Born a mute, beside a dead brother, in a puddle of peel shine, in the back of a burnt-out wreck, atop of a hill of garbage – this was only the opening hand, a mere whiff of what destiny held in store for me. What maybe ah didn’t know and mah dead brother did, was that we were two very sorry sprogs. One dumb and one good-as-dead, the sickly issue of truly squalid loins – unsightly urchins cast from her slum-womb into a wicked, wicked world, a world too cruel for such ill-begotten mites as we.
O sure, the workers of the fields did hammer me down and those from the town chased me away and in the schools the children pelted me with stones and those at the mill kicked me and kicked me, but ah did brave all of the blows that rained down upon me. Indeed, these afflictions seemed almost small when set against the unending outrage suffered within the bounds of mah home. Yes! A most vile enemy was there within! O Mama was mah true and most unspeakable foe. She was black spit. Ah had no asylum either side of the fence. It was not the valley folk but the drunken despotic hell-hog who spawned me that really put to the test mah mettle. Her later years, ah swear, were spent in the relentless pursuit of mah misery. Just to think about it, even now, two full years since her popping off, is enough to chill mah chitterlings.
It sometimes baffles me, you know, as Staff-bearer and Rod-raiser to the Lord, chosen to unnertake His most ecstatic mission, how the Almighty in all His goodness and grace could conceive such an abomination as she. Or was this vixen built by another, more terrible hand? Was she the monsterpiece of some hellish cosmetician? A limb of Lucifer? Which bloody dungeons did they plumb? Which fucken sewer did they drag? Do you know? No? Yes?
VII
She was seated in a simple hard-wood high-backed chair, surrounded by a deep sepia void. She wore the same white cotton smock as always, but not stiffly as before. Instead the skirts were hitched a little to reveal her knees, the blouse thin and loose. Her limbs had been elongated a little, ah think, and though she was sitting formally, for a portrait, there was a certain ease of poise that made her appear totally unselfconscious, as if ah were watching her and she didn’t know it.
Maybe the beam of the torch was responsible for deepening the murky surrounds and accentuating the ghostly brilliance of her smock and the loosely-tossed locks of gold that fell across her shoulders, but – and this is near impossible to explain – reaching from the pale shores of her face, like two hexing hands twirling and dancing their witching device, came her eyes. Drowning-pools, emerald green and mesmerizing like winter webs or the circles on a devil-moth’s wings, hexing and hexing, peering from unner two heavy lids, kinda outward but kinda inward too, filling mah mind with jabbered mutterings – weird, dark murmurings – mah blood pounding in mah head – sucking me unner – down and down and unner…
How long ah stood there, spellbound in the dark of the tabernacle, ah could not, in truth, say, but it must have been a long time because the image of her face began to fade, like a dying moon, until ah could barely see it anymore, and this is what eventually broke the spell, the batteries in mah torch flatting. That, and the voice.
‘Is it that I have depicted the saintly in a human, or could it be that I have shown there to be humanity in a saint?’
Ah spun around, pointing the torch at the voice. Lit by the dying beam, a dark figure stood in the doorway. Ah pointed the torch in every direction searching for an escape. There was none to be found.
‘Do not fear. I am honoured that one of you has returned to view my picture in private. I have not come to hurt you. You have committed no sin in being here. Tell me, why have you come back to look on Beth? What is it about the picture that has brought you here?’
Ah tasted blood, for mah nose had started. Ah could feel the punishing sticks and stones of public rebuke even then, as ah spun round and around, searching for a way out.
‘You may go if you want. I wish you no harm.’ He moved forward, clearing the entrance of the tabernacle.
‘Sure you fucken don’t,’ ah thought. ‘Sure you fucken don’t.’
Ah bolted down the hall, thundering across the bare boards of the tabernacle. Ah waved mah arms, windmilling them in furious circles as ah lunged toward the interloper. Ah tried to scream, and ah guess ah must have looked pretty menacing coming at him like that, because he had second thoughts about jumping me and just held back as ah flung mahself out the door and down the steps, not stopping running until ah had reached the turn-off that led up to the shack.
Ah dabbed at mah nose with a handkerchief, mah heart pounding, too fucken scared and cold and breathless to see the significance in it. Mah blood nose.
Ah lay upon mah back beneath the cover of the hedgerow. The moon was new and in the sky ah saw it become one thousand things – a slice of lemon rind – a sinister fin menacing the welkin water’s royal pool – a pellet from the golden fleece – the Reaper’s tool – a golden bow released – a single slipper made of glass – a lamp cast in gold – a fold – a gilded horn within a maiden’s gown – a lick – a tongue – an angry thorn – a manger’s roof – a crib or a cradle – a ladle – a tooth – all up there, above me and beyond mah touch. Removed.
Ah rolled on to mah belly, keeping an eye on the matter at hand.
Beth was unbuckling her pumps and still she murmured a song:
’… O field of mustard, field of clover
Bird with crooked wing flew over…’
But the fucken cicadas blasted again upon the night with their shrill-splitting alarum and ah could not make out another word. So ah simply watched the child clutching her knees beneath her crisp cotton dress, loose and very white, and if it had not been for the fact that her toes were curling and flexing and moving in the dust, her shiny pumps discarded by her side, ah could have mistaked her for a lesser work, chiselled by the same deft hand that had created the marble angel – sickle and blonde bangs bright as the moon that loomed aloft, and deadly still.
Beth of stone.
Spawn of sin.
Spawn of sin.
See Pa sit, his brow knitted in deep concentration, his hand sure, steely, nerveless. See the towering edifice made entirely of playing cards, stacked one on one, upon the table before him. See how slow and with what excruciating patience it climbs? See the picture of calm – Pa with his quiet cards. Floor upon floor.
Yet, not even thirty minutes beforehand, ah had watched Pa, through a spy-hole in the outside wall, standing, legs astride and with an old knotty walking-stick, hammering Mule again and again. Whack! Whack! Whack! See the wet welted stripes that blister across the poor creature’s back and rump. See how Pa viciously beats his beast until he is literally too weak to raise another stroke of the stick. Hear Mule’s sick bray. Hee-haw! Heehaw! Hee-haw! Half on his haunches and half off.
See how, even as Mule brays, Pa is rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to begin on the first floor of cards?
See Mule churning a hopeless circle in the corral as he tries, in vain, to lick the bloody wounds that cut across his rump.
See Mule infected with Pa’s sickness. And Pa – his madness gone! Passed on! Working calmly. Painlessly. Forever upward. See?
It was past midnight by the time ah entered the Ukulite tabernacle, the shears tucked unner mah belt, flashlight in hand. It was near one o’clock when ah left, the great roll of canvas unner mah arm…