Douglas Dawes descended the steps and was swallowed up by the slow-closing crowd. No sooner had he disappeared than the body of Cosey Mo stirred, as if driven on by the numbing narcotic. She raised herself to her knees, lifting her right hand a fraction and speaking through a mouthful of blood and pieces of teeth; she gurgled, she blithered, stupid. But the crowd was upon her before her utterance could take form, drowning her in a hail of fists and feet. The storm raged unabated, quelling only when her body lay, naked and limp, in the blood-coloured mud at the bottom of the steps.
Tilting her head towards the battered harlot and straining at her clogged wheels in an attempt to motivate herself, Wilma Eldridge cast her stupefied spouse a sly, conspiratorial glance.
‘Wheel me, Franklin,’ she barked, her voice set a-tremble by the violence she had witnessed. ‘Closer!’
Franklin Eldridge dutifully complied, the mud sucking noisily at the chair’s wheels as he pushed his wife alongside Cosey’s motionless body.
‘Lepers and harlots should be marked! Your shame shall not go unrecognized, Mystery!’ said the cripple, and proffering her hand palm up she added impatiently, ‘Franklin! The shears!’
Franklin reached into his jacket, produced a large pair of scissors, and pressed them into his wife’s hand.
‘May your sin be upon you, whore!’ she said, leaning out over the side of her chair. And the enraged woman set about hacking off to the scalp Cosey Mo’s bountiful locks.
She sat back in her chair with the long muddied locks of hair in her hand, and the cruel smile that had formed upon her lips as she attended to ‘the marking’ turned suddenly into a sneer of disgust. She flung the fistful of hair on to the churned-up ground.
‘Whore hair!’ she said, each word spat out like it was too foul for the mouth.
Philo Holfe broke up the crowd and Doc Morrow knelt by Cosey, lifting one arm by the wrist.
‘She’ll live, I think,’ said the doctor bitterly, and laid her arm down again.
The mob dispersed without a word. Franklin Eldridge took the handles of his wife’s chair. Wilma looked at him, her mouth twisted into a rebarbative smile of contempt. She nodded toward the outstretched arm of the battered whore, and, wet-lipped and gloating, was borne away. Cosey’s brittle fingers cracked like candy beneath the wheels of the chair.
Philo Holfe shuddered and for a moment shut tight his eyes. Then he said, ‘We’ll take her. Carl and me, we’ll take her out.’
The two brothers lifted the broken woman gently into the front seat of their pick-up. The doctor covered her with her sopping robe, brown and bloody.
Carl Holfe drove, making a wide turn atop Hooper’s Hill before plunging down the drive toward Maine.
Abie Poe backed his nag into the little caravan and with some added encouragement from his wicked spurs, the animal sent Cosey Mo’s tiny pink parlour tumbling down the side of Hooper’s Hill like a runaway toy.
Alone atop the hill, Abie Poe dropped to his knees and, stretching his arms heavenward, he wept. A thunderbolt leapt from a cloud’s blackened belly.
‘Thank you, Lord, thank you!’ cried the preacher into the crackling thunderama. ‘O thank you, and again I say, O Lord, I thank you!’
Ah saw the little caravan come careering down Hooper’s Hill and explode in a splinter of wet pink wood. From where ah sat the caravan was exactly the same size as mah thumbnail and ah watched the crowd as it followed it down the hill, led by the raving priest. With the wreckage at the bottom they managed to build a blazing fire, despite the rain. Poe flapped up blackly against an infernal backdrop of flame, framed in dark clouds as the kerosene smoked thickly. The windows exploded with four loud cracks. Showers of yellow sparks burst like constellations of new stars.
Ah saw all of Cosey Mo’s sexy red unnerwear hanging across the bushes like devilish fruit, and on the ground too in sheery pools of scarlet lace and bloody silk.
In mah mind’s eye, ah saw the hill all covered with naked, writhing whore-wraiths that moaned and romped in the mud, all humping ghosts in the mad grapple of copulation.
The following day ah sifted through the pile of ash and cinder that lay at the foot of Hooper’s Hill, and found amongst the charred remains a blackened beauty case. It contained the blue glass bottles of scented water. Coloured cotton-balls and bottles were both undamaged. In the case was also a hypodermic syringe and three attachable needles that were very sharp. A bubble of blood sprung upon mah thumb. Also a photograph of Cosey Mo, upon the back of which was scribbled a short poem, signed and dated June 1930; two tiny brown vials, the seals of which were as yet unbroken; a packet of three pink balloons that needed stronger lungs than mine to fill; and a gold locket containing a kindergraph of a little girl that was unmistakably Cosey Mo. Ah treasured these things in a shoebox that ah lined with strips of newsprint and filed under ‘Cosey Mo, 1943’. Ah also took a white nightgown ah found snagged on a shrub. When wrung out and dried it looked fresh and crisp.
That day, if mah memory serves me well, mah scalp was a battlefield of tuft and bloody clump, of scab and gash. Later, in mah room, ah dabbed at the six or so crusts that dotted mah skull with a ball of cotton wool soaked in the essence of lavender. Mah skull stung as the scab grew soft and lifted from the slitted scissor wounds. Those fucken scissors! That fucken bitch! Ah could hear mah mother cackling with glee up at the shack at the freakish mess she had made. Rage throbbed through mah brains, humiliation burned mah ears.
If it were not for the fact that ah shine victorious over the whole lot of them here in mah dying time, then humiliation and rage would, ah have no doubt, consume me still. As it stands, mah countenance has been soured only marginally by the memory, and certainly her massive personage would shrink to that of a gnat if she were here, now, in these grander, greater days.
Mah butchered scalp was fragrant with Cosey’s waters. Lavender. Rose. Musk.
Ah kept the sorry clumps of hair that littered the shack floor in with mah other clippings – finger and toe nails, dead skin, teeth, eyelashes, scabs, that sort of thing.
Kept beneath mah bed ah had twenty-two shoeboxes full of mah things. Ah visited Cosey Mo’s box without restraint. Each time ah took a drop or two of the waters. Heaven scented these growing years.
Yes, but up on Hooper’s Hill…
Up on Hooper’s Hill ah scoured the ground for traces of her – some blood, maybe, or her body print still held in the mud. But whatever secrets belonged to this hill the cryptic rain had erased from its memory, or else the hill simply wasn’t telling – or so it seemed.
Disappointed and not looking forward to mah slippery descent ah made to leave, pitching the empty pickling jar ah had brought along in case of a lucky find down the hill.
It was then ah discovered two curious parallel furrows about three feet apart, each rain-filled stripe about two inches wide and twice as deep – evil, mean-looking furrows they were, and ah followed them to a place where the terra gumbo had been all churned up.
There, floating in a large pool of muddy water, ah found the harlot’s hair.
The flaxen locks shone like a reef of pure gold as ah fished them from the dingy rain-pocked puddle, and as ah did this ah couldn’t help but be struck by the uncanny duality of the incident – the coincident shearing of our crowning glory. And as ah stood there with the rain pissing down on mah ravaged scalp ah experienced an overwhelming sensation of incomparable shame – her shame – and for a moment in time the signals of mah heart and those of the harlot crossed paths, and ah knew that at that very moment, wherever she might be, Cosey Mo was experiencing a hell fully different to what she had known before – mah hell, just as ah was living hers.