by Nick Cave
Pa swung her around and let her slide down the wall, so that she sat, legs outstretched, arms hanging at her sides, with her head standing up like some mad fat puppet grinning, her neck stretched out like a cane toad’s.
Pa picked up two bricks from off the top of the old pot-belly stove, and one in each hand he swung them out-a-ways – then brought them in together like a pair of cymbals crashing, clapping his wife about the ears and smashing the bottle inside her.
Blood.
Her head dropped forward into her chins and the busted neck of the bottle pierced the back of her neck, forming a neat little funnel that jutted out, parting the greasy slab of hair at the back like a spout, the size of mah thumb, and gushing steamy blood and peel liquor.
Pa let the bricks drop from his hands. They made a dull, wet clunk as they hit the blood-mudded sod. He breathed, shallow and sharp. A high-noted moan bubbled on his lips in a series of queer, short-lived expulsions. In his right fist was a clump of grey hair. He stood there, doing and saying nothing, until his boots were two islands adrift in a sea of steam and scarlet.
Ah punched the nog back in the hole, slid off mah bed and entered the living room. Ah waded over and stood by mah father.
Pa slowly inclined his head, so that eventually his eyes stared into mine. He shivered like a pup, his eyes clear and alive.
‘Git the sheet offa your bed. And bring some strong rope.’
Ah returned with mah dirty bed linen, handed him the bundle, then went back to mah room to sort through mah stuff, saying in mah head, ‘Rope rope rope rope…’
In the talcum light of dusk, as the fleeting sun retrieved its bright spears and the fine black hem of night veiled its brow, Ezra and Euchrid made their way across the marshlands. Each wore across his shoulders a simple pine-board halter from which ran about fifteen feet of thick rope hitched to either side of a giant pallet of corrugated tin. Freighted upon the pallet’s considerable circular expanse was a vast and ghastly carcass, enshrouded in muddy white cloth and trussed in coloured electrical cord. Both figures strained against the lumbering deadweight that they hauled behind them, their bodies angled forward, a knotted walking-prop clenched in each fist, their faces strangely void of grimace, of effort. Each solemnly bore his burden as if some shred of dignity was to be retrieved in the trappings of ceremony – hence the grim grey hoods, the sombre masks. Hence the crying, straining muscle beneath.
The marshlands were cast in gold, the syrupy waters silent and still. The funeral party of father and son slowly approached the floodwaters that encompassed the infernal black island, two slanted posts roped to their bloody burden – that hill of death dragged across the sloblands now raked by the futile, gilded fingers of the dying sun.
When they reached the uncertain edge of the water, Ezra and Euchrid removed the pine-board halters and, without pausing for a second’s rest, began to haul in the ropes, lugging the cow-big corpse the final few feet until it was flush with the lip of the land. And without a word or a glance or a nod, without a prayer or a song or a sprinkling of clay, the old man and the boy, with a firm push of their feet, rolled the huge white slab from the pallet into the water.
She sank beneath the surface, the scoriae waters not splashing, not leaping up, but opening to take her. And for a moment she was no more. Father and son stood silently on the bank looking down at the inscrutable waters, and watched as the enshrouded cadaver bobbed obscenely to the top and revolved there upon its side.
Then slowly, helplessly, and not without some prodding from their sticks, it fell to the tug of the swampland’s fetching waters. Bound in its bloody trousseau the vast mass of death sailed toward the dark wheel of vegetation, as if reeled into its evil black heart. The two grim figures on the bank, mere shadows now, looked on as varlet crows dipped and swooped aloft and marsh rats swam to claim this new slow-moving ground, and the great floating isle died in a double darkness of swamp and night.
XVI
Strange days followed the death and disposal of Ma Crowley.
The old man seemed to float around the shack with the same kind of weightless euphoria that is felt after the laying down of some carking burden at the end of a long and arduous journey. He did not smile or sing or do a little jig; rather Pa seemed to be infused with a quiet pleasure, a contentment, a deep appreciation of the absence of his spouse.
Stranger still was the bond that formed between Euchrid and his father in the wake of his mother’s death, grafting them together as fast as the most enduring Siamese ligature. Ma had been as a vast and poisonous sea separating a father and his son, and in one monstrous catharsis Pa had parted the waters and fallen into a kindred embrace.
But the bond that tied them together was of a manifold weave, and this served to strengthen their strange friendship all the more. Euchrid became the perfect foil for Pa, for the invisible ties that bind a father and his son, a murderer and his accomplice, a confessor and priest, and a raconteur to his rapt listener – all meshed to create a steadfast and oddly devoted union.
Each evening, at the living-room table, Pa would embark on long reminiscences, recalling the lawless days of his youth, the wild escapades of his deranged kin, the ill-fated journey into the valley, the bottle of mountain madness that had cost him an ear – all imparted to a spellbound audience of one. Other nights, Pa’s muttered discourses took on a distinctly confessional air and Euchrid would sit, spooning down hash and boiled cabbage, listening intently as the mad old man unburdened himself. Some evenings he would speak of Ma and the scourge of his words was enough to flay her in her grave. Yet despite the conviction with which he denounced ‘the queen of the trollops’, or ‘the potted hog’, as Pa repeatedly called her, something rang untrue – like a cracked bell – and the more Euchrid listened to his father’s harangue the more vulnerable Pa seemed to become, as if there were other emotions at play that perhaps even the old man himself was unable to acknowledge and hence repressed, instinctively swamping them in bitterness and bloody-mindedness. Euchrid saw, to his increasing bewilderment, that the tirades on which Pa embarked were in fact diligent disguises, worn like fast armour over a shabby skeleton of regret and guilt and a deepening sense of loss. As difficult as it was to accept, Euchrid was forced to conclude that behind the old man’s brag there trembled a glum heart that swelled with remorse at the measure of his deed.
‘Guilt?’ Pa said, one evening, laughing sick. ‘Do ah feel guilt at what ah done? Haw Haw! That’s a goddamn cracker if ever ah heard one! Did George feel guilt when he slewed the dragon?! Was David regrettin’ when he pole-axed Goliath?! No sirree! And King Jehu – did he rue the day he stomped Jezebel and fed her to the dawgs?! You’re damn right he didn’t! And you’re goddamn right ah don’t neither!’
A blowfly crawled across the table and Pa snatched it up with one nimble swipe. The insect screamed in his fist as he held it to his good ear.
‘Why, that piss-eyed hell-bag had more monster in her than a pack o’ dragons and was a damn sight more ornery than any Philistine ogre and twice as ugly. And furthermore – an’ here ah’ll swear on a stack – ya could drag all the sewers in whoredom ‘n’ still ya wouldn’t land a sloppier, more downright low-livin’ scum-monger than the hog that bore you.’
Euchrid swallowed.
The blowfly had ceased its long spinning frenzy and lay mostly silent in Pa’s closed fist, buzzing briefly in fits and starts that became less frequent and less urgent.
‘She was the original Whore of Babylon – and now she is no more…’ Pa said, opening his hand and flicking the fly corpse out the door. ‘And now she is no more/he repeated quietly.
And Euchrid sat and Euchrid saw and Euchrid said nothing at all.
Yet, mumchance as he was, Euchrid the mute wished more than he had ever wished before that his tongue would stir and wag awake and burst the shackles of the million unspoken secrets that lay incarcerated in the dungeons of his heart. He petitioned God in silent prayer that He might grant His humble servant an ev
ening’s tongue-time. Or even an hour’s. But Heaven handed out no miracles on this day.
Such was his need to speak that Euchrid put aside his faith for an instant and questioned the sanity of the Lord’s ‘greater scheme’. He thought of the dying blowfly and how even brute creation’s lowliest and most putrid of creatures, the shit-eater, was capable of trumpeting its own petty demise, while a chosen soldier of the Lord, an earthly appendage of God Himself, His rod and His staff, was denied the gift of speech.
Euchrid wondered as he sat, his father’s vitriol a far-away buzz, whether his muteness was a necessary provision in order for him to receive the word of God. He thought of Heaven and wondered if he would be dumb there too. He shuddered. He wondered whether God actually heard his silent prayers and petitions and if He did, what did his voice sound like? Did he mumble like Pa? Or snarl and bark like Ma? He wondered, as a slumberous dark engulfed him.
He dreamed he was a ghost moving in slow motion through the dark convoluted alley-ways of iniquity. He saw the moon marbled with blood and milk. He felt the heat hanging on him, hot as a brothel. He saw beat whores working the chippy shift and grinning pimps in doorways. Winos nursing bottles crawled like legless dogs, and urchins set fire to sleeping bums. Mugs in cars waved bundled cash, cruising through him as if he were not there. The streets grew crippled, convoluted, the cracks directing him. He passed an open window and discovered a sleeping child. Her head was facing the window. Reaching in, Euchrid seized her with his left hand and began to strangle her, roaring with laughter until the little naked child awoke. His prey struggled, twisting and stretching and beating the crib as she fell into unconsciousness. Euchrid took her head and held it hard down upon an embroidered satin pillow and stabbed her in the throat with a pair of mud-caked shears many times until an old whore behind him said, ‘O bless thee, thou hast slain the bad queen! Her blood is spilt. Sisters of Whoredom! We are free! Free from the valley of the shadow of Beth Beth Beth Beth Beth…’
The dreamer’s elbows slipped out from under him and his nodding head dropped with a sick crunch, his forehead cracking against the edge of the table at which he sat. Euchrid tasted blood, sour and salty. Rising from his chair he stumbled across the room to the pot-belly stove upon which sat a metal tub of water. His head ached and he plunged it into the tub, holding it under and letting the cold water dissolve the webs of sleep and rinse away the blood that streamed from his nostrils. His whole head submerged, Euchrid listened to the roar of water in his ears, gradually discerning a dull thudding pulse that seemed with each passing second to quicken its pace, and with each deep beat to rise in intensity, like a kettle drum in crescendo, hammering, hammering, rocking his brains with its thud-thud thud-thud thud-thud…
Ah mean, what would you call it?
Ah call it an act of mercy – and for a short time following it, Pa was rewarded with a term of quiet pleasure, and the whole of our humble household seemed infected with it and for weeks we lived like that, content in each other’s company, him talking and me listening, mah head brimming with all manner of things, brimming and spilling as if by proxy, so often did he seem to take the words right out of mah mouth – speaking wildly at times and exciting mah mind to wildness. So it was that mah brain shouted out thoughts of such unbridled brass – O such wild wild poetry – that the old man’s tongue merely shaped and spoke them, the way the crow of the morning cock is really an echo – an echo of the tongueless eloquence of the new day’s first and most glorious inspiration. Brimming with special blood, we were – of the kept kind, unnerstand, of the confidential kind – both of us, father and son – and on those long hearing-hollering nights, we had ourselves an association, the air fully bursting with our wild, wedded gas.
Pa called it an act of mercy as he mixed up a bucket of whiting, size and water and set about first scrubbing then whitewashing the bloody, tell-tale wall. Ah rinsed and painted the bricks and put them both out on the front porch to dry. The sun, ah remember, did battle with a pack of fat, cotton clouds and the shadows came and went and came and went, until the hooded night did up and bag them all. Ah went indoors and fetched a spirit lamp. Pa had finished the wall and sat in his chair, staring at the great, white glistening expanse. Ah lit the lamp and returned to the porch, now hearing Pa blithely humming from within. Ah watched through the doorway. Ah saw him stand, get a hammer, go to the wall and drive three four-inch nails, in a row, about head-height, into the freshly-painted planks. Then he walked to the other end of the room and out of view. Ah put the lamp beside the two wet bricks and cursed the order of Thysanoptera – both bricks were covered with a zillion fucken stuck thrips. Ah nudged the bricks off the edge of the porch and into the dust.
Inside, Pa had resumed his position, seated in his chair, staring proudly at the whitewashed wall. The Black Bastard, all thirty pounds of it, greased and hungry, hung on the nails, leering back at him like some giant prehistorical jawbone.
Ah stunned a winged thing with a sly swipe, thinking, ‘That’s one for the bricks’, and thinking on, ah figgered it had been almost two weeks since we set Ma afloat. Two full weeks, sitting in the shack, swatting at a swarm of blood-hungry gnats, and ah wondered then as ah still wonder now, here, stuck as ah am in this quickmud like a thrip on a sticky brick, why Pa waited so long before he coated the killing-wall.
But our term of simple contentment together as father and son drew closed like a leaden curtain, slammed shut like a door in mah face, and, ponder as ah may, the matter still baffles me. Listen.
It was the end of the second week of mah life-without-Ma. It had been a pleasant eve and Pa had retired to his bed, his spirits high and jaunty. Yet come the next morn, a very different father did emerge. Grim and crooked, he was, as if some carking incubus or succubus or whatever had squatted on his chest through the night and sucked dry his happy heart and filled him full of dread and desolation. It was as though Pa knew he was walking his last mile. He moped around the yard like a sick dog. He dragged his chair on to the porch and spent hours at a stretch gazing across the marshes toward the swampland. He spoke not, but seemed muzzled by some awful sorrow-sick lowness that clung so fully that it defied cause or reason or… His heart was entombed in an unplumbable pit of black woe. There was no ‘because’ for there was no ‘why’. Yet still ah wondered. Still ah wondered. And wonder still, ah do.
How often have ah cast mah mind back to the night before Pa’s mysterious change of nature. It was the last evening that our home would know the spirit of contentment. Ah was helping Pa bundle together all of Ma’s belongings – little more than a few armfuls of rancid rags – carting the sour garments around to the rear of the shack and shoving them in one of five forty-four-gallon drums that ah had rolled all the way from Glory Flats – the scorched and ashen church-grounds now an unofficial dumping-ground for the valley’s unwanted junk and, might ah say, a virtual gold mine. Pa deposited all the articles that belonged to his wife inside the oil drum, every last ugly memory. Included in the rejectamenta were a few sundry personals from her younger days that she had hoarded in a hat box trussed up with a now rotten satin ribbon. Under the ribbon had been slipped a small gilt-edged card, which stated in a neat girlish hand
This box belongs to Jane Crowley
Keep out
1910
Pa read the words out loud, and with an indifferent grunt tossed the box, unopened, into the drum with the rest of the junk. Before ah had a chance to retrieve the mysterious hat box and all the secrets that it contained, Pa emptied a half-gallon can of meths over the lot and was already striking a match on the bonnet of the Chevy. He flicked the match into the drum and ah watched mah chances of ever examining the contents of that wonderful hat box – emerald green with gold stripes it was, and on the lid was a gold embossed crown, nestling in a group of three crossed purple feathers and across the top a banner that said
The House of Three Plumes
held either side by two slanting spears and around the bottom, in stately Goth
ic demi-bold face
Hatters of Excellence for Over fifty Years
– go boom.
And then Pa was gone, while ah kind of stood there, feeling the warmth of the incinerator pinking mah cheeks and inhaling the dizzy fumes, not really aware of much at all, mesmerized by the dancing flames that leapt over the lip of the drum, all yellow and white against the soot-black smoke that vomited forth, bullied this way and that by the late summer night’s breeze.
And then Pa was back with his Bible in his hand and together we sat on the bonnet of the car, side by side, yes, father and son, and for a minute we remained that way, spellbound by the blaze. Then Pa opened the book and turned to the Psalms.
‘Ah want you to concentrate. Ah want you to try and unnerstand. Can ya do that? Ah want you to listen with both ya ears and try and unnerstand,’ said Pa at last, kneading the nob of his ear and spitting into the fire.
Ah nodded but did not take mah eyes off the fire, and Pa tilted his book a little toward the flames in order to read the dense black type. Ah listened intently to his grave and emphatic recital, even though ah knew the Psalm by heart and recognized it the minute he began. Psalm 58. How often had Pa read aloud Psalm 58 as ah sat crouched in hiding, a mere pup, low-breathing in the pickle barrel, listening.
PSALM 58
1. Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation?
Do ye judge up – rightly, O ye sons of men?
Ah answered not and a great belch of smoke lumbered over us for a dark moment, like a dirty grey ghost, before mercifully rolling and curling back upon itself –
2. Yea, in heart ye work wickedness;
ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth.
