The Knife of Never Letting Go

men do, and it’s just me and my dog only ever but here he is and I don’t don’t don’t wanna know.

He smiles down at me, thru that beard of his, smiles down at me in the grass.

A smiling fist.

“Language, young Todd,” he says, “binds us like prisoners on a chain. Haven’t you learned anything from yer church, boy?” And then he says his most familiar preaching. “If one of us falls, we all fall.” Yes, Aaron, I think.

“With yer mouth, Todd.”

“Yes, Aaron,” I say.

“And the effs?” he says. “And the geedees? Because don’t think I didn’t hear them as well. Your Noise reveals you. Reveals us all.”

Not all, I think, but at the same time I say, “Sorry, Aaron.”

He leans down to me, his lips close to my face, and I can smell the breath that comes outta his mouth, smell the weight of it, like fingers grabbing for me. “God hears,” he whispers. “God hears.” And he raises a hand again and I flinch and he laughs and then he’s gone, like that, heading back towards the town, taking his Noise with him.

I’m shaking from the charge to my blood at being hit, shaking from being so fired up and so surprised and so angry and so much hating this town and the men in it that it takes me a while till I can get up and go get my dog again. What was he effing doing out here anyway? I think and I’m so hacked off, still so raging with anger and hate (and fear, yes, fear, shut up) that I don’t even look round to see if Aaron heard my Noise. I don’t look round. I don’t look round.

And then I do look round and I go and get my dog.

“Aaron, Todd? Aaron?”

“Don’t say that name again, Manchee.”

“Bleeding, Todd. Todd? Todd? Todd? Bleeding?”

“I know. Shut up.”

“Whirler,” he says, as if it don’t mean nothing, his head as empty as the sky.

I smack his rump. “Don’t say that neither.”

“Ow? Todd?”

We keep on walking, staying clear of the river on our left. It runs down thru a series of gulches at the east of town, starting way up to the north past our farm and coming down the side of the town till it flattens out into a marshy part that eventually becomes the swamp. You have to avoid the river and especially that marshy part before the swamp trees start cuz that’s where the crocs live, easily big enough to kill an almost-man and his dog. The sails on their backs look just like a row of rushes and if you get too close, WHOOM! — outta the water they come, flying at you with their claws grasping and their mouths snapping and you pretty much ain’t got no chance at all then.

We get ourselves down past the marshy part and I try to take in the swamp quiet as it approaches. There’s nothing to see down here no more, really, which is why men don’t come. And the smell, too, I don’t pretend it don’t smell, but it don’t smell nearly so bad as men make out. They’re smelling their memories, they are, they’re not smelling what’s really here, they’re smelling it like it was then. All the dead things. Spacks and men had different ideas for burial. Spacks just used the swamp, threw their dead right into the water, let ’em sink, which was fine cuz they were suited for swamp burial, I guess. That’s what Ben says. Water and muck and Spackle skin worked fine together, didn’t poison nothing, just made the swamp richer, like men do to soil.

Then suddenly, of course, there were a whole lot more spacks to bury than normal, too many for even a swamp this big to swallow, and it’s a ruddy big swamp, too. And then there were no live spacks at all, were there? Just spack bodies in heaps, piling up in the swamp and rotting and stinking and it took a long time for the swamp to become swamp again and not just a mess of flies and smells and who knows what extra germs they’d kept saved up for us.

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don’t remember nothing, don’t remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone’s ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it’s true, but who knows?

I am the youngest of the whole town, tho. I used to come out and throw rocks at field crows with Reg Oliver (seven months and 8 days older) and Liam Smith (four months and 29 days older) and Seb Mundy who was next youngest to me, three months and a day older, but even he don’t talk to me no more now that he’s a man.

No boys do once they turn thirteen.

Which is how it goes in Prentisstown. Boys become men and they go to their menonly meetings to talk about who knows what and boys most definitely ain’t allowed and if yer the last boy in town, you just have to wait, all by yerself.

Well, you and a dog you don’t want.

But never mind, here’s the swamp and in we go, sticking to the paths that take us round and over the worst of the water, weaving our way round the big, bulby trees that grow up and outta the bog to the needly roof, metres and metres up. The air’s thick and it’s dark and it’s heavy, but it’s not a frightening kind of thick and dark and heavy. There’s lots of life here, loads of it, just ignoring the town as you please, birds and green snakes and frogs and kivits and both kinds of squirrel and (I promise you) a cassor or two and sure there’s red snakes to watch out for but even tho it’s dark, there’s slashes of light that come down from holes in the roof and if you ask me, which you may not be, I grant you that, to me the swamp’s like one big, comfy, not very Noisy room. Dark but living, living but friendly, friendly but not grasping.

Manchee lifts his leg on practically everything till he must be running outta pee and then he heads off under a bush, burbling to himself, finding a place to do his other business, I guess.

But the swamp don’t mind. How could it? It’s all just life, going over itself, returning and cycling and eating itself to grow. I mean, it’s not that it’s not Noisy here. Sure it is, there’s no escaping Noise, not nowhere at all, but it’s quieter than the town. The loud is a different kind of loud, because swamp loud is just curiosity, creachers figuring out who you are and if yer a threat. Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all?

Swamp Noise, tho, swamp Noise is just the birds all thinking their worrisome little birdie thoughts. Where’s food? Where’s home? Where’s my safety? And the waxy squirrels, which are all little punks, teasing you if they see you, teasing themselves if they don’t, and the rusty squirrels, which are like dumb little kids, and sometimes there’s swamp foxes out in the leaves who you can hear faking their Noise to sound like the squirrels they eat and even less often there are mavens singing their weird maven songs and once I swear I saw a cassor running away on two long legs but Ben says I didn’t, says the cassors are long gone from the swamp.

I don’t know. I believe me.

Manchee comes outta the bushes and sits down next to me cuz I’ve stopped right there in the middle of a trail. He looks around to see what I might be seeing and then he says, “Good poo, Todd.”

“I’m sure it was, Manchee.”

I’d better not get another ruddy dog when my birthday comes. What I want this year is a hunting knife like the one Ben carries on the back of his belt. Now that’s a present for a man.

“Poo,” Manchee says quietly.

On we walk. The main bunch of apple trees are a little ways into the swamp, down a few paths and over a fallen log that Manchee always needs help over. When we get there, I pick him up around his stomach and lift him to the top. Even tho he knows what I’m doing, he still kicks his legs all over the place like a falling spider, making a fuss for no reason at all.

“Hold still, you gonk!”

“Down, down, down!” he yelps, scrabbling away at the air.

“Idiot dog.”

I plop him on top the log and climb up myself. We both jump down to the other side, Manchee barking “Jump!” as he lands and keeping on barking “Jump!” as he runs off.

The leap over the log is where the dark of the swamp really starts and the first thing you see are the old