Free George Mills by Stanley Elkin

horse stopped in its orbit and Mills got on. “Let’s go,” he said. “Straight lines only, Mills’s horse. Follow the merchant, fellow. Follow Guillalume’s horse.” And guided him with the reins, pulling the bit roughly whenever the animal started into one of its turns. To keep him moving Mills chatted amiably, mindlessly. “Well, that’s it, folks,” he said, “bye-bye. God’s instrument tells you ‘so long.’ God’s instrument’s instrument—tell them, merchant—asks you to abide here and pray a while. Pray and fast four days. Amen and thank you, Jesus.”
    “You mean you didn’t know? ” Guillalume asked him later.
    “I didn’t,” Mills said, “I didn’t truly. Bloody goddamn horse worshippers. And that one says there’s no infidels.”
    So he gave them the Word. (And, indirectly, ultimately, invented dressage too who knew nothing about horses, inventing haute école for them and the principle of the pony ride.) The Word changing as they worked their way backward across not only geography but culture as well. Telling them not only and not even always out of self-defense, but for hospitality, three squares and a kip for himself and his companions, spouting Jesus for their entertainment as he might, if he’d had a good voice, sung them songs. In Russia he told them, in Romania, in Bulgaria. In Greece and in Turkey. And doing them miracles out of their small store of salt. Changing fresh water to sea water in jugs which he permitted them to dip into their own sweet lakes and running rivers, elsewhere pressing the salt onto their very tongues, a mumbo-jumbo of condimental transubstantiation.
    Saying “I shall make you the salt of the earth.” Or demonstrating its emetic properties, swallowing any poison they wished to give him and coming back to life before their eyes. Telling sailors along the Aegean and on the Ionian and Adriatic and Mediterranean and ports of call up and down the Atlantic.
    And that was the First Crusade.
    And then they were in England again, and then in Northumbria, and the other crusade was over too now, ended, the one Guillalume’s brothers, who had gone to Palestine after all, had gone on, to be killed by the infidels the merchant did not believe in, and now Guillalume was the eldest brother and, in another year, would be the lord of the manor himself, and Mills was back in the stables because it would not do for one so high placed to have as a retainer a man who knew nothing of horses.

1
    L ouise lay beside him, her flannel nightshirt bunched beneath her chin. The nightshirt was baby blue with tiny clusters of gray flowers and smelled of caked Vicks and cold steam from the dehumidifier. Her fingers probed her breasts, stroking, handling boluses of flesh, sifting tit like a cancer miner or a broad in pornography.
    “All clear?” George asked as she lowered the nightshirt, yanking it down under her backside and consecutively rolled hips.
    “When you bite me,” she asked, “do you ever feel anything hard?”
    “When I bite?”
    “When you take them in your mouth. Do you feel anything hard?”
    “I spit it out.”
    “Someday I’m going to find something.”
    “Well,” he said, “you’ll be catching it early.”
    “I spotted again. It wasn’t much. A little pink on the toilet paper.”
    Louise got out of bed and put on her house slippers. She smiled and raised the nightshirt. She pulled it over her head. She drew the shades and turned on all the lights, even the one in the closet.
    “I have to tell you something,” George Mills said.
    Television had taught him. Edward R. Murrow had shown him their living rooms and studies, the long, set-tabled dining rooms of the famous. Commercials had given him an idea of the all-electric kitchens of the median-incomed, the tile-floor-and-microwave-oven-blessed, their digital-fired radios waking them to music. He knew the lawns of the middle class, their power mowers leaning like sporting goods against their cyclone