Sometimes ah heard thousands of voices, for God is many tongued, whispering things to me as ah lay there all alone. All mah feelings of fear and of anger and of despair that ah ate daily like bread would depart from me, and ah would feel most powerful. Most powerful.
They tol… He told me things that ah know were special knowledge. Of mahself at first. Then of others.
Without really realizing it, the Ukulites had begun to prime Beth for sainthood the moment the sun had first reached through the cover of cloud and kissed the curl on the foundling’s forehead. Never did the flesh of one seem so precious as did the earthly body of Beth. Nor was a child ever so pampered, preened and downright spoiled as this unwitting deceiver.
Having no mother and an adoptive, inexperienced father, Beth became in her infant years part-daughter to a hundred doting sometime-mothers – or would-be sometime-mothers, each determined to tend to the needs of the heaven-sent in a manner that befitted the blessed fruit of such miraculous circumstance. Women took turns in cooking for Sardus Swift and little Beth, proud when the infant ate their pap, despairing when she refused it.
The attentions of this many-breasted, multi-voiced, preening, pinching mater seemed but a boon to the tot as a babe in swaddling clothes. Beth’s first five years passed without incident, in health and abounding good temperament, and, as a quiet and self-possessed child, she remained good natured toward the ever-fussing string of women, finding in time a way of smiling, coy and dimpled, that would guarantee a coo or a cluck from the sternest matron – warm reward for their efforts.
And each year on the anniversary of her coming, the Ukulites would take Beth – a pearly white bundle, her head wreathed in a chaplet of violets – into the town square. Beneath the august monument strewn with garlands of inky blooms cut from the burial grounds of Hooper’s Hill, Sardus Swift, holding the babe heavenward, would deliver a prayer of thanksgiving – his eyes, two wells that once had sprung with the bitter vinegar of grief, now clear and blue, flowing with the deep, sweet waters of joy. And all about him his sobbing flock mustering a bigger rain.
Then, one by one, the members of the congregation would fall to the ground to kiss the sun-warmed step upon which the foundling had been discovered, the summer air full of hallelujahs and hosannas and the sickly scent of trumpet blooms.
During the child’s sixth year, the eye-batting spinster Molly Barlow would return Beth’s queer little smile and say, ‘This child is surely of more saintly stuff than me or thee, Sardus,’ her hawking remark wet with innuendo and tuberculosis.
‘Let us hope so, Sister,’ Sardus would reply coldly, secretly tired of the do-gooders who plagued his home to coddle the child and fatten the man, tired in particular of the Molly Barlows who saw him not as Sardus the father but as Sardus the eligible.
But these feelings were never allowed to surface, for Sardus only needed to look to his daughter to know that he would continue to eat whatever the women dished in front of him, would listen to their incessant chatter and return their oily compliments, for it was all a small price to pay for the continued health and well-being of his child, Beth, his single and superlative joy.
Beth yawned and arched her little body back; for a blissful moment all her young muscles stretched over her soft, growing bones. Infecting the room with her yawn, she watched as both Sardus and Molly Barlow moved to their own deep, sleepy breath.
‘Thank you for dinner, Miss Barlow. May I go to my room, Daddy?’ asked Beth, beaming at them both.
They beamed back in reply, and even as Beth entered her room and pulled the door gently closed behind her, the two adults sat there still smiling silently – happy victims of the child’s contagious device.
In the solitude of her room, Beth’s smile slipped from her mouth like an unwanted thing. Fat dolls with fat wax heads and hands sat, fifty-fold, in two fussy rows along the wall opposite her.
She fumbled in the pocket of her smock, her green eyes wide and turning inward to set another world in motion, a world unsullied by bigger hands. Humming to a tune she alone could hear, Beth pulled from her pocket a wooden clothes pin and held it tightly in her fist.
‘Don’t cry, Peg. Mother is home.’
HE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No. 3
Another time, ah watched two young men from the refinery fuck a girl about the same age as ah was – fifteen – at the bottom of Hooper’s Hill Cemetery. Seth and Billy were their names, and when they had finished, instead of following the trolley tracks down along the back of the fields, these young men walked straight up and through the graveyard – right in the direction of where ah was crouched. They grabbed me and pulled me down on top of a stone slab, winding me. Seth straddled mah chest, pinning mah arms down with his knees. When the girl finally caught up with them and saw me, she threw her arms over her face and began cussing and bawling. ‘Kill him! Seth! O Billy! Kill him! He’ll tell on us! He’ll tell – O kill him!!’
Seth gave mah face a slap. ‘Calm down. Who’s gunna believe a goddamn crazy baw? Look!’ The girl, still sobbing, sort of edged over, her hands masking her face, teary eyes peering through her fingers. ‘Hold him, Seth. Tight!’ she gasped and came close, looking down at me, her breasts rising and falling. She reeked with the smell of sex. A shriek leapt from her lips and she was laughing and laughing and did not stop laughing even as Seth set about whupping the shit out of me, and, dismounting, let Billy sit and slog at the slops. Laughing to the last. The bitch.
But not every down-borne hand that sought to chastise me was crooked. O no! The godly, the meek, the righteous – they too were party to mah persecution. For mah tormentor, he was many masked. Surrounded as ah was by his apparatus of deception, there was no limit to his atrocious device. The workers, the faithful, the children, the homeless, the drunken, even mah own flesh and blood were but limbs of the persecutor – puppets! The rack, rod and stake, the block and the blade, the pillory, the stocks, the switch and the stones and the witch’s stool, the whip and the wheel, the crank, the plank, the boot and the fist and all the rest, the endless list – hidden and waiting, regardless of the path ah chose.
More than once did the God-fearing Ukulites chase me from the town. Still ah am baffled by an incident that occurred when ah was maybe fourteen. Listen.
Ah was sitting on the step of the marble monument, squeezing the dark sap from a trumpet creeper that ah had found there, when ah noticed a group of maybe seven or eight Ukulite menfolk, one brandishing a hay-rake, crossing the square. Ah watched as they marched toward me, wondering at the reason for the commotion. Slowly it dawned upon me, the crazed mob only yards away, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, was the object of their gall! Such was mah innocence! Ah leapt to mah feet, tangling mahself in a gilded rope – tasselled and low-slung – that surrounded the steps, escaping the madded throng by inches, by seconds, though they chased me through the town, puffing and panting and shaking their fists, till ah was but a scorned and skulking speck upon the horizon.
It was by no means the first time that the good folk of Ukulore Valley had retched and heaved and sicked me up on the town’s outboundary. O no, nor would it be the last! Even now as ah inch unner, something rushes at me. Something of hellish reason – evangelists hooded scarlet come, turned vigilante with bloody deed done! O wicked little Beth! What havoc we have wrought!
VI
‘The Martyrdom of the Prophet’ by Gaston Georges had hung on the south wall of the Ukulite tabernacle since the year 1935, when the respected academic portrait painter had taken up residence in the booming vale, having been struck by the ‘utter uncomplicity and tireless dedication’ of the Ukulites to the memory of their prophet.
‘Your greatest treasure is your unswerving faith, a gift more precious than I will ever know,’ remarked Gaston as he presented the commissioned portrait, refusing any payment but the permission to make his home in the valley.
‘You have made me very happy. I will continue to serve you, in the hope that I will one day find peace thr
ough your example,’ he continued, trembling with emotion but plagued by prickling doubts that he was never to resolve, though he would remain in the valley for the rest of his life.
His right foot buried beneath the hem of his frothing raiments – a fierce drama of gleaming ripples and deep, dark folds – and his other foot, his left, slung in a gilded sliver of moon, the Prophet ascended heavenward on a cloud of romping cherubim. A great spilling robe stained scarlet at the heart, a dazzling sceptre and crown, dewy blue eyes – all pulled the eye upward to the darts of light that sprang from the crack in the clouds parting to receive him.
Gaston Georges dedicated the remainder of his life to documenting through his portraiture the history of the Ukulites. The stark fundamentalist principles practised by the pioneer Ukulites came to stiffen the painter’s brush somewhat and bridle the boisterous voice of his imagination; so much so that the series of eight portraits, oval in shape, that flanked the chill interior of the Town Hall, bore no resemblance to their predecessor at all. These were lean, haggard, pious faces, scowling behind beards and beneath stiff, black bonnets. Eight grim sitters – cold and unadorned pillars of the community – the product of a cramped and shackled hand.
But Georges was yet to paint his unrivalled masterpiece. This he would do some six years after the rain had stopped.
‘Beth’ hung opposite the spiralling afflatus of ‘The Martyrdom’ in the Ukulite tabernacle, on the north wall. It was despised by some, lauded by others. Others it simply baffled. Sardus Swift made the decision to have it hung in the tabernacle. It was of Beth aged
THE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No. 4
O God, ah petition Thee! Hear mah cry and make haste mah respite, for ah am tired of this day and its most earnest work. Gather up thy servant and bring me home. Lord, there is no place upon this ground of men for me. Ah have seen complete the matter of thy command. It is done. She is shut down.
Three crows circle overhead! Ah am coming, Lord! Ah am coming! For the door to Thy kingdom lies not at mah head but at mah heel. Call me unner! Let this mire shut its mouth upon me! Prepareth Thee mah way! O God, hear mah prayer. Call me unner and deliver me from bloody men!
You would think that being born dumb – stricken of tongue and bereft of the faculty of exchange – would’ve sufficed. You would think that the burdens of mutehood would weigh heavily enough upon the head of a child. O no! Whoever was dealing out the bum breaks, whoever was spooning out the woe, must’ve seen me and up-ended the whole fucken can because ah was dripping in the stuff – hard luck and ill fortune. And an ill wind blew every day and every night shone forth an evil star and a day didn’t roll past that ah wasn’t catching some kind of crap.
Born a mute, beside a dead brother, in a puddle of peel shine, in the back of a burnt-out wreck, atop of a hill of garbage – this was only the opening hand, a mere whiff of what destiny held in store for me. What maybe ah didn’t know and mah dead brother did, was that we were two very sorry sprogs. One dumb and one good-as-dead, the sickly issue of truly squalid loins – unsightly urchins cast from her slum-womb into a wicked, wicked world, a world too cruel for such ill-begotten mites as we.
O sure, the workers of the fields did hammer me down and those from the town chased me away and in the schools the children pelted me with stones and those at the mill kicked me and kicked me, but ah did brave all of the blows that rained down upon me. Indeed, these afflictions seemed almost small when set against the unending outrage suffered within the bounds of mah home. Yes! A most vile enemy was there within! O Mama was mah true and most unspeakable foe. She was black spit. Ah had no asylum either side of the fence. It was not the valley folk but the drunken despotic hell-hog who spawned me that really put to the test mah mettle. Her later years, ah swear, were spent in the relentless pursuit of mah misery. Just to think about it, even now, two full years since her popping off, is enough to chill mah chitterlings.
It sometimes baffles me, you know, as Staff-bearer and Rod-raiser to the Lord, chosen to unnertake His most ecstatic mission, how the Almighty in all His goodness and grace could conceive such an abomination as she. Or was this vixen built by another, more terrible hand? Was she the monsterpiece of some hellish cosmetician? A limb of Lucifer? Which bloody dungeons did they plumb? Which fucken sewer did they drag? Do you know? No? Yes?
VII
She was seated in a simple hard-wood high-backed chair, surrounded by a deep sepia void. She wore the same white cotton smock as always, but not stiffly as before. Instead the skirts were hitched a little to reveal her knees, the blouse thin and loose. Her limbs had been elongated a little, ah think, and though she was sitting formally, for a portrait, there was a certain ease of poise that made her appear totally unselfconscious, as if ah were watching her and she didn’t know it.
Maybe the beam of the torch was responsible for deepening the murky surrounds and accentuating the ghostly brilliance of her smock and the loosely-tossed locks of gold that fell across her shoulders, but – and this is near impossible to explain – reaching from the pale shores of her face, like two hexing hands twirling and dancing their witching device, came her eyes. Drowning-pools, emerald green and mesmerizing like winter webs or the circles on a devil-moth’s wings, hexing and hexing, peering from unner two heavy lids, kinda outward but kinda inward too, filling mah mind with jabbered mutterings – weird, dark murmurings – mah blood pounding in mah head – sucking me unner – down and down and unner…
How long ah stood there, spellbound in the dark of the tabernacle, ah could not, in truth, say, but it must have been a long time because the image of her face began to fade, like a dying moon, until ah could barely see it anymore, and this is what eventually broke the spell, the batteries in mah torch flatting. That, and the voice.
‘Is it that I have depicted the saintly in a human, or could it be that I have shown there to be humanity in a saint?’
Ah spun around, pointing the torch at the voice. Lit by the dying beam, a dark figure stood in the doorway. Ah pointed the torch in every direction searching for an escape. There was none to be found.
‘Do not fear. I am honoured that one of you has returned to view my picture in private. I have not come to hurt you. You have committed no sin in being here. Tell me, why have you come back to look on Beth? What is it about the picture that has brought you here?’
Ah tasted blood, for mah nose had started. Ah could feel the punishing sticks and stones of public rebuke even then, as ah spun round and around, searching for a way out.
‘You may go if you want. I wish you no harm.’ He moved forward, clearing the entrance of the tabernacle.
‘Sure you fucken don’t,’ ah thought. ‘Sure you fucken don’t.’
Ah bolted down the hall, thundering across the bare boards of the tabernacle. Ah waved mah arms, windmilling them in furious circles as ah lunged toward the interloper. Ah tried to scream, and ah guess ah must have looked pretty menacing coming at him like that, because he had second thoughts about jumping me and just held back as ah flung mahself out the door and down the steps, not stopping running until ah had reached the turn-off that led up to the shack.
Ah dabbed at mah nose with a handkerchief, mah heart pounding, too fucken scared and cold and breathless to see the significance in it. Mah blood nose.
Ah lay upon mah back beneath the cover of the hedgerow. The moon was new and in the sky ah saw it become one thousand things – a slice of lemon rind – a sinister fin menacing the welkin water’s royal pool – a pellet from the golden fleece – the Reaper’s tool – a golden bow released – a single slipper made of glass – a lamp cast in gold – a fold – a gilded horn within a maiden’s gown – a lick – a tongue – an angry thorn – a manger’s roof – a crib or a cradle – a ladle – a tooth – all up there, above me and beyond mah touch. Removed.
Ah rolled on to mah belly, keeping an eye on the matter at hand.
Beth was unbuckling her pumps and still she murmured a song:
’…
O field of mustard, field of clover
Bird with crooked wing flew over…’
But the fucken cicadas blasted again upon the night with their shrill-splitting alarum and ah could not make out another word. So ah simply watched the child clutching her knees beneath her crisp cotton dress, loose and very white, and if it had not been for the fact that her toes were curling and flexing and moving in the dust, her shiny pumps discarded by her side, ah could have mistaked her for a lesser work, chiselled by the same deft hand that had created the marble angel – sickle and blonde bangs bright as the moon that loomed aloft, and deadly still.
Beth of stone.
Spawn of sin.
Spawn of sin.
See Pa sit, his brow knitted in deep concentration, his hand sure, steely, nerveless. See the towering edifice made entirely of playing cards, stacked one on one, upon the table before him. See how slow and with what excruciating patience it climbs? See the picture of calm – Pa with his quiet cards. Floor upon floor.
Yet, not even thirty minutes beforehand, ah had watched Pa, through a spy-hole in the outside wall, standing, legs astride and with an old knotty walking-stick, hammering Mule again and again. Whack! Whack! Whack! See the wet welted stripes that blister across the poor creature’s back and rump. See how Pa viciously beats his beast until he is literally too weak to raise another stroke of the stick. Hear Mule’s sick bray. Hee-haw! Heehaw! Hee-haw! Half on his haunches and half off.
See how, even as Mule brays, Pa is rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to begin on the first floor of cards?
See Mule churning a hopeless circle in the corral as he tries, in vain, to lick the bloody wounds that cut across his rump.
See Mule infected with Pa’s sickness. And Pa – his madness gone! Passed on! Working calmly. Painlessly. Forever upward. See?