Several scandals broke out involving Ukulite adherents of impeccable standing; these spread first through the ranks of non-adherents and eventually reached the ears of the Ukulites themselves. It was true enough that many of the members began to lose weight rapidly, their eyes swollen and heavy-lidded as if they were being consumed by the over-indulgence of some closet vice.
It was clear that the Ukulites needed a new leader. Yet although those suggested were adequate candidates to take the wheel of their community, each one found an equally adequate argument to disqualify him from the position. Not a man among them would accept.
The regular prayer meets gradually dissolved. Some of the faithful even attended the hymn-singing fiascos that were organized each Saturday night in the Unitarian Church which stood, abandoned by the contractors, ghastly and unfinished, up on Glory Hill.
Along with their apostasy came the moral downfall of some of the men, who took to frequenting the saloons, crap-shoots, poker games and the whorehouse.
Many of these men traded off pieces of the valley in order to pay back gambling debts.
Midnight calls were made on the balkers. Ugly scenes. Ugly scenes.
Ugly scenes to which Sardus Swift was oblivious as he lurked in the shuttered bounds of his house, all the angles of his face locked in bitter grimace and lost in time beneath a long unruly beard.
VII
As ah get called unner, flesh by little flesh, with the comely boggery swaddling mah loins in its warm and sulphurous issue, tugging meatus unner, unner, to its nether-lands, its no-whither-lands, ah make the space about me open up its wounds. The night holds out a dark lantern and springs its shutter open, so that in the pitch of mah blindness, mah scotoma is blasted into a battle sphere of wild meteors, blood-blown moons, suns and molten planets, butchered asteroids, berserk comets, luminary clusters, gaudy wreaths of stellar motion, green nebulae, gaseous nebulae, white and spiral nebulae, hairy-stars and fireballs, shimmering sun-spots and solar flares, blinding faculae, flocculi, and day-stars, new moons, red planets, and stars of blue and tinsel, trinket-yellow and white stars, harlequin showers, spectral moons and mock moons, Sol, Helios, Phoebus, Mars, Saturn, Dipper, Saucepan, Big Bear and Little Bear, in collision, in colour, here, in the guttles of the sump, alone and at war with the macrocosm, unner-borne, eyes squeezed shut and rolling-squeezing, squeezing out the last drips of the spectrum behind mah lids, till ah open mah eyes again and feel them adjust back to grey, for everything is forever grey and the pressure unner mah ribs is hurting me, breathing is getting harder, lungs will cleave apart, only just on one half swallered and the pressure… the pressure… the planets of pain…
Mah life in review as ah go down. Listen to this.
It was the Second Year of The Rain and ah was hidden in the womb of the old Chevy – mah obstetrical glory hole, if you remember, the stripped and gutted crate into which ah was dispatched along with mah martyred brother – low-slumped in the blck seat ah was, nursing a shoebox marked ‘Cicada Cicala Cigala’. It contained nineteen cicada shells – all in perfect condition. Ah had plucked them from the trunks of trees up on the thickly wooded eastern versant, before the rain had come and smashed the shedded paper pods and finally driven the cicadas from the valley. How hollow seem the hills without their shrillance.
A sleepy kind of calm had infected me as ah pondered upon the awesome mysteries bound up in the brittle pods, and safe inside the crate ah let mahself drift away, drift away, only to be wrenched awake by a freakish noise coming from the corral. Placing the shells carefully on the cottonwool pads that lined the bottom of the shoebox ah peered out the car window, keeping low.
Mule flung himself about the corral, bucking, kicking and beating his hooves in a bid to wrench himself free from the hitching post, slipping and skidding in the mud and emitting a queer ‘Hawnk-neee! Hawnk-neee!’, blowing through his lips and slamming his hooves against the side of the shack. ‘Hawnk-neee, hawnk-neee!’ For a second ah wondered what the fuck had flung Mule into such a funk.
And then ah saw it – through the leaden folds of rain it came – a flurry of canine limbs cannonballing up the slope toward the corral – a wild dog – a blood-bent beast – a hill-hound driven down from the hills in search of living food. And ah will tell you this. Ah have seen a lot of these hill-dogs, or ‘barking wolves’ as they are known locally, but ah swear this slavering brute had to be the meanest, hungriest, ugliest, most desperate-looking inbort ah had ever laid eyes on – great green fangs and drooling flews, blood-shotty eyes, flattened brow and massive shaggy shoulders that tapered away to a ratty sawn-off rear end, tailless and hairless and covered in crap. Ah watched the dog leap up the corral fence with a liquid snarl and attach itself to Mule’s flying rump.
‘Haaawnk! Haaawnk!’
Blood ran red down Mule’s rump, as the dog, high upon his back, spun and whipped and kicked and bit. The panicking ass floundered and tottered beneath the onslaught until finally, with mouth agape and tongue lolling, Mule buckled, and with a splash and a drub fell flat on his side.
The vicious cur held on fast, and only at the sounding of Pa’s shotgun did it unlock its jaws and bolt back down the slope. Pa came marching along the back of the shack, shotgun up at his shoulder, and with aim wild and myopic, he emptied the other barrel just as the dog bounded into the sodden cane trash.
Cussing obscenely, Pa entered the corral.
Mule lay upon his side, unmoving, a rain-soiled puddle of blood growing at his hind. And ah watched as Pa removed his hat and crouched by Mule, poking at the moribund beast with his finger. Mule did not respond and the rain pissed down, and after a time Pa rose and walked to the apple barrels where he unhooked a spade. Then, head lowered, hat back on, spade across his shoulder like a grey bone, he crossed the yard to the old water tower.
There, a few feet from the rickety support upon which the tower stood, he began to dig.
Leaving the shoebox wrapped in an old shirt in the glove compartment – thoroughly checking first, of course, for roaches or rats – ah crept from the Chevy and footed it over to the corral.
Ah saw mah romping body on the pocking faces of the puddles. Splashed a few too.
Mule lay ossified in a petticoat of scarlet lace. His toothy rictus made it look like he was laughing.
Ah drew mah hand in a soft stroke across Mule’s neck. His wet grey coat was warm. Ah uttered the beast’s name, in quietude: ‘Mule’, and Mule rolled one spooked eye open and upward into mine – and the ass saw the angel, eye to rolling white eye, and long-locked was the looking. Slowly, and yes, miraculously, Mule climbed to his feet. Blood ran in rivulets down his hind legs. Ah looked for Pa and found him bent waist-deep in the grave, cussing and furiously digging.
So, me and Mule, we exchanged a second glance, but it was me this time who broke the spell.
Ah returned to the Chevy, and found mah cicadas still secure as ah had prayed they would be. And ah sat rapt in mah box of little bleached cast-offs, one of which ah held gently up between thumb and fore to the grey light that oozed through the windows. So engrossed was ah that ah barely registered Pa’s whoop of joy when he returned to the corral to find Mule – lolloping a little but alive. Eye right close up to the weightless shell, ah pored over the wing’s tessellated arterial skeleton, and mused upon the myriad bifurcations and forks, the branches and anabranches revealed against the murky light.
Suddenly the person of Ma lumbered on to this field – entered it drunk and reeling, with the last wobbling circumgyrations of a clipped skittle. Clad only in a lurid floral dress she came, having donned neither stocking nor slipper, nor any coat against the rain – her stone bottle clutched in her paw. As she rolled the length of the cicada wing, I trapped her, there in that awesome network of subdivision.