Then the babe reached from her woollen swaddle and dug her tiny fingernail into Euchrid’s neck.
Hulga Vanders retrieved the child with one massive paw, while beating Euchrid across the head with her umbrella. Nena and Olga Holfe followed suit, striking him repeatedly about the head, and soon the entire platoon, armed with umbrellas and walking sticks, had fallen upon Euchrid with a rain of blows served across his hunched and bucking body.
Eventually Euchrid was able to see clear of his attackers and take flight, tumbling down the steps into a deep and muddy puddle, and lurching off like a beaten dog into the rain and all down Maine, while his assailants remained in the shelter of the balcony, waving their umbrellas at the retreating figure.
Head down and hunched, Euchrid made his way through the thrashing rain, his paces reckless and irregular as he skidded and stumbled and slipped down the treacherous roadway.
Watching the ground for potholes and puddles, he became aware of the faint but frantic stain of his shadow pooling about his feet, and was overcome by a curious sense of having found something that he thought he had lost for ever. As he ran and jumped and barrelled homeward, he saw, with increasing rapture, his long-lost companion grip ahold of his heels, and passing the city limits sign, he slowed down – the reason for his mad flight forgotten in the light of his recent reunion – and with eyes glued to the ground drew to a halt, half expecting his shadow to keep on going or fade away again just as it had come. But it did neither, and he marvelled at the dark shape as it steadily deepened in intensity, hunched and squat about his feet.
Overcome by a thousand conflicting emotions, Euchrid bit his bottom lip and choked back a sob. So consumed was he by matters of the heart that when he tasted blood, the source of the flow did not register in his mind until he noticed a drop of it break the still surface of a puddle of muddy rainwater.
‘Hey, shadow, ah’ve got a bloody nose,’ thought Euchrid, as he pinched his nostrils and tilted back his head. His eyes closed, he felt his face glow warmly. He opened them to a dazzling light that was almost blinding, and squinting, he saw that the sky above him was of infinite blue, cloudless and warm. The sun spun aloft, an erumpant orb of balling glory thrilling the blue sky with its brilliance.
Face lifted to meet the sun, Euchrid felt the hotness, heard the silence, breathed the new air, sensed his new-found shadow cringing at his feet.
‘Well what do you know, the rain has stopped. The sun is out and the rain has stopped. What do you know?’ said Euchrid to his shadow.
Then he heard the cries of jubilation coming from the town, but he was running now. Away. Away.
XXI
So the infant came and the rain stopped, and the vast black cloud parted across the firmament like a leaden curtain and all the people of the valley beheld the glory of the blue and saw the great sun in the sky. And they raised the babe heavenward so that she might be I the first to feel the warm breath of atonement and so that their God would see that the incarnate token deposited upon the monument steps had not passed unnoticed and that the dual miracle was indeed fully understood, one to one and never to be forgotten. And, falling to their knees, wailing and weeping, it was God and the babe whom they praised and praised – this frail bundle juggled, hand to hand, so brightly glowing, bound in its swaddling cloth, this miracle, this reward of faith – upheld and jostled, thus, aloft.
BOOK TWO
BETH
(Six Years On)
I
Six years passed. Six young gunfighters down on their luck. Six pine boxes to carry them in. Six crooked miles walked. Six broken stiles crossed. Six passing bells swinging but making no sound. Six widows weeping. Six plots of cold ground. Six blackbirds throwing six crooked shadows. Six sinking moons. Six wounds. Six notches. Six muddy crutches broken in two.
So rolled the years of mah springtime.
Six wicker baskets.
Into these did the years of mah youthhead roll.
II
Night fell suddenly upon the little valley and the moon menaced the heavens like a terrible fang – a gilded scythe, flung into the hushed nocturnal pastures of the sky. And from midst the teeming cedars that clung to the east- and west-side scarps, the clicking fritinancy of a million cicadas burst in shrill unison upon the humid night. They fell dumb with equal precision and the baited silence hung heavily, a weird and fully different din. By moonlight the rich crops could be seen to swell and rock, bumped by a lazy zephyr that swept the fields and the near empty streets, catching dust and coils of smoke, occasionally turning fragrant with lavender, lily or peach blossom, gooseberry rose or pine, all borne away by the breeze to whirl within Memorial Square and to set the world a-rustle, lifting dead leaves and dust to dance upon the sepulchre of the martyred prophet and squall at the feet of the marble angel, there, beneath a moon tinted scarlet now, each sinister tip as though dipped in blood. Lit from beneath by four footlights, the monstrous angel loomed wraith-like against the pitch backdrop, sickle raised and ready, as if awaiting some sort of signal to bring the golden tool down and murder the little one that sat huddled on the steps at its feet.
They had christened her Beth, this little one.
Shoeless, she crouched upon the bottom step, arms wrapped around her knees, the form of her slender body lost in the folds of her white cotton smock. She rested her chin in the crooks of her arms, looking neither here nor there, wriggling her toes in the dusty gravel of the path leading up to the monument steps and shining white in the glow of the lights, like a spectral companion to the great marble angel that towered behind her. Her little black pumps sat, side by side, next to her. Her blonde plaited locks shone golden as the pall of night descended all about.
As she sat, she sang, soft and slowly chiming,
‘There is a sleepy river I know…’
until the slam of Doc Morrow’s door and the sound of her father’s voice cut short her song.
‘Beth! Time to go home!’ called Sardus Swift from the doctor’s porch, and the child was already buckling her pumps and tramping down the path to the road.
Sardus lifted his daughter into his arms and kissed her lightly upon the forehead. Beth smiled at some secret thought of her own, showing her new teeth, small and white.
‘Home,’ she sighed, putting her arms around his neck, her blonde bangs bright and strangely out of place against the coarse black bush of Sardus’ beard.
Humming softly with the child asleep in his arms, Sardus Swift looked to the winking stars and saw the moon – a smirk on the face of heaven – as he made his way home.
In the golden days of reprieve that followed the end of the rain, when sheets of mudded water rose in veils from field and road and valley floor, and the Ukulites rejoiced at each bright day that passed, and thanked in prayer their God most merciful, a certain doctor by the name of Morrow had stolen from the heart of jubilation to visit one still unlit corner that he might chase the chilly spirit from its last, dark hiding place.
At first Sardus Swift would neither answer nor unbolt his door and the doctor would return to his office further down Maine with the then unnamed foundling cradled in his arms. But on the fourth visit, the doctor knocked and the old plank door gave, unlatched, and swung slowly open.
Doc Morrow entered, stepping over a pile of mail that lay unopened upon the floor. Such was the arrant squalor of his friend’s hermitary that the doctor recoiled at the sight before him. A surge of anger rose in his throat, but the more he plumbed the depths of self-loathing written in the very swinishness of his surrounds, the more the feelings of anger gave way to a sadness of heart toward the impossible lot of his brother.