George Mills (20 page)

“So it was simply a matter of putting things into perspective. If my cousins could lay down their lives for my uncle, surely I could lay down and sleep for a few hours.

“I rose on a Thursday morning in the second week of my efforts to sleep during the day. I showered, dressed, made my bed, breakfasted and returned to my bedroom, where I undressed, got into the pajamas I had taken off less than an hour earlier, removed the spread from the bed I had just made, got into bed and was asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.

“Separation came quickly, my astral integument peeling off from my body like rind. The trip to Vermont was uneventful.

“I am, perhaps, too sentimental, but it was a place I’d summered when I was a child, where I’d spent all those sharp, bright weeks of un-Michigan youth, where I was a visitor, privileged, glamorous even to myself, cargo’d by all that distant geography of the Midwest, the kid who’d seen Chicago, who’d lived for a time in Detroit, where the automobiles came from, where dozens of factories employed thousands of men simply to tighten a bolt, or just to patrol, take down the names of men talking, where there were machines, assembly lines longer than the main street of my cousins’ New England town, where somehow—I knew it, my aunt did, my cousins—the scale was different, not just the buildings that were bigger and taller, but the people, too, who would have had to be if only to manage those immense planes and perpendicularities. (They asked if there were mountains in Michigan. I told them no. Of course, they said. Meaning, I think, that there wouldn’t have been room for them, that something would have to give way in the fierce moil of all that activity and that of course it would be Nature.) So, welcome as I was, I was looked on by my cousins with something like awe, and if they took me on trails in their mountains or patiently taught me to fish in their streams, or sidestepped with me, hugging the loose timbers for handhold, along the outside ledges of their covered bridges or sneaked me into their granges and meeting halls where we hid in the back or crouched beneath the stage while the grownups argued, or invited me to church on Sunday mornings or quickly hustled me inside their one-room schoolhouse after they had picked the lock or read aloud the strange motto—‘Live Free or Die’—on the New Hampshire license plates on the occasional car parked near the green, or Vergil’d me through the small, ancient graveyard, waiting while I read each tombstone, the dates and names and epitaphs, it was not so much to show off as to brief me, actually lobbying I think, pressing me with information, facts, their identities subsumed even then, if only I’d known it, their decisions already made, goners to the twentieth century and asking only that their mottos, names and epitaphs be taken back with me to what even they thought of as the real world.

“So if I hesitated outside my uncle’s smithy it was not grief, though it may sound like it, not a moment of silent prayer, though it may sound like that too. It was not even tribute. It was nostalgia. Not for my cousins, for myself. For those good old days when they had imbued me with the mystery of distance. (Who had it now, who could hopscotch space like a token on a Monopoly board, negotiate the round trip of half a continent in a piece of a night or day——the astral leapfrogger, the astral miler.) I did not re-attend those old haunts, the greens and streams and trails and halls, graves and grange, schoolhouse and covered bridge, merely taking them in at a glance, no more, the lovely street of the lovely town—it was daylight, not yet noon—and guessing at the weather like a sailor—in repose the astral essence, the astral gist is insensate as coin—gauging the temperature of the late August Vermont morning by the hard edges of the shining clouds against the high sky, blue and crisp as a fresh workshirt, putting it in the mid-sixties, say, from the legible, razor-sharp shadows of the leaves. It could have been twenty years earlier, I could have been that proud, privileged visitor who’d seen Chicago, who’d lived for a time in Detroit. I tell you all this to prepare you.

“The street outside my uncle’s shop was practically deserted. No farmers with wagons were lined up outside waiting. There was nowhere to be seen those cronies I’d heard about or seen myself when I’d made my visits as a child. A single wagon stood unhitched and pulled up against the great, shut, almost barnlike doors at the side of the shop. I could see smoke rising from one of my uncle’s special chimneys but in no great quantity and with no special force. I couldn’t hear anything, neither the ringing slam of the blacksmith’s hammer nor the great low huff of his fire. I went inside. I shan’t set the scene.

“My uncle was alone in the locked shop. Perhaps I had misread the weather signs, I thought, or maybe heat was cumulative, like sweets or starches, and if you stayed around it long enough you began at last to store it, like a fever thermometer that has not been shaken down. Except for his leather blacksmith’s apron he was naked.

“There was a mare with him, a Morgan, I think, a little darker than most Morgans, but maybe less full in the flank and croup. I’m not really expert in these matters, only what I picked up—overheard—from my uncle when I was a kid, but something off about her proportions. Her front, from chest to withers and elbow to shoulder, was full as a gelding’s but she tapered at mid-rib to an attenuated hind quarters and she gave one the sense—listen to this, I refer to the astral pith as ‘one’; you get used to anything—of prow, some foreshortened, figurehead horse.

“Pay attention, listen to me. What do
I
know about a horse’s proportions? Perhaps something
was
a little off, but I dance around like this because I don’t know how to say it. I’ve come this far, those two weeks of insomniac days, those four deaths, those five round trips from Michigan to Vermont, and I don’t know how to tell it.

“My uncle was directing the horse like a ringmaster. I don’t mean that the horse moved around him in circles but that my uncle constantly repositioned himself within her arcs and windings, ducked inside her torsions——more sheepdog, really, than ringmaster.

“ ‘How’s that shoe?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘Go ahead, put your weight on it.’

“Then he spoke to it more gently still, his open palms moving in and away from his body, doing the passes of perspective and appraisal, his low voice choked with implication. ‘Sets the hoof off nice.’

“The words were strange. He spoke of her walls and white lines, of her bars and buttresses and frogs. ‘Your elastic was almost threadbare,’ he said. ‘I could feel horn. In places it showed through the pulp like new tooth. Well, your frog’s so big. I never seen such frogs on a mare. I had to hold it with both hands. I had to hold it with both hands, didn’t I? No, no,’ he said soothingly, ‘you got the bulbs for it, sister. It ain’t as if you didn’t have the bulbs for it. Bet you could kick a man to Kingdom Mountain with those bulbs.’

“He might have been a shoe salesman, with all such a salesman’s oblique, evasive flattery. He was almost flirting with the animal, talking in tongues of the equivocal, the shy acrostics of obsession, his words almost matching the shifting position of his hands.

“He never touched it. All he did was look, encouraging its aimless parade around his smithy and constantly adjusting his own relation to it like a man changing seats in a movie.

“ ‘Well,’ my uncle said finally, ‘your owner will be calling for you. What do you say we get into our tack?’

“He turned to some harness hanging from pegs on the wall of the shop, pacing back and forth beside the gear before choosing.

“ ‘Let’s get a look at you in the bellyband,’ he said, and took down the thick girth, angling it from just behind her withers and along the forward line of her belly. He buckled it slowly, stepping back when he’d finished, drawing deep breaths. ‘Don’t
you
look provocative?’ he said. ‘Too tight?’ he said. ‘You don’t want it loose and it’d take more than
I’ve
got to do a wench like you a bruise. Nice you’re so dark. I like a dark mare. It brings out the power. I’m a bit of a dark horse myself. Well,’ he said, ‘a girl has to breathe. I’ll take that off for a bit.’ He unbuckled the bellyband, let it lie where it dropped, fallen as garter on the floor of the shop. Then he selected a bridle, setting the headstall loosely, the thin, unfastened straps vaguely wreathing her face like the struts of some extraordinary veil. He attached the bit and curb and added a set of blinders which he took from the pouch of his leather apron. ‘Eye shadow,’ he said, then removed one of the blinders. ‘Don’t
you
look haughty. Like some old, one-eyed whore. Let’s take that off, missy.’

“The bridle’s reins and checkreins he allowed to hang loose, then, studying them, proceeded to wind them like sandal straps about the horse’s chest and belly and flanks. He watched silently as the mare, reaching behind her with her long head, began to undo the great, loose package of itself that my uncle had made. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘aren’t we shameless, aren’t we bold?’ He scooped off the bridle and reins and, opening her jaws, pulled the bit from her mouth, transferring it, before I realized what was happening, into his own mouth, impossibly, greedily shoving all of it inside his distended cheeks. He started to gag. He stood over the looping reins of his retching. ‘No, no,’ he said breathlessly, ‘it ain’t you. Your breath’s just as fresh, as fresh——’ He vomited again, hitting the side of her muzzle. Stooping quickly, he raised a corner of his apron and wiped his mouth on the leather. The startled horse shied obliquely, prancing back and sideways away from my uncle. I thought she was going to back into the forge. So, apparently, did my uncle, who, recovering immediately, sprang forward while she was still off balance and, shoving against her haunch, managed to knock her over.

“You’d think he’d have stopped. He was a Vermonter, a canny New Englander. The owner might already be on his way back. He was still naked, the mare was too. You’d think he’d have stopped. He cradled her head for a moment in his great arms, then allowed her to rise, studying her now from underneath. You’d think he’d have stopped.

“Then maybe he did. He stood and put the bellyband on again. Working quickly, he attached the breast collar to it, tightening it across the mare’s shoulders and holding it in place with the straps that went over her back. He stepped back.

“ ‘Lewd jade,’ he said. ‘Hussy horsy, minxy mare. Piece, baggage, chippy, drab! Floozie, doxy, harlot, tart!
Racy, ain’t we, in our horse brassieres?
’

“He set the breeching between her loins and croup and around her buttocks. He looped a thong through both brass breeching links and tied it off tightly under her belly. Her rump suddenly jumped into place, set off like something mounted. My uncle walked around behind her.

“He’s going to cover her! My God, I thought, he’s going to cover her!

“He raised his apron. He was wearing her crupper, my uncle’s penis in the leather loop. He’d been wearing it all along, big enough all along
to
wear it. ‘The smith,’ he said huskily, ‘a mighty man is he,’ and loosened the loop, rolling it down the length of his cock. Then, raising the mare’s tail, he passed the loop quickly under it, buckling it to the harness so that the tail, arched now, perked in some counterfeit of swank and hauteur and pride, the beast, arranged in leather, seeming as abandoned and wanton and vainglorious as anything my uncle had yet called it, its own leathery being made for harness, for all the dressings, gauzes, slings and splints, all the bandages, swabs and tourniquets, all that Sam Browne belt kink of girdled loin, and the intricate sexual square knots of leverage, actually prosthetic perhaps, the bandoleer and bunting arrangements, the flashy, fleshy piping of possibility.

“He’s going to cover her. He’s not even going to remove his apron. He’s going to cover her.

“But he didn’t. All he did was squat behind her on his bare feet, his long testicles grazing the floor. All he did was watch.

“Then, suddenly, the mare stiffened, locked her legs and shit a steaming mound of manure bright as tobacco. And so did my uncle.

“Yes. I wondered about that part, too. It had been a good projection, I mean an easy one. The trip to Vermont was uneventful. I wasn’t even winded. What had happened to the astral telegraph? Where was the soul semaphore, the point-to-point red alert of the heart? At first I was going to ‘speak.’ I had meant to. I had my objections and chastisements and pleas all ready. I had meant to speak out.

“First I didn’t. Then I couldn’t.

“The smith, a mighty man is he. Who denied the claims of biology and brooked no precedence in love. Who would not vary a psalm or alter an iota of eulogy and who built his coffins not to custom but to paradigm. He didn’t want his children to die, he couldn’t have known that they would. I can only presume that he knew the preferences of his glands, that he had identified them from the beginning, from the time he first went into blacksmithing—he could as easily have tapped the maple trees or farmed cider or made a crop of hay—before, perhaps, perhaps from the moment he had first seen a horse saddled. Not only permitting the old-timers and cronies but actually hosting them, wearing the scratchy checkered shirts (who wanted hide next to his skin or nothing) out of some native patience and politeness, some I’ll-come-as-you-are deference and courtesy, like a man who manages to get down some food he can’t stand simply because his hostess has taken the trouble to prepare it for him. And then permitting the children as he had permitted the cronies, not a host this time but a father, and evidently a good one, possibly a great one. Not forbidding their attendance on him even after their mother had died, only—love makes no precedence, no distinction—asking of them that they settle the pecking order themselves. The glands in abeyance, their rampage not tamed but checked, whip-and-chair’d up onto the heavy platforms of decorum, and his back never once turned.

“As I say, astral projection can take you so far and no further. As I say, it can’t even get me past the Rockies. As I say, it is often a cold comfort, well intentioned but of as much real use as the casserole of a condolence caller. It can clear the air though. Sometimes. A little, a little it can. That blazing sprint of the soul can clear the air, and perhaps may even explain the good weather, the briskness of the day, its sharp shadows, focused as ink on a bright page.