by Nick Cave
‘Air,’ spoke the doctor for the first time, ‘and sunshine, pure as God himself. For these are God’s gifts that on this day He has seen proper to reward us with… to give of His own self… just as He, in His supreme judgement, can taketh these same gifts from us. We must be content with the wonders before us, not live in the dark in the hope that we stumble upon some wonders unforeseen! Breathe, Sardus, breathe! And see what is before you!’
Sardus shielded his eyes with one grimy paw.
‘I thank thee kindly to leave my home the way it is… draw back the blind as you found it, sir… This is not Open Day at the bug house, Doctor!’
But the doctor crossed the room again, leaving the window open, the blind rolled.
‘So grave our misdeeds, good Doctor, yet see,’ Sardus gestured with a flourish to the azure sky beyond the window, ‘the world is resplendent with His infinite Mercy! O Lord! Shower me! Shower me with your tender mercies!’
His whisper was nothing but a croak now and Doc Morrow was already shuffling down the hall. Sardus sat and did not rise, waiting for the slam of the kitchen door, and upon hearing it he remained seated, just so, there midst the sea of garbage.
Doc Morrow visited the next day and the next day and for many days after that, each time bringing with him the tiny foundling.
The third and mostly silent party in their daily colloquy lay cradled in the doctor’s arms throughout, and the doctor made no move to mention it. It was not until late into the fourth week that Sardus asked about the child.
In the days that followed, the doctor unfolded the story of the miraculous infant, and gave the foundling at last to the shabby recluse to hold.
The moment that Sardus peered into the bundle and beheld the beauty of the child’s face, felt her tiny body, warm and coddled in his own thin limbs, both he and the doctor could see, it seemed, the light of Truth begin to shine, stretching its hand a little further into the bramble of their mystification.
The man who had once been the proud leader of the Ukulites handed the girl-child back to the doctor, and, leading him through the kitchen to the front door, said with solemn intonation: ‘Doctor Morrow, I must ask you to bring neither the child nor yourself to my household for one full week. Promise me that. Come Tuesday next, at the usual time, and bring the little girl with you. I will be ready, then, to receive you both.’
In the week that followed, Sardus slaved within his house. With the aid of some of the womenfolk he swept the floors clean of trash, scrubbed the kitchen tiles and skirting boards, and all the ledges and mantles. Assisted by the brothers Holfe, he scraped and painted the walls, inside and out, while his new neighbour Jude Bracken repaired the porch and replaced the broken stove-pipe. He polished up the brass on the beds. He washed the windows and hung new blinds.
As news travelled through the valley that Sardus Swift was to take the blessed infant as his own, donations from his brethren came flooding in. New sheets and blankets; tables and chairs; light-shades, toys and books; foodstuffs; ornaments and vases; an old pianola that had belonged to the late Elisa Snow; clothing by the boxful, including three handmade cotton smocks.
The smocks had been made by Edith Lamb, whose hooded vision was so impaired that she could not leave her house across Maine to deliver her labour of faith, but was forced to send another with the gifts.
By Tuesday, the house was again a home. And just as it shone glorious from its reparation, so too it was a new and grinning Sardus who met his two guests at the door.
And so the little girl found a bright new home.
THE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No. I
These bottoms, this humid heart, this unearthly sod that claims me now is the same grim ground into which the kernel of mah youth did split and shoot, and out of which black tillage the twisted stalk of mah manhood groped – all blind and white and hairless.
It was here, in this dark part, that ah built mah refuge, far from the shadow of the hand of man, here on this wheel of umbrage, at whose boundary the righteous hammers of all of them did hesitate. All of them who lived to hurt me.
The measure of mah youth – mah springtime – ah would divide between this murky inner sanctum and its cruel merciless exterior, where the snares of mah enemy lay everyplace. The grinning jaws of ignorance and prejudice were parted and ah was their unhappy prey. For they lay in wait at home and in the town, in the infields and the outfields. Be it at night or in the daytime, the one consistent thing through mah green and growing years was the snap of the trap and the snare.
Ah was deemed unworthy of the organ of lament. Ah am not one to bemoan mah lot. But even Christ himself was moved to loosen the tongues of His wounds. But hear this, now at mah deathtime, hear this, in the course of mah own crucifixion, ah challenge you all – mah cynics, sceptics and downright disbelievers – to roll up your sleeves and thrust your hands into this sack of injury.
When ah was about fourteen and the first crop of cane after the rain was about head-height, three boys – cane-workers, themselves only a handful of years mah senior – forced me at machete point to strip naked, whereupon they knocked me to the ground and set about kicking me to the brink of death. Ah was spun on to mah belly, mah hands were bound, and, to the rousing count of his cretinous brothers, the lean pimply one who wielded the machete dropped to his knees and buggered me. Ah went unner, blacked out, and when ah awoke ah could smell the piss all over me. Another thrashing weight crushed me now – the big one ah guessed – and ah could hear him hot at mah ear going, ‘God ain’t listening to ya, punk. Ain’t no sense in calling on God.’ It took me a second or two to realize that at some point they had stuffed a sock in mah mouth and gagged me. Even then that struck me as strange.
When their dirty business was done and things started to get mean, their leader slapped me repeatedly across mah buttocks with the flat of the machete blade, leaving a cluster of wicked cuts, the markings of which ah still bear to this day – though that part of me has gone now, for ever.
With their whoops of conquest reboant in the heat of the early afternoon, the bloody-minded trio pissed on me one last time then fled, taking with them every stitch of clothing ah had.
Three crows cackled overhead and ah remember thinking as ah passed into unconsciousness: one crow – a stranger, two crows – danger, three crows – a summons…
Ah woke in mah bed, on mah belly. Mah head and ribs and the middle two fingers of mah right hand were all bound tight in heavy linen bandages, and lint dressing and adhesive tape covered mah elbows and knees and right shoulder. Mah rump, inscribed for all eternity with the signature of mah assailants, boasted a do/en or so stitches courtesy of Ma’s own drunken hand. And hanging on a nail were mah britches, flannel shirt, bracers and unnershirt – the very ones that had been stolen!
Pa told me, while he sat spooning scalding soup between mah swollen lips, his hands reeking of carbolic oil, how Ma had left the property for the first time since ah was born and marched to the cane-workers’ camp, nursing the shotgun, and had raided the trailers until she located mah stolen clothes, which the three youths – having split the booty – were by then wearing proudly. Pa told me how Ma, gun at her shoulder, had marched the trio through town to Hallis Crossing – a low bridge that crosses a dry creek bed almost completely engulfed by a dense tortuous briar of wild rose.
‘Strip,’ she had said. ‘Now… jump.’ And she had left the sorry three to flail about in the thicket until they were hauled out, near flayed alive and coated head to toe in their own blood.
‘Thievin’ bloody monkeys!’ ah heard Ma bawl from her bedroom.
III
Ma spent an increasing amount of time in her bed, but she continued to tyrannize the household, bawling orders from her room. Pa obeyed her without complaint, as did Euchrid, but as the years passed and the matriarch persisted in testing to the limit her husband’s resilience, his body could be seen to shudder some, his hands begin to shake, and Euchrid, watching through one of the peep-holes, c
ould not help but notice the way Pa’s jaw would clench and his eyes narrow at each barked command, and a white ring of suppressed rage appear around his mouth.
Often Euchrid was sent to the still to tap a pint or two of liquor, and this he would do though the punishing stench of rotted carcass that wafted from his father’s chamber of death made him gag as he squatted beneath it, waiting the two minutes or so that it took for the crude distilling device to piss out its pint of poison.
Pa would often be seated on his throne above, gnashing and muttering as he watched the crippled menagerie do battle inside the old water tank, the air alive with its freakish hullabaloo. Euchrid would peg off the hose and hammer the bung into the neck of the bottle, his face blueing with kept breath, and after dashing across the junk-pile to the shack he would slump in the doorway, sucking and blowing the new air, hearing now not the song of the dying beasts but that of the deranged despot within, bawling like a babe without its bottle. He would leave the pint, with a clunk, at her bedroom door, barely registering the door’s groan or the grapple of the fetching paw as he entered his own room, his mind a mire of murder.
One day, Pa brought to the house a near dead wolf-dog he had found crippled in a trap. Instead of hurling it into the tank with the rest of the day’s catch, he covered the windows of the old wreck with chickenwire – double-ply – and emptied the snarling mongrel into the car, slamming the door shut behind it.
The dog had triggered one of the larger hog-snares, and the massive jaws had sunk high into its left thigh – snapping the bone like a twig, but being too blunt to take the leg clean off.
Curious, Euchrid had watched his father with the mad dog, but only after the old man had caged the beast and wandered inside did Euchrid come out from the tin drums behind the corral and approach the huge iron cage.
Inside, the dog growled and spat, turning a tortured circle with its three good legs, great shoulders buffaloing and bristling, the skin of its brow drawn down over bloodshot eyes and its flews, in contraposition, curled upwards in a mean snarl.
Euchrid rested the animal with his presence, much the same as a priest would one possessed by demons, and once it was thus chased of its madness, Euchrid tended the dog, swathing the stump in gauze and pulling over it a thick woollen sock, black with yellow diamonds around the ankle.
Euchrid mused over a name for the beast, deciding after long and serious consideration to call it ‘Yellow’. Later that afternoon he changed its name to ‘Diamond’ and then to ‘Yellow Diamond’, but after further consideration he abandoned the idea altogether, reluctantly accepting the pointlessness of it all.
He fed the dog on rats and toads mostly, and water, until it regained its strength and Euchrid let it go.
The dog hobbled down the hillside and into the cane by the gallows-tree. Standing upon the crest, Euchrid watched it go. He counted the crows that circled overhead.
Three days later Euchrid observed a small cluster of schoolchildren running along the main road, and he wondered, as he hopped down the porch steps, what they were doing so far out of town. He took another look before bounding down the slope – they appeared to be waving their arms above their heads, but from that distance it was hard to tell.
He dived into the cane and hurried down his runway toward them. Every minute or so he would stop and listen to their chiming, becoming louder and louder as he drew closer. Finally he spotted a huddle of colour on the side of the road, about twenty feet away. The shouts of the children were manic now, piercing the balmy afternoon with shrieks and squeals of delight. They no longer ran.
Suddenly there was silence.
Euchrid crept as far as the boundary, obscured from view by the cane trash that hung from the wire fence. He watched as the children turned tail and took off down Maine, heading back to town. He climbed through the fence and watched the retreating group, his eyes slits of rage. Some waved sticks, others were tossing them into the cane. One knock-kneed boy chased a shrieking, bandy-legged girl, a grubby hood pulled over his head – black with yellow diamonds around the throat.
‘Look!’ cried the girl, who had stopped running and stood looking down the road, her arm outstretched with one derisive finger pointed straight at Euchrid. The other children ground to a halt and turned. The child in the mask collided with another boy and was sent sprawling on to the road, skinning his knees and the palms of his hands.
A fearful silence ensued, broken only by the muffled moans of the raw-kneed boy. For a moment or two Euchrid was alone with the double thud of his heartbeat. He saw red.
Scooping up a rock from the ground, he stepped forward and took aim. The children had turned tail and were fleeing down the road before he had a chance to throw it.
The rock in his fist was sticky with blood.
At his feet lay the three-legged dog, its naked stump cocked obscenely. Its head had been bashed in and its brains squeezed through a split in the top of its skull like a cock’s comb. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, coated in dust, looking twice as long as it should have. A splinter of fractured bone had pierced the meat of its good thigh, poking through the red fur like a jellied finger. A thin trickle of blood seeped from its anus, soaking into the piss-wet soil at its hind.
‘That’s how they got him,’ observed Euchrid. ‘Knocked out his other leg.’
‘Yep,’ he thought, his suspicions confirmed by a swept trail of wet dust, which began ten yards away and ended at the dog’s smashed hindquarters.
Euchrid dragged the carcass off the road and slung it into a ditch.
Then he walked down Maine and retrieved the sock, slapping it for dust as he slipped back into the cane.
THE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No.2
Ah am one luckless bastard. God knows. Dumber than a hat full of earholes. A vile thing. Unworthy. Worthless. O yes! Grotesque in form. Misshapen. Yes! Misshapen and vile of mind. O hideous deed.
IV
After the great rain, a task force was organized by the Ukulites to reconstruct the cemetery at Hooper’s Hill. Their job was to gather up the human scrappage, the split and swollen caskets and the crude plank boxes made of pine, the rubble, the roods, the stones and urns and markers, and so on. For the most part they succeeded in piecing together the old graveyard, although whose bones went in which box went in which hole was anybody’s guess, and for many years after the rain’s end and the graveyard’s reparation it was not uncommon to stumble upon the odd knuckle or kneecap or rib, buried or half-buried in the downgrade.
Few of the original cane-men stuck out the storm years, and the reconstructed graveyard was rarely visited, let alone tended to. What had been a morbid mud-pit became, in a few short years, a sea of weed and creeper. Bald white headstones like the domes of drowning men sank beneath the mat and tangle of ivy and vine.
The vine was unique to Ukulore Valley, and grew only on and around the plot occupied by Hooper’s Hill Cemetery. Sprouting in the wake of the rain, and seeming to flourish in the rain-ruined soil, this freakish flora known as ‘Tolley’s Trumpet Creeper’ was the only trumpet creeper on record to boast a navy blue bloom. Little is known about Frank Owen Tolley, upon whose stone the plant first bloomed blue. His stone and its inscription offer no clue. The creeper’s secret must remain with poor Tolley and God – and no doubt the Devil. Only they could tell from what poisonous sump this creeper drank to deepen its velvet bell’s complexion to such a deathly midnight hue.
V
Mah sanctum – mah cave of vine and moss – is to mah right about ten paces into the thicket that surrounds me now. So dense grows the swampland that sometimes it would take me up to thirty minutes to find the little hideaway ah had fashioned, though ah had been there hundreds and hundreds of times. Ah would look for the strips of white sheet, bright like bush ghosts, that hung along the woven walls – they would tell me where.
All about me were mah treasures. The stained bandages like flags. Boxes of nails and tacks. A crate of electrical cord. Mah hammer. Candles an
d plastic bags full of matches and tapers from the church. Mah Bibles. Twine. Animal bones and feathers and bird skulls. Shells and nests. Some of mah shoeboxes – about ten. Pictures ah had cut from magazines and threaded through the walls. The tiny blue glass bottles of scented water.
And with these ah kept mah Life-trophies, mah God-tokens – the parts of her left behind – blood mementoes. The whore’s hair. Her nightdress. The portrait of Cosey that ah had delivered from the hands of those who rose up against her, sheared her, cast her out. The kindergraph and the instructions she had written, in verse, aback of it. The painting of Beth – of her – fastened to the walls and ceiling of the grotto, angled so that it hovered above me as ah lay in mah shell.
On a carpet of pink silk and frill – yes, and the ten pearl buttons leaving their evanescent impression down mah back or belly – the stroke of hair – a ruby bead sailing down a yellow strand – a trembling scarlet drop – the bitter-sweet sip – O the lifetimes lost in queer congress, holed-up in that dark retreat – holed-up in that dark retreat –
A felled tree trunk, carved down the middle by a cleaver of lightning – during the rain days, ah guess – made a kind of a pallet where ah would lie, stretched out between the two halves that ah had padded with cardboard and moss, encapsulated by two walls of umbrage that twisted about a few clapboards nailed to the trunks as supports, the vines intertwining overhead to form a low ceiling. Ah could sit up with a full foot’s grace – room enough for mah angel too, who would, in mah later years, appear on the tree stump at the foot of mah cocoon, then come inside and lie with me.