Ah hung it in mah grotto the next day – a kind of figurehead that watched over mah dim retreat. With the kindergraph of the whore in mah hand, ah would marvel at the likeness – the yellow curls, the same sullen attitude, the sense of glum abandon that rested in the bold swivel of puerile hips and the idle bunching of angled bones, the curious tilt of the head and the booty of spilled gold that fell across each shoulder. Ah would lose mahself for hours in the witching pools of their eyes – of her eyes – her eyes – of her witching, pooling eyes.
VIII
Beth was afraid of the other children.
Having spent her early years smothered beneath a scrum of fussing mothers, she had never known the companionship of other children, and when Sardus Swift entered his daughter at Ukulore Valley School fears that had previously lain hidden became manifest in the child. Beth was simply unable to feel at ease with children of her own age. Nor did time serve as a poultice; as the weeks passed by and the first term drew to an end, Mr Carl Cullen, headmaster of U.V.S., suggested to Sardus Swift that his daughter be removed from the school and placed under private tutelage.
In a gesture that was more than a mere courtesy, for the decision could not be made alone, Sardus met with a handful of the foremost among the adherents, and together they discussed Beth’s future. Her welfare was, said Sardus, ‘as much a community concern as a parental one’. It was decided that, as things stood, more harm than good was being done in keeping the child at school, and that a Mr Henry Mendleson of Davenport, cousin to Wilma F.ldridge, be approached for the position of private tutor.
Beth secretly grew to despise Mr Henry Mendleson – dreading the daily advent of his shiny, pink pate, which bounced nervously on to her horizon at eight o’clock sharp each morn. She shrank at the sound of his tiny, polished shoes as they squeaked aross the linoleum and stopped outside her door. She hated the little ‘ahem’ that would follow, and the pursy, one-knuckled knock. But what really boiled Beth’s blood was the way he called her ‘Beeth’, with a near-inaudible tremor in his intonation: ‘Morning, Be-ee-th’.
Yet despite her loathing for Mr Mendleson, Beth thanked God that her sentence at Ukulore Valley School had been terminated. No longer need she feel the terrible enmity that she had faced during the three cold months she had spent as a pupil there. No longer need she face the children who hated her. No longer need she feel their jealous, appraising eyes, hear the scornful whispers and laughs, the cruel taunting rhymes.
Such had been Beth’s fear of the other children that she had taken to spending her recess and lunch-break on the far side of the peach grove at the back of the school, squatting in the wind-whispering cloisters of the orchard. Her eyes would gaze at the space before her, still and wide and somehow vacant. What worlds so absorbed her as she squatted in the pink and white peach blossom we can only guess.
IX
One late-spring afternoon Ma was winding up a five-day drunk in her usual manner, banishing me from the house, to be closely followed by Pa.
Pa scuttled off around the back of the shack, tossed a few hessian sacks across Mule and filled the saddle bags with the tools of his trade: rope, hunting knife, snake-pincers, chicken-wire muzzles, dog-rod – a forked pole for bagging potentially dangerous beasts, and so on. Then he trotted off down the slope toward Maine. Keeping close to/the cane, where most of the traps had been set, he reset and baited any that had been triggered, tested those still unsprung, and bagged any beast that had been claimed.
Ah tagged along, careful to keep well hid, crouching behind clumps of periwinkle, peering through the blue and white blooms. But after ten minutes or so ah decided to take a walk along Maine while it was still light.
Ah had only been walking two or three minutes when ah heard a strange moaning sound. Human sounding, it was, and in great pain – not like the other voices at all, for it seemed that ah could locate the source of this agonizing with little trouble, whereas with the special voices there is a totality about their presence that makes it damn near impossible to… shit, forget it.
Ah hopped the gully, wriggled through the fence at the bottom of Glory Flats and stepped into the long grass. Ah walked toward the moaning, beating the grass with a stick that ah had handy. The moaning grew louder, more pitiful – and suddenly ah noticed the waist-high grass rustling madly, only a stone’s lob away.
Ah moved toward it, stick outstretched.
‘Mercy! Mercy!’ ah heard someone cry, and, parting the grass with mah stick, ah saw before me a stinking hobo, dressed in black.
The hobo had shoved his foot into one of Pa’s pit-traps – the lid off a steel drum with about eight cross-cuts made in it, all converging on the centre like a star and covering a ditch about two feet deep. He lay on his back looking at the sky, both hands clutching his bloody leg at the knee. He howled with pain.
Ah dug out the lid and pulled the two pins that held it together at the lip, and, pulling the lid apart until the fins of tin were freed, ah winced as the hobo slowly lifted his leg from the jaws. His boot was filled up with blood.
He was a withered man, badly in need of a shave. Propping himself up on one elbow, he lifted his free arm and pointed one chilly finger at me. ‘God strike thee down, if thou leavest me here!’ he hissed. Then he closed his eyes, bared his tiny green teeth and passed into unconsciousness.
Taking the hobo unner the arms, ah hauled him, inch by inch, up to the decrepit church on Glory Flats, a dark ribbon of blood at his heel.
Ah left him on the broken steps of the church.
Ah bolted for home.
From the hill of bottles stacked against the south wall of the shack ah grabbed a pickling jar. Ah filled it with peel liquor from one of the stills, screwed tight the lid, and footed it down the slope to the gallows-tree, where two crows busied themselves pecking at the stump. With the fat end of mah stick ah dug up the shears, slipping them into mah belt, and without so much as a moment spent on catching mah breath ah headed down the track in the general direction of the church. Even as ah ran ah could feel the hobo’s grim finger, turning steely and barbed as he spat out his forebodement. Lord, ah could hear his sinister warning!
In the grass again it took me no time to find the hobo’s trail of blood, and with mah brains throbbing horribly ah followed the scarlet river to his boot.
Ah found it, sticky with flies, where ah had left it. But the bum – he was gone!
Ah ventured up the steps and passed over the threshold of the house of the Lord. Mah mind was full of the iconoclastic marvels that had touched me so strongly upon former clandestine visits to the church, so many years before. Ah recalled the stations of the cross that peopled the pillars, so intricately and so lovingly executed, and the saints trapped in the leadlight windows – luminaries, staining both chapel and antechamber with their blocks of brilliance. Ah recalled the shock of fire-red – a golden gloriole – a clear, dappled cloth of light – the blocks of colour warm, all-pervading, refulgent, as ah basked in the glory of their saintliness – their martyrdom.
Ah entered the antechamber and O how this place of worship had fallen from grace. There was a bookcase stacked with hymn books and little bibles, shamefully neglected in their jackets of dust and web. Ah removed one of the bibles. Water had warped the cover and stained the pages, and inside the paper was still damp and spotted in blotches of grey mould. On one page it said:
5 They have corrupted themselves
Their spot is not the spot of his children:
They are a perverse and crooked generation.