OCR Text |
Show 216 THE WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW the hitch and delivered her to her paramour. He was a good-looking stallion, black with a white starred forehead, slighdy taller than she and obviously glad to see her. There weren't many Shetlands around and like Beauty he spent most of his time without the consolations of his kind. But he got consoled by her all right, the litde whore. Still, she didn't take. I don't know why, the stallion sterile or maybe he just didn't force her virginity that far. It was that spring when Dad bought a jackass stud. Mules were stronger and tougher than horses, he said, and brought higher prices, but though it was all good economics I was sorry to see that beast. A stallion is a beautiful creature, as masculine an animal as there is, even those big heavy broad-rumped work-horse ones like a Dutchman had on a place two miles from us. I used to saddle Sam and lead one of our mares in heat up to him. He would be out in the field like any other working slob, one of a team pulling a hay mower, and the Dutchman would unhook and unharness him and lead him in to the corral. As soon as he smelled that mare in heat his head lifted and he began to prance like he could win a Derby. But he was a huge horse, a glossy bay with bulging gliding muscles, and our mare was big too, and those two animals in a corral together was something to see, the coupling violent and awesomely beautiful. Afterwards though, the stallion was as indifferent as if he was Zeus in disguise. The mare couldn't care less either, and I led her home. But that jackass was an ugly scrubby beast with a bray that made our dog howl and me grind my teedi, the most loveless sound in the universe and so loud he made cakes fall on neighboring farms. The mares hated him and in or out of heat would have killed him, except we didn't give them the chance. We fed him oats daily as if he was prince over them and kept him off in a special remote corral like some fertility god. Because his previous owner had, we called him Phil and thought nothing of it, but now I remember Philip of Macedonia and all those King Philips of France and Spain, and I wonder if that man, whom I don't remember, had a sense of irony. Or, had he been cultured and straightforward: Phil short for Philistine? Certainly that fit, especially after his bestial assault upon Beauty. That spring though she was off living it up with her lover and we were engaged in finding a way to enable old Phil to assault our work mares. For that purpose, near his private one, we built another special corral, round so that the mare couldn't back into a corner and high so that in desperation she couldn't jump over it. The problem then was to put the two together in the corral and have old Phil come out alive. So we built a special stall in die corral. We led die mare into it, up until her chest was against the cross pole, dropped another pole across her neck, locked it, and tied her heavy lead rope to a solid post Now she couldn't rear. In back we slid |