And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  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.

  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.

  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, we
ld 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.

  A characteristic, certainly, of all the traps was that they were built to detain and to maim but not to kill. Pa had no use for dead animals. Lizard traps made of fly-wire and thumb tacks, traps for feral cats made from a metal bucket hammered through with nails, great crippling spring-jawed traps so powerful that their teeth would thrust deep into the bones of the wild beasts that roamed the valley ridges and howled and barked and laughed in the night. Simple traps, too, briars of tangled wire and slicing glass, or a tin sheet with an asterisk cut into it lain across a ditch – or contraptions left baited and armed with a series of triggers that could not only spring terrible jaws, but also release nets, or trap-doors above pits filled with acid mixes, nettles, or rats.

  Each morning Pa would load Mule with as many of the chattering black traps as the beast could carry and, having decided beforehand where he would set them, click his tongue against his palate and mumble ‘Gitch, Mule,’ as he led the beast away.