by Carys Davies
I didn’t hear her come in.
I didn’t hear her set down the logs on the floor next to the hearth, I didn’t hear her step onto the woven rug and walk up behind me. I didn’t know she was there until we were standing together in front of the mirror, the two of us, me in front and her behind, me and Magdalena Hirsch.
I had never seen her up close before and it was ages since I’d seen her in town; years since I’d happened to be there when she’d paid one of her rare visits to the shops in the Hauptallee. She looked, to me, neither young nor old. She was slender and tall and her brownish-greyish hair was very straight and soft-looking. Her eyes were grey and the skin of her face was pale from living in the woods. She still had on her black coat from being outside but the buttons at the front were open and I could see her smock underneath. It was dark and rough looking and loosely woven and hung in folds from her shoulders and behind the folds I could see her shape. I thought of Trude. Trude with her starched white blouse and her straw-coloured plaits and the stingy kisses she’d sold to me in the cave above the weir. My face had grown suddenly very hot, I could see it in the mirror, red and burning beneath my short dark hair that was still damp from the rain. Behind us I could see the bed, the white pillow and the flowery eiderdown that had been cold when I’d touched it, and I could feel Magdalena’s breath, very quick and warm on the back of my neck. She smelled of milk and woodsmoke.
‘You?’ she whispered, bewildered, amazed.
A rose-coloured flush had spread into her waxy face and her mouth was open. I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were wide and her face was taut and very still and she was staring into the bamboo mirror at my reflection as if she had seen a ghost. I swallowed and waited and she said it again—You?—and then her arms came up around me and quick as a snake she reached past me to the dresser and snatched up the little fist-sized box that was on top of the cloth and sprang away from me.
‘Get out,’ she said softly, clutching the shiny black container against her open coat, hugging it and pressing down with her thumbs on its lacquered lid as if her life depended on it, and then her voice rose and she shouted at me at the top of her lungs, to get away from her, right now, and never come back, to go back through the woods the way I’d come, back to my wife and my baby son, she didn’t want to see me ever again, she didn’t need me anymore, everything was fine now just the way it was and if I ever tried coming back to her ever again, she would kill me.
THE COAT
SOMETIMES WHEN I arrived she’d open the front door and just stand there as if she’d hardly noticed I’d come—her arms folded beneath her breasts, watching the empty battered garment fill with the breeze from the open door, the body swelling up and moving about, as if it were alive. I wondered if she took it down at night from its curved hook, put its soft arms around her neck, its hips against her hips, and danced with it across the room and told it she loved it.
In the evenings, when I sat with her in the lamplight, I could see it out there, hanging in the passageway. The three scuffed leather buttons down one side, the nub of thick pewtery thread where a fourth had gone missing. It made me think of a roughed-up dog after a fight.
‘You should fold it away, Evangelina,’ I’d say then, as gently as I could. ‘Pack it up with your memories and put everything in a box and start again.’
When she didn’t say anything I’d reach out and cover her hand with mine.
‘Forget him, Evangelina.’
‘No.’
It was grey, a soft dark grey like old heather or the sea at Duddon in winter. Broad-shouldered and long-armed like Joseph himself. She kept it on a hook next to the front door like some kind of charm, a lure that would bring him home, like one of the lamps in the windows of the inn that were there to guide the carts and carriages safely across the bay.
It was more than a year since Joseph Hine had walked out of the door and left without a word of goodbye or explanation of any kind and Evangelina kept dreaming up all kinds of reasons why he might have gone. Once, in a flood of tears, she asked me if I thought there might be some far-off war she’d never heard of he’d felt called upon to fight; another time, if I thought it could have been something religious, some difficult question to do with his soul he’d gone away to figure out.
‘Don’t be daft,’ I wanted to say.
I don’t think it ever entered her head, what everyone thought: that her good-looking husband must have another woman somewhere, in Blackpool or Manchester or Liverpool. Somewhere glamorous and busy she’d never been, someone Joseph had met when he went off carousing three times a year with his uncles and his brothers and his sisters’ big loudmouthed husbands.
Once, not long after he took himself off, there’d been a report of a horse out on the sands with its saddle hanging down under its belly and the body of a man trailing beneath. Sonny Peen had seen it from his little hut above the shore and come running into town making frantic shapes with his arms and bellowing from his long wordless mouth. Sonny always liked to be the first with news of anything interesting or unusual out in the bay and when Evangelina heard his awful bellowing—that terrible donkey-sound of his that was like an ancient see-saw, or the slow drawing up of a bucket on a rusty winch from the bottom of a cavernous well—when she heard it she went running down there with a shawl pulled on over her nightgown but it wasn’t Joseph it was only a poor traveller attempting to cross over in the dark without a guide. Since then there’d been nothing, no rumours or sightings or reports or false alarms; Evangelina the only person who didn’t believe that the emptiness out in the bay, the mist, and the water creeping soundlessly back and forth beneath the moon, in and out over the sands, were the silence of a man who was doing his best to disappear.
It was the minister at Bethesda who first asked me to visit Evangelina, to sit with her from time to time and keep her company.
‘It will do her good, Margaret,’ he said, ‘to have someone there. Another voice, another face.’
We all knew by then what had happened when the schoolteacher, Mr. Gardiner, had gone to visit her in his best clothes with a bunch of snowdrops in his fist.
‘Are you blind?’ she’d shouted at him from the open doorway, not even asking him across the threshold, and pointing at Joseph’s coat. She snatched hold of one tattered grey lapel and shook it in the schoolteacher’s face. Didn’t he know she was waiting for her husband to come home? Couldn’t he see that? Her voice shrill, indignant, amazed. The schoolteacher blushed, he was young like she was and thirteen months must have seemed a long time to him for a good-looking husband to be gone and for his wife to believe he was ever coming back. When she carried on shouting at him he dropped his flowers and hastened backwards down the path. He hadn’t argued with her. If that’s what she wanted to believe, he’d told people afterwards, let her.
We didn’t talk much, Evangelina and I, and hardly ever, after those first few months, about Joseph.
We sat, we sorted laundry, we quartered fruit and cooked it and packed it in jars. We walked, we planted out her garden for winter—onions and kale and some pale flat wrinkled beans I’d never seen which she said wouldn’t mind the frost and would be soft and tender and delicious by early summer, and I remember thinking that it was a good sign, that she was talking about the summer as if she looked forward to it, and a picture came into my head then of me and Evangelina Hine sitting down to a plate of new beans on a table in her garden in summer. Later, too, another picture came: in my mind, winter has always appeared like a big, dark shoulder, or the long curve of a road up ahead, and once you are round it, it is all downhill and I remember standing on the ridged earth in Evangelina’s garden between her quiet house and Joseph’s empty forge behind it, seeing the two of us, me and Evangelina Hine on a sledge, in the last of the winter’s snows, somewhere up on the fells, Evangelina clinging on tightly behind, our heels stuck out to the side, our toes pointing up, hurtling down, shrieking and crying out and laughing.
I began to hate the stup
id coat. The way she clung to it, its woollen crust. Its grey shell. All her hopes crowded into it, all her passion and all her faith, as if just by hanging there, all limp and droopy and old, it was some kind of promise or pledge, a sign that he would come back to her one day, warm and safe and whole.
I made up my mind to tell her what I thought, what everyone thought, about Joseph having another sweetheart somewhere and her being too blind to see it.
‘Evangelina,’ I began slowly, but there must have been something in my voice that suggested I was about to say something she didn’t want to hear. She was sitting opposite me at her kitchen table, peeling the apples we’d brought in from the shed behind the forge where we’d stored them in the autumn. I thought how thin and tired she looked.
‘What?’ she said, keeping her eyes down. I watched while she picked up a fresh apple and dug the blade of her knife into its wrinkled skin and carried on, more briskly and fiercely than before. She had never looked so stubborn. She began dumping the peeled apples into a pan and drawing the loose peel together into a mound between her hands.
‘Perhaps, Evangelina—’ I began, but she cut me off.
‘How is Harold?’ she said, in a bright way.
I took a breath.
‘Harold is fine,’ I said. ‘Busy at the bank.’
Harold is fine, I wanted to say, but he is not you.
Harold and I lived then, as we do now, in a large house in the village, a half mile walk to Evangelina’s place. Being the forge, hers is the last of all the houses and beyond it is open country and the sea. I always loved that walk to her house, once in the morning, and then again in the early evening, when I said goodbye to Harold and set off from our house to see her. The water and the big sky and the hills rising behind.
Harold would always ask me, when I came home after my visits how ‘the poor woman’ was. He would always say how good I was to keep going there and spending so much time with her. Then he would kiss me on my forehead and pat my hand and tell me some story from the bank.
Spring came and in Evangelina’s garden we put in peas and raspberries and potatoes, a quince against the wall at the back of the house. The beans were getting so tall we had to support them with ropes strung between pairs of stakes, one at either end of each row.
It was Sonny Peen who saw Joseph Hine walking back across the bay.
Harold and I were away.
The Ulverston bank had closed for a day’s holiday and Harold had arranged a trip to Maryport. It seems foolish now, but as we walked about through the streets and around the harbour and sat over our lunch in the Golden Lion, I actually found myself looking out for Joseph Hine to see if this might be where he’d decided in the end to begin his new life away from Evangelina. It seems foolish now, in view of everything that has happened, that in a kiosk near the harbour wall, I bought Evangelina a china thimble with A Present From Maryport written along the bottom in tiny blue script.
Sonny Peen’s wooden hut is perched on the rock above the shore, something like the lookout on a rampart. It has a chimney made of beaten metal, one small window at the front made of pieces of bottle-glass stuck inside a shellacked frame. From there he can see all comers, which is what he likes. He likes to see the travellers coming in when the tide is chasing them, when they have to cluster around the guide’s white horse and cling to the edges of his floating cloak, like rats on a cheese. He likes to see the shapes of the people and the carts and the carriages looming up through the mist like creatures from the deep, and when he spots something out in the bay he makes a circle with his forefinger and his thumb, as if he has a telescope, and then he presses his good eye to the imaginary glass and closes the other eye and squints through the hole. He does this several times a day, and, depending on whether the tide is in or out, he sees carts and carriages and wading birds, herons and egrets picking their way delicately through the muddy sand; fishing boats and seagulls afloat on the rocking grey surface of the water.
Perhaps Sonny had his own theory all along about what had happened to Joseph Hine; perhaps he’d studied the big blacksmith from afar through his make-believe telescope and perceived some unusual sort of anguish; perhaps it had seemed to him that Evangelina’s husband was not well, that he was suffering or sickening for something and had gone away, like a cat or an elephant, to die. Perhaps, when Sonny Peen spied the tall powerful figure of Joseph Hine approaching across the shimmering sand, and saw his long weird clothing, snapping and guttering in the salt wind, he thought he was looking at a shroud.
But when Joseph Hine came back, he wasn’t a ghost. When Joseph Hine stepped off the wet sand into the marshy grass of the foreshore, what Sonny Peen saw, through the small shellacked frame of the bottle-glass window in his little wooden hut, was a woman.
He is a sight, though I suppose most of us are used to it now.
It is more than a year since he returned and I have often wondered what it was like, his first meeting with Evangelina when he came back, the first time he walked in through the door in his woman’s clothes. I have often imagined their conversation.
Joseph?
Evangelina.
A long silence.
How are you?
I don’t know. I missed you. I wanted to come home.
Another long silence.
I kept your coat for you.
Thank you. Thank you, Evangelina. That was kind.
Another long silence.
Joseph?
Yes?
Come.
When they are out in cold weather Joseph wears the big grey coat on top of his woman’s clothes.
For the forge he has his old apron as before, and though there are some, like Harold, who have chosen to take their business elsewhere, he appears to manage—he is still good, I suppose, at what he does.
It is hard to say exactly what he has become.
Underneath it all, it seems, he is still a man for they have a child now, the two of them—a little girl called May, and there is every appearance of Evangelina having another one on the way.
I have kept the china thimble I bought for her in Maryport and I would like, if I could, to give it to her, but Harold has forbidden it. He grows sweaty and uneasy if he ever finds himself within a hundred yards of Joseph Hine, coat or no coat. If he sees them in the street, Joseph and Evangelina and their little girl, he grips my arm firmly behind the elbow and marches us over to the other side.
In the evenings I watch him across the table, chewing on his dinner, the bones of his face moving and clicking at his temples, and from time to time he’ll look up at me and nod, and with his mouth full and food brimming onto his whiskers, he’ll say how good the dinner is, how tasty the meat, and afterwards, later, when we have drunk our tea and read a few pages out of our books or the newspaper and he is busy doing his thing above me in the dark, I’ll think about being high up on the fell with Evangelina in the last of the winter’s snows, her cheek against my neck, her arms across my heart.
THE REDEMPTION OF GALEN PIKE
THEY’D ALL SEEN Sheriff Nye bringing Pike into town: the two shapes snaking down the path off the mountain through the patches of melting snow and over the green showing beneath, each of them growing bigger as they moved across the rocky pasture and came down into North Street to the jailhouse—Nye on his horse, the tall gaunt figure of Galen Pike following behind on the rope.
The current Piper City jailhouse was a low cramped brick building containing a single square cell, Piper City being at this time, in spite of the pretensions of its name, a small and thinly populated town of a hundred and ninety-three souls in the foothills of the Colorado mountains. Aside from the cell, there was a scrubby yard behind, where the hangings took place, a front office with a table, a chair and a broom; a hook on the wall where the cell keys hung from a thick ring; a small stove where Knapp the jailer warmed his coffee and cooked his pancakes in the morning.
For years, Walter Haig’s sister Patience had been visiting the felons who found them
selves incarcerated for any length of time in the Piper City jail. Mostly they were outsiders—drifters and vagrants drawn to the place by the occasional but persistent rumours of gold—and whenever one came along, Patience visited him.
Galen Pike’s crime revolted Patience more than she could say, and on her way to the jailhouse to meet him for the first time, she told herself she wouldn’t think of it; walking past the closed bank, the shuttered front of the general store, the locked-up haberdasher’s, the drawn blinds of the dentist, she averted her gaze.
She would do what she always did with the felons; she would bring Galen Pike something to eat and drink, she would sit with him and talk to him and keep him company in the days that he had left. She would not recite scripture, or lecture him about the Commandments or the deadly sins, and she would only read to him if he desired it—a psalm or a prayer or a few selected verses she thought might be helpful to someone in his situation but that was all.
She was a thin, plain woman, Patience Haig.
Straight brown hair scraped back from her forehead so severely that there was a small bald patch where the hair was divided in the centre. It was tied behind in a long dry braid. Her face, too, was long and narrow, her features small and unremarkable, except for her nose which was damaged and lopsided, the right nostril squashed and flattened against the bridge. She wore black flat-heeled boots and a grey dress with long sleeves and a capacious square collar. She was thirty-six years old.
If the preparation of the heart is taken seriously the right words will come. As she walked, Patience silently repeated the advice Abigail Warner had given her when she’d passed on to Patience the responsibility of visiting the jail. Patience was always a little nervous before meeting a new prisoner for the first time, and as she came to the end of Franklin Street and turned the corner into North, she reminded herself that the old woman’s advice had always stood her in good stead: if she thought about how lonely it would be—how bleak and frightening and uncomfortable—to be shut up in a twelve-foot box far from home without company or kindness, then whatever the awfulness of the crime that had been committed, she always found that she was able, with the help of her basket of biscuits and strawberry cordial, to establish a calm and companionable atmosphere in the grim little room. Almost always, she had found the men happy to see her.