“[A]ristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak … In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.”
— Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism
Welma was rescuing worms from horses, carts, and boys. They seemed hardened stains on the gravel road before she put them in moist, dark alleys, where they could fatten and squirm with time. Welma jumped back from a driver’s speeding cart, whose wheels split half a dozen of the creatures in half. She wanted to cry, while the driver laughed out of sight.
He had killed them on purpose, she was sure of it. That, or he had tried to hit her, because one could not see the worms from such a high seat.
She looked at a split worm on the road. There was no helping this pink-green slime, but perhaps if Welma could take it to a farm it could fertilize the earth. Wait – It moved! It was suffering! Yet Welma did not have the heart to kill it.
Worms help, her mother would tell her. Sometimes, Welma heard her say it to herself when she thought Welma was asleep. Worms help, worms help, worms help.
She found another one, alive and avoided by the cart’s wheels and horse’s hooves.
A rough sandal stomped on it. The foot belonged to a soldier’s boy, Cam Harrel, surrounded by four others. Their faces looked like their fathers’, all of which Welma remembered from her mother’s strange introductions.
“Welma! Welma!” Cam said. “Wormy Welma!”
“Leave them be! They haven’t done anything to you!”
“They’re not worth anything,” said one of his friends. “They don’t know anything. They don’t have heads, or souls. They just are. They’re like rats.”
“That’s not true! My mom says all the time: Worms help!”
“Worms help who?”
“The earth,” she said, but the boys heard uncertainty.
“The earth, she says!”
“Oh, well, if it’s for the earth!”
One of the boys in the back stepped forward. “He’s right that worms don’t know anything. Just so, it doesn’t matter if Welma helps them. We might as well leave her alone.” It was Fredman Borle. “This is a parade. We are here to have fun. Let’s go find a drink.”
Cam did not turn, but stared harder at Welma. “White knight wants to leave the bitch alone.” He kicked gravel at her, but all of it hit the clay brick wall behind her. That was unimportant – certainly, the boys knew, he had aimed at the wall anyway.
“Cam,” Fredman said.
His own name was a very convincing argument, more than any heartfelt plea. “Fine. Let’s go get a drink.”
No, Fredman, Welma wanted to say. Stay with me and help save worms. You’re better than them. But they were already far away, and the fifth day of the Godsribbon parade was beginning. Today, they would celebrate the Godsribbon’s fifth color, the color blue. The morning saw the first of the day’s people marching through the streets of Bridgwal, in the bluest clothing they could find. There were blue ribbons and blue banners for those who could afford them, or who had won them at the end of the green parade the day prior. Every so often, somebody threw a puff of blue powder into the air or at someone else, and this was the one time every seven years when adults had a sense of humor.
Welma joined them. She was in her regular brown cotton, but she was able to goad a friendly child into spattering her with the powder, and then she was part of the blue crowd. She sang songs with them, and it seemed to her that the worms and rats were singing as well. This was a parade for the people.
She was having so much fun that she hardly noticed where the march was headed until she was already at the gallows. The songs stopped at once, and Welma wondered if the people around her hadn’t known either. She wondered if the mass hadn’t come here against its will.
The overseeing soldiers on the great wooden box were unfamiliar to Welma, which was odd. She thought her mother had introduced her to the entire guard, but the faces of these men were strange. There are more of them, Welma thought.
“People of Bridgwal!” one of them said. “The three men you see before you have so unjustly interrupted this celebration of the glory of our homeland! We regret to soil this display of pride with an example of the Crown’s justice. However, this interruption is necessary, as we cannot preserve the very glory we are celebrating in soulless vice, or sympathies with anarchists, or most especially either one that furthers the other! Here, we have a former soldier who deserted his duties to play at dice. Here, a thief who stole from a butcher. And here, a conspirator for the Flowers-in-Autumn. All by their own confessions.”
Welma was almost certain she had seen hundreds of gamblers over the course of the parade. All the vendors were stolen from at one point or another, especially during the busiest seven days in seven years. Why privilege the shops? Welma herself had stolen an apple the night before. Why punish this man in particular? she thought. As for the conspirator, she had no idea what a Flower-in-Autumn was. I like flowers. I like autumn. That’s when the plants are prettiest.
Three trapdoors shot open, three stones tied to the ends of ropes were let loose, and three bodies dropped. Only two necks snapped. The thief kicked and checked his shoulders at open air, or he seemed to from the small angle of him that Welma could see. He was the image of the worm from early, writhing, split by the cart’s wheel. Is there no mercy here? Welma asked herself. Is there no mercy for the dying?
Just then, another soldier walked up to the platform from behind. Welma knew him well. Of all the soldiers who had visited her home, he was the kindest. He brought her sweets and oranges. It was Paul Borle, Fredman’s father, the man who shared Fredman’s freckled face.
He drew his soldier’s sword and cut the thief’s head clean off with righteous anger, which he then turned toward the soldier who had spoken. “You are very bad at your job.” The words were meant for the one overseer, but the voice was meant for the audience.
The audience understood: Move on. Leave. They did not need to be told again, and the marching and singing resumed.
Welma left the train when she saw a group of street performers. She drifted into the small blue crowd that surrounded them, and then she saw why the crowd was so small – two soldiers stood in the corner, halfway in the shadows, steel half drawn, waiting for an excuse to exercise the Crown’s peace. The half of themselves they showed was loud in the sun, but Welma was certain that if no excuse presented itself, they could say they had never been there at all. That was the way they were, Murka and Erin Plouwe. She remembered her mother introducing her to them: These are the Plouwe brothers, Welma. After they leave, you must forget them, because then they were never here.
Worms gathered in the gravel about them. The worms would remember. Worms help.
The performers finished a song of joy. “Thank you,” said the singer, a boy of fifteen or sixteen with a clean beard. “We are the Unfortunate Rakes, and you will all see us soon enough. Perhaps in a denser corner, or a more popular square.” There were claps as one of them put away her six-string, another took apart his flute, and another performed some final tricks with a rainbow-colored coil. At first it fit in his palm, but then the painted spring swung and jumped all around him like an arm-sized wyrm, and Welma loved him more than any of the musicians.
She left by a different way than the others – or she tried to. She started through an alley toward another blue march, but before she was halfway through, a dog turned the corner to greet her at the other end. It stood and panted like some tired guard. Welma thought that it crushed a worm with its final step.
A window opened from above. “Momma!” called a boy. “It’s Koko! The stray! Can I get some meat for it?”
“I don’t know why you love that thing. It’s a wild beast. We saw it kill a cat once.”
“That’s not true, it was playing!”
“The cat was dead, Nathan.”
“No, it wasn’t. I saw it get up and walk away.”
“Then you saw a ghost.”
Arf. Arf! it barked.
“Please!” said the boy, Nathan.
Arf arf arf!
He is not begging the boy, Welma thought, but threatening me.
A rat crawled out near her. Run, its blank eyes said. Run, or die.
Welma ran.
…………
She ran for what felt like miles, until it was not gravel digging into her bare feet, but broken glass – until it was not beer and wine in the air, but ash and smoke. There was a butcher’s shop with the windows smashed in. A gaggle of soldiers walked out with bloody sacks, but they avoided Welma like they avoided the worms and rats that fled into the gravel.
“My brother, my brother,” said one of them, Hearse Enalbiac. He was the only one Welma recognized. Her mother hadn’t told her much about him. As they left, she saw the others draw long knives from the hands that weren’t carrying meat.
There was sobbing in the shop, and Welma crawled over to peer inside.
A boy lay on the dirt floor dead. A splintered ham bone was lodged in his neck, and neither his own nor the meat’s blood was dry.
A man with a droopy mustache knelt beside him. “I do not understand,” he chanted. “I do not understand. I do not understand.”
A large, armored soldier sat on the counter. He held a hunk of pink meat in a gauntleted hand. “Evidently.”
“You killed my son.”
“You have falsely accused a public servant of theft. A good man, honest and true to the state until the bitter end. You have harbored terrorists, and strategized with the Flowers-in-Autumn. You have all but shaken hands with Darren Whitecolm himself.”
“I gave food to the hungry.”
“Hungry for blood. If mouths decide of their own will to spout propaganda, to turn the good people of Bridgwal against one another, to scream paranoia until one cannot see a man sit his working arse without imagining greed and sloth, then those mouths should not be fed.”
“Indeed. Such a liar should bleed out in the street like the dog he is.” The butcher pulled the splintered bone from his innocent son’s throat.
The soldier sighed and stood. He dropped the meat and drew a sword seven times the length of the poor brittle bone. “Yield, confess, repent, and return to whatever honest life I’m convinced you lived before.”
The butcher nodded to Welma. “Did she believe that?” Welma jumped, but then realized the butcher did not even notice her. She followed his gaze across the gravel road to a woman nailed by her wrists and ankles like a star to the wall of an herbalist’s shop – dead, thank god. Its windows were broken as well, and glass sprinkled on the dying plants. Below the woman were three small lumps covered by a huge bloodied coat of red fur, the warmest shroud in the world.
The soldier did not look, but struck first. He pinned the butcher to the wall by the chest with one jab. Welma did not want to watch another man die today, but the soldier enchanted her with his free hand. As the butcher dropped the bone, the soldier removed his helm with unmatched deftness and slowly, slowly, twisted his head toward Welma.
The face was covered in blue-gray hair, from the top of his head to the neck that wormed into the leather and steel that covered the rest of his great grotesque body. Large pink ears that heard too much rose above where any ears should be. His eyes were nights without stars: solid black but for yellow goop in four corners. Salt-and-pepper whiskers sprouted from the base of a nose that was far too long, which ended in a gummy pink dot. He smiled to show four long yellow teeth, two on the top and two on the bottom: As above, so below. This, the gross teeth seemed to say, is the justice of your god.
“Ah, the face…” said the monster, but he was not talking about his own. “I believe I’ve met your mother.”
She fled into another alley, and from there to another, and another. Find the crowd! she told herself through tears. This is a parade! The Godsribbon! Once in seven years!
She heard the march before she saw it. When it could only be a few streets away, she ran into the boys from early: Cam Harrel and his gang. They had found a new victim while everyone was celebrating. Almost everyone, Welma reminded herself. Did you forget already?
Welma stayed and watched from the alley with the worms and rats, as she was so prone to do.
Then she saw that the child they had surrounded with savage kicks and jagged gravel in hand was not separate from the gang. It was Fredman Borle himself who coughed blood on the ground, and whose hand was crushed under the foot of a friend in whom he had seen good.
Cam threw his piece of gravel down. It missed Fredman’s head and smashed against the road, but that didn’t matter, because Cam picked up and threw a new piece. That missed too – or else Cam had aimed at the ground all along. “Say he shouldn’t have done it!” Cam yelled. “Say he should have stayed where he was.”
“My father gave mercy to a suffering man, by doing the job that four others should have done in the first place.”
“Traitor!” said another boy. “He did it for contempt!”
“Out of spite!” someone else agreed.
“Yes,” said Cam. “Contempt and spite. Tell us your father’s a doubting, spiteful, fucking traitor, and we won’t treat you like they’re about to treat him.”
Fredman tried to rise, but Cam stomped on his back. “Say it!”
Welma felt a horrible urge to intervene, but with what? The worms told her to shout, the rats told her to throw gravel, but what then? What could she do that wouldn’t get her hurt, or killed, or worse?
Kill them, a voice told her. Her objection was not ethical, but practical.
“I…” Fredman said.
Say it! Welma thought. Say it! Say whatever! Say that the sky is orange, say that fish can fly, no matter if it’s true! You know Cam would!
Fredman spat red. “I love my father.”
Cam stepped off of him and knelt down. “You look like him, too.”
“And you like yours.”
Cam forced Fredman’s head down, grabbed a crude piece of the road, and jammed it into Fredman’s neck.
Welma covered her mouth to dampen her squeal. Worms help, worms help, worms help, she thought, because there was nothing left in the world to comfort her.
No, that wasn’t true. She had a mother.
As the boy who loved his father died unprotected by the blue parade, Welma began a long walk home.
…………
Welma opened the door, sobbing. “Mom, he – they – there was a hanging and – and a man with a rat’s face who said he knew – knew you and boys killing each other and I just – I don’t understa-haaand!”
Her pale, wheat-haired mother was at the kitchen table with none other than Phillip Harrel, the pig, the father of pigs. “Were there?” he said. “Do tell.”
Welma walked shaking to her mother, who embraced her. “Welma? What’s wrong?”
I watched it. I watched Cam Harrel kill Fredman Borle in cold blood, and I stood there like a sack of flour. I’m a coward, Mom. I’m a coward. “They’re killing each other. I don’t know why. Help me understand. I just want to understand!”
“Oh, but surely, you do,” said Harrel. Welma noticed the wine glass, whose stem touched his wrist on the table. Purple stains blotched his thin, hairless lips. “You have your mother’s big, understanding eyes.”
Welma felt her mother’s hug tighten, felt her mother’s arms go cold. “Leave.”
“What?”
“Leave, sir. Some of us don’t want to be seen in our children.”
“You’re imagining insults!”
“I am noticing threats. Leave, or I’ll kill you.”
For the first time that day, Welma wanted to see a man die. She wanted blood for blood. Kill them, Mom, she thought. Kill the gallows overseers, kill the big rat, and kill the Harrels: Father and son.
He stood suddenly, kicked the chair back, and swung his arm at the wine glass – or he aimed at empty air, because that is what his arm found. “Bitch,” he hissed. Nonetheless, he left. Phillip Harrel was not dead yet.
When he was gone, Welma’s mother began to stroke the girl’s hair. “I am so sorry, Welma. I heard rumors of brutality, but I thought they were just that – rumors. I did not think they would strike during the parade. Tell me what you saw.”
Welma told. She told everything, from helping the worms to the botched execution, from the soldiers who may or may not have watched the performers to Koko the white dog, from the rat man who killed the butcher to Cam Harrel killing Fredman Borle.
“And I could’ve done something!” Welma confessed. “I could have shouted or thrown stones or distracted them but I watched them kill their friend and mine too and I did nothing, like a coward!”
“You were right to stay.”
Welma sniffed, but the snot was already on her mother’s shirt. “Huh?”
“They would have killed you too. Or else they would have hurt you, and then killed Fredman anyway. Welma, I am so sorry, but it is not brave to be brashly defiant.”
“But I watched them… just like I ran from the dog.”
“You were right both times. Sometimes, the brave thing to do is to watch or run. It would have been easy to fight and lose: Not so to stay and win another day.”
“But Fredman…”
“Fredman was a good kid. In a just world, he and his father would be alive and well, and adored by all. Their bravery would be celebrated – not punished. But this is not a just world, and it is as you said: Fredman should have confessed to crimes – by him or his father, real or imagined – to live to fight another day. I think that you are the bravest person in all the world, Welma, and I am glad you have the type of bravery that this world needs. Do not destroy yourself in a vain prolonging of injustice. I am glad you’re here, and I love you.”
Welma stopped crying and breathed her mother in, and everything was sweet and good.
…………
It burned to piss. Welma’s mother missed a good night’s sleep, but at least Welma was safe in her bed. That is all I can hope for, Welma’s mother thought, when I’m woken up in the middle of the night by this hellfire coming out of me. At least my daughter is safe.
She was glad, however, for the pennyroyal tea. Welma was safe, for now, but that did not mean there needed to be more of her. Besides, the heat of the tea inside her was a healing warm, unlike the searing of the acid brought about by those damnable worms.
“Worms help, worms help,” she breathed as the piss burned out of her and into the pot, but it was harder and harder to believe. Help whom? They certainly don’t help me.
When she was done, she moved to the small excuse for a vanity by her small excuse for a bed. At the desk was a letter. The sigil on the wax seal looked like a child’s drawing of a flower – a droopy stem, two leaves, and four big petals – but it had not been put there by children.
Fuck the Flowers, she thought. She tore the letter in half, then into quarters, then into eighths, and then slivers after slivers and slivers. The next fire she saw, this parchment would feed. Fuck Darren Whitecolm, for the work he has put me to.
She turned to the mirror and angled her head down to look through her wispy hair. Slowly, she put a finger to the top of her head, moved the hair aside, and pressed into her skull.
The finger met no resistance. The empty spaces were becoming as familiar to her as those fingers were themselves. It was getting bad enough that she would need to purchase or find a wig. Even the pig-headed Phillip Harrel had come too close to discovering her today.
The worms have dug holes into my skull, she thought. Or is it the crabs? I get these conditions confused. It is so easy to exchange them in my mind when they beget one another, when they find each other, when they gather like cruel and indistinguishable twelve-year-old boys. She wondered how many other tiny monsters were somewhere in her body making misery and death. Though she did not know which infection caused which symptom, she could feel them all, a mass of worms and things inside her, eating away at her body and mind one hour at a time. They were killing every part of her except her soul, but Darren Whitecolm had already done that some ten years before.
She heard the strumming of strings, the whistle of a flute, and the wordless vocalizing of a singer, and came to her window to look out. Just outside in the square below were a group of performers and a sizable audience.
“Welcome, welcome,” said one of the entertainers, a boy with a beard. “Welcome, celebrants of the night. Thank you for joining us as a blue fades to an indigo. I never saw that shade, but nobody asked me.” There were giggles. “We are the Unfortunate Rakes!”
He is drunk, she realized. The crowd hooted and applauded. They are too. There was behind him a flautist, a six-string player, and a flexible coilmaster.
“This song,” said the boy, “has a complicated oral history, but we like to call it St. James Infirmary!”
More cheers, more applause, and Welma’s mother found herself smiling at this small joy in such dark times. That was, until a monster joined the crowd: Koko the white dog, the stray that Welma’s mother hated so much. When the boy sang, it seemed as if the dog howled along. The introduction was slow:
“It was down at Harold’s barroom,
The corner by the square.
They were serving drinks as usual,
And the usual crowd was there.
Then up stood thin Harry Harkwood,
His eyes were bloodshot red,
He looked at the crowd all around him
And this is what he said:”
The flute and the six-string hastened to a groove, and the motions of the coilmaster sped to match.
“I went down to St. James Infirmary.
I saw my lover there!
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So sweet, so cold, so fair.”
So sweet, cold, and fair indeed! thought Welma’s mother. Is that what I am to you, Darren? I should not be so instrumentalized! I do not deserve this! Yes, the men who come to me deserve it all. The worms, the crabs – all of it. Their wives? Perhaps. I do not know the extent of their participation. But who else? The undeserving whores they’ll visit? Prisoners, already subject to such injustice? Worms help the movement, but will they help the people?
She supposed that, in a far and distant future, the answer was yes. When strong men were dead and buried, when men with swords and cannons were weaker than they otherwise would be, people would be glad for the worms, and the justice would eventually be worth the suffering in its name. But in the time between then and now…
“Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be!
She can search this wide world over,
She’ll never find a sweeter man than me.”
I should have gotten help.
I deserve help.
I will not seek help.
“When I die, bury me in straight-legged britches,
A fancy coat, and a high-top hat,
Shower my corpse in silver and gold
To let the boys know I died standing pat.
Gimme six crap-shooters for my pallbearers,
A choir girl to sing me a song,
Put the Unfortunate Rakes on my hearse wagon
To raise hell as I roll along!
Bring half a dozen or so good horses
To pull my rubber-tired hack,
’Cause it’s a mile or a league to the graveyard,
But she an’ I ain’t comin’ back.
Folks, now that you’ve heard my story,
Let’s have another round of booze.
If any of our friends should ask you,
Tell ’em I got the St. James Infirmary blues!
If anybody else should ever ask you,
I got the St. James Infirmary blues!”
There will be silver and gold, thought Welma’s mother, at the funeral services for all the men I’ve begun to kill. There will be great, fancy gatherings for those who will mourn Murka and Erin Plouwe, Hearse Enalbiac, and Phillip Harrel – even the Bullrat, whom I had hoped Welma would never meet. Their corpses will indeed be dressed in fancy coats and hats, their black carriages will be high and pristine, and bands and singers will make loud music in their names. But among the mourners, specking those fancy clothes, and in the cadavers themselves will be vengeful, wriggling worms. Something overtook her – the worms, probably – and she shouted “Worms help!” to the crowd of celebrants below. They all cheered.
These worms inside me are inside so many soldiers too. They have in them that which they hate.