George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “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.

  “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 i
n 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!)

  “All this I saw last night in my dream, saw it as I’d seen it then and, as then, heard the scolding of the knights: ‘You, boy! Wool-gatherer, what are you staring at?’ ‘Come away, come away!’ ‘Kid, kid, bring the spear, you’ll eat your heart out.’

  “But I wasn’t, you see. Not angry or jealous, no covet or revolution in my heart. Not even reform there. Only wonder at the curious assortment of life, its dicey essence and laddered station.

  “We went upstairs. Through the cold scarped halls, the parapeted, circumvallated keep and fastness, through miles it must have been of that fortress house. And that’s where I saw it. Along one immense stairwell. A hanging, they told me, a tapestry. Woven in Germany, I think, or France, or some such far-off place. Whatever name they used as meaningless to me as the sandpaper syllables of animals.

  “ ‘Please, sir, may I look for a bit?’

  “And one of the men raised his hands as if to strike me, but Sir Guy himself stayed the blow. ‘Noblesse oblige, asshole. Let him. What? The ink not yet dry on the Magna Carta and you’d strike a stableboy for looking at a tapestry? Give Elvin my lance, lad. Thank you for carrying it this far. Take my coin. When you’ve done, go out quietly.’

  “It was like a flag, Mills’s horse——only larger than any real flag. And the colors not as bright as they’d been on the escutcheon, for those were the consolidate, idealized, concentrate colors of claims and qualities, the paints of boast and fabled beasts. This was a picture. Not a picture like a picture in a church. No saints with halos like golden quoits above their heads, no nimbuses on edge like valued coins, not our Lord, or Mother Mary, or allegory at all, but only the ordinary pastels of quotidian life. A representation, Horse, in tawns and rusts, in the bleached greens and drought yellows of high summer, in dusty blacks and whites gone off, in blues like distant foliage. Everything the shade of clumsy weather. There were gypsies in it and beggars. There were honest men——hewers of wood and haulers of water. Legging’d and standing behind their full pouches of scrotum like small pregnancies. There were women in wimples. Ned and Nancy. Pete and Peg. It was how they saw us——see us. Shepherds and farmers. Millers, bakers, smithies. Mechanics with wooden tools, leather. Pastoral, safe, settled in the tapestry condition of their lives, woven into it as the images themselves.

  “Only I knew I wasn’t like that——though I wouldn’t have objected if I was. Maybe the Germans, maybe the French, but not me, not anyone I knew. We are a dour, luteless people, cheerless, something sour in our blue collar blood.”

  He fell silent. Yet the horse continued to turn in its orbit and he in his, the two of them reflective now, ruminative, Mills and the horse too, not even taking for granted the respite and thoughtless free ride earned for them by Mills’s calm oratory. Indeed, when Mills looked up he saw that he had been talking to a different horse entirely, that he walked beside another horse talker. “Oh,” he said, “ ’scuse me,” and caught up to Mills’s horse. “I got lost,” he explained to the beast. “I got caught up in what I was saying. I lost my place,” he apologized.

  “Where was I?” he asked of it, who first picked up its shit and then had to sweet-talk it, playing up to the very horse he’d serviced before ever he’d serviced Guillalume. Humiliated, his life proscribed and red-lined from the beginning, and angry now, heavily caused as an underdeveloped nation or a leftist history of legitimate beef, no longer soft-soaped by life, and suddenly frightened too, frightened beyond immediate threat, frightened to the bone, scared right down to hope itself.

  He knew he had to escape. Not because he thought things would be different elsewhere—he knew they wouldn’t—but because he needed comfort and even his own old turf would do. (Nor did he care about Guillalume now, whose people had perpetrated the tapestry against him, nor about his—Mills’s—horse, or Guillalume’s. There was nothing personal. There was everything personal.)

  He would need the merchant.

  After his shift he returned in the dark to his hut, the communal long house where he and the other salt farmers stayed. He did not even begrudge the horse talkers and the other farmers their wives——square, blockish women who ministered to their men with their soft songs and heavy bodies. Partitions blocked his view like stalled, angled space in public toilets. There were no proper walls, only hanging rafts of nailed baffles, so that what he saw from his cot were bare feet, legs, the dropped clothes of lovers. He had a sense of timeless peep show, of infinite availability, of his own discretionary participation. If he so much as stooped to undo a clog he knew he would see animal vistas of coupled flesh, himself protected by the blind abandon of the others’ concentration. He might have crawled unchallenged and unassailed the entire length of the long house, tunneled beneath their lovemaking, bellying like some fuck farmer just beneath the lovers’ groans and clipped cries. There were more than thirty cots, and their orgasms seemed peremptory and staggered as farts or coughs, a continual hubbub of what he could not even bring himself to believe was ecstasy, only some long, ongoing conjugal Las Vegas of copulation, ceaseless as card game, not even headed. Not even headed by the occasional laughter and applause which was the collective, mechanical acknowledgment of these performances. But he did not stoop, did not undo his clogs (though he held in reserve his right to do so). Nor, after a while, did he even stop to think: Beasts. Animals. Semen and the smoky smell of female parts were simply the prevailing weather of the place, changeless as California. Mills was without lust. Unsmitten, bored by concupiscence in a foreign language. Though he’d had his chances. Knew there was great curiosity among the women, and even the men, about his foreign parts.

  “I get you girls,” the merchant told him.

  “No.”

  “No trouble. Easy. I tell them you got square balls. I tell them you got pecker that don’t go down except when you’re sleeping. I tell them your ass got two ruts like road. Or one up and one over like crossroad. What you want me to tell them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Too late to tell them nothing. They ask me.”

  And so, apparently, they had. The merchant brought them to his doorless cubicle where they stood watching him, chattering. There were one or two men among them.

  “Better show stuff,” the merchant said.

  “Show stuff, show stuff,” they took up the cry, understanding well enough what they asked.

  Guillalume smirked. “Go ahead, Mills,” he said, at ease on his pallet, “better not keep them waiting.”

  “As to that,” the irritated Mills shot back, pointing at Guillalume, “he’s more foreign than I am, being an aristocrat and all. You’ve only got to
look at his fine cheekbones and delicate features. Look at his fair skin, why don’t you? He’s like that all over. I’m his valet. I dress him. I know. Fair down there he is as flour with a foreskin you can see through the testicles so clear you can spy their milk. Make him show you his nipples, white as shirt buttons. Make him show you his forked cock, one for piss and one for love.”

  The merchant translated what Mills had said and the others stepped back involuntarily, peeping out between the fingers of their laced hands over their shielded eyes.

  “That was insubordinate, Mills. You’re for the rack and strappado when we get back.”

  “In that case I’ve nothing to worry, have I?” Mills said, raising his voice. “When we get back! We’re the other side of hell, we are. We might as well be where the Meuse River meets the Waal channel of the lower Rhine. Ha! High and dry on the bloody floating islands off the bloody drifting shores of the bleeding loose lands! When we get back!”

  “No more today,” the merchant told the women. “All over now. Good night. Good night.”

  When they were alone it was Guillalume who apologized. “Sorry,” he murmured, “didn’t mean to wake the dander. It’s just our adventure has gone boring and uncomfortable. Father’s fault. Adventure should never take place more than a day’s journey from the castle.” Mills stared at the rough wooden ceiling. “Forgive me? Give us a smile?” Mills smiled dutifully in the darkened long house. Mills heard the rattle of the shucks as Guillalume turned on his pallet. When he spoke again his voice was still conciliatory. “What are you thinking, Mills? What are you thinking, George?”

  “I’m wondering what I’m going to tell the horse tomorrow.”

  “You take that part too seriously.”

  “If it stops they’ll kill me.”

  “You think too much in terms of punishments,” said the man who had just threatened him.

  It was true. Once Mills knew that they—he still thought “they”—would need the merchant he wondered what they would do to him—he thought “him”—if he was caught. They could stone him, flay him, hang him, cut away his features as you’d peel a potato. There were hundreds of punishments on the books, for the other end of the tapestry condition was the conditional condition, the notion that he held his life by sufferance, the moody good will of his unpastoral superiors. (The chain of command was unclear: there could be women in the long house who had authority over him. He did not even know if he was a slave, if Guillalume was.) Men of his station lived ringed by deterrent and each time he thought of a way to use the merchant to make good their escape—he thought “their”; Guillalume, though his master, was his charge, too; and there were also the horses—he thought of the terrible retribution which would come with capture, and constantly modified each violent plan with a gloss of extenuation. (He had invented a sort of Mexican bandit, a fellow who joked with a hostage, who plied him with drink and cigarettes and sent out for hamburgers, who offered him extra blankets, and shared jokes, all the while sleeping with pulled pin grenades and a cover-story smile on his lips. It may even be that he invented the Robin Hood legend itself, bringing hospitality and class and a light heart to violence, all the forced, hypocritical courtesies and jolly rogering that come with bright ends and hardened means.) It made no difference. A month later he was still tampering with his plans, ballasting action with all that was incompatible with it.