Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  The militia butcher came to us. He asked the old man what we were discussing, and I told him it was none of his business.

  ‘I’m talking to him,’ the butcher said. I saw that he and the old man were acquainted.

  ‘He thinks there’s a better way to kill a sheep,’ the old man said, and the pair of them laughed.

  ‘And what might that be?’ the butcher said to me. He chewed on something and then spat heavily at my feet. I looked down. ‘Mutton. I get a sense of the worthlessness of the stuff by chewing on it raw. Not that it matters in this case, not where this lot’s going. Want some?’ He took out another piece from his pocket and held it in my face. I turned away. Then he offered it to the old man, who pressed the meat into his mouth and sucked hard on it.

  49

  A further three days passed, during which time I spoke to no one.

  I went again to Mary Latimer’s home, but found it just as I had left it, another empty dwelling abandoned, if not to the water itself, then to the emptiness and desolation which preceded it and which now spread outwards in all directions from it.

  I searched for her in my usual desultory fashion, calling for her, and still unsettled by the sound of my own unanswered voice coming back to me.

  Elsewhere, rumour begat rumour, and the tales needed little encouragement to thrive and to persuade those who repeated them that she was alive and well and living elsewhere, that their concern and my insistence upon it had been unwarranted. Only the old woman remained genuinely concerned, but she too refused to indulge me and preferred to remain silent rather than to confirm my own dark thoughts.

  All talk now was of the new promises made by the Board, and I sensed that those who remained felt a perverse sense of pride in what they believed their stubbornness had achieved for them.

  The departure of the Board men had been as inauspicious and as disappointing as their arrival. I was summoned to join them prior to their going, but they showed little real interest in what I had to say to them.

  After barely an hour of reassuring and congratulating themselves, they returned to their carriage. The baskets of food and drink were taken down and I was invited to share their meal. The blinds were drawn and we sat in a stale gloom as we ate.

  Finally the time came for them to go, and I was again praised. My work here would not go unnoticed or unrewarded, they said.

  I left the carriage accompanied only by Smith, who walked with me to the water’s edge. I asked him if the others wouldn’t be anxious for him to return to them so they might leave, but he gave me an evasive answer and put me on my guard. He said he had hoped to see where I lived and I pointed through the falling darkness in the direction of my house.

  ‘Did they tell you to come with me?’ I said.

  He looked away from me. ‘They wanted me to talk to you about the rest of your time here.’ He coughed to clear his throat.

  ‘Three more months. By which time their glorious duckpond will be filled to overflowing.’

  ‘They wanted me to let you know how surprised they were to see the water already so high in advance of the spring thaw. They didn’t expect to see half so much.’

  I began then to understand what he was having such difficulty telling me.

  ‘Do they believe my work here to be finished?’

  ‘There is no question of you not receiving your agreed salary.’

  ‘Do they want me to leave?’

  ‘There are new schemes already being prepared and undertaken elsewhere. My own in Durham. Others in Derbyshire. Over the hills there in Lancashire and Westmorland. Or, if you’d prefer, further south, the Home Counties. I believe there is even a new scheme in Shropshire.’ He stopped abruptly, conscious of having said too much.

  ‘Am I to understand that I’m being offered another contract to undertake work elsewhere?’

  ‘I don’t … they believe that your abilities and talents …’

  ‘What? That they are now being wasted here?’

  ‘That they … that you …’

  That I now formed an unnecessary link between what was happening here and them, and that they finally wanted that connection severed.

  ‘Save your breath,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m in no position to argue with them,’ he said.

  ‘You never will be. Never.’

  He acknowledged this with a sigh.

  ‘And presumably their promises of further compensation are lies,’ I said.

  He was about to answer when someone called to him from the carriage.

  ‘Did they suggest a date to you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nothing specific.’

  ‘But the sooner the better?’

  He looked around him. ‘They can’t imagine anyone choosing to spend a whole winter up here.’

  The voice called again.

  ‘You’d better get back to them,’ I told him.

  ‘What shall I tell them?’

  ‘Tell them you told me everything they told you to tell me.’

  ‘It was why they wanted you to come to the hotel. So we might have had this conversation there.’

  ‘And so that I might see everything I’ve been deprived of these past months.’

  He held out his hand to me. ‘There’s a civic reception next week – it’s more than an annual meeting – at which the success of the scheme will be announced and celebrated.’

  ‘Are you invited?’ I asked him.

  ‘They want to parade me in front of prospective investors. These men never stand still.’ He began to walk away from me.

  ‘Tell them I’ll consider their proposals,’ I called after him.

  I saw then, watching him go, that just as my departure might sever the connection between those men and this place, so, equally, my remaining here would destroy completely whatever small chance I might still have had of being further employed by them, to dance again on the end of their strings. The future beyond this valley had counted for little in my reckoning of late; it was now a forbidden country to me.

  Smith disappeared into the darkness and then became visible again briefly as he approached the light of the carriage lantern. He paused and raised his hand to me and I waved back. There was some further small commotion as he climbed aboard and was beset by questions.

  As I walked home it started to snow again, lightly at first, the flakes falling widely separated in the windless night, but then ever thickening and flowing in currents as I reached the middle valley.

  50

  And with the killing of the animals, so it seemed that a long-delayed rush of events was set in motion in the place. For after the slaughtermen came the woodcutters, and after these came the men to dig up the graves. The sickening body which had for so long lain barely moving on its deathbed had now begun to writhe and to convulse and to fill the air with its moans.

  This was what I saw then, in those few unstoppable days, and it was what I afterwards remained to bear witness to.

  The woodcutters came, but kept themselves apart. They worked mostly downriver and on the far side of the valley. They cut at a rapid pace, as though the contraction of time above the dam now also pertained below it, and they burned in giant fires that wood which they did not take away with them.

  As might be imagined, this sudden loss of even the leaf-less trees created a dramatic change in the appearance of the valley. The men were under instruction to clear the slopes completely, to leave nothing which might obstruct the flow of water should the sluices need to be fully opened in an emergency.

  The smoke from their fires thickened and gathered in a pall, kept low by the winds which played constantly above it, and watching this interplay of warm and cold air, the smoke looked almost as though it were liquid flowing uphill and harried into turbulence as it rose. And in the falling dusk it even seemed as though the land itself were melting and being drawn away. The smell of burning was in everything and the ground stayed blackened and pocked.

  Carts came and went for three days and the hillsi
de was cleared. Some of the local men wandered among the hewn stumps and smouldering ground, looking like the survivors of a great disaster. I watched them from a distance, high on the dam, but did not join them.

  More snow fell, this time lying lower down the hillsides. Further up the valley, the paths were blocked and the winter-born streams frozen over. Opposite my house, a small waterfall – previously no more than a glissade of spray from one scarp ledge to another – froze overnight into a brilliantly white ribbon, seemingly more substantial and permanent in this state than when it had been alive and flowing. I had noticed it only recently, and now the frozen course stood like a giant thermometer, a constant reminder of the cold that was settling down through the land as insidiously and relentlessly as the water was driving up through it from below; air, water and earth all now fixed together in their various combinations, freezing and thawing, transforming and remaking until soon everything would be unalterably changed.

  It occurred to me to wonder what might happen if all the feeder streams froze, or if the rising water encountered frozen and impenetrable strata. A month ago the prospect of investigating such a possibility might have intrigued or even excited me. But not now. Now it was merely one more pointless conundrum within a tangle of pointless conundrums. A month ago my charts and instruments would all have been made ready; now my reckonings were passing thoughts of no more consequence than the countless other trivialities which filled my days.

  The staff of my authority had been taken from me and I felt its loss keenly in everything I did.

  Usually, the snow started to fall in the late afternoon and continued through to midnight, when it abated for several hours before resuming two or three hours before dawn, afterwards falling until mid or late morning.

  I saw the land as it might once have been beneath its mantle of ice. I searched the shallows of the lake and in places saw the mash of crystals gathering in the slower currents. I saw a white line form across the wall of the dam where the foam of the waves hit the cold stone and froze there in its shadow.

  51

  On the fifth day of my snow-bound isolation, following an afternoon and night during which there were no fresh falls, I made my way laboriously down to the mine road. This was the day when the men were due to come and dig up the graves. A final line drawn through my list of obligations.

  It was a clear day, a winter’s day a man might otherwise delight in, and for the first time in a month I could not see a single cloud in the sky, only a slight darkening from the washed-out blue to the palest grey of the western horizon.

  The mine road was clear for much of its length. Some freak of the valley’s configuration meant that the winds which came at it from the west drove the snow uphill into drifts, leaving the narrow bottom with only a thin covering.

  I met a boy who confirmed that the grave-diggers (if such they could still be called) had arrived.

  I encountered the men around a fire by the chapel door. I recognized some of the wreckers who had come a month earlier, but Tozer was not among them, and I learned from the man who had taken his place that he had been fired by the Board following the previous visit.

  As we spoke, a heavy cart appeared and came slowly along the path leading to the chapel.

  A few of the locals came with it, and with them came a preacher I had not before seen. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, with a sash of the brightest scarlet draped over his shoulders. He walked past me without speaking and climbed on to the chapel wall, and there he began a sermon, telling the diggers to wait until he was finished. He made them all uneasy with his words, condemning them for what they were about to do. The locals applauded each of his short, calculated phrases. The man’s hot breath formed in plumes around his head, and steam rose from his chest and shoulders to wreathe him further in his overblown piety.

  A woman came to stand beside me. ‘You trespass against us, you surely do,’ she said to me, her words little more than a cold hiss. Those standing around us nodded in agreement with her.

  In the burial ground the diggers gathered more closely together.

  ‘We will not leave the dead if they are not to be allowed to rest in peace,’ the preacher shouted.

  The devil in me wanted to call out and ask him what he expected the dead to do – did he think they might all rise from their coffins and swim to the surface of the coming water like so many silvery fishes?

  When his sermon was finished the man dropped his head and clasped his hands in vigorous prayer. I did not hear his exact words for the murmuring of the men and women all around me, and because of the rising claver of the gulls arrived to stake their own noisy claim in the empty future of the place. It occurred to no one to ask whence the birds came, so far from any sea – as in most other things, there is no wonder here, no awe.

  The grave-diggers dug quickly, piling the snow into mounds before attacking the hard earth beneath. The few remaining headstones were lifted and carried to the side of the chapel and stacked there.

  The first of the rotten coffins soon appeared, but little was done to identify the occupants of the raised boxes. It had been the custom here to open old ground and to bury family members on top of each other. Consequently, the more recent burials rested only a few feet below the surface, and the diggers were surprised and pleased to encounter these so easily.

  In some instances the wood of the coffins remained sufficiently intact for them to be lifted whole, but mostly the boxes had succumbed and collapsed, and they and the remains they held were shovelled into sacks before being taken to the waiting cart.

  The same woman came back to me as the others dispersed. She said how pleased I must be feeling with myself after all I had achieved there. Again, I made no reply to her. She said that Almighty God, though forgiving, would never forgive me for what I had brought into being on that day. Had I chosen to speak, I might have agreed with her.

  The preacher left his perch on the wall and came to me. He stood beside me for several minutes watching the labouring men. Then he looked out over the lake and traced its outline, dark now against the whiteness of the land. He was clearly impressed by what he saw. I braced myself against the first of his own damning remarks, but instead he held out his hand to me and introduced himself.

  ‘You are not a well-liked man,’ he said, his tone tempered by amusement. ‘They wanted me to say more on the matter.’ He nodded to those passing us by. ‘I came overnight. Interminable hours spent in prayer. I don’t know what they expected of me, but I don’t doubt that I too have disappointed them. They told me the multitude of ways I might condemn you. I wonder that you are not already in flames.’ He paused. ‘A short prayer was said for the woman who lost her sister to the asylum. Your name was mentioned in connection with her.’

  ‘How soon will they take the bodies?’ I asked him, refusing to be drawn.

  He looked again over the lake. ‘Would it surprise you or dismay you to learn that I am a shareholder in the scheme? This and others like it.’

  ‘My stocks of surprise and dismay are both long since exhausted where the Board and its works are concerned,’ I said.

  ‘I understand your feelings. Perhaps I should have come here before. An acquaintance of mine said he had encountered you in the autumn.’

  ‘The historian?’

  ‘He said even then that you would succeed in your work and that the world here would be changed for ever.’

  ‘And is he, too, a shareholder?’

  ‘Of course. These things are wise investments. Men of our limited means must risk what we can. Surely you yourself have some financial commitment in the work.’

  I told him it seemed scarcely any risk and he smiled at this and fluttered his hand.

  ‘I attend all the shareholders’ meetings,’ he said.

  ‘And you find no conflict between your profits and the work going on here today?’

  ‘Why should I? There are plenty of others always ready to stand in the way of progress.’

  I turned aw
ay from him to watch the diggers. Another fire had been lit, but this one burned with more smoke than flame, fed as it was with the rotten wood and earth of the coffins. I saw where grey bones spilled from the sacks on the cart.

  ‘Will you bless the remains?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s what they want. They want me to stay the night, but the word is for more snow.’

  ‘Do you live far away?’

  ‘Far enough. You could leave with me if you were prepared.’

  I shook my head at the empty offer.

  The wagon with its load of boxes was brought closer to the chapel.

  ‘It was never a much-used place,’ he said. ‘Whatever they might have told you. A few blue ribbon bands on holidays, visiting fanatics, healers. Did you imagine it to have once been the spiritual centre of the place? No. They are affectionate for it now only because it is the last of what they have to lose. Had I stayed tonight, my prayers would have been short. Like you, I do what is expected of me and no more. I fit into the expectations of others more than I fulfil my own intentions. It is a commoner path than you might imagine.’ He again held out his hand to me, then put on his gloves and left me.

  I was alone in the company of the diggers. There was now little method in their work and they left behind them as much as they retrieved.

  Beneath us, the gulls settled on the water and drifted there in motionless silence.

  The glow from the fires, and the lanterns and the black shapes of the men moving among them, remained visible to me as I made my way home, and all around the lying snow cast its strange and shifting patterns of metallic glare and shadow in the falling dusk. I need hardly say it, but if ever a vision of Hell existed in the mind of a simple, fearful man, then this was surely it.

  52

  There have been times these past days, especially when my eye is caught by something I wrote or mapped during my early weeks here, when I cannot do other than wonder at how much I have lost. I do not say this loss is akin to a loss of faith – for that would be to glorify something far removed from the glorious – but it is as though I have been a sleepwalker, a man who sees the distant cliff edge, the ever-steepening or crumbling slope, and yet who insists on marching boldly forward, knowing full well that after a thousand such bold steps, a single one will take him over the edge and into oblivion.