by Tim Pears
Enoch made his hand into a fist and rapped the knuckles against his own skull loudly. ‘Like fuckin iron,’ he said. ‘Nothin can get in through it. No ideas. No nothin.’
‘Enough,’ Amos said.
‘That is if he don’t wish me to shut it for him,’ Albert said.
The boy walked to the door of the shed and looked out on to the yard. The farmer’s chickens had come in number and were gleaning the rickyard of loose grain. They pecked at the ground with swift efficiency. Their strutting posture gave the impression they were helping themselves to what was theirs by right, even as they couldn’t believe their luck, and must take what they could before their luck ran out. Above them, sparrows snaffled what they could find on the ledges and in the crevices of the machines. Leo ran out of the shed, and the rooster and hens scattered in great and noisy affront.
In the afternoon Dunstone the old lad appeared. ‘What can I do?’ he asked. ‘What can I do?’ Amos Tucker told him he could help the boy carry water. Leo found him another bucket and they worked in tandem, Dunstone following close after him and telling him of all he had seen in his peregrinations about the estate that morning. ‘I seen horses on Home Farm bigger an your’n here,’ he said. ‘Bigger an I ever seen. I seen one a the gardeners up at the big house sneakin a fag in the glasshouse. With one a they maids. Smokin away they was. Wouldn’t give me one neither.’
Late in the afternoon Amos Tucker’s two younger daughters came into the yard with the farmer’s terriers. As the corn rick grew smaller so rats began to rush out, into the net Fred had secured there. The terriers caught most of them. Others the girls clubbed with wooden cudgels. One small pink rat Nellie Tucker held by its tail and brought over to Leo. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to put this feller down your shirt?’
Leo looked at her, neither advancing nor retreating, neither smiling nor grimacing, nor saying a word. Then Dunstone saw the baby rat squirming as if a puppet hung from a string. A brief squeak issued from him. He turned around and scuttled off, and Nellie ran after him, caterwauling.
March
The boy walked home from school. He slowed, let the others carry on ahead, chattering, bickering. None looked back.
A pair of geese came flying low, over the hedge, landing in the meadow by the river. He’d noted a couple there this morning. There were many more now, standing in pairs apart from each other. Waiting. Like celebrants gathering for some country baptism, or mass wedding. Perhaps when the priest of their kind and his cackling acolytes and the matronly geese with the food arrived, the shy creatures would begin to mingle.
He passed Sedge Field with Isaac Wooland’s dairy herd of Ruby Reds. Red Rubies. He stopped. The cows, some twenty or twenty-five of them, stood close to one another, jostling, by the hedge where it curved some thirty yards along from the gate. He climbed up on to the second rung and leaned over and watched. They might have been a crowd penned in, yet the whole of the field around them was empty. The cows were silent. Their udders were full. They chewed the cud. Leo climbed over the gate. One of the cows looked at him then looked away but did not move. He squatted and peered in amongst their legs. There was something there, he was unsure what. Some shapeless entity. He stared, waiting for his brain to come to an interpretation, even if erroneous. A conjecture. There were two cylindrical shapes, close together. It dawned on him that he was gazing at the soles of a pair of boots.
Leo rose up off his lean haunches and walked slowly forward. He did not know cows, or have any feeling for their actions or their characters. He couldn’t talk to them. As he reached the herd one of them let out a long mewling groan. He had no idea of its meaning. Threat. Lament. They were blank animals to him.
‘Git on,’ he said. ‘Shift it.’
They took no notice. Perhaps they couldn’t hear his voice. They smelled of soft bovine ordure and herbage and something sour. He had no stick with him, to beat them on their rumps and force a way through. Then the one that had lowed did so again, and she walked lazily away, past the boy towards the middle of the empty field, her udders swaying. Another followed her example, and a third, and a fourth. Gradually the whole herd dispersed from this odd spot. Leo waited for them to depart. None of them stepped on Isaac Wooland but walked delicately around his prone figure. The last one left stood above him, leaning her long neck down and licking his face of its sweat. She looked up, abruptly startled to find herself alone, faced by this son of man who stood erect, and stumbled away after her brethren.
Leo kneeled down beside the stockman. A strange choice of place to sleep in the middle of the afternoon. He prodded Isaac’s shoulder. He lifted the man’s hand but when he let it go it fell back limply. Isaac’s jaw was half-covered in greyish bristles, inexpertly shaven. The flesh of Isaac Wooland’s dead body was still soft and warm. He must have died minutes before. Perhaps he was still dying when Kizzie and the others passed by on the other side of the hedge, all children’s gibberish and blether.
They fetched a cart and the boy brought them to the spot. They stood considering Isaac’s body. Albert lit his pipe. Enoch looked at the herd of cows who had moved to the far side of the field, and shook his head. They were like a gang of criminals who would protect the guilty one amongst them. Amos Tucker stood by the body and, putting his hands on his knees for support, leaned forward and studied Isaac’s face. Leo could see plainly now where he had been kicked on the left side of his head, for in death a bruise was spreading, yellow, purplish, around his eye and cheek.
April
The day was unseasonably warm and all life girded and roused its sleeping self. On haw and wild fruit trees blossom sprayed, countless posies offered to the boy’s passing sight. The wind brought petals down upon him. On an empty pasture the dew had identified spider webs laid across the grass, an incredible multitude of them, closely packed, each trap its own discrete squarish parcel of territory. Without the dew he would not have seen them. One phenomenon of nature had made another visible. For whom? The passing boy. What if he had not passed but taken a different route across the estate? What then? He did not know. Would the webs not have lain clear but unobserved by man? Birds looked down from on high but he did not believe it interested them unless they wished to swoop low and nick an insect struggling in a web for themselves.
The birds were swallows. They came to and from a barn over to the side of the track. They must be nest-building in the eaves yet they did not all fly off to the woods or down to earth for materials. No, many rose up into the sky. Some he eyed and tried to keep in sight but they grew minute and then were lost to him. Perhaps there existed some other realm up there in the heavens. A mirrored image of this one, with gravity working the other way, and the swallows by going up from this world came down in that one and gathered beakfuls of mud and brought them back again to make nests on earth. Why? He pondered the matter and in time decided that there were no humans in that otherworld, and so no buildings with their overhanging roofs and jutting timbers creating the places for their habitations such birds preferred. That was why they returned. So Leo amused himself.
They flew too high and fast for swallows. It was too early in the year for swifts yet that they were. Here already. He stopped. They beat their wings in hectic blurs then let them rest, arching out from their bodies like scything blades, and sliced through the invisible wind. They were black in the sky though he knew their feathers were brown. They veered and wove at such speed it took concentration just to watch them. Their brains were minuscule yet they avoided collisions. It was not possible to understand how. They lived their frantic lives and soon were spent. They were no doubt devouring insects but were they also playing, cavorting together in the air at their insane speed? He watched one chase another and to his surprise alight upon it. For some seconds the two became a single four-winged bird gliding. Then they decoupled and with their madly flurried wings were parted and went their separate ways. Would the two of them know each other again? What had he just seen?
*
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br /> At the gamekeeper’s cottage Mrs Budgell said his brother was not there but that Sid had left something for him. He stayed by the back door while she fetched it. The chains by which Aaron Budgell’s spaniels were tethered lay unused upon the ground like the rusty skins of metallic snakes. Mrs Budgell came back bearing a tray made of short lengths of hazel switch interwoven and tied with string. She walked one careful step at a time, eyes on the precious cargo. Upon the rustic tray was the small, delicate skeleton of some unknown creature. She handed the tray to Leo, who took it with equal anxious care.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Mrs Budgell frowned. ‘Bones,’ she said.
‘Does thou know what creature owned them?’ he asked.
She regarded the fragile skeleton as if for the first time, tilting her head this way and that. ‘It don’t look like nothin I seen.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know nothin about animals,’ she said. ‘Don’t wish to neither. My old man knows moren enough about em for the two of us. I don’t bother him about is animals and he don’t bother me about my ouse.’ Mrs Budgell turned and stepped inside and half-turned back again, closing the door behind her. Leo set off, carrying the tray with its delicate cargo. He heard the door open and Mrs Budgell’s voice call to him. ‘Sid,’ she yelled. She must have known he did not carry the same name as his brother but could not remember his and made do with the closest to hand. Leo turned.
‘It come back to me,’ she said. ‘Yon brother said to tell you tis a weasel.’
Leo thanked her. She returned inside once more.
As he walked along the track through the wood Leo studied the skeleton. The leg-bones were bent in a crouch all ready to spring upon its prey, as if animals continued their savage choreography of hunter and hunted in a spectral limbo after death. The weasel’s long spine continued past its pelvis for ten or more vertebrae, diminishing in size into its tail. The rib-cage was long and voluminous, slung from the spine. Perhaps weasels had long, thin hearts. The feet, upon which the skeleton stood squarely, were built of thin bones that looked as if they could snap like brittle stalks of straw. The head too was long, the skull moulded back far from the sharp-toothed mouth, as if the brain though small was longer, the creature cleverer, than one would have thought.
If he could draw, Leo thought, he should like to sketch this entity. He wondered whether, before God made the creeping things and the beasts of the earth for Adam and Eve on the sixth day, He had spent much of the eternity preceding this world in idle sketching. Designing the animals that would be there on that day as well as all those to come.
To his relief the boy found Herb Shattock in his tack room. The groom sat at his desk, writing in a small book. He must have been scribbling much faster than he appeared to be for he filled two pages and turned them, and did the same again. The boy stood in the doorway. He recalled the tea room at Bampton Fair to which the master had invited him. A waiting woman had brought them a tray with bowls of stew on it. He felt like a parody of such a waiter, bearing this home-made tray and the bones of an animal with no meat upon it.
Herb Shattock’s pencil scraped faintly across the pages of his notebook. As the sun moved the boy watched the silhouette of himself enter the room and sidle along the wall. Shattock turned, pencil in hand. He stared at Leo and blinked, then broke into a smile. ‘Come on in there, boy,’ he said.
Leo came forward and placed the tray upon the desk. The groom stared at it. ‘What’s this, then?’ he said. ‘Pole cat?’
‘Weasel,’ Leo said.
‘Aye,’ the groom said, studying the extraordinary bones. ‘And what do you wish me to do with it?’
‘I’d be might grateful if you could give it to the young mistress, Mister Shattock.’
Herb Shattock frowned. He blinked again. Leo looked at the notebook. The words written in pencil were uncommonly large on the page. PRIDE OF GALWAY. HALF HOUR ON THE GALLOP. LINSEED OIL IN CHAFF filled one side.
‘Miss Charlotte?’ the groom said. ‘What’s er want with this?’
‘I’m not rightly sure, Mister Shattock.’
The groom put the pencil down beside the notebook. ‘Did er ask you for it?’
The boy shook his head.
‘I’m not a postman, boy.’
‘I don’t know no one else,’ Leo said. ‘Well, I do, but they don’t like me. I believe her might have an interest in the anatomy of animals.’
Herb Shattock gazed at the boy. ‘I seems to remember bein told that time was, weasels were brung up tame. Kept in the granaries to fend off mice. Don’t know when that stopped.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Yes, boy, I’ll do that for you.’
‘You don’t ave to say tis from me,’ Leo said.
The groom nodded. ‘Do us a favour in turn.’ He rose. ‘Come with me, boy.’ The chair scraped back on the stone-flagged floor. Herb Shattock walked over to the far wall and lifted a bridle off its hook. ‘Take this,’ he said. He himself carried a small saddle.
Leo followed the groom into the yard and along the block. A lad brushed a horse down yonder, another carried buckets of water. Leo took them in at a glance and kept his head down. The top half of a stable door was open. Herb Shattock half-opened the bottom half and rested the saddle upon it. He entered the box and spoke to the young horse therein. A filly. He reached behind him. The boy passed him the bridle and watched as Herb Shattock fed the bit into the pony’s mouth and passed the bridle over her head and tied the straps, talking all the while in a litany of odd noises, a language issued through his teeth, akin to that of the boy’s father but distinct from it. To each horseman his own voice. He placed the saddle upon her back, crouched down and reached for the girth straps, and tightened them. The pony stood docile and compliant.
Herb Shattock led her out of the yard and down through the trees to the paddock where Leo had watched the girl suppling her roan. This pony was entirely black save for a white blaze upon her forehead. She was similar in stature to the blue roan. Perhaps a little taller, slighter, more elegant.
In the paddock the groom came to a halt. Holding the bridle with his left hand, he reached for the stirrup with his right and turned it away from the saddle flap. The boy stepped with his left foot into a stirrup for the first time in his life and, reaching for the front and back of the saddle, kicked up from the ground, flexed his left thigh muscles and pulled himself up. He swung his right leg over the saddle and sat upon it. He leaned over to his right and turned the right-hand stirrup as Herb Shattock had and pushed his right boot into it, then sat up and took hold of the reins lying loose upon the pony’s neck.
The groom still held the bridle. He rested his other hand upon the boy’s knee. ‘Lord Prideaux reckons his daughter’s done grievin,’ he said. ‘I’ve examined this mare. Her’s no defects of sight nor wind that I can see, her ain’t lame. Her knees is good. I don’t think er’s a crib-biter nor a windsucker. Not a weaver, neither. I’ve had one a the lads ride her but my smallest lad’s twice the size a Miss Charlotte. You’re a sight lighter an her, I should say, you don’t weigh much moren your own bones, boy, but you’s closer. Would you ride her for me? Take her round, nothin spectacular.’
Leo nodded. Herb Shattock let go of the bridle and walked to the fence. The boy took up the reins and made a clicking sound with his teeth and heeled the pony’s flanks. It felt odd to sit upon the saddle and to feel his feet enclosed in the iron stirrups, yet he liked it. The pony walked forward. He trotted her around the perimeter, then when he asked her to speed up she did so instantly and cantered. She was exceedingly obedient. It occurred to him that if he did not give her an order she would stand all day awaiting one. He stopped her and turned her in circles, then figures of eight, one way then the other. When he galloped her it was apparent that she did not have the fearful speed of the colt he’d ridden at Bampton Fair.
Leo brought the mare over to the fence. She stood, blowing hard. Herb Shattock put his ear to her nostrils and listened. Then he studied them closely. The boy asked him w
hat he was looking for.
‘Blood,’ the groom said. ‘If there’s bleedin into the lung. But I can’t see none.’ He stood back. ‘What do you think? Is her as accommodatin as her looks?’
Leo nodded. ‘I believe so.’ He shook his head. ‘She does not have the character of the blue roan.’
‘That’s what I reckoned,’ Mister Shattock agreed. ‘Tis no bad thing.’
The boy dislodged his feet from the stirrups and dismounted from the horse as if there were no saddle, pivoting from his belly and sliding to the ground. He watched the groom lead the pony back through the trees, then turned and walked homeward under the noonday sun.
April
The wheelwright Hector Merry came to the farm to measure Isaac Wooland’s body. A bachelor, Isaac had slept in a room in the attic of the farmhouse but his body was laid out in a shed off the dairy. The wheelwright came back out into the yard and conferred with Amos Tucker. The boy could not forget him walking behind his new-wrought waggon, listening to it. Hector asked Amos what kind of timber he wished for the box, they had all sorts down at the sawmill. Oak was the most expensive, of course, and then there was … The farmer interrupted him.
‘We’ll not have oak for old Isaac, no chance,’ he said. ‘When we had that landslip as I was a boy, I seen a body barely altered from when it were buried eighty year afore.’ Amos grew annoyed. ‘I heard a one yard where bodies buried in the reign a George the third was in the same condition. It ain’t right, Hector.’
The wheelwright nodded. ‘I’ll get you the softest, cheapest planks they got.’
The farmer grew red-faced. ‘It’s not the bloody money and you knows it.’ The boy had never heard him curse before. ‘Tis what is Christian. Earth to earth. Wrap him in a shroud like what they used to and let him return to the soil.’
‘You’ll not want a stone coffin then, Amos, like the master’s family?’