And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  ‘Cleanse me,’ ah thought. ‘Cleanse me,’ and the heavens whelmed me with their ablution.

  Ah opened mah eyes and looked to the smitten gallows-tree, and ah thought for a moment that the thunderbolt had struck the long-dead tree to life, for in silhouette both its arms seemed lifted again, heaven-raised and thrashing wildly, its thin fingers raking the sky and its trunk reeling on its spindly roots. And then it was magically given voice, and in that second a flash of white light burst upon the horizon and exposed the enchanted gallows-tree for the madman it was – Abie Poe.

  Standing there in mah nakedness ah watched the horse-borne preacher ride toward me, and all of a sudden ah was overwhelmed with dread – the horror of imminent doom. Ah heard a voice inside mah head intone: ‘Death wore black and came by horse and many thronged behind him’, then repeat it, and in that instant mah palms began to itch madly and ah inspected the blushing holes and the itch and the rain and the bellyache of the clouds, and the voice inside mah head – which seemed to me like many voices now – and the man that came toward me shouting, always shouting –

  All these things – each by their own and as one legion of voices – all these things spoke to me of death and of darkness and of blood – and ah dropped to mah knees and inclined mah head, numbed by the rain, deafened by the fremitus of the deluge, and ah closed mah eyes. Ah think at that moment ah heard – for the very first time – God’s voice begin to speak to me – yes, ah believe that God did try to speak. For above the chantings that grew louder and louder ah heard – inside mah head – a voice, low and soft-spoken yet clearly apart and unaffected by the chanting.

  ‘Euchrid,’ it said, ‘Euchrid…’

  There was a low peal of thunder. There was a flash of white lightning – and in that instant ah was hoisted by both arms onto mah feet and swept up by a scrambling mass of persons in pursuit of Poe – up the slope and down. Pushed and bullied and jostled, ah spun wildly midst the horde of sopping, shoeless creatures, like a blind man in a busy street. Ah had not heard them coming, drowned out as they were by the storm’s thunderama, but once within the scrum’s mad bosom its din was such that the war in heaven seemed almost tamed.

  Darkness drenched the valley as men and women slipped and skidded down the muddy slope in the wake of Poe, who, gesticulating wildly, led them in a wide half-circle around mah shack, to stop at the brink of the murky and bloated waters that surrounded the swampland – a vast moat, a circular girdle of black, poisoned water.

  Through the milling crowd that teetered upon the moat’s uncertain edge, ah glimpsed Poe wading fearlessly through the atramental waters, clad in white unnerwear, his sinister black jacket and shirt and his ridiculous black hat – ah hate hats – doffed and left with his horse back on terra firma somewhere. By the way he took to the water, it is mah belief that as the raving wompster waded deeper and deeper into the drowning-pool of his swollen religious mania, he saw himself not as one in a long line of disciples re-enacting the sacred ritual of Baptism, but rather this cachexic and beardless huckster, who was now bellowing at his followers to join him, believed he was the great hairy hydrophiliac himself, and that his sodden and shapeless longjohns were no less than camel skins.

  One or two of the throng had stepped gingerly into the water, frightened by Poe’s tirade and the grim vision he proffered for any who did not partake of his exoteric ablution. Bulrushes rocked and reeled in the low waters. People swarmed about me, closing in on all sides, bumping me on.

  Some of the less hysterical participants stood further along the bank like a flock of water-birds, each balancing on one leg as they rolled up their trousers and removed their heavy black, their starched shirts smeared and splashed with mud. Others flocked to the very lip of the bank, which was not altogether rock solid – if you know what ah mean – mostly it was just slippery and limp and sagging and unsafe. Ah was an animal in unnerpants trapped in a cage of legs – hoary, hairy, mud-caked and discalced – and ah was getting very fucken tired of being trodden on, kicked, tripped and trampled. Ah wanted desperately to scream ‘Let me out of here! Ah don’t wanna be cleaned! Mah natural state is unclean!. Ah am a very filthy human being. Just shift to one side and let me out of here!’

  But ah was hectored, bullied onward and onward and onward.

  The thin shadows of bulrushes, backlit by spirit lamps, reached across the tar-black waters, so that gilded fingers of light raked the swelling dominion of the wild-eyed baptist with their eerie fidgetings.

  ‘Praise the Lord!’ bellowed Hilda Baxter who, judging by her busty anhelations, had clearly pushed Wilma Eldridge on her two cranky, mud-packed wheels from the church to the lip of the baptismus, quite probably unaided. But now, her sanity temporarily unhinged through sheer exhaustion – or so it seemed – she ignored the frantic objections of the crippled crone and, abandoning her place behind the wheelchair, leaped monstrously into the raven drink and thundered toward the evangelist.

  ‘I am vile! I am foul! My spirit stinketh!’ she roared, as ah squatted in her spot behind the chair and watched through the wheels.

  ‘Wash me! Wash me!’ she cried, and ah noticed the wheelchair, packed with black muck, sink an inch into the muddy bank. The cripple stiffed, hovering as she was on the threshold of ablution.

  ‘Elijah! Baptise us!’ burst forth Carp Boone and, hand in hand with his wife Sadie, he pressed past me and plunged into the sinister water. The throng inched forward.

  ‘I want to be clean! Renew my spirit, Baptist!’ piped pink-eyed Sadi’e, and a thunderbolt rent the heavens with a spike of blue light.

  ‘And I, Baptist! Wash away my sin!’ cried another who had braved the floodlands. Ah turned around and attempted to push back through the crowd, but people were clambering from the rear ranks to the front, pushing and shoving their way to redemption, and ah found mahself, after considerable struggling, precisely where ah had started – pressed against the back of the wheelchair.

  Wilma Eldridge had a front-row seat and she sat facing the soup, frozen stiff and speechless with fear, her two bony hands gripping the sides of her contraption, her bare wet head sitting erect on her scrawny neck – and, well, ah was kind of sandwiched between this twisty old gimp and the roiled throng – and, well, all the time the pushing and the shoving and the jabbing was getting more intolerable – yes, it was – and the cloacal sump that they were rejoicing in was filling more and more with candidates ready to be purified – and, well, a lot of things were working their way through mah mind – like, well, first off, ah didn’t belong here with these people, and, secondly, ah was going to be up to mah eyeballs in sewerage if ah didn’t do something fast, and ah was thinking about some kind of diversionary tactic, and how, if something fairly drastic happened to Poe or one of the faithful – and someone elbowed me again and ah thought ‘Dear Wilma Wheelchair, why is it that we unfortunates, the lame and the dumb – why must we forever be the ones who catch all the crap? Why?’ and as ah leant over and yanked back her safety brake, ah believe ah almost heard her draw breath in order to answer me – ah did – as ah squeezed to one side and let the surge of the mass do its ugly business.

  The chair rolled forward with a groan of vulcanized rubber against steel, a flurry of futile fingers furiously back-braking, raking the mud-caked spokes, hammering the handbrake. It leaned, toppled forward, and loomed out over the water’s grim catoptric surface that stretched before her, and then completing a half-somersault plunged headlong into the shallows of the abysmal, baptismal bilge.

  Then, like the legion of unclean spirits that Jesus bid enter the swine, the squealing herd went the way of the wheelchair, leaping to each side of it or diving over it so as to avoid becoming entangled in the infernal contraption – the two slow-churning wheels only partially submerged like the paddles of a river steamer. And while the surging, floundering, flailing stack-up of semi-naked bedlamites thrashed in the shallows, ah, standing in relative safety to one side of the bank, noticed the cripple’s upturned feet connec
ted to about six inches of ankle, protruding quietly from the bubbling waters between the sinister wheels – two peaceable mud-monsters calmly observing the madness about them – and, well, let me say right now that the sight of those numb, blue feet and the sense of calm they maintained in the face of such crying evil somehow touched me – yes, reached right out and touched me – and, well, shit, you know what ah mean – ah mean, hell, ah… ah dunno -look, it just touched me… all right?

  A minute or two passed in the watching where all the madness was just a distant murmur in mah ear, as if infected by mah sense of quietude, and then ah saw the left foot twitch and almost immediately ah saw it twitch a second time – this dead foot – trying to gain someone’s attention, ah expect – and after much floccillating she was remembered, and the stronger men of the concourse were upon her, hoisting the wheelchair and the gagging woman out of the turbid, reeking shallows and into the rain. Wilma Eldridge wore a hood of tar-black sewage that stretched down over the tops of her shoulders, the rest of her body being coated in a lamina of surface scum – dead leaves, rotten reeds, bulrush seeds. She was lifted, rigid and blue, back into the chair by the Schultz twins, all three ignoring the ferret-like fussings of her husband. Baker Wiggam dropped his massive grey greatcoat over her shivering body as the cripple lifted her face to the inclement heavens and let the hood of filth be washed away.

  Somewhat sobered by the incident, the crowd, with the intention of deferring its baptism for a short time, gathered around the bank, whilst Abie Poe, who had himself climbed from the waters, stood behind the decrepit wheelchair, gripping it by the handles. Conducting a long, drawn-out scan of his congregation, staring into silence each of those that still talked, he took one deep nasal intake of air, then cried out, ‘Can you smell the sulphur? Breathe it, everyone. Learn that stench! Sulphur! The stink of Satan!’ He leaned over Wilma Eldridge and spoke softly to the stunned crone – to her, yes, yet to all – the way only Poe knew how, his tirades being full of sinister whispers and poison hisses, though never a word escaped unheard.

  ‘Praise be to God, Wilma Eldridge,’ he whispered. ‘Satan, thy name is Calamity. The Devil’s is the hand that pusheth us forth? into the abyss! But it is the hand of the Lord that pulleth us out!

  ‘Hallelujah!’ bleated the crowd sequaciously.

  By now ah had kind of shrunk behind some bulrushes, the whole turn of Poe’s blood-sneaping homily becoming suddenly very intimidating – intimidating? To be honest, all that stuff about who’s pushing and who’s pulling gave me the fucking black chatters – know what ah mean? Ah felt at that moment in time about as comfortable as a chippie in a church, shrinking and shivering down there in the rushes.

  Then, from only a few feet away, came the sing-song tauntings of a child, pealing out above the din of the rain, above the mob’s dumbfusion, above the tumid throb throb throb of mah heart’s condition.

  ‘There’s ya Deevil! There’s ya arm that done the pushing! Him, there! Ah seen him do it! Threw the safety catch and let her roll! Kerspla-a-ash!! See? In the reeds yonder, chicken-scared ’cause he knows he done it!’

  Fists Wiggam stood, legs astride, puffed up with spite, one pudgy arm pointed at me as he yelled ‘Idjit threw her in the sewer! Idjit threw her in the sewer!’ with screwed up nose and sour mouth. ‘There’s ya stinker! There’s ya stinker!’

  Suddenly everybody seemed to have taken a step in mah direction! Then another!

  In no time at all Poe had loomed out of the mob, rolling one soppy sleeve of his unnerwear way up above the elbow. He plunged his arm into the rushes and hauled me out, one huge, black hand clamped vice-like about the back of mah neck.

  The whole damn mob crowded around, all staring and craning and looking disgusted – all nodding and going ‘uh-huh’ and ‘ye-e-s’ and ‘that’s the one,’ and suddenly there were two hundred witnesses all crying ‘ Sabotage!’ Ah just stared at the ground, Poe’s steely fingers still clamped around mah neck.

  ‘Who are ya, baw?’ snarled Poe, and then to the crowd, ‘Who owns this child?’

  Fists Wiggam piped up. ‘This kid’s trash, Preacher! Lives in the shack yonder.’ And again his little fat hand did its bit of pointing.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said Poe, grabbing me by the chin and jerking mah face upward so he could better see me. ‘I asked you your name, baw.’

  ‘Ain’t got one! Couldn’t speak it if he had’n! He’s a idjit! His daddy’s got hill in him! He’s schoopid dumb, Preacher!’ squealed Fists… and ah reached over and shoved mah hand down his throat and tore his tongue out by the roots, slapping the whole bloody lump of green meat, still twitching, into the fat little fucker’s horrified hands… but ah did not. No, ah did not. Instead ah looked up into Poe’s terrible face. The intensity with which he stared at me was becoming almost embarrassing. And then, before mah eyes, ah saw his face dramatically change. The cruel crimson scar blanched and became a pale violet, and his vulturous eyes glazed, turned hyalescent – but strangely smokey too, as if the hell-fire that had raged behind them had burnt itself out, but still smouldered steadily. His tone of voice became suddenly hollow, and when he spoke to me it was as if he was addressing someone inside of me. The crowd moved closer, mouths agape, infected by the preacher’s turn of mood.

  ‘Behold, a child which hath a dumb spirit. How long hath this futile spirit been within? I say life-long! I say possibly ten long years hath his spirit lain dumb.’

  ‘Wrong. Thirteen and a half,’ ah thought.

  ‘O faithless generation, how long must I suffer thee?’ cried Poe.

  ‘How long must I suffer thee?!’ cried ah, inside.

  ‘I am the spirit of Elijah,’ continued Poe, weirdly, ‘a little cleansing, a little healing, a little crying in the wilderness.’

  The crowd moved in and ah sought desperately for an opening in its ranks.

  ‘If thou canst believe, then anything is possible. Dost thou truly believe?’ asked the preacher, abstractly, and a few said ‘Ye’ and ‘Ah do’ – uncertain of who the preacher was talking to.

  ‘Then dumb spirit, I charge thee! Come out of this child and enter no more!’ Poe cried out.

  And, well, ah felt a squirming of mah entrails and suddenly ah knew – ah just knew that ah was going to speak – yes, ah did – and the squirming tore into mah chest and roiled up mah glottis into mah mouth, and ah spat with all mah heart. A great glob of sputum hit Abie Poe on the right knee, dangling greenly there, then dripped and slid obscenely down his foot and between his toes.

  Ah gnashed mah teeth. Ah frothed. Ah foamed. Ah shook mah head wildly, and suddenly all the words ah had ever wanted to speak were there for mah choosing, all crammed up to be first spoken, mah body now free of the dumb spirit.

  The crowd widened, drew back, thinned as ah bucked and neighed and thrashed and beat mah breast and crossed mah eyes, and made ready to shout ‘Hallelujah! Praise God in Heaven for His mercy!’ as ah wept and laughed and wept and rolled around in a puddle.

  The people moving slowly away shook their heads grimly and muttered things that ah could not hear, as ah flailed and weaved and writhed mah way up the hill – the crowd quite distant now.

  Ah lay in the grass, breathless and naked, and watched them trudge wearily toward the road that took them home, and ah flattened the wet grass unner mah chin with mah hand, and, turning mah head to the side, gently laid it down, ear pressed to the muddy earth, and ah listened to the sound of the rain as it crashed down all about me.

  XI

  Ah remember a time of eudemonia. A time when skies were azure blue and streaked with veils of cirrus – or else they carried the hull of a cotton-coloured cumulus across their infinite waters. A time when the shrill song of the cicada filled the vale and the cedar’s low sough mingled with the hush and mutter of the cane crop’s relentless unner-song. A time filled with the scent of pine and orange flowers. When jack-o’-lanterns and will-o’-the-wisps shone in the brakes and bracken. When the humming breath of summer
grazed the cheek of shallow waters, sending bulrushes all a-reeling. Ah remember a time when years were quartered into seasons, when day became night. A time of dusks and dawns and suns and moons. When all the valley green worked toward the ingathering, the munificent harvest and the rewards of honest toil, of good health, of well-being, of Christian charity, of brotherly love and the love of God, all beneath the boon of a golden sun. Ah remember a time when there was peace in the valley.

  But not for me. Never was there peace in the valley for me.

  In truth – and ah hope by saying this ah don’t convey any mean-spirited notions – the only time ah felt the heap of mah burden diminish was in the term of the curse. It occurred to me, as ah became accustomed to its insistence and saw a divine motive in its ruthless slog, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, liked the rain.

  Often ah would fill these grim, grey days by sitting on the porch and studying the valley through the veil of rain. Casting mah eye way way out across the ravaged crops and the virtual ghost town that the bustling little community had now become, ah would scan the black horizon and the churning unnerbelly of the heavens and mull over the possible cause of mah feeling of relative melody. Not wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say, and so deciding that too much probing of the question might not be wise, ah concluded that suffering was, in general, a comparative sensation felt most keenly in the face of felicity. Given that the valley and its people were bound, at that time, in the fetters of affliction, it seemed to me little wonder that mah own sack of woe felt considerably lighter.

  The rain had other advantages besides making misery and desolation the rule. It also served as an excellent day-cover, making it possible for me to venture into the town without fear of castigation, especially as after the first year few citizens left their hushed and shuttered homes. Some days ah could stride down Maine, kicking a can or whistling a tune, and simply bowl right through the centre of town and not pass anyone – and the few that ah saw would hurry by, heads inclined, eyes fixed to the ground, as if they themselves feared mah presence, in case ah was a friend or acquaintance they had known back in the brighter days, before the rain had come and soused each one in shame.