Kenny Gordon
The Horse That Was the Devil
1
One day, the Devil went out into the world as a horse. In those times, as you know, it often suited his purpose to take the form of an animal. Sometimes he was small and enticing, to lure a soul with counterfeit innocence. And sometimes he was large and powerful, to fill his intended with awe, or even terror. This time, it pleased him to appear as a magnificent palomino stallion, sixteen hands if he was an inch, as broad as a boat, full of golden fire in the clear mountain sunlight.
He came upon a woman called Joanna, who was a keeper of horses. He said nothing, but stood before her, solid as a tree, humming with life. He gazed at her with eyes so deep they reached back to the beginning of time.
“Oh, God,” she said, touching his flank. “I’d give anything for such an animal.”
The Devil shivered at this familiar, thrilling admission.
It’s so simple, he thought. They want to be taken.
He followed her through the pasture and across the corral to what would be his own stall. She gave him oats and the best hay. She named him Moony. The three mares nickered and flirted from their stalls on the far side of the paddock. One tossed her mane and batted her dark eyes. He ignored them. Even as a horse they were beneath his notice, and he was much more than a horse.
2
As he followed the woman, the Devil felt around inside his new form and liked what he found. Some shapes are so flimsy they are hardly worth assuming at all, and some are so strangely assembled that he never feels at ease in them, no longer how long he inhabits them. But this creature was certainly built to its own purpose and no other. There was no awkwardness, no useless part. Nothing was out of place. Muscles slid over solid bones, his hide rippled like molten brass, the heart rocked in his great chest like a subterranean river. He bobbed his long head and relished the sharp power of each hoof as it struck the packed dust of the corral. In the horse’s body he felt clean and bright and transparent and uncomplicated. Each hard hoof was a simple moment of force, and the earth rang like a stone bell at each step. He vibrated with power. He tossed his mane and the hills shook with thunder.
He knew he could reach out as easily as brushing away a fly, and the woman would crumple like a pile of sand. But the Devil is not the Destroyer. There are enough perils in the world, and the Devil has only to set his snares and wait. The souls will come. If they are drawn by great power, if they long to be near the strength and ferocious will of this towering creature, can he be blamed?
3
The Devil was a little surprised the first time the gate to his stall clicked shut and the woman returned to her house. He had expected a pasture, or at least a barn. But now a square of steel rails twelve feet on a side was his new domain, he who ruled under all the Earth. The corrugated tin roof rattled in the wind, rattled in the rain, sizzled in the sun. An oppressive hill of earth and stone was piled up behind the stall, a hill that threatened to collapse into it with every storm. Dry and greasy scrub covered the hill and waited to burn. Coyotes lurked in the brush and yipped in the night.
The woman’s house was twenty yards away, backed against the same hill. It was no palace—a crooked little bungalow crammed with detritus—but its windows glowed at night, and it was shaded in the summer by ancient, dilapidated willows. Within view of the kitchen window he stood and rocked and stamped his hoof. He watched the mares, who were allowed onto the lawn to crop the fresh grass and rest in the shade of the apple trees.
4
He agreed to the halter with grudging resignation. It was necessary to his design. To rule her, he must let her believe herself the ruler. So he allowed the bit and bridle, he allowed the saddle, and let himself appear to be led, and trained. And when the time came, he even allowed her to climb on his back and believe she directed his path.
They are never so vulnerable, he thought, as when they think themselves in control.
She steered him around the shabby, cluttered acres of her little ranch, and along the crooked trails that crisscrossed the surrounding hills.
He sometimes convinced himself that his future triumphs were worth the present indignity. Not only the riding and the leading, but the stall, which was too small, and too far from the mares. And his water trough, which was awkwardly placed and cleaned infrequently by the boy who tended the stables.
But the shoes—oh, yes, the shoes—they were another thing altogether. As soon as the farrier arrived and lit his forge, the Devil recognized him as a brother of the fire. Nothing felt more natural than to have the smoking metal nailed in place. He already loved his hooves, but once they’d been capped in iron and he’d grown used to the weight, he truly felt his power among the lesser creatures. He had sledgehammers in his fingertips. He knew that when he rose to his full fire-breathing fury he would strike the ground like lightning. Here was the hammer of the gods, indeed.
5
As a rule, the Devil does not hate his subjects. He is contemptuous and greedy, but he does not stoop to hatred. Hatred is rooted in a deep connection with another soul, and he does not trouble himself to know them that well. He prefers to remain at the edges of his quarries’ awareness, pretending indifference. They are confused by his near absence, by his seeming disregard. His ambivalence allows them to become tangled in their own anxieties until, in the end, they snuff themselves out and he steps forward to claim his prize. It is delicious. He never tires of it.
After some years, however, enduring the long, powerful, simple skull of the horse, he began to hate the woman. There is no doubt she was smarter than a horse, and even a devil of a horse is still a horse. She commanded him, and after a time of feigned obedience he could no longer find it in his sturdy spine to disobey. She could lead him about, ride upon him, scold him, shout at him, and he could only acquiesce, meek and furious, filled with a narrow, single-faceted malevolence, a pure animal hatred that became, when it flared up, everything he knew and felt, a single red hot point of malice directed at the woman in her high rubber boots.
The dogs scampered away laughing. The mares whinnied and tossed their manes, or worse, purposefully ignored his humiliation.
Only the boy who cleaned the stable was appropriately cowed by him. Each day the boy fed him and mucked out the stall, always keeping to the farthest corners, flinching at every flick of the horse’s tail. A simple-minded, feeble being, the boy presented no challenge. Already terrified, he provided only a fleeting distraction before the horse became bored with him.
I could kill you with one blow, he thought as he ate. I could pulverize you to the dust you came from. I could tear out your soul and show it to you as the light leaves your eyes. But what would be the point?
He buried his muzzle in the sweet alfalfa hay and stamped a forehoof in time with his heartbeat.
6
Years passed—for the Devil’s time is not like our time, he moves within time and without it, so in one sense all time is the same for him, and in another sense time does pass, yet each moment is an eternity. Nevertheless, the years do turn, and he realized that the day was long past when Joanna had ridden him for the last time. He looked through all his days with her, forward and backward, and saw no more rides, no saddle or bridle, nor would he ever be released from the stall again.
When he had come to her, he had no way of knowing her age. She could have been an ancient crone or a fresh young flower of a girl. All souls look alike to the Devil. But, in fact, she had been in her middle years then, a solitary woman who had moved through many circles, finally coming to the ranch in search of stillness. And stillness she found, measuring her life by the slow rhythms of sun and rain. In time she became stout. She was wary of illness and believed herself frail. She began to fear the horse, and she punished him for this fear, and punished herself, by saddling him up one late summer afternoon and riding him at a steady walk for hours through the familiar sage and rabbitbrush, coming home in the near dark and hanging up the saddle forever.
Now, years later, his memory, tied to the small mind of the horse, was unclear, but he seemed to remember the ride as almost pleasant—aimless plodding through humming insects, the soft yellow light that filled the air, and returning home agreeably tired down to his very bones. Had he begun that ride as he had all the others? Mute and obstinate, uncooperative, making her suffer for every triumph? How could it have ended as it did—with him swaying in his stall, complacent and happy, even thankful, for hay and oats and cold gallons of water? And what of the years since? Were the mares the same or different? And what had become of the frightened boy? Or boys? Had they come and gone in succession, or was it the same boy over and over again? He considered this. This and the slanting sun and the mute packed dust beneath his hooves.
7
There is a curious bond between the Devil and the damned. They remain tied to one another as long as they both live. In taking a living form, the Devil becomes mortal himself, temporarily, and must remain so until the form’s natural end. Of course, the horse was not his only form during that time. Then, as now, he was many things and in all places. That is the Deceiver’s essential nature, his curse, and his torment. He is always fragmented. He has no center. He is never whole.
But in all his long time, in all his many forms, perhaps it is as the horse that he feels at least approximately complete. In his blunt solitude he is perhaps partly relieved of his multiplicity. In his simple horse’s rage he possesses something resembling clarity.
If he could, he would give up his claim. He would kick open the stall, gallop into the hills, and shed the horse’s form, shoes and all. But once the deal has been struck and the soul marked with the Devil’s thumb, he can no longer interfere with the natural course of the life. He cannot hasten the end by any means, natural or unnatural. Now he curses the rules of his own game, watching the woman through her glowing kitchen window. In her cluttered cottage, fumbling with stacks of old magazines, she is as wedded to him as he to her.
If she dies by accident while riding, I will let her go, he thinks. If she will only take me out of this stall one more time and then expire from the heat or by a fall, I will leave her soul where it lies, to whatever end it deserves. I will not have her cling to me.
But she does not ride anymore. She hardly comes out of the house to scold the boy. At dusk, the mares doze and the dogs pant in the dust. The horse waits for the moon and the derisive yips of the coyotes. He watches her slumped face, flickering in the blue light of the television, waits to hear his own shrill whinny echo from the darkening hills, his forehoof—stamp, stamp, stamp. Head down, his tiny horse’s brain consumed with a single thought— stamp, stamp, stamp—he counts the moments until he will at last be free of her.