And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  Ah knew that it would be only a matter of minutes before someone recognized mah trademark, mah sickle. And indeed even as ah looked a figure swung around, and stretching out its arm dramatically pointed its finger straight at me, at mah eye – and all the mob turning, all, and all the mob looking up at me and screaming for blood, all, all screaming at me for blood, and ah said, and ah said it’s time, and ah said it’s time to move, ah said, it’s time for me to move.

  And even as Euchrid climbed from his turret and scrambled through the garbage and filth that covered the shack floor, a dozen rattling utilities and bucking pick-ups careered down Maine toward him. In each vehicle men crouched and bounced and grimaced into the gritty rush of speeding air. In each hand was an implement held as a weapon.

  *

  Ah bade mah Kingdom farewell and the silence in there told me mah subjects were fit to tangle – ready to rumble.

  And suddenly there was peace in the valley no more.

  Suddenly the air was hijacked by pirate violence – every sound amplified and infused with threat. All the infernal static – all their shrieks and shouts and oaths, the roaring, the gunning of motors, the rush of their coming, of their coming in outrage – rang terrible in the air. Terrible. Even the clamour of mah retreat was like thunder-drums. Mah breaths were rushing, ringing clouts to the ear. Mah heartbeats – why, mah heartbeats were outrageous.

  Having crawled through a hole in the wall, Euchrid paused a moment, looked once to the vehicles that came charging along Maine, then once again took flight. Bootless, he tramped through the marshlands, following a vague trail already coursed. Bulrushes knocked at his knees and he left them rocking in his wake, inverted pendulums anchored in their reeky, paludal bottoms.

  Reaching the outer boundary of the swampland Euchrid turned and took one last look at the wall of red dust that moved steadily toward the shack. He removed his jacket and hung it from a tree. From the same tree he untied a length of rope and followed the line of wire, string, strips of sheet and chain into the trembling spissitude of the swampland, reeling in the line as he went.

  But the moment ah breached the threshold of the swampland, the queerest absence of sound prevailed and mah flight became dreamlike, rhythmical, painless. Ah felt as though the line that ah followed, hand over hand, was, in fact, attached to me – that it was a part of me, and that ah mahself was being reeled in – that ah mahself was being called home.

  Arriving at the gates of Doghead, Sardus Swift leapt from the front seat of a pick-up, Beth’s smock bundled under one arm, the murder weapon in his hand. He raised the blood-glazed sickle above his head, and in a voice shrill with rage, commanded Euchrid to come forth. Already sweat-soaked cane-men were attaching tow-ropes to the gates. An order was given to stand clear, followed by an angry gunning of engines, whereupon the great gates of Doghead tore from their hinges.

  The mob stormed the yard, their farm tools poised awkwardly over shoulders and above heads, now graceless implements of destruction, pitchforks and long-handled hay-rakes held straight out in front like lances. They charged into the space defined by the bizarre wall of reconstructed junk.

  Even from the yard the stink of death should have been intolerable, but the rage that consumed them was a blind kind of rage, and so strong was their collective anger that the queer contraptions, the rigging, the obsessionals, the booby stakes, the flags, the poles – all the flights of fetish knocked together to construct the absurd kingdom of steel and plank and rope and nail and bone and skin and blood – inspired no horror, no outrage, nor even wonder in the hearts of these men – just as the foul stench that wafted from the shack went unrecognized as the mob clambered up the porch steps and charged headlong inside.

  The bright fingers of their torches probed the dark interior. The turbid air clung to their faces like warm wet skin and all about them was revealed an appalling vision of bestial and human filth, of gangrenous crawling carnage, of death piled upon death.

  And it was only then, inside, that the sickness became apparent, and rage shrank back and grew clammy and cold. The men swatted wildly about their faces and panicked at lumps of flyblown meat hung from the ceiling, tripping on piles of soiled bedding and screaming at the death, screaming at the death and the rats screaming back. And the men fled the shack, blundering across the porch and lurching over the rail to disgorge their festal supper across the clumps of sun-shrivelled periwinkles that grew below.

  But the screaming was for inside. Outside no one spoke. And from the shack came the work-song of the flies – a relentless whine, high and strange.

  Though no order was given, petrol canisters were opened and splashed about the shack, and in silence the men stood together in the yard as they watched the shack become a vast crematorium before their eyes, witnessing the sky seared by hungry flames a second time that day.

  Two men came running through the gates, shouting.

  ‘We found his trail!’

  ‘He’s in the swampland!’

  And the crowd all turned. And the crowd all cried out.

  Ah eased through the inner boundary of the hypertrophia, into the clearing – the girdle of unvegetated terra firma, no more than four paces wide at any point, that encompasses the circle of quickmud. Ah was bereft of all robing and in a state of nature and mah body was covered with a legion of new welts and wounds, nettles, spines and thorns and blotches of ivy irritation.

  Yet the pain is perfect, for the warm mud is so completely soothing to mah crucified flesh, that that which passes out of life is relieved of its suffering, whilst that which remains within merely hurts.

  Death is the poultice to the pain of Life-that’s mah news to the world.

  And ah stood there before the bog, sweating salt into mah wounds and consciously suffering the pricks of mortality, that mah death be that much sweeter – and it is! It is!

  In town, in Memorial Square, women clad in black prostrated themselves, while others reeled about on bended knee, gnashing their teeth and execrating the heavens. Others stood chanting, frozen, as if hypnotized, and others still simply ran in blind circles, beating their breasts with stones.

  The glass in the prophet’s sepulchre had been shattered and his white robe shredded and strewn about the grounds. Three women slogged at the marble monument with mallets.

  In time ah began to circle slowly the awesome muck, taking step over painful step, observing the way of the quag and noticing subtle undulations and shifts of tension upon its surface – sullen, soundless contractions, a slow building swell, then a sudden retraction – indeed, a clench – and ah saw the ringed swamp as a sinister, annular muscle, and this threw me into a state of fear – of doubt.

  Walking a complete circle around the bog, ah drew to a halt, inclined mah head, and folded mah fingers together, as in prayer.

  Ah prayed.

  And then – and then ah knew exactly what to do.

  Full of God, ah stepped bravely out and gently lay mahself down in the very centre of the circle, in the mire’s eye. Upon mah side, knees pulled up to mah chest, head tucked in, ah was secure, sainted, unborn.

  The clamorous mass that bulldozed its way across the marshlands appeared in the uncertain light of dusk to resemble a giant black beetle with many thrashing, tramping beaters going, returning to its sinister nest. But once the crowd had entered into the swampland itself, it was hard to imagine that it had ever existed, so thoroughly was it absorbed into the darksome terrain. It was only the crushed and trampled rushes, and the three carrion crows that circled beak to heel above, that betrayed there ever having been any trespass at all.

  You know, as ah go below – and really ah am so nearly almost gone – all that remains is mah head, and perhaps the very crest of mah hump – ah can hear them coming, yes ah think ah can. All the trees about me, why, their heads are veiled in fog, inclined toward me – inclined toward me like ah am a source of light, a luminary. O could it be that ah am glowing, even now?

  And once inside the c
onfines of the swampland, the mob beat and hacked a blind trail – blinder now, for their rage had by no means tempered and their road to revenge had become a bright and blinding one – but no matter, for the bog brought them miraculously on, drawing them toward its threshold.

  Is it you, Death? Is that you, Death, there behind me?

  Crashing into the clearing they come, from all sides, heaving and panting from fear and from rage and from blindness. They had come for his head and this, of course, is all they will get – but time is against them. They must work fast.

  Look there, up above me. See the heavenly hemisphere? Notice the way it curves around me, like ah am the middle pin! And the trees, see how they too lean toward me!

  And now. Look! Up there. Great grape-coloured storm clouds moving single-file across the empyrean plains. O ah know, ah know, they are the souls of the dead marching out to greet me. See? Look! The spooked nag! Hear its beating hooves.

  A series of leaden nimbuses cross the dome, gathering at its northern extremity then sealing off the clearing as cloud piles upon cloud.

  From above, the clearing looks like a cattle brand, seared into the hide of the world. Makeshift weapons point at the central pin, at the one they hate, like so many broken spokes.

  A bolt of lightning leaps from the sky like the finger of God, to point at the circle of men and charge them all with a stuttering blue light.

  The heavens bark and the mob in turn look toward the turbulent skies to read the heavens and to absorb their significance. One word is written across every gaping upturned face – rain – the return of rain, the return of too much rain.

  And lo! Ah can see Mule. Ah can! Watch how proudly he highsteps across the heavens. Now there’s your dignity in death, sir! There’s your just reward! Spine straight, coat brushed, head high – O long-suffering life, there’s your fucking prize! And there, look, coming up behind, mah loyal subjects, mah beasts! See the parade of innocents, winged brute creation, marching across the firmament to await the advent of their King. See them all falling into their ranks.

  For some a mere glance at the sky served to alert them to the oncoming threat, and no sooner had they looked up than they were looking down again, their fury rekindled – for ah brought the rain, ah brought the rain – for it was, after all, HE who brought the rain.

  O now ah know, now ah know what’s happening.

  Here she is descending. The shifts of breeze tell me. The blue effluxion, the flutter of wings. O mah winged protector! Mah guardian angel! Is it you? Is it you, come to carry me through the gates? Can you tell me? O can you tell me? Can you tell me what’s happening?

  They pour gasoline from canisters.

  O weeping angel, do you cry?

  Euchrid strains his dripping chin upward.

  Will they sound the trumpets? Roll the drum?

  The empty canisters crash about him.

  Ah, here they are! Death’s lights!

  EPILOGUE

  Dark was the night and the township of Ukulore cringed beneath a merciless rain.

  Doc Morrow battled to save a life, while a group of five women waited anxiously in his office for reports of his progress.

  The door opened and an ashen-faced Philo Holfe entered, his tired eyes cast downward.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Wilma Eldridge.

  ‘He may have to choose,’ replied Philo Holfe.

  ‘He has had his instructions,’ said the cripple, turning toward the window to contemplate the downpour outside. ‘There is no choice.’

  Inside the surgery the doctor battled to save a life – to save two lives. It was Beth’s life for which the doctor so earnestly fought – her life, and another’s.

  ‘She is a strong child,’ said Hilda Baxter. ‘Look at what she has already survived.’

  ‘But she has never really recovered from the accident,’ said Widow Roth.

  ‘Accident! By God, it was no accident,’ barked Wilma Eldridge.

  ‘Just like her father was no accident – or have you convinced yourself that he fell into the swamp?’

  ‘Can you blame Sardus for that, Wilma? He thought that Beth had died.’

  ‘We each have our cross to bear. Our lives are a test,’ replied Wilma Eldridge without mercy.

  But the doctor could not save both lives, nor was there any choice. Emerging from his surgery, a man at low ebb, wan and grey and barely able to support the weight of the bundle that he cradled in his arms, he entered the office.

  ‘The child lives. It is a boy.’ And holding out the bundle he added blankly, ‘The mother died in labour.’

  ‘He is born,’ said Wilma Eldridge, her arms outstretched to receive the infant, ‘As the prophet predicted, He is born.’

  And with the babe in her arms and the rest of the women huddling around, the cripple folded back the swaddling rug with one finger. A thunderbolt leapt from the teeming night sky and the craning sisters ruckled and clucked at the tiny infant face that stared up at them with shivering, pale blue eyes.