A perilous dirt road winds about the region’s eastern extremity. At the turn of the century this twisted trail had earned a certain infamy, due to the unexplained disappearance of some twenty-odd travellers who had sought to cross the range in quest of the promised prosperity that lay for the taking in the East.
Investigation into the disappearance of the Black Range travellers (the ‘Morton’ was added to the name officially in 1902), led to the discovery and subsequent disposal of one Toad Morton, or as the press-gang tagged him, Black Morton. A low-minded, wart-worried giant, Toad had been driven from the Morton clan by his own kin, after they had found the family hog dead in its pen, covered in flies and human teeth marks – its back leg had been bitten clean off. Finding Toad covered in pig-shit and sucking a trotter, they had chased him out of the Morton’s valley to roam the gullies and gulches of the out-hills, a sore Goliath shunned by his own blood, without friend or companion save the league of demons that rubbed and itched amongst the crags and sunless cracks of his bad, mad and unholy brain.
Crouched in ambush on that tricky eastern road, Toad plucked at his pleasure lone-riders befitting his own infernal usage.
Found in a small stone cave bitten from the roadside, stitchless save for his great outsized boots and a plague of flies, fat on the human scrappage of dinners long past, Toad squatted in the slitted stomach of a warm child, eating loudly the face of her hapless, headless father, who sat a good foot off the ground impaled up the ass on a pointed post.
Looking up at the search-party silhouetted in the glare at the mouth of the cave, the great lonely oversized Toad said, gesturing at the carnage, ‘Brothers, ah am found! You have come to bring me home! Pull up thy stool!’ Then a hot tear broke upon each cheek and he smiled warmly up at them, his green teeth filed to wicked points.
The search-party had ridden up from Salem led by Deputy Sheriff Cogburne. Deputy Sheriff Cogburne shot Toad Morton like a dog on the spot.
On the road running the eastern extremity of Black Morton Range is a large stone slab upon which is written in white paint:
BEWARE! MORTON’S MURDER MILE
O world-weery Pilgryms, unburden thy lode
Nowither a Doome mor horrid I know
Than that wich awaits Thee down bluddy roade
Prey! Bewar ol Black Morton. The murdress Toad!
Toad Morton was the eldest in a family of fifteen. Then there was Luther. Then there was Er. Nun came next, named after his father, and in the same year Gad was born. Ezra was soon to follow. Then came the three little girls: Lee, Mary Lee, and Mary. Then Ezekiel. Blind Dan. Little Fan, who died aged three and a half. Angel, who had three children of her own by the age of fourteen. Next came Batho, followed by Ben who was quick to die – a sickly child afflicted with some undiagnosed congenital malady the little two-year-old could not shake.
So Euchrid’s father, Ezra, was sixth in what seemed to be an endless stream of puling, snot-nosed offspring. He changed his name from Morton to Eucrow in 1925 after fleeing the merciless bounty-squads that terrorized the hills as part of Sheriff Cogburne’s infamous clean-up campaign.
Since his early teens Ezra had suffered beneath the yoke of his kinfolk’s incestuous practices. His family tree was as twisted and tangled as the briars that tortured the hills. Eye-blinding headaches, catatonia, seizures, trances and frequent outbursts of violence were the order of the day. Whether or not this was due to the consanguineous union of his ancestors, he knew not.
The question of heredity weighed heavily upon the God-fearing Ezra, who was capable of reciting great slabs of scripture by heart -the Bible being the only book his mother would allow inside the house, and Ezra being the only member of her brood that she had successfully taught to read. In any case, if Ezra was burdened with bad blood, his burden remained hidden.
For the young Ezra did not suffer the same tell-tale blights that his siblings bore – worn on their faces, retarding their speech, and betraying them in their gait. In fact, Ezra was by no means an ugly man, and his looks remained unsoured by the long-practised ancestral indiscretions of his forebears. He had a strong back and straight legs and a fine crop of dark hair. His teeth, though too large and too many, were strong enough, and his eyes, his blue eyes, a little pale, a little wild, were in no way impaired, fits and trances notwithstanding. He did not squint, like Gad, nor was he blind, like Dan, nor were his eyes crossed, like little cock-eyed Angel.
Back then, ol Ma Morton had the run of things. The eldest two, Luther and Er, could still be controlled and wore the welts of correction to prove it. Ma ruled the brood as mercifully as Moses, pacing back and forth across the porch in her boots, the wicked nettle scourge in one hand, the jar of red pepper in the other, pacing and sometimes stopping, then hollering into the bush, ‘Lu-u-ther!’ or ‘E-e-e-er!’ … back then, before the Applejack, before the shotgun, before the bloody Morton Range Round-Ups.
Crazed with the effects of mountain liquor and pilfered petrol sniffed from jam-tins, the older brothers, Luther and Er, were reduced to drooling lunatics. Nagged by toothache, hill-pox and the mad itch of scabies – the epizoon that would hound the Morton family to its various lousy graves – they would howl in duet like dying dogs. Plunging from utter despondency into displays of the most heinous violence, the brothers would seek relief from their discomfiture by brutalizing their dull and drivelling sisters, raping them at gunpoint into mulish motherhood.
The day before Sheriff Cogburne and twenty men rounded up the whole Morton Clan, Luther and Er beat each other to death in a fist-fight. That day Ezra slipped from the house, taking the mule, the Bible, Er’s shotgun, and a pocketful of cartridges, feeling in his bones that catastrophe was close at hand.
Having milked a full quart of liquor from the still he stole into the tall timbers and with the mule in tow, gun resting over his shoulder, he descended into the valley.
The year was 1925.
And Ezra, son of Nun, went down into the valley and a cloud descended over the valley.
And Ezra tarried not beneath the umbra but further went until the umbra passed. And for six nights and six days Ezra made his headlong way and for the first day he kept to his left side the sun that he might surely be making distance away from his home, for the valleys grew thickly.
And Ezra knew not that to which his flight would bring him.
And on the first night of the first day Ezra slugged long on his bottle and felt the taste of mountain madness for the first time, yea, and passed along a river-bed that was dry and rock-full.
And he knew not its name and still he had the gun over his left shoulder like a black bone.
He took for his resting place a high smooth stone and drank of his bottle till it was empty and laughing he threw the bottle over and it broke and the noise it made seemed to pierce in his ears and rush with a cold rod of sound and he saw the stones were white and were many skulls beneath the moon that rose to his rear and sat upon the tip of black bone by his cold rushing ear and smooth for he span in roaring white skulls and fell backward upon the foot-stones and hid the ear within the greatest blood-blown bang and smoking bone in a bed of blood-speck he got up and laughing for his ear he fell across his mule which bore Ezra away and stitched the hills with drips of blood.
‘Swall this,’ said the widow.
Ezra woke and gagged on White Jesus.
He convulsed and retched, lurching his upper body over the side of the bed, and disgorged a ribbon of mustard bile on to the footworn sod. He hung there, half on, half off the bed, letting the prickling blood rush to his head.