The Centaur (36 page)

Yet even in the dead of winter the sere twigs prepare their small dull buds. In the pit of the year a king was born. Not a leaf falls but leaves an amber root, a dainty hoof, a fleck of baggage to be unpacked in future time. Such flecks gave the black thatch of twigs a ruddy underglow. Dully the centaur’s litmus eye absorbed this; slowly the chemistry of his thought altered. The intervals between the hedgerow trunks passed him like ragged doorways and he remembered walking
on some church errand with his father down a dangerous street in Passaic; it was a Saturday and the men from the sulphur works were getting drunk. From within the double doors of a saloon there welled a poisonous laughter that seemed to distill all the cruelty and blasphemy in the world, and he wondered how such a noise could have a place under the sky of his father’s God. In those days he customarily kept silent about what troubled him, but his worry must have made itself felt, for he remembered his father turning and listening in his backwards collar to the laughter from the saloon and then smiling down to his son, “All joy belongs to the Lord.”

It was half a joke but the boy took it to heart.
All joy belongs to the Lord
. Wherever in the filth and confusion and misery, a soul felt joy, there the Lord came and claimed it as His own; into barrooms and brothels and classrooms and alleys slippery with spittle, no matter how dark and scabbed and remote, in China or Africa or Brazil, wherever a moment of joy was felt, there the Lord stole and added to His enduring domain. And all the rest, all that was not joy, fell away, precipitated, dross that had never been. He thought of his wife’s joy in the land and Pop Kramer’s joy in the newspaper and his son’s joy in the future and was glad, grateful, that he was able to sustain these for yet a space more. The X-rays were clear. A white width of days stretched ahead. The time left him possessed a skyey breadth in which he swam like a true grandchild of Oceanus; he discovered that in giving his life to others he entered a total freedom. Mt. Ide and Mt. Dikte from opposite blue distances rushed toward him like clapping waves and in the upright of his body Sky and Gaia mated again. Only goodness lives. But it does live.

Now he came to the turn of the road. A hundred strides ahead of him he saw the Buick like a black mouth he must enter. It had been an undertaker’s car. It made a black spot against the heaped snow, fifty-fifty he could get it out. Above the brow of the field on his left the Amishman’s silo poked with its conical hat of corrugated iron; an abandoned windmill stood stark; a few grackles wheeled above the buried stubble.

Brutish landscape.

The invisible expanse the centaur had in an instant grasped retreated from him with a pang; he focused forward at the car and his heart felt squeezed. An ache spread through his abdomen, where the hominoid and equine elements interlocked. Monsters are most vulnerable in their transitions.

Black.

They really put the shellac on those old pre-war Buicks. As Chiron drew nearer, the shattered grille looked astonished. He saw now that this was the mouth of a tunnel he must crawl through; the children he was committed to teach seemed in his brain’s glare-struck eye the jiggling teeth of a grinder, a multi-colored chopper. He had been spoiled. In these last days he had been saying goodbye to everything, tidying up the books, readying himself for a change, a journey. There would be none. Atropos had opened her shears, thought twice, smiled, and permitted the thread to continue spinning.

Chiron bit back a belch and tried to muster his thoughts. A steep weariness mounted before him. The prospect of having again to maneuver among Zimmerman and Mrs. Herzog and all that overbearing unfathomable Olinger gang made him giddy, sick; how could his father’s seed, exploding into an infinitude of possibilities, have been funnelled into this, this
paralyzed patch of thankless alien land, these few cryptic faces, those certain four walls of Room 204?

Drawing closer to the car, close enough to see an elongated distortion of himself in the fender, he understood. This was a chariot Zimmerman had sent for him. His lessons. He must order his mind and prepare his lessons.

Why do we worship Zeus?
Because there is none other.

Name me the five rivers of the dead
. Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon, Kokytos, and Lethe.

Who were the daughters of Nereus?
Agaue, Aktaia, Amphitrite, Autonoe, Doris, Doto, Dynamene, Eione, Erato, Euagore, Euarne, Eudora, Eukrante, Eulimene, Eunike, Eupompe, Galateia, Galene, Glauke, Glaukonome, Halia, Halimede, Hipponoe, Hippothoe, Kymo, Kymodoke, Kymothoe, Laomedeia, Leiagora, Lysianassa, Melite, Menippe, Nemertes, Nesaie, Neso, Panopeia, Pasithea, Pherousa, Ploto, Polynoe, Pontoporeia, Pronoe, Proto, Protomedeia, Psamathe, Sao, Speio, Themisto, Thetis, and Thoe.

What is a hero?
A hero is a king sacrificed to Hera.

Chiron came to the edge of limestone; his hoof scratched. A bit of pale pebble rattled into the abyss. He cast his eyes upward to the dome of blue and perceived that it was indeed a great step. Yes, in seriousness, a very great step, for which all the walking in his life had not prepared him. Not an easy step nor an easy journey, it would take an eternity to get there, an eternity as the anvil ever fell. His strained bowels sagged; his hurt leg cursed; his head felt light. The whiteness of limestone pierced his eyes. A little breeze met his face at the cliff-edge. His will, a perfect diamond under the pressure of absolute fear, uttered the final word.
Now.

Chiron accepted death.

Z
EUS HAD LOVED
his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.