But these feelings were never allowed to surface, for Sardus only needed to look to his daughter to know that he would continue to eat whatever the women dished in front of him, would listen to their incessant chatter and return their oily compliments, for it was all a small price to pay for the continued health and well-being of his child, Beth, his single and superlative joy.
Beth yawned and arched her little body back; for a blissful moment all her young muscles stretched over her soft, growing bones. Infecting the room with her yawn, she watched as both Sardus and Molly Barlow moved to their own deep, sleepy breath.
‘Thank you for dinner, Miss Barlow. May I go to my room, Daddy?’ asked Beth, beaming at them both.
They beamed back in reply, and even as Beth entered her room and pulled the door gently closed behind her, the two adults sat there still smiling silently – happy victims of the child’s contagious device.
In the solitude of her room, Beth’s smile slipped from her mouth like an unwanted thing. Fat dolls with fat wax heads and hands sat, fifty-fold, in two fussy rows along the wall opposite her.
She fumbled in the pocket of her smock, her green eyes wide and turning inward to set another world in motion, a world unsullied by bigger hands. Humming to a tune she alone could hear, Beth pulled from her pocket a wooden clothes pin and held it tightly in her fist.
‘Don’t cry, Peg. Mother is home.’
HE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No. 3
Another time, ah watched two young men from the refinery fuck a girl about the same age as ah was – fifteen – at the bottom of Hooper’s Hill Cemetery. Seth and Billy were their names, and when they had finished, instead of following the trolley tracks down along the back of the fields, these young men walked straight up and through the graveyard – right in the direction of where ah was crouched. They grabbed me and pulled me down on top of a stone slab, winding me. Seth straddled mah chest, pinning mah arms down with his knees. When the girl finally caught up with them and saw me, she threw her arms over her face and began cussing and bawling. ‘Kill him! Seth! O Billy! Kill him! He’ll tell on us! He’ll tell – O kill him!!’
Seth gave mah face a slap. ‘Calm down. Who’s gunna believe a goddamn crazy baw? Look!’ The girl, still sobbing, sort of edged over, her hands masking her face, teary eyes peering through her fingers. ‘Hold him, Seth. Tight!’ she gasped and came close, looking down at me, her breasts rising and falling. She reeked with the smell of sex. A shriek leapt from her lips and she was laughing and laughing and did not stop laughing even as Seth set about whupping the shit out of me, and, dismounting, let Billy sit and slog at the slops. Laughing to the last. The bitch.
But not every down-borne hand that sought to chastise me was crooked. O no! The godly, the meek, the righteous – they too were party to mah persecution. For mah tormentor, he was many masked. Surrounded as ah was by his apparatus of deception, there was no limit to his atrocious device. The workers, the faithful, the children, the homeless, the drunken, even mah own flesh and blood were but limbs of the persecutor – puppets! The rack, rod and stake, the block and the blade, the pillory, the stocks, the switch and the stones and the witch’s stool, the whip and the wheel, the crank, the plank, the boot and the fist and all the rest, the endless list – hidden and waiting, regardless of the path ah chose.
More than once did the God-fearing Ukulites chase me from the town. Still ah am baffled by an incident that occurred when ah was maybe fourteen. Listen.
Ah was sitting on the step of the marble monument, squeezing the dark sap from a trumpet creeper that ah had found there, when ah noticed a group of maybe seven or eight Ukulite menfolk, one brandishing a hay-rake, crossing the square. Ah watched as they marched toward me, wondering at the reason for the commotion. Slowly it dawned upon me, the crazed mob only yards away, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, was the object of their gall! Such was mah innocence! Ah leapt to mah feet, tangling mahself in a gilded rope – tasselled and low-slung – that surrounded the steps, escaping the madded throng by inches, by seconds, though they chased me through the town, puffing and panting and shaking their fists, till ah was but a scorned and skulking speck upon the horizon.
It was by no means the first time that the good folk of Ukulore Valley had retched and heaved and sicked me up on the town’s outboundary. O no, nor would it be the last! Even now as ah inch unner, something rushes at me. Something of hellish reason – evangelists hooded scarlet come, turned vigilante with bloody deed done! O wicked little Beth! What havoc we have wrought!
VI
‘The Martyrdom of the Prophet’ by Gaston Georges had hung on the south wall of the Ukulite tabernacle since the year 1935, when the respected academic portrait painter had taken up residence in the booming vale, having been struck by the ‘utter uncomplicity and tireless dedication’ of the Ukulites to the memory of their prophet.
‘Your greatest treasure is your unswerving faith, a gift more precious than I will ever know,’ remarked Gaston as he presented the commissioned portrait, refusing any payment but the permission to make his home in the valley.
‘You have made me very happy. I will continue to serve you, in the hope that I will one day find peace through your example,’ he continued, trembling with emotion but plagued by prickling doubts that he was never to resolve, though he would remain in the valley for the rest of his life.
His right foot buried beneath the hem of his frothing raiments – a fierce drama of gleaming ripples and deep, dark folds – and his other foot, his left, slung in a gilded sliver of moon, the Prophet ascended heavenward on a cloud of romping cherubim. A great spilling robe stained scarlet at the heart, a dazzling sceptre and crown, dewy blue eyes – all pulled the eye upward to the darts of light that sprang from the crack in the clouds parting to receive him.
Gaston Georges dedicated the remainder of his life to documenting through his portraiture the history of the Ukulites. The stark fundamentalist principles practised by the pioneer Ukulites came to stiffen the painter’s brush somewhat and bridle the boisterous voice of his imagination; so much so that the series of eight portraits, oval in shape, that flanked the chill interior of the Town Hall, bore no resemblance to their predecessor at all. These were lean, haggard, pious faces, scowling behind beards and beneath stiff, black bonnets. Eight grim sitters – cold and unadorned pillars of the community – the product of a cramped and shackled hand.
But Georges was yet to paint his unrivalled masterpiece. This he would do some six years after the rain had stopped.
‘Beth’ hung opposite the spiralling afflatus of ‘The Martyrdom’ in the Ukulite tabernacle, on the north wall. It was despised by some, lauded by others. Others it simply baffled. Sardus Swift made the decision to have it hung in the tabernacle. It was of Beth aged
THE LAMENTATIONS OF EUCHRID THE MUTE, No. 4
O God, ah petition Thee! Hear mah cry and make haste mah respite, for ah am tired of this day and its most earnest work. Gather up thy servant and bring me home. Lord, there is no place upon this ground of men for me. Ah have seen complete the matter of thy command. It is done. She is shut down.
Three crows circle overhead! Ah am coming, Lord! Ah am coming! For the door to Thy kingdom lies not at mah head but at mah heel. Call me unner! Let this mire shut its mouth upon me! Prepareth Thee mah way! O God, hear mah prayer. Call me unner and deliver me from bloody men!
You would think that being born dumb – stricken of tongue and bereft of the faculty of exchange – would’ve sufficed. You would think that the burdens of mutehood would weigh heavily enough upon the head of a child. O no! Whoever was dealing out the bum breaks, whoever was spooning out the woe, must’ve seen me and up-ended the whole fucken can because ah was dripping in the stuff – hard luck and ill fortune. And an ill wind blew every day and every night shone forth an evil star and a day didn’t roll past that ah wasn’t catching some kind of crap.