The Rye Man

by David Park

  They walked along the line for about a mile, sometimes having to climb over rickety barriers erected by farmers who wished to discourage trespassers, and once they went under another bridge where the decaying innards of some discarded engine lay rusting under choking tendrils of ivy. When they came to a point where a solid barrier of barbed wire prevented further progress, they climbed the twisting ribbon of path which successive feet had worn to bare soil and emerged in a humped scrub of field.

  They paused to regain their breath after the steepness of the climb and she pulled a burr from his hair. He was not sure where they were and it felt good, as if they were on some childhood adventure together. Walking to the top of the rise they looked about them to gain their bearings and she was talking to him, holding on to the sleeve of his jumper in mock exhaustion, but he was not listening, her words drifting through his senses. Down below, the copse of tall trees, the snake of stream beyond them. The angle where the hedgerows hit the curve of the road. A topography lodged in his memory. But it was the house, the house above all with its slate roof, squatting on the sweep of field under the shadow of the tree, whose pollarded branches clutched the sky like stumps of fingers. His eyes moved slowly from the line of the house to the stone barn and then away again. He crouched down almost as if he was frightened the house might see him, know that he had come back.

  She was looking at him now, asking him what was wrong, her face searching for answers.

  ‘Maguire’s place – that’s it. That’s where it happened.’

  He stood up and stared at it, his memory and the present fusing in a fleeting pulse of fear. He felt her hand slip into his. There was a tightness in his stomach. He had always known that the return to his home ground would eventually bring him to this place but he had always thought he would choose the time, never thought of it happening like this – unprepared, suddenly thrust at him when he did not expect it.

  The place held them both still and silent. She pulled his hand, inviting him to return the way they’d come but he did not move, did not take his eyes from the house below.

  ‘I want to look.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He didn’t reply, but started down the slope to where the farmhouse nestled in the hollow. Everything seemed smaller, less solid than he remembered it, the different parts which went to make it disconnected and insubstantial. There was no smoke now from the house. He remembered there had always been smoke from the chimney and with it the smell of peat, a tight funnel which spiralled back towards the trees and then seemed to hang motionless, trapped in some depression. They walked across the fields from which she had made a bare living by renting out the land for grazing, and from what vegetables grew in the stony patch to the side of the house.

  By now they could see the house was derelict, thin cordons of ivy fanning across the slate roof and black squares in some of the window frames where the glass was missing. A ragged tumble of tall grass and weeds smothered the garden, reaching the top of the broken fence, and clumps of gorse had crept closer and closer to the house.

  After she had been released she had moved away. People said she had gone to England but no one knew for sure. It had briefly passed into the hands of someone else and then he, too, was gone, the land sold and the house left to rot. The wooden door, still the dark red he remembered, sagged inwards, held now by a solitary rusted hinge. They paused at the brick path which led up to the house. It felt as though he was about to step into his past but there were none of the feelings that normally brought, only a powerful surge of emptiness, a kind of trembling inside him which made him nervous and uncertain. Emma moved closer but suddenly he wished she was not there, did not want her to see or be part of this moment, but it was too late now and he had to go on.

  He stepped out with a boldness he did not feel and made towards one of the windows. The little paint left on the sill was blistered and bubbled, flaking away at his touch. Resting his arms on it, he shaded his eyes from the reflected light and peered into the room. Empty of furniture, a light fitting hung limply from the low ceiling and on the fireplace was a fantail of smoke-blackened bricks. He looked at the faded pattern of wallpaper, its corners flapping loose with years of damp, and the black-framed mirror whose silvered surface stared into a cracked emptiness. The mirror in which each day she would have brushed her hair and pinned up the coil of tresses, the mirror where her fingers would have traced the lattice of lines spreading slowly from the corners of her eyes as she searched for signs of approaching middle age. Where, too, her secret slept, waiting to rise up and meet her unbroken gaze.

  He climbed the tree carefully, selecting his hand- and footholds like an experienced climber while the scent of bark and sap swamped his senses and his hands felt sticky with resin. Once he reached the lower branches the hardest part was over and he sat in the fork and rested. His knees bore the crinkled print of bark and he tried to lick the resin off his hands. Above him the canopy of leaf and branch rustled in the breeze, light squinting through the moving mesh.

  His eyes suddenly caught the scuffmarks on his sandals and he spat on them, then rubbed them with the cuff of his jumper. They were still new enough to merit regular inspections from his mother and he did not want to incur her wrath. He knew they had been expensive. They had gone the previous Saturday to Dawson’s in Market Street in a kind of yearly ritual which marked the coming of summer, and Mr Dawson had measured his feet in the metal shoe with the sliding toes, then produced a green box from the steeply-tiered shelves. He had the habit of holding the box in his broad hand and removing the tissue with a flourish to reveal the shoes as if performing some conjuring trick.

  When they were on his feet, Mr Dawson pinched the toes with his thumb and finger to assuage his mother’s concern that there was growing room, and he had to parade the length of the shop, conscious of their eyes on his feet. A serious business buying shoes. He loved the smell of the new leather, the cleanness of the white spongy sole, but above all he loved the lightness on his feet. After the clumpy heaviness of his black winter shoes, it felt as if his feet had sprouted wings, like he was walking on air. It was difficult to resist the impulse to run but that would have to wait until he was on his own. Mr Dawson parcelled his old shoes in the green box. On Monday the tissue would wrap an apple he took to school and later the box would be used to store the newest recruits to his model army. On their way out his mother would give him the pennies from her change to drop into the collecting box held by the lifesize model of a boy with callipers on his legs, the boy with blue eyes and pleading face who stood sentinel in the shop doorway.

  It had begun with shoes. It must have been the lightness of his step that carried him further that day. It was May and the lanes were white with cow parsley in the verges and hawthorn blossom in the hedgerows. White like a wedding cake. He was often alone as a boy but rarely lonely, and that Saturday he knew no other restriction but the extent of his own impulse, and on this day it carried him outside the normal parameters of his play. There was a feeling, a scent of summer which gave him a sense of freedom, a desire for newness in his wanderings and so he followed the stream, its soft voice where it lisped and splashed over stones his only companion. Followed it as it dawdled and curved round the reeded banks and pock-marked edges where cows had stood to drink. Clouds of midges trembled and sometimes a dragonfly skimmed its surface. He dropped a peeled stick into the water and followed its voyage but soon its pace was too slow and boredom made him leave it becalmed in still water. For a second he thought of stepping on stones along its shallow stretch but remembered his sandals and could not risk the telltale white marks.

  Across the fields now which were new to him, and then he saw the copse. It was almost circular in shape, clumped on a slightly raised plateau, its circumference bound by a moat of bushes and a yellow flame of gorse so bright it hurt his eyes. With little effort his imagination fashioned it into a fort, a walled castle which invited exploration and so he followed the narrow path which wound
its way into its heart. It was darker now and the dappled light filtering through the meshed vault of branches reminded him of the way light seeped through the coloured glass of church windows on Sunday morning. A secret world of sky and shadows, and he knew from the start that it would be a special place. He touched the trees as he walked, as if by touching them he gave them names and claimed them for his own.

  To his disappointment he broke into a clearing where the blackened bones of a fire showed that someone else knew this place, but he told himself that it had been a tramp, or travelling person who was long gone and would never return. He pushed his way through brambles which plucked at his jumper, holding his hands high in the air as if wading through water, and made his way to the other side where it broke open revealing the world below. He climbed a tree, the one he was to climb again and again, then made his way along a knotted branch which jutted out into space, sitting astride it and shuffling his way forwards until he reached a point where he could peer through the veil of leaf and see the countryside spread out before him. See, without being seen, the house below while all about him the trees rustled and breathed gently.

  A house with a red door and a blue slate roof. A curl of smoke. A yard with a stretch of flapping washing held aloft by an angled wooden pole; a piled store of peat; a stone barn to the side of the house. He saw her too, working a hoe in the vegetable patch with its ridged rows, stooping from time to time to pick out a stone or weed. Her hair was pinned up and sometimes she stopped to push a fallen wisp of hair from her eyes. Her name was Maguire – he had been in McMinn’s fruit shop one day when she had placed a box of lettuce on the counter and Mr McMinn had marked the transaction in a ledger he kept under the counter.

  Once she stopped for a rest and glanced up at the trees, looked right at him, but he knew she could not see him and it made him feel like a god, as if he had power over her, and at the same time his feeling of omnipotence was tinged with guilt, an awareness that he was spying on her. He meant no harm but her world was open to him, drawn into his vision like light into an eye.

  It became a game, this journey to the copse, nestling in the sanctuary of the branches and watching the world below. He became familiar with her movements, came to recognise the clothes she wore and grew intimate with the pattern of her work. Always only a game.

  As May slipped into June he found himself spending more time in his secret place but he told no one about it, afraid that to share its existence would rob him of its ownership. He made a makeshift hide and stored objects which he surreptitiously borrowed from home. He watched her build a scarecrow and drape it with tattered clothes, watched her move through the repetitive pattern of her life, as she tilled the flinty ground that was greening with new growth. And never any visitors, just once a younger woman on a bicycle who stayed a short while and then was gone.

  Only one thing eluded him, one thing for which he found no meaning. At intervals she would walk to the stone barn. Usually she would carry some sort of container, a bowl perhaps, and then return a few minutes later. He could tell by the way she held it then that the bowl was empty. Wooden pallets and sacking blocked the windows and the slated roof was mottled with yellow moss. A bowl of meal perhaps. She always paused before entering and then one day, in the glint of light on metal, he knew that it was to unlock the door with a key. Perhaps she was frightened someone would steal her stock, or maybe it stored something valuable to her, but it was a small thing and it drifted to the back of his mind.

  Once his mother mentioned her in a conversation he overheard, only a passing reference that told him little, other than that she was a widow whose husband had died in an accident ten years earlier, and she had a grown up daughter living in England. That was all anyone seemed to know. One Saturday he saw her for a second time in the town, scurrying with her busy, anxious gait. She walked right past him, a canvas shopping bag clutched in her hands. He looked into her face and for the first time saw the features which had always been just too far away to grasp. He did not know what age she was but maybe about the same as his own mother, with a small tight mouth and dark brown eyes that seemed to burrow deep into her head. She wore a long green raincoat, belted and buttoned tightly about her, and her shoes were scuffed and splashed with mud. Her hair was pulled back tightly and pinned in a bun and it made her face look pinched and taut. As they passed, he half-expected her to look at him and recognise him, but instead she stared straight ahead. He watched her hurry down the street, never pausing to look in shop windows, separated from everything around her, like a shadow moving across a field.

  Now the grass grew tall, fanning in undulations, allowed to grow before being cut for silage, while in the trees leaves thickened and blocked out more light, casting flitting, trembling shadows which darted about him like fish in a rock pool. The sap of summer was in the touch and smell of everything. Soon school would end and bring the possibility of new adventures. And as that day approached he grew more curious about the stone barn and the journeys she made with the bowl. Slops to feed some animal or poultry? But why were they never allowed outside? How could they live in the dark outhouse where only slivers of light would filter through the cracks in the wooden pallets? He thought, too, of the key with which she opened and locked the door. What was it that she was so frightened of people stealing?

  Gradually he grew bored with his game, frustrated with a life where nothing happened, and he knew he would soon desert it. Then, one Saturday afternoon when he had fled the visit of aunts, he saw her come out of the red-painted door, her canvas bag in her hand and wearing her belted raincoat. He knew she was going into town.

  He watched her hurrying down the laneway on to the road, her pinned-up hair bobbing above the top of the cut hedgerow, and on impulse he was down the tree and walking across the field, the seeded heads of grass lapping round his waist. He hesitated for a second at the fence, then climbed over it, the wooden post trembling for a second under his weight then vibrating slightly as feelings of guilt rustled inside him. No one would know. Just one look at everything to see it clearly, cleanly, like the final focus of a lens, and then he would be gone forever. No harm to anyone, just the final satisfying of a curiosity and then forgotten. His hand on the whitewashed walls of the house, baked warm by the sun, his shadow moving in front of him like a ghost.

  He came to the window but could not bring himself to do anything but glance guiltily out of the corner of his eye and move on, almost as if to stop and stare would be to intrude too deeply. He glanced at his fingers whitened with dust like chalk and as he faltered across the front of the house he carried an image of a brown interior like a sepia photograph. A mirror on the far wall, a crackling square of frizzling light. Into the yard and saw for the first time the lopped branches of the trees piled on top of each other, one of them stretched across a cutting block, an axe buried in the rotting bark, the yellowed end of the branch broken off like a snapped pencil. The heaped mound of peat, two sheets on a clothes line, a wooden pole with a V cut in its end holding them up like a mast and sail. As he looked towards the barn a sudden thwack of a sheet made him jump and quickened an impulse to escape back to the safety of the trees. He stared up at where the trees stood tall in the rising wind. What if she was there, watching him now just as he had watched her? A shiver passed through his body like the wind in the field of grass.

  In front was the red barn door, wooden pallets and sacking nailed to the window frames. Purple-headed weeds sprouted from crevices along the base of the wall. He looked about him once more to check that he was alone and then tried the door but it was locked as he already knew it would be, and its solid frame resisted all of his half-hearted efforts to push it open. Moving to the windows he put his eyes to the gaps between the slats of wood and peered into the gloom. Almost at once he pulled his head back as if he had been punched, the smell unlike anything he had ever known. Living on a farm had taught him about smells, but this one was different. It was not the uncovered slurry pit, the rotting carcas
s of a sheep hidden in reeds by the stream, the stored mound of turnip to be used as winter feed.

  He pinched his nose and looked again and that was when he heard it – the low, almost inaudible whimpering, but mixed with it was another sound, the strangled, guttural breathing of some animal he could not recognise. He pushed his face closer to a knotted gap in the slats and thought he glimpsed the shuffling shape of some shadowy creature. The noise grew louder, more insistent, and he suddenly felt that it sensed his presence, the way a dog knows when some stranger has encroached on its territory. The sounds were not fierce, but almost pleading; not falling or rising beyond the whimper but a low, steady, plaintive sob which held him with its strangeness and for which, despite his frantic searching, he could find no reference in his memory. A little louder now, maybe closer, and with it a flurry of smell, infused with some festering sore.

  He pulled back his head to breathe clearer air and as he did so the sacking trembled behind the pallet. He wanted to turn and run, run and hide in the heart of the trees, but the creature was calling to him now, a wordless pleading, breaking on itself and now rising again in a fragmented and desperate rhythm of need. The sacking moved an inch from the wall leaving a narrow margin of darkness, and then just above the sill and from behind a tiny half-moon-shaped knot in the wooden band of pallet, he saw it moving towards him. His heart banged in his chest and he stepped back, frightened that somehow it might seek to drag him into the blackness of the barn, but it rested on the stone sill, thin, shorter than his own, ingrained with dirt, the long ragged nail speckled with white and brittle-looking like the shell of an egg. The whimpering had stopped and there was only the rustling, shuddering breathing behind the sacking which trembled now like a veil. And then he stepped forward and slid his own finger along the sill until the two tips touched.