Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘In Bradford. A man shot her.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘For no reason other than that he was sighting a rabbit along his gun when she chased it and caught it.’

  ‘Was she killed cleanly?’

  ‘Only when I reached her.’

  ‘And the man who shot her?’

  ‘Pointed the same gun at me until I was long out of sight.’ He waited for more from the animal, but nothing came. Their lives, it again occurred to me, were no more or less harsh or uncertain than his own.

  ‘Why are you back here?’ I said to him.

  ‘I am back because I shall return no more.’

  ‘Then are you here to say farewell to someone?’

  He bowed his head.

  ‘Who? Have you seen them?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Is it Mary Latimer?’ I said, though not knowing why this sudden guess came into my head, but then knowing by his raised face that I was right in my guess.

  ‘And some accuse me of having second sight,’ he said.

  ‘It was merely a guess.’

  ‘I knew you would have sought her out, or she you.’

  A thought occurred to me. ‘And you knew she and Martha were watching us from high on the hill on the occasion of your last visit.’

  He acknowledged the truth of this with a further nod.

  ‘Had you been to see her then?’

  ‘To see Martha. I know the two of them from all those years ago.’

  ‘Then you knew Martha before—’

  ‘Before she lost her own reason, yes.’

  ‘Then she—’

  ‘What? She must have lost hers before I lost my own?’

  ‘I was going to say that she – Mary – must have been pleased to see you. I know how hard life has been for her since her return, what isolated lives they lead.’

  ‘My apologies. I sat for an afternoon with Martha and she was as clear in speech and reason to me then as I am to you now. I understand all that this implies, of course, but it is how she was with me. Or perhaps you believe the madness in me cancels out her own and we can sit and talk as equals.’

  ‘You speak as though she had some control over how she behaved, over the workings of her mind.’

  ‘No – I speak as someone standing on the edge of that same abyss. Were I the ranter you believed me to be at our last encounter, I would not be sitting here like this with you now.’

  Neither of us spoke for several minutes, both of us watching the fire and the kettle.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps I, too, have become over-accustomed to everyone else knowing what is best for me.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning I am not the lonely, lost or forlorn soul you might imagine me to be.’

  ‘You have a family?’

  ‘All the worthless parts of one. And a home, built on stone and raised to last. Not like this poor place.’ He looked again at the damp-pocked walls and then up at the ceiling.

  ‘Then we all misjudge you,’ I said.

  ‘No. You see only what you are shown.’

  ‘And is that what you are also telling me in relation to Martha Latimer?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Tell me,’ I insisted.

  He considered this for several minutes before speaking again, and when he spoke he told me only the barest details of what had happened to him – that a railway company had built a line where he lived, that his home and the surrounding land had been compulsorily purchased – ‘stolen’ was the word he used – and that he had fought the railway company in the courts for three years before finally being forced to succumb to the weight of their authority, empty promises and wealth.

  I guessed, too, that the balance of his mind had also been lost in the fight.

  ‘Three years I stood against them. And on the day I could no longer afford to pursue the matter through the courts, they sent a gang of men to pull off my doors and put stones through every pane of glass in every one of my windows. The same day.’

  ‘But you were compensated, surely?’

  ‘You cannot measure three years of living against three years of dying, Mr Weightman. You might imagine it possible, but it is not.’

  ‘And you see the same thing happening now to Mary and Martha Latimer.’

  ‘To everyone here.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you are wrong in that judgement.’

  ‘Of course you do. Because otherwise how would the scales of your own mind and conscience ever again be balanced equal?’

  I could frame no reply to this.

  ‘How long ago did all this happen?’ I said eventually.

  ‘Seventeen years,’ he said.

  ‘Seventeen years?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ he said. ‘Yesterday.’

  He rose from the table and began fastening up his coat.

  ‘You are welcome to stay,’ I told him. My hand was still on the kettle.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Shall I mention you to Mary Latimer?’

  ‘To Martha, perhaps.’

  ‘Will you go and see her again?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘She’ll be sorry to have missed you.’

  ‘I watched her earlier from the hillside above the ruins of their home. She would not have recognized me. The sight of me would have sent her screaming indoors in fright.’

  ‘But Mary would have known you.’

  ‘Oh, she would have known me.’

  ‘But you think she would have kept you from seeing her sister?’

  ‘It was beyond me even to ask her.’

  ‘You being a madman yourself.’

  ‘You see my dilemma.’ He extended his hand to me and then went to the door. He opened it and I saw that his dogs were waiting directly outside. One of the animals rubbed its bony head against his knee, and I guessed immediately which of the creatures this was.

  ‘I shall tell them you came,’ I called after him.

  ‘I know you will,’ he said, and then the door closed behind him.

  34

  I left my house to be greeted by the urgent rising of a flock of crows (the collective noun, I know, is a ‘murder’, but that has always struck me as being far too melodramatic) that had congregated in the grass at the front. The birds abound in the district, riding the winds seemingly without concern for where they are blown. There are few perfect specimens; most sport torn tails or missing wing feathers, and some display patches of aberrant white. They flock to the dead sheep on the moors like flies to ordure.

  I stood back to let the mass of birds clear the ground, deafened by their clamour. They rose awkwardly, frequently colliding with each other in their struggle to gain height. Some rose only as high as the wall, where they settled and then turned to face me, bucking their heads at me and cawing in anger at being disturbed.

  Feathers floated to the ground around me and I gathered these up. It had been an occupation of Helen and Caroline to create pictures and patterns from gathered feathers, though ones more colourful and decorative than the specimens I now collected. The birds on the wall fell silent.

  Later that same day I met a man who remarked on the feathers still protruding from my pocket. He told me it was bad luck to carry them. I stopped him from plucking them out, and my reluctance to be rid of them, of the memory they held, offended him. He told me that if the opportunity arose I should observe the birds in coition – those were not his words – because when their congress was at its most urgent both the male and the female birds bled from their eyes. He told me of the birds he had stoned among his lambing sheep whose faces had been red with the blood of their mating, and when I suggested that this might have been more a consequence of their feeding he dismissed the remark with a snarl.

  35

  ‘I met an acquaintance of yours,’ I said.

  She paused briefly in her walk beside me.

  ‘You were visited by h
im,’ she said. Her eyes had been on the ground before she spoke. She kept her head bowed.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  I stopped walking.

  ‘What, Mr Weightman? Did you imagine that I would not know that he had been to see you?’

  I resented the challenge in her voice.

  ‘So were you waiting for me to raise the subject of his visit?’

  ‘He comes here every few months. The last time he came he visited Martha and the two of them spent several hours together. He believes that he, too, might have been committed to an asylum. But presumably you know all this already. He will have told you everything.’

  ‘I know he points a finger at you for having committed Martha when she might have lived a life as carefree as the one he now lives.’

  She laughed at this. ‘Black and white, Mr Weightman, right and wrong. Oh, how you like the lands and seas and islands of your own little globe well ordered and severely locked in their places.’

  ‘Meaning what? All I meant to say was—’

  ‘All you meant to say was that you agreed with him in some measure, this new friend of yours.’

  ‘You misjudge me. I see that no other course was open to you.’

  ‘No, but perhaps the smallest of doubts is already forming in your mind: perhaps I could have kept her from all that; perhaps I should have implored harder for my husband to make some better arrangement for her; perhaps I should have denied myself some small part of the comforts and privileges I went on to enjoy while she was all those years locked away.’

  She stopped walking and clasped a hand to her mouth. She stood into the wind with her eyes closed.

  I regretted all I had brought so suddenly back to the surface, all I had yet again forced her to face in the open when she faced it inwardly every waking moment of her life.

  ‘All I meant by the remark was that I understood what little choice—’

  ‘Choice, Mr Weightman? Choice? Choice does not apply. There is no choice, there never was any choice. Choice, Mr Weightman, is what you enjoy, and you alone. Where else does this choice exist? Look around you, as far as you can see, and tell me where.’ She opened her eyes and flung her arms around her.

  After a minute or so of this rage, she grew calm and let her arms fall.

  I could think of nothing to say to her.

  Eventually, she came closer to me and said, ‘He visits her because he sees himself all too clearly in her. He knew her at the very outset of her illness, when a good deal of her old self still remained. Who knows, perhaps he even harboured some romantic notion towards her. Perhaps he saw what he saw, and seeing how tenuous then was the hold of her illness, he imagined he might yet save her. I wish I could make my own confusion clear for you. Perhaps I wish he had been more to Martha. Perhaps then I would not have been so alone with it all. Perhaps every decision made on her behalf would have not been so great a weight on my shoulders alone. Perhaps if her illness had held off only a single year longer she might have been courted and married and then she would have had a husband to make all those impossible decisions, those choices of yours. Or perhaps we might extend our imagining even further and see her illness five or ten years away from her, perhaps a doting husband and half a dozen doting daughters of her own to care for her. Imagine my own role in those proceedings then, Mr Weightman. Imagine what luxury of choice I might have possessed.’

  ‘It was never my intention to judge you,’ I said, knowing how inadequate these words sounded.

  ‘Nor his,’ she said.

  ‘Circumstances, I suppose,’ I said. ‘The parallels between Martha’s life and his own.’

  ‘The comparisons are too convenient,’ she said. ‘I prefer not to make them. Believe me, they are no help.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She rested against a post beside our path.

  There was rain in the air.

  I had encountered her crossing the high moor and knew immediately from her slow pace and the direction she walked that she was bound for no destination other than the emptiness in which to wander alone with her thoughts.

  ‘When he first came he showed me his toes,’ I said, and she laughed at this.

  ‘When we watched you.’

  ‘Before I knew who you were.’

  ‘When you still considered yourself apart from all this.’

  ‘Before my own choices were scattered in the wind.’

  She acknowledged this, but said nothing, making it clear to me that she did not entirely concur with what I said.

  ‘He told me then that he would make the reservoir his own watery kingdom and that he would live upon the fishes within it.’

  I expected she might laugh again, but instead she said, ‘He is a truthful man. We must never doubt for an instant that whatever he says he does not mean.’

  Now it was my turn to acknowledge this gentle reproach.

  ‘One of his dogs was killed,’ I said.

  She considered this. ‘Then he will have been mortally wounded himself. He believes his family no longer cares for him. It is why he leaves them to wander with his animals. The first thing they do upon his return is put him in a bath and scrub him clean. What is it, do you imagine, that they believe they are washing away?’

  ‘He never even told me his name,’ I said.

  ‘His name is Jacob Wright,’ she said. ‘See how much more of an ordinary man it makes him.’

  ‘He told me something of the cause of his wandering.’

  ‘It was no cause, merely something for him to blame.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘His wife and family were never reluctant to leave their home. It was poorly located and built in an unsanitary place. Three babies his wife lost. Why should that not have played a greater part in his sense of loss and growing madness?’

  ‘Perhaps he distinguishes between those acts of God and the acts of men.’

  ‘More choice. A whole ripe tree of choice from which to pluck.’

  ‘Jacob Wright,’ I said, seeing how much better clothed he was with the name than without it.

  ‘He was an engineer, like yourself,’ she said. It was an almost intolerable thought.

  ‘What will become of him?’

  ‘Who knows? Is a man mad simply because another man points a finger at him and calls him mad?’

  ‘Then I wish he might be left in peace,’ I said.

  ‘In this day and age? The nets are cast, Mr Weightman.’

  I said nothing in reply.

  She came to me and touched me briefly, as though to remove any pain she might have caused me by her earlier attack.

  ‘I wish I’d known his name and history from the beginning,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Perhaps there are people here who might think the same of you.’

  ‘To know about me?’

  ‘To understand something that might make their plight a little easier to bear.’

  Their plight?

  ‘They have only to ask,’ I said.

  ‘They would no sooner ask than reveal their own webbed feet to you.’ She turned her face to the sky above us. The wind drew out her unbound hair. ‘I ought to be getting back and you ought to be getting on with your work.’

  I waited until she lowered her face, and then said, ‘How many of those dutiful daughters would Martha have had?’

  ‘Three,’ she said immediately. ‘Abigail, Rebecca and Mary.’

  ‘And her husband?’

  ‘A country doctor who loved her and cared for her, and who kept her comfortable and safe inside a well-appointed house inside a high-walled garden within a community of people who knew her and cared for her also.’ She tried not to smile at all I had so easily exposed.

  ‘And grandchildren?’ I said.

  ‘I try hard not to think of them,’ she said. ‘There are limits to my indulgence; I know what purpose it serves.’

  ‘And you never confuse this imagining with choice.’

 
‘Never. But I shall not persevere in trying to persuade you of that.’

  I let her know that I believed her. These beliefs were the props which kept her upright, just as the wind appeared to do on occasion, and she tested her beliefs as she leaned into the wind and tested that, too. I saw that she was strength and reason and belief enough for the pair of them.

  We parted and I watched her go. She was quickly lost to my sight, and only when she was finally gone did I thank her for not having asked me the names of my own unborn, beautiful and doting children.

  36

  In my dream I am walking across a field, the saturated surface of which is repeatedly rent open beneath me, causing me to leap from one spot to another, uncertain if the ground where I aim to land is solid or liquid or somewhere in between. It is a recurrent act – if such a thing can be said of the sleeping mind – only this time varied by the presence of a great crowd of people standing around me on the solid ground there, every one of them applauding my expertise at avoiding the pitfalls and soakings, and all of them shouting for me to run to them, these men, women and children all with their arms outstretched towards me, each one of them urging me to save myself. It is too large a crowd to be composed solely of the local inhabitants, and I recognize faces from long ago and hear voices I had never thought to hear again, but these come only in snatches of unintelligible language, quickly lost to me amid the overall excitement.

  I cannot say for certain that I hear in my dream the hatred, mockery and contempt that I know must season the calls of many in the crowd, but I hear something in that surge of yelling which, like the cry of a child, can be neither disguised nor ignored.

  In places I sink to my waist; elsewhere the ground rises beneath me so that I stand clear of the water. At times I am wearing my high boots, and my leaping from place to place in the shallows is no more than a game, another act put on by me to entertain my watchers. And at other times my feet and legs are bare and I jump into submerged pools and land up to my waist in the coldest water. I feel my feet sucked into the mire beneath me. Several men throw ropes to me, but these fall short of where I stand, and the ones that do come close, the ones for which I might reach out, are quickly snatched away as my hand approaches them. When this happens, the laughter and the shouting is at its loudest, and it occurs to me then to stop jumping, to land upon some more solid ground and to stand there motionless, thus depriving my audience of its entertainment. But when I attempt to do this, and by my stillness and silence remove myself from this dreamed suffering, the solid ground upon which I stand turns to liquid, and I know – even in my sleep I know – that there is no end to my ordeal except waking into darkness.