by David Almond
“Dusk’s the best,” he says. “When the sky begins to burn and the poppies start to glow and the shadows of the deer prowl and wild black starlings swirl in massive clouds above.”
He smiles.
“Sometimes I think I’m turning to an old fool,” he says. “I’m losing me mind to the beauty of the world, and one day I’ll be lost in it forever. I’ll be standing here at the fence, but the real me will be gone, lost in the starlings and the deer and the poppies and the setting sun . . .”
He grins as his voice peters out.
“Tek no notice, lad,” he says. “But you passing by with the dog gives us a chance to blather on. Heading upward, eh?”
“Aye.”
“A good direction to go.”
“You’ve not seen Zorro Craig, have you?”
“Zorro Craig? I don’t know the feller, so I wouldn’t know if I had. What’s he look like?”
“Just a lad. Dark hair. He’d’ve been running, if it was him.”
“No. Sorry. Mind you, I do get lost in the contemplation of me brassicas and peas.”
Oliver doesn’t mention the death, the murder. Maybe he knows nothing about it yet. Maybe the news hasn’t traveled so high yet. Davie doesn’t tell him, doesn’t want to disturb the peace.
“I did see a running lass, though,” says Oliver.
“A running lass?”
“Aye, dressed all in blue with her black hair flying, dashing up the allotment path.”
He closes his eyes.
“Bonny, she was,” he says. “Running like she had a wind behind her and wings at her back.”
He smiles. He reaches into another pocket.
“And I get lost in the contemplation of these sweet little beggars too.”
He takes out a tiny bright-yellow chick. He cups it in his hand. So soft, so bright, so trembling, so alive.
“Come into the world just two short days ago. You want to hold her?”
Davie puts his hand out. He takes the chick into his cupped palm. There’s hardly any weight to it at all. He raises it to his eyes and gazes at it. How can anything be so yellow? How can anything be so frail and yet so filled with life? How can anything take such a shape? How can anything be anything?
“Three days back,” says Oliver, “she was a lump of feathery gloop squashed into a shell. Weeks before that she was nothing at all. And now she’s come out and she’s the color of the sun that’s shining down on her. How can something like that come about?”
He looks at Davie as if he expects an answer.
Davie shakes his head.
“Nobody really knows, Mr. Henderson,” he says.
“Aye, that’s right. Nobody knows. It’s all a mystery and it keeps on happening and happening and happening. And I wake up every day this summer and I come into this garden, and every day I’m . . .” He stares at the sky, seeking a word. “I’m astonished, I’m astounded, I’m absolutely flabbergasted, lad.”
Davie passes back the chick. Oliver takes it, puts it into his pocket again.
“Of course, the thing to protect her from is Mr. Fox, who’s another wild and wanton visitor to these parts at night. You ever hear him calling?”
Davie thinks of his own fox cries. He doesn’t even know how close they are to true fox cries or whether they just pour out of him.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“You will, if you listen hard enough and deep enough on a still and silent night. It’s a screech to chill your blood.”
Davie ponders that. It will be something to listen for, something to remember.
“So has he got something you’re wanting?” says Oliver.
“Who?” Davie says.
“This Zorro lad.”
“Oh. I’m not sure, really.” Davie laughs. “I’m not sure I even want to find him, really.”
Oliver laughs too and gives Davie another pear. He tells him to keep it for the journey. Davie puts it into the sack.
“Thank you,” he says.
Oliver contemplates the boy.
“You think I’m kind, don’t you?” he says.
“Yes. I think so.”
“I am, Davie. I’m known for it. And these hands are tender.”
He holds them out, his hands. Davie sees the intricate patterns on them, the dark garden dirt caught in the creases.
“They turn the earth,” says Oliver. “They plant seeds and they pick fruit and vegetables and flowers. They tend newborn chicks.”
Davie wants to reach and touch them, to run his fingertips across the skin of this man.
Oliver knows that.
“Go on, son,” he says. “Touch them.”
So Davie does that. The skin is rough and dry. He can feel the muscles and bones beneath. Oliver turns his hands over and Davie touches the smoother skin there, feels the strong tendons, touches the knuckles, the nails. He used to touch his dad’s hands in the same way, back when he was young. It was an intense and simple joy, to touch the man who was his father. He remembers how they laughed together when Davie ran his finger across his dad’s palm to tickle him. And how tender his dad’s hands felt when they tousled his hair or stroked his cheek. And how strong and safe they felt when they gripped him and raised him high into the air and when his dad called out from below, “Go on, my Davie! Fly!”
Oliver smiles gently. He touches Davie’s cheek.
“Good lad,” he whispers, just like Davie’s dad used to.
“But,” says Oliver, closing his hands and letting them hang at his sides, “these hands have been with me to war, Davie. And I should tell you that I strangled three men with them on a summer’s night.”
He tilts his head to the side and regards the boy.
“I’m a killer,” he says. “A strangler.”
He pauses, allowing Davie to ponder this new fact.
“You ever known a killer before?” he says.
Davie shakes his head and remembers a morning a few years back. His dad had bought him a toy gun for his birthday. It was a plastic thing, just like the shotgun they used on stagecoaches in The Lone Ranger to kill pursuing bandits and renegade Indians. His dad grinned with pleasure as he demonstrated how to put the gun to the shoulder, how to peer through the sights, how to squeeze the trigger and fire imaginary bullets at some unsuspecting passerby.
“You’re dead,” said Dad.
They both laughed.
“Everybody likes to get a gun in their hand, eh?” said Dad.
He fired again.
“You’re dead!” he said again.
Then held the gun, admired it, passed it back to his son.
“Your turn,” he said, and Davie started squeezing the trigger and firing bullets and sending imaginary people to their imaginary deaths.
A siren sounds again, calls Davie out of the memory, and it seems so far away, as if it’s in another world.
“My dad went to war,” he says to Oliver.
“I know that, son. And he was a tender man like me, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Yes. Of course his dad was tender. But he knew nothing about his time at war.
“Would my dad do what you did?” Davie asks.
“Who knows?” says Oliver. “Maybe he would, if he had to. But if he had, I suppose he wouldn’t tell his own son about it when the son was still a bairn.”
Davie tugs at the haversack straps. He feels its weight on his back. When Dad took it out of a high cupboard and passed it on, he said, “This sack’s been all the way to war and back, Davie.”
Davie hears his voice in his ear, his breath on his cheek.
“Now carry it through the peace,” Dad whispered.
Oliver’s smiling gently.
“You keep slipping into a dream, don’t you?” he says.
Davie shrugs and smiles.
“Into dreams and memories,” he says.
“That’s all right,” says Oliver. “Sometimes a memory or a dream is a fine place to be. And sometimes it can seem
like everything is just a dream. Don’t you think that?”
“Yes,” says Davie. “I do.”
They’re silent for a moment.
“It had to be done,” says Oliver. “It had to be done in silence on that summer’s night those years ago. It was the only thing to do. I was the only one to do it.”
He sighs.
“It’s all a mystery,” he says. “Isn’t it? Poppies and starlings, newborn chicks as bright as the sun, ugly dogs, gardeners’ hands that care and kill.”
He watches Davie.
“It is, isn’t it?” he repeats.
“Aye. It’s all a mystery, Mr. Henderson.”
“They should just have chosen two, shouldn’t they?”
Davie doesn’t know what he’s on about.
“Two men,” says Oliver. “They should have chosen a man from either side and let them fight it out. No need for all that war. No need for bullets and bombs. No need for all that slaughter. No need for three lads to be strangled. No need for men like me to turn to stranglers. Just two men fighting to the death and letting that be a start and end to it.”
“Aye,” says Davie. “It would have been better.”
But he remembers the delight of the kids on Balaclava Street as they hauled him to the fire. He remembers the determination of the gathering Killen clan. He remembers his dad’s contentment when he held the toy gun in his hands.
“Good lad,” says Oliver Henderson. “Walk on in peace. I hope you find your Zorro Craig. You’ll say hello on your way back down again?”
“I will.”
And on goes Davie, with the ugly dog in front.
Two ladies in a garden before a house on Windy Ridge.
“You’re Davie, aren’t you?” says one of them in a low voice as he passes by.
She’s Letitia Spall. He knows her. The one beside her is unknown. They both have arms folded beneath their breasts. There are dazzling hip-high flowers, perhaps dahlias, glowing all around them.
“I see your mother’s face in you,” says Letitia. “I see your father’s too.”
Davie wants to move on but the words cause him to hesitate.
“I knew you when you were a baby,” she continues. “I remember I slipped a coin one day into the covers on your pram. You were a bonny bairn. I see that bonny bairn in you as well.”
She smiles and leans closer.
Her companion smiles as well.
“I didn’t know you when you were a bairn,” she says. “But that’s not too surprising. I come from Hexham, from far beyond the far side of the hill, and didn’t know these parts at all until I came to know Letitia, and began to come across the hill to spend my time with her. My name is Annie, Davie. I am pleased to meet you, son.”
The ladies lean toward each other, and their shoulders touch.
Behind and above them, a bedroom window of the house is wide open. A white net curtain drifts before it in the gentle breeze.
An orange butterfly lands on Letitia’s shoulder. She whispers to it that it is welcome there.
Davie smiles and moves to move on.
“We were talking of the buzzards,” says Letitia.
“Of the buzzards?” says Davie.
“Aye,” says Letitia. “And of the vulnerability of all babes.”
“Look high,” says Annie. “And peel your eyes.”
They all turn their faces to the summit and to the light beyond. There are larks there, Davie knows, that are invisible.
“They are there, the buzzards,” she says, “if you’re able to look hard enough.”
So Davie looks as hard as he is able, and turns his eyes and mind from the two ladies, from gardens and allotments and from playing fields and drifts of poppies, and from the hill above him that he will climb, and, yes, at last he sees them, two dark birds with wings outstretched, wheeling in the blue. Two tiny birds, which must be massive to be seen from here so far below. Two massive birds above the place to which he seems to be heading as he wanders through the day.
“We talked,” says Letitia, “of a tale that was told to me so long ago when I was little more than a babe myself.”
Davie turns his eyes from the distant birds to the nearby lady.
“I was told,” she continues, “that one summer morning, bright and warm as this one is, a buzzard dropped from its distant sky to the air above these gardens. It dropped down to a basket on a table in which a little babe was fast asleep, and it took that babe in its claws and carried it away.”
“And I said,” says her companion, Annie, “that such a thing would be impossible. A little babe, no matter how tiny it might have been, would be an impossible thing for a bird such as a buzzard to lift. What do you think, bonny lad?”
“I suppose,” says Davie, “that I think it’d be impossible as well.”
“And yet,” says Letitia, “I was told that such a thing indeed was true. And in my bairn-ness, I believed it. And I was told that the mother and the father and the brother of the babe rushed out of this house and from this gate, and hurried upward across the fields, all the time calling to the bird above to give them back the little bairn they loved so much. But the bird continued upward, and the tiny babe continued dangling from its claws.”
She pauses, to allow Davie to look once more toward the sky above the hill, to imagine there the upward-flapping bird, the dangling babe. Would the babe, he wonders, have been screaming? Would it understand that now it was exposed in air, when once it was at home on earth? Would it perhaps accept that this was just the fate of all babes born onto this earth?
And he imagines the frantic family beneath. He imagines them howling at the sky, holding out their arms in case the babe should fall.
“A bird,” Letitia goes on, “can fly through air much quicker than a man, a woman or a boy can run across the earth. Soon, because of shrubs and trees and rocks, they could not always keep the bird in sight.”
“Can you imagine it?” says Annie. “I’m sure that I cannot. Perhaps a buzzard could carry a babe as far as a garden gate, perhaps even as far as an allotment row, but surely it couldn’t carry a babe as far as that! Couldn’t carry it, as Letitia told me, until it hovered a hundred feet over the summit of the hill with the babe in its sharp claws while the desperate family sprinted, gasped, grunted in useless hot pursuit.”
“But that’s the tale that was told to me,” Letitia continues, “the tale that has lodged itself deep in my heart, so that at my age now, I hardly care if it’s true or not. I care only for the strangeness and the beauty and the terror of it. The bird went out of sight, Davie. The sky was empty but for the everlasting larks. And the family reached the summit and they wept to know such loss. And then they roamed the high land, until the boy, the brother, began to call, ‘There! There! Hear it? Hear it?’ And he led the mother and the father toward what he had heard, the weeping of a baby.”
“They found it?” says Davie.
“They hurried to the sound. And, oh, they found a baby lying on green turf beside a trickling stream.”
“A baby?” says Davie. “It wasn’t theirs?”
“Ah, at first they said they couldn’t be certain.”
“Couldn’t be certain?”
“They said at first they thought the baby’s crying voice had changed its tone. They thought the eyes were a brighter blue than they’d been before. And when they came to it, it did not stretch its arms out to them as it would have done before. But then they calmed. They knew that it must be their own babe.”
“Who else’s could it be?”
“No one else’s, of course. They said afterward that their perception of the babe had been confounded by their terror. They said that it wouldn’t be surprising if a babe did not undergo some changes after the experience of such an ambushment and such a flight into the sky. They lifted the babe and carried it home to Windy Ridge, where it was loved, they said, as no other babe has ever been loved, and it grew and flourished as all babes seem to do in this place.”
&
nbsp; She reaches out and tousles Davie’s hair.
“As you do yourself, Davie, despite all toils and torments.” She narrows her eyes as she peers at him. “Oh, I remember you, the bonny babe beneath the covers in the pram with everything before him. And I see you now, all grown up and walking in the gorgeous light with everything before him still. I see the babe, the boy, the man you will become. I see the changes that have happened and the changes still to come. Your mother must be proud of you. Oh, how you have changed.”
Her companion laughs.
“Of course he’s changed,” she says. “But it didn’t take an ambushment by a buzzard on a summer day to bring the change about.” She bites her lip and stares into Davie’s eyes. “Or did it?” she says. “Have you been lifted from the earth in terror, lad?”
Davie laughs out loud at the thought.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I don’t remember it!”
They watch him and wait.
“And my journey to the summit of the hill,” he says, “is much slower than the baby’s or its family’s was.”
“It was the babe herself who told the tale to me,” says Letitia.
“The babe?”
“The babe who by then had grown into a woman old enough to have babies of her own. She had been told that this had happened to her many years ago, before she could remember anything.”
“And she believed it?”
“She said that she believed it. Ha. And she said that sometimes she believed that she was not the babe they had pursued, but was a babe from somewhere far across the hill, laid down there by that buzzard or another buzzard. She said that maybe she was the wrong baby. She talked of going on a journey sometime, to find out if there was another baby dropped down by a buzzard. She wondered if the real she was someone else to be discovered somewhere else.”
She touches the orange butterfly. It flaps and floats away from her shoulder.
“Anyway,” says Letitia Spall, “what are such tales but beautiful distractions on such a perfect day as this?”
At the bedroom window, the white net curtains drift. The ladies lean together, smiling.
Annie winks.
“Perhaps,” she says, “the tale she tells is the tale of Letitia Spall herself.”