Carter raced towards his home, a quick pelt from the church. Probably wanted to show his wife the shirt and get her to wash it, so he could hang on to it, some sorry keepsake and trinket of a giant love that’d gone from him, swept up like a twig in a crow’s beak.
‘Carter!’ I wanted to offer to anoint the shirt at least, though it was a blunt idea, anointing a piece of old linen. ‘Herry! Herry Carter!’ But Carter didn’t respond. He was holding the shirt above his head and waving it about as if there were people to see him.
Go ahead and suffer then, I thought – not cruelly. Men and women clasp to their right to suffer, and sometimes it’s better to let them for a while. I would mention Newman again in Mass and arrange to have that tree cleared from the river. Not that day, though; that day the hours were going to pass before we knew it; I needed half an hour’s sleep. Try not to dream of that body getting dragged downstream, try not to be heart-broke over how savage death is. Think only of the pink light on the bulrushes where the shirt was found, and think only of how good it was that the shirt was found there, there, in the gentle holiness of the bulrushes; it was the best of all possible signs, and if a man had to die such a violent and unresolved death before disappearing as if swallowed into the whale, at least something of his appeared draped – caught, held, salvaged, saved – in that crowd of rushes, like a man who had fallen back into the arms of his people.
Was the light on the rushes even pink? Maybe not, but in my heart it was now and would always be. There in my thoughts, on the way home, was my sister’s voice wise and soft: The tongues and pens of men must fall silent in wonder. Why I should have heard this I can’t say, except that I was tired and sad and glad and angry and comforted all at once, and when I opened the door to the church I let myself cry over Thomas Newman, and was surprised by how long it took for the tears to stop coming.
Superstition
‘A PRIEST IS also a judge and a sheriff, whether or not he wants to be.’
‘So he is,’ I said, without surprise, because I’d got used to the dean appearing before me in the church, waiting, with nothing better to do. This time he was leaning against the pillar near the opening to the vestry, winding around his child-sized fist the spare rosary that he must have lifted from the nail in the porch.
‘I hear Newman’s body has reappeared? Or – had reappeared,’ he said. ‘Before it vanished again.’
‘Word reaches you quickly.’
I’d left Carter only ten minutes before – come into the church, gone to the vestry to find dry things to wear. Hidden my tears in the stole that hung from a peg til the white silk was grey in patches. When I came out the dean was already there; he had what they called a nose for the nasty. I stood in front of him with the new alb folded on top of the new cassock, a great heavy pile of cold cloth to take home and change into. Nothing to be done about my shoes.
‘I saw you and Carter running back from somewhere,’ he said, ‘and I was, well, curious. So I asked Carter where you’d been.’
‘Clearly you’re the better judge and sheriff.’
He looked at me. He, small and neat like a field mouse brushed by panicked dash through wheat and grass. Its little heart always pounding in a tiny, courageless chest. I, tall and precarious, my eyes made raw by tears. Robes mud-smeared and stained, shamefully, with goose-fat.
‘This is the last day,’ he said, and then he took from his burse a small roll of paper, which he unravelled. It was the pardon that had been pinned on the church door since Saturday. ‘You know, don’t you, that a man like Newman can’t die without explanation?’
I went to speak; he didn’t allow it. ‘And you’re going to say that there is an explanation – the river is high, the rain’s been hard, men aren’t fish. They fall in, they drown.’
‘They do.’
‘But Newman isn’t the kind of man who falls in a river.’
I went to the altar to rest the vestments there; they were heavy. I was wet and cold. I asked wearily, ‘Is there a kind of man who falls in a river?’
‘This is the last day,’ he repeated, and I looked up at our east window, which allowed a morning light that was wide, thin and silver. He flourished the piece of paper as if I’d never seen it before, and as if it hadn’t been pinned for three days to my church door. ‘This pardon is our best hope of luring the murderer to confession – ’
‘There isn’t a murderer.’
‘So we think, until one is lured. As I said, this pardon is our best hope of luring the murderer to confession, and it isn’t going to be offered after today. Tomorrow, too late. A good pardon, Reve – the most you or I could offer, the most anyone in this sorry parish is ever going to get. I can tell you there are plenty of people here who need it, murder or not. You aren’t a village that’s going to crowd heaven. Do you know purgatory has a waiting room? They call it Oakham, there are so many of you there.’
When I was a boy I’d thought that anger lived in large men; my father was a large man. It was still strange to me when men like the dean, pale and trivial men with narrow faces, could house so much anger. It sat beneath cool skin, in blue-veined hands that shook so slightly most wouldn’t notice. But I noticed; the pardon between his fingers tremored like a catkin.
‘If you hate Oakham I suppose you could leave,’ I said. ‘Not everybody likes it that you’ve taken up in Newman’s house anyway.’
Eyebrow raised, a wristy wafting of the pardon and he said, in a voice trying to aim a tone lower than was natural to it, ‘I have a death to investigate.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘If I went away now, on the last day of confession before Lent, on the last day a generous pardon is offered, after all this hard work – ’ He paused, and I was left to wonder what hard work he imagined he’d done. ‘Well, I don’t want to beat the bushes so that others can get the birds, if you understand me.’
You don’t want to leave before somebody is tied to a stake, I thought. You don’t want to leave on this of all days, this day of celebration, in case the village runs in wild riot, like the animals we are.
‘Oh, I understand you,’ I said. I bent to pick up a finger-length of dogwood that must have fallen from the chancel pillar sconce, where they faded slowly with the witch hazel and wintersweet – my sister’s wedding flowers, now dying. Then I didn’t know what to do with this bit of claret twig, so I held it uselessly. I wanted him to feel that it was more worthy of my attention than him, though I don’t think he noticed.
Towards the west of the church, on the north wall opposite the entrance, we have a wall painting of St Christopher carrying the child Jesus across the water – a huge figure, a giant or as good as, with the child scooped in one arm, feet crossed in the saint’s palm, the size of a week-old lamb. It covers the whole of that wall, from rafters to lintel. Pinks, reds and yellows. It’s been said that if you saw it within a day of your death, it was as good as Last Rites. If your death was sudden or solitary, and you had no Last Rites, no holy oil, no sacrament, sight of St Christopher could still let you off hell. If Newman had seen it on Friday, before he drowned, his soul would be in safe transit to the afterlife by now. Had he seen it? Nobody but Newman could know; I’d flayed my memory trying to find the answer, but no answer would come. Nothing. I took up the bundle of vestments again, and went to the painting and knelt.
The dean watched, and turned away in frustration, and watched, and sighed, and handled the chalice that he’d taken absently from the altar, rolling its stem between his fingers, with the rosary still around his knuckles. I should say our rosary, Oakham’s. A gift from Robert Tunley. He put the chalice down with a sudden impatience, walked to the chancel pillar, scratched his nail at the stone, swirled on his heels, peered down the length of the small church towards the confession box. I didn’t desist from my prayer, but I knew everything he did because I knew how to see without looking, while he only knew how to look without seeing. I knew he was about to lose patience and would come scuttling towards me.
> ‘Reve,’ he said finally, clip-clipping short, quick steps through the nave. He was waggling his fingers for me to rise. ‘Enough, Reve. If I can’t go to the archdeacon by tomorrow morning with some information about Newman’s death, we will all suffer for it. You’ve taken confession all day for the last two days – you have one more day of confession to discover something. Tell me you’ll discover something.’
I raised my head from prayer. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘haven’t we already this morning discovered something?’
‘A vanishing corpse and a stinking shirt?’
‘Thomas Newman’s shirt. And where was that shirt found? In the bulrushes. The bulrushes. Signifying the arms of God, as you know – Newman’s safe delivery to him. How did it end up there? And yet there it is, and I don’t know about you, but there are few enough signs from God for me to take heart from this one.’
His mouth opened to argue, then closed. His posture eased, his lips moved to the faintest of smiles, and someone pleasant appeared in his expression, the boy his mother must have once loved. I wondered what had softened him. I saw him for a moment as I’d seen him on Saturday when he’d first ridden into Oakham on his sad and soulful mare. How unknowable men are, full of corners. Old and mean sometimes, and suddenly young and kind. But to no end, I thought; he was never kind for long.
Sure enough, he looked upwards, raised his arms. ‘A shirt in some rushes, hallelujah!’ Then dropped his arms. ‘Not enough, Reve, sadly. Discover something else.’
I stood with my armful of cloth and the spindle of dogwood still in my hand, and nothing to say.
‘As for that shirt, Carter gave it to me.’ He affected pleasure at a good, clean idea, his hands brought together, a brow lifted. ‘I’ll hoist it up on the maypole at Old Cross, shall I, to remind us all of the shortness of these dear little lives we live?’
I bowed, because he was the rural dean and I only a priest, and for no other reason under the sun. ‘Excuse me,’ I said.
I went home, ate a slab of not-freshest bread, slept briefly, changed clothes, returned. By then the bell had long since rung out ten o’clock. In the village, children were outside playing catch-me with a dead chick, and running three-legged, and forming castles from mud. The churchwarden, Janet Grant, informed me she’d done her morning rounds, had knocked on doors to make sure nobody had overslept, or was newly ill or dead; door after door had opened, thankfully. I was relieved to hear that Sarah Spenser’s was one of them; the way she’d been the evening before, I’d wondered if she’d endure the night. Townshend’s fields were dotted with stoopers coercing the earth with spades, rakes and harrows in hand, trying to make the acres of mud ready for seed. It couldn’t be called soil any more, this earth of ours, only an unfurrowable sludge, which met a rake as a fork meets melted fat.
I knelt in the chancel with the easterly light pale and flat on my hands. Heal Carter’s wound, I asked, give Sarah Spenser back her health. Help with our soil, give our seeds something to grip to. Accept my prayer for Terce, which I’m late for, and Sext, which I’m early for. Forgive that I missed Matins and Lauds entirely.
The wind blew apart eleven strikes of the bell. Janet Grant went after that with the shriving bell to tell the workers to down their tools, and to urge them towards confession. I picked myself up from my knees and settled in this little booth that is just a triangle, this box-that-is-not-a-box, a box with no roof, a box made hastily and out of a sense of trial. Booth, box; both dignify it with a structure it doesn’t have. Myself in a tight triangular space behind an oak screen, on which hung three rosaries to signify that I was there to take confession. There were three sessions in the day, and after each I’d take a rosary away. Creates a sense of urgency, a little drama, so I was told in my training. A little drama! As if we needed more of that. I gathered myself on a low stool with the amice pulled up over my head, staring towards the wall.
This was the south-west corner of the church, near the entrance. All the light it had plummeted from above and died at my feet. In the early morning the stone, though whitewashed, was a deep greyish-brown; as the morning wore on, it lightened to a flat wool-white, as it was then. I’d stared for many hours at this stone until it had seemed to turn into fabric that was being woven in front of my eyes. On a sunny day a strap of light would fall across it eventually and change its substance. At this time of year that light would come at around two o’clock and the wall would wear it diagonally like a silken stole. If the sun stayed clear of clouds, I could tell the time within ten or twenty minutes by its progress, its changing width and slant.
I squatted with my legs gathered up awkwardly in a space made almost entirely of angles too acute for comfort, back pressed into one of them, knees into another, a cup of beer by my right foot. I pictured myself: the roosting priest. One day perhaps I’ll give up on the ample discomfort of this home-made not-booth-not-box, or else finally get a real one made by skilled men with good tools, or one shipped over from Italy (which would involve sums of money way beyond this parish, if what I know about Italians is true).
Despite the morning’s adventures, despite the death of Newman and the grief of Carter, I had a feeling of pure, divine waiting. Maybe the feeling was all the more for the morning’s adventures. The year had tipped again towards spring and in a few short hours we’d be back in Lent. When I was a boy of eight and learning to swim underwater, I’d take in a last greedy breath so that it was as if my head had bulged bigger, and everything around took extra colour and shape just for one second before I plunged under. It was like that now; we hovered on the verge of deprivation, and forty days of feeling hungry. During those four days of Shrovetide before Lent began, we filled ourselves with air and we smelt and tasted and touched, we ate, we danced, we confessed. Or anyway, they ate and danced and confessed. I felt only apprehension and something eager stirring, a violent jarring of my senses.
I closed my eyes; there, the river bank and the mud calf-deep welled with hoof marks, and there some longer, narrower, shallower tracks that could have been made – had they? – by the slipping of a human foot as its owner tried to access the river edge near the bridge – probably to see better how the bridge had recently fallen. Those narrow tracks perturbed me; they told of Newman’s frailty. It was hard, still, three days later, to reconcile this clumsy fate with a man as self-possessed as Thomas Newman – and yet, with these rains of late, anybody standing too close to the river’s edge would be giddied by its swirl and its stormy roar. Entranced as if dealt a hex. Even a sure-footed goat could’ve taken a slide down. Even the most self-possessed man in the world could suffer the consequences of worn shoe-sole on rain-slick mud.
Find something, the dean said, and by that he meant: find me the murderer. I’d assured him I would. What I’d neglected to tell him was this: the murderer isn’t who you think. Who is it that invariably takes life? Death, of course. Death itself is the murderer, and birth its accomplice. Men die because they’re born to die. By drowning, by disease, by mishap, by all God’s assassins. What was either of us going to do to change that?
As I waited in silence I felt the universe fall about me in timeless cycles, I heard the planets roll and the hawthorn come to bud; the church’s stone smelt of a vast deep lake, and the oak panel smelt of autumn woodland, and the pain in my bruised knees was a surge of sweet, hard life.
‘Benedicite,’ she said.
And I: ‘Dominus.’
And she, young and harassed: ‘Confiteor.’ A quivering pause and fluttered breath and the fussy shifting of the fretful. There may have been a screen between us but my vision no longer relied on what my eyes could see. She gave a short cough.
I was about to ask her to recite her Creed, but she spoke before I could. ‘Father, a man is dead.’
I asked calmly: ‘Which man?’ But the muscle running up the inside of my left foot shortened and the toes curled with cramp.
‘I don’t know, but he’s drowned, just like the other one,’ she whispered through the gril
le, and I could hardly hear, with the cloth shrouding my ear. I had to bend my back to draw myself closer. ‘Word’s going round faster than the wind.’
‘Who did you hear this from?’
‘Oh, others, all. I was on my way here and I heard it – ’
‘On the wind.’
‘But it’s true, Father, they say it’s true.’
Wild with chance though this life is, there are things that seem impossible – such as two drowned men in one morning. So I thought: she must mean Newman. At the same time I thought this new drowned man must be Herry. I didn’t know how these opposite instincts could live together so easily, but they did, and I saw Herry throwing himself in the river after Newman in his sorrow, while I napped soundly with a square of fustian over my head.
I reached down into darkness for the beer, for something to hold on to, and remembered then the small iron box I’d put under the stool the day before. I fumbled, anxious, to make sure it was still there. My fingers met it, spanned its length at a stretch and pushed it backwards. I fumbled next for the beer, but left it there on the floor after all, since my cold hands baulked at the pewter cup. The smell was warming though, the smell of hops and honey like the hilt of a summer afternoon.
‘But you don’t know who the dead man is?’ I asked evenly, since this was the seventeen-year-old wife of Lewys, a little stalk of a thing, always so watchful and nervous.
‘That’s what I was hoping you might know.’ Her fingers at the grille, picking. ‘All that’s left of him is a shirt – torn shreds of a shirt, they say, covered in blood – ’
The Western Wind Page 2