A blind bolt of pain hammered into his left ear. He groaned and pulled himself up and flopped on to his back again, his eyes screwed up and him spiralling down and down and down.
‘Swall.’
Again Ezra’s gullet filled with the foul White Jesus and he roared and again spat his stomach on to the sod.
He lay in the bed of the widow they called Crow Jane. In her shack. In Ukulore Valley. On the outer reaches of Ukulore town. And Ezra saw her and wondered.
‘Ya ear shot off. Ya mule is hitched,’ said the widow. ‘Ah waited twelve years but ah knew ya’d come on back.’
Ezra fell into a sleep and dreamed he stood at the bow of a great ark that was shaped like an ear, and that he took a crow and sent it out across the water that stretched to every horizon and that on the sixth day the crow returned and in its beak was a black bone.
And that’s how Ezra, Euchrid’s father, came to Ukulore Valley, and that’s how he met Euchrid’s mother, and he lived there, tucked beneath the sour and flabby wing of his spouse, till they were both dead.
Euchrid’s mother was almost thirty when Ezra’s mule, soaked in the blood of his earless and delirious master, entered the yard of the little clap and tar shack. Though the woman had not been seen in the township since the day of her marriage in the winter of 1913, the memory of her was still firmly locked in the stocks of public ridicule. The cane-men had given her the cognomen ‘Crow Jane’, taken from a song that old Noah, the coloured barber, would sing in his low rich voice as he clipped and shaved and swept in his little shop on Maine.
Jane Crowley was infamous in Ukulore Valley on account of the fact that her day of matrimony in the winter of 1913 had provided the valley with its one and only shotgun wedding. A virago through and through even then, at the age of seventeen she had accused – in a torrent of tears and flump-footed tantrums – a dim-witted and wholly innocent cane-worker named Ecker Abelon of having taken advantage of her on the understanding that they would marry within the month. All was done in alliance with her unruly kin, who went so far as to denounce the fornicator and publicly demand that he make good the family name of Crowley which he had so readily sullied.
In the sight of God and under the unblinking eye of a Winchester rifle, Ecker had delivered the sacred pledge and tied the nuptial knot till death do they part.
Two weeks later, Ecker crossed the valley to the cabin of his new-found kin on the pretext of borrowing Old Man Crowley’s notorious shotgun, saying simply ‘Cats are breedin fastern ah can hit em with a bat’. And with a slap on the back from his father-in-law, Ecker Abelon walked into one of the south fields and pulling both triggers blew his face away.
Old man Crowley solved the mystery of the body in the field when he recognised the Winchester as his. own. Buried in the graveyard at the foot of Hooper’s Hill, box and marker courtesy of the Workers’ Fund, Ecker slipped the nuptial knot forever.
Though Ecker lay dead in the ground, no member of the community had been willing to shoulder the responsibility of informing the wife of the deceased.
Crow Jane took to sitting on the front porch day after day, awaiting the arrival of her new spouse, passing the long hours slugging liberally from an unlabelled bottle containing one of her home-brewed liquors, which she made and bottled out behind the junk-pile under the old disused water tower. Though it was barely drinkable, even to the most seasoned sot, Crow Jane managed nevertheless to palm off the occasional pint to one of the hobos that haunted the outer regions of the valley or to a pick-up full of drunken cane-cutters who were too shit-faced to care about such minor hurdles along the road of intemperance as drink-ability.
Casually, the widow would ask each visitor: ‘Have ye spied Ecker Crowley today?’ and the men would shuffle and reel as she tapped off a pint and awaited their answer. ‘No mam, not this day,’ each would reply from behind a trembling hand, ‘Not today, mam.’ And as they clambered back on to the pick-up and roared off toward Maine they would burst into fits of laughter, rolling around the back and knocking back slog upon gagging slog of the widow’s gut-rot.
For twelve years Jane awaited the return of her husband, drinking herself day upon night into madness.
The image of her truant partner began, in time, to fade into obscurity, becoming eventually a vague and abstract notion that hung like a shroud over the ever increasing be-shitment of her rationale.
So when the mule carried Ezra – earless by one and in a state of acute delirium, a river of dried blood caking the mule’s belly and hind legs – into the widow’s yard, the vagaries and obscurities of the past decade began to solidify once more, and, as if hearing a great golden bell tolling in the stillest of nights, she knew her man had found her.
Ma Crow has three stills. These are the brews: White Jesus, Apple Jack, Stew. The hobos call White Jesus – which she makes from potato peelings – White Lightning, but the cane-men call it Ecker’s Tears. Ma Crow’s choice is White Jesus. The Apple Jack is Jack to the hobos, Widow’s Piss or Widow Water to the cane-men. Apple Jack is the most popular brew as it is nearly drinkable. Unlike White Jesus, Apple Jack will solidify when frozen. The hobos call Stew, Stew mostly, though some of the older ones mix it up with Ma Crow’s choice and call it wrongly Stewed Jesus. The cane-men call it Stiff, Piss, Swill, Bilge, Shit, and it is made from any fermentable scraps. This brew is often touch and go and is sold cheaper than the rest.
VII
Listen to this. It’s truth.
Ah am witness to its authenticity.
It concerns Pa.
Believe me, ah spent many a long and muzzled hour, blue with kept breath, watching, in utter bewilderment, his capricious habits.
Ah wanna explain about Pa and his traps. No. What ah wanna do is try and explain what ah saw, in these shadowing, looking days – days that would rear monstrously from the stagnant waters of Pa’s seemingly inert passivity. Ah want to explain what ah discovered as he unnerwent the scrutiny that led me to believe his actions could only eventuate in the most bloody of consequences. Ah want to explain these notions using the story of Pa and his traps as the vehicle.
All Pa’s traps were completely home-made. After a time, ah came to see them as the direct embodiment of the unsuppressible and spring-sprung hatred that Pa felt toward the world and everything in it.
He collected metal scraps from the junk-heap – pieces of car body, hub-caps and bumper bars, wires and metal brackets, springs and coils, rusty nails, paint tins, petrol canisters, steel cylinders, copper piping, lead piping, nuts and bolts, old pans, cutlery, metal panels, steel barrels, chains and ball-bearings – and by subjecting them to bulk-cutters, metal-shears, files, pliers, tin-snips, fire and icy water, hammer and anvil and lead-headed mallets, he would heat and bend and bash them into monstrous shapes or file and shave them to sinister points, weld and wire tin teeth and fangs of shaved nails into heavy black jaws, cut and moulded from hardened plates of steel or bits of track or bumper bars weighted with bolts and rocks. Then he’d also fashion a spring, a catch, a lock and a trigger. Coating the whole contraption in a black, acrid grease that glistened darkly on the cruel and ragged teeth, he would wrench the slippery jaws apart and lock in the catch so that the greasy fangs yawned wide, grinning and salivating with skunk-oil in an obscene leer that begged to be fed.
Pa would then trigger the trap with a piece of broom-handle, and watch as the black jaws crunched the wood in a splintering fracture.
There was no single design, as such. Or rather, if there was -that is to say if there was a single homogenous trait – it lay in the fact that they were all unnecessarily cruel and all cruelly ingenious. Even the small traps, the ones for rats and scorpions, were ferocious in design.