And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  ‘O Lord, how excellent is Thy name.

  Give ear to my supplication when I cry unto Thee,

  when I lift up mine hands to Thy holy temple.

  With my whole heart I have sought Thee.

  Thy word have I hid in my breast

  that I may not sin against Thee.

  My soul doth magnify the Lord.

  I am Beth.

  The affirmation of your mercy.

  Only Chastity and Purity have known me.

  Regard me in the humble estate of handmaiden to the Lord.

  I await the exacting of Thy Word.

  I am prepared.

  May the Holy Ghost come upon me

  and the Highest overshadow me,

  that 1 may bear blessed fruit

  from which all generations shall spring.

  Lord, 1 await the exacting of Thy Word

  as revealed to the most blessed prophet Jonas Ukulore.

  This is the day which the Lord hath made!

  Thy righteousness endureth for ever.

  Thy horn shall be exalted with honour.

  With long life I will satisfy Thee

  and shew Thee my salvation.

  A-men.’

  And then, as if it had been awaiting the end of her supplication, a light went on in the next room and ah saw the knife-like shadow of Sardus Swift rise into view and slide across the blind like a dark fin. Ah pinched mah nose and made mah escape, across Maine and into Memorial Square. Ah slipped into the shadows undetected. Ah kept low. Ah watched.

  First there was a long silence. Then ah heard the muffled sobs of Beth. Then crying, but much louder. Sardus Swift flung wide the front door and marched around to the window where ah had been standing. Beth followed, crying, ‘Don’t scare him, Daddy! Please! He has come for me!’ Then Sardus was crouching and dipping his finger into the cluster of blood spots ah had leaked on to the porch. Next, the houses on either side of the Swift home blinked alive simultaneously, and a second later ah saw two bullocking matrons emerge, wrapping themselves in flannel nightcoats and converging upon the scene. Ah recognized them from the meets.

  Ah barrelled across the Square and headed for the town limits, reaching relative safety as the commotion at the Swift house spread across the town. Ah could already hear the hawking exclamations of the two neighbours, brought to mah ears by a late summer breeze. Ah rocketed off, the lure and tug of mah Kingdom suddenly strong. Very strong.

  O shit. What? O no. Yes? Ah drifted off, ah guess. Yes, ah did.

  Ah awoke, panic-stricken and ah said, ‘This is the last day! This is the last day!’

  But it is not. No, it is not. There are some yet to go. We still have some to go. Past time catching up on present. Time to go. Time to go…

  O shit. What? O no. Yes? Ah drifted off, ah guess. Yes, ah did.

  Ah awoke, panic-stricken and ah said, ‘This is the last day! This is the last day!’

  But it is not. No, it is not. There are some yet to go. We sti… Past time catch… Time to go. Yes, it’s time to go.

  Ah dug a pit inside the shack. Up against the west-side wall. Ah had bagged many snakes – too many to keep in separate cages. So ah dug a pit and finned the sides with pieces of down-sloping tin to prevent the snakes from crawling up.

  The snake-pit became something of a fascination with me for a while. Ah used to spend time safe on its perimeter, watching the deadly trogle and keeping record – the ways of the squirm. Sometimes ah would lower a rat or a hamster down and watch the knotted pool rise and jump at the bobbing, squealing vermin. If the vermin did not squeal ah would do mah best to save him, committing him to mah ranks. Power ranks.

  Menaced by cachinnations of the corvine kind, ah awoke one spring morning in mah turret. Instinctively ah loaded mah catapult and sent half a brick spinning toward the family of fucken hecklers. The brick slammed into the trunk of the gallows-tree and with one final, choric screech, the four oily crows leapt into the air and chortled off. ‘Fuckers’ ah wanted to cry. Ah wanted to cry.

  Ah sat back down, then carefully put mah eye up to the telescope. Beth’s house. Beth’s house. Beth’s house. It was focused on Beth’s house. Ah had fallen asleep waiting for her signal, as ah had done many times before. Ah felt the telescope being pulled toward Memorial Square – toward the playground in Memorial Square.

  The playground, if you can call it that, consisted of a swing, a see-saw and a sandpit. Nothing more. It was erected the year before Pa passed on. A Ukulite had died and left a legacy and a pitiful penny it must have been too. Still, it bought her a brass plaque and the assurance that her name would be etched into the spilling pages of perpetuity, along with the million other Miss Bitches and Mister Bastards that willed a trust fund and bequeathed their petty savings, so that the beggary of their miserable lives could be enshrined in a park bench or a horse trough or a fence post. ‘Lest We Forget’, if ah recall correctly, ‘The Miss Eartha Pylons Memorial Playground, South West Corner of the Jonas Ukulore Memorial Gardens, Maine Street, Death Valley, State of Mourning.’ Ah mean, this playground – what is it? It’s a goddamn scandal, that’s what it is. Two bent poles, twenny feet of chain, a plank and a box of dirt. O thank you, thank you, Myrna! Hang your head in shame, Martha!

  Ah mean, if it isn’t a dog turd then it’s a brass plaque. They’ll get you every time. Mah blood shudders when ah think of all the skinned shins, scraped knees, split toes, nosebleeds – all the flying gravitations, leaping defluxions, forced landings, pratfalls, ground pounces – all the cannonballs, gravel rakes, land attacks, gutter bungles, pile-ups, prangs – the stinging tears of shame, of rage, of defeat – all the fucken jeers and all the fucken japes – encountered and again encountered through the existence of these sly ground plaques. Lest we forget. Ma’m, sir, mah brain squirts, glands leak and ah go cold. Wicked cold.

  Far be it from me to thunder on unduly, but show me a freestanding structure and ah’ll show you a brass plaque. Ah mean, for Christ’s sake, you can’t have an erection in this town without some clammy cadaver roping it off and slapping an ‘In Memoriam’ marker unner it. This town is owned by a bunch of stiffs. This town is built on graveyard charity – on a low-house legacy. Its very foundations are interred, bound in white linen, sunk six feet down and anchored in pineboard coffins. It gives me the creeping leaks just to think about it.

  Why mah memory embraces this particular morning with such vigour ah do not know. God only knows, to think about it makes mah every sense recoil. Recoil? Christ! Right now, mah senses are in a state of high protest! Ah gag. Ah do. Ah blur. Stink. Ring. Itch. Ache. This is shit and ah am sinking, make no mistake. This is memory’s midden. Yes, it is. This is surely memory’s massive meadow-cake.

  Ah remember brushing an empty liquor bottle with mah boot as ah focused the telescope on Memorial Gardens. The coruscant spread of new grass leaped into mah big eye as the bottle wavered indecisively on the lip of the trapdoor then toppled through the yawning chute. The sound of it shattering was in slow motion.

  Its fragmentation was slow – dream-like. Shards of emerald glass were sprayed across the perforated roofs of the coops and kennels and cages and the green and gravid buzz of a million winged shit-eaters in full orgy – buzz, fuck, sick up, shit, frot, crap eggs, eat each other, scream, spin out, knee-deep in death and egesta – floated up through the chute of the turret. The fly-buzz ate at mah scalp, gnawed awfully at mah brains, burrowed unner mah skin – a formication. From the yawning chute wafted a belch of rancid interior air – womb temperature, cloistral, clinging to mah hands, mah face. The air was a clammy membrane, a gangrenous sheath. Ah gagged, squirmed, focused, trained mah magic eye and tugged the playground into its galaxy.

  The swing and see-saw were buried in the coffin-shaped shadow of the hedgerow that jutted out over the spruce green grass. Mah head resounded with the hum-buzzance of the swarm and mah eyes itched and wept and ah squinted and dabbed with a handkerchief. Suddenly something pure and white swooped into mah fie
ld of vision, then hovered in the block of shade, and ah thought for a moment ah had seen a spectral swan, pearly pinions open, head sleek and neck erect. The bird seemed to hang, to hesitate mid-air, boxed in shade. Then it tucked in its wings and flexed – streamlined and sylphlike – to dive in a low arc, swooping deeply and splashing into the morning sun, like a phoenix from the ashy shadow.

  Beth on the swing. O poor Beth on the swing. Her hair was like molten gold. Her milk-skinned legs extended – bare feet pressed together, arched and pointed at the toe – she hung in the vertex of her climb, thrilling unner the shimmering sun.

  Ah awaited her return, in vain. There was a puff of dust and Beth, like a wraith rising from the grave, stepped clear of the shadow. Her hair shone – no, truly – as if suffused with its own source of light. A halo of silver encircled her head. Her face radiated. She looked into mah eye – she looked into mah eye – she looked into mah eye – squinted, bobbed her head to the left, to the right, dipped and looked into mah eye. Then she flung one thin arm across her eyes, as if to shield them. After some time she dropped the arm and clasped her hands in front of her, and with her eyes fixed on mine, an eerie smile passed across her lips.

  The telescope slid from mah hands and ah collapsed in a heaving, whee2ing, roaring heap on the turret floor. Ah lay there, eyes squeezed shut, and in time the blooding subsided.

  When ah opened mah eyes it was a noon-day sun that spun in a near cloudless sky. The day burred and clicked with the industry of spring. A party of tiny red ants circumnavigated mah left boot. Two flies fucked in the seared crater of an unhealed sore on the back of mah hand. Ah left them to it, having neither the strength nor the notion to do otherwise. Ah lifted mah head, let it roll back against the side of the turret. From the swamp came the belch of a bullfrog. Small comfort.

  That was a full six weeks ago. Imagine that. Six full weeks. It was a late harvest, this year. No doubt about that. And it would have been a bumper crop, too, with only four fields on rotation. Shit. It would’ve scratched the one seven zero zero zero yield of 192.8 clear off the record.

  Windowless. Mah shack is windowless. Once there was a window – three, in fact – but ah sealed them up with planks. Ah cemented the ledges in broken bottles, just in case. With the trapdoor in the ceiling shut and the front door closed and the padlocks, bolts and chains checked, ah could render the panting interior almost void of light, penetrated only by the steaming needles and fast fins, the guillotines and steak knives of leaked light – sun-silver lances, like ah was the bikini-clad assistant in some magician’s trick gone horribly wrong. Yes! Sometimes ah would watch steely sunlight, ragged, serrated, saw me in half. Ah spent an afternoon plugging the major leaks with plaster but the minor clefts, pocks and crannies, the sly seeps and trickles, the countless chinks in mah castellated armour, ah left unhindered. Perforations. Air holes hammered in the lid of mah coop. Of mah coffin.

  If the beasts were up to it we would talk. In this hushed, sepulchral stillness, with the air putrid, septic, heady and receptive, a lot of thought waves got moved around. Rat chat, crackling cat shriek, snake hissance and lizard fizz, chipping rabbit blather, hare air, bug thrum – beast din, muzzled, telepathic. O but the drooling dog thoughts – dull, belligerent, doped, full of mean transmission – blood, meat, sex and so on. Lame, cock-eyed hill-bitches, agitated into a perpetual state of oestrus, turning mean, nasty, as they frot and butt and rut and hump in the ordure and straw, gnash and grabble in their squatting capsules on the floor.

  When their murgeoning got out of hand, ah would give them a goofball. A calmative. OK – a comative. One part water. One part White Jesus. Half to one powdered sedative. Never failed. A bowl or two of that – they lapped it up – and they’d be goo-gooing like sucklings, all pooped out. All the mad air slaked. The feral static, the hate waves abated. Ah would sit and nod and nanny these lumpen fadges of incumbent dung. There were no in-between moods. No slippers brought to the bedside. No hobble around the block. Either those brutes were in a state of high coma or they were coming at your face.

  But that’s the way they had to be. That’s the way ah wanted it. It’s the way God had it organized. That pack of riggish bitches and low bloods – O they will get their chance to make good. Like me. They will have their moment of Glory too. And very soon, ah think, and very soon. Let the sleeping dogs lie. But don’t believe a word they say. Ah am the Truth. Ah am the Light. Every dog has its day.

  *

  Ah am having mine now. Mah time is nigh. You’re too late, Mister Hay-Rake, Mister Spade. Ah said, hey boss, take up that cross and put on your walking shoes. Yes, you lose, Mister Noose. Today belongs to me! Not thee! Me! Me! Me! This day is mine! Into the ranks of the elite ah climb, saying, ‘This is the last day! This is the last day! The last day is mine!’ There are plenny others, brothers. Take your pick. Take your hoe. Take your goddamn gallow. Leave this day alone. Sift through all your yesterdays. Don’t count on your tomorrows. Ah can see them coming and it’s not a pretty sight. The fear is here. The fright. Here is the night.

  At the centre of Doghead was a raw board palace with twelve plank steps leading to a cylindrical, one-man, saw-toothed turret. Pitched on eight poles, the turret sported an octagonal, pyramid-shaped roof. It was from this roof that the flag of Doghead was hung.

  The flag was a rag of once fluffy, once grey fur. The sun had seared and hardened the pelt, so that unfurled it was approximately the same shape and size as a man’s opened hand. The furred side was weather-beaten, the grey fluff soiled and clotted with umber muck. On the other side the skin was withered and orange. The flag was secured to the pole by means of a stocking threaded through a series of small eye-holes poked through the skin at one end. Still attached to one corner of the flag was a leg and a tiny paw the size of a lady’s finger.

  Hung either side of the main steel-gridded gates to the Kingdom were two more such flags, and three others – unprepared, unskin-ned, and in a state of advanced decay – hung on a nail on the back wall of the shack, out of reach of the yard-dogs and the ground-rats, though not of the million blowflies that teemed across them like a restless, gangrenous epidermis.

  The wind moaned. The turret rocked. A sheet of greasy newspaper wrapped itself around a steel oil drum. The fortification shifted and strained. A sheet of tin flapped like a cranky lip. The kitten-skin flag upon the turret jerked around its pole. The wind abated and likewise its little havoc. But the wall continued to girn as it moved its weight around.

  The King was neither in the yard nor in the shack. Nor was he sitting in his turret. In fact the King was not within the walls of Doghead at all, for the King was without, down in the town, making some calculations. Yes, ah was down there, in epaulette and in braid, ticking in the shadows as ah figgered things.

  Then Beth started propositioning me by way of notes and weird little offerings left on the ledge of her bedroom window. The first time she did this ah suffered such an arrant blooding that ah almost keeled over, right there on the porch. She had never done anything but sit quietly on the edge of the bed and sometimes recite her petition – always the same words – so ah was taken unawares at the time, battling with the buttons on mah trousers as ah was. The light went on and by the time ah looked up she had slipped from her bed and was walking directly toward me. Boom, boom, boom went mah blood as ah stiffed and sucked in mah breath, praying to God that she would not look up – for her head was inclined, as she came walking shoeless across the boards. Head still bowed, she opened the window just enough to push the piece of folded paper through, then turned and without so much as a sound moved across the room to her bed. She sat there motionless for a moment, then reached with one golden arm and turned the lantern down. The glutinous light slipped from her thin form, and mine, as she slid between the cotton covers.

  Ah unfolded the piece of paper and read the opening line – ‘To God’ – and ah silently drew a ‘G’ on the glass in nose-blood. Then grabbing mah shoes and stuffing the note into mah
open shirt, ah bounded off, homeward.

  That first note was wrapped around a lock of her hair. The lock was tied at one end with a length of navy-blue velvet ribbon. The lock had a lavender perfume… a lavender perfume… a lavender perfume – like mah angel – like Cosey Mo.

  DEAR GOD,

  I know You are there at my window. I know you watch over me at night. I love You as You love each of Your children. The wise ladies say I am being tested and that I am part of Your big plan. I ask them what is the big plan and they say it is not for me to know. They say I am ready ever since the sign of the blood. Yours and mine. Your sign on the porch brought mine, as You know because You know all things, and that too is part of the big plan, as the wise ladies say. Please make it soon, because I love You.

  Your little doll,

  Beth.

  Wrapped inside the note was the lock of her lavender-scented hair. As bright as spun gold it was. Ah would hold the lock of hair in mah hand and read the note and a shiver of excitement – anticipatory, tearful – would run through me. Ah mean, good grief, even now, in the light of all that has transpired, there is a chilly portentousness to those words. ‘The big plan’, she called it. How right those ladies were. And ‘the sign of the blood’ – ah wonder, did she have bloodings too?

  A few days later there was another note. This one was rolled into a kind of scroll and tied with a piece of embroidered lace from one of her nightdresses.

  DEAR GOD, MY FATHER AND MY FRIEND FOR ALWAYS,

  I am ready, God. I will not resist. No matter what. But please make it soon. Every day they look at me to see if it has happened. They ask me if I have been good and pure. Yesterday Mrs Barlow said that I must have been shaming the Prophet. I have kept your sign a secret. The one you left by the window. The sickle of blood.