Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [31]
“Want a look at yourself?” He handed me a fragment of mirror. “Not bad, eh? And the best thing about it is that it’s probably the worst job I’ll do, because I’m bound to improve with time.”
“Holy smokes!” I shrieked. My scalp looked like the back of an Airedale with mange—patches of bare scalp alternated with wild tufts of hair, and blood oozed from a dozen tiny cuts.
“Do you mean to say that for doing a job like this you get to stay in camp all day?” I roared.
“Come on, kid, simmer down,” said Louis. “I think you look real nice.”
There wasn’t anything very novel about the situation after all. It was business as usual with him. The rest of us continued to work our heads off all day, and to come home weary in the evenings to be trimmed by Louis Gigliano.
The Unicorn Trap
In the year 1067, anno Domini, in the village of Stow-on-the-Wold, England, eighteen dead men turned this way and that in the eighteen arches of the village gibbet. Hanged by Robert the Horrible, a friend of William the Conqueror, they boxed the compass with fishy eyes. North, east, south, west, and north again, there was no hope for the kind, the poor, and the thoughtful.
Across the road from the gibbet lived Elmer the woodcutter, his wife Ivy, and Ethelbert, his ten-year-old son.
Behind Elmer’s hut was the forest.
Elmer closed the door of his hut, closed his eyes and licked his lips and tasted rue. He sat down at the table with Ethelbert. Their gruel had grown cold during the unexpected visit from the squire of Robert the Horrible.
Ivy pressed her back to the wall, as though God had just passed by. Her eyes were bright, her breathing shallow.
Ethelbert stared at his cold gruel blankly, bleakly, his young mind waterlogged in a puddle of family tragedy.
“Oh, didn’t Robert the Horrible look grand, though, sitting out there on his horse?” said Ivy. “All that iron and paint and feathers, and such extra-fancy drapes on his horse.” She flapped her rags and tossed her head like an empress as the hoofbeats of the Normans’ horses died away.
“Grand, all right,” said Elmer. He was a small man with a large-domed head. His blue eyes were restless with unhappy intelligence. His small frame was laced with scraggly ropes of muscle, the bonds of a thinking man forced to labor. “Grand is what he is,” he said.
“You can say what you want about them Normans,” said Ivy, “they done brought class to England.”
“We’re paying for it,” said Elmer. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” He buried his fingers in the flaxen thatch of Ethelbert’s hair, tilted the boy’s head back, and searched his eyes for a sign that life was worth living. He saw only a mirror image of his own troubled soul.
“All the neighbors must of saw Robert the Horrible snarling out front, so high and mighty,” said Ivy proudly. “Just wait till they hear he sent his squire in here to make you the new tax collector.”
Elmer shook his head, his lips waggling slackly. He had lived to be loved for his wisdom and harmlessness. Now he had been told to represent Robert the Horrible’s greed—or die horribly.
“I’d like to have me a dress made out of what his horse was wearing,” said Ivy. “Blue, all shot through with them little gold crosses.” She was happy for the first time in her life. “I’d make it look careless-like,” she said, “all kind of bunched up in back and dragging—only there wouldn’t be nothing careless about it. And maybe, after I got me some decent clothes, I could pick me up a little French, and parlee voo with the Norman ladies, so refined and all.”
Elmer sighed and cupped his son’s hands in his own. Ethelbert’s hands were coarse. The palms were scratched, and earth had worked into the pores and under the nails. Elmer traced a scratch with his fingertip. “How’d you get this?” he said.
“Working on the trap,” said Ethelbert. He came to life, radiant with intelligence of his own. “I been fixing thorn trees over the hole,” he said eagerly, “so when the unicorn falls in, the thorn trees fall in on top of him.”
“That should hold him,” said Elmer tenderly. “It isn’t many families