At his feet lay the three-legged dog, its naked stump cocked obscenely. Its head had been bashed in and its brains squeezed through a split in the top of its skull like a cock’s comb. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, coated in dust, looking twice as long as it should have. A splinter of fractured bone had pierced the meat of its good thigh, poking through the red fur like a jellied finger. A thin trickle of blood seeped from its anus, soaking into the piss-wet soil at its hind.
‘That’s how they got him,’ observed Euchrid. ‘Knocked out his other leg.’
‘Yep,’ he thought, his suspicions confirmed by a swept trail of wet dust, which began ten yards away and ended at the dog’s smashed hindquarters.
Euchrid dragged the carcass off the road and slung it into a ditch.
Then he walked down Maine and retrieved the sock, slapping it for dust as he slipped back into the cane.
THE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No.2
Ah am one luckless bastard. God knows. Dumber than a hat full of earholes. A vile thing. Unworthy. Worthless. O yes! Grotesque in form. Misshapen. Yes! Misshapen and vile of mind. O hideous deed.
IV
After the great rain, a task force was organized by the Ukulites to reconstruct the cemetery at Hooper’s Hill. Their job was to gather up the human scrappage, the split and swollen caskets and the crude plank boxes made of pine, the rubble, the roods, the stones and urns and markers, and so on. For the most part they succeeded in piecing together the old graveyard, although whose bones went in which box went in which hole was anybody’s guess, and for many years after the rain’s end and the graveyard’s reparation it was not uncommon to stumble upon the odd knuckle or kneecap or rib, buried or half-buried in the downgrade.
Few of the original cane-men stuck out the storm years, and the reconstructed graveyard was rarely visited, let alone tended to. What had been a morbid mud-pit became, in a few short years, a sea of weed and creeper. Bald white headstones like the domes of drowning men sank beneath the mat and tangle of ivy and vine.
The vine was unique to Ukulore Valley, and grew only on and around the plot occupied by Hooper’s Hill Cemetery. Sprouting in the wake of the rain, and seeming to flourish in the rain-ruined soil, this freakish flora known as ‘Tolley’s Trumpet Creeper’ was the only trumpet creeper on record to boast a navy blue bloom. Little is known about Frank Owen Tolley, upon whose stone the plant first bloomed blue. His stone and its inscription offer no clue. The creeper’s secret must remain with poor Tolley and God – and no doubt the Devil. Only they could tell from what poisonous sump this creeper drank to deepen its velvet bell’s complexion to such a deathly midnight hue.
V
Mah sanctum – mah cave of vine and moss – is to mah right about ten paces into the thicket that surrounds me now. So dense grows the swampland that sometimes it would take me up to thirty minutes to find the little hideaway ah had fashioned, though ah had been there hundreds and hundreds of times. Ah would look for the strips of white sheet, bright like bush ghosts, that hung along the woven walls – they would tell me where.
All about me were mah treasures. The stained bandages like flags. Boxes of nails and tacks. A crate of electrical cord. Mah hammer. Candles and plastic bags full of matches and tapers from the church. Mah Bibles. Twine. Animal bones and feathers and bird skulls. Shells and nests. Some of mah shoeboxes – about ten. Pictures ah had cut from magazines and threaded through the walls. The tiny blue glass bottles of scented water.
And with these ah kept mah Life-trophies, mah God-tokens – the parts of her left behind – blood mementoes. The whore’s hair. Her nightdress. The portrait of Cosey that ah had delivered from the hands of those who rose up against her, sheared her, cast her out. The kindergraph and the instructions she had written, in verse, aback of it. The painting of Beth – of her – fastened to the walls and ceiling of the grotto, angled so that it hovered above me as ah lay in mah shell.
On a carpet of pink silk and frill – yes, and the ten pearl buttons leaving their evanescent impression down mah back or belly – the stroke of hair – a ruby bead sailing down a yellow strand – a trembling scarlet drop – the bitter-sweet sip – O the lifetimes lost in queer congress, holed-up in that dark retreat – holed-up in that dark retreat –
A felled tree trunk, carved down the middle by a cleaver of lightning – during the rain days, ah guess – made a kind of a pallet where ah would lie, stretched out between the two halves that ah had padded with cardboard and moss, encapsulated by two walls of umbrage that twisted about a few clapboards nailed to the trunks as supports, the vines intertwining overhead to form a low ceiling. Ah could sit up with a full foot’s grace – room enough for mah angel too, who would, in mah later years, appear on the tree stump at the foot of mah cocoon, then come inside and lie with me.
Sometimes ah heard thousands of voices, for God is many tongued, whispering things to me as ah lay there all alone. All mah feelings of fear and of anger and of despair that ah ate daily like bread would depart from me, and ah would feel most powerful. Most powerful.
They tol… He told me things that ah know were special knowledge. Of mahself at first. Then of others.
Without really realizing it, the Ukulites had begun to prime Beth for sainthood the moment the sun had first reached through the cover of cloud and kissed the curl on the foundling’s forehead. Never did the flesh of one seem so precious as did the earthly body of Beth. Nor was a child ever so pampered, preened and downright spoiled as this unwitting deceiver.
Having no mother and an adoptive, inexperienced father, Beth became in her infant years part-daughter to a hundred doting sometime-mothers – or would-be sometime-mothers, each determined to tend to the needs of the heaven-sent in a manner that befitted the blessed fruit of such miraculous circumstance. Women took turns in cooking for Sardus Swift and little Beth, proud when the infant ate their pap, despairing when she refused it.
The attentions of this many-breasted, multi-voiced, preening, pinching mater seemed but a boon to the tot as a babe in swaddling clothes. Beth’s first five years passed without incident, in health and abounding good temperament, and, as a quiet and self-possessed child, she remained good natured toward the ever-fussing string of women, finding in time a way of smiling, coy and dimpled, that would guarantee a coo or a cluck from the sternest matron – warm reward for their efforts.
And each year on the anniversary of her coming, the Ukulites would take Beth – a pearly white bundle, her head wreathed in a chaplet of violets – into the town square. Beneath the august monument strewn with garlands of inky blooms cut from the burial grounds of Hooper’s Hill, Sardus Swift, holding the babe heavenward, would deliver a prayer of thanksgiving – his eyes, two wells that once had sprung with the bitter vinegar of grief, now clear and blue, flowing with the deep, sweet waters of joy. And all about him his sobbing flock mustering a bigger rain.
Then, one by one, the members of the congregation would fall to the ground to kiss the sun-warmed step upon which the foundling had been discovered, the summer air full of hallelujahs and hosannas and the sickly scent of trumpet blooms.
During the child’s sixth year, the eye-batting spinster Molly Barlow would return Beth’s queer little smile and say, ‘This child is surely of more saintly stuff than me or thee, Sardus,’ her hawking remark wet with innuendo and tuberculosis.
‘Let us hope so, Sister,’ Sardus would reply coldly, secretly tired of the do-gooders who plagued his home to coddle the child and fatten the man, tired in particular of the Molly Barlows who saw him not as Sardus the father but as Sardus the eligible.