by Bill Broun
“Why didn’t you protect us?” he said aloud just then. “Why not? All we had was an old woman—and the otters.”
Cuthbert began to sob, but he soon stuffed the red ropes of pain back down his throat and made himself stop.
green st. cuthbert the wonderworker
CUTHBERT SAW HIS MONSTROUS FATHER WEEP FOR the second and last time in his life when the family—father, mother, and himself—took a harrowing trip to visit his grandfather’s grave, which his parents hadn’t visited for two decades. It was around 1970 or so—two years after Drystan’s vanishing during the trip to the aunties’ cottage, two years after he fell into Dowles Brook and was “saved” by the otter. Granny had been bedridden often at that time, he remembered, and he’d had to swear to his father not to tell Granny about the excursion. It was a rare moment of sensitivity on the part of his father.
“It would break her ’art,” his mother had explained. “She’s buried this part of the past and it shouldna be opened again.”
The Handleys had driven southwest from West Bromwich in their aquamarine Hillman Imp, through Dudley, Netherton, Quarry Bank, and Lye, to the other side of the Black Country, past Stourbridge and Kiddy, and once again to the narrow, jobless old lanes of the Wyre Forest.
Even though Alfie was his father-in-law, Harry Handley had revered the man he imagined—the soldier, the self-starting farmer, the morning drinker—far more than his own father, in fact, who still lived, in a caravan senior community, in Stafford, where he was curiously renowned for his excellent orange-peel rock cakes.
“If yow end up as ’af the bloke as Alfie Wenlock,” Henry was telling his son, “yow’ll make the old man proud.”
“But he wasn’t yowr father, was he?” Cuthbert remembered asking that day. “And Gran says he was gentle. He was very sweet. He was a sweet and gentle man.”
“Ha,” said his father. “He was a right hard man.”
CUTHBERT RECALLED how they careered up to an ancient Norman church, St. Cuthbert’s, his namesake, parking in a gravel semicircular drive. They were less than a kilometer from the Wyre Forest. There was the greenest grass he’d ever seen in the driveway’s center. The day was blue and clement, with splashy sunlight and swifts circling the square belltower like hot, torn electrons.
“Yow’re going to learn a thing or two,” his father told them, smiling, almost skipping up to the church. He was in a rare good mood. “Your granddaddy’s in the oldest church in this part of England!”
The sexton, a very thin man with white hair and thick white eyebrows, had showed them a jumble of misshapen stones mortared into an inside wall, stones, he said, from the “ode times church” the Normans had built St. Cuthbert’s above. An elaborate oak chancel screen, near the altar, was covered by the faces of men with foliage growing around their heads like halos. Oak and ivy leaves poured from their mouths. Some of the faces cried leaves.
Eventually, he took them into the crypt to examine a book of burial records. The “book,” as he called it, was kept in a modern steel strongbox in a desk that seemed unused and dusty. It took a long time to get the volume out and placed solidly upon the desk. There was a smell of frankincense.
“It’s Alfred Wistan Wenlock, you say?”
“Arr, died 1933,” answered his father.
The sexton began looking through the pages. “Handley . . . Handley . . . Handley,” he said. He settled on one page, and ran his thumb down a long column. He peered close, putting his face nearly against the paper. But he suddenly pulled away, almost jumping back. He scrutinized Cuthbert’s father. He seemed boldly nervous, shaking his head, frowning. He began flapping through the large, grid-covered pages again, but he hardly was looking—it was strictly for manners. Then he stopped.
“There’s a matter,” he said, and Cuthbert to this day remembered him repeating the exact phrase: “A matter.”
“Your relative’s plot cannot be located precisely,” he had said. “The ode lane, see?” He licked his lips and looked down. Cuthbert’s father was still smiling gently, and blinking. “The ode lane,” the sexton said, “the one that runs beside the churchyard—where there’s that stone wall, see? It was dangerous, it was so narrow, see?” The face of Cuthbert’s father was reddening and his smile had gone. “The council had to widen it and we sadly ’ad to move a few of the unmarked graves.”
“Cannot be located!” Cuthbert’s father bellowed. “What?”
The sexton took off his green plaid cap and kneaded it with his fingers. “Uh, we only moved them as we found them, but where we could find them, mind you. I’m afraid a few of the sites—quite a few—there was a mishap with the backhoe and the builders. They . . . they removed some soil they shouldn’t have, see? We just didn’t know where the plots were afterward, not anymore. It’s always the poor who suffers, isn’t it?”
Cuthbert’s mother had said, “We’re not poor.”
The sexton continued: “Of course not. But the graves that got moved, they was the ones under the statue of St. Cuthbert the Wonderworker—the graves of people who didn’t have much money, and abandoned people, and the paupers’ graves and such. Half of them . . . are still under the statue, we suspect, and half of them, see, are under the new road pavement, I’m sad to say. No one ever visited, see?”
The sexton turned his cap over and over in his hands. He set it down and sorrowfully set the book back into the strongbox, and clasped the lock. He looked aggrieved, but not ashamed. There was a flat look on Cuthbert’s father’s face; then he screwed up his eyes and started to weep.
“You bloody bet I’ll complain about this,” his father said, snorting, waving his arms around.
“Hank,” Cuthbert’s mother said.
“I’ll go see the focking Archbishop of Canterbury!” Henry continued. “I will.” The sexton nodded, as if he thought this was a plausible idea.
“And I don’t blame you, sir. I couldn’t,” said the sexton. “I just couldn’t.”
Eventually, without saying a word, the family had trudged outside to the churchyard, and walked over to have a look at the statue. The sexton trailed behind them, standing at a respectful distance. He stepped forward at one point and ushered the four of them toward a neat, plain, pretty corner section of the churchyard—the remainder of the paupers’ graveyard. White and pink campion flowered on the grassy mounds. On a thick pedestal, plated with bright green copper, stood the weathered figure of Cuthbert.
Over the years, acid rain from the Black Country had given the statue its green patina of copper sulfate. The saint was represented in flowing bishop’s vestments and a miter, bending over to lift a hank of marble cloth up from his leg to let a sea otter comfort him. Two short-haired otters (which looked oddly like fox terriers) stretched at Cuthbert’s feet. The otters were of a brown-painted bronze, the same color as the soil, and the same that he had seen near the Wyre Forest on the day Drystan went away. The forelegs of one of the otters were off the ground, clasped angelically, its paws holding a small cross. Cuthbert had nearly frozen himself to death while standing in the North Sea to pray, and God had sent the otters to warm and dry his legs.
Henry Handley gave the statue a tortured look.
At the time, it had seemed quite clear to Cuthbert that both otters and the saint had come straight from heaven. The animal, the human, and the divine were all part of the same. He recalled Granny saying that, long ago, her own father had trained an otter to fish for eels and roach on the Stour and Severn near Kidderminster, and it made many of the townspeople jealous. Cuthbert’s father and mother both claimed it was impossible, but to Cuthbert it did not seem impossible at all.
“Grandad’s watched by a Green Man,” Cuthbert had said. “Just like Drystan.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said his father. “If only the focking vicar would have watched.”
“Hank,” said Cuthbert’s mum, grimacing at her husband. “The boy. Please. Not here.”
His parents looked destroyed that day, but Cuthbert, bruised inside
and out, actually felt very proud. He still recalled how he had rubbed one of the otters’ heads and said, “Magic.” To Cuthbert, his ghostly granddaddy was as well marked as he could possibly be. His lost body, folded into deep England, was being both guarded and marked by St. Cuthbert and two otters that traveled between dimensions. This was far better than any headstone, better than religion, better than his parents, better nearly than England.
a brother to jackals
CUTHBERT, STANDING IN REGENT’S PARK, FEELING ready to wake up the world, leaned close to the Wounded Elephant and kissed the granite as if it were some blarney stone. He wished it would kiss back, warming him inside, licking him like an otter into its own sacred self, into warm animal sainthood, into its strong, hot, brown mind of bronze.
“St. Cuthbert,” he said. “I will not drink Flōt again. Here I will stop. I will really give it a go!” It was his own distraught form of “taking the pledge,” perhaps. He’d have a go at stopping tonight, with all his heart. As he freed them, he would ask the animals for help.
CUTHBERT WAS EXCITED NOW, and he trotted along toward the zoo. He crossed the Broad Walk. Far away south, on the other side of a big, ornate fountain, he thought for a moment that he saw a light flash that would have to be inside the park itself. He ran to his little nest in the shrubs beside the zoo’s fence. Just as he crawled in, an astonishingly long and tightly focused beam of light shot across the playground. It raked across a tubular slide and an aerial ropeway. There were four little wood-plank towers with red saddle roofs in the middle of the playground, and the searchlight lingered on the towers, as if waiting for dome-helmed archers to rise from the fortress cupolas.
Cuthbert sat as still as he could. A Royal Parks Constabulary glider, a Vauxhall Paladin, drove right up the Broad Walk and parked about thirty meters from him. It was a bright white police pandaglider with yellow-green decals and reflective strips, and it stood out in the darkness as if it were radioactive. Cuthbert couldn’t believe his bad luck.
He pressed himself as close to the ground as possible, and rifled through the junk in his jacket pocket for the eye shadow.
He opened the case while it was still in his jacket and clawed out as much makeup as he could with his fingernails and then, with his face down, rubbed the stuff all over his cheeks and forehead. It smelled odd to him, like clovers burned in oil, and for a moment he began to retch. He figured that there must have been some trouble reported—perhaps an argy-bargy between two street people. Or had someone seen him come in?
Eventually, Cuthbert managed to get his hands on the old Flōt orb left from his last visit.
“Just once more,” he said quietly. He drank. The Flōt soothed his muscles quickly, but it didn’t take away the dread. He drank all that was left, but it just didn’t help.
“Now, it’s really over,” he said, burping. “It’s all over. Never again. I’ll never drink again.”
After what seemed hours to him, the glider’s engine stopped and the headlamps snapped off. A little while later, the searchlight, which had remained aimed at the playground, was extinguished. Cuthbert felt a little less afraid, but not relaxed, not by a long shot. He could just make out the hot cherry of a cigarette glowing where the officer would be sitting. He felt a spell of relief. The officer lowered the driver-side window of the glider. Its electric, churning hum was weird in the greenish black silence of the park, as if a tiny section of the natural night had become motorized. He could make out a dim outline, a gentle shape—a female constable, by herself. She seemed to be fussing with something in the car he could not see.
He didn’t know what time it was, but he guessed around midnight. He was sick of waiting and watching, and finally he shimmied himself around, grabbed his bolt cutters, and squeezed through the hole he’d made in the zoo’s fence earlier in the month. Once inside, he stood up clumsily, and sidestepped, half-hunched, to the Golden Jackal exhibit. There were no sounds in their pen, no “voices” in the air. They had all stopped. Cuthbert wished, so dearly wished, that he could hear words now. The foolishness of his actions tonight had brought with them a barren, icy sanity. And the Flōt had put a nice little glow above the ice, and allowed him to gaze down on it from purple clouds.
Something’s going to happen now, he thought.
Indeed, it did. The second he stepped onto one of the paved paths, a small overhead light clicked on. Motion detectors. Cuthbert knew that much. He hopped off the path and crouched down. After a few minutes, the light went off, again with a click. The night could turn into a great disaster, he sensed. Yet he felt no anxiety. Indeed, part of him hoped for catastrophe.
The jackals were stowed in their guillotine-gated kennels at night, yet this made Cuthbert’s task easy because each kennel’s back wall was formed by the main fence of the exhibit. He only needed to cut through one flimsy fence and the jackals would be free, at least to roam the paths of the zoo. They weren’t otters, and nothing sacred, but they were a start, surely.
He got down on his knees and began snipping through the fence. He worked quickly and handily, moving right to left, one kennel to the next. The fence gauge was so light, and his cutters so powerful, he could not feel the slightest resistance.
There were three cages total, with five jackals. On each cage he ended up making three arm-length cuts, creating little flaps, which he pulled back with considerable strain. The fencing seemed easier to cut than to bend. The animals were keyed up, roving in fast ovals in the cages. One of the jackals barked at him with a high, compressed Yip! Yip! It stopped barking and approached him warily and he stopped. He was so terrified he could not move; three of his fingers were still latched into a fencing. The jackal began to lick his fingers. He began to cry. “Soz,* mates,” he said. He pictured the dead stray beside the canal, its blank black eye staring at him, the prickles on his hands as he and his friends gathered furze to hide their crime. “I was evil, evil, evil. Please forgive me, puppies.” Don’t care if the jackal takes off me arm, he told himself. I’m doing what I set out to. So he kept snipping and tugging at the fence, and when he worked each flap open, one or two at a time, the yellow-haired creatures bolted out of their cages, took a few long-legged lopes, and halted. One of the jackals brushed against his hand, and he was surprised by the softness of the hair and the lightness of its frame.
We’re lies, they said to Cuthbert. Lie and lie and lie and lie and lie.
“No,” Cuthbert said. “Now you’re out, aren’t you? You can have all the names you want, see? You can go out into England, you can. We have otters, you know.”
They said lie down lie down lie lie lie sit stay lie down lie lie lie.
Cuthbert felt a bond with the dogs, “a brother to jackals,” like Job, with an anxious, despairing pride in his actions.
He wanted the jackals to keep moving, and for the most part, they did—and seemed to know exactly where they were going, as if they’d done this for years but merely fallen out of practice recently. Each of the jackals traipsed over to an especially flouncy line of daffodils planted along the main path. They sniffed and dug at the flowers, and to Cuthbert they looked both obsessive and surprisingly gentle. A few yellow cups and long leaves flew into the air behind them. Their backs would hump way up, accentuating the shaggy black mane between their shoulders. The daffodils were planted directly across from the sign that described the Golden Jackal exhibit. Cuthbert sat back, delighted. The last jackal urinated on the flowers, and darted off with the others. They were, if nothing else, staying together.
Cuthbert set down his cutters. He pressed one of the fence-flaps back to its original position as best as he could. The repair appeared crude, like an old tin of kippers with its pull-lid breached. He decided not to bother with the other openings. Maybe the jackals will want to return, he thought. He retrieved the cutters and stood.
Cuthbert walked over to the path in an awkward manner. A huge array of lights blazed on with a sound of metal unlatching. It was as if the whole zoo had been opened
for night visitors.
“That bloody copper,” he slurred. “Bloody git.” His head was spinning and he could barely balance, such was the perceived length of his legs. He was still spiring on Flōt, a little more than he had expected to be. He collected himself as best he could, holding on to his own jumper’s front for balance, and he staggered ahead, trying not to tumble forward. He felt both vengeful and scared. He would find some monkeys—yes, they needed to be freed next. They were smart creatures, and England needed them to defend it and themselves against the death cult. Then the giraffes. Tall, useful sentinels of the layer of Britain located between ten and twenty feet above the ground. Arr. Any animal he could free—why not? But above all else, of course, the otters—they must be released into the canal!
He heard a stir of animal grunts and screeches, rising steadily around him—the jackals were making their presence known in the world. Cuthbert Handley was going to make his presence known, too.
four
the jackals’ first kills
A FAILING SCREAM ROSE FROM SOMEWHERE BEHIND Cuthbert in the zoo. It was distant and plangent, the sound of a creature losing everything. A series of gross barks cavorted around it. Listening, rubbing his thumb across the foam handle of his bolt cutters, Cuthbert felt a tiny, ugly maggot of grief, weak but true, squirming beneath his Flōter’s stupor. He prayed the otters were not the victims. A swell of mammalian cries mounted for a moment, as if in response to his feeling, and faded. He wondered if Drystan was hearing this, too.
“Drystan? Are yow here?”
Cuthbert thought, for a moment, that he heard a man’s voice, but then the sounds of other animals flooded in.
Eeeealllhhhhhhh! some sorry animal yawled. Eeeealllhhhhhhh!
The jackals’ bloodcurdling enterprise had begun. It is a journalistic cliché that when even the fiercest wild animal escapes from a sanctuary, or a circus, or from some foolish Floridian’s roadside zoo, these fugitives seldom show aggression or shrewdness. A loose puma’s dispassion near children, or the chimp found asleep on a park swing—all proof of the softening effects of captivity, it will be noted in the news, and with a firm touch of bathos.