Emptying his six-shooters in a wild salute, Abie Poe bade welcome to Ukulore Valley. He span his guns like propellers. He shot holes in Noah’s barber shop sign, and Noah’s dark habitude darkened still more. Two pot plants exploded into clouds of terracotta dust and blew a russet blanket over the windows of Joy Flockley’s haberdashery. He shot at Wiggam’s Wishing Well, and an ounce of lead wedged itself between two piled slabs of the wall, inches above a plastic bag containing a note that a pale and trembling hand had deposited there, in that ashlar surround, months before. The wall splashed a puff of dust. Stuffed into a window, the Wiggam family huffed. Abie Poe fired blindly into the sky. Drips sizzled on his rods’ hot barrels. Smoke curled in blue arabesques.
Abie Poe sat astride an absurd pine-wood mount, under which his ancient horse swayed and strained. Poe reeled extravagantly, pivoting from the saddle, describing with his wiry torso a series of deep and sweeping arcs to the left and right, back and forth, wild and thrashing, and though it is true that the nag made no motion to move, it must be said that in all his perilous reeling, Poe never once left the seat of his mount.
The mount upon which Poe pivoted was a makeshift contraption invented by Poe himself and patented in Salem, under the name ‘Poe’s Throne’. Although ostensibly a deluxe sedan, it was in reality two overweight ‘A’ frames with a home-made saddle of leather and possum pelts slung between, a built-up back-support, canvas side-flaps and a standard under-brace. Apart from the hide seat, the whole structure was built out of pine lumber and weighed close to twice the amount of any more conventional equivalent.
But really, the crowning feature of this invention was a contrivance that Poe added a year or so after the patenting. It was a safety harness that secured the rider in the saddle at all times and which was indeed the very device that enabled the drunken gun-slinging Poe simultaneously to weave his wild way, sound both irons, and remain cleaved to his throne.
If it had not been for ‘The Throne’, Abie Poe would not have been in this God-forgotten valley at all, for it was under the pretext of finding someone to manufacture the mount that he had up and left the lonely prairies of the west and headed south. Figuring that westerners knew too much about horses and had too little cash to be spending it on fancy saddles, Abie Poe took his design to where everybody was ‘stinken rich or fucken stupid’. Or so he thought.
But the south had proved no more sympathetic than anywhere else he’d wandered. No one was interested in buying the patent on a pine-beam mount, saddle and safety harness.
Poe had found employment as a truck driver, tobacco picker, dish washer, poacher, rustler and housebreaker, none of which lasted further than the first pay packet.
Hired as a salesman selling silver cutlery sets door to door, and utilizing his innate powers of persuasion, Poe would insinuate his way into the lives of the young wives who formed the bulk of his clientele, bullying them with soft nothings, flirting through a sham of oily compliments and guiding their trembling hands toward the dotted line which bound them lock, stock and barrel to contracts which they had no chance of upholding. Poe generously took their sexual favours in lieu of the instalments, and in doing so seated himself in a position of absolute control, whereupon he proceeded to extravasate them mercilessly for their all. Those years had seen Abie Poe slip his tongue into the most sordid pies.
Seven years passed and Poe had found himself serving a term of four years for two counts of extortion and three counts of fraud in the scandalously over-populated Binbridge State Penitentiary. The last six months of his term he served in the prison infirmary, owing to a severely advanced infestation of Trichuris trichiura, more commonly known as whip worm.
The figure that had entered Binbridge Penitentiary in the winter of 1935 returned to the free world a changed man. Thoroughly emaciated, his once baby face was now drawn and bloodless. A thin purple cicatrix emerged from one bushy eyebrow and hooked around his right eye, terminating at a small, latent mole sprouting short, clipped hairs – like a fish hook baited with a little black beetle. His small teeth had grown flavid and troublesome, and his most profitable asset – his large, seemingly veridical eyes – seemed to have lost their directness, grown icy and prone toward gazing at the middle space, the area between things.
His rangy gait had stiffened and affected a rolling limp, the parasites responsible for his atrophy having spread from the enteric region and infested his right thigh, and his posture had become stooped and broken.
Depressed and taciturn, Abie Poe took a train and moved one town further down the line.
He found lodgings the same evening, renting a room from a Swiss spinster named Heidi Hoch, becoming her sole boarder. Heidi was a devout Anabaptist and at the age of eighty-three still walked the quarter-mile to her church each week.
The white-haired spinster nursed her sickly lodger back to health. But in 1940, Heidi Hoch was stricken by a severe case of Black Measles.
At her deathbed, Abie Poe had barely been able to bring his eyes to look upon the haemorrhagic rash that blistered upon her face and scalp. So chronic was the pemphigus that her scalp seemed to be crawling with black ants. Then, opening her eyes and lifting a scarlet hand to her face, Heidi had said: ‘Look what is upon me, Abie. Your sin. Your sin which I have gladly rooted from you. I will take it with me when I go. You are clean, Abie. I have made you clean!’
Abie Poe filled a tea chest with Heidi’s tiny carved dolls, wrapping them in her hand-painted linen and embroidery and laying a white pearl crucifix on top. He carried the box to the Parish Welfare Centre and traded the lot for a severe black suit and tall wide-brimmed hat, made of felt and also black. Looking in the mirror, Abie Poe saw a man lean and hungry looking, his face grave and stern and deeply carved by the unremitting tools of remorse: a man imbued with a mission, a calling.
‘There does God reside, stamped like a brand upon my face,’ thought Abie Poe by way of initiation into his new-found ministration.
Back at the little house, Abie took Heidi’s Bible and then left for the last time.
From that day on, the evangelist pounded his Bible at every opportunity, be it on street corners or at makeshift tabernacle citizen meets, in saloons, or down the lost beats of whoredom, in squares and parks and in schools and gaols, up the elm-lined streets of the rich and throughout Salem’s infamous slums – echoing the words of his dead landlady, and infusing them with thespian thunder as he shouted ‘Sin! Sin is everywhere, Sir! It is upon everything! Madam! Are you so steeped in muck you cannot see it?’
Yet Poe’s true calling was yet to be found.
It was not until he began hearing reports concerning the sordid activities of certain families living in the mountain areas – xenophobic ‘clans’ involved in blood feuds, murder, rape, infanticide, incest and so on – that Poe the sin-seeker felt his life-mission had truly commenced.
Abie Poe bought a horse and rode to the range. At the ridge that marks the official gateway to the mountains, he met a young girl of eight or so years. She was sitting by the road amongst a massive pile of bedding.
‘Come here, child. Direct me to the nearest house of worship in these parts,’ said Poe.
The girl stood. The skin on her cheeks was cracked and raw. She held a small green grass snake in her grubby hand. Observing in her eyes the first clots of blindness forming Jike a skin, Poe asked a second time.