And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  The throb had stopped. The pulse. There was not a sound to be heard, as if the entire valley now held its breath beneath the spreading penumbra.

  Ma and Pa stood together on the porch, speechless, eyes cast south. Ma held her bottle limply at her side, sobered by the sight of it. Pa just stood there beside her, dumbfounded – the two of them bound, at long last, by a common bond, one to the other in the fetters of terror. Stuck by the unerring horror of its coming, they stood petrified like two filthy pillars of salt.

  And ah will tell you this: if ah were standing as ah was then, but with a pole-axe raised at mah hind, ah could not have felt more vulnerable than ah did on that day. And if ah were on bended knee in the very lion’s den, or if mah skull was rested between the hammer and the steely anvil ah could not have felt more intensely threatened than ah did at that moment, mah back turned on it – gravely coming – this cold, breathing beast.

  Ah have met with fear before, but believe me, on this day, the first day of the summer of 1941, ah felt – well – let’s just say, sir, that ah was one very fucking shit-scared mute. Yes, ah shaked. Ah shook. Ah did.

  Ah felt ah could not look upon it. Ah’m not sure why now, yet even with mah eyes inclined toward the ground, ah knew exactly the nature of the thing that loomed at mah hind. And ah knew – for all along mah bones this knowing blew – that the bounded duty of this abomination was part of something that only He can comprehend, all working as part of His massive scheme, moving us in ways we often cannot unnerstand. And keeping mah eyes downcast, ah watched mah squat black shadow melt into the treacherous umbra that engulfed us all, spreading over the valley like dark, gelid lava.

  And the silence could not have held its breath a moment longer.

  At mah feet there broke a faint but firm sound. Three slow-metered drops – themselves a prophecy, ah would realize in the years to come – leaked into the very centre of the frying-pan, trespassing within the bounders of its claim, with a ring somewhere between a ping and a plunk – an ictus, solemn and even, upon its punished face. That trio of cold, tin chimes broke the tumid silence like distant curfew bells carried on the new night air. And it seemed to me at that time that this trinity of tears – like the curt taps of the maestro’s baton or the three commands barked at the fusilade – struck the fetters from the cataclysm.

  It thundered. It did. The skin of the sky ripped open, spewing forth its burden into the valley’s basin. Corrupt and putrid and unrecanting, it came in slashes of bilge and sheets of swill – vile and poisonous waters, as if all the welkin bile had been pumped from the sewers of Hell then vomited in a black and furious torrent down upon the shack and the cane, soaking me through to the bone before ah even thought to run, before ah even thought to raise mah head. Ah watched the raddled dust pock, then turn to running mud around mah boots. Ah let the rain bite at mah nape and naked arms, figgering shelter to be a waste of time, and in any case ah could not stand to hear the bloody fracas inside – for ah had seen Ma, still on the porch, raise one porky fist at the rain and engage in a brief but stormy exchange, to be cut short as the rusted guttering above her head buckled unner its sudden, muddy load and pissed a soup of leaf and possum crap down her thrashing tit.

  So ah just stood there like that, in the rain, feeling mah skin go numb – a little from the pelt of its hard waters, ah guess, a little from the cold.

  Above the wrath, above the din, above all the angels’ barking thunder, ah heard Mule making a wheezing ‘Hee’, then release a long and heavy ‘Haaaw’, and ah looked up and ah saw Mule, and Mule it seemed looked straight at me – and we stood that way for a numb, wet moment, pondering the folly of each other’s lot: the mute and the mule, the mule and the mute.

  Finally Mule rolled one derisive eye at me, as if to say: ‘Who, but an ass, would tarry midst the deluge when shelter be to his left and to his right and when he is neither hobbled nor is loaded up with chains?’

  Then, with a flick of his head, he curled his lips around his muddle of teeth and grinned at me.

  Mule lowered his eyes and sighed, bowing beneath the yoke of his creaturehood, to suffer the downpour in silence.

  Mule’s chain clinked and ah felt a twinge of shame.

  ‘Who, but an ass?’ ah asked mahself, and in truth ah could not answer.

  Ah booted the frying-pan into the air and watched it whorl once and land face up on the flooding slope, only to be set awash on the running waters, down-bound and spinning round and around, that rambling pan, like a legless beggar, its one asking-arm grasping wildly as it sailed down the versant toward the cane crops already ravaged by the deluge. There, at the foot of the gallows-tree and at the edge of the ruined cane, ah could just make out the pan slowly revolve but one time, upon that darkly growing pool, before slipping unner. Yes, but one drunk demented circle before the pan was summoned down, face-first beneath the surface, its lone and mendicant arm still asking, still grasping into the merciless torrent – its one hopeless, sinking plea echoed in the stone-same gesture of the stone-same gallows-tree.

  II

  Inside the tabernacle the congregation sat atrophied on pine-board pews, all eyes fixed upon the vestry door. There was a stench of wet rags and a sneaping clamminess in the air. No one spoke. Only the rain could be heard, slamming down on the old iron roof.

  The men and women seemed older, dogged and haggard with want of sleep, their faces like the countenance of the valley itself, grizzled with new lines and gutters born overnight and longanimously worn.

  The women, young and old, wore heavy black sackcloth tunics covered with clean white cotton smocks. Their heavy black archless shoes were not unlike clogs, in that they swelled at the toe and stiffened the gait to a slow, rigid shuffle. Each woman’s hair was long, but coiled up fiercely into a cruel bun, or ‘knop’, held tight – to leave scrubbed ears exposed – by two or three cane needles. Draped across the knop and similarly secured was a piece of hand-embroidered lace. So severe was the knop that the skin, drawn tautly back along the hairline, seemed to be stretching the features of each woman’s face like a shrunken mask. Their well-scrubbed cheeks gleamed. Their fingernails were pared to the quick. Many held battered Madonna lilies plucked from the lily beds around the tabernacle. The flowers’ pointed yellow tongues pushed out through the fat labial folds, cut golden against all the virgin white of smock and fleshy petal.

  The menfolk wore trousers and jackets, all cut from the same coarse black fabric, and their shirts, boiled clean and white and heavily starched, were worn collarless. Each man held in his lap a straw hat with a wide flat brim, unless he was one of the older members of the society, who distinguished themselves by owning hats of a similar design but cut from stiff black felt.

  For this glum assembly the catharsis was over. For five fevered days and nights, the streets of Ukulore had reflected, in a hundred puddling eyes, the shapes of sackcloth reeling in morbid genuflexion, like the fast shadows of bats and birds, as the Ukulites petitioned their God for mercy.

  The Ukulite women found, it seemed, in times of death or high catastrophe such as this, an irresistible vehicle for dramatic expression.

  There in the night, hidden beneath veils of rain, they had wailed and weltered in the mud, punishing themselves with frightening abandon in an orgy of self-abuse. Shoeless, their sackcloth robes torn and sodden, each wearing over her face a black veil – as often as not discarded in the throes of penance – the Ukulite women tore at their hair, beat their breasts with stones, crawled through the streets on bleeding knees and purged their bodies with nettle wands, disinfectants and irritants.

  Into the early hours of the morning they had performed their weird piacular rites, each in deep and delirious potation with her own pain, each a single hump of convulsions unto herself and each in a self-effacement as determined as the tempest, inflicting brutal rebuke upon her own person, for these were the dues exacted by a collective shame.

  But the downpour did not abate, despite every morbid bid for atonemen
t. The air hung heavy, reboant with spent oblations and worming acts of contrition, all tossed back by the rumbling nimbus, like undersized fish.

  And all the time the rain still fell, spreading puddles into each other to form pools so dark – even in the half-light of the new day – that they looked like pockets of ink, and every so often the eye would be deceived by a discarded veil lying lost upon the ground like a pool.

  The vestry door opened and Sardus Swift entered the chapel. Thin and stooped, his eyes stared fish-cold from their orbits.

  The congregation’s mood seemed to darken further still as he moved into the glow of the candles, and the people saw, in the buckled figure that bid genuflexion to the altar, all the vile doubts so apparent in each one’s heart.

  Sardus walked a broken line to the mahogany pulpit. The rain punished the tabernacle with a roar and a crash. He raised his voice and petitioned his Lord, but his words were lost in the relentless drumming of the rain.

  Water dripped upon them, there, within.

  III

  These figures tell the story of sugar production in Ukulore Valley in the early 1940s.

  IV

  Below is a page.

  Ah took it from a book – part inventory, part diary.

  And it belonged to Pa and it was a secret.

  It spanned the years from 1937 to 1940.

  FIRST DAY IN JUNE 1940

  Main ‘BURN-OFF’ CATCH… NTH-EAST ROW

  Baggers

  50 Rats (approx)

  6 Toads (all dead)

  Wire nets

  15 Rats

  40 Toads (approx) (10 dead)

  2 Vargus Fan Lizards (1 dead, 1 part eaten)

  3 Grass Snakes (2 large, 1 small) (1 dead)

  1 Horned Lizard

  1 Blue-runged Lizard (dead and eaten)

  Trip-traps + Teeth-snares

  1 Barking Wolf (med) (bitch) (b. legs gone but live)

  2 Razorback Hogs

  3 Feral Cats (1 w/litter (8) everyone dead)

  1 Lizard (type unrecognizable but dead)

  1 Possum (burnt but live) (maimed)

  1 Black Snake (poisoners)

  1 Toad (d)

  7 Rats (all dead)

  1 Crow (trippt snare while scabbing on cat)

  (first bird catched in land-snare) (dead)

  Pit-trap

  35 Rats (approx) (6 dead)

  1 Black Snake (5ft) (dead. part eaten.)

  1 Feral Cat (dead. eaten.)

  Loops + Coils

  0 Zero (all trigged)

  Spike-slap

  0 Zero (not trigged)

  Drop-beam + Tangle-beam

  0 Zero (all trigged but one)

  Grab-sacks

  7 Toads (all dead + eaten + part eaten)

  1 Feral Cat (dead + part eaten)

  Rat shite + big holes gnored in hessian

  Ah found it, this diary, this inventory, in the very same tin trunk in which ah was to discover the jacket, the telescope and the compass, each wrapped up in newspaper. Only the Great One, in all his omnipotence, could have foreseen just how crucial it was that ah, His Servant, His cog, should break the lock and lift the lid of that forbidden tin trunk and remove, one by one, each parcel wrapped in yellowing newspaper and, like a fruit, peel away the pith of mah predestination – and in God’s measured time, expose the core of mah calling.

  The trunk was kept covered by a hessian potato sack in mah parents’ room. The heavy lock bulged beneath the coarse cloth. Pa kept the book a secret, for it was wrapped in newspaper when ah found it. Even though ah had fashioned a spy-hole in the west wall of their room, ah never once saw Pa make one solitary entry in the little battered book. Yet it was printed in Pa’s slow hand, in Indian ink, which, kept in a tiny bottle, was also wrapped carefully in newspaper, stored in the trunk that stayed always in their chamber, until they were dead and both long gone.

  Ah was absolutely forbidden to enter mah parents’ room.

  When ah was just four mah Ma grabbed ahold of mah ear and, twisting it viciously, she hissed into mah eyes, ‘To enter me an ya Pa’s room, baw, keep ya spyin eye peeled for the V1XO! Beware! The Vixo will ask ya for the password and if ya cain’t say it out loud, baw, it will jump up and jam a tin-stick square ups ya lil ass and all his screamin wogs and hog-dogs will hunt ya down and eat ya brains for supper. Unnerstan?’

  Ah was scared – yes, ah was. Ah could feel mah innards become bundles of livid rope from which swung a chattering sabbat of hunchbacked bell-ringers – the dread gnashing Wogs – vile misshapen gnomes shinning up mah spine for a brain-bake – and ah could feel the Vixo’s bloody butcher’s knife punched up mah flue – oh yes – and the gush of guts running down the insides of mah legs – oh and listen – here comes the Hog-Dogs grunting and snarling in the distance, hungry and drawing near and so on and so forth.

  Ah can only add at this point, that at four years of age mah mind was but a thirsty sponge. It was absorbing all the wonders of life without prejudice, drinking at every fount and spring, drawing no conclusions, no correlations, making no order of mah observations, accepting the long with the short, the good with the bad, without question and without query.

  In mah infant years and so through to mah teens – even as a young man ah sat not in judgement of mah fellow man. But hear this. Even as ah dangled from one pinched empurpled ear, a wincing woeborn puppet surrendered up to the pedophagic freak show which mah mother would so sadistically invoke – even then, no more than a mite, not even a lustrum of life’s waters passed – ah, Euchrid Eucrow, harboured such a hate for that sick fucken bitch that ah felt mah glands fill with a deadly venom that polluted mah bodily secretions – it did. Ah emitted a lethal catarrh – black spit, foul and deadly.

  Ah was corrupted by hate. Ah was monstrous. Ah was diabolical, deadlier than a rattlesnake, and while the sow slept, the snake – it struck! Listen. Once, while Her Slutness lay sprawled in her armchair, ah slid up to her and deposited whole mouthfuls of warm, morbid sputum into her bottle. Then ah left the house, making sure ah woke Her Bitchship with a slam of the door. Ah slipped around to the south wall, pulled the spigot from the spy-hole, and put mah eye up to the hole – mah black little heart romping in its cage, happy as hell.

  Ah watched her down the killer elixir in one long swig. Mah eye went cold. She belched ominously and shut her eyes like before. She began to snore. A minute passed and ah fell into a sickly sweat. Mah mouth filled with foul and acrid rheum.

  Ah slammed the spigot back in its hole and hissed.

  The hog was immune.

  Utterly shitted ah gobbed at mah shadow and watched an onion-weed curl and die on mah left shoulder.

  Needless to say, ah never entered the room until Ma and Pa were both dead and gone. Even so, the Vixo reigned long in mah brains, butchering the passing years.

  V

  Sometimes ah would sit unner the dubious shelter of the porch and watch as the parade of vehicles climbed and descended Hooper’s Hill – unner the curtain of the rain, deep into the night.

  Sometimes ah would single out one vehicle and watch it crawl down the harlot’s hill and ah would follow with mah eyes the bright fanning of its beams all the way to the faceless driver’s nuptial nest.

  Often ah could see, like the glowing doodles left hanging by a firefly upon the face of the night, the car beam’s after-light, like a golden chain binding together whoredom and wifedom – like two massive lead balls – and shackling them to the shins of the falsehearted fornicator who could never again feel the presence of one without suffering the weight of the other.

  But as the rain persisted and the months passed and the seasonal and permanent workers alike began to abandon the ruined valley, the parade to and from Hooper’s Hill gradually thinned.

  Even so, the little pink caravan remained upon the hill like a valentine.

  For a time

  VI

  When the malignant year 1941 finally abdicated, it left as its successor a black and mons
trous spawn. A sullen year was 1942, stewing in the pits of constipation but nevertheless pissing a dark and gravelly stream down into the valley as if it were a pot.

  The deluge had lost its former wrath and roar, but the bane of the valley was far from lifted. To the townsfolk, God seemed as a mule who would not budge: a dog in the manger of mercies. The grey and bitter swill of the Second Year steeped the valley and its denizens in a bog of glum torpor.

  The streets lay all but empty, the streetlights in permanent use; for the days were dim and pitch-dark were the nights.

  The town slumped. Things rotted. Others swelled. Some got bogged while others sunk. There were things that withered and things that shrunk.

  The Second Year saw the funk and fear thicken as apathy closed up the eyes and ears and grew upon tongues like a mould. Able-bodied men succumbed to an inertia that saw them spend more and more days on their backs, in their beds. Women sat at windows, lost in other worlds. Some bore the scars of rejection in their hearts, others upon their faces. There were those big with favours given, and those wasted by favours taken.

  Intemperance. Self-abuse. Gluttony. Sloth.

  There were some homes that took in Madness as a tenant.

  It was on one wet and eldritch eve that Rebecca Swift, Sardus’ young but abstracted wife, heard a knocking in her head – too loud this time to ignore – and with trembling heart and tiny, trembling hands, drew back the big, black bolt a crack, and let the tenant in.

  Rebecca was slave to a crushing melancholia that plundered at will her frail person and lay upon her like a spent lover. As these attacks grew longer and more funest, so too her moods, deep and blue as bruises, grew more deeply fumid, and Sardus paid agonized witness to his beloved’s slow but steady estrangement, seeing himself in his long-practised, self-abasing mind’s eye as an odious mockery of manhood – a wretched travesty, cuckolded by an incubus, by a circus of blue devils.