Male Tears

by Benjamin Myers

A sun that gave off no heat.

  A sun that offered no solace.

  It was a shimmering thing of beauty, like cooling mercury pooled in the dub of a smelter’s furnace floor, yet useless except to guide us east from the shifting sands of Solway through the Eden Valley to where it was said this wall ended and the salt of another sea stung the nostrils and a man of great wealth awaited us.

  Our party numbered six.

  There was Colly the Bellman, whose every other spoken word came with a rattling cough that sounded like Death himself was shaking tarn pebbles in his fist, and his apprentice Foul Wendle, whose breath was as rotten as a rat that’s been found drowned belly-up in the midden runnel.

  This sackless pair carried with them a great bronze bell that Colly had spent a year casting and polishing and buffing and tuning, and it was as big as I am tall, which is to say not that tall, but as heavy as four fattened sheep when strapped to the handcart that they took in turns to drag and push as far as the wall would take them.

  This bell was the reason for our journey as it was my father who was charged with guiding coughing Colly and Foul Wendle, and to ensure that no hands but theirs were laid upon it all the way from one briny water to the next, for it was deemed more valuable than most men’s lives, and Fath had quite a name for fighting. No person of any colour, tongue or standing had licked him yet because when the fury was rising in him Fath was one of the most feared beasts of the northlands. Men of the emperor’s wall had given money, malt mash and meat to watch him, a mere man of poor Carvetii blood – someone who had sailed no seas and joined no army – fight their best soldier until only one was left standing. And it was never a wall man.

  ‘Like the wall stones in the breeze, I bend to no one,’ he said loud and often.

  We brought with us our Peg, my sister, for Mother was not long in the sod and a girl of her age could not be left alone at the hearth of the homestead, for to do that would be to tie a doe in the clearing of a copse that you know echoes to the sound of wolves who have its scent in their shining snouts. No, Peg could not tarry, even if she was the only daughter of feared Fath, for some men would sooner strike first and think on their actions later.

  Then there was the Priest Popple, who walked to spread the word of Jesu, who he reckoned to be quite the man of magic and miracles, though we all knew that the priest was fond of the ferment so prone to riddle-spinning. A pious man never known to have creased his face with laughter, he carried with him two pieces of timber lagged crossways and laid across his shoulder, a most pointless and burdensome piece of kit that Colly the Bellman said was green but still keen for burning, but he got a clump from the Priest Popple when he tried to do as much.

  And then there was me, with a slingshot and the sharpest eye, bagging rabbits and keeping watch. The bell’s clapper I was also given to carry across my back by Colly, who said it was a special honour to bear such a thing, though the aches and blisters and welts it gave me suggested both he and Wendle were too lazy to take it themselves.

  ‘This clapper is heavy,’ I said.

  Colly replied by coughing until he was near blue.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But cherish your aches, young lad, for what use is a bell without a clapper?’

  ‘He’s right,’ said the Priest Popple. ‘Your burden is holy.’

  At this I saw Foul Wendle smirking.

  ‘Come,’ said Fath. ‘The storm is set to rage. We’ll seek a hollow somewhere to fetch up.’

  We awoke to thick snow and the sound of Foul Wendle moaning most absurdly.

  Fath stuck his head out the slit of our leather tent and there was Wendle shirtless, the snow blowing around him.

  ‘It’s my master, Colly,’ he said, then added ‘Colly the Bellman’, as if there were any other.

  ‘Well, what about him?’

  ‘His face is a mask.’

  ‘A mask,’ said Fath.

  ‘He is dead.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘His lips are the shape of an eternal cough and his limbs as stiff as that clapper that your boy carries,’ said Wendle. ‘I reckon it’s this bell what’s seen him done for. It’s cursed.’

  ‘What rot you talk,’ said Fath. ‘Colly drinks goose fat by the tankard and lies at night with any pox-scarred harlot from Whitehaven to the Wall’s End that his Roman bit will buy him. He was bound to sleep with his feet up one of these days.’

  At this the Priest Popple appeared from his tent.

  ‘What’s this stink?’

  ‘You’ll have to help with the bell cart,’ said Fath. ‘Colly’s carked it.’

  ‘But I have the cross of Jesu to carry.’

  ‘That’s tough tagnuts for you, then.’

  The Priest Popple spat in the snow. He looked at the bell. ‘It’s ungainly.’

  ‘But I thought you said all burdens are holy,’ I piped.

  Fath laughed at this.

  ‘Come on, holy man. We’ll put the bellman in the ditch where he’ll be on ice till spring and then the ravens can be at him. Let’s get to moving before this storm fills our bones.’

  We pushed through boscage thicket spiked with hoar frost and tussocks of brittle spinney. It was our third day and the going was slow. My feet were numb, the clapper heavy on my back.

  We walked with the wall to our left. Beyond it masses of whinstone pushed up from the earth in great columns around which a gust could blow a slight boy right off the edge.

  Worse still were those who lived out there. It was said that these roughhouses had been making gains on the empire forts and that some had fallen to them. Word said that the soldiers of Rome had been called away by whoever it was that did the calling, and they had gone to fight in foreign fields, leaving their stores ripe for plundering by these fearsome Caledonians.

  We Carvetii boys were alright, though. We Carvetii boys of the Solway Plain, who chiselled our names or rosette markings in milestones across the Land of Cumber, had been trading with the soldiers since Fath’s fath’s father’s day, maybe longer, and sometimes our women lay with them too, so blood got mixed and we were left alone. Civitates, they call us – citizen associates – and now we were bringing a great big bell for one of their boats, cast on commission. Payment: a pretty bit.

  We rested in milecastles, each eerily empty, to eat our slices of greasy mutton and drink the grain mash that made the growing snowdrifts tolerable. Only the Priest Popple refused to take the drink, saying it made a man turn.

  Arriving in one such place we found a fellow wide of eye and hairy of chin.

  ‘Tidings,’ said Fath.

  The man had in his hand a cudgel.

  ‘No need for that,’ said Fath. ‘We’re bringing a big bollocking bell for a boat that they say will sail to the emperor himself or thereabouts. What castle is this?’

  Fath had all the milecastles memorised. The big forts too. Maia, Concavata, Aballava, Petrianis. These we had already passed close enough by to see that no smoke drifted upwards but not so close that we could tell whether they housed friendly faces.

  Vercovicium was halfway across these open plains and the one that we had been told would welcome us with an eight-hundred-strong army who would replenish our supplies, for though this bell may have been moulded and hoisted by us Carvetii boys of the Carlisle locale, it was a returning empire merchant who had requested it and therefore warranted safe passage.

  Strange that we had not yet seen any of these great soldiers who were said to be as tough as oak and the colour of this bronze bell. Strange indeed.

  ‘Where are these men with their helmets of tin and broadswords you have told me many a tale about?’ I had asked Fath.

  ‘Might be that they’ve finally seen sense and left this land that is as cold as a tinker’s tit,’ he had replied.

  ‘It’s my castle,’ the man growled in the accent of a fearsome Caledonian of the Borders. ‘And you can ask a dozen dead men of Rome if you think otherwise.’

  ‘We have empire pass
age,’ said Fath.

  ‘This is a Roman place no more. You’ll give me all you have to eat and drink. And that girl.’

  The Priest Popple stepped forward. ‘With this cross of Jesu – ’

  The Caledonian struck out. He swung his cudgel and struck the Priest Popple on the temple and he fell like a scarecrow in a storm. Peg gasped. He twitched twice then did not move.

  ‘Well, then,’ said the Caledonian.

  ‘This man has much meat in his bedroll,’ said Fath. ‘A jar too. Those and his clothes are yours in return for our passing.’

  ‘What meat?’

  ‘Good mutton. A side of ham too.’

  ‘What jar?’

  ‘Honey and oatmeal ale. The best there is.’

  The fearsome Caledonian paused, then he stepped aside.

  ‘I never much cared for that priest anyway,’ said Fath as we walked on into the blizzard.

  Whiteout.

  We shared a tent that night. Me and Peg flanked Fath, and Foul Wendle lay long across our feet.

  In the deepest part of night Peg said she needed to spill her waters and left, never to return.

  The three of us went out looking for her in different directions, calling her name into the raging winds of a treacherous squall, our own noses barely visible. We saw nothing of my sister. The snow covered up her footprints and damn near buried the tent. Even the wall disappeared from view.

  Only the bell guided us back. A fleeting shard of moonlight was enough to anchor us in this diabolical sea of rock and ice and we saw the bell glinting, a thing of beauty, set next to the creaking sanctuary of our cowhide shelter.

  We never saw Peg again. She was lost to the land forever. Poor Peg, with roses in her cheeks and her life not yet lived.

  No tears were shed that morning for that would have only made more ice for the world, but we took our victuals in solemn silence, warming our hands on the splinters of a burning wooden cross and hoping that the storm would return our Peg. It did not.

  ‘We must honour my girl’s death,’ said Fath. ‘And that of Colly and the Priest Popple too, though I grieve for neither. Soon we will be at Vercovicium, where it is said the stone floors are warmed by hidden fires and there is a room that makes a man sweat even when the sky is swirling sour outside.’

  Fath and Wendle took the cart and we wordlessly continued.

  Carvetii is our tribal name and it comes from carvos, meaning deer or stag. For stags we are. Wandering beasts, sleek and silent. Noble too. But on this day I knew what it was to be a pack-trail ass, dumb and bent double with the weight of my troubles, a blighted thing.

  An arrow through the trunk of Foul Wendle was his undoing. From whence it came I know not, only that it flew twisting up over the jagged scarp somewhere north of the abandoned auxiliary fort of Vindolanda.

  A miraculous shot, all told.

  Fath folded the bellman’s apprentice into his coat then laid him down in the shadows of the wall, away from further harm, and we both leaned in as death danced in his eyes like wet woodsmoke and a little black blood bubbled on his lips as he uttered his last words – something about that bloody bell that neither of us heard because the cruel wind stole even those.

  Fath strapped his wrists to the cart handles with leather lanyard strips that blistered his skin. I pushed from the rear.

  ‘How far to this fort, Fath?’ I yelled to him, for the wind was up again.

  ‘Not far now.’

  ‘And you say the stone floors are warm to the touch there?’

  Without looking back, Fath nodded into the storm.

  ‘And there is enough food there to feed us for days?’

  ‘Enough to feed an army.’

  We were heaving the cart up a particularly steep and uneven section and I could see nothing but the cart and the back of Fath’s head.

  ‘And they will treat us well on account of this bloody great bell?’

  ‘Son, when we’ve finished eating they’ll have to roll us home.’

  I smiled into the snow for I knew that better days were ahead.

  Here Fath paused. As he took the strain of the cart I saw him look first to one side and then the other. Then again.

  ‘No,’ he cried out. ‘No. It cannot be. Oh, for the love of my dear dead wife and my dear dead daughter – it cannot be.’

  I pushed through the snow to join him.

  ‘What is wrong?’

  ‘The wall,’ he said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Wedge the wheels of this cart and unstrap these handles.’

  I found some stones the size of fists and pushed them beneath the handcart wheels and then loosened the leather strap on one of his hands. We leaned into the land.

  Fath rubbed his wrist and then pointed through the streaming veils of thick white snow.

  ‘Don’t you see?’

  I looked, then I looked again.

  ‘The wall,’ he said. ‘It is to our right.’

  ‘To the right?’

  ‘We have crossed it,’ said Fath, his voice raised again. ‘We have crossed the wall and are going back on ourselves. Or perhaps we have crossed the wall twice. We are surely going in the wrong direction.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ I said as a sob of desperation and fear welled up through my chest. ‘It’s true this bell is cursed indeed. It destroys everything in its path.’

  And that was when the bell-laden cart start rolling backwards.

  I turned to grab Fath but he was pulled away from me, the cart first dragging him by his one snared wrist and then flinging him up into the air as it flipped, and then bell, cart and man became one tumbling mess of wood and metal and flesh. Finally it came to a splintered rest deep in the drift of the wall.

  I skidded down to where Father lay twisted and broken, his legs and arms at incomprehensible tangents.

  I took the clapper from my back and beat the bell then. I struck it and hit it and smashed at it, and the sound of it rang out across the frozen northlands, but nothing happened and no one came, and I finally fell upon my father as the last warmth of him slipped away.

  Ten Men

  When Ray-Ray got out the second time he came to work on the farm.

  He was brought in on the first warm breeze of the season with nothing but two carrier bags and a mean squint. He said he had heard we were hiring; he said he’d take any damn bloody thing going. As it happened, Uncle was short on labour for the coming season’s grunt work so he gave him a pair of overalls and rigger boots and set him on there and then.

  The days were extending. As spring slipped softly into summer, the sunlight was there for using and a hand could easily work twelve or fourteen hours, breaking off only for drink or bait, or to slink away behind a particular hedgerow with a woodbine and a dock leaf. Thinking time was what Uncle called it. He left a trowel back there.

  Ray-Ray was a worker from the off. One of the best that he had ever seen, Uncle reckoned, and he was as short on his compliments as he was of temper, so you knew a good word that came from his mouth had currency.

  Uncle said that Ray-Ray might look like a runner bean that had withered on a winter vine but that looks can be deceptive, and it didn’t take long to see that he had the strength and stamina of ten men. Oftentimes you’ll see that it’s the skinny ones who can keep on at it until the moon is a pink pearl in the sky while the big beefcakes who are throwing tyres like Frisbees all morning end up bent double, spitting strings of breakfast bile on to their toecaps by lunch. Big biceps count for squat out in the fields, said Uncle. How long you can motor on down the road for is all that matters. It’s about the endurance.

  Most of the other workers were itinerants, brought on for short spells. There was a lot of foreign labour then. Romanians, Czechs, some Albanians. Plenty of Irish travellers too. Uncle didn’t care for the whos, whys and where-froms, though he always said that the Poles were the best. The Poles could work like packhorses, he reckoned, and they never meddled. Some of them were building houses b
ack home and they did the jobs that many English lads simply wouldn’t do, at twice the speed and half the price, and never once complained about their lot. Good boys, the Poles.

  Mostly those that came in for picking and harvesting and baling were men with pasts that went unspoken. Men with secrets; men on the move.

  Some, like Ray-Ray, had previously been detained at her majesty’s leisure, while others were shedding old names that had been recorded for life in registers for reasons they did not care to reveal, reinventing themselves out in the fields. The few Englishmen who lasted to the season’s limit were those who had already grown up with dirt streaking the lines of their hands, and who didn’t have much of a compulsion to try anything else, for their lives were locked into older agricultural ways, their roots running deep through generations. They were in the soil and the soil was in them, though they were in the minority now and, as the song said, the times they were a-changing.

  Ray-Ray had the good sense to keep to himself. Daytimes he worked the fields and nights he spent in the static van hunched over a little black-and-white portable that you had to tune with a dial. He didn’t drink away his brown envelope like the rest of the hands, who supped their week’s earnings in town each Saturday night, then went at it with the local toughs on the cobbles before spending the next seven days sweating and cursing through dry mouths of bitter regret in the fields, only to do it all over again come the weekend. No, Ray-Ray kept his head down.

  Spring through summer was spent ploughing furrows and baling hay, topping haulm or rinsing turnips. Whatever Uncle required. Down south our Kentish farming counterparts worked the hops too, but not up here in the northlands, where the soil is bad for all that, and they say the sun doesn’t burn so hot either.

  The men worked. The men drank. They bickered and they ate well, and for the most part they sorted out their differences the old way, bone on bone, with blackened eyes sported like medals.

  Then later, as autumn beckoned, when the last grass had been stored and the cows brought in, and a woodpile the size of a bungalow had been built with logs split from trunks that Uncle had us drag up mob-handed from the oxbow bend on the floodplain, the foreign men scattered to the four corners of the compass for the winter.