And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  The figure that had entered Binbridge Penitentiary in the winter of 1935 returned to the free world a changed man. Thoroughly emaciated, his once baby face was now drawn and bloodless. A thin purple cicatrix emerged from one bushy eyebrow and hooked around his right eye, terminating at a small, latent mole sprouting short, clipped hairs – like a fish hook baited with a little black beetle. His small teeth had grown flavid and troublesome, and his most profitable asset – his large, seemingly veridical eyes – seemed to have lost their directness, grown icy and prone toward gazing at the middle space, the area between things.

  His rangy gait had stiffened and affected a rolling limp, the parasites responsible for his atrophy having spread from the enteric region and infested his right thigh, and his posture had become stooped and broken.

  Depressed and taciturn, Abie Poe took a train and moved one town further down the line.

  He found lodgings the same evening, renting a room from a Swiss spinster named Heidi Hoch, becoming her sole boarder. Heidi was a devout Anabaptist and at the age of eighty-three still walked the quarter-mile to her church each week.

  The white-haired spinster nursed her sickly lodger back to health. But in 1940, Heidi Hoch was stricken by a severe case of Black Measles.

  At her deathbed, Abie Poe had barely been able to bring his eyes to look upon the haemorrhagic rash that blistered upon her face and scalp. So chronic was the pemphigus that her scalp seemed to be crawling with black ants. Then, opening her eyes and lifting a scarlet hand to her face, Heidi had said: ‘Look what is upon me, Abie. Your sin. Your sin which I have gladly rooted from you. I will take it with me when I go. You are clean, Abie. I have made you clean!’

  Abie Poe filled a tea chest with Heidi’s tiny carved dolls, wrapping them in her hand-painted linen and embroidery and laying a white pearl crucifix on top. He carried the box to the Parish Welfare Centre and traded the lot for a severe black suit and tall wide-brimmed hat, made of felt and also black. Looking in the mirror, Abie Poe saw a man lean and hungry looking, his face grave and stern and deeply carved by the unremitting tools of remorse: a man imbued with a mission, a calling.

  ‘There does God reside, stamped like a brand upon my face,’ thought Abie Poe by way of initiation into his new-found ministration.

  Back at the little house, Abie took Heidi’s Bible and then left for the last time.

  From that day on, the evangelist pounded his Bible at every opportunity, be it on street corners or at makeshift tabernacle citizen meets, in saloons, or down the lost beats of whoredom, in squares and parks and in schools and gaols, up the elm-lined streets of the rich and throughout Salem’s infamous slums – echoing the words of his dead landlady, and infusing them with thespian thunder as he shouted ‘Sin! Sin is everywhere, Sir! It is upon everything! Madam! Are you so steeped in muck you cannot see it?’

  Yet Poe’s true calling was yet to be found.

  It was not until he began hearing reports concerning the sordid activities of certain families living in the mountain areas – xenophobic ‘clans’ involved in blood feuds, murder, rape, infanticide, incest and so on – that Poe the sin-seeker felt his life-mission had truly commenced.

  Abie Poe bought a horse and rode to the range. At the ridge that marks the official gateway to the mountains, he met a young girl of eight or so years. She was sitting by the road amongst a massive pile of bedding.

  ‘Come here, child. Direct me to the nearest house of worship in these parts,’ said Poe.

  The girl stood. The skin on her cheeks was cracked and raw. She held a small green grass snake in her grubby hand. Observing in her eyes the first clots of blindness forming Jike a skin, Poe asked a second time.

  ‘Your chapel? Where is it? Point the way.’

  The child lifted a sheet from the bedding. A woman lay beneath it, her skin alive with the parasites of the long dead. Said the little girl with difficulty, ‘The worms git Ely… git Maw now…’

  Abie Poe covered up the woman, leaning her against a stone-slab sign that had been made illegible by the passing of the years.

  The girl turned and walked off into the mountains, the evangelist following closely. He looked at every shrub and stone for sinners.

  It would be seven months before Abie Poe rode his nag back out of the Black Morton Range. A pint of moonshine in his saddle-bag. A six-gun on each hip.

  Though his guns remained holstered, the measure of his inclemency tempered not; rather Preacher Poe stormed the church in a rampant state of crazed malediction, raving prophecy, revelation and inflated promises – reboant echoes of his black-clad gestures – and winning the occasionally renitent but generally beseeching trust of those in attendance, Ukulite and non-Ukulite alike.

  One or two of the elder Ukulites made token attempts to quiz the preacher, but Poe danced through their snares, skipping deftly through their jaws. Even the ill-tempered Wilma Eldridge, always ready with a crow to pluck, had her affront turned upon her when she questioned Poe’s insistence that he was invested with the spirit of Elijah, and had been sent to the valley under divine instruction. Wheeling her squealing chair toward the preacher, she cut him off in mid-sentence with her bitter croak: ‘Forgive my not standing, Prophet Poe, but I wish to know just what sign has the Lord given you to prove that you are what you profess to be?’

  ‘They who are not blind see it,’ answered Poe and took a pace forward, refusing to be intimidated by the cripple.

  ‘Surely the Almighty makes His signs more evident?’ she replied, rubbing her numb legs till her knuckles showed white.

  ‘Blinder than he who has lost his eyes is he who closes them tight and refuses to see the light of day.’

  Then the preacher stretched forth one accusatory finger and moved his hand in a slow semicircle until it had pointed to everyone present. Proffering not a word, Poe allowed the slow, pained squeal of the wheelchair to speak for him. A weary Wilma Eldridge made her retreat, retracing her muddy tracks.

  ‘And ye,’ said Poe, finger pointing at one and all, after the chair had at last stopped its terrible puling and the attention of the congregation was his again, ‘ye cocks of the dunghill, ye strutters on the muckheap of the world, ye who have kissed the devil beneath the tail, pray to the Lord God Almighty that He have mercy upon you! For His hunter has his arrows drawn, and, like the way to the kingdom, his aim is straight and clean. Pray, wallowers, for His hunter’s heels are raised! Wicked hearts shall be lanced, and their carcasses swallowed into the earth!’

  ‘Who is the hunter?’ called a trembling voice.

  ‘He is before you, even now,’ said Abie Poe.

  Ah listened to the preacher’s first sermon from unner the church that tottered upon two feet of pine-wood stilt. Ah could hear his words plainly from that crawl-space, his limping footfall, the murmurous throng uttering hallelujahs in solemn communion, the cry of the cripple’s wheels, and ah knew from the force of his thunderings that they were as much a self-delusion as they were a public deceit.

  ‘Who is the hunter?’

  ‘He is before you, even now!’

  Ha! The irony of it all! Poor deluded Poe! The mad preacher’s prophecy was almost correct! O, the torment of saints and would-be saints. Ha! Never to bask in the glory of his forecast affirmed! Had he only known that the hunter of whom they inquired was, in fact, me!

  ‘Who is the hunter?’

  ‘He is beneath you, even now!’

  The floorboards rumbled as the congregation rose to leave. Fearing detection and not chancing a dash across the coverless plateau, ah crawled beneath a large tarp that lay across a pile of pine planks. Ah heard them descend the stairs only an arm’s stretch above me, but ah felt safe in mah funk-hole, eyes closed and breathing deeply the not unpleasant odour of mould and damp canvas. Scarlet bouquets blossomed beneath mah eyelids. A web breathed upon mah face and the spiders of sleep spun their sweet slumber –

  Ah dream ah am a hunter, naked but for a quiver and a bow, leaving in mah wake a trail
of dead beasts. Ah stalk an unknown quarry amongst tall cane. Cosey Mo steps into mah path, barefoot and dressed in a thin white petticoat. Ah am ashamed of mah nakedness but she smiles and beckons me toward her and though ah have pitted mahself against the most ferocious of beasts, ah tremble like a leaf as ah approach her. Her shivering garment slips from her shoulders and crackles over the rise and fall of her breasts, her belly, her hips, her buttocks, her thighs, spitting static the length of her body and pooling about her feet. Her toenails are red. She is incomparable in her pulchritude, her golden hair lifted from her shoulders by the gently fanning fronds. A panther slinks toward her, unner cover of the cane – and glad of the chance to display mah prowess as a fearless hunter ah draw back mah bow, aim, and send an arrow through the cane, piercing the heart of the big blue cat. A rabid bloodhound appears, crashing through the cane. Mah arrow stops it in its tracks. Cosey draws breath, her hillocks of pleasure rising like full, golden moons. An eagle wings yet closer and mah arrow finds its feathered breast. Cosey lets forth a stifled cry and, sobbing, she calls out, ‘Oh Jock!’ as a naked man crashes through the cane into the clearing, three arrows embedded in his body, the white feather tailfins bright against the kingdom of ink-blue beasts that roam his body. He falls into Cosey’s arms and is dead. Ah pluck each arrow from the corpse and return them to their quiver. Ah hear harp music. The blood dries on Jock Snow’s body and the animals all go still. The music swells and a host of cupids descend in the guise of Love. The cupids shoot a volley of tiny silver arrows from their curlicue bows into the air. The arrows dip and sing and lance and kill Cosey’s body, for they are envenomed with asp drool. Ah am the hunter and mah mark is sure. Ah empty mah quiver into the breasts of the pink, winged babes, grounding the entire flock. They squirm on mah arrows in the nodding, rocking cane. Ah lay me down by Cosey’s corpse, and folding her blood-specked petticoat across mah face ah listen to the music of their moaning, swallowed by the darkness. Yellow bouquets. Red bouquets. Ah inhale the scent of the unnergarment – mould and damp canvas.

  *

  Poe wasted no time in putting to the test the boundaries of his sanity. Three days after arriving in Ukulore, on a wet Sunday, the maniacal preacher embarked on one of his most farcical exploits. It began at the church.

  Satisfied that all the townsfolk were present, Poe began.

  ‘Sinners! Look not to your neighbours’ hands, but to your own. Not a soul among you is clean. You are all steeped in filth. Muck is upon you and your neighbour. But behold, backsliders. The wicked are known from the womb and they are sullied as such till death spits them into the abyss. They stand amongst you now. Before we can know the truly corrupt, we must first ourselves be cleansed. Harken to my word, sinners. Ah speak of the conversion of the spirit through the mystery of baptism! Too long have you wallowed in the muck and mire. Forward! Follow! The healing-pool of the spirit is pure! Come, sinners! His waters await your apotheosis of faith.’

  Abie Poe limped to the rear of the chapel and stood before the huge double doors. Again he addressed the congregation.

  ‘Heed this, sinners! The purification of the spirit begins here at this very door. Attend to my word and obey it completely! Before leaving the chapel, remove your hats and cauls. Make bare your heads before the Almighty! Take off your shoes and remove your gloves, so that heads nor hands nor feet are hidden, for these are the places of the stigmata. Now, Onward! Forward! Ah can smell the blood upon you! Leave everything, sinners! Follow on foot! To the blessed waters! To the blessed waters! Onwards!’

  The preacher flung open the double doors and plunged into the storm. By the time Poe had mounted his ‘throne’ with the aid of his unique two-step stirrup and had clipped and buckled the harness into place, the hatless, shoeless and gloveless three hundredfold had also braved the storm and stood in the rain awaiting further instructions.

  ‘Onward!’ cried Poe, and dug his spurs deep into calloused flanks. The ancient nag uttered a sick neigh, then seemed to sigh as he bore Poe away. Down Glory Trail and north along Maine, away from the town, and toward the wetlands. The multitude clamoured in his wake.

  Two immense, grape-coloured clouds butted and brawled in the vault of heaven, roped in by a cincture of spine and gorge. So low were the dark colossi that the tops of both versants were engulfed, and so completely did they cover the valley that, even though it was mid-afternoon, the three hundred or so denizens were barely able to see just where they were headed.

  As the storm thickened Abie Poe held high a spirit lamp, waving it wraith-like beside him and allowing its light to fire up his gaunt skull and catch the madded glint within his eyes.

  Barking wild edicts at the throng who blundered blindly behind, Poe allowed himself to become fully ensconced in his newfound role as Messiah. His rhetoric became bombast, his manner nothing less than burlesque.

  ‘O flock! Follow! I am the light that shines at the bottomless pit! When darkness is upon everything let me be your guiding lamp! For mine is the way to salvation! To glory! If redemption is thy wish, sinners, then follow, for I am the luminary that flickers, even in the valley… of the shadow… of death!’

  A cleaver of lightning leapt from the belly of a dark and purple cloud like a silver finger splitting a dead tree that stood at the foot of the ruined crops some two hundred yards away. Poe swung the spirit lamp madly.

  ‘Yonder are the waters! For God speaks and clear is His voice! Yonder, sinners! Yonder!’

  And to the roar and tumble of the black-bellied nimbi that butted thunderously like two battling moose, Abie Poe – arms flapping above his head – burst into song, in a tenor so rich and strong that it might conceivably have reached and even soothed the empyrean arena of war above, had the nature of the song been a little less mean-spirited.

  ‘Ah told that ol’ backslider!

  Ah told that ol’ backbiter!

  Told the rambler! Gambler!

  That midnight rider!

  Ah told them, “God Almighty’s gunna cut you down!!”’

  Then, pointing his nag toward the north-east, he turned off Maine, tramping up an unnamed track that terminated atop a low rise upon which sat a weather-punished clapboard shack, built beside a sprawling junk-heap. Clambering aback of him came the multitude, like a grand parade of clowns, tripping and tumbling their way to a sloppy, fully slapstick salvation.

  If it had not been for the bolt blasting the left arm clean off the gallows-tree, ah might never have let up playing with mah blood at all. As it was, mah anxiety in regard to the uncertain nature of mah delinquent blood saw me digging up the shears from beneath the gallows-tree and smuggling them into mah room. Ah had already gouged a sizeable hole in each palm with a fang of ragged tin, prised from the grinning jaw of a trap that hung rusted and redundant on the shack wall – one of a vast gallery of ghastly steel goblins. As it turned out – though things turn a little murky here – ah did not use the shears upon mah person, though ah do remember snipping mah bed sheets into strips that ah used, one by one, wound upon wound, as bandages. Later, when ah had taken control of mahself, ah folded the used and crusty bandages and put them in a shoebox. Ah labelled the box ‘Strips’.

  After three days and three sleepless nights, with the corked and sordid air of mah cell sticky and damp and the rain outside showing signs of a fucken monster thunderstorm – ragged pitchforks of blue fire, deafening tonitruation, thrashing rain – ah sat in mah unnerwear, oozing grey sweat, corpse-like and ashen-faced through lack of sleep and food and quite possibly blood. The initial inspection of mah claret’s complexion having taken a murky turn, ah picked at the evil, black crusts that capped each wound with a dead and ghastly crown. New blood would bubble in each one’s place, bright and red at first but darking blackly at the heart to a grim crimson curd, finally to clot and to harden, sick and black. Yes, sick and black. Ah put the scabs in a tobacco tin that ah lined first with cotton wool, and put the tin in the shoebox with the hair and nail clippings, the shoebox labelled ‘Clippin
gs’.

  Ah find it hard to recall… all this… for want of details… all lost in the impossible tangle of thorny gore and crimson briar… dark mutterings… sticky pools… trembling palms and little thickened wellings… dimly… filling… these days of fear.

  Ah had pulled the loosened plank in the wall of mah room to one side and was in the process of pissing on a few thistles, when ah saw through the wedge-shaped opening a lightning bolt leap from the leaden heavens and thrust its prong into the soggy heart of the gallows-tree, blasting its left arm clean off the main stem, leaving but one arm to beseech the sky, begging Heaven’s tender mercy. God, it seemed, had at last acknowledged its dumb cry in the wilderness, and roaring with laughter, had flung down one sure bolt of fire to dismantle its beggar’s gesture.

  It made a sickening crack.

  Ah sat back down on mah bed, and as if suddenly delivered from some kind of bedevilment ah gaped in horror at the state of mah being and at the state of things about me – the litter, the smeared sheets, the splattered potato-sack blind, the wet balls of newspaper, the threaded needles, mah Bibles soiled and torn – pages strewn around the room and glued to the walls with mah blood – the splashed floor beneath mah feet, the unholy state of mah sick-bed studded with tiny glass fragments, thumbtacks, splinters –

  Mah skin crawled. Ah oozed icy grey sweat. Tears streamed down mah cheeks. Ah sat with fingers splayed, arms lifted, and ah felt mah very soul squirm within its shabby vestments of squalid flesh. The tiny room reeked with the stench of me. Ah was filth. Ah was foulness. Ah was swinishness itself. And ah longed to be clean.

  Ah rose weakly and stumbled from the shack, across the front porch and into the yard, mah hands bandaged into two filthy gauze mittens. Ah felt the heavens’ cold emission upon mah upturned face, on mah tight-shut lids, rinsing the muck from mah gaping mouth, from mah scalp, from the slum of mah body. The storm thundered and crashed, the air crackling with electricity. Rain thrashed about me. The atmosphere swelled with God’s brawling legions – butting bull clouds grew tusks of fire, renting the leaden bellies of other welkin beasts of war.