John Hawkes - The Lime Twig

“Take a smoke now, Cowles — just a drag, mind you— and we’ll get on with it.”

She ought to see her hubby now. She ought to see me now .

He had got his arm through the fork of the boom and was holding the lantern properly, away from his body and down, and the glare from its reflector lighted the figure of the man Cowles below him and in cold wet rivulets drifted sternward down the length of the barge. Midships were three hatches, two battened permanently shut, the third covered by a sagging canvas. Beside this last hatch and on a bale of hay sat a boy naked from the waist up and wearing twill riding britches. In the stem was a small cabin. On its roof, short booted legs dangling over the edge, a jockey in full racing dress sat with a cigarette now between his lips and hands clasped round one of his tiny knees.

“Cowles! I want off …I want off this bloody coop!” he shouted.

The cigarette popped into his mouth then. It was a trick he had. The lips were pursed round the hidden cigarette and the little man was staring up not at Cowles or Hencher but at himself, and even while Cowles was ordering the two of them, boy and jockey, to get a hop on and drag the tarpaulin off the hold, the jockey kept looking up at him, toe of one little boot twitching left and right but the large bright eyes remaining fixed on his own— until the cigarette popped out again and the dwarfed man allowed himself to be helped from his seat on the cabin roof by the stableboy whose arms, in the lantern light, were upraised and spattered with oil to the elbows.

“Get a hop on now, we want no coppers or watchman or dock inspectors catching us at this bit of game. …”

The fog was breaking, drifting away, once more sinking into the river. Long shreds of it were wrapped like rotted sails or remnants of a wet wash round the buttresses and hand-railings of the bridges, and humped outpourings of fog came rolling from within the cargo shed as if all the fuels of this cold fire were at last consumed. The wind had started up again, and now the moon was low, just overhead.

“Here, use my bleeding knife, why don’t you?”

The water was slimy with moonlight, the barge itself was slimy — all black and gold, dripping — and Cowles, having flung his own cigarette behind him and over the side, held the blade extended and moved down the slippery deck toward the boy and booted figure at the hatch with the slow embarrassed step of a man who at any moment expects to walk upon eel or starfish and trip, lose his footing, sprawl heavily on a deck as unknown to him as this.

“Here it is now, Mr. Banks!” He felt one of Hencher’s putty hands quick and soft and excited on his arm. “Now you’ll see what there is to see. …”

He looked down upon the naked back, the jockey’s nodding cap, the big man Cowles and the knife stabbing at the ropes, until Cowles grunted and the three of them pulled off the tarpaulin and he was staring down at all the barge carried in its hold: the black space, the echo of bilge and, without movement, snort, or pawing of hoof, the single white marble shape of the horse, whose neck (from where he leaned over, trembling, on the quay) was the fluted and tapering neck of some serpent, while the head was an elongated white skull with nostrils, eye sockets, uplifted gracefully in the barge’s hold — Draftsman by Emperor’s Hand out of Shallow Draft by Amulet, Castle Churl by Draftsman out of Likely Castle by Cold Masonry, Rock Castle by Castle Churl out of Words on Rock by Plebeian … until tonight when he’s ours, until tonight when he’s ours . …

“Didn’t I tell you, Mr. Banks? Didn’t I? Good as his word, that’s Hencher.”

The whistles died one by one on the river and it was not Wednesday at all, only a time slipped off its cycle with hours and darkness never to be accounted for. There was water viscous and warm that lapped the sides of the barge; a faint up and down motion of the barge which he could gauge against the purple rings of a piling; and below him the still crouched figures of the men and, in its moist alien pit, the silver horse with its ancient head, round which there buzzed a single fly as large as his own thumb and molded of shining blue wax.

He stared down at the lantern-lit blue fly and at the animal whose two ears were delicate and unfeeling, as unlikely to twitch as two pointed fern leaves etched on glass, and whose silver coat gleamed with the colorless fluid of some ghostly libation and whose decorous drained head smelled of a violence that was his own.

Even when he dropped the lantern—“No harm done, no harm done,” Hencher said quickly — the horse did not shy or throw itself against the ribs of the barge, but remained immobile, fixed in the same standing posture of rigorous sleep that they had found it in at the moment the tarpaulin was first torn away. Though Cowles made his awkward lunge to the rail, saw what it was — lantern with cracked glass half sunk, still burning on the water, then abruptly turning dark and sinking from sight — and laughed through his nose, looked up at them: “Bleeding lot of help he is. …”

“No harm done,” said Hencher again, sweating and by light of the van’s dim headlamps swinging out the arm of the boom until the cable and hook were correctly positioned above the barge’s hold. “Just catch the hook, Cowles, guide it down.”

Without a word, hand that had gripped the lantern still trembling, he took his place with Hencher at the iron bar which, given the weight of Hencher and himself, would barely operate the cable drum. He got his fingers round the bar; he tried to think of himself straining at such a bar, but it was worse for Hencher, whose heart was sunk in fat. Yet Hencher too was ready — in tight shirtsleeves, his jacket removed and hanging from the tiny silver figure of a winged man that adorned the van’s radiator cap — so that he himself determined not to let go of the bar as he had dropped the lantern but, instead, to carry his share of the horse’s weight, to stay at the bar and drum until the horse could suffer this last transport. There was no talking on the barge. Only sounds of their working, plash of the boy’s feet in the bilge, the tinkle of buckles and strap ends as the webbed bands were slid round the animal’s belly and secured.

Hencher was whispering: “Ever see them lift the bombs out of the craters? Two or three lads with a tripod, some lengths of chain, a few red flags and a rope to keep the children away … then cranking up the unexploded bomb that would have bits of debris and dirt sticking peacefully as you please to that filthy big cylinder … something to see, men at a job like that and fishing up a live bomb big enough to blow a cathedral to the ground.” Then, feeling a quiver: “But here now, lay into it gently, Mr. Banks, that’s the ticket.”

He pushed — Hencher was pushing also — until after a moment the drum stopped and the cable that stretched from the tip of the boom’s arm down to the ring swiveling above the animal’s webbed harness was taut.

“O.K.” It was Cowles kneeling at the hold’s edge, speaking softly and clearly on the late night air, “O.K. now … up he goes.”

The barge, which could support ten tons of coal or gravel on the river’s oily and slop-sullied tide, was hardly lightened when the horse’s hoofs swung a few inches free of that planking hidden and awash. But drum, boom, cable and arms could lift not a pound more than this, and lifted this — the weight of the horse — only with strain and heat, pressure and rusted rigidity. Though his eyes were closed he knew when the boom swayed, could feel the horse beginning to sway off plumb. He heard the drum rasping round, heard the loops of rusted cable wrapping about the hot drum one after another, slowly.