Skunk: Crowbound! CROWBOUND!
making all the clamour of which I’m
capable, I break on through the brittle vegetation choking this desiccate gully
down which the last of the stream is channelled.
Is it raining?
There are so few leaves to these trees,
barren here in the height of summer.
I move at the pace of my own time, and
relative to actual time it’s like the tossing and catching of a coin on a
speeding train, me within my time in actual time, and moving. I think.
This is what I know about whiskey, that my personal temporal space decelerates,
even as it moves at the same speed within actual recorded time, time as
understood by day and night and day again. And with my time slowed down, I find
more room in which to move, more time to assess what has to be done, to ponder
options, and so I’m staggering through the gulch, and crowbound, wanting
nothing more than to arrive at nothing. There is nothing extant between this
time yesterday and this time today: a home-movie loop of Super 8 spliced and
sequestered, and my history shrugs across this void.
I want him gone, and him. That this
might be female does not occur, like the separating of a shadow from the
surface to which it falls, this is not female. More noise, my guts’ gurgle lost
in the skinny sounds of water, and my scarecrow shouts of
Skunk: CROWBOUND!
This is a single take void, a frame or
two is all that’s absent, a mis-splice moving from yesterday, when this same
stretch of creek had somewhere further up and on the left a crow, sentinel in
the thin edge of water to some small unfeathered clump of organic sludge clung
to skeletal matter, submerged and still beneath the never-still yank of current
and lapped by an ersatz tide.
I cannot keep my footing.
Within these missing frames I arrive at
not nothing; yesterday’s bird tipped over in the water, its beak buried in the
built-up bubbled scum surface and its offspring alongside.
It was rain I’d wanted, washing all this
all away, downriver, away, but the river is drying, and the trees are all dead
in the sunshine.
I pick my way back up the steep bank,
back to my little wagon and its brittle stink of chemistry and magic.
Skunk:
I have no idea how or where this is
heard:
cog: Most folks thought when blind old
Coe died last spring it was on account of a heart broken by shame, since it was
just days after his son Ellis was strung up to a tree by a posse of angry
husbands, but seeing as it was me as found him, I like to think I know the
telling of it better’n most:
Ellis worked as a photographer for the
Survey, riding his wagon up and down the country making pictures of the
changing land and its people, and every time he got done on a trip he’d come on
back home to his pa, who often as not could be found right in this here bar,
and Ellis’d lay out all of them new photoprints on the table and describe out
loud every loving little detail. It made some of the womenfolks cry just to
hear him talk like that, and to see old Coe’s face twist and grin, fighting to
not forget the look of things he’d known and struggling hard to imagine those
he’d never seen and never would see. Folks thought Ellis a good son and I
reckon he was at that but like I said, I know more’n most.
See, what no-one knew then but what we
know good enough now was that each town Ellis visited with his little wagon,
he’d be using that same charm and wordplay to persuade a few of them pretty
women he’d meet to take off their clothing and even their underwears so’s he
could make photoprints of them, photoprints he would like as not be selling in
the next town he came to. Now you only got to walk yourself a circle to see how
that couldn’t last, and sure enough Ellis tried to sell on a photoprint of some
naked young doe to her very own husband, himself in the next town on account of
a poorly relation.
Ellis got himself the hell on out of
there but fast, so fast that one of his mules expired just out at the edge of
town there. Next day a posse showed up and that was that for Ellis: they busted
up and burnt his equipment, stole that remaining mule and left Ellis swinging
at the end of a rope, but they never did find them lewd photoprints they was
after. Ended up they left our town empty-handed and ‘bout as angry as when
they came in.
When I found his pa’s body maybe a
fortnight later, he was laying in a corner of that big barn out back of their
house with that familiar twisted grin stretched between his cheeks, and all
around him numberless photoprints of them soiled doves – every loving little
detail of ‘em pricked through with a pin.
Skunk: but I know the sensation of its hearing,
the words’ carrying dialect that of Faulkner’s travelling Ratliff* and dampened
by the acoustics of whatever substance soaks inside my skull.
What’s working of my memory crawls
around the truth of this: the name of Ellis, his pornography yes I seem to
think I might remember, and daddy dead and brother Ellis too, his
cog: Necessity makes lawful that which
by the law is illicit
is something else I hear, which from
just this and the short term of its hearing, the just that there now heard, would
also seem to fit. Ellis Coe hanged and now me in the unburnt wagon,
surrounded by plates both exposed and unexposed, his photographs and the tiny
yellowed notes on their creation, his script scribbled and smeared into
illegibility, and bottles full, and bottles empty.
Or the wagon too is gone, is never was even, and
everything thus done mere dream, the mind’s one sustained trick of diffidence,
performed upon itself for no more bounty than the passing of time, then ‘til
now.
Jesus.
I have such dreams from which I’m glad
to wake.
*RATLIFF,
V. K. [VLADIMIR KYRILITCH]. A character in “A Bear Hunt”, The Hamlet, The Town, and
The Mansion. Ratliff is the
descendant of one of the original founders of Jefferson, V. K. Ratcliffe, who
in turn was descended from one Vladimir Kyrilitch, a member of a hired German
regiment in the American Revolution. Ratliff is a sewing-machine salesman,
regularly covering four counties and thus observing all that is of interest in
the area. His sister keeps house for him in Jefferson when he is not
travelling, and with Grover Winbush he owns a small restaurant in town.
Perceptive and loquacious, he narrates many of the sections in the Snopes
trilogy, though he infrequently takes part in the action himself. He is perhaps
Faulkner’s most successful narrator-character: as an observer of human nature
he is both shrewd and compassionate, sufficiently detached to recount with
irony and dry humour the activities of others, and sufficiently involved to
become a fully delineated character in his own right. In Sartoris he appears briefly under the name of Suratt.
-A
Handbook of Faulkner
-Dorothy Tuck
-Chatto
and Windus, 1965
