Stanley Elkin - George Mills

George Mills

Stanley Elkin

CONTENTS

To Joan

B ecause he knew nothing about horses. Not eventhough he made wagershow to what would not then have been called handicap them. Betting the knight, his money on the armor, the intricate chain mail like wire net or metal scrim, beings effulgent Maginot line, his stake on the weighted mace and plate mittens, on the hinged couters and poleyns, on vambrace and cuisse and greave, banging the breastplate and all the jewelry of battle for timbre and pitch like a jerk slamming doors and kicking tires in a used car lot. Not even betting the knight finally so much as his glazed essence, his taut aura. (And in winter something stirring and extra in the smoke pouring through the fellows ventails, as if breath were a sign of rage or what would not then have been called steam a signal of spirit.) But nothing about horses. Under their fortressed heads and jousting pads, their lumpish disfiguring raiment, perhaps not even what they looked like, in his head a distorted image of frailty, an extrapolation from their pointy hocks and slender shanks and still more slender pasterns of something more scaffold than beast.

A sissy sir far far down the primogenitive pecking order, a younger son way, way below the salt. (This to become a great joke between them later in Wieliczka.)

It just so happening that he was all the lord, his father, could spare at the time. Anyway, who even knew what they were talking about? Franks? (Crusade not even coined yet.) Still, how did one answer Godfrey of Bouillon? Well, as his father himself said, G. of B.they were cousinscould be answered, but an emissary? An envoy? An envoy was very heady and impressive stuff. You didnt muck about with envoys, you didnt make waves with what would not then have been called the Geneva Conventions. An envoy was worth curteis and that was that. Frankly, he thought his dad was a little jealous. Having spies and envoys and proconsuls was a little like being in two places at once. Class. A surrogacy his pop, the lord for all his staff and retinue, could not even imagine until the man appeared, sailing up the Humber into Northumbria in the swan-necked, jib-lashed, cursive-prowed ship the very week the river had become navigable again. Listening patiently, even curiously, to the fellows strange pitch. To come along. To go with them the thousands of miles to Jerusalem with all the men he could muster in their Sunday-go-to-battle best. And for what? What for? (The reasons not much clearer really in the emissarys note.) The fuzzy spiritual politics of Christianity? Oh? And would have turned him down flat, sent him packing in his boat, but then he glimpsed the emissarys retainers carousing in the minor hall with his knights and he understood how good it must feel, how grand to command such surrogacy, to live the remote, levered, long-distance life!

He would send Guillalume; the one who knew nothing about horses. (Godfreys emissary spoke of barons, earls, dukes and princes, of counts and marquis, of all the kings men, of all graduated picture card aristocracy and rulerhood, of all blue-ribbon force. No Irish need apply.) Guillalume. Send Guillalume. Gill could go. Him. His out-of-the-picture card, below-the-salt son. A great joke on Godfrey and his envoy, or fun with the Franks.

(This all by oral tradition of course, the hand-me-down history of a millennium of Mills raconteurs, impossible to check, particularly the motives of the lord, his pop. But what else could it have been? What else could it be? Although as Millses, almost a thousand years of enlisted men and their NCOd vision behind them, they understood well enough, had often enough heard, had had drummed into them, had even themselvesthe NCOs properoften enough said that some assholes never get the message. So much of it could have been bullshit, horseshit, scuttlebutt, crap, the dreary speculation of barracks lawyers. Particularly the motives part. But finally, a thousand years later, George didnt see it that way. What George thought now was that Mills must have had it from Guillalume himself. Hadnt his own Harvard second lieutenant come across man to man, GI to GI, in Inchon that time, the two of them on patrol, the woods full of gooks and the Harvard guy actually spelling him at the wheel of the Jeep? So George thought that great great great great great to the umpteenth power Grandfather Mills got the lowdown from Guillalume somewhere between a rock and a hard place in old Wieliczka.)

If Guillalume even knew. If he had been let in on the joke. If anything, even a wink, had passed between them on the occasion of the summons: Guillalume. My lord? Youre to travel a journey with this man. With this man, sire? And the emissary, Oh no, my lord, not with me. Ive arrangements to make in Mercia and Saxony, business in Scotia and Friesland. Hell have to cross the Channel with his men and horses and join Godfreys forces at the Meuse at the Waal channel of the lower Rhine. And Gill: The Meuse? The Waal channel of the lower Rhine?

Hell be there, sir.

Good, my lord.

But he knew nothing about geography either.

And Greatest Grandfather Mills probably even less. Pairing the two of them, Greatest Grandfather hand-picked most likely by Guillalumes lord, the Dad, probably arbitrarily, spied at the stables, say, where the man had been accustomed to see himthough not notice him, not conscious of himalways there, always around, for that was where the horseshit was, always there and always reeking of horse so that Guillalumes father somehow associated the smell of the man with a knowledge of the beast. Hence the promotionthe irony being that he had never made yeoman, only yardman, and this, the stink of horse his credentials, making him the first Mills in history to be enlisted and promoted at the same time, their yardman-yardbird Founder.

And the father playing it that straight at least, or what would be the point of the joke? It never even occurring to him to wonder what if they got lost. Because what value a surrogacy if they could not even find the spot where the surrogacy was to begin?

And that was that. The two of them, who had none, left to their own devices. The one who knew nothing about horses or geography and the other with no notion of geography and only a stableboys notions about manure.

Though somehow they managed not only to find the Channel but to cross it. Tracing, very likely, the Humber as it flowed to the sea and crossing in a good-sized oarboatwater plow, sea shoe, whatever their awed poetic term for it must have beenwhich would accommodate the horses. Then, in Europe, Guillalume throwing himself completely on Millss mercy, though it wouldnt have appeared that way to Mills, who, though in the lead, took for granted that it was Guillalumes job to get them to wherever the hell it was that the Waal channel of the Meuse met the lower Rhine, who assumed he went first to blunt dangers brunt and who did not once question Guillalumes failure to give a single command. Guillalumes error like his pres total reliance upon Millss equine stench. Though the stableboy actually had a theory about horses. It was this: That they knew what they were doing. And this an empirical judgment. Hadnt he seen them returning riderless to the stable again and again? Mountless mounts? And watched their thrown or fallen riders lagging two or three hours behind reeling like drunks? Thinking: Leave it to the orses. Great snooty brutes. Droppin their dirt where they please. Leave it to the bleedin orses. Knowin their ungerthough they didnt have this dialect in those daysan tossin off even fine gentlemen, be dey ever so well turned out, like dey ad no more weight than toys. Cor blimey, leave it to the fuckin orses. The stableboys theory of horses being an exact paradigm of his theory of great menGuillalume included.