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Authors: Walter Wangerin Jr.

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BOOK: The Second Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations
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[Ten] In Which the Dun Cow Makes Herself Known
[Ten]
In Which the Dun Cow Makes Herself Known

Sing,
says a voice.

And a voice says,
What shall we sing?

A voice says,
Sing of heroes and their witnesses.

The voice of a thousand congregations seethes:
Arma virumque.

Chauntecleer stands beside Russel’s grave. In dark night he had flown here. In darkness he stands, listening. The words he hears come hissing from the surface waters of Wyrmesmere. And he can
see
them, for they arise as a kind of ghostly light, an
ignis fatuus
that he can see slant, but cannot see by on.

It was the slumping of the earth that drew him thither. He feared he’s find Russel’s sepulchar broken open and his bones dishonored. But the tomb was still intact. Then the sea has destroyed the Rooster’s relief—by speaking.

Sing.

What shall we sing?

Sing encomia.

How meet, right, and salutary it is to praise the great now gone before us.

Fimbul-winter has forged the Liverbrook into a winding snake of ice, its mouth a paralyzed bite at the coast of Wyrmesmere. Lakes and rivers; what once were the autumnal roaring foam and the quiet pools; the rills and ponds and fountains and the mighty mountain falls—all these are fixed in dream-shapes, anvils and unbreakable spears.

The air in this place is stinks of salt

Sing.

What shall we sing?

Praise Russel the Fox. Glorify his memory. For he took Vipers in his mouth
and died that others might live.

Yes: in his soul Chauntecleer too praises the Fox. Russel did not scorn his duty. He deserved his feathered bier and the devout “Amen” of the whole community. Chauntecleer cannot gainsay the sea’s homage. But it pinions him nonetheless.

Sing of him, the Anointed, who by vast love and a hornèd spear….

Mundo Cani Dog! Chauntecleer resists the memory. He would leave if he were not spellbound. He covers his ears. But the words slide into his brains.

Sing of him who blinded monarchs. Apotheosize the Hound of the most stunning humility.

All at once, Chauntecleer is sobbing. Mundo Cani, who proved himself the paragon of warriors—he does. He deserves the greater homage.

The Rooster is staggered by the shame these words have renewed in his breast.

And now the voice grows thunderous, crashing like rolling breakers:
Sum Wyrm, ab Cane caecor!

The Language of the powers! And Chauntecleer is struck dumb.

The light on the sea now glows like a field white with fire.

But then the next words flow over the Rooster’s as a father warms his children in winter. They bring consolation.

Like woodwinds they sing,
But you, O Lord of the Coop that was, and of the Tower that is: your
glory has never been extinguished. What is a Dog to the grandeur that shall be yours?

Chauntecleer cocks his head sideways. With his left eye he peers at the gaseous light. Nor does he blink, lest he miss something of the future unrolling now before him.

Who is this that knows the work of Mundo Cani? Who is this that promises a heroism superior to the Dog’s?

We sing of the penultimate hero. For there exists yet one heart able slay the horrors underground.

Chauantecleer is panting. Even so quickly have these sweet predictions cleansed his soul of regret, and then filled the space with hope. Lost in his desiring, he is unaware that the warmth of the sea has been blown away by a Fimbul-freeze.

One heart is shapen in nobility. One there is—for there is no one else on this round glob—who is worthy to be shown the navel to the netherworld.

Chauntecleer hears what is spoken of himself. Of himself! After even
Pertelote
had demanded penance for his transgressions. No, the Rooster will not question the singers’ veracity. By wish and by want, he permits his own transfiguration.

The voices are French Horns
. You, Galle forte—you are the Chosen One. You alone can descend Wyrm’s caverns and arise again triumphant.

By his left eye Chauntecleer peers as far as sight allows him over the sea of his commissioning. He strains to see his benefactor. The singing seethes, and this is what he sees: the waves combusting into a dance of ghostly light. Upon the waves is the source of their combustion: a slick of oil. And a tarry scent reaches his nostrils, blown at him on a benumbing wind. The oil spreads and thickens, forming an island against whose edges the waves begin to lap.

It pleases Chauntecleer to be vouchsafed the birth of an island on which there is no snow, under which there is no ice. Wyrmesmere is proof against the winter.

He and the sea! What heart can
not
triumph in such a company?

A single voice now, formal in its declaration:
O brave Rooster, today have I made you my son.

The pastel light diminishes, but Chauntecleer is not troubled. The icy breeze continues. His left eyeball has grown cold in its socket, and the more cold because the rest of his body burns with wild electricity.

The son of the sea.

The Rooster turns back toward the north. He moves without haste, glad for the solitude in which to savor his new station in life. If he isn’t home by Lauds, well, then he isn’t home by Lauds. He will choose to arrive when he will, for he come with new purpose, and every Animal will exult in a Lord so bright with glory.

Suddenly, at some distance ahead of him, he spies another kind of light altogether, a spitting light, a narrow spouting of blue light.

Chauntecleer’s hackles stand up and quiver the way they do before the rip-
crack!
of a lightning bolt.

He is unnerved.

Abruptly the point from which the sparks shoot is right beside him. The sparks project from something like a long spear. The spear swings low and touches his breast, and the Rooster gasps. This is no spear. It is the single horn of the Dun Cow.

“You are a dream!” he yells and casts his head to the side.

The Dun Cow says, “Look at me.”

The scent of her breath is as sweet as timothy and a motherly as cud. Her voice is the low pipe of an organ.

“Look at me.”

Chauntecleer, the baptized. Chauntecleer, grown bold by the sea’s adoption, crows, “No!” He is, by God, better than the Dog!

Chauntecleer crows again, “You gave Mundo Cani more comfort than ever you gave me. No!”

“Chauntecleer, look at me.”

“Shut up! Go away! I know you, woman. You say you suffer with suffering Creatures. You said you wanted to bear
my
suffering. You made a weakling of me. But I am not suffering now!”

The Rooster refuses to turn toward her, the witchery Cow, this wringer of souls.

In deep, lowing tones the Dun Cow says, “You are in harm’s way, child. Lend me your fresh afflictions. Look at me.”

After a moment the Dun Cow removes her sizzling horn from Chauntecleer. He is free to leave.

But in the night and in its silences she begins to sing an awe-ful song in long and lofty notes:

“He who is ungrateful, he refuses me.

‘I will not look on thee.’

And she, untroubled by his strife, replies,

‘Who made the eyes but I?’”

Chauntecleer fights to see before him what he sees inside his mind: her moist, resistless, long-lashed gaze.

She sings:

“‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

Come, child, sit and eat.”

It is a beatitude, a palpable mercy. The Dun Cow stands unmoving. Waiting. Poor Chauntecleer is invaded by her compassion. She offers him no praise. Her promise is comfort, and in her presence even Fimbul-winter seems to release its grip.

“Humility, Chauntecleer. It is the beginning of wisdom.”

In spite of himself the Rooster lifts his head. He turns ghis left eye to the Dun Cow, finally to look at in hers.

But he does not see her. He cannot see her! That eye is blind, frozen as hard as a marble.

The charm breaks. He had almost…. Chauntecleer had almost fallen for her blandishments. But what high irony! He was saved by his loss of sight.

Be gone, Cow!

The Rooster repents humility and swells again with glorious purpose.

PART THREE
PART THREE
John Wesley is in his Element Now
[Eleven] In Which Three Pups are Named
[Eleven]
In Which Three Pups are Named

Rachel is thirsty. It is a consuming thirst. Not that
she
is consumed by it, but that Ferric is. He worries, on account of, he is a Coyote and not a physician, and who is he to figure out the troubles in his dear wife’s tummy?

But she
will
not stay protected in their den, and he
cannot
let her trot off on her own; therefore, they go together into the forest to find rivulets or streams or puddles. On this particular afternoon in the selfsame week after finding her den, Rachel is happily lapping fresh water with a blithe disregard of dangers. Ferric is hiding.

All at once a shifting deep underground and a quake on its surface cause both Coyotes to stumble and fall. Ferric’s stiff bones nearly crack in half. His hissing comes so forcefully it bids fair to loosen a tooth or two.

Rachel herself is up on her feet and would continue drinking, except that, all in a flash, the stream freezes solid.

She looks at this wonderment and says, “Interesting.”

Interesting!
For his part, Ferric’s sinews go so taut he could skitter up tree trunks. And he would race to safety—but this earth-tremble like this one must have canceled safety everywhere.

Rachel says, “Well, there is one warm place.” She canters north, out of the forest, across the iron-hard wilderness, and back to the den.

As she goes, Ferric shoots past her.

She is thinking about the heat of the steam that rises from the stones below their muskeg-hole. The den itself is a chamber at the end of a three-foot crawl-way, and is set about a foot below the tundra. At the opening of the crawl-way is a ledge wide enough to land four-footed on. The chamber large enough to accomodate two grown Coyotes and little pups, when the pups should come.

Rachel says, “Well, would you look at that.”

For the steam produces a wandering cloud in the cold above their hole, an exhalation more voluminous than it was when they left this morning.

She jumps to the ledge and looks down and understands the reason for the greater heat. The stones at the bottom have moved, creating steps into a lower hole, a kind of tunnel that drops into blackness.

Ferric is back on the edge of the defile, squinting down. Rachel says, “Ferric? It’s time,” then retreats into the den’s chamber.

“Time? Time?” He crouches on the tundra. The cold has crisped his whiskers. The pads of his paws are melting small depressions in the unaccountable ice.

Ferric Coyote thinks he hears sobbing in their den.

“Rachel?”

He pops his paws loose from the ice and drops onto the stony ledge. Yes! His wife is sobbing! She huffs between her sobs. She grunts pitifully on account of the pressure that pushes the sound out of her lungs.

“Rachel!”

The noises stop. For an instant Ferric is torn between freezing before the dangers in the den and rushing to his wife.

“Rachel, here I come.”

“Ferric?”

“What?”

“It’s time. But this is no time for you. Stay where you are.”

“But—”

“You don’t know now much I love you, Ferric. Let me love you from here.”

So, then: he freezes again.

And it seems that Rachel is trying with all her might not to laugh.

Her grunting grows intolerable. Then she cries, “Whoop!” And she whispers, “Here’s the first.”

“Whoop!” she says. And, again, “Whoop!”

Now the woman is giggling. He hears a
Lick-licking
back inside the chamber.

After several wretched minutes, Rachel calls, “Come in, Ferric. Come meet my love for you.”

Poor Ferric. Poor ignorant Coyote. He gets down on his elbows and his knees, hyperventilating himself dizzy, and crawls to his bumfuzzeling wife.

“Oh, my solemn husband, I have three gifts for you,” she says at his approach. “And maybe you can laugh today.”

In dim light Ferric makes out three glistering bundles. The bundles squeak. They wriggle. Rachel is lying on her side. He sees how big her nipples have grown. He sneezes, embarrassed by the sight of nipples. But look how the three bundles are squirming to Rachel’s nipples. And biting them! Mauling them?

But Rachel sighs sweetly. She says, “This one is your son. These are your daughters. I will name the daughter-pups. You name our newborn boy.”

Ferric Coyote thinks he is in pain. But the pain twists in him like pleasure. Such pleasure he has never known before. It brings tears to his eyes.

Children.

Compulsively, as though the name has always been waiting for its reason, Ferric whispers, “Benoni.”

“Good,” says Rachel. “A perfect name. And to our pretty little girls I give the names Twill and Hopsacking.”

The other part of his pain is this: now Ferric Coyote must protect not one, but
four!

Oh, the exhaustion of it all.

[Twelve] In Which John Wesley Weasel Receives an Assignment
[Twelve]
In Which John Wesley Weasel Receives an Assignment

Because Chauntecleer had been absent the long night through, Pertelote prepared to crow Lauds in his place. Lovely Lady of the community, she could comfort the Animals. That was her gift. But she could not excite them to generous and purposeful labors. That was her husband’s gift.

But just as the dark started to resolve itself into a grey dawn light, the duty was taken away from her. Chauntecleer stood on the crown of the Hemlock.

The first Canonical Crow of the morning streaked the low sky as if the sun had indeed arisen. Lauds seemed to strike heaven with vermillion spears: Lauds, as if the Rooster’s mouth were the bell of a silver trumpet.

“Blessèd be the Lord

Who keeps his word;

The Lord of Lights

Who shall redeem your lives—”

Chauntecleer’s Jovian paean roused the Animals to a scarcely remembered wonder. Ears shot up. Eyes widened. A small hole spat up seven Mice, one at a time. Pertinax, unsleeping still, was transfigured. He raced the length of his tunnel and popped up perpendicular at the doorway. The passive Sheep slowly thought a thought. Someone was declaring them worthy and their presence important.

“O worship the great Creator

Who sends a Savior

To make your labors

Holy.”

There had been no Matins that night. Sleepers had suffered deceitful dreams. They dreamed of banquets spread before them, and of invitations to eat. They tried to eat, but their stomachs cramped on hollow promises, and dinner turned to dust in their mouths.

Oh, but what a Laud’s! The Rooster’s Crow seemed to snatch back cloudy curtains to reveal a colorful stage and a magical entertainment for the delight of all the Creatures in Lord Chauntecleer’s care.

“And I, by the Lord God’s choice,

Shall be the voice

That bids you eat

The feast in peace!”

Pertelote stepped from the thatched Hemlock into the waking day. She lifted her eyes and gazed at her husband perched on the highest spire, Chauntecleer, so golden and so coral-crowned.

Except that this winter was a Fimbul-winter, he should have banished the fog and the foul air.

The Roosterwas radiant, his jet-black beak, his stockings dipped in the purple dyes of nobility.

When Lord Chauntecleer had brought Lauds to its last silvery notes, he sailed down and turned to the tasks of the day.

Skinny Chalcedony was already at work on the frozen ground outside the Hemlock tower. She was scratching at the glassy ice under which a cone was visible. Its scales were open, its small wing-seeds exposed. She scratched and scratched at the ice until it was laced with blood.

Chauntecleer stood beside her.

“Chalcedony.”

The Hen snapped upright, glanced at him, then swiftly bowed her head.

“The Lord Rooster,” she murmured, “dasn’t spend breath on this tag of a barren, unpretty Hen.”

But with his beak Chauntecleer jackhammered the ice until he’d broken through and Chalcedony’s seeds were free.

The tasks of the day: he became the assessor of bins, of storage rooms, and of all the foodstuffs stockpiled against the sub-zero winter. The Animals had gathered a bountiful harvest.

Here, then, was the salvation of every Creature that otherwise would starve on the iron, unforthcoming earth. And he alone, Chauntecleer himself, had been appointed their Savior, the Lord of the populations whose homes were spread even unto the ends of the earth—for hadn’t the sea told him so?

“John Wesley Weasel,” Chauntecleer called, “I have an assignment for you!”

He heard a snort inside the Hemlock hall.

On splendid wings the Rooster flew through the boughs and straight to the Mouse-nest. He poked his beak inside and said, “It’s a vocation, John. No one but you can do this thing.”

This time there came no snort
.

“Come, my little Buster, and go. Run through the forests. Run through the fields and the valleys and all the wilds, persuading Animals find food in this place,.”

“It’s a John Double-u the Rooster wants?”

Chauntecleer withdrew his beak. “No one
but
a Weasel,” he announced. Then he called to all the Animals, “Which one of you has the gumption to brave strange lands and bring the hungry ones in?”

A vast silence followed his call.

John Wesley said, “Is a Double-u, right? Chickies and nobodies else, right?”

“Right!”

And so it was that John Wesley Weasel laid aside his gloom and jumped into the light and plumped his fur and said, “Is a John Double-u what’s got scars of mighty battles. Is a John what’s gave up his ear to win wars.”

“And no he is a Weasel of independence and admirable fortitude. Are you ready, John?”

“Hoopla! John, he’s
ever
ready!”

Chauntecleer, proud of his own providence, watched the Weasel shoot out of the Hemlock hall. At the same time he noticed a flash of white outside. His Pertelote.

He went to her.

“What medicinals, Lady?” he asked. “Balms? Lotions? Can you heal the famished when they come?”

“Everyone who comes.”

Chauntecleer smiled and kissed the fire-red feathers at her throat. He felt a shiver pass through her body. “For thou art beautiful, my love,” he murmured.

And she murmured in return, “He peeled a straw, a summer’s thistle….”

“Just so,” he said, then he raised his coral-red comb, the banner of the undefeated, and turned and took to his wings.

So quickly had the Rooster begun to solve the starvations not only of his Animals, but of all the families under heaven, that Pertelote felt an adoration greater than when she first met the him and gave herself to him in marriage.

But at his turning she gasped.

In spite of his radiance and his lordly confidence, her husband was not whole. If he had waited, she would have begged an explanation. His left eyeball revolved in its socket a solid, pale-blue orb.

As for the rest of Chauntecleer’s community, at the end of this wonderful day they went cheerfully to their beds and fell into dreamless, peaceful sleeps.

Alleluia! The golden Commander had crowed the duties of the daylight hours with such assurance and with such good order that no one could not
not
labor, nor anyone neglect the needs of the others.

“Pertinax Cobb,” Chautecleer had called, and the Ground Squirrel, stunned that the Rooster knew his name, popped up from his hnole.

The Rooster had said, “I know the ways of the frugal. They fill their warehouses with food enough to outlast the winter season.” He’d swept one wing wide, gesturing to the Creatures busy around the Hemlock. “Behold your brothers and your sisters. They are here to serve you as much as you serve them.”

Mrs. Cobb came and sat beside her husband, her quartermaster Mr. Cobb.

The Rooster said to both of his whole community, “Serve each other as faithfully as kith serves kin.”

Pertelote spent that night roosting on the limb she shared with Chauntecleer, though once again the Rooster was not beside her. The affection she felt for the communion of the Meek almost balanced his absence, except that she had missed the opportunity to ask him about his blind left eye. He seemed unaware of the loss. If he had acknowledged it, the deformation would not have diminished him a whit. He would still be hers. But ignorance separated them.

As much for the love of the sleeping Animals, then, as for comforting her own soul, Pertelote sang fully the ancient song that she had begun before:

“Lullay lully, lully lulay,
A fawcon hath borne my mate away.

He bare hym up, he bare hym down,
He bare him off on a thundercloud.

And in that cloud there was a hall,
Hangid all with a purpil pall.

And in that hall there was a bed,
Hangid with a veil so red.

And in that bed there lythe a knyght,
His wowndes bleeding day and nyght….”

BOOK: The Second Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations
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