MSTed: Return of the Native, Ch. 3, Part 1

[Jess Nevins]

3 - The Custom of the Country

Mike (singing): He was the custom of the country...
Tom: House rules, Mike: no Kenny Rogers. Ever.

Had a looker-on been posted in the immediate vicinity of the barrow, he
would have

Tom: Plucked his eyes out rather than face one more paragraph.

learned that these persons were boys and men of the neighbouring
hamlets.

Crow (British accent): To be or not to be--
Mike (British accent): No, no, you're doing it wrong; it's "To BE
or not to BE--"
Tom (British accent): Where did you learn acting from, an
American? It's "TO be or NOT to BE...."

Each, as he ascended the barrow, had been heavily laden with furze
faggots, carried upon the shoulder by means of a long stake sharpened at
each end for impaling them easily--two in front and two behind.

Mike: It's the Vlad Tepes Dancers!

They came from a part of the heath a quarter of a mile to the rear,
where furze almost exclusively prevailed as a product.

Tom: South Boston?

Every individual was so involved in furze

Crow: Hey, furze dead, man.
Tom: Thank you, Peter PETA.

by his method of carrying the faggots that he appeared like a bush on
legs
till he had thrown them down. The party had marched in trail, like a
travelling flock of sheep; that is to say, the strongest first, the weak
and
young behind.

Mike: Friedrich Nietzsche's _Chorus Line_.

The loads were all laid together,

Tom: And Dorothy Parker wasn't surprised at all.

and a pyramid of furze thirty feet in circumference now occupied the
crown
of the tumulus,

Crow: And Egdon's crown was the *grandest* of them all!

which was known as Rainbarrow for many miles round. Some made
themselves busy with matches,

Mike (British voice): Matches? Blimey, we don't need no bleedin'
matches!

and in selecting the driest tufts of furze,

Tom: Completely ignored the rest of Somerville.

others in loosening the bramble bonds which held the faggots together.
Others, again, while this was in progress, lifted their eyes and swept
the
vast expanse of country commanded by their position,

Crow (British voice): I don't care how you do it, you must sink
Egdon Heath.

now lying nearly obliterated by shade.

Mike: Yeah, "Cool Operator" has that effect on me, too.

In the valleys of the heath nothing save its own wild face

Tom: Wasn't that the sequel Audrey Hepburn refused to make?
Crow: Yeah - they got Ruth Buzzi to do her character instead.

was visible at any time of day;

Crow: I'd say this story is risible at any time of day.
Tom: Ralph Nader on Thomas Hardy: Unsafe To Read At Any
Speed.

but this spot commanded a horizon enclosing a tract of far extent,
and in many cases lying beyond the heath country. None of its features
could be seen now, but the whole made itself felt as a vague stretch of
remoteness.

Mike: Kinda like the feeling I get watching Dick Clarke.

While the men and lads were building the pile, a change took place in
the
mass of shade which denoted the distant landscape. Red suns and tufts
of
fire one by one began to arise, flecking the whole country round. They
were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets

Tom: Number double zero, the Chief, *IS* the Melancholy Dane!
Crow: On tonight's episode: To be, or not to be - that is the
MURDER!

that were engaged in the same sort of commemoration. Some were distant,
and stood in a dense atmosphere,

Crow (British peasant voice): Alright, who had the bean burrito for
lunch?

so that bundles of pale straw-like beams radiated around them in the
shape
of a fan. Some were large and near, glowing scarlet-red from the shade,
like wounds in a black hide. Some were Maenades, with winy faces and
blown hair.

Mike: And some had slimy green skin and oozing sores, and were
from New Jersey.

These tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds above them and lit up
their
ephemeral caves, which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons.

Tom (old British woman voice): Double, double, toil and trouble,
As The World Turns, and watch the Hubble....

Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole
bounds of the district;

Mike: For this was Orange County, and everybody was burning Bill
Clinton in effigy.

and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the figures themselves
are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality of each fire by its
angle
and direction, though nothing of the scenery could be viewed.

Crow: Because they hadn't paid their cable bills.

The first tall flame from Rainbarrow

Mike: Was Tom Cruise.
Tom: And his beard, Nicole Kidman?
Crow: I thought he was her merkin.

sprang into the sky,

Tom: HUZZAH!

attracting all eyes that had been fixed on the distant conflagrations
back to
their own attempt in the same kind.

Crow: Does that sentence scan?
Tom: Maybe if we play it backwards?

The cheerful blaze streaked the inner surface of the human circle--

Mike: This sounds like a teaser for the Montel Williams show.

now increased by other stragglers, male and female--with its own gold
livery, and even overlaid the dark turf

Tom: They're holding a campfire in Giants Stadium?

around with a lively luminousness, which softened off into obscurity
where
the barrow rounded downwards out of sight. It showed the barrow to be
the segment of a globe,

Crow: Egdon Heath is near the MIT dome?

as perfect as on the day when it was thrown up,

Mike ("INDUSTRY!" voice): God created the heavens and the
Earth in seven days - with the help of Ipecac.
Tom ("INDUSTRY!" voice): Ipecac - buy it at a pharmacy near
you.

As even the little ditch remaining from which the earth was dug. Not a
plough had ever disturbed a grain of that stubborn soil. In the heath's
barrenness to the farmer lay its fertility to the historian. There had
been no
obliteration, because there had been no tending.

Tom: It was after the apocalypse. No farmers were left to farm. But
none were prepared for....the robot Hardycost.
Mike: Is that when large typewriters roam the land boring people to
death?

It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some radiant upper
story of the world, detached from and independent of the dark stretches
below.

Crow snores.

The heath down there was now a vast abyss, and no longer a continuation
of what they stood on; for their eyes, adapted to the blaze, could see
nothing of the deeps beyond its influence. Occasionally, it is true,

Mike (jolted awake): Whuh?

a more vigorous flare than usual from their faggots sent darting lights
like
aides-de-camp down the inclines to some distant bush, pool, or patch of
white sand, kindling these to replies of the same colour, till all was
lost in
darkness again.

Tom snores.

Then the whole black phenomenon beneath represented Limbo as viewed
from the brink by the sublime Florentine in his vision, and the muttered
articulations of the wind in the hollows were as complaints and
petitions
from the "souls of mighty worth" suspended therein.

It was as if these men and boys had suddenly

Crow (Rod Serling voice): Been trapped - trapped in a world where
long-windedness masquerades as style, and prolix pretends to be deep.
You see,
these men and boys have wandered...into the Hardy Zone.

dived into past ages, and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had
before been familiar with this spot. The ashes of the original British
pyre
which blazed from that summit

Mike: Let me guess - Arsenal's supporters were celebrating the FA
cup finals?

lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread. The flames
from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone down upon the
lowlands as these were shining now.

Tom (Estragon voice): Nobody comes, nobody goes - it's awful!

Festival fires to Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and
duly had their day.

Crow: Maybe, if we're lucky, the Vikings will come back and kill
Hardy?
Tom: Nah - they're too busy losing Super Bowls.

Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen
were
now enjoying

Mike: Actually, Crow, if we're lucky the Vikings will come back
and kill us.

are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon
ceremonies

Tom: Which is a pretty apt description of the Tory Party platform,
don't you think?

than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.

Moreover to light a fire

Crow: Will provide inspiration for a song to MC 900 Foot Jesus.

is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress,
the
curfew is sounded throughout Nature.

Mike (British voice): Stay clear of the moors between 9 pm & 6 am
on weeknights, boys, and 11 pm and 6 am on weekends.

It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat

Tom: Yeah, the Barchetta is a lousy car.

that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery
and
death.

Crow: What - Thatcher's running again?

Black chaos comes,

Mike: John Major's opening his mouth!
Tom, Crow and Mike all duck & scatter.

and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Mike: And the veiled Joelle said, "Look at that @#$%&! dance."

The brilliant lights and sooty shades which struggled upon the skin and
clothes of the persons standing round

Tom: Goths. Just no getting rid of them.

caused their lineaments and general contours to be drawn with Dureresque
vigour and dash.

Crow: "Dureresque?" Maybe he means Goyaesque?
Tom: Yeah - Vincent Van Goya.
Crow (to Mike): Hit him.

Yet the permanent moral expression of each face it was impossible to
discover, for

Mike: They were farmers, and had lost their faces in various
accidents.

as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped through the
surrounding
air, the blots of shade and flakes of light upon the countenances of
the
group changed shape and position endlessly.

Tom: It's Mumenschantz!

All was unstable; quivering as leaves, evanescent as lightning. Shadowy
eye-sockets, deep as those of a death's head,

Crow: It's Joan Collins - run!

suddenly turned into pits of lustre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then
it
was shining; wrinkles were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated
entirely by a changed ray.

Mike: Sounds like Downtown Julie Brown, pre- and post-facelift.

Nostrils were dark wells; sinews in old necks were gilt mouldings;

Tom: I'm developing a deep revulsion for the human body, Mike.

things with no particular polish on them were glazed; bright objects,
such as the tip of a furze-hook one of the men carried, were as glass;
eyeballs glowed like little lanterns.

Crow: Kyle Rayner is on fire?
Tom: Good.

Those whom Nature had depicted as merely quaint became grotesque, the
grotesque became preternatural; for all was in extremity.

Mike: In other words, he went to Doug Herzog's family reunion.

Hence it may be that the face of an old man,

Tom: Inspires deep loathing in others.

who had like others been called to the heights by the rising flames, was
not
really the mere nose and chin that it appeared to be, but an appreciable
quantity of human countenance.

Crow: I'm seeing Jamie Farr - how about you guys?

He stood complacently sunning himself in the heat.

Mike (British voice): No way that punk Zonker is gonna beat me in
the George Hamilton Invitational this year, no sirree!

With a speaker, or stake, he tossed the outlying scraps of fuel into the
conflagration, looking at the midst of the pile, occasionally lifting
his eyes
to measure the height of the flame, or to follow the great sparks which
rose
with it and sailed away into darkness.

Tom (old man voice): Back in the old days, we would have thrown
some of the local Irish on the fire...these kids, no respect for
tradition.

The beaming sight, and the penetrating warmth, seemed to breed in him a
cumulative cheerfulness, which soon amounted to delight. With his stick
in
his hand he began to jig a private minuet,

Crow (British voice): He's having an episode - medic! Medic!

a bunch of copper seals shining and swinging like a pendulum from under
his waistcoat:

Mike: That's not a seal.
Tom: Oh, gross.

he also began to sing, in the voice of a bee up a flue--

Mike, Tom and Crow (Jerry Lewis voice): Ladadee oh lady so fine
with the skirt and the thing with the frills and the thing ladadee.....

"The king' call'd down' his no-bles all',
By one', by two', by three';
Earl Mar'-shal, I'll' go shrive'-the queen',

Crow: He'll go swive the queen? Can you say that?
Mike: Shrive, Crow, shrive.

And thou' shalt wend' with me'.
"A boon', a boon', quoth Earl' Mar-shal',

Mike (commercial voice): Big Daddy Earl Marshall, 5 time Formula
One champion and Quaker State user.

And fell' on his bend'-ded knee',
That what'-so-e'er' the queen' shall say',

Tom: Paul Lynde has no comment.

No harm' there-of' may be'."

Want of breath prevented a continuance of the song;

Crow: And there was much rejoicing.

and the breakdown attracted the attention of a firm-standing man of
middle
age, who kept each corner of his crescent-shaped mouth rigorously drawn
back into his cheek,

Mike: With a big ole chaw of Red Injun.

as if to do away with any suspicion of mirthfulness which might
erroneously have attached to him.

Tom: Mirth? Because of Hardy story? Oh, I don't *think* so

"A fair stave, Grandfer Cantle; but I am afeard 'tis too much for the
mouldy
weasand of such a old man as you,"

Crow: Mouldy Weasand? I saw them in concert once. Great mosh
pit.

he said to the wrinkled reveller. "Dostn't wish th' wast three sixes
again,
Grandfer, as you was when you first learnt to sing it?"

Mike: Oh, dear. I thought we were reading the English translation.

"Hey?" said Grandfer Cantle, stopping in his dance.

Tom: If I had to watch his dance I think I'd be physically ill.

"Dostn't wish wast young again, I say? There's a hole in thy poor
bellows
nowadays seemingly."

Crow: Well, now I know who my most hated character in this book
is.

"But there's good art in me?

Mike: A sentence that has never been said about Hardy.

If I couldn't make a little wind go a long ways I should seem no younger
than the most aged man, should I, Timothy?"

Tom: If he's talking about what I think he's talking about I'm going
to hurl.

"And how about the new-married folks down there at the Quiet Woman
Inn?"

Crow (tv announcer's voice): And what about Chad's love for
Naomi? Will Jeremy ever walk again?

the other inquired, pointing towards a dim light in the direction of the
distant highway,

Mike: Maybe this is where those lines from "An American Girl"
came from?

but considerably apart from where the reddleman was at that moment
resting.

Tom (Anna Russell voice): You remember the reddleman, don't
you?

"What's the rights of the matter

Crow (old man voice): I'll ask Tom Paine - he knows all about stuff
like that.

about 'em? You ought to know, being an understanding man."

"But a little rakish, hey? I own to it. Master Cantle is that, or he's
nothing.
Yet 'tis a gay fault,