George Mills Read online

  George Mills

  Stanley Elkin

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART FIVE

  1

  2

  A BIOGRAPHY OF STANLEY ELKIN

  To Joan

  PART ONE

  1

  Because he knew nothing about horses. Not even—though he made wagers—how 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, being’s 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 fellow’s 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 cousins—could be answered, but an emissary? An envoy? An envoy was very heady and impressive stuff. You didn’t muck about with envoys, you didn’t 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 fellow’s 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 emissary’s 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 emissary’s 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. (Godfrey’s emissary spoke of barons, earls, dukes and princes, of counts and marquis, of all the king’s 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 NCO’d vision behind them, they understood well enough, had often enough heard, had had drummed into them, had even themselves—the NCO’s proper—often 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 didn’t see it that way. What George thought now was that Mills must have had it from Guillalume himself. Hadn’t 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?” “You’re to travel a journey with this man.” “With this man, sire?” And the emissary, “Oh no, my lord, not with me. I’ve arrangements to make in Mercia and Saxony, business in Scotia and Friesland. He’ll have to cross the Channel with his men and horses and join Godfrey’s forces at the Meuse at the Waal channel of the lower Rhine.” And Gill: “The Meuse? The Waal channel of the lower Rhine?”

  “He’ll 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 Guillalume’s lord, the Dad, probably arbitrarily, spied at the stables, say, where the man had been accustomed to see him—though not notice him, not conscious of him—always there, always around, for that was where the horseshit was, always there and always reeking of horse so that Guillalume’s father somehow associated the smell of the man with a knowledge of the beast. Hence the promotion—the 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 stableboy’s 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 oarboat—water plow, sea shoe, whatever their awed poetic term for it must have been—which would accommodate the horses. Then, in Europe, Guillalume throwing himself completely on Mills’s mercy, though it wouldn’t have appeared that way to Mills, who, though in the lead, took for granted that it was Guillalume’s 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 danger’s brunt and who did not once question Guillalume’s failure to give a single command. Guillalume’s error like his père’s—— total reliance upon Mills’s 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. Hadn’t 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. Kn
owin’ their ’unger—though they didn’t have this dialect in those days—an’ 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 stableboy’s theory of horses being an exact paradigm of his theory of great men——Guillalume included.

  So each leaving it to the other in mutual unconditional surrender and deputation. Guillalume leaving it to Mills and Mills to Guillalume and the horses. Even Guillalume’s horse, as much a stranger to Europe as either of the men, involved in the delegation of responsibility, it devolving at last upon the lead horse—Mills’s—to get them to that fabled cusp where the Waal channel of the Meuse met the lower Rhine.

  Thus missing their turn-off entirely. Failing to hang a right in the Netherlands, sticking to the flat country, the topography of least resistance, a good green graze across northern Europe, Mills’s horse out for a pleasant month-of-Sundays stroll—it was high summer now—and taking the rest along with him. And pleasant enough for Guillalume and Mills, too. So many new sights to see, so many strange new fruits and raw vegetables to eat and queer tongues to hear. And that year—it was 1097—the weather absolutely beautiful, a mild winter, a fresh and pleasant spring, a cool and perfect summer, the delightful climate prelapsarian and Nature never more generous. As though the biblical seven fat years had been squeezed into one delicious obese season. Bumper crops all over Europe that time, so lush the barbarous landowners and peasants thought the gods Wodin, Odin, Thor and Christ had been placated forever, and flashing their hospitality like fathers of brides, shining it on whomever they saw, our friends, the strangers, now so irrevocably lost that Guillalume himself, by-passing Mills, had begun to leave it to the horses.

  They spoke of it. Why not leave it to the horses? Look how well they had served them so far. Taking them from the rough, chunky dissolution of the Northumbrian winter through the evolving spring and developing summer of western Europe fifteen miles a day closer to whatever pitch-perfect paradise lay at the end of their journey. As if they possessed some tropism for grace which sifted them through danger and past all pitfall’s parlous, aleatory, dicey circumstance, a daily accretion of joy, incremental as snow rolled downhill. Horse-sensing the continent’s gravitational pull and advancing along the ebb tides of earth so that—though they were actually climbing longitudes and latitudes and grazing a very orbit of the tonsured globe—they seemed to be proceeding in that rich alluvial trough between beach and sea, skirting not only danger but even ordinary difficult country.

  There was no sea of course, only the flat and fertile plains, pastures, arbors, and orchards—a green garden of agriculture in which the peasants and farmers seemed engaged in some perpetual in-gathering, a harvest like a parable, as astonishing to themselves as to Guillalume and Mills who, in what was not then even England, had, in that wet and misty bronchial climate, seen bumper crops merely of grass, measly grains, skinny fruit. Here it was the actual skins and juices of fruit staining the farmers’ flesh and beards, all their up-shirtsleeved bucolic condition, their breechclouts puddle-muddied at the knees with a liquid loam of opulent fermentation, a liquor of citrics, a sour mash of rotting—because there was too much to in-gather, vegetables discarded half eaten—potato and cabbage, squashed squash, cucumber and carrot, a visible strata of vegetable artifact, a landscape of the overripe like a squishy gravel of flora. The horses leading them through all this, grazing at sweet-toothed will, chewing in surfeited content from the broad green groaning board of earth. And so satiated finally that they—the horses—seemed to bloom beneath them—Guillalume reminded of his father’s quilted cavalry—the former nags filling to Clydesdale dimension (Guillalume and Mills, too, heavier now), and gradually reducing their pace, the fifteen miles a day diminishing to thirteen, to a dozen, to nine, to a sluggish seven, so that they seemed at last barely to progress at all, managing, even as they moved, merely to keep abreast of the countryside, to pace the farmers and landlords and peasants on foot, appearing to convoy them, cordon them off in some National Guard relation to their fields, creating—they (all of them: the horses, Guillalume, Mills, the in-gatherers) wouldn’t know this—the illusion of some governmental sanction to strikebreakers, say. So slow and easy that it would have been embarrassing to all of them had conversation not been struck up. Guillalume leaving this to Mills, too. (It wasn’t the old confidence—Gill reeked of horse too now and knew better—but laze, all avuncular, subruminative, long Christmas dinner sloth.)

  “Ask after them, Mills.”

  “I haven’t their language, m’lud.”

  “Smile. Offer fruit.”

  “They’ve fruit enough, sire. It’s a nation of flatulence here. Did not the breezes quicken the air as soon as it’s fouled we should die of the farting sickness, sir.”

  “Well do something, man. It’s too nuisance-making to ride beside them on this cushion of silence.”

  So he asked directions. Speaking in the universal tongue of petition, greenhorning himself and his master. “Moose?” he said. “Wall channel of the lower Rhine? Moose? Godfrey of Boolone? Wall?” The words making no more sense to him—they were in Friesland, they were in Angria, in the Duchy of Billungs, in Pomerainz—than they did to them, but the sound of distress clear enough. Even if Mills knew that the distress was feigned, who had begun to suspect—though not yet acknowledge aloud to Guillalume—that the horses were no Christians, that the horses had betrayed them, gotten them lost, and that long since, and who asked for directions—might even have asked for them even if Guillalume had not instructed him to speak—merely to be polite, to demonstrate with each rise in the pitch of his voice that he and his companion were foreigners, that they came as friends to kill the Islamic hordes for them. (Having absorbed at least this much of their mission from Guillalume.) “Moose? Wall? Killee killee smash balls son bitchee pagan mothers? Killee killee bang chop for Jeezy? Which way Moslem bastards?”

  And everyone smiling, offering food, sharing lunches from wicker baskets spread out on white cloths in the open fields——picnics. (It was Mills who introduced the concept of picnics to England, bringing this foreign way of dining back to Blighty like Marco Polo fetching spaghetti from China.) Slaps on the back all round and the wine passed. And always during those idyllic seven fat months well met, hospitalitied as candidates and, when they had run out of toasts—always before they ran out of wine: the bumper crops, the vintage year—they were returned the mile or couple of kilometers or verst and a third to where they’d met, where Mills had first spoken his gibberish of good intention, always careful, though they did not travel in armor, to lean down from their mounts to shake hands in the trendy new symbol of emptyhandedness and unarmedness that they’d picked up on their travels. Or, though they wore no visor, to try out the rather rakish novelty salute which was just then coming in among the better class of knights. Although more and more of late some did not seem to know what to make of their toney salutes, but smiled anyway, enjoying the sight of grown men banging themselves on the forehead with the flats of their hands.

  And then, often as not, the salutes were unreturned and the proffered hand ignored. And after a while it was taken again, but turned over, examined as carefully as if it were about to be read, and later as gingerly as if it were a rope or a chain, and once or twice it was actually bitten.

  “Bleedin’ wogs,” Mills would say, turning in his saddle to wink at Guillalume.

  Which was how they ultimately discovered that they were lost.

  “Mi-ills,” Guillalume said one evening when they had tucked in in one of the barns where the farmers permitted them to stay.

  “M’lud, m’lord?”

  “I was just thinking…Have you noticed how no one will shake hands with us anymore or return our salutes?”

  “No class, guv. They’re a bolshy lot.”

  “Well perhaps, Mills, but it occurs to me that they haven’t the custom.”

  “Just what I was sayin’, your lor
dship.”

  “Well, but don’t you see, Mills? If they haven’t the custom, then it’s very likely no one’s shown it to them.”

  “I ’ave.”

  “Yes, certainly, but if real knights had been by, campaigners——well, it’s just that one would have thought they’d have seen it by now. They’re not a stupid people. Look at the stores in this barn, think of the delicious produce we’ve seen them grow, the delightful cuts of meat they’ve shared with us, all the fine stews.”

  “Yar?”

  “Butter. And, what do they call it, cheese? Yes, cheese. I’ve kept my eyes open, Mills. That butter and cheese are made from ordinary cow’s milk. We don’t do butter, we don’t do cheese. This is an advanced technological civilization we’ve come upon here. And wine. They do that out of fruit.”

  “They never.”

  “Oh they do, Mills, yes. Out of fruit.”

  “Bleedin’ Jesus.”

  “But they haven’t the handshake, they haven’t the salute.”

  “No manners.”

  “Quite right. One suspects one is off the beaten track, rather. I don’t think our fellows have been by. I think we’re lost.”

  But what could they do? If they were lost and had left it to the horses—as both now openly confessed—and the horses had taken them deeper and deeper into ever more amicable country, what could they do but leave it entirely to the horses? Mills articulating that if horses knew anything—hadn’t he seen them return to the stables riderless?—it was the main chance, their own steedly interests. They had done pretty well by them thus far. Why shouldn’t they do even better? Take them into even finer country? Guillalume’s fright seemed tuned by the moonlight.

  “What?” asked Mills.

  “They’ll take us to Horseland.”

  “To Horseland, sir?”

  “Someplace where there are no riders, where the hay grows wild as meadowgrass. Carrying us through the better weather as if we ambled along the Gulf Stream or the tradewinds of earth.”