledged to his mistress, the Vicomtesse Marguerite de Bonnemains, lover, advisor, and administerer of ever increasing doses of morphine to alleviate the pain of an old war wound of the General’s.
On January 27, 1887, General Boulanger was elected to the constituency of the Seine by a stunning majority of 80,000 votes. That night France was his for the taking, virtually without opposition he could have established his dictatorship. In the Restaurant Durand, where he awaited election results throughout the evening, an enthusiastic mob was kept at bay with the iron shutters closed over the windows. Admirers urged him to act, to seize the government. Workingmen, students from Montmartre, aristocrats chanted “A l’Elysée! A l’Elysée!” in the streets. Boulanger withdrew to a private room in the restaurant and consulted Marguerite. When he returned he issued orders that nothing was to be done.
Sensing indecision and weakness on his part, the government set in train steps to arrest The Man on Horseback and General Boulanger fled wife and France accompanied by his mistress. A brief period of fashionable acclaim in English society followed, but the General was a spent force, an article for the shelf. In exile on the isle of Jersey, Marguerite fell ill while the General sat in front of a large portrait of Tunis.
The unhappy couple removed themselves to Belgium. There Marguerite died on July 16, two days after the date of the General’s greatest triumph on the field of Longchamps. Several months later The Man on Horseback shot himself on his lover’s grave. A large photograph of Marguerite which he carried under his shirt was so firmly pasted to the skin of his chest with dried blood that it had to be torn to be removed.
A horse can carry a man only so far and no farther.
Joseph Kelsey left home at the age of seventeen. For four years he attended the University of Saskatchewan, supporting himself with part-time jobs and scholarships. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship took him to the University of Wisconsin. From there he went on to the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in modern French history. While in Chicago he met and married Catherine Bringhurst, a medical student and a native of the Windy City. In 1974 Catherine completed her medical degree, Joseph took a job teaching history at Carleton, and they moved to Ottawa.
Each of these steps removed Joseph Kelsey a little further from his father, geographically and emotionally. Distance made visits more expensive and more infrequent. The world he lived and worked in now made the one he had departed seem impossible, at the very least improbable. Whenever he told Catherine stories of his childhood, of life in a shacky house, of a father and mother who never read a book, he felt self-dramatizing and false. The stories were true but in the alchemy of Catherine’s imagination they were transformed and he became located in an unreal world of glamorous destitution. In rare moments of self-knowledge, Joseph Kelsey knew that this had always been his intention – to make his origins as romantic to her as hers were to him. His goal was a reciprocity of envy, something conceivable, given the mood of the sixties. Raised in an affluent suburb of Chicago by a doctor father and a psychiatrist mother, whom she addressed as Claude and Amelia, Catherine seemed inconceivably exotic to her young husband.
Joseph and his new wife made trips back to Saskatchewan twice in the years between 1974 and 1977. On both occasions they stayed in the local hotel at Catherine’s insistence. Because Joseph’s parents’ house was so small, she didn’t want Rupert and Mary disturbed by Andrew, a fussing baby on their first visit and, on their second, a small child in the throes of the terrible twos. Joseph didn’t tell his wife that her middle-class consideration was interpreted by his parents as high and mightiness, a distaste for ordinary people and plain living. Overhearing his mother refer to Catherine as “Dr. Bringhurst” confirmed for her son that it was a sore point with his mother that his spouse had retained her maiden name.
How Catherine reacts to this, or doesn’t react to this – she is oblivious in the way the protected, privileged so often are, they cannot conceive of opinions except the proper ones, theirs – makes Joseph swell with a mild, chafing contempt. She has no idea. For her the man with the prematurely, fiercely lined face and the woman with the home permanent and tough, callused hands are salt of the earth idealizations; honest, kindly peasants like the ones first encountered in a suburban fairy tale, Chicago-style. Deep in her heart she assumes that they must admire her because that is what peasants do with princesses. (Catherine would be shocked and hurt if Joseph accused her of such an attitude.) But Joseph knows what his parents think of women who give their boy child a doll to play with, or hang on to their maiden names, or put up in hotels on family visits. Hoity-toity bitch, is what they think.
So his son turns five before Joseph can bring himself to pay another visit home, before he and Catherine, his mother and Andrew find themselves standing in the IGA parking lot, watching the local Canada Day parade assemble. This year, like each of the fifteen before, his father, on horseback, is going to lead the parade and bear the flag.
It is not a good day for a parade. The morning is woolly and grey with a fine, misty rain, which recalls for Joseph the barely perceptible spray suspended in the air above the observation railings at Niagara Falls. He wishes it would piss or get off the pot. The day has the feel of a sodden Kleenex about to shred in his hands. He doesn’t know why he should feel this, but he does. Maybe it’s because Andrew, holding Catherine’s hand and delightedly awaiting the commencement of the parade in a brilliantly yellow raincoat and sou’wester, seems to his father the only genuine patch of brightness on the scene, a patch of brightness soon to be eclipsed by disappointment. It’s Joseph’s guess that the boy expects a parade of pomp and magnitude, an Ottawa parade like he’s used to. Andrew doesn’t understand that all he is going to get is what is already collected in the parking lot.
That’s the local high-school band whose uniform consists of the high-school jacket, nothing splashier, showier, or more elaborate. Also the local Credit Union, which has resurrected its perennial float, a six-foot-high papier mâché globe spotted with cardboard Credit Union flags to illustrate the international nature of credit unionism. The owner and parts man of the John Deere dealership are drunk and in clown costumes. The owner will drive a John Deere riding mower pulling a child’s wagon in which the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound parts man will hunker, honking a horn and tossing wrapped candies to the children. The few remaining parade entries are of a similar calibre. Meanwhile the hapless drizzle continues, making everything fuzzier and murkier, wilting the pastel tissue paper flowers on the floats, frizzing the hair of the high-school queen and her attendants, painting a pearly film of moisture on the hoods, roofs, fenders of parked cars.
Things As They Are? Page 4