And the Ass Saw the Angel

  3. The wicked are estranged from the womb:

  they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.

  And an icy chill clutched mah heart and mah head swam, but not from the smoke, not from the fumes –

  4. Their poison is like the poison of a serpent:

  they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;

  5. Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers,

  charming never so wisely.

  -not from the poison fumes did mah hands grow hotter and hotter, raw and rubbed and throbbing horrible, mah snaking veins worming, throbbing and worming –

  6. Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth:

  break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD.

  7. Let them melt away as waters which run continually:

  when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows,

  let them be as cut in pieces.

  – mah teeth shooting up mah face and fucking mah ears, so that Pa’s words are melting, mah poisoned brains are boiling full –

  8. As a snail which melted,

  let every one of them pass away:

  like the untimely birth of a woman,

  that they may not see the sun.

  9. Before your pots can feel the thorns,

  he shall take them away as with a whirlwind,

  both living, and in his wrath.

  – of other voices, angry voices –

  10. The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance:

  he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.

  – righteous voices. O blood –

  11. So that a man shall say,

  Verily there is a reward for the righteous:

  verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth:

  – O bloody reward –

  Ashes glowed faintly in the drum but shed no light and the starless night served as a veil, so that mah father could not see the stream of tears that had wet mah fiery cheeks. We sat in silence. Then Pa said, his voice sounding from the darkness, suddenly old, choked and old, ‘Boy… don’t cry, boy… it’s all right… it’s all right…’

  Then Pa’s hand reached out of the darkness, but ah was not so upset that ah didn’t see it coming and quick smart ah ducked, keeping low, but – and it – he touched me – no, but gently, placing his hand over mine, mah right one – just like that, gently and ah could hardly hold mah hand still, trembling as it was – and the feeling was so goddamn strange – so completely, goddamn strange – his cool, rough human hand, over mah hot little throbbers. Only for, say, about four seconds and then he gave it a little pat, sliding as he did it off the bonnet of the Chevy.

  Ah remained seated there, in the humming darkness, mah whole being quaking, and ah listened as he trudged across the yard, hearing the clank of the pail and the slop-splash of the trough-water as he filled it, and again his footsteps, and finally a hisssss as he emptied the bucket into the drum.

  ‘Even the ashes stink,’ ah think ah heard him mutter, as the sound of his retreating footsteps died in the night.

  After a while, when the tingling had stopped, ah too slid off the bonnet and crossed the yard to the incinerator. Ah took a deep sniff as ah peered in. Ah smelled nothing, or rather, ah forgot to smell something, as the full face of the moon laughed at me from the bottom of the drum, mirrored in the dirty, ashen soup.

  Exhausted, ah charged indoors.

  XVII

  The sun rose and waked the cock. The cock a-doodled and waked the wild dog. The dog gave a ho-o-o-owl and waked the crows, who took to the air, flying low, going ‘caw-caw-caw’ and not stopping till the whole fucken valley was woke. Little wonder every season is open season on crows.

  Ah crawled from mah bed, mah mind a slaughterhouse. Plucked birds with big yellow beaks fell victim to the cleaver. Mah head I throbbed with the ‘caw-caw-chop’, ‘caw-caw-chop’ of mah bloody I morning thoughts. Ah dressed and entered the front room, creeping past Pa’s room so as not to wake him, hoping like hell that his darksome mood of the last two days had lifted.

  Mah conjunctivitis – something of a family thing, on Pa’s side – could not have been worse than on this bugger of a morn. So raw and itchy and swollen were mah eyes that ah figured the sandman must have died and they’d called in the mustardman as a replacement. Ah picked at the mucus crusts as ah groped mah way toward the tub, feeling like ah had cat’s tongues for eyelids. Ah dipped a handkerchief in the water and, holding back mah head, folded the soppy cloth across both eyes, dabbing and patting at the sockets, feeling the coolness seep through mah lids.

  ‘If it ain’t one thing, then it’s a hundred others,’ ah thought. ‘Weighed in the balance and found wanting. Defect and Deformity. Blemish and Flaw. Handicap, Inadequacy and Malady. Will this shabby lot hobble forever at mah heel, from now unto the grave, evermore to be the sorry dogs of mah days?’ ah grieved, feeling downright sorry for mahself. ‘How can ah launch a holy war’ – ah beat at mah sunken chest with mah free hand – ‘when mah battledress is more chink than fucken armour?’ Ah shook one plaintive hand heavenward.

  God, what a morning. Ah wiped away the eye-muck, made soft by the soppy compress, and, squinting and blinking, ah looked for the first time at everything about me. All was as it should’ve been.

  All was as it should’ve been, except…

  On the table, only an arm’s length or two away and towering a good foot taller than me – and ah’m scraping five and a half mahself – six, if ah could stand up straight – was a house made up of playing cards. Only this time Pa had excelled himself, for it was a colossus of truly awesome highness. Yet its base was only five cards square – lengthwise arranged, of course. Ah counted as ah stood there – frozen in mah tracks, breathing but not breathing, afraid to even look too hard at it – exactly twenty storeys, stacked one on top of the other, making the soaring monolith a full four feet high – that’s a heaven-tickling seven feet, if you include the table, leaving a meagre twelve inches grace between its topmost storey and the fucken goddamn ceiling! Can you imagine just how many cards it would take to construct an edifice of such lofty perpendicular proportion?

  And can you imagine just how fragile, just how prone to collapse this structure was? Do you realize just how much this building ached to fall down?

  ‘Ah sure as hell don’t plan to be around when it does,’ ah thought, as memories of mah mother, dead and pasted on the north wall, flooded mah mind. And just at that moment a giant green blow-beetle flew through the shack door and, chirruping loudly, ploughed straight into the middle of it.

  Pa’s masterwork collapsed in on itself like it was imploding, flatting floor by floor, with a sinister method to its undoing – a cold symmetry and a tragic inevitability that froze me stiff, even as it came crashing down. Ah watched in horror but what ah heard, ah heard in disbelief!

  The tower of playing cards crumpled with a sound of splintering wood, followed closely by a god-almighty ‘cra-a-a-ash’ that literally shook the whole damn house as the paper cards fell into a pile on the table top. And then…

  And then there was silence, complete and utter silence.

  ‘Is it not enough that ah am voiceless? Is it not enough that mah eyes still burn-itch from this morning’s clagging? Is it also necessary that mah ears go idiot on me, just now?’ ah thought.

  Ah stood like a wooden Indian, petrified, feeling like there was no-one left alive in the world but me – alone – in fear – with all the voices coming now, rushing in, telling me, telling me… but ah knew – O God, ah knew…

  Then Euchrid was hurtling across the front room, upturning the table and sending the paper ruins of the card-house spilling across the sod floor as he careered past. Crashing through the screen door and taking all three porch steps in one lunge, the terror-fraught mute threw himself along the front of the house, swung around the corner and headed down the side of the shack to the junk-pile.

  As he grew closer his frenzied sprint suddenly slowed to urgent paces, l
ike some berserk clockwork toy winding down, and those paces soon became faltering steps, until Euchrid was no longer moving but standing rigid, his back bent and shoulders stooped in such a way that his posture appeared even more crooked, even more comical than usual. He stood with his hands folded over his head, in the manner of chimpanzees seen at the zoo, his lower jaw slack, sucking and blowing deep lungfuls of the new air, his red-rimmed eyes quivering. He stared.

  Euchrid remained riveted before the sight that confronted him. An unspeakable sadness crept over his face. All his fears were founded.

  The rusted iron water-tank – Pa’s gladiatorial arena and menagerie of death – lay upon its side. The splintered stilts of its base jutted up behind like so many unearthed bones, brown and rotten, whilst the corrugated tank itself had flattened from the impact of its fall and was now oval in shape, the chicken-wire lid having sprung free so that the top or the mouth of the tank looked liked a monstrous maw spewing forth a gutful of death, a jumbled hecatomb of bleached and eaten bone, many-spined and many-limbed and many-skulled, skins and furs and feathers rotted from the pale remains, with skulls still spinning and rolling even as Euchrid watched.

  And thrown beyond the spillage, lying on his side though still in a sitting position, his stool only inches away, lay Pa, a growing pool of black blood spreading about his smashed skull and a thin string of watery blood bubbling from the nob of his missing ear.

  One eye, still and yellow, hung by its optic nerve from a blood-pooled orbit. Dead eye. Crow bait. On Pa’s shoulder a wily black scavenger sidled back and forth, across his arm, fending off two smaller crows, taking sly pecks at the dangling morsel then flapping back along the arm to thrust its vicious beak at the squawking interlopers.

  Euchrid span on his heel, entered the shack and returned within seconds, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He aimed, fired, and blew the head clean off the big crow. He fired again and blasted the second into oblivion. The third bird fled, flapping into the morning ether as, reloading and aiming again, Euchrid squeezed the trigger, winging it so that it flailed and squawked and plummeted earthward, landing a barrel’s distance from Euchrid’s foot. It flapped weakly in the blood-specked dust, one pleading black bead fixed on Euchrid.

  Gun at his hip, Euchrid aimed at the crow, then lifted the gun again and, sobbing now, tears breaking down his face, brought his foot slowly down upon the bird’s shivering head, hearing the skull give beneath his boot as he ground its head to pulp. He wiped his boot clean on a patch of onionweed.

  Euchrid pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and shook it open. He walked over to his father and draped the white linen square across the old man’s face. Then he walked over to the Chevy and climbed on to the bonnet, and with his legs dangling over the side he lay back beneath the shimmering sun.

  He reached into his front pocket and retrieved a second handkerchief and, unfolding it slowly, he let the thin fabric float over his own face, until that too was enshrouded.

  He let the gun down by his side.

  The handkerchief was sea-green.

  He lay just so, locked in silence, until mercifully he fell away; for he could go no other place than the dark retreat of sleep – to the poultice of his dreams where there was no cause to wonder, to comprehend…

  The sun was hell and all the flies hummed and in a matter of seconds Pa’s shroud turned a deep crimson, like a flag red and wet.

  The sun was hell and the flies all hummed and fed upon the carnage and spoliation, and two dark patches soaked into the green fabric that covered Euchrid’s face

  Inside the shack the sod floor was carpeted with playing cards of which there were at least twenty different designs – cards from three or four of the packs were red or blue and bore intricate linear patterns; another design boasted a watercolour painting of a Chinese junk; there was a pack that showed a lickerish blonde – a fleshly Venus-with-arms, climbing the steps of a sunken bath, her hair pinned up off her shoulders, patches of bath foam shimmering in a glissade down the swollen slopes of her breasts, golden and pushed forward, those soapy paps, and her belly sucked-in and the rest of her lost in the warm suds, a gilded gargoyle with fierce eyes spewing a jet of steaming water from its nostrils, inches from her hind; another was simply deep red; one had an old river-steamer etched upon it; some advertised products, such as ‘Vestal Padlocks’, or ‘Cure ’em Quicks’; there was a pack that showed a willow-pattern vase full of roses and another with a basketful of ginger kittens; two of the packs advertised liquor – Malt Hash Bourbon and Kentucky Straight – and another advertised Havana cigars; a silhouette of President Lincoln adorned yet another; one was simply covered in yellow and black diamonds, harlequin style; another showed a retriever standing at point; there was a photograph of the first T-model Ford with a young man in jodhpurs standing next to it with one gaitered foot up on the running-board; and finally, there was a pack that showed a picture of a little girl, with a funny little cock-eyed kind of face, maybe about ten years old – no more – dressed in a sloppy red and white ski jumper with matching mittens, and a scarf and cap under which her hair had been tucked, though some of the strands had fallen down and hung in thin yellow wisps across her sad little face. The cap had a pompom that hung comically to one side. A red skirt peeked from under her jumper and she wore a pair of thick white woollen tights that concertina’d at the tops of her white ankle-high gum-boots causing the crutch to hang down below the hem of her skirt and making her thin child’s legs look a little too short. In her arms she cradled a soot-coloured kitten that had a patch of white over one eye, making the kitten look as scraggly as the child. At the bottom of the picture were the words ‘Little Miss Rags and Blotch’.

  When Euchrid upset the table of playing cards in his mad flight from the house, all twenty packs – over one thousand cards – landed on the floor, face down, picture-back up, with one exception. Over by the door, a little apart from the rest of the cards, a ‘Little Miss Rags’ card stared, face up. It was a royal card. A Jack. A Jack of Spades.

  Euchrid buried all the corpse and carcass of that black morning right there, in the yard, where the tower had stood. His face was as impassive as the sun’s was triumphant and he bent beneath the blistering flog of it all and dug and further dug and continued digging, while the sun rolled fulgent about the heavens, a haughty bully, filling the valley with all its brag and swollen business.

  First he dug around the splintered stumps of the tower, which were still entrenched in the earth. Straining beneath the weight he hauled them out, each rotten pylon anchored with a lump of concrete and wire.

  Then he began to dig the hole.

  He dug from noon until nightfall, smeared with sweat and grime, his face a blank page, like a dead man’s; all through the hell of the day, until the dark earth rose, piled high about him, and the pit grew dim in the gloaming hours, dim and drowned in shadow, so that Euchrid could no longer see to dig.

  He dragged his body from the grave and collapsed upon a hill of sweet clay, blistered and bloody palms turned upward.

  The following day, each hand swathed in a grimy mitten of gauze and tape, Euchrid shovelled all the dead and rotten spillage back into the overturned tank, then, attaching a rope to one side of it, hoisted the tank around so that the mass of putrid hecatomb began to slide and spill, with a rattle of bones across tin, into the pit. Euchrid dragged his father’s corpse by the feet over to the hole and dumped it in, having to get down on his knees and push with his hands in order to roll the stiff dead weight in.

  ‘So much death…’ he thought, and wished himself to die.

  Then he filled the hole and by evening all death was interred. He slapped the swollen mound with the back of the spade, then walked around the yard, stooping sometimes to pick up a tooth or a knuckle and pitch it into the junk-pile. He threw pieces of crow into the incinerator. He continued to saunter around the yard in aimless circles, drawing to a standstill at last behind the naked mound of earth. He sat down. The clay was
warm. He brought his knees up to his chin, yawned, and stretched them out in front of him again. He rested on one elbow, rolling on to his hip, in a state of semi-repose. His head he propped in his hand. He closed his eyes. He brought his knees up to his chest again and laid his head upon the moist earth.

  Like a conceptus he lay upon the gravid belly of dirt, counting the beats he heard in the earth – the beats of a heart. First one, then two, faintly drubbing, growing, in time, into a family of thumping hearts, and he could feel the vibrations coming up from under. He heard a claw scratching, then a spine; a pecking bill; a gnawing tooth or two. He heard a dead hand rising against all the dying risen, he thought. And then an adder’s hissssed reply. A yowl and savage yapping. Then all the dead belly’s unborn, unmuzzled, did sound, and soon the earth was throbbing with the clamorous dead and Euchrid, their keeper, lay curled and sleeping, lulled into dumb slumber by their kick and their commotion.

  He did not dream. Instead, his memory hauled him back, to relive a time when he was barely ten years old.

  Ah was barely ten years old when ah became the keeper of an Atra virago, more commonly known as the Vargus Barking Spider, but ah had to let him go, for ah could not compete.

  Mah Atra virago was given to me by a hobo in exchange for a pint of peel liquor, which ah milked off one of Ma’s stills the same evening.

  If ah had been just a little stronger, ah know ah could have healed him.

  The exchange went as it should have, although ah sensed it was a solemn moment for the hobo. The way in which his hands trembled as he handed me the fatty skillet, barely able to hold down the lid, betrayed a certain sensitivity that was rare amongst the hobos, who, in the main, were a worthless, roguish lot.

  Ah made for mah spider’s home an ingenious coop. This is how. Listen.

  Ah found on the junk-pile an old hubcap and a battered kitchen colander, that put face to face fitted perfectly and formed a slightly flattened globoid with a solid bottom and heavily perforated ceiling, for breathing, and looking. Ah tore up a newspaper into even strips and lined the hubcap with them, making a soft, springy floor.