by Nick Cave
But it was in the nature of these fits to shun the afflicted with as little warning as they possessed her. Even under the head of the storm she would perk up, her blue mood suffusing with silvery light.
Like a laughing lark in a fountain of mirth, Rebecca would hop and chirp, her chatter kittenish and fanciful, flapping about her heart-sore husband as she gushed forth her eidetic vision like a child.
Sardus would listen, battling to keep a smile upon his lips, indulging her in her monomaniacal chatter as if he had not heard it all before. With tiny hands dancing about her in a succession of fluttering gestures, the childless Rebecca Swift would gaily evoke a world of frosted pink and baby blue, of booties and bonnets and bunny-rugs, of rattles and rubber teething rings.
Cooing and clucking over her ecstatic imaginings, her eyes filling with tears and cooling her flushed cheeks with her own shivering fingers, Rebecca would squeeze shut the real world and behind closed lids create around her the same crystal palace that she always built: a palace of frosted spires and arches of glass, cloud-capped towers and mirrored floors and staircases, white and winding, crystal walls and porcelain doors, the clear peal of vesper bells like the laughter of children – all spilling with warm light beneath a spinning silver sun.
And there she would stay for a day or so, until the sun spun white and melted her babies and the palace of glass all down around her. And there in the heavy folds of melancholia she would brood, drowned beneath her own little rain that would wash across her heart, but could not bring to bud one shooted seed, to swell and to split inside her. No. Not a solitary one to breach the grief of Rebecca.
*
On the afternoon of 12 August, 1942 – that is, the Second Year of The Rain – Doc Morrow had the unenviable duty as the Swifts’ family doctor of informing the couple of what he had ascertained: that although Sardus was as potent as a goat, his wife was unfortunately as barren as a stone, and that all the love and the seed furiously spent in the name of procreation was thus issued in vain. The doctor knew it would not be necessary to add that, in the light of such knowledge, the act of love (which, as crucial to the process of multiplication, was tolerated) would become, if continued, downright fornication, which the Church could not condone.
Dropping in on the Swifts on his way to vespers, the doctor found only Rebecca at home, Sardus having already gone on to church to prepare for the service alone. Rebecca Swift’s bad attendance record was becoming a point of concern for many of the elders; of this both Rebecca and the doctor were fully aware.
Rebecca stood before the cold mouth of the hearth and warmed herself in imaginary flames. She asked two questions and the doctor replied with two words.
‘Can we have a child?’
‘No.’
‘Who?’
‘You.’
Nothing more was said. Doc Morrow left her to make his way to church. Rebecca Swift had had but one lone crutch upon which to prop her tormented world, and with two words the crutch had shattered beneath her.
Shortly after Sardus had returned home and – depressed, exhausted and appalled at the doctor’s news – had fallen into a worried sleep, Rebecca slipped out. Through the back door, wearing only a nightdress and carrying before her a spirit lamp, she crept like a bird into the night. She stopped only to collect a length of rope from the tool-shed that stood at the rear of the rain-battered yard. With the rope coiled over one shoulder she left the garden by the back gate, her cotton nightdress glued to her body like a shrivelled skin, soon to be despatched.
No sign remained of her garden – yet it had once been envied widely throughout the region. Before the rain had beaten the spring blossoms to rotten pulp, the little garden had literally burst with clusters of sunflowers, gold and sun-gorged, tropical vines, and a prize-winning vegetable patch which had swollen with giant beets, titanic pumpkins and bounties of large beans that had cleaned up in their respective fields in three different fairs in three different counties. It had once been a glorious garden indeed, one of the finest in the valley.
‘Have you ever seen so many awards? Look at these ribbons! Green thumbs! By Heavens, there’s nothing my wife can’t grow!’ Sardus had once boasted. He would remember this alone at home, in days to come.
Lamp outstretched, Rebecca walked the length of her street, then turned left up Dundass and made her way across the courtyard of Wiggam’s General Store. There she approached the old disused well. Painted in faded letters on its little tin roof were the words:
‘WIGGAM’S WISHING WELL’
– make a wish come true –
There upon its little slab wall she rested the spirit lamp. Then she tied one end of the rope she had brought to the central crankshaft of the hoist, and composed a crude hangman’s knot at the other. She disrobed. Her hands flickered about her like white flames as she incanted a last prayer into the cheering downpour. I Black ribbons of rain broke upon her pale arms, her tiny breasts, her futile belly, and a system of dark, ropey veins coiled and crawled down the sheer slopes of her body like a plague of shimmering snakes. From the pocket of her discarded nightdress she took the plastic bag which contained her suicide note – this she stuffed between two of the piled slabs of the wall, up on to which she duly climbed. Lifting the halter, she clapped on the noose and pulled it over her head, tugging the rope till it fitted snugly about her throat.
Tottering a little beneath the great knotted growth that sat grotesquely upon her right shoulder, she wavered a brief moment upon the brink of the well, then leapt naked into the dark hole.
At the well’s mouth the spirit lamp flickered lowly like a vigil light.
Wondering why he still bothered to look out his window of a morning, a certain early riser and creature of habit, Baker Wiggam, did just that and was greeted by the lamp’s last waning light calling from the well. Baker Wiggam grabbed his coat and pocketed a large torch.
Thirty minutes later, Wiggam’s fat and evil son Fitzgerald – known to one and all as ‘Fists’ – bowled through Sardus Swift’s open backdoor and, without so much as a knock, burst into his bedroom. Grabbing hold of the foot of the four-poster, he bullied its brass rail violently. A shaken Sardus awoke to the sight of Fists Wiggam grinning and rolling on the spot like a bad penny, the terrible news a trembling bubble on the top of the boy’s fat tongue.
The boy chuckled as Sardus rubbed his face with one hand and explored the empty space beside him with the other. Both hands fell still as it dawned upon him that there was no wife in his bed; he lay there with the one frozen upon his face, the other outstretched to where the barren belly of his woman should have been.
The boy drew breath and spoke:
‘Not dere, Brudder Sawdus. Wife not dere. Tain’t cookin’ neither. Tain’t moppin’. Tain’t scrubbin’. Tain’t even in da house, Brudder! Nope! But ah know where dat woman is, Brudder Sawdus! Know where?!! Ya wife done backa our well wit not a stitch on!! Ha! Ha! Stark naked assa babe!!’
Later, as he stood between the murmurous circle of public outrage and the dark shape of the well, Sardus Swift bent visibly beneath his grief and shame. Hunched over, he stared hopelessly at the dogged and beaten face in the puddle between his feet, unable to recognize it.
His ears rang with a string of the most wicked expletives and curses, to which the town’s citizenry also was subjected as it huddled around the well, clucking and gasping as the stream of filth spewed from its nether-regions.
Baker Wiggam and Doc Morrow fished the mad woman out of the well, naked save a few livid leeches fatted to the size of thumbs. Beneath the collar of rope, a rubescent wound oozed pink water. Her delicate little hands were worn raw, flayed by the coarse fibre of the rope, the rough rope that she had clung to all through the late spring night as she bobbed in the near-brimming well, her ‘long drop’ a mere two feet down.
Over the following days, the faces of the townsfolk began to look to Sardus like a gallery of crude portraits which, framed in their window squares, gazed vacantly do
wn upon him as he doggedly awaited the specially equipped ambulance to drive the four hundred miles from Marilyn Cottages, Delaware, on Cape le Winn.
When, after much delay, they had finished signing the final committal papers, Sardus and Doc Morrow watched the grey windowless Maria plunge into the hyaline midnight sky and disappear behind its starless screen to become yet another puddle of no-colour, its wriggling cargo jacketed in soft grey pads and grey leather straps, seized in a convulsion of grey insanity, borne off to Marilyn Cottages, off to Marilyn Cottages, off to Marilyn Cottages.
Sardus Swift retired to his home, which was to become his fortress, as the rain beat out a constant recital of his loss upon the tin roof.
And so it was without a leader that the Ukulites entered a new circle of depression and of apathy and of torpor. And each day was steeped and further steeped in numb uggr. And the rain came down and washed each last shred of hope away.
A few of the women found, in Sardus’ tragedy, an excuse to wail and wallow around the well, but the attendance and the spirits of those who did was low, and no resistance was offered when a horrified Baker Wiggam ordered them off his land. The women merely rose, gathered about them their last vestiges of pride midst a shower of mud-pies flung at them by the laughing, windmilling Fists, and returned to their homes.
Several scandals broke out involving Ukulite adherents of impeccable standing; these spread first through the ranks of non-adherents and eventually reached the ears of the Ukulites themselves. It was true enough that many of the members began to lose weight rapidly, their eyes swollen and heavy-lidded as if they were being consumed by the over-indulgence of some closet vice.
It was clear that the Ukulites needed a new leader. Yet although those suggested were adequate candidates to take the wheel of their community, each one found an equally adequate argument to disqualify him from the position. Not a man among them would accept.
The regular prayer meets gradually dissolved. Some of the faithful even attended the hymn-singing fiascos that were organized each Saturday night in the Unitarian Church which stood, abandoned by the contractors, ghastly and unfinished, up on Glory Hill.
Along with their apostasy came the moral downfall of some of the men, who took to frequenting the saloons, crap-shoots, poker games and the whorehouse.
Many of these men traded off pieces of the valley in order to pay back gambling debts.
Midnight calls were made on the balkers. Ugly scenes. Ugly scenes.
Ugly scenes to which Sardus Swift was oblivious as he lurked in the shuttered bounds of his house, all the angles of his face locked in bitter grimace and lost in time beneath a long unruly beard.
VII
As ah get called unner, flesh by little flesh, with the comely boggery swaddling mah loins in its warm and sulphurous issue, tugging meatus unner, unner, to its nether-lands, its no-whither-lands, ah make the space about me open up its wounds. The night holds out a dark lantern and springs its shutter open, so that in the pitch of mah blindness, mah scotoma is blasted into a battle sphere of wild meteors, blood-blown moons, suns and molten planets, butchered asteroids, berserk comets, luminary clusters, gaudy wreaths of stellar motion, green nebulae, gaseous nebulae, white and spiral nebulae, hairy-stars and fireballs, shimmering sun-spots and solar flares, blinding faculae, flocculi, and day-stars, new moons, red planets, and stars of blue and tinsel, trinket-yellow and white stars, harlequin showers, spectral moons and mock moons, Sol, Helios, Phoebus, Mars, Saturn, Dipper, Saucepan, Big Bear and Little Bear, in collision, in colour, here, in the guttles of the sump, alone and at war with the macrocosm, unner-borne, eyes squeezed shut and rolling-squeezing, squeezing out the last drips of the spectrum behind mah lids, till ah open mah eyes again and feel them adjust back to grey, for everything is forever grey and the pressure unner mah ribs is hurting me, breathing is getting harder, lungs will cleave apart, only just on one half swallered and the pressure… the pressure… the planets of pain…
Mah life in review as ah go down. Listen to this.
It was the Second Year of The Rain and ah was hidden in the womb of the old Chevy – mah obstetrical glory hole, if you remember, the stripped and gutted crate into which ah was dispatched along with mah martyred brother – low-slumped in the blck seat ah was, nursing a shoebox marked ‘Cicada Cicala Cigala’. It contained nineteen cicada shells – all in perfect condition. Ah had plucked them from the trunks of trees up on the thickly wooded eastern versant, before the rain had come and smashed the shedded paper pods and finally driven the cicadas from the valley. How hollow seem the hills without their shrillance.
A sleepy kind of calm had infected me as ah pondered upon the awesome mysteries bound up in the brittle pods, and safe inside the crate ah let mahself drift away, drift away, only to be wrenched awake by a freakish noise coming from the corral. Placing the shells carefully on the cottonwool pads that lined the bottom of the shoebox ah peered out the car window, keeping low.
Mule flung himself about the corral, bucking, kicking and beating his hooves in a bid to wrench himself free from the hitching post, slipping and skidding in the mud and emitting a queer ‘Hawnk-neee! Hawnk-neee!’, blowing through his lips and slamming his hooves against the side of the shack. ‘Hawnk-neee, hawnk-neee!’ For a second ah wondered what the fuck had flung Mule into such a funk.
And then ah saw it – through the leaden folds of rain it came – a flurry of canine limbs cannonballing up the slope toward the corral – a wild dog – a blood-bent beast – a hill-hound driven down from the hills in search of living food. And ah will tell you this. Ah have seen a lot of these hill-dogs, or ‘barking wolves’ as they are known locally, but ah swear this slavering brute had to be the meanest, hungriest, ugliest, most desperate-looking inbort ah had ever laid eyes on – great green fangs and drooling flews, blood-shotty eyes, flattened brow and massive shaggy shoulders that tapered away to a ratty sawn-off rear end, tailless and hairless and covered in crap. Ah watched the dog leap up the corral fence with a liquid snarl and attach itself to Mule’s flying rump.
‘Haaawnk! Haaawnk!’
Blood ran red down Mule’s rump, as the dog, high upon his back, spun and whipped and kicked and bit. The panicking ass floundered and tottered beneath the onslaught until finally, with mouth agape and tongue lolling, Mule buckled, and with a splash and a drub fell flat on his side.
The vicious cur held on fast, and only at the sounding of Pa’s shotgun did it unlock its jaws and bolt back down the slope. Pa came marching along the back of the shack, shotgun up at his shoulder, and with aim wild and myopic, he emptied the other barrel just as the dog bounded into the sodden cane trash.
Cussing obscenely, Pa entered the corral.
Mule lay upon his side, unmoving, a rain-soiled puddle of blood growing at his hind. And ah watched as Pa removed his hat and crouched by Mule, poking at the moribund beast with his finger. Mule did not respond and the rain pissed down, and after a time Pa rose and walked to the apple barrels where he unhooked a spade. Then, head lowered, hat back on, spade across his shoulder like a grey bone, he crossed the yard to the old water tower.
There, a few feet from the rickety support upon which the tower stood, he began to dig.
Leaving the shoebox wrapped in an old shirt in the glove compartment – thoroughly checking first, of course, for roaches or rats – ah crept from the Chevy and footed it over to the corral.
Ah saw mah romping body on the pocking faces of the puddles. Splashed a few too.
Mule lay ossified in a petticoat of scarlet lace. His toothy rictus made it look like he was laughing.
Ah drew mah hand in a soft stroke across Mule’s neck. His wet grey coat was warm. Ah uttered the beast’s name, in quietude: ‘Mule’, and Mule rolled one spooked eye open and upward into mine – and the ass saw the angel, eye to rolling white eye, and long-locked was the looking. Slowly, and yes, miraculously, Mule climbed to his feet. Blood ran in rivulets down his hind legs. Ah looked for Pa and found him bent waist
-deep in the grave, cussing and furiously digging.
So, me and Mule, we exchanged a second glance, but it was me this time who broke the spell.
Ah returned to the Chevy, and found mah cicadas still secure as ah had prayed they would be. And ah sat rapt in mah box of little bleached cast-offs, one of which ah held gently up between thumb and fore to the grey light that oozed through the windows. So engrossed was ah that ah barely registered Pa’s whoop of joy when he returned to the corral to find Mule – lolloping a little but alive. Eye right close up to the weightless shell, ah pored over the wing’s tessellated arterial skeleton, and mused upon the myriad bifurcations and forks, the branches and anabranches revealed against the murky light.
Suddenly the person of Ma lumbered on to this field – entered it drunk and reeling, with the last wobbling circumgyrations of a clipped skittle. Clad only in a lurid floral dress she came, having donned neither stocking nor slipper, nor any coat against the rain – her stone bottle clutched in her paw. As she rolled the length of the cicada wing, I trapped her, there in that awesome network of subdivision.
Then, still looking through the cicada’s wing, ah thought this: ‘Ma is gonna fall in Mule’s open grave’. And d’you know, that is precisely what she did – slipped mah fetters, disappeared off the face of mah cicada’s wing without a trace. Mah heart pinked and ah exploded into a dumbshow of laughter. Absently ah crushed the wing and shell in mah hand, unaware that ah did so. Such was mah elation!
Pa had disappeared around the side of the shack, so ah felt it safe enough to climb on to the roof of the car. Below me, like a giant turtle upon its back, thrashed mah phocine Mama, working herself ever deeper into the sucking mucilage that threatened to engulf her and overwhelm her and drown her for ever.
Pa returned, with Mule in tow, led by his chain.
Ah made mah self scarce. Low. Unner the Chevy.
On mah belly, the ground beneath me felt damp and cold, but ah suffered in silence – having no other choice. Ah looked toward the corral and could just see, through the thrashing torrent, Mule’s four blood-stained shanks and the huge muddy boots of Pa, all straining away from the grave-hole, and the chain leaping from the great puddle like a silver snake, alive and hissing. Then Mule let forth a cracking bray – at least ah think it was Mule. Slowly a giant mud-coloured gastropod – a black and flapping slug the size of a baby whale – rose horribly from the brimming slough and sprawled out, to merge with the mud beside the trench – amorphous, atramental and viscid. The thing wore a heavy chain girdle about its middle.
