She slipped something into mah jacket pocket. Ah stared back in disbelief. Ah realized ah was still holding her by the shoulders and ah dropped mah hands. Ah looked into her welling eyes. She bit her bottom lip and swallered and a tear rolled from one eye.
‘You’ve got the wrong God, girlie,’ ah wanted to say. ‘Ah was sleeping off a two-day drunk last night. Ah’m afraid you got your wires crossed, ah’m no…’
But mah thought responses were no sooner kindled than they were terminated – hell, they were burked! – throttled by a terrible squawking to mah right. Ah did not need to look around to know that the odium that inspired such an ungracious fray was me, but ah took a look anyway, glancing over mah shoulder as ah adjusted mah sickle for flight and took off.
Thundering over the porch of the house next to Beth’s there lunged a seven-foot mastodon in a baby-blue housecoat. She barreled down the steps toward me, mouthing insanities and swinging a wooden rolling-pin like a battleaxe.
‘That’s him! That’s him!’ she boomed. ‘Look! He’s got the child! He’s got the child!’
‘No ah haven’t! No ah haven’t!’ ah cried dumbly.
‘You want more, eh? You’ve come back for more? You want me to bash your pervertinizing brains in this time? I ain’t afraid of you! Sardus! Sardus! Where the blazes are you?’ she squawked. Ah looked back again and the woman had stopped chasing me and was dabbing at Beth’s face with a corner of her housecoat. Beth struggled and squirmed.
‘What did he do, child? What did the nasty man do to you? Answer me, child! Did he touch you? Answer me! Where did he touch you?’
Ah ran and ran and did not stop even when ah passed the city limits sign at the south entrance to the town. No one followed me, but ah had a feeling this incident was not over yet.
At last ah came upon a bridge. Hallis Crossing. It was many years since ah had been there. Each side of the bank was clogged with a thickly-knitted briar of wild rose. Ah unsheathed mah sickle and set to work.
Here ah am, in all mah pain, in all mah suffering, going unner, out of life, down to death. And ah’ll tell you this much – this dying hurts. It does, it pains – yet – and yet – in spite of all the punishment of mind and body and all the rest, yes in spite of it all, you know, ah have to smile, yes ah do, why sometimes ah can’t help smiling in the face of it all.
Ah mean, all this wrath and reprobation heaped upon us from on high, all the displays of consummate malice and wanton cruelty, of hot displeasure, all that God, in his seemingly irrational, injudicious, outrageous magistracy does unload upon our sad and giddy planet is – why, this is just a front. Deep down God has a heart as big as a barn. Ah know. Ah’ve talked with him.
On the other hand, exactly what the reasoning is behind our earthly sufferance is as much a mystery to me as ah’m sure it is to you. Ah mean, what is the process by which God arrives at a decision to, say, take all the water from place A and dump it on place B? What? Ah’m asking you. If it is not meted out according to the zeal with which we go about our Godly pursuits, which we can safely say it is not, then what is it? Ah wonder. What goes on up there? What measures the affliction? What weighs the iron? Is it a chance system? A roulette wheel? Is that where the die got its name? Or is there a pattern? Something invented ante-creation, something seasonal, something astrological? Why was the diluvian technique employed in the first recorded wholesale extermination? Was God taking a bath? Ah’m asking you. Or was there first the system and then the creation? Is the system mathematical? Is it numerical? Or maybe alphabetical? ‘Today is ‘P’ day – widespread Pestilence, some Pogroms, a variety of Plagues, a Purge and a Prickly Pear…’ Soon ah will know – when death has finally overcome me – when ah am out of reach of life – when there is no chance of me returning – yes, then all will be revealed.
The night moved in on Hallis Crossing and ah squatted beneath the bolted beams of the bridge, listening to the shifting of its wood, the. shifting of the waters, while the air got serious around me. The moon was a steely prong stabbed into a sky as black and untried as the chambers of a dead nun’s heart. The moon was trying to rattle me and it had chosen the right night to do it. There was an indisputable aura of imminent catastrophe in its attitude – the way it was so carelessly perched in its invisible sling, supramundane and to mah eyes top-heavy, this sickle moon, top-heavy and tilting over as if the slightest disturbance would topple it from its heavenly roost and send it crashing down upon me. The reservoir of courage that ah’d had cause to milk so frequently on this day had all but dried up – the last brave drops spent on getting me through the raking brambles of the briar.
Ah had looped mah belt over a bridge beam and lowered mahself down, knowing ah had gone about it in the wrong way at about the same time as ah realized ah could not turn back again. It was too dark and the briar seemed deeper than ah had at first thought. Denser. Thornier. Mah belt wasn’t long enough. Or strong enough. Or was it that ah was too heavy, what with mah many burdens, mah mass of troubles, mah great whacking load of woe? Anyway ah’d taken a tumble in the wild roses and found mahself sprawled on the bank of the cloacal rivulet, free of the clawing snagglepatch, but with mah body, face, hands and neck a feast of tiny bubbling welts and scratches. Crawling unner the bridge ah took off mah jacket and trousers and spent some time in silence plucking the angry thorns that had become embedded in their fabric, in mah flesh.
‘If there was a thorn for every time that ah have died today,’ ah thought, ‘a thorn for every time that they have killed me, the world would be one big briar patch.’ And ah sighed a sigh so deeply wrought, so full of despair, so full of grief, yes, so fucking bloody sad, that ah was forced to say to mahself,’ Steady up there, Euchrid, steady up. Stay brave. You’re safe now. No one can get you here. No one can hurt you here. Chin up. Everything will turn out all right in the end.’
And ah guess the sluice-gates on some other reservoir opened up, and wearily and with many deep and draining sighs ah cried and cried and in time ah fell asleep upon the bank of that filthy little creek. And just before mah dreamtime crowded in ah remember thinking that some very bad moments were yet to be lived. Some good ones too, maybe, but most of all ah remember thinking that there were some very bad moments heading for me, close and coming fast, bad moments demanding to be lived.
Ah dreamed ah was a carpenter. The best carpenter in town. One day ah made a great cross and carried it up a hill all alone. The sun was hot and a warm wind blew, bringing the hue and cry of the townsfolk to mah ears. Ah turned to see many people young and old clambering toward me. Ah hoisted the great cross onto mah back and ran on up the hill.
There ah met a harlot who was digging a hole and when ah asked her what she was trying to unearth she told me nothing ah am burying the sins of the world. Ah looked in the hole and saw only a blood-brushed glove and ah reached in and took it out and she said lie down. Ah lay down on mah cross and she undressed me. She pulled thorns from mah flesh. She covered mah body in lavender saying that she must prepare me and draped mah loins in her own pink nightdress. Still the crowd grew closer. She hammered me on. Then she jammed mah cross in the hole and ah hung there absorbed in mah own tiny pain.
When ah opened mah eyes the crowd were all about me. Each person was dressed in a robe, with a crown of thorns and five wounds. Too many Christs and not enough crosses, ah thought, panicking.
They pulled me off, all fighting for a position on the cross. It groaned beneath their weight, and ah grew angry.
It is mah cross, ah cried, and the people all ran away. Ah produced a giant saw and knelt by the cross. Ah started sawing. A few paces to mah right ah saw another cross, the same, and ah began to saw it. Then another. And another. Until ah had sawed through four mainstems.