by Ted Hughes
Through the rafters of grass and weeds
Ants are racing from crisis to crisis.
Baffled shouts probe the plantation.
He flattens under brambles, in a drainage channel,
And watches Garten wading past, face glossed in the level
sun,
The pitchfork glinting.
As the shouts go off
He sidles along low and comes to a rail and peers over
To reconnoitre forward.
He pulls himself erect.
A light electric shock touches him.
The landrover’s horribly familiar mass is there, ten yards
away.
It emits a shout.
Lumb realises with nausea he has come in a circle, like a
simple fool.
Simultaneously
An explosion encloses his head, like a sudden bag.
Shot slashes weak leaves.
A pain clubs his fingertip.
He drops, dragging backwards, and turns, and runs
In lit smoking of pollen and dust.
Another blind shot wounds the wood’s depth dully.
He leaps on different grounds.
And now in a roofless tumblestone linney, he props
himself back in a corner.
Burdock, nettles, brambles mound over tile-heaps and
jags of beams.
He fights to quiet his breath forcibly and to repair his
shaking body.
The sweat melts on his face full in the facing hot-coin sun.
A crackling approaches, Lumb withers into his corner,
And Evans, pushing in over the debris, positions himself
leisurely
And urinates ponderously on to a camp of nettles, with a
hard sigh.
Turning, contemplative, he meets Lumb’s stare
Who even now feels he might slide aside from under this
confrontation unseen.
But Evans’ incredulous ‘Bloody Hell!’ splits with a bellow
to the whole landscape.
The gloating pitchfork, prongs downfanged, inches
gleaming toward Lumb
Slowly tightening this corner to certainty
While Evans’ face tightens, as if he were to splinter the
levelled shaft in his grip.
Lumb leaps suddenly
Cat-scrambling upwards, up the rotten stonework
Which crumbles scattering over him.
But he scrambles higher,
Abandons to the expected blow
That part of his body which must protect the rest.
Sure enough, a sickening weight has snagged him
Above the hip, but he drags on upwards,
Lifting the weight with him
And half-turns, and half-sitting on the wall top
Grips the crutch of the sun-gleaming tine
And eases his body off the parallel hidden one.
Evans, cursing, levering, is trying to fork Lumb off the
wall-top like a bale,
And he sees too late
The stone block spinning in air in a shower of dust.
For a black vital second he loses contact with everything.
Surprised he finds himself numbed and criss-cross
struggling to get up from the rubble
With an ugly taste in his mouth, and a detached
precarious feeling,
While slowly understanding swarms back to centre.
His alarm to the wood is a disgorging beast-roar clotted
with obscenities,
A rage as infinite as it is helpless.
But Lumb has vanished.
Evans strays out of the linney, dizzied and wanting to sit
down.
His face wears a thick mask of drained woodenness,
which he dare not touch.
But Lumb
Beyond caution is bounding
Through undergrowth, crashing like a hurt stag
That feels itself surrounded.
He vaults a rail and gallops out on to parkland and into a
great spaciousness.
And keeps on running.
And sees Hagen’s squat elegant residence swinging into
view on the right.
All the anchored bulls recoil, as if interconnected,
Then focus
Under their neck-humps.
He runs with freed limbs.
He bounds down the new-grassed slope toward the long
flat of the lake,
Gold-hot and molten, under the late sky.
And toward the skyline beyond, and the tree-lumped
frieze which is the highway.
He runs imagining
Mountains of golden spirit, he springs across their crests.
He has plugged his energy appeal into the inexhaustible
earth.
He rides in the air behind his shoulders with a whip of
hard will
Like a charioteer.
He imagines he is effortless Adam, before weariness
entered, leaping for God.
He safeguards the stroke of his heart
From the wrenching of ideas.
He hoards his wasteful mind like a last mouthful.
He runs
In a balancing stillness
Like a working gleam on the nape of a waterfall,
And he is exulting
That the powers have come back they truly have come
back
They have not abandoned him.
At the same time
He runs badly hurt, his blood inadequate,
Hurling his limbs anyhow
Lumpen and leaden, and there is no more air.
His whole body is an orgasm of burning, a seized-up
engine.
His mouth hangs open, forgotten as in an accident.
His face has become a mere surface, like his thorn-ripped
shins
And he knows
He has lost every last help
Of the grass and the trees,
He knows that the sky no longer ushers towards him
glowing hieroglyphs of endowment,
That he is now ordinary, and susceptible
To extinction,
That his precious and only body
Is nothing more than some radio-transmitter, a standard
structure,
Tipped from an empty dinghy by a wave
In the middle of a sea grey and nameless.
And he knows that the puncture in his side
Which will be so round and tiny
If ever he comes to look at it
Is black with deepness, blue-black, like the crater of a
drawn tooth
But unthinkably deeper, and more real
Than anything on this earth, anything containable by
this sky.
And he sees
Over the jouncing tops of his stride
Through his jarred and spilling retina
The car
Gliding down the avenue of chestnuts
To reach the lakeside before him.
But he does not feel
The pressure
And ten magnifications
Of Hagen’s telescope, in which he now jigs like a puppet.
As the sun touches the skyline, under the red-plumed sky
Lumb reaches the lake’s edge.
The quilted parkland behind him is aswarm with running
men and shouts.
Westlake and Estridge have left the car.
They are coming along the lake’s edge.
Westlake is carrying his gun.
Lumb understands quite clearly at last
Why he has been abandoned to these crying beings
Who are all hurrying towards him
In order to convert him to mud from which plants grow
and which cattle tread.
He sees the reeds sticking up out of t
he water
So conceitedly dull in their rootedness
Like books in a technical library.
He sees the lakewater
Simply waste liquid flowed in here, and collected by
inertia,
From the gutters of space
Where it is worthless and accidental –
A spiritless by-product
Of the fact that things exist at all.
He knows now that this land
This embroidery of stems and machinery of cells
Is an ignorance, waiting in a darkness –
He knows at last why it has become so.
But he does not step to the end of this overhanging
thought.
He collects himself, and concentrates
On the small target, the small carefulness
Of liberating himself
From this crux of moments and shouts and water-margin
With his bones whole and warm, his nerves intact,
In his own bag of skin.
He sees Estridge has stopped, and is sitting, holding his
chest.
He sees Westlake stumbling closer.
He enters
The crackling of reeds, the silken complexities of the mud,
The bubbling belly-gas of the roots.
He wades into coldness, with plunges and flounderings,
deepening,
Eager to sink himself
Equal to the wildness and finality of the cold grip.
A waterhen
Ploughs a spattering runway from beside him and out
across the clear reaches of midlake depth and subsides
with a soft crash into the reedbank opposite.
Lumb looks down at the freckled brown earthenware of
the family of eggs, on the clump of decay.
In that moment’s pause, Westlake’s shot
Smokes a boiling track through the reeds towards him
and beyond him.
Lumb’s unhurt arm jumps to protect his face
And the long carpet of echoes unrolls
Across the still land into the upholstered distance.
Lumb presses deeper, leaning into the surface blade of the
water,
And Westlake fires again. Lumb’s head and shoulders
Gesticulate in the smoking pattern.
He pushes out further, chesting the cold press, till he
pauses
In the oily fringe of lilies.
His broad ripples go riding out over the clear depth
beyond
Which is floored with a pale jungle.
And he sees
The box-profile of a truck nudging up the tree-rough
skyline
Against the cooling sky.
He hears it change gear.
He hears around it the whole cooling world, hung like a
glass bell,
Simmering with evening birds.
He balances,
Narrowing himself to pierce a disappearance, to become
infinitesimal
To slip through the crack of this place
With its clutching and raging people, its treacherous
lanes, its rooted houses.
Hagen, leaning in the window-frame,
Cheekbone snug to the glossed walnut, introduces his first
love to the panorama of his marriage and retirement.
The Mannlicher ᛫318
Regards Lumb’s distant skull dutifully, with perfectly
tooled and adjusted concentration.
Germanic precision, slender goddess
Of Hagen’s devotions
And the unfailing bride
Of his ecstasies in the primal paradise, and the midwife of
Eden’s beasts,
Painlessly delivered, with a little blood,
And laid at his feet
As if fresh from the Creator’s furnace, as if to be named.
With her, only with her
Hagen feels his life stir on its root.
The crossed hairs have settled on Lumb’s crown.
And now the trigger
Caresses in oil, and the kiss of sweetness jolts softly
through Hagen’s bones.
The burned muzzle flings back.
The crack
Shattering a globe, drives its deep spike.
And the whole scene splits open under the long slash, like
a stomach.
Lumb
Poised for his swimming plunge
Smacks face-down
Hard, like a flat hand on to the water.
The hunchbacked bullet has already escaped among
lily-roots.
Lumb floats, splayed like a stunned frog, face downwards.
Every visible figure is frozen, a parkful of statues.
Slowly the tangled dark lump among the lily pads starts
to churn
As if trying to flee in every direction simultaneously.
It flails the lake’s sky-colours, heaving out slow wings of
cold evening shadow.
They have dragged him out
Onto the bank
As the strewn western clouds smudge ashen.
The blood from his burst head washes his face and neck
In thin solution and ropy lumps,
And puddles black the hoofprints under his head.
Lily stems cling to him.
His pursuers stand in a ring
Like sightseers around the maneater’s long body.
The bulls have come up in a wider wondering circle, tossing sniffs towards the odour and the frightening object.
Lumb is carried back
Strung under a fence-rail
Through the darkening countryside.
In the graveyard
A group of women
Like people standing around for no reason still
magnetised after an accident
Are waiting near Felicity’s body
Which lies under a curtain, in the church porch.
The men carry Lumb down into the basement.
Maud is sitting alone there in the dark, as if now totally
imbecile.
They switch on lights.
Maud watches
As they pile chairs, tables, the goggling masks and the
jumble-sale of skins,
Everything combustible, in the middle of the room, over
the bloodstain.
They lay out Lumb on top of the pile, on a table.
Felicity
Has to be part of a presentable accident.
They take her body forcibly from Garten
And bring it into the basement, where they find Maud
Curled on the floor around Lumb’s dagger, her temple to
the boards, as if quite comfortable in death,
And like a foetus asleep, with crossed ankles.
They stretch her out on one side of Lumb.
They leave Lumb’s dagger in position because nobody
wants to touch it.
They lay Felicity on the other side of Lumb.
So the three lie, faces upward, with touching hands, on
the narrow table,
On top of the pyre.
Lumb’s eyes are closed, but the women’s eyes are wide.
The men arrange all this in deep silence, entranced by the
deep satisfaction of it.
Evans brings a can of petrol.
Holroyd anoints the pile, he douches the three bodies.
Windows are smashed out for vents.
Holroyd spatters a petrol fuse up the stair and out into
the churchyard,
Then drops a match on to it.
All evidence goes up.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
In a straggly sparse village on the West Coast of Ireland, on a morning in May – a morning of gust and dazzle – three small girls came to the priest where he sat
in his study gazing at an open page of St Ignatius.
They brought something wrapped in a black waterproof folder. A stranger, a man, who had gone off in a car, had left it on a boulder down by the sea-lough. The priest unwrapped the folder and discovered a tattered notebook. Looking closely at the densely corrected pages he saw it was full of verse. He became curious about the man. He asked the girls more.
They had been playing among the rocks, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Then they got a fright. One minute there was just rocks, and the next minute there was this man, right beside them, sitting on a rock, watching them.
Before they could run off, he spoke. He asked them the name of the lough. Then he wanted to know the name of that mountain across the lough. Then of that other mountain, and the mountain beyond it. So with all the mountains in sight, mountain beyond mountain, far away to North and to South, the girls had to name them or say they didn’t know. Finally the man asked them if they’d ever seen a miracle. They had not.
He made them sit down on the rocks beside him. They promised that whatever happened they would not move or speak or make the slightest sound. Then he put the back of his hand to his mouth. He pursed his lips against the back of his hand. The girls waited. Suddenly their nerves seemed to shrivel, like a hair held in fire. An uncanny noise was coming from the back of the man’s hand. A peculiar, warbling thin sound. It was like a tiny gentle screaming. A wavering, wringing, awful sound, that caught hold of their heads and was nearly painful. It was like a fine bloody thread being pulled through their hearts.
The man stared at the lough and the sound went out over the water. On and on and on. And the girls sat, petrified, staring at the man. He was solemn-looking, long-faced, dark-faced, and his bald shiny head was lumped with scars.
He stopped his noise abruptly. The silence was even worse. The girls looked where he was looking. Something was standing up out of the water at the lough’s edge. It was a beast of some kind, gazing towards them.
Now the noise started again, but this time much more softly. The girls could feel it plucking at different places inside them. It made them want to cry. And the beast came up out of the water.