Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ said Bentwater. ‘She did.’

  ‘Now the peacocks, they screech sometimes. And to my ears that is one purely dreadful sound. But my wife, she didn’t even mind that. You ever heard that, Martin?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well you will, if you come to work here. You strong, though? You don’t look strong. But nor did my wife. And she was. She could hold a hog down.’

  ‘I’m stronger than I look,’ I said. ‘And I don’t tire.’

  The Judge smiled. He was dropping cake crumbs all down his shirt. ‘Bentwater worked for me once, didn’t you Bent?’ he said. ‘He used to tire. He could sleep anywhere. He could lie down on the bare dirt and start dreaming. Right?’

  I moved out of 767. It was summer. Outside my window were watermelons and sugar snap peas. The shade made by the shade trees was black.

  Bill C. and Audrey cooked me a farewell meal. It was Shrimp Creole. They said: ‘We know Judge Riveaux. He’s a good man. He treats the world right.’

  I said goodbye to Les Ches. He said: ‘Goddammit, Martin. You were the long-sufferingest friend I ever had.’

  I don’t live in the Judge’s house. I live in what he calls ‘the studio’. The studio was once a barn. The Riveaux converted it into a separate living space for their daughter, Suzanne, when she grew up and wanted to be an artist. Then she moved away. She married a Claims Adjuster from Florida. She lives in Boca Raton with three children. She never paints now and she never comes back to the farm.

  Some of her possessions are here. There’s an album full of photographs. There are books on Klimt and Picasso and Edward Hopper. There’s a pile of records and a love letter from a boy called Irwin. There’s a photograph of Mrs Riveaux when she was young. The bed is wide. It has a heavy quilt over it that hangs to the floor.

  At night, cockroaches come out from under it and do figure skating in the moonlight.

  I get up at six. I put on my overalls and my boots. There is no planning done on this farm. I walk down to Jeremiah’s house and he says: ‘Okay. What we do this mornin’, we hoe the beans,’ or sometimes: ‘What the hell we gonna do today? Mend the post fence? What we do?’

  Sometimes, Beulah calls out: ‘Come in, Mister Martin. Have some coffee. Ain’t no hurry this mornin’.’

  So I go into their house, which is always dark, winter and summer. Lettie and Glorie sit side by side drinking milk, with their school lunch boxes packed and ready on the table. The colour of their eyes is amber. One morning, I said to them: ‘Do they teach you about the universe at school?’

  ‘No,’ said Lettie.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Glorie.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I used to make up stories about the universe – you know, about the stars? I could tell you one some time if you wanted.’

  ‘Mamma tells us stories,’ said Lettie.

  ‘She tells us real stories,’ said Glorie.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Mine aren’t real.’

  While we sit there, drinking Beulah’s coffee, Jeremiah decides what we’re going to do. In winter, he sits there a long time, near the woodstove, deciding.

  Then we go out and start our task, whatever it may be: making a ditch, chopping wood, mending a fruit cage, burning bean stalks, mucking out the hogs’ barn. He and Mrs Riveaux used to work together. They did everything side by side except the tractor work. And this is how Jeremiah likes to work with me. He says he can’t concentrate if he isn’t talking. He says: ‘Miz Riveaux, by the time she died, she knew my whole life. I told her it in ’bout one million sections. She knew my life better ’an I know it myself.’

  Now, he’s telling it over again, to me. He says: ‘The thing ’bout my life, Mister Martin, is this. What I don’t have, an’ what I never done had, is the gift of contentment.

  ‘Now Beulah, she says to me: “Look at you’ life, Jeremiah Hill, and then look back at the life of you’ ancestors who were slaves down in Georgia.” She says: “You look at that an’ see if you don’t got a reason to be happy.”

  ‘An’ she’ right. I got some reasons. One reason I got is her. And Lettie and Glorie. An’ Mrs Riveaux, Miz Judge, she always did every way treat me fair.

  ‘So I got reasons. I know that. An’ once in a while it can come at me, like a breeze in August, a little sudden breeze of happiness. You know? But it don’t last. I don’t know why. I was always that way, all my life. Little breeze. Feel it right here, on my face. Then it goes.’

  We’re cleaning a ditch. We’re not far from the creek. It’s a hot day but we’re down in the deep ditch and it’s cool here.

  I say: ‘In the times when you’re not happy, Jeremiah, are you unhappy?’

  He stops work and considers this. He wipes his face on his overall sleeve.

  ‘Unhappy?’ he says. ‘No. It ain’t that. It ain’t that. It’s just, I keep on thinkin’ there’s somethin’ more. I keep on and on believing there’s somethin’ more gonna come an’ then I’ll be happy. After that new thing done come. After that more thing done show itself to me. Then I’ll be a happy man.’

  Some evenings, I have supper with Judge Riveaux. He can’t cook. Beulah makes all his meals and sends Lettie and Glorie over with them. But he’s fond of carving. He likes it when Beulah roasts a hen or cooks a ham. He takes a very long time sharpening the knife.

  He doesn’t talk much. He stares at his food with his kind eyes. He says one evening: ‘I never went to England. My wife and her friend Kathleen, they used to go. To see Shakespeare. You can see Shakespeare in Nashville. I guess you can see Shakespeare in Alaska. But that wasn’t good enough for Mrs Riveaux; she liked a thing to be authentic.’

  Then he says: ‘Mrs Riveaux was an anglophile. We got a larder full of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. I tell her in my prayers that you’re working here and I can feel her smile.’

  I say: ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t have met Mrs Riveaux.’

  ‘Yes,’ says the Judge, ‘yes.’ Then he changes the subject. He says: ‘Tell me about that farm in England. Still there, is it?’

  ‘It was sold,’ I say. ‘When my father died. The land’s still there. But I left it a long time ago.’

  ‘Can’t remember it, can’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I can remember it.’

  The Judge is sitting very still. He doesn’t want the conversation to go back to the subject of Mrs Riveaux. He wishes he hadn’t mentioned her. And so, to comfort him, I start describing Elm Farm, I take myself on an imaginary walk, out of the back door round the farmyard where Marguerite used to peck, into the barn where I tried to turn mower blades into swords, down the lane to the field where the hen houses used to be, where Timmy threw grain up into the air. I describe the Scots pine and the tyre swing. I walk on down to the river and the watercress beds …

  The Judge folds up his napkin. He rests his hands neatly on the folded square.

  I say: ‘There were two acres of forest not very far from the house. When I was a child I got lost there. The night fell and I couldn’t see my way out. I held on to a tree and waited. I was found in the end. But I don’t love woods and trees the way most people do. What I love here is the silence and the sky.’

  It has started to get dark while I’ve been talking. It’s a summer darkness, mauve and soft.

  ‘Go on,’ says the Judge.

  ‘There’s nothing more,’ I say. ‘That’s it.’

  Sterns sends me a command. He says: ‘It’s time to come home. It’s time to go on with your life.’

  He believes I should have what he calls ‘reconstructive surgery’. He thinks I am one of the few female-to-male transsexuals for whom the creation of a penis is of critical importance.

  This penis is real flesh, my flesh, moved and sculpted.

  A pedicle or barrel of tissue would be raised on my abdomen. Operation by operation, it is moved downwards till it hangs where it should. The urethra is re-routed into it. A synthetic stiffening rod of the same kind that is inserted into the penis
es of impotent men is sewn inside it.

  With this, I could be a woman’s lover. She would know no difference. Almost none.

  Sterns believes that I will never be happy until I am capable of this. He thinks this is what I keep dreaming about.

  I don’t dream about this. I don’t dream about anything. Days unfold. Martin lives them. He works through the hot afternoons. He drinks lemonade made by Beulah. He listens to Jeremiah’s life. He strokes the necks of the peacocks. He sleeps soundly in the big bed. I am him and he is me and that’s all. That’s enough.

  The woman I wanted was Pearl. I wanted to be Pearl’s universe. For her, I would have re-made myself as often and as completely as she demanded. She could have gone on inventing me until death parted us.

  Sterns knows this. Knowing it, you’d think he’d have a better understanding of my everyday dreams. But then he is a long way away from me and sitting in the dark. He has fish as companions. He’s never seen the sun on the creek. He’s never heard Walter Loomis sing.

  I tell Sterns in a letter that I have no desire to return to England. I tell him I have reached a plateau, a level place. I say to him: ‘Something or someone would have to call me back for me to give up the life that I have. The idea of more surgery doesn’t call me.’

  I remind him and I remind myself that I am thirty years old.

  And out in the fields I say to Jeremiah: ‘Age isn’t the only thing to creep up on us. Sometimes it’s happiness.’

  Walter has bought a car. It’s a second-hand blue Chevvy with patched leather upholstery.

  He folds the roof down and drives around in the sunshine with his rhinestone elbow leaning out into the breeze. Sky sits beside him with a chiffon scarf tied round her hair. When the fall comes, they’re going to go on a trip in search of Sky’s husband. They say: ‘We want to be married before the cold weather blows in.’

  Their record is out. TMS Records gave a little party for them. Everyone drank and danced. I thought it was going to be an LP containing all the songs Walter’s been writing since the beginning of time, but it isn’t. It’s a single. And it isn’t often played anywhere. But no one is downhearted. Walter and Skippy Jean and Bentwater all say: ‘That was just a start. A single is a toe in the lake.’ The lake they’re dreaming of is where the sword Excalibur lies, jammed into a rock.

  They live on what Sky earns as a backup singer and on Walter’s yard work. The last gift he had from one of his women employers was a baseball bat.

  Sometimes, he sings for tips at Fay May’s. He’s earned more than two hundred dollars in tips and he tells me: ‘I’m sending these to Pete. I’ve told him to save for an engine to put in the bus. Then he can drive it away. He can convert it into a proper motor home. He could go somewhere where he can get electricity in through the window.’

  One Sunday, Walter and Sky and I drive out to Opryland. Sky says: ‘This isn’t just a concert hall, it’s a complex. When they finish it, it’s gonna be like a village. That’s why they call it Opryland. You could live here and not move and have everything you need.’

  It has the biggest parking lot in the world.

  The blue Chevvy is the only car on it. We sit and stare at all the fiat space round us.

  Bentwater is with us. He’s showing no sign of betraying Walter. Sometimes, what the world predicts doesn’t occur. He looks at the enormous car park and says: ‘This moves me somehow. Hell knows why.’

  And then something beautiful happens …

  Sky has brought her roller skates. She tells us these are the same skates she’s had since she was thirteen. She puts them on. She hitches up her skirt and unties her scarf and climbs out of the Chevvy. She clomps a few yards and then turns round and smiles at us.

  ‘Go on,’ says Walter. ‘Let’s see you!’

  So she starts skating. With the thin legs she has, the skates look enormous. I expect her to fall and bruise herself. But she doesn’t fall. She lifts her arms like a dancer and glides cleanly away. She does circles and figures. Her hair flies out as she goes faster. She’s as graceful as a swallow. We sit absolutely still, with the sun burning down on us, gazing at her.

  A girl on a parking lot roller skating. You wouldn’t necessarily have thought of that as a wonderful thing.

  ‘Darn me!’ says Bent.

  Walter hears nothing, sees nothing, except Sky. He gets slowly out of the car and walks towards her. He takes off his rhinestone jacket and lets it drop. He holds out his arms.

  I have bought a Roach Motel. Now, in the bright nights, there’s no sign of my cockroaches. They’ve waltzed into the motel and died. Les Ches had Roach Motels on his brain, along with his leatherette lounger and his lost wife.

  Our minds are like women at a jumble sale, sifting and searching, moving things around.

  Mine still moves one piece of the past around:

  Estelle. My mother. Est.

  Sometimes – most of the time – she’s with Cord at Gresham Tears. Sometimes, she’s at Mountview. She’s never with Timmy and Pearl. Sometimes, she’s walking along, in no place that I recognise.

  Wherever I move her, she is beautiful. Even when she’s knitting a grey square. Her skin is white and clear and she’s wearing her old beautiful smile.

  Sometimes she’s at a window. It might be a window at Gresham Tears, or it might not. All I see is that the window is half-open and that there is sunlight falling onto my mother who stands there, waiting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1980

  Estelle:

  A new decade.

  But.

  These days, you have to put ‘but’ after everything. ‘I am alive. But.’

  Too much has happened to me. These happenings crowded together so densely in my mind that I had to find some rest here, at Mountview.

  But.

  Mountview is closing down.

  This is what they tell us. They say: ‘It is new government policy.’

  I never used to notice what governments did. I should have paid closer attention.

  It’s going to become a hotel. There’s going to be a swimming pool, underground. I say to them: ‘That’s perfectly all right. I’ll stay on and become a hotel resident. I’ll buy a swimming costume.’ They say: ‘Stop turning things into jokes, Estelle. Concentrate on getting well.’ I say: ‘In the old days, if you made a joke here, it was considered as a sign of recovery.’ They say: ‘The staff are more adequately trained in this modern day and age.’

  These new, more adequately trained staff believe they can make you well by asking you questions. I have my own personal questioner. She is called Linda. She’s young enough to be my daughter. I go to what is called a Counselling Room and sit opposite Linda and she interrogates me. She smiles as I come in and then she always says the same thing. She says: ‘Right, Estelle. Where were we?’

  Where were we?

  I don’t know.

  That’s why I came here. To remember whereabouts I was in my life.

  But Linda’s in a hurry. She has six weeks in which to cure me. Then we all have to walk out of here, carrying our overnight bags.

  I say to Linda: ‘The government has overlooked a simple thing: you cannot mime tap dancing.’

  The things that overcrowded my mind were deaths.

  Sonny’s. I forget when.

  Then after that there was a period of respite when I lived with Cord at Gresham Tears. He said: ‘What’s happened to your cooking, Est? It’s gone off.’

  So I started to make the old kind of food. I made oxtail stews and shepherds’ pies and Summer Pudding. And Cord and I began to thrive and get fat. In the mornings I’d hear him whistling in his room. In the afternoons we went for walks. He said: ‘It’s good to see you well again.’ I made a wild-flower collection and bought a flower press. We spent some of our evenings making greeting cards.

  But then the other deaths came.

  Pete Loomis died in a hospital in Ipswich. No one went to see him except me. The cancer he’d had in his nose reapp
eared in his lung. He told me the turkeys were the cause. He said: ‘If I were a younger man, I’d sue.’

  I said: ‘Listen, Pete, when you get out of here, come and stay with me and Cord. It’s quiet there.’

  He never got out of the hospital.

  We buried him in Swaithey churchyard.

  Grace Loomis said: ‘If ever there was a wasted life, Estelle, this was it.’

  I said: ‘Your son wouldn’t agree,’ and I walked away from her.

  Walter sent a guitar-shaped wreath made of carnations.

  Pete left me his wind-up gramophone and his record collection.

  Cord said: ‘The things we treasure, honestly!’

  The trolley bus was removed by the council, on Grace’s orders. She said it was a health hazard.

  We went on with our life at G. Tears, as Cord often called it. It was during that time that Cord said: ‘There’s something I want to tell you before I go, Stelle.’

  ‘Go where?’ I said.

  ‘Pay attention,’ said Cord. ‘Listen, for once.’

  I said: ‘I’m listening. This is all I ever do: listen out for clues to the meaning of the world.’

  We sat in deckchairs in the garden. We were getting so fat, the chairs creaked.

  Cord said: ‘Remember Mary?’

  I said: ‘It’s history. It became history years and years ago.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It’s history. But you might as well get the history right. We’ve all protected you from it – Irene, Pearl, Timmy, me – but it’s time you knew.’

  So he told me the story of Martin.

  When he’d finished, I had to go in search of something sweet to sustain me. I opened a packet of Cadbury’s Orange Creams. I brought it out to the garden and put it near me, under my deckchair, in the shade.

  I didn’t speak. Cord was never like Linda. He didn’t make you talk when you didn’t want to.

  I sat there, eating chocolate biscuits. After a long time, I said: ‘Were we the cause? Sonny and me?’

  Cord shook his head. He said: ‘You, of all people, know that certain things appear to have no cause. They just are and that’s it. And the answer’s blowing in the wind.’