by Jeffrey Ford
Belius lost his breath and leaned over on the window sill. “Pezimote!” he cried in admonishment.
The tortoise looked over his shoulder. “Not quite a man o’ war pie,” he called to the minotaur and then resumed the unaffected stance of all fours.
Belius watched as his friend moved slowly down the path to the beach. As the waters of the ocean lapped over Pezimote’s shell, a shrill squeal rose up from the forest. The mole’s horrific cry jarred something in Belius’ diminishing brain, and the memory of his last days in the lesser world swept across his darkened mind. Although he had just related the story to Pezimote, the impetus for the telling came only from his tongue. Now, each detail returned to him with frozen clarity.
When Austina caught a whiff of the perfume that Belius had dowsed himself with, she farted to try to clear the air. She called out from her stall in the barn, “Halfling, what’s that rancid aroma?”
Belius tried to ignore her as he coaxed the plough horse out into the center aisle.
“Who died?” asked Plension, taking in the minotaur’s dress: a black, double breasted suit, forest green shirt, maroon ascot. He wore a shiny black wingtip shoe on his human foot and had colored with black polish the cuticle of his hoof to match the shoe.
“No one died,” Belius muttered, knowing better than to try to explain his new clothes to them.
“I think he’s in love,” said Austina to her sister over the wooden boundary separating them.
“Is it the human we saw him with in the field last week?” asked Plension.
Austina mooed.
“I’m just going visiting,” Belius said to them.
“To the doctor’s again,” the old plough horse said to the cows.
“That’s right. He has a very fine library in his house, and he lets me borrow his books. I have to go there. He’s helping me study.”
“We totally understand,” said Austina. “It’s important that you make these concessions in your dress and aroma for the old man.”
“It’s civilized,” said Belius, “to dress properly.”
“We just thought you were out to impress the female,” said Plension. “See how ignorant we creatures can be?”
The horse and the cows laughed and Belius grabbed the horse’s bridle, giving it a rough tug. He led the old plough puller toward the door of the barn, wishing he’d laughed along with them from the beginning.
“How is she on all fours?” Austina mooed after him as he stepped out into the light of the winter day.
He slammed the barn door. The horse was no longer laughing, but Belius could see from the glint in the animal’s eye that he was working hard not to.
“You know, I don’t have to give you any carrots on this trip,” Belius said to him sharply. Then in the same instant he drew a carrot from his pocket. As the horse munched the treat, Belius rigged him to the wagon.
He climbed into the seat of the wagon and took up the reins. “O.K.,” he said to the horse. The old animal gave three lethargic pulls against the weight of the wagon and finally got it rolling.
The afternoon was clear and cold, but off in the west dark clouds were gathering. The clean, sharp scent of snow was so prevalent in the air that it even drilled through the lavender-fruit smell of Belius’ cologne. He had not worn the overcoat, the suit jacket being enough for him as long as the sun shone. He wanted anyone who passed him on the road to note how well dressed he was. The camel hair wrap was rolled up and stored in the back of the wagon with the books he was returning to the doctor.
As the wagon moved slowly along the road, passing barren fields dotted with patches of unmelted snow from the last winter storm, Belius tried to think of the concepts he intended to discuss with Grey. He’d been making notes for a Cosmology, reading the great philosophers and scientists and poets, trying to boil down the workings of the universe so they might be presented in the form of metaphor—a scientific/philosophic/epic that would encompass all thought and emotion, that when read would center the spirit of Belius in the souls and minds of his readers. Even while he worked on the farm, planets and stars, great black distances peopled with characters called Gravity and Entropy filled his head. His musings excited him and filled him with the joy of discovery. Youth blanked out any idea of failure, and, as much knowledge as he gained, he was still able to stay ignorant enough to think that he was capable of his task. The only other thoughts that he gave any time to at all dealt with Nona.
Through a slow process that began on his first stay at the doctor’s house the previous winter, he had been able to prove to her that he was not the beast he appeared. At first, his only intention was to be friends with her. The sense of calm she inspired in him was like a drug that he knew he must have in increasing doses. On his early visits to Grey, in the weeks following his recovery, he would always make a point of chatting with her about incidentals, making sure not to push her into any weighty conversation that assumed any kind of bond between them. He found it difficult sometimes to know she was right there in the same house with him while he spent the entire day in the doctor’s library.
Then one day, late in the afternoon, he was sitting in the red leather chair of the first library he had entered on his original visit, reading an interesting little monograph by Scarfinati, dealing with the mathematical concept of the golden section. He was lost to the ideas of the book, having settled down after a few hours of nothing but staring at the crowded shelves and daydreaming conversations with Nona. The huge house was silent, which sunk him even deeper into the morass of print. The doctor was out on a house call, delivering Phil and Terri Miller’s new child. It was a blustery spring day, and a light rain splashed softly against the outside of the one stained glass window that interrupted the walls of books. For no reason, he broke off his reading in the middle of an engaging concept and looked up to see her standing in front of him with a tray holding two tea cups and a kettle.
“Am I bothering you?” she asked quietly.
He straightened up in the big chair and uncrossed his legs. At first he was dumb with surprise, but he soon regained his composure and was able to say, “Not at all. I was just going to take a break.”
She stood there staring at him. Then he realized that there was no other seat in the library and jumped to his feet. What he had not realized was that his human leg had fallen asleep while he was reading. As he motioned for her to sit down and said, “Please,” his unconscious leg buckled beneath him and he lunged forward. She made a graceful movement to the side as if the tray were a red cape and she a matador, turning to foil a charge. “Leg asleep,” he yelled to let her know he was up to nothing untoward as he stumbled forward and fell, his horns goring, respectively, the bindings of Aristotle’s Poetics and the Letters of Abelard and Heloise. The weight of his embarrassment prevented him from standing, so after he had disengaged himself from the classics, he merely crawled closer to the chair and took up a sitting position. His own stupidity had so dumbfounded him, he just stared at her, hoping she would not run away.
“Are you alright?” she asked as she leaned over and set the tray on the floor between them.
He meant to say yes, but instead he gave a short moo before his words could form.
Her eyes widened at his animal indiscretion, but, all the same, she sat down in the red leather chair and smoothed out the front of her skirt. As she leaned down to pour him a cup of tea, the top of her blouse opened and he couldn’t help seeing her breasts. In moving to give him a spoonful of sugar and some cream, the view increased. He quickly turned his head to stare at the stained glass. “Rain,” he said quickly, uncertain as to whether she had caught him peeking. “Yes,” she said and handed him the cup and saucer.
For the following hour, the conversation came in fits and starts, well padded with many layers of thick silence. They spoke in simple sentences about the weather, Belius’ farm, the doctor’s most recent cases, how to prepare turnips and a few other things equally as interesting. For Belius though, her descr
iptions of how to pare a turnip seemed to carry the same philosophical import and excitement as the closing chapter of Scarfinati’s autobiography. Only once did the conversation take a crucial turn. Belius happened to mention how helpful the doctor had been to him by letting him use the libraries.
“He likes it when you’re here,” Nona said. “He finds you very interesting. We both do. Perhaps in different ways.”
Belius took a sip of tea, trying to think of a way to ask her to explain without seeming to make too much of her statement. Luckily it wasn’t necessary for him to be shrewd. After a slight pause she continued.
“I’m amazed at how much time you can spend reading. You must have a marvelous mind, full of all kinds of wonderful ideas.”
He snorted, the sound a little too close to the barnyard he thought and waved his hoof in the air as if to thank her. “Everyone has the same amount of ideas,” he tried to explain. “It’s just that they’re different. One set of ideas is no better or worse than the other … as long as they are good ideas, of course. I mean as long as they are ideas about things that are good and are not too evil or uncaring or …” He could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making much sense, so to cover his foolishness he laughed. “There’s a few empty ideas for you.”
She smiled but didn’t laugh, and it was evident to him for the first time that, given her personality, it would not be right if she had. In that moment, it came to him that she was so very different from him. Life itself seemed to be enough for her, she didn’t need a Cosmology or the thoughts of long dead thinkers creeping through her brain or to know the why of everything. When she looked at a tea cup, the picture was not distorted by the concepts of physics or the fact that the matter that formed it might have originated millennia past in the white hot turmoil of an exploding star. She was willing to drift without a center and accept the uncertainty without fear. As she gathered the cups and saucers onto the tray and stood up to leave, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
After that spring day in the library their friendship escalated through different stages, bringing them closer. Near the end of summer, she was making trips to see him during the day. At first it was under the pretense of bringing him some books that the doctor thought he might find interesting. She would stand out in the field with him as he worked, and they would talk. His mother was beside herself whenever Nona would stop in for lunch. The old woman never dreamed that anything even close to romance would ever be part of her son’s life. What Belius’ mother saw so clearly, Doctor Grey either ignored or was totally unaware of. When he talked to the minotaur, he never spoke of his niece. She was never invited by him to join in their conversations. Belius didn’t insist on it, feeling in some ways relieved that the old man took no notice. In the presence of Grey, he sometimes felt guilty about his growing love.
Belius was shivering so hard by the time the old plough horse brought the wagon to a stop in the yard of the doctor’s mansion that the hoof at the end of his beastly leg was doing an involuntary tap dance against the foot board. He had not passed one person on the road and was feeling somewhat disappointed, the long ride having taken some of the newness out of his suit. The pants were wrinkled and the left lapel of the jacket had been kept standing so long in the same position by the wind that it now refused to lie down as it was supposed to. As he unhitched the horse and put him in the barn, he tried unsuccessfully to keep one hoof over the lapel. Finally, he gave up on it.
He stood on the porch of the old boarding house, and the wind whipped by with a noise that sounded too much like the bickering of Austina and Plension. Grey answered the door after the second knock and ushered the minotaur in with a handshake and a pat on the back. The old man seemed in fine spirits, and it was obvious that he hadn’t yet begun to drink for that day. Belius was pleased with this, not that it ever really bothered him if the doctor was a little under. Sometimes the alcohol would make the old man lose his train of thought right in the middle of a complicated conversation and send him off on an incomprehensible monologue. Being the dutiful student that Belius was, he could never interrupt. He would simply sit there for the duration of the dementia and nod as if he understood everything that was being said.
“What is that smell?” asked the doctor as he led Belius down the hallway to his office.
“Cologne,” said Belius.
The old man turned around and reached up to tug on the minotaur’s right horn. As Grey entered his office, Belius paused for a second and looked down the hallway over his shoulder to see if he could catch a glimpse of the physician’s niece. She was nowhere to be seen. His spirits sank a little when he thought that he might come and go that day without her ever getting a look at him in his new clothes.
In the office, the doctor took a seat behind his desk and Belius pulled up a seat facing him. Whenever they had their discussions in the office, Belius could see that the doctor, when sitting in that chair, couldn’t help but treat him somewhat like a patient. Belius would describe what it was he was presently reading and Grey would ask questions as if he were trying to diagnose some malady.
Always present at these discussions, like a third party who had as yet never had anything to add was the homunculus in the huge glass jar at the corner of the desk. Only when the doctor fell into one of his alcoholic rants, did Belius actually recognize how strange an ornament it was. Sometimes the minotaur would just happen to glance at it, and he could swear that he saw it move one of its delicate little fingers or blink an eyelid. Occasionally, when waking in the morning, he would have a vague sense that he had dreamed about the tiny being, but it was as if the dream was always too upsetting for his mind to allow him to take it with him into the waking day.
The topic of conversation that afternoon was an idea that Belius had dreamed up concerning the natural force of gravity. He was trying to establish some relationship between the attraction of objects in the solar system and the attraction of love between people. Grey admitted he couldn’t quite see the analogy. Belius tried to be more specific. The doctor stepped up his side of the argument and, in no time, they were off, soaring into the stratosphere of half-baked ideas. As they sat in the office, lost to the perturbations of a metaphorical cosmos, the blue sky outside the house turned dark with clouds and snow swept down across the valley.
Hours later, there was a knock at the door and Nona’s voice called out, “Uncle, it’s a blizzard outside.” Only now did they hear the wind moaning and the patter of snow against the side of the house.
“Oh, my,” said Grey, getting up and moving to the window. “There must be a few feet already.”
Belius’ mind was on other things than the weather. He straightened up in his chair and pressed down his errant lapel, hoping that Nona would come through the door. She didn’t enter, though, and eventually he heard her footsteps moving away down the hall.
“You’d better stay the night, Belius,” said the doctor. “I’ll have Nona make up a room for you.”
“Is it that bad?” asked the minotaur.
“If you go out in this, we won’t find you till the spring thaw,” said Grey. “Relax, stay the night and leave first thing in the morning when it’s over.” He moved back to his desk and took a seat. Bending down, he heaved a great sigh and reached into a bottom draw of the desk for his bottle and glass. As he set them up on the desk, he said, “That’s enough talk for today. I’m afraid I’m talked out. Why don’t you go and have something to eat and then go upstairs and read.”
Belius watched as the doctor poured a whiskey and took his first sip. The leathery skin of his cheeks puckered and his eyes shut tight. The gulp of liquor moved down the old man’s scrawny throat as if it were a hard boiled egg. Then, with an audible smacking of the lips, his face unclenched. When the lids of the eyes lifted, Belius could immediately discern the sadness in them. Grey shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.
“Goodnight,” Belius said. “I’ll see you in the morning before I leave.”
The doctor n
odded his head and poured another. “Don’t forget to put that rock in your collar tonight. We don’t want to wake up with the snow in our faces tomorrow morning,” he said as if at the end of a consultation he were prescribing treatment. “The physical attraction of heavenly bodies seen as love,” he said as Belius moved toward the door. “You’re a hopeless Romantic.” He gave a curt laugh and then turned his attention to the glass of amber.
While munching on a celery stalk in the kitchen, the minotaur mulled over the doctor’s diagnosis of his aesthetic. In the light of his conviction toward what he was trying to accomplish with his Cosmology, he could not see the epitaph as anything other than a compliment. He continued eating, putting down cold ears of corn left over from some previous dinner, apples and a half a loaf of bread, and decided that he would not worry about Nona that night, seeing as she had not gone out of her way to talk with him. He made plans to find some immense epic poem full of heroes and battles and settle down in the red leather chair to read until his eyes played their usual trick of fatigue—a column of smoke rising out of the yet unturned pages of his book.
Hours died and were carted away into the past while Belius followed the shipmates of the Argo on their search for the Golden Fleece. Wrapped in the solitude of this distant dream, he only thought of her once. As Jason wrestled with the soldiers sprung from dragon’s teeth, the minotaur changed his position in the chair and looked up, wishing that he would see Nona there. She wasn’t, and he focused for a second on the two books he had gored on that spring day when she had brought him tea. Another fifty pages later, he closed the book and left the study.
What it was that had awakened him, he had no idea, but suddenly he found himself wide awake. The room was cold and the snow could still be heard blowing against the window. He sat up in the bed and listened. There was the occasional groaning of old timbers and the pop of floor boards realigning themselves. The wind complained outside and some small creature scampered across the roof. All of these noises instantly became components of a great silence when he heard the tread of footsteps in the hallway. They came stealthily, stopping every now and then. They drew nearer and nearer to his room and then, just outside the door, halted. He listened more intently and could barely discern the sound of breathing. Minutes passed and, when he could no longer stand the tension his muscles were suffering from his rigid expectation, he whispered, “Hello?”