The Lime Twig

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes Page B

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Authors: John Hawkes
Tags: Fiction, General
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faint up and down motion of the barge whichhe 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 ironbar 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.
    “Steady now, steady … he’s bloody well high enough.”
    Then, as

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