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Show f 218 THE WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW eyes with his tanned face and neat black mustache made him the handsomest of men. For if our work was often hard, dull and dirty, still there had to be time to see the leaf bud and the alfalfa wave green under a summer breeze, there had to be time to scrub off the manure and go to town, there had to be something entirely useless for anything but that deepest craving for a sweet melody. And I must say for that jackass that he fathered some fine-looking mules. After mat first spring, with our help, there was hardly a brood mare around without a swelling belly, whereupon we took him out of his special corral, took away his oats and kicked him out with the cows to forage for himself. Of course, the next spring it was back to the special corral, special diet and your majesty again. But since farmers don't breed their work mares annually, that spring old Phil had fewer duties and got shoved back with me cows earlier. Beauty was in with the cows too - we didn't figure she could hurt him - but then she came in heat and diat jackass started following her around and braying fit to sour the cows' milk, the most persistent wooer I ever saw, wouldn't take no for an answer, totally unaffected by scorn, contempt, insult and the most stinging rebuffs. Since she wasn't tall enough to kick his head off, he kept following and she kept running, and I asked Dad to please put that fool ugly beast away somewhere before he ran Beauty to death. Dad laughed and said exercise was good for her figure, but one day I noticed that though she couldn't kick hard and couldn't kick high she was so steady at it that the jack's chest was a bloody mess. Still he persisted: he came up behind her with diat milk-curdling bray, she let him have it with both feet and then ran; he followed, approached again; she pasted him, ran again. I didn't say anything to Dad. But when he saw his costly jackass being slowly kicked to hamburger, he howled all right, and banished Beauty to die corral and dry fodder. Thus we noticed early that she was in foal. I had no doubt she had been assaulted, die jack guilty of rape, but now that I know he couldn't have been I also understand more of Beauty's blind drive to perpetuate herself. The irony of course is that a mule is die end of the line, a dead-end, all his time self-contained. I was crushed that the little Shetland stallion hadn't been successful instead, but I knew, grudgingly, that he had been only willing while that jackass had been able as well, and not only able but persistent enough to succeed when the odds, given his nature and Beauty's distaste, looked hopeless. Now it doesn't seem to matter. I recall that Venus wasn't married to Apollo but to Vulcan, ugly and lame and probably sooty as well. I might wish that Venus and Apollo had had an affair, Beauty and Truth coupling on the sly to produce Eros, but now I see no evidence that such is the case. I do know that my Beauty produced a mule, which, for accuracy, should have been named Thanatos. |