by Nick Cave
Silently the men headed back toward the beams of their pickups, until two or three of them halted in their tracks, their torches shining on a weird grotto-like edifice built from planks of wood and small sheets of corrugated iron bound together with string, electrical wire and vine: a strange one-man shelter, more like an animal’s lair or a thief s hideaway filled with booty.
Bloody bandages had been threaded through the walls and a selection of tools had been hung from little looped strings inside: a hammer, a huge pair of scissors, a fretsaw, a screwdriver or two, some knives, nails, syringes.
Hanging on little strings from the ceiling were seven or eight bird wings. From a stack in the corner, one of the men kicked over a shoebox and fifteen or so birdskulls rolled out, glowing yellow in the torch light.
‘Jesus Christ. This is hobo ground,’ said one.
‘Goddamn animals,’ said another.
And as if some great weight had been lifted from their shoulders the cane-workers set to chopping the grotto down, united at last in an act of arrant destruction, scattering the boxes, stealing the tools and smashing the bottles.
They set little fires.
Meanwhile, the owner of the hideaway limped down Maine, his head held back, a rag held to his nose, covered from head to toe in red dust.
Meanwhile, the carcass of an old nag floated deeper and deeper, bumping the slow-moving corpses of other things – some thousands of years old, preserved by the weird mud and suspended, in limbo, silently drifting and descending.
A week prior to the ‘burn-off Fists Wiggam lost both hands playing ‘chicken’ with the cane-trolleys. His friends fled, leaving the belligerent youth to stagger two hundred yards down Maine unaided, before collapsing outside his father’s general store.
His hands, were they more graceful, could have been those of a pianist sitting at his instrument, the way they lay side by side, twitching there on the tracks – two bloodless bundles of slow-dying nerves.
Coming out of hospital and answering only to his given name, Fitzgerald, the young man seemed to have aged somewhat, mellowed out.
And in this lavender hell ah lay, upon a bed of tangled vine, and all the spinning webs did leave a sticky grey veil about mah face. And when she did appear, floating above all the desecration, her pinions fanned the scattered offerings up into a pile of hair and skin and bone, of paper and ash, of feather, tooth and nail, of blood and rags and fractured glass, and consumed them all in sudden fire that leapt and licked the tips of her wings and crackled unnerfoot. And though the hood of web masked mah eyes, ah could see the sad and sultry aspect of her face, and her hair worn loose, and her damp, swelling breasts, her painted lips and nails and her heavy-lidded eyes – and though mah ears were wrapped in web, ah could hear her slow breathing and the lazy turn of her words as she told me that ah must know mah enemy.
Exhausted, ah sought to leave the swampland, and as ah trekked through the thickery, tramping the damp and spongy unnergrowth beneath mah feet, ah felt that ah was leaving this dark haven for the last time, never to return. Fear and doubt now knew this place. Never again could ah lose mahself within these sacred climes. For how could ah ever now be certain that within the menagerie of shadows that shifted all about me, there was not one that was the shadow of man? Never again could ah trust this umbrage, now that it had been laid open by others.
As ah neared the perimeter mah foot caught on something hard, and ah sprawled in the tangled growth. And as ah lay there something cold bit mah ankle. Ah climbed to mah knees and found at mah foot fierce evidence of mah sanctum’s violation – a grinning sickle. That sickle, it felt heavy in mah hand. Ah slashed the air.
Gone was mah faith in the absence of man.
Is there no place they would not follow me?’ ah asked mahself.
‘Slash, slash, slash,’ ah dumbly replied.
XIII
God is not gushy. You won’t catch Him expelling a lot of heavenly gas on pleasantries and idle confabulation. Nor does He go in for a hell of a lot of preachifying, either. Gone is the hard sell of the old days – the old fire and brimstone pitch. These days God deals in a specialized commodity – people now are less inclined to part with their precious creature comforts and earthly pleasures for the promise of a celestial kingdom after death. God’s clientele is small and select. The Devil has a shovel.
God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowelless being of the Testaments – the vehement glorymonger, with His bag of cheap carny tricks and His booming voice – the fiery huckster with His burning bushes and wonder-wands. Nowadays God knows what He wants and He knows who He wants. If in His majesty He has seen fit to select you as an instrument in His Greater Plan, then, ah tell you, you must be ready to receive, comprehend and act upon His instructions, without question or debate.
Ah was His sword, sharp and keen and poised to strike. Ah glinted in the sun.
Ah sat alone on the crest of the slope that ran from the back of the shack down to the cane. Ah had mah arms folded over mah knees, which were drawn up to mah chest, and the lower part of mah face was sort of lost in the crooks of mah arms. Huddled up like this, ah watched the valley.
Ah did some thinking as ah looked down.
Ah watched the valley and saw the black fields and tall, charred sugar-cane, stripped of its trash and no longer whispering – hushed and waiting now, as death closed in. Ah saw the groups of cutters, sweating and smeared with soot, slamming low at the stalks with their machetes. The cutters swung and the cane fell.
Ah watched mah runway systematically destroyed by these men – the very same swine that had penetrated mah swampland and razed mah grotto to the ground. The same scum that had smashed and scattered mah treasures – all the mysteries ah had amassed – dark pockets of accumulated wonders – ancient shells – shivering feathered collectibles – boxes and boxes of rare and terrible secrets – brittle bones and beaks – captured noises – frail prizes – waters and glutens – specimens scraped from a lifetime of being – all that ah had ever thought or done or was, kept corked or lidded or unner glass – all that was ah – the skeleton upon which mah pale and paltry skin hung – gone. Mah fucken home, mah very bones – gone. In that wanton violation of mah self, these vandals of the soul had taken with them mah very past – mah history – and left, in its place, a shadow. A shell.
As ah sat there upon the scarp, watching and thinking, ah felt something hard and thorned, thistle-like, grow within me, filling me, replacing all that had been destroyed, smashed and ground to dust beneath boot and down-borne fist. Ah squatted and hissed and mah hands pulsed and swelled, feeling as though ah had thrust them to the wrists in a wasp nest. Ah blew on them, but mah breath burned. All the tiny welts and the larger, older scars made maps of mah hands and wrists, like smarting purple brands.
Similarly mah brains seemed gorged with blood, for stirring and squirming awake in the slumberous subcaverns of mah mind poisonous thoughts crawled forth, as if from some age-long hibernation – pit asps craving red meat. Ah sweated. Ah wheezed.
Ah looked back to the fields in the hope of lifting mah mood. Ah tried to extract some pleasure from the sight before me – dog-weary workers engaged in the punishing, back-breaking labour of field work – but the thistle of hate flourished all the more.
‘Cunts,’ ah thought.
Ah found mahself wishing – praying – that the noon-day sun, already hell-hot, would spin itself still hotter, until the vast acres of uncut cane would begin to smoulder and smoke, and the skin of the workers would bubble and blister, and as the sun beat down and the crops burst into flames, the roasted flesh would peel away from their arms and legs and backs and screaming faces in wet, red strips, layer upon layer, until their black-baked bones pierced the thin tissue of skin, shredding the webbery of veins and the last tattered rags of hide to a bucket of gore, then crumbling down, these eaten skeletons, to ash… to a thimble of cinders… to screaming dust… to dead fucken death.
Fearing that ah would be th
e one to burst into flames if ah continued to entertain such incendiary thoughts, ah cast mah eyes elsewhere.
Ah looked across the fields to the main road, where a party of thirty or so schoolchildren milled about the perimeter of the crop, receiving first-hand a lesson on the valley’s sugar industry.
With them were a handful of adults and ah instantly recognized Miss Annapearl Wells, assistant headmistress at Ukulore Valley School, by her dazzling bonnet – not unlike a nun’s coif – covering her ears and neck but with a ludicrous upsweeping peak at the front, like a giant duck’s bill, mid quack.
Though quite a distance away, ah could also easily make out Mary Hanley, towering a good head and shoulders above her husband, who ah recognized by the blaze of red hair and the new and brightly glowing surgical sling. Mary Hanley stood by – a Goliath amongst the first-graders – while Miss Annapearl Wells, her peek-a-boo face red as a raspberry against her starched bonnet, worried and fussed at the heels of her flock, shepherding them this way and that.
A fat man in a hat with a clipboard in his hand – doubtless a mill man – appeared to be answering questions put to him by the children. So utterly black was mah mood that day, that the thought of creeping through the long grass on the other side of the road and spying on them failed to send even the slightest tremor of excitement through me. Ah just sat and looked and after a while ah was looking but kinda not looking as well, unable to bridle mah fugitive thoughts.
Sometime, somehow, mah attention drifted to the two tin holding sheds that had been erected up on Hooper’s Hill a year or two earlier for the purpose of storing sugar, raw and refined, pending delivery to Patterson.
Ah thought about the tubs of molasses that lined the inside walls of the sheds and ah thought of the dark, heavy syrup, so sweet and sticky. In mah mind’s eye ah recalled the little sugar-pink caravan that once had sat upon that self-same hill, and in the treacle of mah day’s dreaming, sweeter than a sorghum spring, ah conjured the image of her, honey-skinned and candy-boned, and for a time ah floated in ambrosial molasses and visions of Cosey Mo, climbing her honeycomb hill to her little pink honeypot – and with mah heart beating bliss-time ah plunged mah hands in – but the buzzing was not of bees, no, but of flies, for now she floated front up in a ditch, her face covered with the stigmata of the beat whore, black eyes and broken nose and not a tooth in her head, her body spotted with the scabbed badges of harlotry, her arms martyred by the pricks of addiction, her breasts bruised and her hair thin – a dirty dead whore in a ditch – because once you’ve got one scar on your face or your heart, it’s only a matter of time before someone gives you another – and another – until a day doesn’t go by when you aren’t being bashed senseless, nor a town that you haven’t been run out of, and you get to be such a goddamn mess that finally it doesn’t feel right unless you’re getting the Christ beaten out of you – and within a year of that first damning fall, those first down-borne fists, your first run-out, you wind up with flies buzzing around your eyes, back at the same place, the same town, deader than when you left, bobbing around in the swill – a dirty dead beat whore in a roadside ditch. But a little part of you doesn’t die. A little part of you lives on. And you make an orphan of that corrupt and contemptible part, dumping it right smack in the lap of the ones who first robbed you of your sweetness, for it is the wicked fruit of their crimes, it is their blood, their sin, it belongs there, this child of blood, this spawn of sin…
Ah drew mah attention to the road again. Beth dazzled in the dust, unner the blinding sun. By her side a little hairless man in a dark suit struggled to open a huge scarlet sun umbrella.
She stood straight and still. Her snow-white smock and crown of golden curls shone with a shameless brilliance that burned mah eyes. Ah screwed them shut. Her glare trembled in the darkness like a silver tongue of flame, dipped in gold – a luminary in mah moment of blindness. Her serpent-like locks rolled and curled over her shoulders and issued some kind of aura, almost like a gloriole – a quiet brightening of the air surrounding her silken crown. And ah’ll say this – if ah had not been chosen as sole witness to the child’s inception in the valley, to harbour alone this single nub of knowledge – ah could well have fallen prey to her outrageous deception.
O radiant impostor! O fiendish deceptor!
Ah scanned the road again. The schoolchildren were gone – shuffled off to their classrooms, ah expect – and the road was empty but for the two tiny figures, the dark speck and the bright speck and the stubborn, scarlet umbrella, and ah watched them watch the cane-men, on this, the first day of the seasonal ingathering.
Ah recalled the words of the prophet Isaiah.
But draw near hither, ye child of the sorceress,
the seed of the adulterer and the whore.
Against whom do ye sport yourself?
Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue?
Are ye not a child of transgression, a seed of falsehood?
And this is where the Lord who called me from the womb spoke to me with instructions clear and simple, in a voice more beautiful than ah could bear.
‘Euchrid,’ he began, ‘Euchrid…’
And ah sat and listened in mute wonderment as He spoke.
‘Euchrid…’ he began.
XIV
Beth was perched on the edge of her bed. She wore a pair of cotton underpants and one white ankle sock. With one knee brought up under her chin, she wriggled her tiny foot into the other sock, expelling a little grunt as she did so. Dropping one bright young leg back down to dangle aside the other over the edge of the bed, she peered up through sleep-swollen lids at Sardus, who stood before her, immaculate in his black Sunday suit and brushed black beard. He fanned his face with his hat and smiled down at Beth.
‘It’s Sunday,’ said Beth, quietly but firmly, as if disclosing the answer to some long-awaited question.
‘That’s right,’ said Sardus, ‘and you’ve got to be ready for Mrs Shelley.’
Beth’s brow furrowed beneath a nest of golden locks.
‘Father, does God breathe funny?’
Sardus sat down beside her. Clasping her naked shoulders in his large man’s hands, he turned her gently around to face him.
‘What’s happened, child?’ His dark eyes penetrated hers.
‘I think I heard God last night, at my window. Kind of breathing and whistling when he breathed. And He… I mean… His shadow, it was there. I s-saw it, just waiting and whistle-breathing… there at the window… a-a-and then it floated past. I went to the window, trying not to be afraid, but God was gone…’
‘Why do you think it was God?’ asked Sardus, unable to suppress a tremor of rage in his voice, for he knew well the reason why.
‘Well, because God is coming to visit me. That’s what Mrs Baxter says, and Miss Sarah Blume. And I know I musn’t be afraid. Did I scare God away? Will He be angry and punish us again?’
Sardus wrapped his long thin arms around his daughter and held her suddenly very frail little body to his.
‘No, baby, that wasn’t God,’ said Sardus.
XV
Ah visited the graveyard now and then, and spent a bit of time walking around the crops, but there was little point in that as new crops had been planted after the harvest and were too low to actually set foot in without being seen. Ah began to explore the hills, having to walk several miles to get to them, but up in the rocky parts ah found the lairs of wild dogs and climbed out on the tall timbers there. Ah would kill evil sleeping snakes that baked on the hot rocks by snatching them by the tail and spinning them around mah head, and then cracking them like a whip, in the air, or simply dashing them against a rock or tree trunk. Hanging their carcasses from a tree, ah would feel powerful – like a machine. Other times ah would just sit up there and do nothing, just looking down at the valley and thinking. Ah even slept out, unner the stars, once or twice. But most of the time ah passed away in the comparative safety of mah room.
Occasionally a
h would pop the cork on mah peep-hole and watch Ma and Pa battle it out, and wonder to mahself just how much longer it would be until Pa finally cracked and tore the bitch to pieces. Ah thought of the baking snakes and just how goddamn easy it was.
It had to be soon. Ah could feel it.
Well, it was.
Autumn. September 1953. Ah peered in.
Ah could see them both. Pa sat at the table, a churning nest of nerves. He was building up a house of cards. Already it towered so high that ah could see his face only when he peered around to check if the sides of the construction were straight. It was then ah could see his eyes, squinted mean and yellow with bile.
Ma, her back to Pa, stood across the room in deep potations with a stone bottle of shine, scrutinizing a photograph of herself framed and hung on the living-room wall.
She cackled and ranted on about what a little flower she had been before she had been plucked and left to wither and die, her jaws stopping only to suck on the bottle.
Ah could see Pa’s hands shake as she spoke. The house of cards trembled in front of him.
Ma bemoaned her life, tipping the whole can of worms on to Pa’s plate, as though if it hadn’t been for him she would still be that little flower in the picture. She carried on about what a lazy old bastard Pa was and how he was going insane.
The house of cards leaned, hung in the air for a moment, then collapsed, and so did the frail edifice of Pa’s mind.
Pa leaped from his chair and threw himself across the room, picking up all the speed he could muster, while his wife drew long and intimate upon her bottle. He slammed his body into hers, hammering her head face first against the wall. Glass splintered as the bottom of the stone bottle, still in her mouth, smashed the glass in the wedding picture, and a strange sick gurgle accompanied it. With a fistful of hair Pa wrenched back her head and pounded her face into the wall again. The bottle sank deeper and even from where ah was ah could hear her jaws cleave apart with a clear ‘cra-a-ack’, so that the third time the bottle slipped into her throat, splitting her grin’s skin from ear to ear.
