Yes, when all is said and done, no matter which way you view it, ah was, by anybody’s standards, a model child. Yes, ah was.
Ah was also the loneliest baby boy in the history of the whole world. And that’s no idle speculation. It’s a fact. God told me so.
Mummy was a swine – a scum-cunted, likkered-up, brain-sick swine. She was lazy and slothful and dirty and belligerent and altogether evil. Ma was a soak – a drunk – a piss-eyed hell-bag with a taste for the homebrew.
Ma’s drunks worked in cycles, consciousness following unconsciousness like two enormous hogs each eating the other’s tail – one black, fat and unbelievably obscene, the other hoary, loud, with two crimson eyes, mean and small and close together – and these cycles she rigorously adhered to.
When Ma was conscious our little shack on the hill would cringe in horror at the prospect of the inevitable frenzy of destruction – usually occurring on the fourth day – which would immediately precede her term of unconsciousness.
Once awake, Ma would make increasingly frequent and protracted visits to her stone bottle – the vessel that she always drank her likker from – until she was off and sailing, stumbling around the shack or the junk-pile, or sprawled out in her armchair, the stone bottle clutched to her vast bosom. Here she would rant and swaller and rave, recalling the days of her youth, before she had been sullied by the squalid hands of booze and men. And days would become nights and nights, days.
Then, having put away enough of her rotgut to floor an army, she would – and it gives me the screaming leaks just to think of it – she would – this very fucking sick, sick bitch – would begin to sing a version of ‘Ten Green Bottles’ in an increasingly furious bark. When she reached the part that goes ‘… and if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’d be no green bottles …’, she would simply run amok – yes, launch into a fit of such unbridled violence that it simply wasn’t safe to be within bat-swinging range of her.
As soon as he heard the opening strains of ‘Ten Green Bottles’, Pa would drop whatever it was that he was doing and belt out the screen door, me toddling after him. Ah would seek refuge in an overturned pickle-barrel out back of the shack. It was such a secure feeling to be crouched in there with mah knees up against mah chest, the smell of vinegar still trapped in the wood, the cosiness of its size – you know, sometimes ah would crawl into that barrel just to feel safe for a while. In the barrel ah heard some very strange, garbled things – not from without but from within.
To this day ah am struck with wonder as to just how ah managed to stay alive through mah crate-bound days. For to say ah was a bashed baby would be more than a little correct – it would be absolutely correct! Yes! Ah was one very fucking bashed baby!
IV
In early 1940 a meeting was held in the Town Hall at which two bodies weere required to convene: Ukulore Valley Sugar Board and the Ukulite leaders.
The authorities representing the cane-workers and their families had lodged a request proposing, amongst other things, that a Unitarian house of worship be built to cater to the needs of valley residents not of the Ukulite faith, pointing out that of the valley’s population of approximately 2,100 a full eighty per cent were being denied spiritual gratification. Therefore it was suggested that in the interests of ‘equity’ and ‘inter-relation’ and as ‘a gesture of continued concord’ between the two factions, the meeting parties would, without question, find to accept the proposal. Though a foregone conclusion, the outcome had nevertheless been a triumph for the workers.
Sardus Swift, knowing full well that his hand was being forced, had agreed to the proposal and, in a gesture as inescapable as it was magnanimous, had then added that ‘in accordance with my belief that a prosperous spirit is always manifest in the spirit of prosperity, and as leader of the Ukulite colony and representative of the landowners, I hereby accept the responsibility of allocating a suitable plot of land, and in addition, I personally will meet all construction costs’.
The Sugar Board (or UVSB) offered to take charge of arrangements for the erection, making mention of the fact that several building contractors in Vargustone were currently subject to their inspection. It duly requisitioned, for a fraction of the costs it had quoted to the penny-wise but pound-foolish Ukulites, the services of an infamous building firm which had been forced by a string of law-suits coupled with a succession of savage lashings from the local press to change its promotional slant from ‘creative architecture’ to ‘cut-price contracting’.
In late 1937, on a four-acre rise (which became known, ironically, as Glory Flats), the Vargus building contractors and a handful of labourers laid the foundations of what, they promised, was destined to be a heaven-bound leap in the history of the systemization of worship.
But heaven-bound the church on Glory Flats was not. Destiny would not allow, herself to be so readily predicted.
For the church on Glory Flats would never be completed and the years of misadventure drew closer.
Sardus Swift had emerged from the Town Hall weary and taciturn, besieged by feelings of guilt and disgust at his own impotence; for he had known as surely as if there had been a war that he was surrendering his kingdom to the conquerors. And though his people received his announcement in silence and not a man or woman amongst them reviled or even blamed him, Sardus knew that he had betrayed his God, his Prophet, and his people, and that only an act of contrition could stifle the shame which he felt at having surrendered up, in a moment of unpardonable negligence, the Promised Land to the first idolatrous creed that had had half an urge to stake a claim.
Brother Whilom, surviving pioneer leader and hymnist, believed to be over one hundred years old, said to Sardus, not unkindly, ‘God forgive us. We have delivered up the New Zion to the idolators and the infidels. They will carve up the Kingdom as though it were a side of beef and toss it to the factions. And as the earthly Kingdom of God enters the term of division and subdivision, the rod of His wrath shall blossom. All our prayers will be as dust, Sardus.’ With which the old man took his Bible and retired to his bed, never to rise again.
V
Well, ah was in mah seventh year and ah remember sitting on the steps of the porch and looking out over the cane-fields to where Maine Road slices them like a scythe, and there, kicking up a trail of red dust, rolled the first of the lumber-trucks loaded with raw materials hauled all the way from Vargustone; and as ah watched, ah listened, hearing the truck’s gears shift down to low and then change back up as it turned up the track – Glory Trail they named it – that veers off Maine to the east, just opposite the turn-off for that largely disused track that runs westward along the north-west perimeter of the crops, and out about one hundred yards from mah shack’s front porch. Ah wonder what they’ll name it, mah track, now that it has recently earned such notoriety?
Ah watched the trucks crawl up the slope and come to a stop on the plateau on the top of what they now called Glory Hill. And mah hill? What will they call mah hill?
‘Those lorries aren’t from around this way, no way. They’re bringing the timber up from somewhere big. Vargustone, ah bet. Same with everything, the labour, the planners, everything. Ya can tell.’
That’s approximately what ah was thinking there on the steps in the summer of ’40.
VI
A few words concerning Euchrid’s ancestral stock. Euchrid’s father Ezra was born in 1890 in the thick hills of Black Morton Range, a notorious yet largely uncharted region of densely vegetated hollows and hills. Here big, bald rocks line the valley floors. Dry creek beds ride the foothills, the bush deepening on the upgrade, becoming dark and dangerful midst the tall timbers and the strangling briars.