A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

hard January light in the high windows bespeaks that worldliness of the world which no Hegelianism can pretend isn't there, isn't here.

Mr. Churchyard lifted his specs onto his forehead, ran his little finger along an eyebrow, massaged his nose, closed his eyes, licked the corners of his mouth, and coughed softly.

The irony of it.

A horse was as alive as he, and a cow had exactly as much being. A midge.

It would be some comfort if he could know that he was precisely as ugly as Socrates. He was, like all Danes, beautiful in his youth. Then his nose had grown and grown, and his back had warped, and his digestion gone to hell.

Perhaps the troll was not the size he thought it was, and was wrapped in a leaf.

Whatever we say of the god that he isn't, he is.

—Absconditus we say he is, seeing him everywhere. What's with us, O Troll, that we have faith in the unseen, unheard, and untouched, while rejecting what's before our eyes? In the mists of despair I see that we prefer what isn't to what is. We place our enthusiasm in scriptures we don't read, or read with fanciful misunderstanding, taking our unknowing for knowing. Our religion's a gaudy superstition and unlicensed magic.

Mr. Churchyard knew that the troll was behind one of the trees before him. He felt it as a certainty. He would have, when seen, a flat nose, round green eyes, a frog's mouth, and large ears.

—Listen! This Sunday past, in the palace church, the court chaplain, who is very popular and who in his bishop's robes looks like a Byzantine emperor, preached a sermon to a select congregation of fat merchants, lawyers, bankers, and virgins. He preached with eloquence and resonating solemnity. His text was Christ chose the lowly and despised. Nobody laughed.

The afternoon was getting on and the sky was graying over with clouds. Mr. Churchyard decided to make a bargain with himself, a leap of faith. He would believe the troll was there, and not bother whether it was or not. An event is real insofar as we have the desire to believe it. Bishop Mynster preached his eloquent sermon because Mr. Churchyard's father had admired him, not because Mr. Churchyard was sitting between an outlaw dressed as a merchant banker and a lady whose bonnet was made in London. He heard Bishop Mynster for his father's sake. He would converse with the troll for his own sake.

And so, the troll. He was not prepared for it to be naked. Its Danish, when it spoke, was old.

An urchin from up around Swan's Mill. It put out an arm for balance, standing on one leg, swinging the other back and forth.

—Be you a frog? it asked.

—I am a human being.

—Could have fooled me. What way comest ye, through or under?

It was amused by the consternation on Mr. Churchyard's face and crimped the corners of its mouth.

—If through color; that be the one way, to butt through yellow into blue, through red to green. T'other way's to back up a little, find a place to get through, and wiggle in. Through the curve, at the tide. Even's one, odd the other.

The troll came closer. Mr. Churchyard could see a spatter of freckles on its cheeks and nose. It cautiously touched his walking stick.

—Ash, it said. I did not know the tree. Always on this side, one moon with another, bayn't ye?

—This side of what? Mr. Churchyard asked quietly.

—Ye've never been inside the mullein, have ye? Never in the horehound, the milkweed, the spurge? What be you?

—I am a Dane. What if I were to ask you what you are? You are to my eye a boy, with all the accessories, well fed and healthy. Are you not cold, wearing nothing?

The troll raised a leg, holding its foot in its hand, so that its shin was parallel to the forest floor. It grinned, with or without irony Mr. Churchyard could not say. Its thin eyebrows went up under its hair.

—Let me say, Mr. Churchyard said, that I am certain you are in my imagination, not there at all, though you smell of sage or borage, and that you are a creature for which our science cannot account. When we think, we bind. I have not yet caught you. I don't even know what or who you are. Now where does that get us?

—But I am, the troll said.

—I believe you. I want to believe you. But this is the nineteenth century. We know everything. There is no order of beings to which you could belong. Do you know the god?

The troll thought, a finger to its cheek.

—Be it a riddle? What have ye for me if I answer right?

—How could it be a riddle if I ask you if you know the god? You do, or you don't.

—Be you looking hereabouts for him?

—I am.

—What be his smell? What trees be his kinfolk?

—I've never seen him. No description of him exists.

—How wouldst ye know did you find him?

—I would know him. There would be a feeling.

—Badger, squirrel, fox, weasel, hopfrog, deer, owl, grebe, goose, one of them? Or pine, oak, elderberry, willow, one of them? Elf, kobold, nisse, one of us? Spider, midge, ant, moth?

The troll then arranged itself, as if it had clothes to tidy the fit of, as if it were a child in front of a class about to recite. It sang. Its voice had something of the bee in it, a recurring hum and buzz, like the Barockfagott in Monteverdi's Orfeo, and something of the ringdove's hollow treble. The rhythm was a country dance's, a jig. But what were the words?

Mr. Churchyard made out the horse sick of the moon and the owl who had numbers. The refrain sounded Lappish. One fish, and another, and a basket of grass.

When the song was over, Mr. Churchyard bent forward in an appreciative bow. Where had he heard the melody, at some concert of folk music? At the Roskilde market? And had he not seen the troll itself, astoundingly dirty, in patched clothes and blue cap, on the wharf at Nyhavn?

And then there was no troll, only the forest floor and the damp green smell of the wood, and the ticking of his watch.

That