From up here they look like ground-birds.
Circle once these creatures of grief, and then onward across the stricken town, over the clusters of trailers where the cane-cutters live, at the heel of the rhythm of the crops. Here, at this dark hour, only their women and frightened children remain. Standing at their windows, the ghosts of their breath coming and going on the glass, they listen to the motors of their men roar northward then fade amongst the hiss and crackle of the fields.
But onward, winging go, or are you tired brothers?
Pursue Maine Road till the cane ends abruptly against bare wire fences, four miles from town, two miles from the northern valley entrance. Here we can see the pick-ups, trucks and utilities, shedding cocoons of red dust as they file off Maine towards the tarred clapboard shacks. Here live the out-cast, the hobos, the hill-trash.
A lone shack on a junk-heap burns and burns, belching purple smoke into the restless air.
Though weary of wing, a little further.
Beyond the shack the land grows sodden, paludal, and from the marsh rises a wheel of vegetation – tall trees born into bondage, rising from the quitch and cooch and crabbing dog-weed, carrying a canopy of knitted vine upon their wooden shoulders.
Here we dip and dive, for this is the swampland.
As we pass above, we see a line of torches winking beneath the dark canopy, moving inward and towards the centre of the circle in a thin ribbon of light.
Torn from the very centre of the swampland is a clearing, round like a plate, and within this clearing, like a wheel within a wheel, is a circle of quick-mud, black and steaming, large enough to digest a cow. It glistens darkly at our passing. But stop. Wing! Wheel! Look who lies on the surface of the mud, all curled up like a new-born! See how his bones cleave to his skin. How his ribs fan softly each time he draws breath. See how he is nearly naked. And look how very still he is.
But for that eye.
It rolls in its orbit, and, fish-like, fixes us. We freeze and circle.
I
It was his brother who tore the caul on that, the morning of their birth, and as if that sole act of assertion was to set an inverted precedent for inertia in his life to come, Euchrid, then unnamed, clutched ahold of his brother’s heels and slopped into the world with all the glory of an uninvited guest.
The noon-day sun spun in the sky like a molten bolt and hammered down upon the tin roof and tarred plank sides of the shack. Inside sat Pa, at his table, surrounded by his ingenious contraptions of springs and steel, sweating midst the bleeding heat while greasing his traps and trying, in vain, to closet his ears from the drunken ravings of his wife, who lay sprawled and caterwauling in the back seat of the old burnt-out Chevy. Pride of the junk-pile, that car, sitting on bricks out back of the shack, like a great shell shed in disgust by some outsized crawler.
There, in the squirms of labour, his bibulous spouse shrieked against the miracle that swelled and kicked inside her as she sucked on a bottle of her own White Jesus, rocking the Chevy on its stilts and moaning and screaming, screaming and a-moaning, ‘Pa! Pa-a! Pa-a-a!’, until she heard the shack door open and then the shack door shut, whereupon she took leave of the morning and passed into unconsciousness.
‘Too pissed to push,’ Pa would tell Euchrid later.
Prising the liquor bottle free of her grubby clutch, for even out cold she hung on and hung on, Pa broke the bottle carefully on the car’s rusted tail-fin.
Taking intuition as his midwife and a large shard of glass as his cutter, he spread his prostrate wife-with-child and dowsed her private parts in peel liquor. And with a chain of oaths spilling from his mouth, and with all the summer insects humming, with the sun in the sky and not a cloud in sight, with a hellish shriek and a gush of gleet, two slobbering bundles came tumbling out.
‘Jesus! Two!’ cried Pa, but one died soon.
Inside the shack, two fruit-crates lined with newspaper sat side by side on the table. The animal traps had been moved and hung around the walls.
Two boxes and in each a babe. Pa peered in.
Neither made a sound and both lay quite still upon their backs, naked as the day and with eyes wide and wandering. Pa drew the nibbled stub of a pencil from his trouser pocket and, squinting, leaned toward the little ones, writing on the foot-end of the firstborn’s crib ‘#1’, then, licking the tip, ‘#2’ upon the crib in which Euchrid lay. Then he stood back and stared from one to the other, and one and the other reciprocated earnestly.
Theirs were strange almond eyes, with slightly swollen upper lids and next to no lashes, blue but so pale as almost to verge on pink; intent, eager, never still, not for a moment – rather they seemed to hover, these weird chattering eyes, hover and tremble in their browless sockets.
Little Euchrid coughed, short and sharp, his tiny pink tongue lapping at his lower lip then curling back inside. And as if waiting for a signal and recognizing it in Euchrid’s timid hack, the brave little first-born closed his eyes and fell into a slumber from which he would never wake.
‘Goodbye, brother,’ ah said to mahself as he slipped away, and for a full minute ah thought that ah too was going unner, so fucken cold was his dying.
Then sailing through the still night came the raucous fray of her bitchship, mah mother, Ma, screeching in hoarse malediction through the very anus of obscenity whilst banging on the side of the Chevy and going, ‘Wha-ars mah boddle!’
‘Wha-a-ars ma-ah boddle!!’
Pa had fitted two improvised restrainers across mah ankles and chest, forcing me to maintain a horizontal attitude there in mah crate – mah cot – but consumed by an overwhelming need to observe what mah brother was up to now that he had launched so impulsively into Eternity, ah endeavoured to raise mah head in the hope of catching a brief craning glimpse of him.
Having been hauled into Life without warning, jettisoned from the boozy curds of gestation – oh that snuggery where we would float and float! – and left now still reeling from the trauma of birth, mah conception of that final Enigma was, as you may well imagine, shamefully uninformed. Ah mean, how could ah have known just how bloody deathlike Death was?
In any case, much as ah thrashed and craned, there was just no give in the restrainers – nope, no give at all, and eventually ah abandoned all hope. Toil-worn and winded, ah just lay there thinking, ah did, thinking about mah sainted brother in the fruit-crate beside me, thinking how the hell was he gunna get to Heaven if he was having half the trouble that ah was in slipping his bonds?
But ah had managed to wrench one tiny arm free during that first, great, futile and ultimately portentous struggle – and with one grub-sized knuckle ah knocked out a message, using a system of coded raps, taps and gaps that mah brother and ah had devised while adrift in the purling fremitus of the womb.
Do- -Not- -Forget- -Your- -Brother- -Reply
But mah brother did not. Ah tapped out a second time, adding a Please to the end, but again he did not. Please. Undaunted, ah told him what Life was like, and inquired about any special powers he may have developed in Death. Mah signals became urgent and disjointed. The futile raps sounded hollow and lonely as they hung unanswered above mah crate.
Life- -Is- -Bad- -Is- -Hell- -Can- -You- -Fly- -Hel- -Hell- -Help
Finally ah took control, and with mah knuckle barked and weeping ah tapped out one last message upon the inside of mah crate.
Night descended – ah know that now – but as ah lay in harness, supine in mah lonesomeness, and watched with increasing dread as the aching light of day grew subfusc and fraught with the freakish music of the darktime – hoots, incessant shrills, scuttles, bloodcurdling howls – ah thought that the end of the world had come.