The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

by Steven Sherrill

  The candle maker is there most Sunday mornings, and most Sunday mornings she gives the Minotaur pause. But not this day. Something different is happening up on the altar. He cocks his head. Hears. Hears more than he bargained for. There is utterance, for sure. Many voices. Sounds emitted from human mouths, human throats. But try as he might the Minotaur cannot find words in the babel.

  “Unngh,” he says to no one, and leans closer to the window.

  Confused. Compelled. The song, whatever it is, draws him in. But the absence of words unsettles. Language is troubling enough. Words do not pass with ease over his fat tongue. Words crash and burn in his mouth. But hearing is not usually so hard. This morning something has rent the fabric of his understanding. What is happening? Where are the words?

  The Minotaur wants to see for himself how those sounds spill from those human mouths, but just as he is about to put his horns through the window things change.

  “And am I born to die?”

  The cacophony takes shape.

  “To lay this body down?”

  Each syllable is drawn taut, to the point of breaking, by layers of voice.

  “And must my trembling spirit fly . . .”

  Harmonies pitch and heave. The song lumbers into sonic existence. Into the present moment. For better or worse.

  “Into a world unknown . . .”

  He wants to look but can’t. Old Scald Village rattles and clanks itself awake. There is dying to be done. The Minotaur closes his eyes, leans one horn against the church. The song worms its way through the boards.

  “A land of deepest shade, unpierced by human thought . . .”

  What can it mean? The smell of butterscotch lingers in the Minotaur’s nostrils. The taste, even deeper. The Minotaur tastes the hymn.

  “The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot?”

  Fits and starts. Fits and starts. Understanding is a dubious Braille. He’s not looking.

  “Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?”

  What?

  He’s not looking.

  He’s not looking when Smitty comes by.

  “Tssss!”

  Smitty gooses the Minotaur hard in the ribs. The brand, oh so familiar. Torment.

  “Tssss!” Smitty says.

  The Minotaur startles. His horn tip digs a six-inch gouge in the plank wall. By the time his frayed wits are gathered the song is over and the bodies, the worshipers, are spilling from the church’s open doors.

  “There’s words for your kind,” Smitty says.

  Of course there are. Always have been. The Minotaur knows what to expect.

  “T-bone,” Smitty says. “Ribeye.”

  • • •

  Widow Fisk and her confounding questions. To settle. Down. The Minotaur knows only come and go, parsed out by eons. The beast has lugged his cumbersome head across continents and centuries. Pausing here and there to catch his breath. The Minotaur finds it best not to question. But simply to be.

  For the time being he finds himself dwelling peacefully at the crumbling edge of a particular history, finds himself in a faux soldier’s uniform on a make-believe battleground, fighting enemies that never die.

  • • •

  The Minotaur falls dead. Falls dead. Falls (ad nauseam) dead. Rises. This Sunday is a Confederate day for victory. The Minotaur dies regardless. It’s hot. Sweltering already. He falls dead on his side, to keep the sun out of his eyes.

  On the way to the battlefield, the Minotaur walked with his regiment past a tractor pulling a wagonload of sweaty onlookers en route to the bleachers.

  “Look, Mama!” he heard a boy say. “Look at that!”

  The Minotaur didn’t claim ownership.

  The battlefield is a rectangular glade that spans the hundred-plus yards between a hillock called Gobbler’s Knob (in the brochure) and a cedar brake called Dead Man’s Wood (in the brochure). Humans love to name things. It’s likely that the battlefield, before Old Scald Village, was just somebody’s boondocks. But the grassy plain made for a natural arena. The founding fathers dragged in some bleachers and bulldozed up a line of earthen breastworks at the far end of the field.

  The armies take turns. Charge or defense.

  “I think I’m gonna die,” Biddle says on the way up the path toward the field. The man, sweatier and pinker than normal, slogs along with a hand over his face, the butt of his musket dragging a rut in the dirt. “Curse the son of a bitch who invented Jägermeister.”

  The Minotaur doesn’t respond. One of the girls, one of the field nurses, does.

  “Serves you right,” she says.

  “I hope you puke your guts out,” she says.

  “Aren’t you married or something?” she says.

  The Minotaur hopes that Smitty doesn’t see Biddle in this sad state.

  The Confederates are charging the battlements today. When the ragtag company rounds a copse of black alder trees, the Minotaur sees the boy, the same one from the wagon. He stands with his toy pistol—little more than a piece of stained pine, bought that very morning from the Gift Shoppe—raised and aimed. Stands bravely, resolutely, facing down the entire marching battalion.

  He fires nonstop. The Minotaur can see clearly. The boy makes little shooting noises with his mouth. Nobody hears them. But the boy gets an enthusiastic round of applause when his mother leads him away from his post and back to the bleachers. Everybody cheers his valor.

  When the army is in formation, Smitty walks up and down the line barking orders. Biddle’s eyes roll, more than once, back in his head. Biddle tries to position himself away from the stand of cannons on the south flank. He’ll go down long before the fire from the Union battery can assault his booze-weary noggin. When the Confederate drum and fife corps rat-a-tat-tats by, it musters an insipid little (semi-mandatory) war whoop from the soldiers. The Minotaur watches Biddle grimace into the discord. But even through his hangover misery, the pink man eyes up the horn player (whose fat rump bobs and sways freely beneath her black skirt) and the piccolo player (a skinny short-haired girl who passes for a boy even off the battlefield). The Minotaur sees it all, and who is he to judge?

  The band does its best to keep the beat. It drags its crippled melody all the way to the edge of the field, where it will mill about until the fight is over.

  Somewhere along the Union front a tall flag waves. The battle commences with a volley of cannon fire. Everybody on the bleachers oohs and aahs over the gigantic smoke rings. The sharp scent of burnt gunpowder lingers even after the smoke dissipates. Smitty calls out something. The Confederates shoulder their muskets. In a slender moment of military silence the Minotaur hears a truck way up on Scald Mountain, on the turnpike. Then a crow. Then the sound of booted feet on the move and rattling sabers.

  Biddle drops early. Doesn’t even time the fall with Union fire. Just lies down on the hot dirt and starts calling for the nurse. “Nurse! Nurse! Nurse!”

  The Minotaur trudges on.

  There are nurses on the field, then and now. Their billowing skirts hang to their ankles, then and now. Bonnets halo their faces. And their aprons? Then, stark white canvases ready to be marked by the humors of men. Now, all the stains are prefab. Then, the nurses carried leather satchels full of comfort to the wounded and dying. Comfort that ran the spectrum of need. Roll after roll of bandages. Laudanum. “Soldier’s Joy.” Scripture. Maybe even the sweet tincture of martyrdom. Nowadays the field nurses of Old Scald Village carry very little. Sometimes the satchels are empty. The nurses come and go among the, what? The sham, the pseudo, the feigned injured. Mostly they just chitchat quietly. Nobody on the bleachers knows the difference. On hot days like this one the field nurses carry ice in their satchels, so that none of the living-history reenactors has a heatstroke.

  “Nurse!” Biddle calls out.

  But none of the nurses will attend to his cry. They’ve all suffered the indignity of approaching Biddle where he lay. And regardless of where he lay the Confederate cas
ualty would lift their skirts, poke his head beneath their petticoats, look up, and cry out, “Good God, Gertie, what a gash!”

  Biddle can’t be trusted, even dead. Even hung over.

  “Nurse!”

  The Minotaur hears some acceptable fire from the Union army. He takes his gut shot and drops to the ground. He stays, content among the bugs. The taste of butterscotch pie is all but gone. What was it Widow Fisk said? “Maybe tonight.” The Minotaur lies content on the battlefield. Anemic volleys of make-believe gunfire pock the aural landscape. A jet plane tracks silently high above; its white tail striates the blue sky.

  “Nurse!” Biddle cries.

  “Fuck you, Biddle,” somebody says. It’s the broom maker. She hates playing field nurse. They make her do it anyway.

  “Bite me, Biddle,” she says, stepping up to where the Minotaur lies. Her shadow covers him. Cools him. Soothes.

  “You want a sliver of ice, M?” she asks, kneeling.

  “Mmmnn,” he says, and listens as she fumbles with the satchel’s clasp.

  The Minotaur can never remember the broom maker’s name. Makayla or Madison? Something like that. She slips the Minotaur an ice cube without hesitation. Her fingers smell of sorghum, taste of sorghum. Twice in as many hours he’s taken from a woman’s fingers. O blessed day! Widow Fisk and her fingers made the Minotaur yearn for complicated things. This girl, with her rough touch on his tongue, stirs something more animal in the Minotaur. He wishes he could remember her name. He remembers that she talks a blue streak. Talks up a storm. Talks a mile a minute. He remembers her chipped front tooth. Shawna? No. Bailey? No. The Minotaur gobbles her up.

  “Destiny!” Biddle calls in a failed stage whisper. “Bring me some ice!”

  “No!” the broom maker says loudly. Then whispers to the Minotaur, “The fucker can die, for all I care.”

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. He can’t see her face fully. Can’t turn over, this late in this death. He cranes his veiny neck just a bit. “Mmmnn.”

  “Hey, M,” the broom maker says, snapping the satchel shut. “Can you come by the Broom Shack after lunch? I need some help moving the—”

  She doesn’t finish the sentence, and the Minotaur doesn’t answer, the request stopped, truncated, amputated by cannon fire from the Union battlements and the expert dying of Sargent Haberstroh. Sarge dies better than anybody. He takes his hit loudly, with gusto; he contorts in death like a dancer, flings his scrawny arms wide, hurls his haversack willy-nilly; he calls out heroically, “For God and country, boys” or “Rally round the flag, boys” or “I’m coming home, Mama!”; then he falls and lies more still than stone, and for longer. He’s perfected the look of belly bloat, that gathering of gases in the body cavities of the dead; some say he even dabs his neck and behind his ears with the putrid drippings of road kill. They say. After a few well-timed leg spasms Sarge doesn’t move, doesn’t make a peep, until the bugler signals the battle’s end. And he does it all as close to the spectators and their cameras as possible.

  The field nurses love tending Sarge’s death throes. So convincing are the man’s demises that the Minotaur is duped every time. Almost. Every time the Minotaur feels it, the bitter pang of envy. Everybody loves a good death.

  “Got to go,” the broom maker says.

  In her haste the hem of her full black skirt snags on the Minotaur’s horn, pulls at his head, turns his snout. And there it is. The Minotaur wouldn’t look up this dress uninvited, and even then. . . . He looks. It’s okay. She can’t tell that he looks, what with the pitch of his horns, the angle of his snout. He looks. And is so stunned by what he sees that he doesn’t know how to respond. He didn’t expect it, the tattoo. The blackand-white portrait. The walleyed portrait of a little boy smiling from within the razor stubble on the broom maker’s round calf muscle. In Loving Memory, it says over the top of the boy’s head. There is more beneath, but the broom maker moves too fast. The Minotaur misses the full view. She giggles and trots over toward Sargent Haberstroh. She giggles, for sure. But the Minotaur can’t say whether it is about, or for, him.

  “Destiny!” Biddle calls out.

  “Go fuck a barrel,” the broom maker says.

  • • •

  The crowd is sparse, and a sparse crowd makes the hardcores pissy. After the battle, after the pitiful applause, Smitty barely waits for the spectators to load onto the wagon before he starts in.

  “I heard you running your mouth,” Smitty says to one of the soldiers.

  “If I catch you smoking dope before we fight again . . . ,” to another.

  He rarely completes an angry sentence. Fact is, Smitty has no authority outside his own imagined rank. The majority of folks just ignore him, but the Minotaur knows all too well that this is the most dangerous kind of man. He rants. He rails. And his charges are usually trumped up. Smitty never misses an opportunity to berate a fellow living historian.

  He steps up to an unwitting victim and cuts loose. “You want to come out on my battlefield, you better strap them titties down better next time,” he says.

  The girl flushes, instinctively clutches her breasts and presses inward.

  “Ain’t nobody wants to see that mess,” he says.

  The girl soldier—period correct in the whole fraudulent endeavor; brave young women even then fought amid the men—may be crying. The Minotaur can’t tell.

  “Unngh,” he says.

  “You got that right,” Biddle says, stepping up and leaning on the Minotaur for balance. He keeps talking, but the Minotaur pays no attention. He’s watching the girl and Smitty. He hopes to get out of the village unscathed, back to the Judy-Lou, and then to wait for Monday. Mondays are quiet in the village.

  “I’m going to the Tavern,” Biddle says. “Need me some Diet Coke. To hell with barrels.”

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says.

  “You want to come?”

  “No,” the Minotaur says.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Biddle slogs toward the parking lot without even trying to show any of the nurses porn on his cell phone. Only the Minotaur watches him go.

  “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says to no one in particular, then heads for the Welcome Center, half hoping to get another bite of pie.

  Instead he gets mired in the seething herd of kids outside the Surgeon’s Cabin. Doc stands in the doorway, a bloody saw held aloft, over the young heads. He waves it back and forth until the Minotaur looks in his direction. Doc gives a knowing nod. Doc always gives the Minotaur a knowing nod, and the affinity, the allegiance, implied brings the bile up in the Minotaur’s throat.

  Doc stands in the doorway, his apron bloodied. By the stoop, on a table made of sawhorses and planks, one of his patients lies draped in a wool blanket. The mustache is peeling away. One of the glass eyes has rolled far left. And the paint is chipping off the cheekbones. The mannequin has seen better days. But the kids don’t mind. They’re not paying any attention to it. Not to the mannequin outside the cabin, or the two even more battered and bedraggled specimens inside, by a wooden cask of vials with moldering or missing contents, by the tableful of rusting scalpels and horrifying probes, scopes, ligatures, and more—the gorget, the bistoury cache, the cranial drill, the catlin, the Roman director and spoon, the trephine, the bone chisel, the kidney dish. Doc could name each instrument, and fairly swoon while doing so. But the kids don’t care. What the kids like, every time, is the squat barrel full of rubber amputated limbs. Doc uses it to prop the door open, then has to spend much of his time on duty keeping the kids from beating each other with the floppy props.

  The Minotaur likes the kids, their energetic presence. Their goofy bodies and giddy babble. Old Scald Village has much to offer them. And much of it the doing of the broom maker. She runs the Hands-On Program, bringing underprivileged youth in by the busload for the living-history experience. The broom maker does a good job of it. It’s a steady source of income for the village, and the administrators see her worth. They turn a blind
eye to her other occasional unsavory proclivities.

  But not Widow Fisk. More than once, in the Minotaur’s presence, Widow Fisk has badmouthed the broom maker.

  “Slut,” she said.

  “Trailer trash,” she said.

  “Unngh,” the Minotaur says to the boy who jumps up to swat his horn with a plastic femur. Unscathed. The Minotaur wants to escape the village unscathed.

  “Yo, M,” somebody says. It’s a girl. The Minotaur doesn’t know her name. She is in transition at the moment, half foot soldier, half tavern maid. “Destiny’s looking for you.”

  “Mmmnn, who?”

  “She needs help in the Broom Shack.”

  The girl walks away, putting her black hair up in a bun. Her side knife bumps against her behind with each step.

  “Oh,” the Minotaur says. “Okay.”

  The Broom Shack sits tucked between Weinzerl’s Pottery and the Tailor Shoppe, an apt locale (though probably happenstance); the movement from clay to straw to cloth seems right in many ways. The Tailor Shoppe, Sprankle’s, has a full front porch and rocking chairs and a second story, where the smug tailor and his prickly wife are meant to sleep. But there’s nothing up there except two rope-slung beds shoved on either side of the chimney. So the Minotaur has been told. The brochure offered up in the Welcome Center numbers and describes all the buildings of Old Scald Village. Details the “turn-of-the-century” construction: log or stone or frame. The brochure identifies the structures that have been relocated to the site, as well as those re-created on the grounds. The brochure fails to mention that nearly all of the two-story buildings have perilously steep, walled-in staircases that are inaccessible to the handicapped, to the top heavy, to anyone with wide horns. Too, the brochure hasn’t been updated since a more recent century’s turn. The Minotaur tries not to think about it.