Mule lowered his eyes and sighed, bowing beneath the yoke of his creaturehood, to suffer the downpour in silence.
Mule’s chain clinked and ah felt a twinge of shame.
‘Who, but an ass?’ ah asked mahself, and in truth ah could not answer.
Ah booted the frying-pan into the air and watched it whorl once and land face up on the flooding slope, only to be set awash on the running waters, down-bound and spinning round and around, that rambling pan, like a legless beggar, its one asking-arm grasping wildly as it sailed down the versant toward the cane crops already ravaged by the deluge. There, at the foot of the gallows-tree and at the edge of the ruined cane, ah could just make out the pan slowly revolve but one time, upon that darkly growing pool, before slipping unner. Yes, but one drunk demented circle before the pan was summoned down, face-first beneath the surface, its lone and mendicant arm still asking, still grasping into the merciless torrent – its one hopeless, sinking plea echoed in the stone-same gesture of the stone-same gallows-tree.
II
Inside the tabernacle the congregation sat atrophied on pine-board pews, all eyes fixed upon the vestry door. There was a stench of wet rags and a sneaping clamminess in the air. No one spoke. Only the rain could be heard, slamming down on the old iron roof.
The men and women seemed older, dogged and haggard with want of sleep, their faces like the countenance of the valley itself, grizzled with new lines and gutters born overnight and longanimously worn.
The women, young and old, wore heavy black sackcloth tunics covered with clean white cotton smocks. Their heavy black archless shoes were not unlike clogs, in that they swelled at the toe and stiffened the gait to a slow, rigid shuffle. Each woman’s hair was long, but coiled up fiercely into a cruel bun, or ‘knop’, held tight – to leave scrubbed ears exposed – by two or three cane needles. Draped across the knop and similarly secured was a piece of hand-embroidered lace. So severe was the knop that the skin, drawn tautly back along the hairline, seemed to be stretching the features of each woman’s face like a shrunken mask. Their well-scrubbed cheeks gleamed. Their fingernails were pared to the quick. Many held battered Madonna lilies plucked from the lily beds around the tabernacle. The flowers’ pointed yellow tongues pushed out through the fat labial folds, cut golden against all the virgin white of smock and fleshy petal.
The menfolk wore trousers and jackets, all cut from the same coarse black fabric, and their shirts, boiled clean and white and heavily starched, were worn collarless. Each man held in his lap a straw hat with a wide flat brim, unless he was one of the older members of the society, who distinguished themselves by owning hats of a similar design but cut from stiff black felt.
For this glum assembly the catharsis was over. For five fevered days and nights, the streets of Ukulore had reflected, in a hundred puddling eyes, the shapes of sackcloth reeling in morbid genuflexion, like the fast shadows of bats and birds, as the Ukulites petitioned their God for mercy.
The Ukulite women found, it seemed, in times of death or high catastrophe such as this, an irresistible vehicle for dramatic expression.
There in the night, hidden beneath veils of rain, they had wailed and weltered in the mud, punishing themselves with frightening abandon in an orgy of self-abuse. Shoeless, their sackcloth robes torn and sodden, each wearing over her face a black veil – as often as not discarded in the throes of penance – the Ukulite women tore at their hair, beat their breasts with stones, crawled through the streets on bleeding knees and purged their bodies with nettle wands, disinfectants and irritants.
Into the early hours of the morning they had performed their weird piacular rites, each in deep and delirious potation with her own pain, each a single hump of convulsions unto herself and each in a self-effacement as determined as the tempest, inflicting brutal rebuke upon her own person, for these were the dues exacted by a collective shame.
But the downpour did not abate, despite every morbid bid for atonement. The air hung heavy, reboant with spent oblations and worming acts of contrition, all tossed back by the rumbling nimbus, like undersized fish.
And all the time the rain still fell, spreading puddles into each other to form pools so dark – even in the half-light of the new day – that they looked like pockets of ink, and every so often the eye would be deceived by a discarded veil lying lost upon the ground like a pool.
The vestry door opened and Sardus Swift entered the chapel. Thin and stooped, his eyes stared fish-cold from their orbits.
The congregation’s mood seemed to darken further still as he moved into the glow of the candles, and the people saw, in the buckled figure that bid genuflexion to the altar, all the vile doubts so apparent in each one’s heart.
Sardus walked a broken line to the mahogany pulpit. The rain punished the tabernacle with a roar and a crash. He raised his voice and petitioned his Lord, but his words were lost in the relentless drumming of the rain.
Water dripped upon them, there, within.
III
These figures tell the story of sugar production in Ukulore Valley in the early 1940s.
IV
Below is a page.
Ah took it from a book – part inventory, part diary.
And it belonged to Pa and it was a secret.
It spanned the years from 1937 to 1940.
FIRST DAY IN JUNE 1940
Main ‘BURN-OFF’ CATCH… NTH-EAST ROW
Baggers
50 Rats (approx)
6 Toads (all dead)
Wire nets
15 Rats
40 Toads (approx) (10 dead)
2 Vargus Fan Lizards (1 dead, 1 part eaten)
3 Grass Snakes (2 large, 1 small) (1 dead)
1 Horned Lizard
1 Blue-runged Lizard (dead and eaten)
Trip-traps + Teeth-snares
1 Barking Wolf (med) (bitch) (b. legs gone but live)
2 Razorback Hogs
3 Feral Cats (1 w/litter (8) everyone dead)
1 Lizard (type unrecognizable but dead)
1 Possum (burnt but live) (maimed)
1 Black Snake (poisoners)
1 Toad (d)
7 Rats (all dead)
1 Crow (trippt snare while scabbing on cat)
(first bird catched in land-snare) (dead)
Pit-trap
35 Rats (approx) (6 dead)
1 Black Snake (5ft) (dead. part eaten.)
1 Feral Cat (dead. eaten.)
Loops + Coils
0 Zero (all trigged)
Spike-slap
0 Zero (not trigged)
Drop-beam + Tangle-beam
0 Zero (all trigged but one)
Grab-sacks
7 Toads (all dead + eaten + part eaten)
1 Feral Cat (dead + part eaten)
Rat shite + big holes gnored in hessian
Ah found it, this diary, this inventory, in the very same tin trunk in which ah was to discover the jacket, the telescope and the compass, each wrapped up in newspaper. Only the Great One, in all his omnipotence, could have foreseen just how crucial it was that ah, His Servant, His cog, should break the lock and lift the lid of that forbidden tin trunk and remove, one by one, each parcel wrapped in yellowing newspaper and, like a fruit, peel away the pith of mah predestination – and in God’s measured time, expose the core of mah calling.
The trunk was kept covered by a hessian potato sack in mah parents’ room. The heavy lock bulged beneath the coarse cloth. Pa kept the book a secret, for it was wrapped in newspaper when ah found it. Even though ah had fashioned a spy-hole in the west wall of their room, ah never once saw Pa make one solitary entry in the little battered book. Yet it was printed in Pa’s slow hand, in Indian ink, which, kept in a tiny bottle, was also wrapped carefully in newspaper, stored in the trunk that stayed always in their chamber, until they were dead and both long gone.