‘A shirt?’
‘Herry Carter found it by the river.’
‘Herry Carter? Did you see him on your way here?’
‘I saw him, he and his wife Cat were sweeping water out of their door; we’re all swimming in our sleep these nights.’
‘Was it a green shirt?’
‘How did you know?’ Her voice was incredulous and thin.
‘Did you see it for yourself?’
‘No, Father. It’s just what they say.’
She sounded upset and close to tears. My fingers touched hers, I gave my reassurances. ‘Please, settle, it’s alright.’
‘The second man to drown in our river,’ she said, no longer whispering but speaking low into the grille with what sounded like a terrified calm. ‘Never a dead person in there for as many years as I know, and now two in a few days, and I fear it, all this rain, the river is filthy and mad, Father – angry, like God doesn’t want that bridge we’re trying to build. He’s not half-hearted with his signs.’
Not God who doesn’t want it, I might have said. God has no gripe with a bridge. No, all the anger is from the livid little demons of the river itself. And yet if only what she said were true; if only God were sometimes a little clearer with his signs. Until that morning it’d been my life’s thwarted wish to have a plain instruction from him, just one. I brought my hand back into my lap.
‘If God has given a sign to that effect, it hasn’t been known by me,’ I said.
Her hand, too, withdrew, and fell away into darkness. ‘He wants us to knock the remains of the bridge down, don’t you see? He doesn’t want us to make a profit from it at the cost of people who might be poor, he doesn’t want men to die building it. Like those two other men from last summer.’ She paused for a moment before taking up again, and I didn’t know if she wanted me to say something about those other men. ‘The thing is, those two men, and then Thomas Newman who gave his money to that bridge – look at them all now. Gone and dead and forgotten as if they never were. And the man found today, I don’t know who he is, but I bet he’ll have been one of them who helped build it or pay for it.’
‘The men who died last summer died of a fever, not of drowning.’
‘Because they drank the river water, you see? Tom Newman gave his money to building the bridge,’ she said again, as if this fact were a threat to her safety. ‘And my own husband helped with the stone-laying efforts too – he might be next, Father.’
I could hear the stiffness of her jaw as she spoke, and see the cold, unblinking blue of her eyes. I sat up. ‘The body found today was not a second man,’ I said, ‘it was the same man – Newman. Thomas Newman himself. It’s taken three days for him to be washed a mile down the river. It’s not a second man. There’s no sign from God. In fact there is a sign from God, but not the one you think. His shirt was found in the bulrushes, a holy place. He is safe in God’s arms.’
She said nothing, and then she sobbed.
‘It’s mere superstition to think that God is punishing us. Do you think he hates bridges? Have you heard of the great bridges at Rome and – Wade – they’ve built a bridge there, the town is like new.’ There I stopped; I didn’t know any others.
A quiet I remembered hearing underwater. One that flooded the ears. There was a piece of oak a hand-span wide between me and the woman, but still I heard her loose hair brush against her cheek, loud as the broom in the yard.
‘He’s safe in God’s arms,’ she whispered. Then in a louder, sharper whisper, ‘Are we safe, Father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are we?’
‘Are you afraid of God?’
She gave no answer.
‘You should only be afraid of all that is not God,’ I said.
A sniff. ‘There’s no second man who drowned today?’
‘There’s no second man.’
She breathed out. I’d have asked her now to say her Creed, Paternoster, Ave Maria, but I knew she knew them so there was little point, and a queue would soon be forming out in the nave.
‘Do you have a confession to make?’
A shake of her head. ‘I only came yesterday,’ she said. Yes, she’d come then and confessed to taking the last spoonful of honey without sharing it with her husband, which I duly, quickly forgave.
‘You said that you were already on your way here when you heard about the drowned man – ’
‘But I had nothing to confess, Father, I just – it’s been an unsettling few days. I just wanted your comfort. I feel all at sea, sickly. Maybe it’s this one.’
With that, I imagined she ran her little pale hand over her middle.
‘Are you comforted now?’ I asked.
‘Yes, thank you, Father.’
‘So then, that’s all?’
‘I think it is.’
At the very edge of my vision was the white flash of that little hand as it rushed through the sign of the cross. Out she went then, slowly and sighing, and the great orb of her pregnant middle filled the latticed window, like one of those planets up above rolling heavily past.
Desire
DAY LIFTING, MOMENT by moment. My heart beat, and beat again, and I thought: one day it will beat and not beat again. Then what’s in store for me? And the light undid itself, separating out the grain of the stone into a dull, disparate yellowish-grey, the texture of cloth before fulling. I’d forgotten to eat and was hungry.
You see, my people are superstitious and have always been. They live in wariness at the whims and punishments of God and take everything as a warning. They quake too often at his will. He’s made the river angry, they think. He’s thwarted so-and-so for doing such-and-such. He’ll send wolf-men from the northern forests to eat our children, and he’ll multiply the grotesque creatures who swim in oceans that never lap a second shore.
I tell them: No, no, those aren’t the things to fear, we’ve come too far for superstition. We know there are no wolf-men and no sea creatures of that kind; it’s children who believe in those. There are only spirits – ill-meaning spirits, who live as we all do on God’s earth but aren’t made by God. This is no secret to us, and men much sharper than me have proven it. The spirits are here on earth to test and strengthen us; when things die and decay, the decaying matter that has no home in heaven emits a fetid cloud of minuscule spirited matter that brings illness of all kinds – of the body, of our fates. They’re small and lumish and barely seen, specks and flecks suspended in the air or in water which, if only our hands could catch and our eyes could see, would show themselves as black, fast, lithe and slick, but made noxious by their swarming numbers.
They live among and under God’s things, like our shadows live among and under us. They’re what we wrongly call luck, ill or otherwise – because luck has nothing to do with God, who decrees with certainty and reason and whose will can’t be fought; we’re born already conquered by him. But the spirits, we can conquer. They’re our battleground. Perhaps the river is bringing us poor luck, but Lewys’s wife is wrong to think the fate of her husband is set. The river is the host of those spirits, who’ve found a home there, since God only knows what’s rotting in its waters. Men, cows, sheep, offal, entrails, dung. The corrupted hopes of our broken bridge. If our two men last summer drank the spirits and died, and if Newman was pulled under by them and died, then what are we to do? Cower? Pray? Pray to them for mercy, as if they have such power?
Well, I’ve prayed, not to them, but to the Lord. Two prayers, at least one of them delivered. On Saturday, when a body had first been seen in the current, and Newman had disappeared and not come home, I’d prayed for a sign that he was on his way through purgatory and safe to heaven. A shirt in the rushes might mean nothing to our godless dean, but it meant much to me, and I gave my thanks.
I prayed too for wind to come from the west and blow afield this surging of the spirits eastwards, towards God. Overnight the wind came, though it was from the east, and sharp, and wintry. Maybe he hadn’t heard the whole prayer, busy as h
e was; and maybe I hadn’t asked clearly enough, or maybe I’d been over-clear and asked for too much. Still, I reassure my parish: in his grace all superstition dies and all need and desire are met by him, through me. And there was time yet, today, for that wind to change its course.
Father, came voices through the grille. I sinned, forgive me, Father. My left ear listened. It had grown strong with listening as a shoulder grows strong by the mattock. As the day forged inch-wise into brightness, they came thickly, my parish, because they wanted the hefty pardon I’d offered. Benedicite, Dominus, Confiteor. May I be blessed, may I confess.
Benedicite, Dominus, Confiteor.
Benedicite,
Dominus,
Confiteor.
Father, I forgot to come to Mass, I forgot to say my prayers, I forgot to feed my pig, I was rough with my child, I was sick with drink, I pissed in the churchyard, I woke up angry, I lost hope, I was too full of pride, I was too weak, a voice told me to pull my rotted teeth out, is the voice demon or God? I masturbated, but I thought of God as I masturbated, I thought of Mary Magdalene, I thought of John the Baptist, forgive me.
I fell, at some point, asleep, with my head drooping like ripe fruit from a spindly branch. I woke up to hear a voice whispering of masturbation, and above that the music of lutes, which fell as spring rain out in the chancel but came from nowhere. I sat up straight as a strut so that the sleep would fall off me. ‘Try not to masturbate,’ I said, ‘or your hands may shrivel and fall off. At the very least try not to think of John the Baptist.’ But lutes? Newman was the only person in this parish to play the lute, just as he was the only person to have worshipped at the shrines in Compostela and Jerusalem, and to have seen a man hack silver ore from its seam, and to have picked an orange from a branch in Spain and eaten one of their olives – sour in both cases, he’d said. He tried to teach me more than once to play the lute but I was cold-fingered and went about the plucking stiffly. Where others used a quill for plucking, Newman used his fingers, and all of them were busy. Your fingers had to be feathers, he said, yet his weren’t, they were as strong and agile as living creatures. They brought about a sound that worried people with its softness; it seemed too simple to sit among the jumbled pelfrie of life.
But as I sat I realised there was no lute playing, and that the sound I heard must have followed me out of a dream; a dream of Thomas Newman? I couldn’t remember anything about it, and would have thought that brief cleft of stolen sleep hadn’t been long enough to sustain a dream, but it left in me a deep foreboding, the sense that I must do something. Run to the dean, tell him once more about the miraculous appearance of Newman’s shirt; curtail his suspicions of murder. For otherwise something untoward and irreversible was waiting to come.
Abruptly, though, the curtain slid open once again and then closed, and somebody came to kneel at the other side of the screen. Somebody who moved easily and languidly, and whose smell was as sharp as a spear and wronged my nose. A boy, or young man, with the presence of a wolf.
‘Long for a woman,’ he said, after an iffy Creed.
‘Any woman, or one especially?’
‘One especial woman.’
‘A married woman?’
‘A just-married woman.’
‘Then you know you must stop your longing.’
‘Can’t quite so easily.’
His head was low to the grille, which meant one of two things – or both of two things. He was short, or he had a lazy kneel.
‘What have you done to weaken it?’
‘Weaken what?’
‘The longing.’
‘Everything they say to do. When I took myself in my hand I pictured her as an old, dead woman with worms crawling out of her and the flesh falling off her face.’
‘Did that help?’
‘Then I just longed for her worms as well.’
‘It would be better if you didn’t take yourself in your hand.’ Or your hands will shrivel and fall off.
‘Can’t help it, Father. I have urges for putting my thighs over her thighs and running my hand down her lovely back, and I don’t get things done for the aching and the wanting – ’
‘I tell you, think of other things.’
‘And now she’s married off to some limp old shite from a far place.’
Usually I knew who was on the other side of the screen, but the more he spoke, the less sure I was. He was one of the boys who worked down at east barns shovelling the muck, clearing the ditches, but there were plenty of those and they didn’t confess often; I couldn’t say which of them he was, without looking.
‘This woman,’ I said, ‘who is she?’
He hesitated long and – if I’m not imagining it – awkwardly. ‘Not someone from here,’ he said.
‘When did you have a chance to meet somebody who isn’t from here?’
He shifted and burped. A billow of beery air.
‘Where is she from, if not here?’
‘From – ’ a breathless pause, ‘Bourne.’
‘Bourne? Some fifteen miles away – you went there recently?’
‘No, no.’
‘Is she taken to lengthy walks, then, this woman?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’
‘Is that what you love about her?’
‘I told you, I love her hair and her thighs and this part, here, where it does this.’
It didn’t trouble him that I couldn’t see whatever it was he was pointing to, and his imagination of that part – whatever part it was – must have consumed him, because he sank into a reverie, his breath quick and quiet.
‘There’s a difference between love and lure,’ I said.
‘I feel none.’
‘There is, all the same.’
‘Then I’m encountering both.’
This dull ache in my lower back – if only I’d had room to stand, or lean steeply to one side. I kneaded the muscle with my fist. ‘What age is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, but he added suddenly, ‘Not a child. A proper woman.’
‘Have you ever had physical contact with her?’
‘Touchings? No, Father.’ He sniffed; I’ve heard enough sniffing to know it’s the sign of a lie, or a truth not fully given. At least he recanted swiftly. ‘Or – yes, Father. But it was as faint as anything, I’m not sure she even knew it.’
‘When was this?
‘Many months ago, last summer, at a dance.’
‘A dance in Bourne?’
A pause. ‘Yes, Father.’
A poor liar, this boy, since Oakhamers didn’t go to dances in Bourne, nor did Bourne have any dances, surely, what with their pinched-mouth priest, Serle.
I asked, ‘Was it an accidental touch?’
‘I don’t know what you’d call accidental – I didn’t have any plan, just that I saw her chest and my hand flew at it before I knew what it was doing, and at that moment she swirled around – I don’t think to avoid me, only to swirl – and my hand touched her nipple – ’ the briefest pause, ‘like a leaf tickling a bud on a branch.’
‘A leaf tickling a bud on a branch?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Who gave you that ladylike phrase?’
‘Myself, Father.’
‘You meant to – clutch her?’
‘Not clutch, just grab.’
‘The difference?’
He sat forward and moved a hand close to the grille so that I could see it, and closed the other hand tightly around the hazel. ‘Clutching,’ he said. Then, relinquishing the hand and letting it hover, the other swooped in and snapped shut on it for a moment and let it drop. ‘Grabbing.’
‘You mean, clutching is for a longer time?’
‘Right, Father. I mean, I wasn’t trying to trap her and smuggle her away.’
‘Only grab her chest?’
‘But she swirled off into the corner.’
‘And the woman? Has she ever made advances towards you?’
‘In my dreams, alway
s, I’d say every night, and she’s fairly loose and ready in those, if I may say it. Then there’s my daydreams too, though she’s quieter then and has more clothes.’
‘You must end the daydreams.’
He sighed and sounded impatient, frustrated. I asked again, in spite of myself, ‘Are you sure this woman is from another place?’
‘Very sure.’ He seemed confident by then, because he’d done what people do so easily, and had begun to believe his own fabrication. I don’t know what it is about lies; I’ve nothing to say in the wake of them. So we sat for a short while with nothing to say.
‘Do you believe in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?’ I asked him finally; the question was abrupt and I thought caught him unawares, because his answer had all the volition of the wind he’d given earlier.
‘Yes.’
‘The incarnation?’
‘Yes.’
‘The resurrection?’
‘Yes.’
‘The judgment?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you honoured your mother and father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Been overly proud of your wit?’
‘No.’
‘Repeat your Creed once more.’
‘I believe in God, the Almighty Father, and Jesus –’
‘The Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ – ’
He took up again and stumbled through. If he could get this right, and exercise discipline and piety, nothing else would matter, certainly not his desire. Nothing could be done about that – there was no cure for a young man’s desire except to become an old man, and even that wasn’t a cure that could be guaranteed.
When he ended his chaotic recital I exhaled and leant forward to rest my elbows on my knees. ‘You need to learn your Creed,’ I said. ‘Word for word, and when the longing comes you can use its words to break the spell of the longing. Instead, you learn to long for the beauty of Christ. Repeat the Creed and Ave five times a day for a month, and whenever you feel the desire most strongly. You need to control the dreams and daydreams. If there’s nothing you can do about the dreams, you must at least control the daydreams, in the same way, using the Creed. Do you understand?’
The Western Wind Page 3