by Ali Shaw
He plodded downhill, soles crunching on the loose earth. If you found a handful of grass up here you were lucky, and if you pulled that grass even lightly it would uproot, so thin was the Merrow Wold’s dirt. The stink of goat droppings and fur were ever present in the dry air, but hard evidence of the culprits who had ruined the landscape was hard to come by. On the other mountains it was easy to spot signs of them: hoof prints pressed into baked mud or the naked blonde trunk of a tree they had stripped of bark. Here there was neither mud nor trunks. In making the Merrow Wold barren, the goats had made themselves nigh on impossible to track.
His grandfather had believed that on the fifth day the Lord had created every animal on land except for the goat. This he left to the devil, who made them in his greedy image. Upon seeing how they gobbled up the apple trees of Eden, the Lord gave them tails like knotted ropes, and these caught and snared the goats in the undergrowth. The devil was outraged, but the goats were relieved – the Lord had spared them from temptation, and for this they were grateful. This the devil could not bear. He bit off their long tails and licked out their eyes and he feasted upon them, and when he had eaten his fill he replaced their eyes with his own, so that they would never know the difference between restraint and indulgence.
More often than once, Daniel’s father, the Reverend Fossiter, had told that story from the pulpit of the Church of Saint Erasmus. Should any of the congregation have needed further proof of the tale’s wisdom, they needed to look no further than the way the goats’ long teeth tortured the trees. Putting up shoots was an ordeal in the face of the weather that befell these mountains. Even the sun could be the enemy of leaves in need of water. Trees that survived up here bent their trunks close to the soil. Branches grew thrust out like arms in a plea for mercy. A hard enough life, then, without the goats who came to chew away what protective bark they could grow. Daniel had taken it upon himself to guard the saplings whenever he came upon them, erecting fences of ringed razor wire. Still the goats would come. He would find the razor wire red with blood where the animals had chewed it, ignoring the pain it caused them.
Once he found an old nanny dead with her jaws clenched around the blades of the fence, her beard a brownish red from the blood that had flowed from her mangled tongue. And under the shade of the tree slept her plump little kid, who had scrambled on to her rump and used her neck as a ladder to clear the fence and chew so deeply on the sapling that it hung like a snapped straw. A kid like that did not deserve to die quick with a bullet between its eyes. It deserved to suffer with a bleeding belly, to ruminate on its deeds. But Daniel was weak-willed. His father and grandfather had always said so, and he conceded it was true. He had shown the kid the mercy it had not offered the tree, and killed it with one quick squeeze of his trigger.
Daniel loved the trees. Their blossoms in the spring were as silky and fragrant as rose petals. When the winds blew the blossoms loose they rolled through the air and reminded him of that day when he and Betty stood side by side in a swirling cloud of them, and two symmetrical petals had landed on Betty’s nose, for all the world like butterfly wings.
He snorted, and spat out a wad of phlegm.
He had done as she had asked and taken care of Finn, even though the boy was so unnatural that Daniel sometimes feared he was damning his own soul by doing so. He only prayed it would mean something to Betty if she came back and found he had kept his promise.
‘Ah, ahh,’ he said to himself. ‘Now there’s a telltale sign in your thinkings.’
If, he had thought. If she came back.
When she first left he had been so certain of her return. There were some things, he’d told himself, that were fated, and his and Betty’s love was such a thing. Star-crossed, they had been. He had divined it from the feeling of his bones – just as his grandfather had read signs in goat entrails (and charged a shilling for the service).
He no longer felt such certainty. These days, his heart felt like a broken compass, always spinning after a direction it could no longer find. These days, it was as hard to maintain his belief in Betty as it was to hunt for a goat on the Merrow Wold. These days, there was just the mountains, the weather, and the stink of pelt and old dung.
He left the main path and took a tussocky fork that would skirt the edge of Thunderstown to reach the south road, where the Fossiter homestead had stood for over two centuries. Not for the first time was he letting guilt gnaw at him. True, he could not bear to consider the reasons for Betty’s long absence, but he could always bear to torture himself with what he had and had not done during those eight years.
He had done as Betty had asked and looked after Finn, but he had not done so happily. He was a love-smitten fool who was incapable of refusing her, but that didn’t mean he was ready to forgive Finn for being the thing he was. At best Finn was a freak of nature. At worst he was touched by the devil, just as the ravenous goats were.
Every Fossiter man back through the generations had been a culler such as he. Only his father had bucked the tradition. Whereas previous generations had been heavy drinkers, meat-eaters and womanizers, Daniel’s father was a teetotal vegetarian, and as spiteful as a hornet.
Throughout Daniel’s childhood his father and grandfather did not speak to one another, and when Daniel’s father died of a sickness they had still not reconciled. Daniel was fourteen when that happened, and after that his grandfather raised him and recommenced in earnest the Fossiter tradition for raising boys. He taught Daniel how to shoot, how to work his way upwind of a goat, how to use the curved knife that peeled softened fat from the hide. How to cleave the meat, drain the blood without spoiling the pelt and how, once Daniel’s fifteenth birthday came around, to drink. He had made Daniel eat for the first time in his life the flesh of an animal, and it had tasted as seductive and vitalizing as it had immoral.
He taught Daniel the characters of the mountains, the methods and charms for appeasing them and the ways in which a canny goat could exploit the landscapes to hide from a culler. He instructed him in the preparation of traps, the spring-loading of iron jaws that would snap clean through a leg. He taught him to carry goat droppings in his pockets to dupe the foolish beasts into trusting him as he stalked the mountainsides.
He taught him, too, about the roamy goat, the one that could only ever be sighted when the mists hung over the mountains. The one goat he must not shoot.
Nobody had ever seen two roamy goats together. Logic said there must be more than one – there had been roamy sightings for centuries. Or perhaps they were a genetic anomaly, like a white hart, born to a normal buck and its nanny. Or ... or perhaps, as Daniel’s grandfather vehemently maintained, it was one of a kind, an ancient beast still alive and unthreatened by cullers.
It was twice as large as a normal goat, almost the size of a bullock. Its features were nobler, its tread delicate as a deer’s. Its horns were a marvel, patched grey, white and iridescent like flint. Its fleece was threaded with indigo and steel-coloured hairs, so that the shadows of its coat were a moody purple and the outline bright like a cloud’s silver lining.
It would mean, his grandfather used to insist with rare vitriol, a curse on your family to shoot that goat.
Daniel’s father had always taught him to obey his elders. So, after his father died, Daniel did all he could to adapt to the lifestyle his grandfather pressed upon him. Yet the character of his father had also been strong. Daniel feared God, even if he did not always believe in him. He was at times, he could admit, terrorized by God. As a teenager he would sneak off to the Church of Saint Erasmus when he knew his grandfather would not notice, to sit in its vaulted silence staring ever upwards at the black shadows of the ceiling. There he would feel a terrible despair, barren and biblical like this land of the Merrow Wold. He would repent of all the things his grandfather had encouraged him to do, the drinking and the brawling and the savage talk.
Likewise, when he was nineteen, Daniel had wept heavingly at his grandfather’s funeral, even though e
very other tear was one of relief that at last he was free to pick up the pieces of the previous two generations and try to understand how to be the descendent of both men at once. That was a puzzle that would prove difficult to solve.
On the night before the funeral he had wolfed a steak so rare and bloody it was near raw, then, after the burial, resumed the vegetarianism of his childhood. He had consumed the meat both in homage to his grandfather and in fear for the dead man’s soul. Looking back, he could never comprehend how his grandfather had shrugged off talk of his impending torment. ‘You only think that’ll be,’ he had once said with a wink, ‘because you think you yourself are so special. But look at the goats. They think they’re special too, and we cullers know that ain’t true. Living by instinct only. No control over what they do and don’t do. And if you think we ain’t the damned same as them, well ... then you’re more of a fool than anyone for thinking there’s a bed made up in hell for the likes of me.’
Daniel was approaching the homestead now. It was a long building constructed from sturdy beams, more like a feasting hall of old than a home to be at peace in. A sturdy fence marked out the territory of its yard, on the far side of which were an outhouse, a workshop and a disused barn. Although Daniel had lived here since his father’s death, his childhood years spent at the vicarage meant that the homestead, in which so many of his ancestors had dwelt and died, had never felt his own. In fact, for a few blissful years he had left it to rot. That was when he lived with Betty in her house in Candle Street.
He had met her on the Devil’s Diadem one day, while he crouched with his hunting rifle. Stalking like that, in no hurry to make the kill, was an experience as calming as the long hours of prayer his father had encouraged. The Devil’s Diadem, that far up and that far wide of the path, was a deserted place. He had never encountered another human being among its barbed trees and narrow boulders. So, when the woman stepped into the clearing he had been aiming his rifle at, he very nearly placed a bullet between her eyes, as he would have done had she four legs and dainty hooves.
She screamed when she saw him, and the noise stayed his trigger finger and made him blanch.
‘Please!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t! Please just don’t!’
When he realized it was the gun she was frightened of, and that she had completely misread his intent, he dropped it and stood up slowly with his hands raised. He wasn’t a man of words, but a man of doings. People often mistook him for a simpleton, thinking the same had been true of his grandfather and all the Fossiters before him, but he had his father the Reverend Fossiter’s mind and his father’s thinkings. Indeed, it was thinkings that hampered his tongue. So thick and flavoursome that when they came down to his mouth to be spoken it was hard to make the sounds of them, like talking with a mouthful of honey.
He managed, after stumbling over and over, to tell her his purpose. ‘This gun is only for goats, ma’am.’ He pointed to himself. ‘I am a goat culler.’
She laughed. So lightly and freely that he sensed it was all right to smile back, then laugh too. On such rare occasions when Daniel started laughing, out came a great booming laugh that rocked back his shoulders and bent his spine and opened wide his big bearded jaw to let the deep bass laughter out, like the noise of an avalanche echoing in a chasm. They laughed together for several minutes, and later he would try to conjure that sound in his head again and again.
A friendship began between them. Unlikely, someone at church remarked. For Betty was at odds with Thunderstown, while Daniel had it in his bones. Betty often said that the place was so provincial, so small that she couldn’t understand why she didn’t return to the metropolis she’d come from. As for Daniel, he was so rural he found even Thunderstown’s size intimidating. But this was the thing they had in common, this displacement. Two people who found it hard to belong wherever they found themselves.
Daniel had been her confidant. He had been there to listen in giant silence when she told him of the urges affecting her. She wanted a child, she would say, then would say it again. She wanted a child wanted a child wanted a child. Someone she could raise right, make fit in right, fit into the world and live a full life because of it. In response he would scratch his head and try to explain that he wished she wouldn’t talk as if she were some botched job. He feared it when she talked like that, because she made it sound like all she longed for was to replace herself. He could never convey how queasy it made him, for the slowdown between his thinkings and his speakings always let the proper moment slip. All he could do was listen, confused by his sympathy, as she told him of her attempts at pregnancy, and of all the subsequent ways in which her body and medicine had failed her.
She looked as fragile as a thing made from bird bones when she told him what the doctors had said. Infertile. She spat out the word like blood and Daniel at least understood, as he watched the sobs make her jerk like a marionette, that it would have been far better for her to lose a limb, or an eye, or all her teeth than to lose this thing. Then she stepped into Daniel’s arms as if walking over a cliff, and he’d wrapped them around her and sensed that if he squeezed her even in the slightest she’d be crushed to salt.
After she had confessed all this to him he climbed up on to the Devil’s Diadem with just his rifle and his thoughts for company. It was a day of mists: he could see barely a stone’s throw through the cloud.
Then he’d glimpsed for the first time the roamy goat, the one with silver eyes and horns like flint. The one that trod with a gentleness of spirit other goats did not possess. The one whose bleat was like an infant crying. It emerged from the mist with a faint breeze blowing in its blue-hued fur. Its eyes twinkled and its fur sparkled and it was as if there were a bond between them. It cried out and the noise reached inside Daniel’s chest and squeezed his heart in ways he could not understand, and made the mist become a silver world that only they shared. He chewed for a while on nothing, and the goat chewed too, and the pinks and ambers in its iridescent horns gleamed. Then Daniel let out a great choking sigh, raised his rifle and shot the goat between the eyes.
Within minutes, the mists had cleared.
He’d carried the roamy goat dead down to the homestead, letting the weight of the animal describe itself on his shoulder blades and the spike of one of its horns tease his jugular. Down he plodded from the mountains, and once at the bottom he threw it on the counter in his workshop and he skinned it and treated the fur and did all he could to cut the shape of it well, so he could present it, finally, weeks later, to Betty as a birthday gift; a shawl of silver-blue wool that she took from him gingerly and smiled at, then wrapped around her neck. Quilted in blue goat fur, she pressed herself up against him and drew his hands around her waist, helped his broad fingers slide under the soft fabric of her skirt and along the even softer surface of her skin. She led him indoors into her house on Candle Street and undressed him. Then, when he could not make his fingers do the work, she undressed herself, the goat shawl and her skirt and her underwear dropping one by one on to her bed. They lay down on that deep pile of clothes and fur and he drowned in the feel of all her flesh pressed under all of his own.
At the memory of all this he shook his head like a stunned boxer. He blinked moisture out of his eyes. He let out a harrumph. He had reached the gate of the Fossiter homestead, and he entered the yard and crossed to the workshop, still carrying the goat he had killed that morning on his shoulders. Inside, he used the goat’s horns as handles to lower its head on to a chopping block. He collected his old axe from its hook on the wall and whistled it through the shaggy goat neck so that it snicked apart the vertebrae within. He hefted the carcass and left the head staring up indifferently from the block. He hung the empty body from cords suspended from the workshop ceiling and let the blood dribble out of its neck and patter into a stained collecting trough beneath.
Not a day passed by without him remembering that night with Betty. Their lovemaking had been intense and finally ecstatic, but it was their subseque
nt state that had affected him so profoundly. He had lain on his back with her drifting to sleep against him and he had felt aligned. She had made geometry out of him.
In the morning she’d been in tears. ‘I’m so so sorry, Daniel. I’ve made a mistake. It’s not you, it’s me. I can’t explain. Sex just reminds me of how I can’t have a baby. There, I’ve said it. You shouldn’t stick with me, you should have someone better, someone undamaged.’ Then he put his arms around her and told her it didn’t matter, and smelled her hair while she cried against his throat. He meant it. He did not believe that sex was a prerequisite to the peace he had discovered as they lay together. Sex was just bodies. Peace was spirit. They did not sleep together again.
Yet since that night he had never found such peace. Shortly afterwards, Finn had arrived.
When Betty told him she was pregnant she said, ‘I swear to God, Daniel, I swear on my mother’s blood, I swear on my father’s grave. I went up the Devil’s Diadem during the storm, and that was all I did.’
At that he covered his face with his hands. To think – he had been the one who had put that idea into her head! He had told her, without ever thinking she would act on it, a superstition of his grandfather’s. The old man had believed that if a childless woman climbed to the top of a mountain during a storm, and there in a whisper petitioned it for a child, and then drank rainwater until she was sick, then, one out of a hundred such times, she might conceive. His grandfather had believed many such things.
Daniel did not know what he found worse. The idea that she had given herself up to some infernal trick of the weather, or the idea that he had planted the suggestion in her mind. ‘Betty,’ he whispered, ‘is there no likelihood that the child is ours?’
‘No. Daniel, I’m sorry. I would have been pleased by that, but there’s no way. What’s happened to me is a miracle.’
Towards the end of her pregnancy he would sometimes catch himself staring morbidly at her belly, while in his own he felt his terrors kicking. He had always been caught between two fears: his father’s fear of the judgements of the Lord, and his grandfather’s fear of wicked spirits that could conjure squalls out of blue skies. Each man had debunked as superstition the beliefs of the other, leaving Daniel with no middle way save to abandon belief altogether, which would be the most fearful thing of all. In church he stopped praying and forced his mind to think about goats and mountains and camouflaged traps. He did this because he feared hearing the whisper of the Lord in his prayers. If the Lord asked him to do something about the baby in Betty’s womb he knew he would be too weak-willed to obey. Better not to hear the command in the first place. He felt removed from God then, trapped from him as though under rubble, and sometimes he would wake up with his heart thumping in the dead of night, having dreamed about a little boy holding his hand.