by Tim Pears
They laid the deer upon its back. Using the second knife Rufus cut the skin around the deer’s anus. Then he leaned forward and took hold of the penis and lifted the scrotum and cut around its base and kept cutting towards himself, towards the anus, until he could pull the creature’s genitalia away. He threw it off to one side and stood and looked up to the sky, with his eyes closed and mouth open, and gasped. He rubbed his back with his left hand and with his right hand, though it held the knife, his stomach.
Leo feared the old man would lose his balance and fall. He held out his arms in readiness. ‘Is you all right, Rufus?’ he said.
The old man breathed heavily, his eyes still squeezed shut, sweating. He swallowed and opened his startled eyes wide. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, and lowered himself upon the ground beside the deer. He spread the deer’s hind legs and made a small incision in the muscle wall around the middle of the pelvis. He inserted two fingers and lifted the tissue away from organs and entrails beneath, and in the V thus made inserted the knife and cut up through the middle of the deer, following his fingers. Rufus paused periodically to get his breath back, as if this were the most arduous labour, though the boy could see that it was not. Rufus shifted position, shuffling on his knees along the side of the carcass. When he reached the bottom of the ribcage he stopped and showed Leo the sternum or breastbone. Leo leaned over to get a closer view. Rufus said that in truth he could now do with a bigger knife, but that this one would suffice.
‘Move away,’ he told the boy. ‘You’s too close there.’
Leo stepped back. Rufus grasped the handle of the knife with both hands, placed it under the breastbone, then thrust it forward and up and through the bone, his hands on the knife shooting into the air. This he repeated, right up through the ribcage and on up the animal’s throat. He remained there, breathing heavily, for some time. Leo waited.
‘I’ll cut loose the trachea now,’ Rufus said, ‘and the gullet.’ He then opened out the ribcage and showed Leo the deer’s vital organs. Its heart and lungs. He showed the boy the diaphragm and cut it loose on either side.
‘What I intends to do,’ Rufus said, ‘is to take hold of the trachea and gullet and pull them and all the innards of the deer down and out in one fell swoop. But first I’ll split the pelvic bone.’ He shuffled back to the lower end of the carcass. ‘Mind you avoids the bladder here,’ he said.
Rufus used the knife as a saw upon the bone. He admitted that a saw with teeth would do the job better. He held the bladder and perhaps other organs out of the way with his left hand as he cut the bone with his right. In time it gave and he opened the two sides of pelvic bone apart.
‘Help me up, boy.’ The old man rose awkwardly and stepped along the side of the animal to its forelegs, and reached in and took hold of the trachea and oesophagus. When he pulled them up all the other entrails followed suit. Once or twice he paused to cut the diaphragm loose where it was sticking. An entire amalgamation of the animal’s innards came loose and out through the channel he’d cut through the pelvic bone and, earlier, the anus. All this he hurled into the undergrowth.
Leo helped the old hermit roll the deer onto its front so that any blood remaining in the chest cavity might drain away. Then they lifted it together and threw it over the back of the donkey. Leo retrieved the rifle and they made their way back to their own wood.
*
The carcass smelled of blood and meat and the smell was growing sweeter.
‘The day’s too hot,’ Rufus said. ‘A course it is. You should always butcher cold meat. Tis madness to cull a deer in summer.’ It was a hot day but the temperature could not account for how heavily the old man was sweating. ‘But Mister Devereaux might have his reasons. I do not question them. And it’ll be easier to pull off his hide while it’s warm.’
They hung the carcass by its rear legs. Rufus made a cut in the hide on those legs, a neat line on each side from the thigh up as far as the tarsal glands around the knees. He told Leo that he must cut upwards through the hide from underneath, not down, for if he did so he would find hairs in the meat.
Rufus then bent down and made the same cuts in the forelegs, except that it seemed that his vision was shot, or the co-ordination of his brain to his fingers, for his knife wandered in zigzag slices from the knee joints up through the armpit to the open chest.
The old man cursed. He returned to the top legs and began to peel the hide off where he’d made the first incisions. When the hide did not lift easily he cut the tissue that held it to the flesh beneath. Then he stepped back and put his hands on his knees, and stared at the carcass, on his face a furious expression, as if the deer in death were in some way defying him. He lowered his gaze to the ground and he held the knife out to Leo. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘Cut around the knees.’
Leo cut the skin around both hind and forelegs as best he could.
Rufus had retreated and sat upon a log. ‘Give me the knife,’ he gasped. ‘Go behind him and grasp hold a the hide with both hands and pull it down.’
Leo did as he was asked. He gripped the hide and pulled it. It did not come at first, but he summoned all his strength. He discovered that he had more than he’d ever had before. The skin came down and off the carcass.
‘Beautiful,’ Rufus said. ‘You looks like some gentleman taking the coat off the back of a lady there, boy.’
When he had the hide free Leo laid it on the ground. Rufus rose and without a word set to butchering the carcass. This time he did not ask the boy to help. He seemed indeed to have forgotten he was there. Leo watched him in disbelief. The old man attacked the carcass like a butcher suddenly blinded, cutting chunks of flesh and dropping them to the ground, muttering to himself that he must get the meat to the farm and the Devereauxs’ cool larder or pantry as soon as he could. The boy knew enough from seeing pigs butchered that the old man was not working in accord with the skeleton or frame of the animal but extracting crude chunks of flesh. The hermit was covered in blood and gore. The hanging carcass was a gruesome spectacle. Eventually Leo could watch no longer and said, ‘Rufus, please, stop. What are you doing?’
The old man paused, and looked up as if he had heard a voice, not from the boy behind but from the crowns of the trees above. Then he turned. He grinned. ‘There you are, boy. Where you been? Pick up a piece a this meat. Us’ll have ourselves a good venison stew this evenin.’
11
The hermit had willed himself to full strength to shoot the deer. Then he relapsed. He sighed and stared at the fire. The stew was delicious but Rufus hardly touched his. Instead he swigged his blackberry wine.
Leo said nothing.
The old man sighed. Then he took a deep breath. ‘Don’t let me give you the idea that transport’s a good choice, boy,’ Rufus told him. From the grimace on his face it seemed to hurt the old man to talk. ‘It is not. I hope you got that. Choose somethin else.’
Leo did not know of which choices Rufus spoke. He was unaware of having any.
‘Bein somewhat of a horseman, you might be thinkin on joinin the cavalry. Keep out a that too, boy, whatever you do.’
‘I have no plans, Rufus.’
The old hermit drank the wine and talked more easily. He told Leo that the number of horses killed in the war in which he’d served was unprecedented, and in the next would only be worse. When General French relieved Kimberley, he said, the cavalry rode five hundred horses to their death that day.
‘At Ladysmith,’ he said, ‘we was ordered to slaughter our horses for food. After the meat, we boiled down the bones and the bits to a kind a jelly. Hot water was added and we drunk it like beef tea.’
‘Wait up there,’ Leo said. ‘Ladysmith? I thought you was in the First Boer War, not the Second.’
Rufus stared at him with his wide eyes. ‘How old do you reckon I am, boy?’
Leo looked at the hermit’s leathery wrinkled features, his wild grey hair.
‘Seventy?’ he said. ‘Eighty?’
Rufus laughed. The l
aughter turned to coughing, which in turn became what sounded like sobbing. Eventually he recovered, and took another swig from his bottle. ‘Think I’ve had my three score year and ten already, do you?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not quite fifty yet, boy.’ He asked Leo if he was any good with boats.
Leo thought of the ferry on which he and the white colt had crossed the Tamar. Was that a boat? If so, it was the only one he’d ever sailed in or floated on.
‘I’d go on the boats if I was signin up now,’ Rufus told him. ‘One a them battleships. That Dreadnought. They say tis like a floatin hotel. They got to look after you, see? You ain’t goin nowhere, and neither is they.’
Leo said he had not looked beyond seeking brethren in Penzance. An uncle. Cousins, perhaps. He had no particular wish to travel the high seas.
‘I spoke with a man,’ Rufus said, ‘had work loadin in the Plymouth dockyards. He told me the Germans have been buildin the big ships, and we have too. Bigger and bigger battle fleets. Us to protect our Empire, them to create one. But I been considerin the matter. And I can’t see but one end to it.’
Leo asked what this end will be.
‘Them ships is built for war,’ Rufus said. ‘And war is what they’ll bring.’
Leo took their bowls to the bucket and washed them. When he came back to the fire Rufus asked him, ‘What do you look like?’
Leo pondered the question. It was more like a riddle. ‘How do I know what I look like?’ he said.
‘I shall tell you,’ Rufus said. ‘Like a damned baggabone who’s stole some younger boy’s clothes.’
Leo rose and, standing, bent forward the better to see himself. The hems of his trousers were up around his ankles. The sleeves of his jacket above his wrists. He was like a parody of Dunstone, the old boy back on the estate. Now that he considered the matter, he realised that the jacket was tight across his shoulders. The trousers pinched his belly.
Rufus rose with a grimace and stepped around the boy and pressed his own back against Leo’s. ‘Stand up straight.’
Leo stood and felt Rufus’s rough palm flat atop his scalp. Rufus stepped away and came back around and stood before the boy. He still held his hand on top of his own head.
‘Be as tall as me, boy. How’d you do that?’
Leo frowned. ‘You must a shrunk.’
Rufus turned and struggled over to one of the oak trees at the edge of the clearing and reached into one of the small niches he had cut into its trunk. He withdrew his hand and showed Leo a pair of gold coins. ‘I been savin these for somethin, I never knew what,’ he said. ‘Now I do. You must buy yourself a new suit.’
*
On the day following Rufus got up though he could barely move without wincing in pain. He gave the boy some strips of dried badger ham wrapped in dock leaves for the journey. He said he would have liked to come too and help but hoped that Leo would understand, he would not be able to cope with the crowds in the town. Leo said that he did.
‘Find a tailor first, mind,’ the hermit said. ‘Let him get the measure of you. He can’t cut a suit on the spot.’
‘I shall.’
‘There might be a tailors who can, but I never eard a one.’
‘That will be the first thing I do, Rufus.’
Leo told the donkey that he was honoured to have made her acquaintance.
There was one more thing, Rufus said. He told Leo that he had something to ask him. He did not know how to, but he must. It was a request.
Leo interrupted and said that he probably should leave now. Not a moment later. He’d been here long enough, too long, already.
Rufus agreed. It was time for Leo to leave. But before he did, there was this one thing he could help the hermit with. ‘It seems a shame not to use the gun as we got it, see?’
‘I do not see,’ Leo said.
‘Will you help me, boy?’
‘How?’
‘How? Shoot me, a course.’
Leo turned and walked around the clearing. He said that he could not.
‘I can try it on my own,’ Rufus said. ‘But it would be cleaner if another did it.’
Leo walked in a circle around the hermit, unable to look at him. Then he stopped and stood before Rufus. He looked at the ground. He said that he would not do it, he was sorry, he could not. Rufus told him to dry his tears, it did not matter. It was too much to ask.
‘I cannot shoot you, Rufus,’ the boy sobbed. ‘I cannot.’
‘You go and tell Mister Devereaux, boy. Go and fetch him. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?’
*
Leo left the wood and walked to the big house. The same girl as before answered the door. Leo asked for Mister Devereaux. The girl fetched him. Leo requested that he come to the wood. Rufus had for him.
Mister Devereaux walked straight to the clearing, Leo walking behind. The landowner said nothing but parted branches of the weeping beech and entered. Leo remained outside. After a short while Mister Devereaux came out carrying the gun and said that it was done. Rufus had made as good a job of it as could be hoped for. He asked whether Leo had seen a dead body before. Leo said that he had but one, that of Isaac Wooland, the stockman on the farm his father worked on, who was kicked by a cow.
Mister Devereaux nodded. ‘You do not need to see this one,’ he said. He turned and looked around, and said, ‘You could do with your own tack, boy. You can have his if there’s anythin you want. Indeed, you can rest here if you wish.’
Leo explained that he had to go to Penzance, he had only stayed this long as Rufus declined. Mister Devereaux shook the boy’s hand and said that he was going home. He wished Leo a good journey.
Leo said, ‘Is us not goin to bury him?’
‘Why?’
The question did not make sense. ‘Tis Christian, in’t it?’ Leo asked.
Mister Devereaux shrugged. ‘Rufus would never forgive me if I gave him a church burial. Wherever he is now, he’s gone from here. What’s left there’s nothing but meat and bone. Carrion. We can bury it and feed it to the centipedes and worms, or we can leave it where it is for the birds and the flies. Seems to me to be about the same difference.’
‘I do not mean to be rude, sir,’ Leo said. He bit his lip.
‘You may speak your mind,’ said Mister Devereaux. ‘You think I am callous, is that it?’
‘You do not seem sad,’ Leo told him.
The farmer nodded. ‘I am sad,’ he said. ‘I am very sad. Believe me.’
The donkey stood some yards away. Whether or not she was aware at all of what had happened Leo could not say. He recalled what the Orchards had done to Belcher’s horse. He gestured towards the beast. ‘What about the donkey?’ he asked.
Mister Devereaux nodded. ‘We’ll look after my brother’s donkey.’ He turned to Leo, and after a moment said, ‘You look surprised. It is no great burden. She can see out her days in a corner of a field.’
‘I did not know you was brothers,’ Leo said.
The landowner shrugged. ‘All our lives,’ he said.
12
The late-summer day was warm and the sky clear. Leo walked through waist-high grass. There were purple corncockles and yellow buttercups. The seeds at the top of the grasses had turned brown on the green stalks. Thistles grew, taller than the boy, their purple flowers like blobs of paint. Poppies were crimson smudges and there were blue cornflowers too in pale ripe corn.
In a pasture shorn close by sheep a section of the field was covered with the brown cones of molehills. To the smallest insect, he thought, they must be like a range of mountains. Into his head came the word, Himalayas.
There were black butterflies he’d never seen before. Perhaps all over the world different kinds of butterfly inhabited their own patch. Or some did so, while others spread far and wide, according to their temperament.
In a wood he walked through, all was quiet. There were purple foxgloves. A breeze soughed through the trees, stirring the leaves. Then the breeze died and the leaves were stil
l and the silence returned. He stopped walking. Stillness and silence. The wood was holding its breath, the trees aware of him. Waiting for him to walk on. He did so.
All about him Leo could sense the energy of plant life that burst forth out of the earth, of creatures, from the smallest specks in motion. In the grass adorned with daisy and buttercup, the black crows on yellow flowers, gulls drifting inland from the sea. Black flies of some kind flew around him, less like autonomous insects of the air than black scintillae dancing at the edge of his vision. He felt a strange new energy inside him and understood that he was not separate from what he saw but part of it.
Leo slept in a hay barn and walked into Penzance in the morning. The air tasted briny and the light was dazzling. There was a great amplitude about the vistas before and around him and the sky overall. The harbour was dry save for puddles. Askew across the mud, boats leaned over as if ailing, waiting for the tide to bring a cure.
At the first tailor’s he came to on the steeply sloping main street Leo entered and said that he needed a new suit. The man looked him up and down and said he could see that for himself. He called Leo ‘Sir’ and apologised but said that he would need proof of Sir’s ability to pay before proceeding further. Leo showed him the gold coins. The tailor laid out for the boy a selection of swatches of material. Leo chose a grey serge of medium thickness. The man asked him to stand straight and measured him with his tape. He licked his pencil and wrote the figures in a book. When all the necessary dimensions had been recorded, the tailor scrutinised the figures and did some sums and informed Leo that the suit would cost him nineteen shillings and sixpence, half the payment in advance or in other words now. The rest upon collection, which could be as early as this time tomorrow if the young gentleman should wish to proceed. Leo said that he did. He gave the tailor a gold sovereign. The tailor went to his till and came back and gave the boy his change.
He walked up to the top of the street and turned to his left and walked on and down towards the sea. He could have closed his eyes and reached it, for he could smell salt and fish and seaweed all drawing him towards them. He walked along the Esplanade of which his mother had spoken. Women in black skirts and white blouses, wearing straw hats and carrying closed parasols, strolled along. Some pushed prams, or chastised older children who strayed too close to the steep drop to the beach, though iron railings ran right the way along. Dogs that seemed to belong to no one trotted jauntily along the Esplanade. Old men sat on the benches gazing out to sea. Behind them, a building announced its function with a large sign: Mount’s Bay Hotel. Next door, the Queen’s Hotel was more discreet. A flagpole rose from some kind of tower or balcony upon its roof, though on this day no banner flew. Horse-drawn carriages rolled along a metalled road in front of the hotels.