*
On the afternoon of 12 August, 1942 – that is, the Second Year of The Rain – Doc Morrow had the unenviable duty as the Swifts’ family doctor of informing the couple of what he had ascertained: that although Sardus was as potent as a goat, his wife was unfortunately as barren as a stone, and that all the love and the seed furiously spent in the name of procreation was thus issued in vain. The doctor knew it would not be necessary to add that, in the light of such knowledge, the act of love (which, as crucial to the process of multiplication, was tolerated) would become, if continued, downright fornication, which the Church could not condone.
Dropping in on the Swifts on his way to vespers, the doctor found only Rebecca at home, Sardus having already gone on to church to prepare for the service alone. Rebecca Swift’s bad attendance record was becoming a point of concern for many of the elders; of this both Rebecca and the doctor were fully aware.
Rebecca stood before the cold mouth of the hearth and warmed herself in imaginary flames. She asked two questions and the doctor replied with two words.
‘Can we have a child?’
‘No.’
‘Who?’
‘You.’
Nothing more was said. Doc Morrow left her to make his way to church. Rebecca Swift had had but one lone crutch upon which to prop her tormented world, and with two words the crutch had shattered beneath her.
Shortly after Sardus had returned home and – depressed, exhausted and appalled at the doctor’s news – had fallen into a worried sleep, Rebecca slipped out. Through the back door, wearing only a nightdress and carrying before her a spirit lamp, she crept like a bird into the night. She stopped only to collect a length of rope from the tool-shed that stood at the rear of the rain-battered yard. With the rope coiled over one shoulder she left the garden by the back gate, her cotton nightdress glued to her body like a shrivelled skin, soon to be despatched.
No sign remained of her garden – yet it had once been envied widely throughout the region. Before the rain had beaten the spring blossoms to rotten pulp, the little garden had literally burst with clusters of sunflowers, gold and sun-gorged, tropical vines, and a prize-winning vegetable patch which had swollen with giant beets, titanic pumpkins and bounties of large beans that had cleaned up in their respective fields in three different fairs in three different counties. It had once been a glorious garden indeed, one of the finest in the valley.
‘Have you ever seen so many awards? Look at these ribbons! Green thumbs! By Heavens, there’s nothing my wife can’t grow!’ Sardus had once boasted. He would remember this alone at home, in days to come.
Lamp outstretched, Rebecca walked the length of her street, then turned left up Dundass and made her way across the courtyard of Wiggam’s General Store. There she approached the old disused well. Painted in faded letters on its little tin roof were the words:
‘WIGGAM’S WISHING WELL’
– make a wish come true –
There upon its little slab wall she rested the spirit lamp. Then she tied one end of the rope she had brought to the central crankshaft of the hoist, and composed a crude hangman’s knot at the other. She disrobed. Her hands flickered about her like white flames as she incanted a last prayer into the cheering downpour. I Black ribbons of rain broke upon her pale arms, her tiny breasts, her futile belly, and a system of dark, ropey veins coiled and crawled down the sheer slopes of her body like a plague of shimmering snakes. From the pocket of her discarded nightdress she took the plastic bag which contained her suicide note – this she stuffed between two of the piled slabs of the wall, up on to which she duly climbed. Lifting the halter, she clapped on the noose and pulled it over her head, tugging the rope till it fitted snugly about her throat.
Tottering a little beneath the great knotted growth that sat grotesquely upon her right shoulder, she wavered a brief moment upon the brink of the well, then leapt naked into the dark hole.
At the well’s mouth the spirit lamp flickered lowly like a vigil light.
Wondering why he still bothered to look out his window of a morning, a certain early riser and creature of habit, Baker Wiggam, did just that and was greeted by the lamp’s last waning light calling from the well. Baker Wiggam grabbed his coat and pocketed a large torch.
Thirty minutes later, Wiggam’s fat and evil son Fitzgerald – known to one and all as ‘Fists’ – bowled through Sardus Swift’s open backdoor and, without so much as a knock, burst into his bedroom. Grabbing hold of the foot of the four-poster, he bullied its brass rail violently. A shaken Sardus awoke to the sight of Fists Wiggam grinning and rolling on the spot like a bad penny, the terrible news a trembling bubble on the top of the boy’s fat tongue.
The boy chuckled as Sardus rubbed his face with one hand and explored the empty space beside him with the other. Both hands fell still as it dawned upon him that there was no wife in his bed; he lay there with the one frozen upon his face, the other outstretched to where the barren belly of his woman should have been.
The boy drew breath and spoke:
‘Not dere, Brudder Sawdus. Wife not dere. Tain’t cookin’ neither. Tain’t moppin’. Tain’t scrubbin’. Tain’t even in da house, Brudder! Nope! But ah know where dat woman is, Brudder Sawdus! Know where?!! Ya wife done backa our well wit not a stitch on!! Ha! Ha! Stark naked assa babe!!’
Later, as he stood between the murmurous circle of public outrage and the dark shape of the well, Sardus Swift bent visibly beneath his grief and shame. Hunched over, he stared hopelessly at the dogged and beaten face in the puddle between his feet, unable to recognize it.
His ears rang with a string of the most wicked expletives and curses, to which the town’s citizenry also was subjected as it huddled around the well, clucking and gasping as the stream of filth spewed from its nether-regions.
Baker Wiggam and Doc Morrow fished the mad woman out of the well, naked save a few livid leeches fatted to the size of thumbs. Beneath the collar of rope, a rubescent wound oozed pink water. Her delicate little hands were worn raw, flayed by the coarse fibre of the rope, the rough rope that she had clung to all through the late spring night as she bobbed in the near-brimming well, her ‘long drop’ a mere two feet down.
Over the following days, the faces of the townsfolk began to look to Sardus like a gallery of crude portraits which, framed in their window squares, gazed vacantly down upon him as he doggedly awaited the specially equipped ambulance to drive the four hundred miles from Marilyn Cottages, Delaware, on Cape le Winn.
When, after much delay, they had finished signing the final committal papers, Sardus and Doc Morrow watched the grey windowless Maria plunge into the hyaline midnight sky and disappear behind its starless screen to become yet another puddle of no-colour, its wriggling cargo jacketed in soft grey pads and grey leather straps, seized in a convulsion of grey insanity, borne off to Marilyn Cottages, off to Marilyn Cottages, off to Marilyn Cottages.
Sardus Swift retired to his home, which was to become his fortress, as the rain beat out a constant recital of his loss upon the tin roof.
And so it was without a leader that the Ukulites entered a new circle of depression and of apathy and of torpor. And each day was steeped and further steeped in numb uggr. And the rain came down and washed each last shred of hope away.
A few of the women found, in Sardus’ tragedy, an excuse to wail and wallow around the well, but the attendance and the spirits of those who did was low, and no resistance was offered when a horrified Baker Wiggam ordered them off his land. The women merely rose, gathered about them their last vestiges of pride midst a shower of mud-pies flung at them by the laughing, windmilling Fists, and returned to their homes.