And the Ass Saw the Angel

  Set, the traps would all cry like babies.

  By the time they returned home from checking the traps, with the sun just falling behind the hills, Mule would invariably be loaded with six or seven hessian sacks, some of which squirmed and whipped and kicked, some of which growled and hissed. Pa would hitch the mule to one of the stilts that supported the old disused water tank and then begin to climb the rickety ladder, carrying one by one the squirming sacks and emptying them into the tank that sat on the wooden platform at the very top. When all the sacks were emptied, having first checked that the chicken wire top was secure, he would climb on to a high stool which he had erected on the platform and gaze over the side of the tank.

  Like some mad imperator Pa would perch on the edge of his rickety throne, twenny feet in the air, and peering into the rusty arena, gloat upon the massacre within.

  But if one were a looker like me, one could see his hard little hands screwed white into fists, resting on the rim of the corrugated tank, and a tortured vein worming across his forehead, his keen little eyes bugged and popping and fluttering from side to side.

  VIII

  Her name was Cosey Mo.

  She stood upon the threshold of the caravan doorway, slumped slightly.

  She was twenty-six.

  Dressed in a faded pink slip she shimmered, pinkly and damply glistening, and yonder a dragonfly alighted on Euchrid’s knee.

  Her toenails, painted thick with countless coats of red lacquer, were badly chipped. Her thin white arms hung limply by her sides, swinging slightly as she rocked upon her heels.

  Sitting at her feet, on one of the caravan steps, was an open vanity box. In it, on a bed of coloured cotton-balls, stood four minikin vials of Prussian-blue glass, each one containing a measure of scented water.

  Euchrid was deathly still, breathing low and long the lavender air as Cosey pulled the crystal stopper from one of the vials and splashed her cheeks with the essence. She dabbed at her nape with a yellow cotton-ball.

  The skin of her arms was faultless, save for where she stuck in needles to wilt those brittle bones and make her limbs hang weakly, to make her heavenly body rock, to and fro, inside her shivering silk skin. Her thin garment strained against all the languid life contained within.

  There were ten pearl buttons down her front. Two at the top and two at the bottom were undone. Her hem flapped with each summer gust and her breathing was deep and deeply rose her breasts.

  Her hair was long and yellow and worn loosely back, held with a bunch of coloured pins, and her upper lids hung heavy and her slack mouth moved around the words to some half-remembered song,

  ‘I’ll fear not the darkness

  When my flame shall dim …”

  As the sun slowly sank, a snatch or two of her song floated behind the bush and reached Euchrid, and he listened to the music of her breathing, caught back in little gasps, all to the rhythm of her sultry rocking.

  Then, with a little push of her body, she moved down the steps and, hand shading her eyes, looked down the hillside road. Pursued by a coil of dust a pick-up roared up the slope toward her. Euchrid leaned back. His heart groaned.

  Cosey Mo spun around on her heels and darted back into the caravan.

  Euchrid watched the open doorway as the motor grew louder.

  Positioned back in the doorway Cosey resumed her rocking, like before, only this time a little firmer, a little more deliberate, heel to toe, heel to toe, and Euchrid, frozen by her pulchritude, observed with the finnicky eye of the voyeur that there were three buttons undone up top.

  He saw her mouth. Messy now, with a thick red slick of lipstick.

  ‘You will be ever there beside me …’

  Euchrid slipped off, back down the way he had come, crouching behind a stump as the pick-up hurtled past him.

  IX

  Ah calculate thus:

  That by the time the moon comes shining over the top of yonder trees – that is to say, in approximately sixty minutes – mah soul will have departed from, and in no way will have remained in, this here world. And mah body which for some time has been and at present continues to be, even as ah speak, under repossession, will have departed from this world and deeply sunken will its flesh and bones be.

  Ah say sixty minutes with at least a pinch of authority for ah have calculated, using the sun as mah measure, that ah have lain upon this mire, bogged in reminiscence, for a full thirty minutes and ah am now nearly one third unner – that is, one third if one employs the popular notion that the human body is divided into three parts, each of reasonably equivalent mass and weight: the head, shoulders and arms, the torso, and the legs and loins. If one discounts the supposition that mah rate of sinkage will accelerate as the quag takes more weight beneath the surface and so has more body-mass upon which to draw, and one ignores, as ah have done on both counts, the proposition that the rate of consumption will decrease as the unconsumed weight drops in proportion to that which is consumed, one can’t, ah hope, fault mah calculations. But one cannot discount factors like those above and still expect to arrive at a reasonably accurate conclusion. So, being that these contentions, or at least the answers to these contentions, lie beyond the limits of mah estimations, mah calculations can only be viewed, at best, as hypothesis – or at worst, utter fallacy. Therefore, in the light of this, ah am not averse, necessarily, to the proposition that ‘It is a madman who tries to count the knell of his own passing’, mainly because ah’m not really sure, exactly, what the said proposition actually means.

  Suffice to say, though, and say not at all unhappily, after long and probing ruminations and having drawn no hasty conclusions, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, have a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the sun come up tomorrow.

  X

  Once ah was watching the hobos squatting around a fire over by the north gorge. They numbered seven in all. They had moved from a sheltered spot close to mah home, and had begun to circle around the swampland, paddling the marsh but keeping their distance from the eerie island of vegetation until they reached the gorge where it was dry. Ma had managed to sell them a couple of pints of Stew and they sat drinking in silence, dressed in filthy green greatcoats that hung to the ground. They wore heavy boots and ridiculous felt hats.

  Ah was hidden in a pot-hole about thirty yards away when a small roan mongrel trotted up and sat at the edge of the ditch where ah was lying, yapping and whining and pushing a beggar’s paw toward me. A single blind eye, sealed by a nacreous cataract, hovered beneath a fringe of matted hair.

  First ah heard a whistle, then ah heard a bum call, ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! C’m’ere!’ Then the other bums were yelling it too and waving their greatcoats, going ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ which ah guess was the name of the mutt. The hobos began to stagger over toward mah pot-hole. Ah looked at the dog and knew ah stood to receive a hard and healthy beating if they caught me, for the hobos were a desperate mob and frequently I had seen them brawling amongst themselves for no apparent reason. Without using mah mouth ah said to the mongrel, to his one dead eye ‘Go to him! Run! Before he gets too close!’ at which the dog span a circle and bounded toward the approaching mob. The leader had his coat off and had bagged the dog in what seemed to be one single motion. Bastard yapped in the hobo’s arms, happy he’d been found. Ah lay in the ditch and watched the mountain of greatcoats huddled across the fire, working furiously.

  When Bastard was turning the hobos settled back in their original spots and silently took in his aroma, hungry as hell.

  That’s how ah knew ah could speak to dogs.

  XI

  The Ukulites believed the swampland to be an abomination.

  They believed that it would erupt and smite the valley should their God become displeased.

  At the school the Ukulite elders would hammer the heads of their children, with a fervour wrought of utter conviction, telling them that it was a diabolic macula on Zion and that within its bounds roamed all the infernal evils of the world. The children
, so frightened were they, rarely ventured past the northern city limit.

  The workers from the fields and refinery were not so superstitious, but still they referred to it with a certain reticence.

  Only once had Euchrid seen these brave and brawling men enter it. The fact that there were vast areas of residential space uninhabited at the swamp end of the valley, and that the opposite end, the south end, literally spilled with its occupants, indicated that the workers and their families looked toward the place with more than a little apprehension.

  The hobos who were driven from the town and residential areas and made to wander its surrounding vicinage whimpered at each other’s baleful tales of nights spent lost in its darksome umbrage, and while slugging greedily on bottles of raw liquor and spitting into the open night-fire they would look through the devilish flames at the great black shape of the swampland and, shaking, throw back another longer, deeper slug.

  Euchrid was barely ten years old when he first felt himself drawn toward it.

  Ah cannot, in all honesty, state the exact age ah was when ah first entered the swampland. What’s more ah cannot pin-point any one day and say – this day was the day on which ah first ventured into the swampland. No, ah can’t.

  For it seems to me that ah had always been drawn to this grim and murky place where ordinary souls would not dare to venture: where the mist lifts off the compost that lines the floor and hangs amongst the woven ceiling of vine and branch like an artificial sky – where the tall, thin trees all seem to bend toward me in attitudes of worship – where a million lumping shadows collide and circle, collide and circle, trunk to scrub – all, in secret, shifting through dim manoeuvres betrayed by jets of nostril steam. At the time it seemed to me – being little more than a decade old – that ah had spent a lifetime in this place, that ah had always walked upon sodden uncertain ground, breathed, heavy air and pushed mah bare hand into the crawling hearts of a thousand rotten stumps, that ah had always worn a black web for a veil. So the urge to slip across the marsh flats that separated the circle of swampland from the shack where ah lived seemed natural enough. Not that ah bounded in! O no! Not bounded in!

  The first few times ah believe ah only ventured a number of yards inside the damp spissitude of the swampland. Ah found the heavy scented air exhausting and confounding and it spooked me a little that mah nervous footfall faltered on the strange layered substratum of mushed leaf and soft, wet wood.

  Skeleton-webs like sticky shrouds clung to mah skin.

  Marsh-toads as big as fists swelled and croaked lowly in the gloom. The air hung upon me like an unwanted skin. Mah head swam and mah boots filled.

  Yet ah returned to this forbidden place again and again, each sojourn finding me a little deeper within its warm wet heart.

  And just as the swampland became, day by day, mah sanctuary and mah comfort, so too the angel did ease herself into mah world.

  First there was just a whispered word. Then a flutter overhead. A day or two later, mah name was uttered, sounding strange to me – unrecognizable – for no-one had ever called me by mah name. Next, a flapping shape, darting up amongst the trees, stirred the fog a fraction.

  Then, the wing and the silver floating feather – time by time, bit by bit – until at last ah sat upon a slimy log in a tiny clearing, the drugged air draining mah body, mah head in mah hands and mah eyes weary and sore; and ah perceived the air to fan slightly as if it were being beaten gently and ah lifted up mah head, ah think, and the breeze that she stirred was cool and of a heavenly hue.

  From the soft forbidden movements of this umbrage she came, only for a moment – a moment too brief – thief of mah heart.

  Immersed in a cobalt light, she hovered before me. Her wings beat through mah lungs, fanning up nests and brittle shells and webs and shiny wings and little skeletons and skulls and skins around me. And this visitation, she spoke sweetly to me. She did. ‘I love you, Euchrid,’ she said. ‘Fear not, for I am delivered unto you as your keeper.’

  And ah sat back down on the slimy log in the tiny clearing and put mah head back in mah hands feeling weary, aching, drugged. Looking up again, the clearing was like it had been before – dark and murky – and what looked like a falling knife, spinning down from above, came toward mah heart. A silver feather pierced the damp fabric of mah shirt.

  BOOK ONE

  THE RAIN

  I

  Harvest time in the year of 1941 and the sun ached in the sky and all around me the swollen air throbbed, holding me warmly as ah, in turn, damply warmed unto it, our sullen summer pulses humming as one.

  Sitting on the porch steps with mah elbows propped on mah knees and mah chin resting in the palms of mah hands, ah let mah eyelids go lazy as the heat doped me like a drug.

  Ah lobbed a bead of spittle over the crackling nettles that twisted up between the steps and watched the frothy pearl land in the dust and roll an inch or so, collecting a fine russet skin upon its outer surface, leaving in its wake a tiny furrow.

  The red bead blocked the path of a bull ant which nudged at the boulder and, unable to budge it, spun in an angry circle and charged past it, feelers groping wildly. On its back it freighted a crumb. Weaving a little unner its burden, the intrepid ant mounted its hill, and no sooner had it disappeared down the hole at the hill’s crest than ah noticed a second bull ant, shouldering yet another crumb and similarly in a mad scramble to get to its nest. With increasing concern ah watched its progress across the block of shadow cast by the lower step, as it too hiked the face of the anthill, drumming the air wildly with its antennae in the same spastic flurry as its brother.

  Ah yawned, rubbed mah face and looked again. Mah eyes had become accustomed to the crafty camouflage of these creatures, red as the earth upon which they scrambled, betrayed only by the bright speck of their burden. Ah saw that the hot dust swarmed with ants carrying a cargo of crumbs, in frantic flight, jockeying their way to the tip of the hill and piling into the hole that led to the mother-nest. The air was haywire with their giddy radar.

  Ah know ants. Ah know them well. Well enough, that is, to know that something was gravely amiss – for in all mah years of studying ants ah have never known them to begin hoarding food so early in the summer months, never!

  Hoping mah footfall would spare the majority of mah wise and busy friends ah leaped across the anthill and bolted into the yard. Ah looked toward the ancient dead tree that stood at the foot of the booming crop, its two arms raised heavenward.

  In the numb gesture of this ever-dead, a pair of pinguid crows hopped, foot to foot, along one pleading limb, like two conspiring nuns cackling and pecking and flapping into the air, to hover a moment and then alight once again, to hop and squawk at the foot of the murmurous crop. Like the ants, the rogue crows seemed unquiet, fidgeting and flapping blackly up there in the arms of that hollow gallows-tree. Ah watched the birds take wing at last and, cawing a rude warning across the valley, circle up and over the west versant to disappear behind the valley ridge.

  The air had turned tactile and tinted red – it stuffed the valley thickly and there was an electricness about it that crackled inside mah head like paper. It kinda oozed – this air – oozed into mah lungs, soupy and reeking of evilness. And ah could see it – ah could see it rolling across every crag and crack, every knurl and knoll, every ridge, each ditch, every hill and hole, through groves of cottonwoods, each knotted chine, the knitted boles of the killing vine, each impressed dent and darksome hollow, over glen, gully, gulch, gorge, gill, glade, gallow – even this very fen, and ah expect this bog – yes, this suck, this darkling quag. There in the very blood of the air ah could sense the most hell-born forecast, hear the murky rhymes beneath its breath-bombinations, hexes and muttered spells – hear the beat of its breath – the first tremors, distant and faint, but coming, coming – feel its plodding pulse, now fuller still, its pounding! This special evil – Coming! Drumming! – and this special air tensed to receive it.

  From the backyar
d came the freakish bray of Mule, joining the driving drums of air, rising now with every quaking count, so that together air and mule raged horribly.

  Keeping close to the wall, ah bolted down the side of the shack. Always suspicious of commotion, ah rolled one quick eye around the corner, just in case Pa was reprimanding Mule by way of a ‘damn good smote’. He was not.

  Something had spooked Mule – it had – and he was madder than ah’d ever seen him – braying and bucking and hurling his rump skyward – wrenching at the chain that held him to the hitching post. More often than not he would slam a baleful hoof into the face of a sooty frying-pan that dangled on a wire hook suspended from the roof.

  The sky, like mah scalp, tightened. It had taken on the look of a vast membrane that stretched itself, like peeled skin, across the valley to form a roof, sealing in the stuffed light. It teemed with a network of intumescent red vessels, tested to capacity by their booming blood.

  The frying-pan made a final crashing protest and flew off the hook and into the roaring air, landing at mah feet and spinning like a top on the spot, describing with its long, bent handle a near-perfect circle in the dust around its pan, as if it were claiming the territory within as its own. Its face stared darkly into mine.

  Suddenly Mule stiffed and fell silent, as though ossified. The clouds of red dust engulfed the beast, then fell away and settled in veils at his feet. We stared at each other. Mule, it seemed, was cast in lead and draped in falling red veils. Dread crawled over Mule and sat like a king in all the places of his face. His lips curled back to reveal huge yellow teeth. He frothed. He foamed. His demented eyes egged in their orbits as if they were being laid. And all the while he goggled horribly, over mah shoulder, at it coming.