The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

by Jesse Ball

  5

  Of course, one’s empty closets are always filling up with children unexpectedly. Of course, that is the price set, the price that must be paid to live the life I do, in the skin of an owl, on the branch of an evening maple.

  6

  Fortunately for me the nurses were all blind and my nakedness went undetected all through the first and second parts of this complicated Amazonian hospital in the faltering construction of a dream.

  7

  Without knowing the names of the men who came this way once, gathered up in this same foolishness which I call strength, I rejoice nonetheless in their companionship in their invisible sovereignty — for surely each has been and is suzerain of some single portion of this clever map? Today I resolved to count things in days to take the uselessness of the week and the day of the week and their names and make it still more useless by lettering any letters seventeenth Sunday of the year, fifth Tuesday, thirty-second Friday. Yes, yes, you have perhaps received already one of my frantic letters dated thus on the back: Thirty-fourth Thursday of my twenty-seventh year. I wonder if you took heart at this small uselessness. I wonder if you smiled and braved your way through some season of filth and disease using small kindnesses that I bestowed on you as breviaries or crutches, as pigeons to be mocked and chased. Chase and they shall lead you to the cote where I sit with a good warm bottle of spirits and a fist of chocolate. We shall go on sitting in secret and we shall, I promise you, let no one know what of we speak. And how the portioned day advances never by portion. I refuse its fingertips when they come slipping through my pockets and setting my coat upon my shoulders. Merely because another wants me to go out? Is that reason enough? It is clear to me that the greater part of happiness is to be found in spending as much time as possible roused and gone out from the place in which one sleeps. Yet how to do this simple thing? Even now I write “roused and gone out” yet I’m within my chamber — is it unseemly not to take one’s own advice? But I do, I do. I am a taker of my own advice such as there has never been in this world, and there are many who think me difficult because of it. But there are others — and how sweet their faces are, come calling in my recollection — who see my gladness in the midst of my contrary nature and it is my gladness they go greeting. It is my gladness therefore that goes to greet them that goes walking with them, impromptu, incandescent, ensconced like a glittering mote in the eye of a sometimes pharaoh who calls upon cats and only cats to navigate this much folded kingdom of days.

  8

  Going out now and then with a heavy wig upon his shoulders Marzipan was soon overwhelmed by the trading of insults that any outward endeavor soon become in these forthright, claptrap, and cancerous times. Have I shown you the masks I made in these days? the lovely daily masks made for business purposes? A mask for the bakers, a mask for the bank, a mask for gardening, for correspondence. I took myself here and there like a leaf in a dry season, framing my replies with all of my heart. If I knew the interlocuter, if I praised the arbiter with a moment’s pause in my rambling interrogations, then who can speak slightingly of my influence? Some are born in latter times with great capability for grasping certain facts, certain ideas, but not others, and so, when they go wandering in their father’s garden that is the past they receive only half the take of their ears. And I, little gray flower at the pond’s edge, make no case for myself on the long corridors of history. My time was wasted in speaking with frogs in treating with minor devils of time and armature. I who lapped happily at my own edges, gracing the lips of an October machination, was soon party to the dream sendings of just such an incorporeal statesman of the old sort, bearded, you understand, decorated in blood (all duelists of note, retaining nothing if not their word as bond). They sowed amongst themselves no good season giving onto season and now the walls shudder before the might of an evening no parlor or parlor game can dispel. Go out Millicent, to the porch and see what he wants, go at once.

  9

  M. Lion Tamer, a puppeteer of no real note, begins each performance with the saying of a Roman proverb. How much I like him for that. Yes, that and the press of the crowd as Christmas nears. Lights have been hung throughout the city center and happiness like coins defeats for a moment the ground of sorrow.

  10

  In a golden room I will resolve on all my futures, placing days like ranked and filed soldiers into passes, bridgeheads and river crossings that must at all costs be held.

  11

  Not without fault then the arrival of the vain, the timorous, the sounding of their names one by one on the rooftops where we wait with hooks and nets for their leader who comes in the guise of concealed laughter. In my coat, the pistol that’s to be used. My hand was trembling when I took it. I am young and not used to these things.

  12

  My love I want only to go to the sunlit chamber above tables and chairs I would push aside spreading space I would lay a sheet upon the ground a sheet of soft cotton and I would say is it soft enough my love? and you would stretch and lie upon it and rise, saying, “it is not soft enough,” and I would lay another sheet upon the first, saying, my love is it soft enough? and you would stretch and lie upon it and rise saying only, my love it is not soft enough. and so for the laying of nineteen sheets, of softest cotton, and the sun.

  13

  Not through any change of color do they blend with their environment but rather through a native instinct. First he matches the footsteps of a fellow and seems to go with him, seems in company. Next he is beside a woman — he seems her husband. Her child immediately appears as his daughter. So convincing the part, so regal. But does she take his hand? We cannot say for sadly we have lost them in the press on this hot day in one or another delinquent later month.

  14

  It was a sort of typewriter, but for writing on thin stone tablets. They watched as the man expertly tapped away here and there on the keys. In a moment, something was prepared! He pushed it into a slot in the wall. A door opened on the far side of the room.

  — Some sort of death certificate, said Macalister. But for whom?

  — Oh, don’t say that, said Lorna. It can’t be.

  They shrunk together against the hard wall of the cell.

  Could it be that the Aztec god was an enormous stone adding machine?

  Macalister thought back. If only he’d kept a hold of his “thunder-stick.” Then they wouldn’t be in this mess. He glared impotently at the guard, who was busy drawing a pictograph of Lorna in her modern-style underwear.

  15 — A LIE HAD BEEN SPREAD

  A lie had been spread throughout the court, that he who would kill the King would have the Queen’s gratitude and would rule beside her. When a man rose up and killed the King, he was captured by the guards and brought before the Queen, who gave him but one prerogative, that he would forever set the manner of punishment that should befall regicides, and that he himself would begin this new tradition. To which the man, sensible of the great honor being done him, replied with a complicated and elaborate manner of death, one that would require an enormous preparation of years, and the expenditure of great wealth. And the Queen set the preparations in motion, and put the resources of her kingdom to this task, and laboured beside the man for fifteen years, until she was no longer a great beauty, and he seemed to her to be no longer the man who had killed her husband, but another man, of newer and more valuable vintage. Yet to his death the man went, in a ceremony so grand that the kingdom was beggared. The execution itself took an entire year, during which no one in the land was allowed to labor. General fasting was required, with the taking of only water allowed, and only that once a day. When the man died in the specified manner, of grief at the loss of a kingdom of lives, the land was barren and corpseridden, and the next traveler to come that way was puzzled at the immense arena which stood in the midst of an empty city, with the body of the regicide set atop a pillar at its very center.

  16

  Why do I always return to the forest path again and
again? The forest path, the forest path with all its attendant resources — the hiding of animals, of people, the dangers, the dimness at midday while near in a clearing the shuddering of full day and dens and burrows beautiful beneath the ground how long days seem when they reach and reach again to their full length and stretch themselves so kindly along the forest path! Shall we go then now and see? Would that I was not so far from the forest. Would that even now I might see with these old eyes the forest path.

  You laugh at my odd bearing, my pauses in speech. You smile at my uncouth abode. Yes it is true, I live in what might be called a meager hut in a filthy dell, set in a wood between hither and yon. Yes it is true, I wriggle in my disguise and seek with each breath to escape. I was, you know, once a fox. Someone tricked me into this human shape and here I will remain until I die. A little girl told me once words of comfort:

  you’ll be a fox again when you’ve gone to your grave.

  It cost her nothing to say it, but for me it was a matter of great pain.

  17

  At the hurdy-gurdy factory, the Master-Builder was selecting melodies. His office was like the inside of a massive harp. Everything was possible with him. One was afraid even to move.

  — Sir, I yelped.

  I was waving some letter, some nonsensical letter. I don’t even know where it came from, but it was very dirty, and distasteful even to hold.

  — Sir, I yelped. Sir!

  But that day was soon finished, and the one after it, and now things have gone so far I can’t even say whether this was my memory or my grandfather’s, the violent man whose grave I share.

  And with waking now upon a particular morning and before you, worlds and doors locked once, left open, particular and inconceivable. Shall we go out this way and down the avenue? shall we enter by the garden gate and slip up the unlocked stair to the room beneath the roof? the unkempt room that once was let to German boarders, young men and such, engaged always in the study of some or another mathematics?

  18

  Licorice. . it was considered a poison by the Romans, and acted in fact, quite well in this regard, save that, as it possesses none of the qualities of a true poison, its victims would have to be informed of their fate. This led to scenes that were often parodied by persons blessed by history with a better understanding. Yet think of this, and think clearly for once — the taste of licorice. . does it not recall to you something? Its taste is misplaced. Somewhere, an error was made and never rectified. The question nonetheless remains, who first discovered its safe use in confections? Thousands of people must have died before some tribune or proconsul proclaimed it safe. And then, how confusing a thing it must have been to the survivors. How sad the fate of those reached last by the news, some proud couple living in a manse on the far frontier, self reliant, comforted by their own strength. The messenger finds only their bodies. I don’t believe anyone knows any more about this.

  It has been long believed that wind is due to pressure differences in the air. However, the recently published research of Ch. Stevens of Greenwich has called this theory into question. Through painstaking observation he has noticed that while pressure differences seem to account for wind, they only approximate how wind might be, leaving us with two possible conclusions — the first that it is not pressure at all that determines wind, but something else entirely, and the second, that some common thing determines and influences both wind and pressure differences, and that the discrepancy between the two is caused by the influence of some third factor. The question then, what is the third factor, has been the work of Stevens’ life. He discovered the discrepancy as a child poring over charts, but told no one for sixty-five years as he set about cementing his theory of the THIRD FACTOR.

  The THIRD FACTOR is, Stevens believes, observation by man or animal. His thesis in particular explains the sudden escalation of tornadoes and tsunamis which hitherto have been scientifically unexplainable. Furthermore, Stevens has posited an enormous sea eye lying at or near the center of the fabled Bermuda triangle.

  19

  said the soldier to the grackle king:

  I am glad of this theatre you so joyously provide, for I travel by foot and by picturing myself still farther down these roman roads.

  20

  I drew you aside once, do you remember it? We were young — you four, I three, we had been put for safekeeping in the charge of a farmyard. Everyone was cruel and we couldn’t see why. We went apart to a shallow ditch in the back of a goose pen and sat in the shade of wet ground. I don’t remember what was said but there was much. We talked all day and into the night, and the searchers discovered us by the moon’s broken spokes. I often think of that conversation, often feel my life has been the length of those words, those scratched diagrams and shapes in mud. Did we leave the wiser? What did I tell you, so important, a thing I now don’t know save in mourning and loss?

  21

  The apologies rendered me by the provincial mayor were, I must say, quite insufficient. I coughed merely and looked into my sleeve while his aide de campe blanched at the insult done. But what matter is it to me? If I choose I may change into a cloud or a stone and sleep for a century until all living are now dead. I have done so before and there is no trouble involved. Only an undoing of buttons, an unhooking of hooks, a light wheeling of countenance here and then about.

  22

  The red cloth that you named Garment Beamer and how you wrapped all your things in it, so many and joyful, and went with me gladly as I sang a song of warders and the wide advance. We climbed a well and were lost to what we knew. Then, afterwards, the day of whistled faces and crowns, the lunches prepared in our honor by a man we had seen once in a shop and thought vaguely respectable.

  23

  In a dream, I come upon a sort of paramilitary canteen. An attack is being readied. People of all sorts, dressed in civilian garb are standing about, remonstrating with each other, preparing themselves. There are great quantities of weapons, presided over by older men, precise fellows of a Swiss type. There was a place to be shoed, a place to be jacketed, belted, etc. Shall I say that the guns were quite odd? Most were of a sort, as was explained to me — oh, I should say first, just then everyone left. It had begun. I was standing there, and the great mass of people left the place of armament and went off into the town. The sound of gunfire came from almost every direction. Still, in the armory I felt quite safe. I talked with one of the men who explained that these weapons they were distributing were of a peculiar sort fit for revolution. They were three shot pistols, firing shotgun shells. They could not be reloaded. Once the pistol was done, perhaps recourse to a knife? I did not ask him this. The main thing is, the pistol could also be used as a grenade, in which case all three shells would explode simultaneously. — Very effective, he explained. No one will have predicted this.

  As a kindness he provided me with an old Remington break-barrel shotgun with which to make my way East. It was predicted the countryside would rise. But if they did not?

  24

  I fought with 3 older children in my father’s garden. What right had they to be there? They are painted, garish like a festival and I am wearing the plainest of clothes. They are older all and speak with authority of matters out in a world to which I have never gone.

  And yet, it is my father’s garden. I approach them even now and the quarrel begins anew.

  25

  I came, when all the rest had gone, with many fine things to say and do. We went as tinkers through the farthest settlements in the fifth of your five lives. So often you would say to me if only our lives had been laid head-to-head and foot-to-foot — instead this brief exchange of shipwright and wind having less to do with what is known than with what we would know and tell.

  26

  The flea perched on the chair’s back reports with utmost fury: There are no studies so foolish as those taken up with another’s leave.

  27

  Of not less than three I speak now coming in rain in dubious
transport through borders of clay and roadways of stone. The mast is off course and next shall cause — treason, which is the poor man’s chance, dubbed fortune in an era of coalbins and apple trees.

  28

  A project:

  1. Find a man out for a walk with his two children, both of a portable and inconsiderable age. Though old enough for memory’s sake. Say five or half past four.

  2. Come upon this man in prepared union with a friend (you and a friend or confederate). Spring upon him in a park, seizing both children when they are equidistant from the man. This is crucial: we will discuss why later.