Adventures in the Skin Trade

by Dylan Thomas

  He implored the old man to speak, but, coming closer to him and staring into his face, he saw the stains of death upon mouth and eyes and a nest of mice in the tangle of the frozen beard.

  It was weak to fly, but he flew. And it was a weakness of the blood to be invisible, but he was invisible. He reasoned and dreamed unreasonably at the same time, knowing his weakness and the lunacy of flying but having no strength to conquer it. He flew like a bird over the fields, but soon the bird’s body vanished, and he was a flying voice. An open window beckoned him by the waving of its blinds, as a scarecrow beckons a wise bird by its ragged waving, and into the open window he flew, alighting on a bed near a sleeping girl.

  Awake, girl, he said. I am your lover come in the night.

  She awoke at his voice.

  Who called me?

  I called you.

  Where are you?

  I am upon the pillow by your head, speaking into your ear.

  Who are you?

  I am a voice.

  Stop calling into my ear, then, and hop into my hand so that I may touch you and tickle you. Hop into my hand, voice.

  He lay still and warm in her palm.

  Where are you?

  I am in your hand.

  Which hand?

  The hand on your breast, left hand. Do not make a fist or you will crush me. Can you not feel me warm in your hand? I am close to the roots of your fingers.

  Talk to me.

  I had a body, but was always a voice. As I truly am, I come to you in the night, a voice on your pillow.

  I know what you are. You are the still, small voice I must not listen to. I have been told not to listen to that still, small voice that speaks in the night. It is wicked to listen. You must not come here again. You must go away.

  But I am your lover.

  I must not listen, said the girl, and suddenly clenched her hand.

  14

  He could go into the garden, regardless of rain, and bury his face in the wet earth. With his ears pressed close to the earth, he would hear the great heart, under soil and grass, strain before breaking. In dreams he would say to some figure, Lift me up. I am only ten pounds now. I am lighter. Six pounds. Two pounds. My spine shows through my breast. The secret of that alchemy that had turned a little revolution of the unsteady senses into a golden moment was lost as a key is lost in undergrowth. A secret was confused among the night, and the confusion of the last madness before the grave would come down like an animal on the brain.

  He wrote upon the block of paper, not knowing what he wrote, and dreading the words that looked up at him at last and could not be forgotten.

  15

  And this is all there was to it: a woman had been born, not out of the womb, but out of the soul and the spinning head. And he who had borne her out of darkness loved his creation, and she loved him. But this is all there was to it: a miracle befell a man. He fell in love with it, but could not keep it, and the miracle passed. And with him dwelt a dog, a mouse, and a dark woman. The woman went away, and the dog died.

  16

  He buried the dog at the end of the garden. Rest in peace, he told the dead dog. But the grave was not deep enough and there were rats in the underhanging of the bank who bit through the sack shroud.

  17

  Upon town pavements he saw the woman step loose, her breasts firm under a coat on which the single hairs from old men’s heads lay white on black. Her life, he knew, was only a life of days. Her spring had passed with him. After the summer and the autumn, unhallowed time between full life and death, there would be winter corrugating charm. He who knew the subtleties of every reason, and sensed the four together in every symbol of the earth, would disturb the chronology of the seasons. Winter must not appear.

  18

  Consider now the old effigy of time, his long beard whitened by an Egyptian sun, his bare feet watered by the Sargasso Sea. Watch me belabour the old fellow. I have stopped his heart. It split like a chamber pot. No, this is no rain falling. This is the wet out of the cracked heart.

  Parhelion and sun shine in the same sky with the broken moon. Dizzy with the chasing of moon by sun, and by the twinkling of so many stars, I run upstairs to read again of the love of some man for a woman. I tumble down to see the half-crown hole in the kitchen wall stabbed open, and the prints of a mouse’s pads on the floor.

  Consider now the old effigies of the seasons. Break up the rhythm of the old figures’ moving, the spring trot, summer canter, sad stride of autumn, and winter shuffle. Break, piece by piece, the continuous changing of motion into a spindle-shanked walking.

  Consider the sun for whom I know no image but the old image of a shot eye, and the broken moon.

  19

  Gradually the chaos became less, and the things of the surrounding world were no longer wrought out of their own substance into the shapes of his thoughts. Some peace fell about him, and again the music of creation was to be heard trembling out of crystal water, out of the holy sweep of the sky down to the wet edge of the earth where a sea flowed over. Night came slowly, and the hill rose to the unrisen stars. He turned over the block of paper and upon the last page wrote in a clear hand:

  20

  The woman died.

  21

  There was dignity in such a murder. And the hero in him rose up in all his holiness and strength. It was just that he who had brought her forth from darkness should pack her away again. And it was just that she should die not knowing what hand out of the sky struck upon her and laid her low.

  He walked down the hill, his steps slow as in procession, and his lips smiling at the dark sea. He climbed onto the shore, and, feeling his heart knock at his side, turned to where the greater rocks climbed perilously to the grass. There at the foot, her face towards him, she lay and smiled. Sea-water ran unheeded over her nakedness. He crossed to her, and touched her cold cheek with his nails.

  22

  Acquainted with the last grief, he stood at the open window of his room. And the night was an island in a sea of mystery and meaning. And the voice out of the night was a voice of acceptance. And the face of the moon was the face of humility.

  He knew the last wonder before the grave and the mystery that bewilders and incorporates the heavens and the earth. He knew that he had failed before the eye of God and the eye of Sirius to hold his miracle. The woman had shown him that it was wonderful to live. And now, when at last he knew how wonderful, and how pleasant the blood in the trees, and how deep the well of the clouds, he must close his eyes and die. He opened his eyes, and looked up at the stars. There were a million stars spelling the same word. And the word of the stars was written clearly upon the sky.

  23

  Alone in the kitchen, among the broken chairs and china, stood the mouse that had come out of the hole. Its paws rested lightly upon the floor painted all over with the grotesque figures of birds and girls. Stealthily, it crept back into the hole. Stealthily, it worked its way between the walls. There was no sound in the kitchen but the sound of the mouse’s nails scraping upon wood.

  24

  In the eaves of the lunatic asylum the birds still whistled, and the madman, pressed close to the bars of the window near their nests, bayed up at the sun.

  Upon the bench some distance from the main path, the girl was beckoning to the birds, while on a square of lawn danced three old women, hand in hand, simpering in the wind, to the music of an Italian organ from the world outside.

  Spring is come, said the warders.

  THE HORSE’S HA

  He saw the plague enter the village on a white horse. It was a cancerous horseman, with a furuncle for a hat, that galloped the beast over grass and cobble and the coloured hill. Plague, plague, cried Tom Twp as the horse on the horizon, scenting the stars, lifted a white head. Out came the grocer with an egg in his hand, and the butcher in a bloody coat. They followed the line of the lifted finger, but the horse had gone, the trees were no speakers, and the birds who flew crisscross on the sky
said no word of warning to the parson’s rookery or the chained starlings in the parlour of ApLlewelyn. As white, said Tom Twp, as the egg in your hand. He remembered the raw head of the horseman, and whispered slyly, As red as mother’s rump in your window. The clouds darkened, the sun went in, the suddenly ferocious wind broke down three fences, and the cows, blue-eyed with plague, nibbled at the centres of the marrow beds. The egg fell, and the red yolk struggled between the spaces of the cobbles, the white mixed with the rain that dripped from the scarlet coat. In went the grocer with a stained hand, and the butcher among the hands of veal. Tom Twp, following his finger towards the horizon where the horse of plague had stamped and vanished, reached the dark church as the rain grew sick of the soil and drew back to heaven. He ran between the graves where the worm rubbed in the tradesmen’s hands. Mrs. ApLlewelyn raised a stone breast above the grass. Softly opening the door, he came upon the parson praying for disarmament in the central aisle. Disarm the forces of the army and the navy, he heard the parson murmur to the Christ of the stained glass who smiled like a nannygoat above him, hearing the cries from Cardiff and the smoking West. Disarm the territorial forces, the parson prayed. In anger, God smote him. There is plague, said Tom Twp. ApLlewelyn in the organ loft reached for the bass stops. The white plague drifted through the church to the music of the savage voluntary. Parson and sinner stood beneath the reflections of the Holy Family, marking in each ginger halo the hair of blood. There was to one the voice of an arming God in the echo of each chord, and, to the other, the horse’s ha.

  One by one the starlings died; the last remaining bird, with a pain in its crop, whistled at the late afternoon. ApLlewelyn, returning from music and marvelling at the sky, heard the last starling’s voice as he walked up the drive. Why is there no welcome, wondered the keeper, from my starling charges. Every day of the year they had lost their tempers, tore at the sashes of the window watching on the flying world; they had scraped on the glass, and fetched up their wings from the limed bar, signalling before him. On the rug at his feet lay six starlings, cold and stiff, the seventh mourning. Death in his absence had laid six singers low. He who marks the sparrow’s fall has no time for my birds, said ApLlewelyn. He smote big, bloody death, and death, relenting, pulled a last fart from the bodies of the dead birds.

  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 grew deepest where the moon rose in a blaze of light, counted his blessings, the blazing (ire, 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 made 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 around 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 shivered and 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 country, the rub of the plague transformed into a circle of sick and invisible promise the globes 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 fingernail. Unbolting, unbarring the coffin with chimneys, he walked into the 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 his 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. H
e did not feel the jackknife 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, created 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 their 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.