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 backyard 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.
The throb had stopped. The pulse. There was not a sound to be heard, as if the entire valley now held its breath beneath the spreading penumbra.
Ma and Pa stood together on the porch, speechless, eyes cast south. Ma held her bottle limply at her side, sobered by the sight of it. Pa just stood there beside her, dumbfounded – the two of them bound, at long last, by a common bond, one to the other in the fetters of terror. Stuck by the unerring horror of its coming, they stood petrified like two filthy pillars of salt.
And ah will tell you this: if ah were standing as ah was then, but with a pole-axe raised at mah hind, ah could not have felt more vulnerable than ah did on that day. And if ah were on bended knee in the very lion’s den, or if mah skull was rested between the hammer and the steely anvil ah could not have felt more intensely threatened than ah did at that moment, mah back turned on it – gravely coming – this cold, breathing beast.
Ah have met with fear before, but believe me, on this day, the first day of the summer of 1941, ah felt – well – let’s just say, sir, that ah was one very fucking shit-scared mute. Yes, ah shaked. Ah shook. Ah did.
Ah felt ah could not look upon it. Ah’m not sure why now, yet even with mah eyes inclined toward the ground, ah knew exactly the nature of the thing that loomed at mah hind. And ah knew – for all along mah bones this knowing blew – that the bounded duty of this abomination was part of something that only He can comprehend, all working as part of His massive scheme, moving us in ways we often cannot unnerstand. And keeping mah eyes downcast, ah watched mah squat black shadow melt into the treacherous umbra that engulfed us all, spreading over the valley like dark, gelid lava.
And the silence could not have held its breath a moment longer.
At mah feet there broke a faint but firm sound. Three slow-metered drops – themselves a prophecy, ah would realize in the years to come – leaked into the very centre of the frying-pan, trespassing within the bounders of its claim, with a ring somewhere between a ping and a plunk – an ictus, solemn and even, upon its punished face. That trio of cold, tin chimes broke the tumid silence like distant curfew bells carried on the new night air. And it seemed to me at that time that this trinity of tears – like the curt taps of the maestro’s baton or the three commands barked at the fusilade – struck the fetters from the cataclysm.
It thundered. It did. The skin of the sky ripped open, spewing forth its burden into the valley’s basin. Corrupt and putrid and unrecanting, it came in slashes of bilge and sheets of swill – vile and poisonous waters, as if all the welkin bile had been pumped from the sewers of Hell then vomited in a black and furious torrent down upon the shack and the cane, soaking me through to the bone before ah even thought to run, before ah even thought to raise mah head. Ah watched the raddled dust pock, then turn to running mud around mah boots. Ah let the rain bite at mah nape and naked arms, figgering shelter to be a waste of time, and in any case ah could not stand to hear the bloody fracas inside – for ah had seen Ma, still on the porch, raise one porky fist at the rain and engage in a brief but stormy exchange, to be cut short as the rusted guttering above her head buckled unner its sudden, muddy load and pissed a soup of leaf and possum crap down her thrashing tit.
So ah just stood there like that, in the rain, feeling mah skin go numb – a little from the pelt of its hard waters, ah guess, a little from the cold.
Above the wrath, above the din, above all the angels’ barking thunder, ah heard Mule making a wheezing ‘Hee’, then release a long and heavy ‘Haaaw’, and ah looked up and ah saw Mule, and Mule it seemed looked straight at me – and we stood that way for a numb, wet moment, pondering the folly of each other’s lot: the mute and the mule, the mule and the mute.
Finally Mule rolled one derisive eye at me, as if to say: ‘Who, but an ass, would tarry midst the deluge when shelter be to his left and to his right and when he is neither hobbled nor is loaded up with chains?’
Then, with a flick of his head, he curled his lips around his muddle of teeth and grinned at me.