Yet, on occasion, one came upon the manifestation of an idea so distilled, splendid, and removed from any immediate notions of recognizable human gratification, that it could only have been driven by something truly insane, childlike, or divine. Those three sources of inspiration being somewhat kissing cousins.
*****
Puck and Brownie carried us at a lope all that next day. They seemed to understand Virtue’s pressing need for milk, and so they did not let down on their efforts. They were lathered with sweat. Froth flowed feely from their panting mouths and dilated nostrils. But I did not need to encourage them even once to make this haste, and I was heartily impressed by their determination and selfless sense of duty. They caused me to wonder if I should perhaps reexamine my own sense of purpose. One could believe the animals truly cared for the child’s wellbeing.
At long last, rooftops came into view.
*****
Now the hamlet of Ablutia was, to state it mildly, singular. It was founded by a brazenly pious sect that was a northern offshoot of a western divergence of a southern belief system clinging to The New Testament model of John the Baptist. Ablutionites, as they dubbed themselves, believed that if a little baptism was good for the soul, a whole bunch must be even better. To this end, they had created a rather sophisticated canal system based – an outsider could only surmise – on the irrigation plan for the Gardens of Babylon. They had redirected the Platte into a web of waterways that wound like a tangle of wet worms throughout their village, and then flowed through openings in the foundations of all the houses. Inside each home was a wide spot in the middle of the floor, as broad and deep as three conjoined bathtubs, lined with stones, and full of muddy water.
The motivation for this communal water system came from Guilt – that ubiquitous force that has for so long been the prime motivator in Christianity. The logic followed that since a person can not help but think sinful thoughts, and since sinful thoughts are as good as the sin itself for direct passage into the deepest territories of hell, and, finally, since sins can be washed away with baptism, why not baptize oneself continually? Waiting for Sunday to come around, what with such vivid daydreams of thy neighbor’s wife, was too risky, and so it made most sense to these devotees that when such wayward reflections infringed upon the mind, one should quick immerse him or herself in the atoning waters. An Ablutionite’s greatest hope was that Jesus would find him soaking in his private pool of repentance when Gabriel’s trumpet blast sounded the Last Judgment.
They were a wrinkled lot, perfumed with mildew, and not prone to getting much work done in any worldly sense of the word, but they seemed content in their sodden state. A passerby could find them always chanting and shivering and dripping, with sublime, blue-lipped smiles spread over their well-washed faces. They might have risen up to become one of the world’s great religious powers – something akin to Rome, or Mecca – had it not been for providence deciding otherwise. Who is to say that theirs was any more farfetched than the well-established beliefs of, say, Judaism, Catholicism, Pantheism, or even Animism? Still, one has learned through close study of such institutions, that all isms are best approached with a healthy dose of skepticism.
As for myself, on that particular day, I was mostly interested in their milk cows. And yet, as we drew near, I experienced the growing realization that all was not right in Ablutia.
*****
Ululations drifted on the air.
A single desolate voice punctuated the laments with an intermittent grunting and gnashing of teeth.
It caused the horses to stop in their tracks; it prompted the little hairs to prickle up under my collar.
“What in the most unholy perdition do you suppose that is?”
I tried to laugh with nonchalance, but my voice came out of me high-pitched, giving away my apprehension. I stood in the stirrups, attempting to see before us into the maze of lopsided buildings. A tangible shadow seemed to have inundated the village, even in the bright sunlight, and it was a most intimidating proposition to now penetrate that dark umbrella of gloom. At that particular moment, I would have just as soon skulked around the place, giving it a wide berth and continuing on our way. Decidedly, it was our want of milk that drove us forward, albeit with extremely inhibited enthusiasm.
“Come on.” I bravely swallowed at the protuberance stuck sideways in my gullet, and wrapped a protective arm around Virtue. “Let us go and see.”
Warily, we strode into Ablutia.
It was truly a wonderland of the sort contrived by Hieronymus Bosch, for nowhere else – outside of the lagoons of Venice – could one find such an otherworldly schema of ditches and sumps working so integrally with human habitation. Water was everywhere. A crisscross of footbridges. Here was a wide puddle with a handrail leading pointlessly into its muck. There was a small amphitheater erected before a recently excavated, but as yet unfilled, baptismal pond. A mute harpsichord teetered at its edge, and a hymnal lay fluttering on the ground like a wounded bird. Paddlewheels turned aimlessly in the slow brown streams flowing languidly into the maws of every house and building. Fountains gurgled and gagged with sludge.
As we penetrated the township, I spotted fat bullfrogs lounging in the ubiquitous mud. Occasionally one would lift off and snap at a hovering damselfly.
Water snakes fornicated in the lily pads, their golden eyes following us askance as we passed.
But the sight that was most surreal was the one we came to at the river’s edge.
Puck spied it first, and reared up in repugnance and alarm.
“Mother of God!”
There, laid out in the figure of ghoulish crucifix, was the entire populace of Ablutia, by all appearances quite dead. A single living woman was bent over among the corpses, some of them puffed and stiff with rigor mortis, all of them dressed in their grimy white baptismal robes. The woman appeared to be sorting and arranging the bodies according to some design known only to her. She dragged a half-grown child to a gap in the cadaverous glyph, and then tucked it stiffly under the leg of a lifeless man lying face up to the sun. Once done, she dropped to her knees, lifted her hands to heaven, and wailed in a most unearthly primalism. At first the woman was unaware of our presence, but then when she heard our hooves, she whirled and saw us.
“Awhoooooooh!” she screeched, and stamped toward us with both her arms stretched before her, forming a cross with her index fingers.
Brownie shied.
“Get away, Dark Angel!” she shrieked. “Get away!”
My heart began beating wildly, as she was most worked up into a frenzied state and seemed capable of a drastic act.
“Woman!” I said. “Calm yourself! We mean you no harm.”
She ceased her forward march, but continued to hold her crucifixal fingers toward us threateningly. Her glower gave us to know that she was most crazed. Her hair was asunder and all sticking out. Like the dead around her, she wore her baptismal robe, and I will say, at the risk of sounding inapposite, that she looked most stunning and perversely alluring, as if she had stepped straight out of some ancient Greek ode to Eros. Her diaphanous toga was wet and clung to all of her more voluptuous attributes. I dare say, too, that her lunacy added to her charm, and for a slender moment I considered that it might just be my magnanimous duty to let her tag along with us for a while, seeing as she was otherwise destitute and without living friends. Perhaps I could sooth her woes in manly fashion.
“Awoooooohoooohoooooooooo!” she howled, rather erotically.
When she was finished, I adjusted in the saddle and swept my arm toward the morbid scene before me. “What horrible plight, my lady, has befallen your people?”
“The Dark Angel!” she hissed. “He brought the sickness.” She pointed at the river. “He put it in the water.”
“The sickness?”
“The river fever. He spat it into our flow of life. He jacolated it into our well.” She clenched her fists and looked at them. “And I alone survived.”
I had
heard that a vibrio poison sometimes infected these villages, as corrupted water is always a problem when too many people come together in one place without a proper sewer. The white man’s disease had been known to wipe out entire populations of the natives. It had erased more than one upstart settlement of whites besides. But this was the first I had ever seen of it with my own eyes.
“Awoooh!” yowled the woman, and then she scurried to the river and, forming a cup with her hands, dipped them into the river. She then hurried back and flung it raining over the corpses. “Awooooooooooooh! We must purify the souls,” she explained. “We must keep them wet.”
I was at a loss for how to help this wretched creature. In spite of my noble intentions, she seemed too far gone. I squinted up into the sky to where a dozen vultures had begun their slow and persistent gyrations. They never once flapped their wings, but rode on some invisible stream of air. One envied them their privileged vantage over the world. “Little birdy up so high,” I whispered. “What keeps you up there…?”
“Awooooooh!”
The woman had grabbed hold of the ankles of a dead old woman and was dragging her backwards to the water. “We must baptize their souls. We must not let them dry or their souls will belong to Him.”
She backed right into the river, pulling the body in after her. It bobbed and floated, and then she pushed it out into the flow, in the manner of someone launching a skiff. A single stiffened arm lifted up above the surface, and one could almost believe the cadaver was waving farewell.
The crazy woman slogged back out of the water. “Awwooooooh!” She grabbed hold of a dead child and dragged it back to the river where she pushed it out into the sluggish dark stream.
“Woman!” I called.
“Awoooooh! And I alone …” she moaned. “I alone survived.”
She kept up her work of dragging corpses, disassembling the ghastly crucifix, and did not pay us any more attention.
“Well that is the way it is, I suppose.”
Virtue sat slumped against my front side. I felt her tremble, and I knew we had to find the cows soon.
“Tck Tck,” I clicked, and we turned and rode away.
*****
It was with considerable dismay and heaviness of heart that we at last discovered the barnyard animals. Ten sheep, nine pigs, and three plump Jersey milk cows. All dead. The Dark Angel, it seemed, chose his victims without discrimination.
“Damn!”
I assessed the dead cows. Their bags were bloated and still full of milk, and for one desperate moment I considered tapping them where they lay. But then that would likely have only produced some vile phlegm, and I thought better of the idea.
“Hmm!” I conferred with the horses and Virtue. I knew that the child was in a desperate state. She shuddered like a withered leaf against me, and I must admit that this made me feel most miserable and sad. In short time, the little girl had become an important part of my life, and I cared for her, I suppose, in a way I have cared for few others. I did not want to let her die. Not to mention she was my grubstake.
“This puts us in a fix, to be sure. But let us not give up hope.”
I gazed up the river. It appeared exceedingly ugly in the midday heat.
“I am becoming evermore disillusioned with this route, as it seems polluted with humanity and rife with hazard.”
I looked to the south.
I considered the north.
We were traveling that portion of the country that gives way to uninterrupted grassland, and it occurred to me that we might be better off just navigating those rolling waves of wild pastureland instead of following the common trail of the westward settlers. It was doubtless a gamble. For few were the rivers of milk to be found on that barren plain. But I felt something peculiar stirring in my solar plexus right then, the likes of which I had never felt before in my life. If I had to give it a name, I might have called it Faith. What else could it be? It made no good sense, to be sure, but that was exactly how I had observed faith working its magic in others. It was as if I had been infected with it by association. And I suppose it was made all the more improbable considering I had just encountered a whole town of faithful who had recently met their demise largely, it appeared, as a result of their faith. But still, and again, I felt compelled to follow my hunch. The stars, although hidden behind that vault of vulture-cluttered blue, seemed to be whispering encouragement into my ear.
I placed my hand against Virtue’s chest and gave her a reassuring squeeze. She placed her own little hand on mine.
“Let us follow another way,” I said.
For what, at this juncture, did we have to lose?
SKY AND GRASS – THAT is all there was anywhere we looked – sky and grass – sky and grass.
The grass was shoulder high to the horses, and we felt to be fairly swimming through it. It became overwhelming and dreadfully monotonous and I found that if one contemplated the situation too heavily, one immediately found himself sinking towards a panic the likes known only to swimmers who have paddled too far out from sight of land.
Virtue languished further. I cuddled her against my middle and she held onto my thumb with both hands. Her head was bowed forward. She breathed in short gasps. She was yet alive, but I could feel her withering, like a cut flower left too long on the windowsill.
I began to doubt my inspired decision to leave the river. At first I believed every step forward could only be a step toward our ultimate salvation. Surely I had not misunderstood the stars’ urging. One thought confidently that we were being looked out for by some force unseen. But then a single patient vulture took up dogging our slow headway, reeling above, round and round, like some feathered shark in the sky. His shadow passed over us again and again, and this began, rather methodically, to unravel my nerves. As the day progressed, my great faith gave way to a lesser hope, and then, with the incessant swishing of dry grass, my hope plummeted to the level of despair.
Puck and Brownie floundered forward.
The vulture soared tirelessly above.
My heart began to ache.
*****
Like most sojourners on this earth, I have experienced the pain of having my heart muscle broke to pieces. Such, it seems, is the lot of every member of humanity. And I am not claiming that mine was any more or less poignant than the impending losses felt by, say, the citizens of Ablutia, as they watched their husbands and wives and children being felled all around them. Life is a trap into which we all are born, strewn with few enough joys, and many perils, and with no surefire escape but death. How that death arrives is, more or less, inconsequential. But a person’s sadness – yes, his sadness – is his own, to be cherished and sheltered, and mine felt most significant to me that day because of the great sense of unfinished business it carried along with it as baggage.
I will not lie; I had been privately proud to be chosen for the job of delivering Virtue to the City of Rocks. At long last, a confirmation of my worth! I had fancied… Dare I say it? I had fancied that it had actually been a divine decision to use me and my special talents – the stuff of epic poems and heroic legend – and so maybe I was more than I had come, in these recent years, to think of myself. Perhaps I was not a shiftless ne'er-do-well. Maybe mine was a valiant soul after all, destined for greatness, just as I had always fancied myself to be since I was but a boy. But now, and regrettably, once again in my life I felt myself approaching the imminent edge of failure.
Mayhap it was only a bad habit resurfacing in time of need, the same way as some men might turn to whiskey or religion when circumstances become all too much for them to endure, but my own mind cowered from the harrowing situation in which we now found ourselves and began, as was its wont, to seek the solace and protection of poetry.
“Oh lift me from the grass!” I spontaneously intoned.
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast; -
Oh! Press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.”
Admittedly, it was not the most optimistic poem I could have quoted, but it was the one that had arisen from my secret internal stockpile, and I have found that verse, even laced with gloom, has the effect of a salve to the troubled soul. Those rhythms and sounds were good medicine for me. Still, I was the leader of this little band, and I comprehended straight away that even though I felt greatly calmed myself, I should perhaps recite something a bit more upbeat for the sake of my troops. I thumbed through the well worn pages in my brain and came up with this song –
“When voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is…”
Brownie halted; so did Puck.
“What?” I said.
They did not move.
“You want something about a happy pony? I have yet to write that one, but will just as soon as I…”
Puck neighed, as if to shut me up. “Listen, you self-consumed dullard!” he said to me in horse.
I sat quietly, if not a bit humiliated, until sure enough, there, over the hiss of the rustling grass, I heard what one supposed must be a song. Although unfamiliar in its cadence and language, it was eerily beautiful to hear, almost mesmerizing, like some beckoning siren tune. Brownie turned his head and bobbed it twice toward the direction of the music. He was, I decided, telling me to have a look.
I nodded obediently, and, holding Virtue close, raised myself up in the stirrups so that I might take a gander.
Delivering Virtue Page 8
