by Dylan Thomas
Plague, plague, cried Tom Twp, standing in a new rain. Where the undertaker’s house had died in the trees, he holla’d, like ApLlewelyn, of big, bloody death; he heard the rooks cawing in the trees, and saw a galloping shadow. The trees smelt of opium and mice, to Tom two sorts of the hell-headed animal who ran in the skirtings of the grave. There were, on the branches of the trees and hanging upright from the earth, the owls that ate the mice and the mouths of the rosy flowers that fed on opium. To the chimneys of Last House and the one illuminated window he called the plague. Out came the undertaker in a frock coat; distrusting the light of the moon, he carried a candle in his gloved hand, the candle casting three shadows. To the middle shadow Tom Twp addressed his words of the white coming. Shall I measure, said the shadow on the left, the undead of Wales? Plague on a horse, said Tom Twp to the left shadow, and heard the darker shadow on the right reply.
No drug of man works on the dead. The parson, at his pipe, sucked down a dead smoke from the nostrils of the travelling horse who now, on a far-off mountain, neighed down at Africa. Smitten by God, the parson, as the dark rose deepest where the moon rose in a blaze of light, counted his blessings, the blazing fire, the light in the tobacco, and the shape of the deep bowl. Hell was this fire, the dark denial burning like a weed, and the poppy out of the smoking earth. The lines of the bowl, that patterned his grave, were the lines of the weedy world; the light in the tobacco faded; the weed was at the parson’s legs, worrying him into a longer fall than the fall from heaven, and, heavier than the poppy, into a long sleep.
Butcher and baker fell asleep that night, their women sleeping at their sides. Butcher and baker took their women in no image; their women broke again for them the accustomed maidenheads, their erected saviours crossing, in my language, the hill of hairs. Over the shops, the cold eggs that had life, the box where the rats worked all night on the high meat, the shopkeepers gave no thought to death. They felt, in the crowded space between hip and belly, the action of a third lover. Death, in the last gristle, broke on the minutes, and, by twelve beneath Cathmarw steeple, the towers fell.
Shall I measure the undead? This, said the undertaker in his parlour, pointing through the uncurtained window to the shape of the night, is the grave for the walking and the breathing. Here lay the sleepy body, the smoking body, the flesh that burned a candle, and the lessening manwax. Go home and die, he had told Tom Twp, and, telling it again to the mad moon, he remembered the story of the resurrection-men who had snatched a talking body out of the Cathmarw yards. He heard the dead die round him, and a live man, in his grafted suit, break up the gravel on the drive of Last House. Cathmarw, in a bath of blood, slept still for the light day, Tom twisted in the hedge, butcher and baker stiff by their loves, and parson with a burnt-out pipe loose in his jaws. ApLlewelyn skinned the six starlings; he dropped to the ground at last, holding two handfuls of red and broken feathers; the seventh bird, naked as its dead mates, still shivering, sang on the limed bar. Plague is upon us, said Mr. Montgomery, the undertaker, for the wind was resounding with the noise of departure, and the smell of the departing flesh crept up the wind. In the skin of this Western Wales, through the veins of the county, the rub of the plague transformed into a circle of sick and invisible promise the globe of seeds; swollen in the tubers of the trees, death poisoned the green buds and coloured the birthmarks of the forest with a fresh stain. Mr. Montgomery threw his glass of vinegar in the plague’s face; the glass broke on the window, and the vinegar ran down the broken panes. He cardboarded each slit and crack, smelling the running acid as he nailed up a cloth to shield night from him; he bolted and barred the doors of his wooden house and stuffed the holes in the parlour corners, until, buried at last in a coffin with chimneys, he took down his mother’s book. Cures for the sickness of the body and the sickness of the mind, ingredients for a saucer for resurrection, calls to the dead, said Bronwen Montgomery. The hand that wrote squarely to the crowded planet held a worm, and rain beat down the letters of her living name, and of Cathmarw’s plague she said, in a translated tongue, that the horse was a white beast ridden over the hill by a raw-headed horseman. Take, said Bronwen, the blood of a bird, and mix it with the stuff of man. Take, of a dead man and bird, a bowl of death, and pour the bird’s blood and the mortal sap through the sockets of the bowl. Stir with a finger, and, if a dead finger, drink my brew by me. He cast her aside. There was a bird and man in the unbolted darkness, plague in the loin and feather tickling the flesh and bone, uplifted fingers in the trees, and an eye in the air. These were his common visions; plague could not cloud the eye, nor the wind in the trees split the finger-nail. Unbolting, unbarring the coffin with chimneys, he walked into the single vision of the night; the night was one bird’s blood, one pocket of man, one finger lifted in the many and the upward world. He walked through the woods and onto the dusty road that led to Wales all ways, to the left, to the right, to the north, to the south, down through the vegetations, and up through the eye of the air. Looking at the still trees in the darkness, he came at last to the house of ApLlewelyn. He opened the gate and walked up the drive. There, in the parlour, lay ApLlewelyn, six featherless starlings at his side, the seventh mourning. Take, take, said Bronwen out of the Cathmarw yards, the blood of a bird. He gathered a dead bird up, tore at its throat, and caught the cold blood in his hands. Drink my brew by me, said Bronwen at his ear. He found a cup on the dresser, and half filled it with the blood of the shrunken starling. Though he rot he must wait, said Mr. Montgomery to the organist, till I drink her brew by her. Take, take, said his mother, the stuff of man. He hurried out and on, hearing the last starling mourn for the new departure.
Tom Twp was twisted in the hedge. He did not feel the jack-knife at his finger, and the going of the grassy wedding ring around it did not trouble him at all.
Parson, dead in his chair, did not cry aloud as his trousers slid down to his boots, and promise filled the bladder of a fountain-pen.
The cup was full. Mr. Montgomery stirred it with a wedding finger, and drank from it in the Cathmarw yards by the grave of his mother. Down went the red brew. The graves spun around him, the angels shifted on their stones, and the lids, invisible to the silent drinker, creaked on their hinges. Poison stirred him and he spun, one foot in his mother’s grave. Dead Cathmarw made a movement out of the wooden hamlet towards the hill of hairs. The hair rose on his scalp. Blood in his blood, and the cold ounce of the parson’s seed edging to creation, he counted the diminishings of the moon; the stationary sun slipped down, and the system he could not take to the ground broke in half and in a hundred stars. Three days went by in a wind, the fourth rising cloudless and sinking again to too many strokes from the out-counted steeple. The fourth night got up like a man; the vision altering, a woman in the moon lit up the yards. He counted the diminishings of the sun. Too many days, he said, sick of his mother’s brew and of the poisoned hours that passed and repassed him, leaving on the gravel path a rag and a bone in a faded frock coat. But as the days passed, so the dead grew tired of waiting. Tom, uneasy in the hedge, raised a four-fingered hand to stifle the yawn that broke up the last remaining skins upon his face. Butcher and baker ached in too long a love, and cursed the beds that bore them. The six naked starlings rose on their wings, the seventh singing, and ApLlewelyn, out of a deep sleep, drifted into a reawakened world where the birds danced about him. So, tired of waiting, the dead rose and sought the undertaker, for the rot had set in, and their flesh fell as they walked, in a strange procession, along the dusty road that led all ways to the graves of Cathmarw.
Mr. Montgomery saw them come, and, as a new sunshine descended on the yards, offered them his cup of brew. But the dead refused his hand. Tom Twp hunched, the sterile parson, butcher and baker ungainly in their loves, and ApLlewelyn with his hands around the feathers, clawed at the earth, making a common grave. Far, far above them, the seven naked starlings scratched on the sky. A darkness descended on the yards, but lifted again as Mr. Montgomery questioned the pa
rson as to the God of death. What is God’s death? Lifting his head from the soil, the parson said, God took my promise. And he smote the earth. I am your tombmaker, said Mr. Montgomery as the unshrouded parson climbed into the grave. I, I took your promise, he said as the soil closed over. What is death’s music? one note or many? the chord of contagion? Thus questioned the undertaker, the cup three quarters empty in his gloved hand. He who marks the sparrows fall has no time for my birds, said ApLlewelyn. What music is death? What should I know of the music of death who am no longer the keeper of birds? ApLlewelyn vanished into the second quarter of the grave. I, I slew your birds, said the undertaker to the vanishing man. The butcher was dead meat. Let me answer your platitudes, said the butcher’s wife, scrubbing the surface of the double hole in the earth. I was love, I am dead, and my man still walks in me. What is death’s love? said the undertaker to the woman. Let me answer your platitudes, said the grocer’s wife. I was dead, I am love, and my man still treads in me. They who filled and were filled, in a two-backed death, filled the third quarter. And Tom Twp, counting his fingers at the edge of their acre, found a tenth miraculous finger, with a nail red as blood and a clear half-moon, Death is my last finger, said Tom Twp, and dived into the closing grave. So Mr. Montgomery was left alone, by the desolate church, under a disappearing moon. One by one the stars went out, leaving a hole in heaven. He looked upon the grave, and slowly removed his coat.
The School for Witches
On Cader Peak there was a school for witches where the doctor’s daughter, teaching the unholy cradle and the devil’s pin, had seven country girls. On Cader Peak, half ruined in an enemy weather, the house with a story held the seven girls, the cellar echoing, and a cross reversed above the entrance to the inner rooms. Here the doctor, dreaming of illness, in the centre of the tubercular hill, heard his daughter cry to the power swarming under the West roots. She invoked a particular devil, but the gehenna did not yawn under the hill, and the day and the night continued with their two departures; the cocks crew and the corn fell in the villages and yellow fields as she taught the seven girls how the lust of man, like a dead horse, stood up to his injected mixtures. She was short and fat-thighed; her cheeks were red; she had red lips and innocent eyes. But her body grew hard as she called to the black flowers under the tide of roots; when she fetched the curdlers out of the trees to bore through the cows’ udders, the seven staring stared at the veins hardening in her breast; she stood uncovered, calling the devil, and the seven uncovered closed round her in a ring.
Teaching them the intricate devil, she raised her arms to let him enter. Three years and a day had vanished since she first bowed to the moon, and, maddened by the mid light, dipped her hair seven times in the salt sea, and a mouse in honey. She stood, still untaken, loving the lost man; her fingers hardened on light as on the breastbone of the unentering devil.
Mrs. Price climbed up the hill, and the seven saw her. It was the first evening of the new year, the wind was motionless on Cader Peak, and a half red, promising dusk floated over the rocks. Behind the midwife the sun sank as a stone sinks in a marsh, the dark bubbled over it, and the mud sucked it down into the bubble of the bottomless fields.
In Bethlehem there is a prison for mad women, and in Cathmarw by the parsonage trees a black girl screamed as she laboured. She was afraid to die like a cow on the straw, and to the noises of the rooks. She screamed for the doctor on Cader Peak as the tumultuous West moved in its grave. The midwife heard her. A black girl rocked in her bed. Her eyes were stones. Mrs. Price climbed up the hill, and the seven saw her.
Midwife, midwife, called the seven girls. Mrs. Price crossed herself. A chain of garlic hung at her throat. Carefully, she touched it. The seven cried aloud, and ran from the window to the inner rooms where the doctor’s daughter, bent on uncovered knees, counselled the black toad, her familiar, and the divining cat slept by the wall. The familiar moved its head. The seven danced, rubbing the white wall with their thighs until the blood striped the thin symbols of fertility upon them. Hand in hand they danced among dark symbols, under the charts that marked the rise and fall of the satanic seasons, and their white dresses swung around them. The owls commenced to sing, striking against the music of the suddenly awaking winter. Hand in hand the dancers spun around the black toad and the doctor’s daughter, seven stags dancing, their antlers shaking, in the confusion of the unholy room.
She is a very black woman, said Mrs. Price, and curtsied to the doctor.
He woke to the midwife’s story out of a dream of illness, remembering the broken quicked, the black patch and echo, the mutilated shadows of the seventh sense.
She lay with a black scissor-man.
He wounded her deep, said the doctor, and wiped a lancet on his sleeve.
Together they stumbled down the rocky hill.
A terror met them at the foot, the terror of the blind tapping their white sticks and the stumps of the arms on the solid darkness; two worms in the foil of a tree, bellies on the rubber sap and the glues of a wrong-grained forest, they, holding tight to hats and bags, crawled now up the path that led to the black birth. From right, from left, the cries of labour came in under the branches, piercing the dead wood, from the earth where a mole sneezed, and from the sky, out of the worms’ sight.
They were not the only ones caught that night in the torrential blindness; to them, as they stumbled, the land was empty of men, and the prophets of bad weather alone walked in their neighbourhoods. Three tinkers appeared out of silence by the chapel wall. Capel Cader, said the panman. Parson is down on tinkers, said John Bucket. Cader Peak, said the scissor-man, and up they went. They passed the midwife close; she heard the scissors clacking, and the branch of a tree drum on the buckets. One, two, three, they were gone, invisibly shuffling as she hugged her skirts. Mrs. Price crossed herself for the second time that day, and touched the garlic at her throat. A vampire with a scissors was a Pembroke devil. And the black girl screamed like a pig.
Sister, raise your right hand. The seventh girl raised her right hand. Now say, said the doctor’s daughter, Rise up out of the bearded barley. Rise out of the green grass asleep in Mr. Griffith’s dingle. Big man, black man, all eye, one tooth, rise up out of Cader marshes. Say the devil kisses me. The devil kisses me, said the girl cold in the centre of the kitchen. Kiss me out of the bearded barley. Kiss me out of the bearded barley. The girls giggled in a circle. Swive me out of the green grass. Swive me out of the green grass. Can I put on my clothes now? said the young witch, after encountering the invisible evil.
Throughout the hours of the early night, in the smoke of the seven candles, the doctor’s daughter spoke of the sacrament of darkness. In her familiar’s eyes she read the news of a great and an unholy coming; divining the future in the green and sleepy eyes, she saw, as clearly as the tinkers saw the spire, the towering coming of a beast in stag’s skin, the antlered animal whose name read backwards, and the black, black, black wanderer climbing a hill for the seven wise girls of Cader. She woke the cat. Poor Bell, she said, smoothing his fur the wrong way. And, Ding dong, Bell, she said, and swung the spitting cat.
Sister, raise your left hand. The first girl raised her left hand. Now with your right hand put a needle in your left hand. Where is a needle? Here, said the doctor’s daughter, Is a needle, here in your hair. She made a gesture over the black hair, and drew a needle out from the coil at her ear. Say I cross you. I cross you, said the girl, and, with the needle in her hand, struck at the black cat racked on the daughter’s lap.
For love takes many shapes, cat, dog, pig, or goat; there was a lover, spellbound in the time of mass, now formed and featured in the image of the darting cat; his belly bleeding, he sped past the seven girls, past parlour and dispensary, into the night, on to the hill; the wind got at his wound, and swiftly he darted down the rocks, in the direction of the cooling streams.
He passed the three tinkers like lightning. Black cat is luck, said the panman. Bloody cat is bad luck, said John
Bucket. The scissorman said nothing. They appeared out of silence by the wall of the Peak house, and heard a hellish music through the open door. They peered through the stained-glass window, and the seven girls danced before them. They have beaks, said the panman. Web feet, said John Bucket. The tinkers walked in.
At midnight the black girl bore her baby, a black beast with the eyes of a kitten and a stain at the corner of its mouth. The midwife, remembering birthmarks, whispered to the doctor of the gooseberry on his daughter’s arm. Is it ripe yet? said Mrs. Price. The doctor’s hand trembled, and his lancet cut the baby under the chin. Scream you, said Mrs. Price, who loved all babies.
The wind howled over Cader, waking the sleepy rooks who cawed from the trees and, louder than owls, disturbed the midwife’s meditations. It was wrong for the rooks, those sleepy birds over the zinc roofs, to caw at night. Who put a spell on the rooks? The sun might rise at ten past one in the morning.
Scream you, said Mrs. Price, the baby in her arms, This is a wicked world. The wicked world, with a voice out of the wind, spoke to the baby half smothering under the folds of the midwife’s overcoat. Mrs. Price wore a man’s cap, and her great breasts heaved under the black blouse. Scream you, said the wicked world, I am an old man blinding you, a wicked little woman tickling you, a dry death parching you. The baby screamed, as though a flea were on its tongue.
The tinkers were lost in the house, and could not find the inner room where the girls still danced with the beaks of birds upon them and their web feet bare on the cobblestones. The panman opened the dispensary door, but the bottles and the tray of knives alarmed him. The passages were too dark for John Bucket, and the scissorman surprised him at a corner. Christ defend me, he cried. The girls stopped dancing, for the name of Christ rang in the outer halls. Enter, and, Enter, cried the doctor’s daughter to the welcome devil. It was the scissorman who found the door and turned the handle, walking into candlelight. He stood before Gladwys on the threshold, a giant black as ink with a three days’ beard. She lifted her face to his, and her sackcloth fell away.