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Show /c 220 THE WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW all very funny, but Henry came back carrying die .22 rifle and told us he'd shot the litde mule between die eyes. Dad couldn't believe him. We walked down to die corral and there lay the mule on his side with a litde drying blood running down over one eye and into the dust. "Why you damn fool," said Dad, as if he still couldn't believe it. "You gone crazy? That mule was worth a lot of money. Pretty litde thing and smart like that, I could have sold him to a circus or somediing." "You said to," muttered Henry. That really made Dad angry. He didn't blow up, he got that ice in his voice which was deadly: "Don't talk like a fool! You don't just up and shoot tilings diat're worth money." But Henry stuck to it, dogged and sullen: he had been told to. In die deadlock we all looked back to the mule and were silent. He loomed diere upon the dull dust and manure of the corral, a thing which a few minutes before had pulsed with life now looking like something dead on the beach. Henry's sullenness had been pardy shocked remorse and now his eyes shifted uneasily away from the carcass, then came back in incomprehension. Dad's anger, I understand now, was pardy the anger of any man who is confronted with death and hates his own mortality. But I sensed it in him then, and as I watched the flies gathering, one settled and walked over an eyeball. I felt a deep bone-numbing shock. In my very marrow I realized diat my father, my brother, myself - all of us would diat completely die and rot to nothing. Just before sundown, with that knowledge still heavy within me, I got a handful of oats and walked out into the pasture. In the same delicate way she always had, oblivious of the touch of fate, Beauty nibbled die oats while I stroked her smooth sun-warmed shoulder, slowly, knowing she was not charmed to survive forever. I wished then that we could have found a Shedand stallion for her, and now and then I still wish it, a really beautiful one is what I have in mind, a high-stepping little prince of a horse, an Apollo with glands all in order. Because it would have been fitting, his small seed to help pass on fertile to new generations what in protoplasm Beauty possessed to pass on to die world; his seed really to fulfill that blind desire of hers even though she didn't know when it was or wasn't fulfilled. I would have liked it for myself too: oppressed now and then by mortality, I could find some comfort in knowing that her issue was not all into a dead end. And yet in a deeper and more personal way it doesn't really matter, for Beauty was diere, now touchy, now serene; now aloof, now allowing herself to be loved; and I was there, learning that one can love far more than one possesses, diat one must, or perish. And now that she is long dead, rotted herself back into the earth, she teaches still her last lesson: that what I loved in her is yet abroad in the world, diat sweeter unheard melody, indestructible, imperishable, immortal. |
