by Ted Hughes
Like a snake’s endless length gliding from a hole.
The bright dove-crimson blood suddenly bulges out
around it.
And all the time Maud is scourging his ear-nerves
With sounds that try only to mutilate.
The shock has sobered him, and stilled him,
Like a drastic injection.
His lips touch Felicity’s cheek.
He sees her eyelashes clogged with tears,
He thinks this at least is a sign of life.
Then Maud’s fingers hook down over his face,
She hauls his upper lips and nostrils upwards, as if she
would tear his face off upwards.
Mrs Westlake
Slews Felicity’s slack sack-heavy body
Away across the floor, by one ankle.
The attached pelt swirls after, in the dust.
Lumb tries to struggle free
But women have twisted to a weight like enfolding nets
under water.
They are clinging to his knees, his waist, his arms, his neck
As if they too were drowning.
Maud has stripped the stag’s pelt off him.
She is flogging him over his bald skull with the cable-
hard, twisted, horny stag’s pizzle.
The women have made one undersea monster, heaving in
throes.
Now he has wrenched his weapon from Maud.
He cuts a way out, flailing a path.
He fights to the stairway that leads up into the
churchyard
And leaps up it and with great strides hurls out under the
open,
And bounds twenty yards and stops.
Panting, he braces himself, forcing himself to look all round, under control, assessing the world and the moment. He looks back toward the church, still fighting clear of the terror that grabbed him down there in the basement. Nobody is following.
The vast light of clouds and stilled evening sky, the hardening, blue, cooling shapes of trees, are an enclosing shock, as if he were hot metal plunged into water. Sweat scalds the cross-hatching nail-wounds in his skin, the lumping weals and claw-rips. He gulps recovery, looking all round at the familiar land, intently, as if he had never been here before, and would be away again in a few minutes. Trembling, he starts to walk towards the gate into the rectory garden.
His whole being is in fiery tatters.
He is whirling in blazing rags, like a blazing rag effigy
Cartwheeling down a mountain.
He grips the stag’s pizzle.
He takes careful note of the tight-scrolled baby ferns on a
grave.
He clasps with his look
The all-suffering million-year gravel, which nothing can
hurt,
As if he could somehow anchor the holocaust of himself
Which seems to be hurtling through space, off some
brink,
Flinging out great streamers of flame and disintegrating.
With deliberate measure, like a drilled soldier, he moves
now to numbers.
In his bedroom he dresses
With a paced fury.
When one cuff-button resists him, he locks to it
With all his strength and attention
As to an antagonist,
While second after second splutters burning in the room,
like a fuse, and hot thoughts grab at him,
reflecting from every surface,
That somehow
Everything has to be cooled, everything has to be
dismantled,
Everybody back into their clothes and their discretion.
The explanation
For Felicity’s body
Is a bomb
They will all have to dig out carefully somehow together.
Somehow everything
Will have to be cancelled, the whole error
Carefully taken apart
And the parts put back where they belonged.
Everybody has to return to exactly where they were,
To stillness, calm, and normality,
Everything has to be cleaned, groomed and made quiet,
as at the start.
Suddenly he remembers Maud’s voice, jarring his ear.
And he feels through all his muscles
The grip of Felicity’s flesh on the dagger-blade as he
pulled.
He sees, with electric shock fright in his every hair,
That horribly long blade still coming out and still coming
out –
At the same moment
He sees through the window men in the churchyard.
The one glance
Flashbulbs all that has happened.
With hardly a footfall sound
Moving like a thought
He reaches his car and his fingers grip at the key which is
not there –
He ransacks every pocket reasoningly
With tightrope walker’s care
While the evening thrushes ring out uncontrollably and
the swifts flare past.
His memory jinks back through every chance
misplacement.
He stands beside his car, stunned by the momentum of
time,
Like one wedged against the piling weight in mid-river at
his limit of depth.
Then the men come round the house-end.
They have heard all that Maud can tell them.
Estridge is struggling with the irrelevance of trying to
stay in control.
The murdered girl, the church basement full of naked, drugged wives, and ritualistic hocus pocus – all that is something for a full enquiry.
But his arguments are lost in mid-torrent.
Evans’ trajectory is direct.
Garten’s face is just a flag, for any prevailing gust.
Holroyd has been convinced and now intends to settle his
private account publicly.
And a number of others
If there is to be any talking, intend to talk with boots
first.
Lumb comes towards them.
He is considering means of playing for a pause and
entangling everybody in words.
But Walsall’s Alsatian
Already the most visibly incensed member of the mob
Liberated
Magnifies suddenly, bouncing towards Lumb
Like a hurtling, runaway wheel off a truck.
Lumb
Has a long second to marvel
At the demented personal malignity
Distorting the mask of this perfect stranger
As it hangs in mid-leap, level with his face, in a halo of
black bristles.
Then he is knocked backwards.
He lies, clear-headed, while the dog’s jaws rave like a
blurring power-saw within inches of his eyes.
He grips its muscled forelegs.
With all his might he wrenches them apart
And the dog’s snarl splits to a damaged yell.
In one move Lumb is up and swinging the coal-sack body
through a full circle
Like a hammer-thrower
To fetch the dog’s spine crack against the stone-built
corner of the garage.
The Alsatian collapses, gets up and careers away twisting
And collapses, chewing its yells.
The men pause, startled by his expert success.
But Walsall
Jerks a garden fork from the edge of a flower-bed and
lobs it like a harpoon.
It thumps Lumb’s left shoulder, and hangs.
He tugs it out but his setback and the obvious wound are
two signals.
Nobody hears Estridge’s restraining shouts about due
process of law.
&nbs
p; But Lumb
Has moved again, and has halted Evans
With a soil-solid flowerpot shattered against his chest,
And is away through the hedge.
He is running in the field above Smayle’s garden.
He disappears.
Just as Westlake drives up behind the rectory and
scrambles out with his twelve bore.
The mob gallop after Lumb shouting varied strategies.
Westlake and Estridge huddle back into Westlake’s car.
Easy and strong
And full out
With elbowing vigour to spare and confidence to spare
Lumb bounds away uphill.
He flings loose plans ahead of him,
Letting them settle over the whole region, shaping
themselves to the contours,
The woods, the roads, the paths and copses.
But looking back from that first skyline tree-fringe
He sees Garten and Holroyd and Evans are losing no
ground at all.
These men too are hardy animals of the same landscape
And their shouts rake him like missiles.
He lopes out along a hogback
Through ungrazed grass
Toughened with buttercup and young thistles
Toward a hill-crown clump of beeches, black against the
broad glare of sky,
Summit of power in the past.
Beyond that point, he knows, many escapes fall away
diversely into blue distance.
He hoists each stride, trying to be the earth and to toss
himself along weightlessly.
He shutters his awareness from the unmanageably tilting
planes of landscape to right and left
But a big thistle ahead is no help.
His fuel is burning too fast and smokily.
His knees tangle with their chemical limits.
His lungs are suddenly not those of a wolf or even a fox.
He imagines the furious micro-energy and stamina of the
blue-fly
But the idea takes no hold.
The miles of otherworld rootedness weigh in against him.
Static trees are a police of unmoving.
He flounders a little,
Seeming to crawl on the floor of his anxiety
Which is as wide and bare as the sucking space of the sky
now poring over him,
And inspecting him tinily
Through a microscope,
Noticing most of all the immensity and immovability of
the grass on all sides.
With jarring and clambering strides
He hauls himself up among the sheep-worn ramparts of
roots
And under the twisted lichen-splotched, lichen-corroded
Torsos of the beeches
And the stirring leaf mass in its first tenderness.
In the draughty gap among trunks
He lets his stopped body, which he had forced to keep
moving,
Loll and lean to a tree.
His lungs churn, his body flames,
He feels mangled
As if his blood had been pouring through rough iron
channels.
He watches Garten and Evans, toiling on the near slope
like plough-horses,
And far down to the right Holroyd running across.
He sees the whole vista scattered with jogging figures.
And now embracing the tree he flattens himself closely
into it.
With fixed imagination he sinks nerves into the current of
the powerline.
He gulps dense oxygen, recharging his trembling leg-
muscles
Which already the strength no longer quite fits.
He feels his separateness, his healed-over smallness,
among the loose stones and the hoof-printed dust.
These boles are bleak as ruins.
The leaf-towers are too lofty and sparse.
The empty sky looks in from every direction. He looks
out at it,
And staring down into the too wide-open world he sees
suddenly no hope.
The bronze polished light of the lowering sun is without
illusion of any sort.
It brings him a poisonous thinness like the taste of
pennies.
Its shadows are prisonlike and depressing,
Hard-cut as machinery.
Every grass-blade wears its affliction of shadow.
The blueing bowl of landscape
Is a migraine of inescapable fixities, like sunglare in an
empty concrete pool.
A frightening sadness closes on him, as if he were
shrinking,
And a futility
Grabs at his heart-beat, but he has already started
running away from it.
Holroyd’s farm is below.
He vaults a wire, he runs downhill with long, jolting strides
Through a constellation of cows,
Statues of darkness in corollas of fire.
He registers aridity of corrugated iron, cruelty of old nails
Stifling walls of tarred wood,
Creosote grubbiness of old sleepers walling a silage clamp,
The sterility of bare, stony hoof-hammered earth, fringed
with nettles and hemlock.
He climbs to the barn loft
Feeling like an early evening rat.
A minute’s hiding, a minute’s stolen relief
In the happy place, the nest among cornsacks
Where he can press his face into the fustiness.
His deep, scorching breaths suck in the lingering of her
perfume.
He groans under the collision of moments and sprawls,
like a casualty,
And with new fervour clenches his hands,
Opening all his loosened fibres to the globe’s power
And releasing a flood of sweat.
He makes himself nothing, he empties his body of all its
history,
For the inrush of renewals and instructions.
He almost sleeps, in a luxury
Of these shortening seconds
In which they cannot possibly touch him
Before those seconds arrive made of their feet, their
shouts, their eyes.
For a long fantasy he is lost
In details of a court defence
But suddenly shouts are stabbing everywhere around him,
like torchbeams.
He shrinks.
He sheds everything into hungry darkness, he yields into
a raw black fieriness.
He launches his whole being into whatever it is that is
waiting for him.
An impulse bends him, with alacrity and lightness,
At the cock-loft window
As voices and steps climb the ladder to the loft behind
him.
He drops twelve feet
Grosses through the near-empty dutch barn,
And runs out across grass, under a halo of gnats.
And now every stride
Multiplies towards freedom.
And every second
Deepens the defences behind him.
A hare jumps out of the earth and scuds away ahead,
ears up, leaning like a yacht,
Like a guide.
Then shouts catch and trip him, eyes have gripped him.
A landrover is bounding over turf, hands cling where they
can.
Runners are bobbing, heels drive deep moons among the
wolf-spiders.
A banked thorn hedge, a tatter wool gap, is behind him.
Barbed wire, padded with bullock’s hair, is beneath him.
A high rail is strong enough, he vaults over it.
Sheep
pour this way and that.
Bullocks gallop off their shock of excitement,
While the air rips in his throat, like a dry piston,
And the blood crisps on his left hand
And all the time his shoulder
Gnaws as if the whole arm-load
Were a swinging iron trap.
Till he topples over the rusty rail
Into the young plantation which is Hagen’s boundary.
He looks back
Just in time to see the landrover misjudge a banked hedge
And keel over, flinging out figures.
Small cries come to him.
He does not stay to identify
Dunworth sitting with his head in his hands letting blood
drip into the grass,
Or Walsall twisted at the awkward angle
Of minimum pain, eyes closed from the pursuit,
Or Evans and Garten
Leading with pitchforks away from the capsized vehicle.
Lumb splashes through brambles among the sparse young
conifers.
Well into the thick, he drops, panting and listening.
Now he concentrates each particular second, cramming it
with recovery.
Long horizontal rays
Finger through the wood, kindling the floss-winged
ephemera.
Safely distant pheasants challenge.
He closes his eyes, trying to feel back to the sure root of
guidance.
He feels his sinewy second wind clearing itself, and his
blood renewing.
He pushes on, foxy-cautious and alert
In a fierce haste, that lifts aside the brambles delicately
as setting a snare.
The low spare plantation is crisp and weary in the late sun.
A few butterflies hither and thither together aimlessly.
Specks with legs crawl glittering on stems, as if in a
dusty sweat.
Wherever he looks down