The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (6 page)

“Butterscotch pie,” Widow Fisk says, and so deftly pokes a forkful into the Minotaur’s mouth that he can do nothing but let the heavenly dollop dissolve on his fat black tongue. The Minotaur’s knees all but buckle. He remembers. He remembers hunger. It has been a long long time. The butterscotch pie in his mouth might be the best thing the Minotaur has ever tasted. In his life. Widow Fisk. Widow Fisk.

“I made it last night,” she says. “Made the crust and the meringue, too. You like it?”

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. “Much.”

Widow Fisk is facile with piecrust. Widow Fisk in her bonnet and her apron. She knows things. The Minotaur doesn’t mean for his mouth to hang open. But it does. Widow Fisk teases his black lips with another forkful of pie.

“You want this?” she asks, keeping it just out of reach. “You want this?”

The Minotaur smells butter and salt and flour on her skin. “Mmmnn,” he says. The Minotaur could take her entire hand into his mouth. He wonders if Widow Fisk knows this.

“What’ll you give for it?” she asks.

The Minotaur sees a tiny fleck of dried pudding on her bonnet. The Minotaur hadn’t imagined the bonnet when he thought of her in the kitchen.

“What do I get out of the trade?” she asks.

The door to the Gift Shoppe opens, to a prickly digital rendition of “Dixie.” Widow Fisk puts, lays, inserts the fork into the Minotaur’s mouth. He lingers before closing, then senses the barely there resistance at the surface of the peaked meringue, tastes that butter, the brown sugar, the vanilla, perfectly balanced. Flakes of crust stick to his teeth.

“Yep,” she says. “I bet they’re gonna make you a five-star general.”

“Unngh.”

“Get you all decked out in a gold sash and those epaulettes, get you two rows of brass buttons. You’ll be so damn sexy none of us can . . .”

Widow Fisk doesn’t finish her sentence. The Minotaur wishes she would. She looks up—her eyes magnified—blinks twice, then turns back to her work.

“Should I put this Confederate icon here?” she asks, clicking away with the mouse. “Or does it look better there?”

The Minotaur doesn’t have an opinion, but he leans close anyway. And when his horn, by happy accident, bumps gently against her bonneted head, Widow Fisk doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away. No. She leans back ever so slightly.

“Mmmnn, there,” the Minotaur says, pointing nowhere.

Widow Fisk straightens her bonnet. The Minotaur turns toward the battlefield.

“Maybe I’ll make you one,” she says without looking. “Maybe I’ll make you a pie. Maybe I’ll bring it by. Maybe tonight.”

“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, possibility once again confounding him.

As he leaves the Gift Shoppe, the Minotaur’s side knife snags in the barrel of whittled walking canes propping the door open. They rattle against the staves and almost tip over.

From the Gift Shoppe, there are two ways the Minotaur can go. The thirty-some cabins, barns, and sheds that make up Old Scald Village are laid out with intent. There is something algebraic about the pinched curves, the denial of horizon line. A forced perspective. You can’t see the Blacksmith’s Shoppe for the wattle and daub walls of the Dumpert House, where the candles are made. But the Minotaur knows it’s there, right across the narrow dirt road from the Old Jail, where, months ago, Smitty cajoled or coerced the Minotaur into one of the two damp cells and hung the
Gossip
placard on the door. Kept him locked in for the rest of the afternoon. Folks just assumed it was part of the show.

The Minotaur goes the other way around the loose figure eight. Passes the Old Round Schoolhouse, a striking anomaly in more than its architecture. Made round, they say, made without corners, to keep the spirits, the haints and ghosts, from getting trapped therein. The Minotaur knows that some spirits aren’t so easily duped. The Minotaur knows, too, that some of the soldiers like to get high in the schoolhouse before the battles. He smells the cannabis in passing. In passing, the Minotaur understands the impulse.

He passes Sprankle’s Tailor Shoppe. It’s been closed for a while. Its spindles and needles and thimbles, its bolts of muted fabric, shut away and padlocked. Some say that Sprankle got born again. The Minotaur has no reason to doubt. He passes.

Pauses, though, at the open window of a church. One of two. Used to be three, but an unexplained fire took the wattle-and-daub Presbyterian last summer. Biddle said there was talk of another church building coming in but had neither real proof nor details.

The Minotaur has made this pause before. He likes the moment—Sunday morning before the battle, at the church window, the service coming to an end—though it troubles him in other ways. The Minotaur’s horns are too wide for the old window, but he wouldn’t look in anyway. He doesn’t have to. He knows the bare walls—no tortured effigies, no gilded icons. He knows the cushionless pews, their upright and unforgiving backs. But it’s not those things he finds troublesome. Most of the time a girl is in the church. It’s the girl who makes candles in the candle shop, who dips the wicks over and over and smells of lanolin. Sunday mornings find her in her secondary role, up by the stark altar, chugging and banging away at a wheezy pump organ and singing at the top of her questionable lungs. “On Christ the solid rock I stand.” The congregants, if there are any, sing along: “All other ground is sinking sand.” The congregants, if any, may be paying visitors to the village, or they may be something other. A few of the Old Scald Village living historians reenact civilian lives. A mayor here, a drunkard there. Too, this early in the season, nearly everybody does double duty. Plays multiple roles. The Minotaur can never be sure who’s who or what’s what. But he knows the candle maker’s nasally song, part yowl, half caw. He leans his head against the plank wall and listens. A paean to discord, for sure, and though the Minotaur is moved by her sincerity, every time, it is the music that rankles. The music seems somehow hobbled. Fettered. As if the very notes are trapped, boxed in, as if they hurl themselves to bloody pulps, verse after verse.

The candle maker is there most Sunday mornings, and most Sunday mornings she gives the Minotaur pause. But not this day. Something different is happening up on the altar. He cocks his head. Hears. Hears more than he bargained for. There is utterance, for sure. Many voices. Sounds emitted from human mouths, human throats. But try as he might the Minotaur cannot find words in the babel.

“Unngh,” he says to no one, and leans closer to the window.

Confused. Compelled. The song, whatever it is, draws him in. But the absence of words unsettles. Language is troubling enough. Words do not pass with ease over his fat tongue. Words crash and burn in his mouth. But hearing is not usually so hard. This morning something has rent the fabric of his understanding. What is happening? Where are the words?

The Minotaur wants to see for himself how those sounds spill from those human mouths, but just as he is about to put his horns through the window things change.

“And am I born to die?”

The cacophony takes shape.

“To lay this body down?”

Each syllable is drawn taut, to the point of breaking, by layers of voice.

“And must my trembling spirit fly . . .”

Harmonies pitch and heave. The song lumbers into sonic existence. Into the present moment. For better or worse.

“Into a world unknown . . .”

He wants to look but can’t. Old Scald Village rattles and clanks itself awake. There is dying to be done. The Minotaur closes his eyes, leans one horn against the church. The song worms its way through the boards.

“A land of deepest shade, unpierced by human thought . . .”

What can it mean? The smell of butterscotch lingers in the Minotaur’s nostrils. The taste, even deeper. The Minotaur tastes the hymn.

“The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot?”

Fits and starts. Fits and starts. Understanding is a dubious Braille. He’s not looking.

“Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?”

What?

He’s not looking.

He’s not looking when Smitty comes by.

“Tssss!”

Smitty gooses the Minotaur hard in the ribs. The brand, oh so familiar. Torment.

“Tssss!” Smitty says.

The Minotaur startles. His horn tip digs a six-inch gouge in the plank wall. By the time his frayed wits are gathered the song is over and the bodies, the worshipers, are spilling from the church’s open doors.

“There’s words for your kind,” Smitty says.

Of course there are. Always have been. The Minotaur knows what to expect.

“T-bone,” Smitty says. “Ribeye.”

Widow Fisk and her confounding questions. To settle. Down. The Minotaur knows only come and go, parsed out by eons. The beast has lugged his cumbersome head across continents and centuries. Pausing here and there to catch his breath. The Minotaur finds it best not to question. But simply to be.

For the time being he finds himself dwelling peacefully at the crumbling edge of a particular history, finds himself in a faux soldier’s uniform on a make-believe battleground, fighting enemies that never die.

The Minotaur falls dead. Falls dead. Falls (ad nauseam) dead. Rises. This Sunday is a Confederate day for victory. The Minotaur dies regardless. It’s hot. Sweltering already. He falls dead on his side, to keep the sun out of his eyes.

On the way to the battlefield, the Minotaur walked with his regiment past a tractor pulling a wagonload of sweaty onlookers en route to the bleachers.

“Look, Mama!” he heard a boy say. “Look at that!”

The Minotaur didn’t claim ownership.

The battlefield is a rectangular glade that spans the hundred-plus yards between a hillock called Gobbler’s Knob (in the brochure) and a cedar brake called Dead Man’s Wood (in the brochure). Humans love to name things. It’s likely that the battlefield, before Old Scald Village, was just somebody’s boondocks. But the grassy plain made for a natural arena. The founding fathers dragged in some bleachers and bulldozed up a line of earthen breastworks at the far end of the field.

The armies take turns. Charge or defense.

“I think I’m gonna die,” Biddle says on the way up the path toward the field. The man, sweatier and pinker than normal, slogs along with a hand over his face, the butt of his musket dragging a rut in the dirt. “Curse the son of a bitch who invented Jägermeister.”

The Minotaur doesn’t respond. One of the girls, one of the field nurses, does.

“Serves you right,” she says.

“I hope you puke your guts out,” she says.

“Aren’t you married or something?” she says.

The Minotaur hopes that Smitty doesn’t see Biddle in this sad state.

The Confederates are charging the battlements today. When the ragtag company rounds a copse of black alder trees, the Minotaur sees the boy, the same one from the wagon. He stands with his toy pistol—little more than a piece of stained pine, bought that very morning from the Gift Shoppe—raised and aimed. Stands bravely, resolutely, facing down the entire marching battalion.

He fires nonstop. The Minotaur can see clearly. The boy makes little shooting noises with his mouth. Nobody hears them. But the boy gets an enthusiastic round of applause when his mother leads him away from his post and back to the bleachers. Everybody cheers his valor.

When the army is in formation, Smitty walks up and down the line barking orders. Biddle’s eyes roll, more than once, back in his head. Biddle tries to position himself away from the stand of cannons on the south flank. He’ll go down long before the fire from the Union battery can assault his booze-weary noggin. When the Confederate drum and fife corps rat-a-tat-tats by, it musters an insipid little (semi-mandatory) war whoop from the soldiers. The Minotaur watches Biddle grimace into the discord. But even through his hangover misery, the pink man eyes up the horn player (whose fat rump bobs and sways freely beneath her black skirt) and the piccolo player (a skinny short-haired girl who passes for a boy even off the battlefield). The Minotaur sees it all, and who is he to judge?

The band does its best to keep the beat. It drags its crippled melody all the way to the edge of the field, where it will mill about until the fight is over.

Somewhere along the Union front a tall flag waves. The battle commences with a volley of cannon fire. Everybody on the bleachers oohs and aahs over the gigantic smoke rings. The sharp scent of burnt gunpowder lingers even after the smoke dissipates. Smitty calls out something. The Confederates shoulder their muskets. In a slender moment of military silence the Minotaur hears a truck way up on Scald Mountain, on the turnpike. Then a crow. Then the sound of booted feet on the move and rattling sabers.

Biddle drops early. Doesn’t even time the fall with Union fire. Just lies down on the hot dirt and starts calling for the nurse. “Nurse! Nurse! Nurse!”

The Minotaur trudges on.

There are nurses on the field, then and now. Their billowing skirts hang to their ankles, then and now. Bonnets halo their faces. And their aprons? Then, stark white canvases ready to be marked by the humors of men. Now, all the stains are prefab. Then, the nurses carried leather satchels full of comfort to the wounded and dying. Comfort that ran the spectrum of need. Roll after roll of bandages. Laudanum. “Soldier’s Joy.” Scripture. Maybe even the sweet tincture of martyrdom. Nowadays the field nurses of Old Scald Village carry very little. Sometimes the satchels are empty. The nurses come and go among the, what? The sham, the pseudo, the feigned injured. Mostly they just chitchat quietly. Nobody on the bleachers knows the difference. On hot days like this one the field nurses carry ice in their satchels, so that none of the living-history reenactors has a heatstroke.

“Nurse!” Biddle calls out.

But none of the nurses will attend to his cry. They’ve all suffered the indignity of approaching Biddle where he lay. And regardless of where he lay the Confederate casualty would lift their skirts, poke his head beneath their petticoats, look up, and cry out, “Good God, Gertie, what a gash!”