Gaudete (14 page)

Lumb leaps suddenly

Cat-scrambling upwards, up the rotten stonework

Which crumbles scattering over him.

But he scrambles higher,

Abandons to the expected blow

That part of his body which must protect the rest.

Sure enough, a sickening weight has snagged him

Above the hip, but he drags on upwards,

Lifting the weight with him

And half-turns, and half-sitting on the wall top

Grips the crutch of the sun-gleaming tine

And eases his body off the parallel hidden one.

Evans, cursing, levering, is trying to fork Lumb off the

                                                      wall-top like a bale,

And he sees too late

The stone block spinning in air in a shower of dust.

For a black vital second he loses contact with everything.

Surprised he finds himself numbed and criss-cross

                                struggling to get up from the rubble

With an ugly taste in his mouth, and a detached

                                                       precarious feeling,

While slowly understanding swarms back to centre.

His alarm to the wood is a disgorging beast-roar clotted

                                                            with obscenities,

A rage as infinite as it is helpless.

But Lumb has vanished.

Evans strays out of the linney, dizzied and wanting to sit

                                                                         down.

His face wears a thick mask of drained woodenness,

                                               which he dare not touch.

But Lumb

Beyond caution is bounding

Through undergrowth, crashing like a hurt stag

That feels itself surrounded.

He vaults a rail and gallops out on to parkland and into a

                                                      great spaciousness.

And keeps on running.

And sees Hagen’s squat elegant residence swinging into

                                                          view on the right.

All the anchored bulls recoil, as if interconnected,

Then focus

Under their neck-humps.

He runs with freed limbs.

He bounds down the new-grassed slope toward the long

                                                              flat of the lake,

Gold-hot and molten, under the late sky.

And toward the skyline beyond, and the tree-lumped

                                           frieze which is the highway.

He runs imagining

Mountains of golden spirit, he springs across their crests.

He has plugged his energy appeal into the inexhaustible

                                                                        earth.

He rides in the air behind his shoulders with a whip of

                                                                    hard will

Like a charioteer.

He imagines he is effortless Adam, before weariness

                                                entered, leaping for God.

He safeguards the stroke of his heart

From the wrenching of ideas.

He hoards his wasteful mind like a last mouthful.

He runs

In a balancing stillness

Like a working gleam on the nape of a waterfall,

And he is exulting

That the powers have come back they truly have come

                                                                           back

They have not abandoned him.

At the same time

He runs badly hurt, his blood inadequate,

Hurling his limbs anyhow

Lumpen and leaden, and there is no more air.

His whole body is an orgasm of burning, a seized-up

                                                                          engine.

His mouth hangs open, forgotten as in an accident.

His face has become a mere surface, like his thorn-ripped

                                                                            shins

And he knows

He has lost every last help

Of the grass and the trees,

He knows that the sky no longer ushers towards him

                                glowing hieroglyphs of endowment,

That he is now ordinary, and susceptible

To extinction,

That his precious and only body

Is nothing more than some radio-transmitter, a standard

                                                                     structure,

Tipped from an empty dinghy by a wave

In the middle of a sea grey and nameless.

And he knows that the puncture in his side

Which will be so round and tiny

If ever he comes to look at it

Is black with deepness, blue-black, like the crater of a

                                                                  drawn tooth

But unthinkably deeper, and more real

Than anything on this earth, anything containable by

                                                                    this sky.

And he sees

Over the jouncing tops of his stride

Through his jarred and spilling retina

The car

Gliding down the avenue of chestnuts

To reach the lakeside before him.

But he does not feel

The pressure

And ten magnifications

Of Hagen’s telescope, in which he now jigs like a puppet.

As the sun touches the skyline, under the red-plumed sky

Lumb reaches the lake’s edge.

The quilted parkland behind him is aswarm with running

                                                          men and shouts.

Westlake and Estridge have left the car.

They are coming along the lake’s edge.

Westlake is carrying his gun.

Lumb understands quite clearly at last

Why he has been abandoned to these crying beings

Who are all hurrying towards him

In order to convert him to mud from which plants grow

                                                  and which cattle tread.

He sees the reeds sticking up out of the water

So conceitedly dull in their rootedness

Like books in a technical library.

He sees the lakewater

Simply waste liquid flowed in here, and collected by

                                                                         inertia,

From the gutters of space

Where it is worthless and accidental –

A spiritless by-product

Of the fact that things exist at all.

He knows now that this land

This embroidery of stems and machinery of cells

Is an ignorance, waiting in a darkness –

He knows at last why it has become so.

But he does not step to the end of this overhanging

                                                                     thought.

He collects himself, and concentrates

On the small target, the small carefulness

Of liberating himself

From this crux of moments and shouts and water-margin

With his bones whole and warm, his nerves intact,

In his own bag of skin.

He sees Estridge has stopped, and is sitting, holding his

                                                                         chest.

He sees Westlake stumbling closer.

He enters

The crackling of reeds, the silken complexities of the mud,

The bubbling belly-gas of the roots.

He wades into coldness, with plunges and flounderings,

                                                                    deepening,

Eager to sink himself

Equal to the wildness and finality of the cold grip.

A waterhen

Ploughs a spattering runway from beside him and out

   across the clear reaches of
midlake depth and subsides

   with a soft crash into the reedbank opposite.

Lumb looks down at the freckled brown earthenware of

                        the family of eggs, on the clump of decay.

In that moment’s pause, Westlake’s shot

Smokes a boiling track through the reeds towards him

                                                          and beyond him.

Lumb’s unhurt arm jumps to protect his face

And the long carpet of echoes unrolls

Across the still land into the upholstered distance.

Lumb presses deeper, leaning into the surface blade of the

                                                                         water,

And Westlake fires again. Lumb’s head and shoulders

Gesticulate in the smoking pattern.

He pushes out further, chesting the cold press, till he

                                                                         pauses

In the oily fringe of lilies.

His broad ripples go riding out over the clear depth

                                                                       beyond

Which is floored with a pale jungle.

And he sees

The box-profile of a truck nudging up the tree-rough

                                                                       skyline

Against the cooling sky.

He hears it change gear.

He hears around it the whole cooling world, hung like a

                                                                    glass bell,

Simmering with evening birds.

He balances,

Narrowing himself to pierce a disappearance, to become

                                                                  infinitesimal

To slip through the crack of this place

With its clutching and raging people, its treacherous

                                                lanes, its rooted houses.

Hagen, leaning in the window-frame,

Cheekbone snug to the glossed walnut, introduces his first

       love to the panorama of his marriage and retirement.

The Mannlicher ᛫318

Regards Lumb’s distant skull dutifully, with perfectly

                                 tooled and adjusted concentration.

Germanic precision, slender goddess

Of Hagen’s devotions

And the unfailing bride

Of his ecstasies in the primal paradise, and the midwife of

                                                              Eden’s beasts,

Painlessly delivered, with a little blood,

And laid at his feet

As if fresh from the Creator’s furnace, as if to be named.

With her, only with her

Hagen feels his life stir on its root.

The crossed hairs have settled on Lumb’s crown.

And now the trigger

Caresses in oil, and the kiss of sweetness jolts softly

                                                   through Hagen’s bones.

The burned muzzle flings back.

The crack

Shattering a globe, drives its deep spike.

And the whole scene splits open under the long slash, like

                                                                    a stomach.

Lumb

Poised for his swimming plunge

Smacks face-down

Hard, like a flat hand on to the water.

The hunchbacked bullet has already escaped among

                                                                      lily-roots.

Lumb floats, splayed like a stunned frog, face downwards.

Every visible figure is frozen, a parkful of statues.

Slowly the tangled dark lump among the lily pads starts

                                                                      to churn

As if trying to flee in every direction simultaneously.

It flails the lake’s sky-colours, heaving out slow wings of

                                                       cold evening shadow.

They have dragged him out

Onto the bank

As the strewn western clouds smudge ashen.

The blood from his burst head washes his face and neck

In thin solution and ropy lumps,

And puddles black the hoofprints under his head.

Lily stems cling to him.

His pursuers stand in a ring

Like sightseers around the maneater’s long body.

The bulls have come up in a wider wondering circle, tossing sniffs towards the odour and the frightening object.

Lumb is carried back

Strung under a fence-rail

Through the darkening countryside.

In the graveyard

A group of women

Like people standing around for no reason still

                                         magnetised after an accident

Are waiting near Felicity’s body

Which lies under a curtain, in the church porch.

The men carry Lumb down into the basement.

Maud is sitting alone there in the dark, as if now totally

                                                                     imbecile.

They switch on lights.

Maud watches

As they pile chairs, tables, the goggling masks and the

                                                      jumble-sale of skins,

Everything combustible, in the middle of the room, over

                                                             the bloodstain.

They lay out Lumb on top of the pile, on a table.

Felicity

Has to be part of a presentable accident.

They take her body forcibly from Garten

And bring it into the basement, where they find Maud

Curled on the floor around Lumb’s dagger, her temple to

                    the boards, as if quite comfortable in death,

And like a foetus asleep, with crossed ankles.

They stretch her out on one side of Lumb.

They leave Lumb’s dagger in position because nobody

                                                          wants to touch it.

They lay Felicity on the other side of Lumb.

So the three lie, faces upward, with touching hands, on

                                                           the narrow table,

On top of the pyre.

Lumb’s eyes are closed, but the women’s eyes are wide.

The men arrange all this in deep silence, entranced by the

                                                 deep satisfaction of it.