‘You don’t know that,’ said Dadda.
‘The Sturzakers came to our farm, Tom,’ said Bill. ‘If someone had come here and done this to you, don’t tell me you’d just sit back and do nowt. The Gaffer didn’t, did he?’
‘That’s enough, Bill,’ said Laurel.
‘The Gaffer? What do you mean?’ I said.
‘Nowt,’ said Dadda.
‘Let’s go home, Bill,’ said Laurel. ‘I don’t want to be away from the farm for too long.’
They looked at one another and then Bill sent Grace to get her coat from the hallway.
When the door had closed, Bill said, ‘Well, are you going to tell him then, Tom? You said that you would when he came up for Gathering.’
Dadda looked at Kat.
‘She’s John’s wife,’ said Bill. ‘She needs to know too.’
‘Not now,’ said Laurel, pulling his sleeve. ‘Another time.’
But Bill stayed in the chair and looked at Dadda again.
‘Come on,’ said Bill. ‘It’s better that they hear the truth from us than the crap Ken Sturzaker comes out with.’
‘Hold on,’ said Liz, gesturing at Kat. ‘We hardly know her. We don’t know what she’s going to do. She’s not from the valley, is she?’
‘She is now,’ said Bill.
‘This isn’t the time,’ said Angela. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’
‘Or not at all,’ said Liz.
‘I agree,’ said Laurel. ‘Katherine doesn’t need to know.’
‘She married into the family,’ said Bill. ‘She has a right to know, they both do.’
‘A right to know what?’ said Kat, looking anxiously around the table.
‘Tom?’ said Bill and Dadda lit his roll-up and looked away.
Bill leant forward. ‘Listen, John,’ he said, ‘something happened after Lambing back in the spring. We’ve been meaning to tell you, but what with the wedding and everything, it just didn’t seem right. And we wanted to wait until you came here so we could explain it in person.’
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I don’t think the Gaffer meant to do it,’ said Angela. ‘He just reacted on the spur of the moment.’
‘Aye,’ said Bill. ‘It weren’t really his fault.’
‘That boy shouldn’t have been here,’ said Angela.
‘What boy?’ I said.
We’d always lambed late, so that new life emerged in better weather and warmer sunlight. That way, within a few days of being born, the lambs could be taken with their mothers up to the high pastures. Down in the valley they got fretful and restless. It wasn’t where they instinctively belonged and they seemed to sense it keenly. The Gaffer said that he’d seen sheep all looking up at the ridges of the fells and braying in the same way they brayed when they were hungry. The quicker they were on the moors the better.
But on the middle day of April, the day I’d arrived to help, snow had started falling and not stopped all afternoon. The ewes put their new lambs between themselves and the walls of the bye-field, bearing the brunt of the weather, and Dadda wanted to take them inside. But the Gaffer, looking up at the sky, said that it would do the lambs no harm to get used to the cold and the snow would stop before dark, which it did, leaving the valley strangely luminous when the daylight gave out.
A few days of cold wind kept the snow from thawing, and more lambs came at all hours. The Dyers and the Beasleys took it in shifts to watch the ewes but Dadda, and especially the Gaffer, didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours before they were back in the shed, watching and waiting.
But even when the natural April warmth returned and the snow began to melt away in the valley, Dadda and the Gaffer had to give the moors another day or two to follow suit. It would have been colder up there and the hollows still deep enough for lambs to be lost in.
I’d stayed for a week and once most of the ewes had lambed Dadda drove me to the station and I made my way back to Suffolk. It had been that night when a young man—a boy, really, Dadda said, a boy not much older than the ones I taught at Churchmeads—had come to steal the new-borns. The Gaffer had been on his own in the lambing shed and, hearing the distress of the sheep outside in the bye-field, he’d gone across the yard to the house and fetched his shotgun from the kitchen.
Kat put her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes. No one spoke for a few minutes until Dadda stubbed out his roll-up and coughed.
‘I’m sorry you had to hear that, John,’ he said.
‘What did you do?’ I said. ‘Afterwards, I mean.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Dadda. ‘You don’t need to know any more.’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What happened to the boy?’
‘We took him to Sullom Wood,’ said Bill.
‘And?’
‘Jesus,’ said Liz. ‘Do you really want the details?’
‘Who was he?’ I said.
‘God knows,’ said Bill. ‘No one’s come looking for him.’
Kat had her head in her hands now and was crying. I rubbed her back and then Laurel shushed her and smoothed her hair away from her face.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘We’re all here for you.’
‘I need to go home,’ said Kat.
‘I know, love,’ said Laurel. ‘It must be hard for you.’
‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ said Kat.
‘God does,’ said Laurel, putting her hand on the crucifix around her neck.
‘What?’ said Kat.
‘I prayed for His guidance and He answered,’ said Laurel.
She sat down now and looked Kat in the eyes.
‘You see, the sins of the world, Katherine, love,’ she said. ‘They’re too much for only a few people to bear.’
‘Give over, woman,’ said Bill. ‘What are you talking about?’
Laurel ignored him and arranged Kat’s hair behind her ears. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘God just asks us to share the load.’
Kat shook her head and pushed Laurel’s hands away. They all tried to stop her, but she went off up the stairs and into the attic room.
∾
I found her sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing her stomach as her reflection came and went in the dangling mirror.
‘Swear to me that you didn’t know, John,’ she said.
‘Of course I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘You heard what they said. They kept it from me as well as you.’
‘Why did he do it?’ said Kat.
‘He must have thought he was doing the right thing,’ I said.
‘God, it makes me feel sick,’ said Kat, staring at the floorboards, ‘that they all came to the wedding having done that.’
‘It was the Gaffer, Kat,’ I said. ‘Not the rest of them.’
‘Come on, they’re all just as guilty,’ she said.
‘What were they supposed to do?’ I said. ‘Turn him in? The Gaffer was eighty-six. He’d have died in prison.’
‘He killed someone,’ said Kat, looking at me with red eyes. ‘He took someone’s life, John. Christ, no wonder Grace has been acting so strangely. The poor, poor girl.’
‘She doesn’t know anything,’ I said.
‘She’s not stupid, John,’ said Kat. ‘She knows plenty by the sounds of it.’
‘Meaning?’
‘What kind of conversations have you had with her about us exactly?’
‘I didn’t tell her about your scars, Kat,’ I said. ‘And anyway, I could ask you the same question.’
‘As if I’d talk to her about things like that,’ she said.
‘She seemed to know a lot about it,’ I said. ‘Is that really how you felt? Did you feel like you had to take whatever you could get?’
‘Of course not,’ said Kat. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She sniffed and nodded downstairs. ‘I suppose they’re all wondering what I’m going to do next, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘What are you going to do?’ I said.
‘W
e’ve got to tell someone, John,’ she said. ‘That’s the only thing we can do.’
‘And what do you think would happen to this place?’ I said.
She looked at me and frowned. ‘What are you saying?’ she said. ‘That we keep it to ourselves?’
‘I’m saying that you should think about Grace, even if you don’t care what happens to anyone else. No, it’s not blackmail, Kat. You’d ruin her life. You know I’m right.’
‘We could take her with us back to Suffolk,’ said Kat. ‘She shouldn’t be here. Not with these people.’
I held her face to make her look at me.
‘I’m not saying that what the Gaffer did was right, Kat,’ I said. ‘But it happened and they did what they did. What good would it do to go around shouting about it now?’
‘We’d be doing the right thing, John,’ she said.
‘By whom?’
‘Come on, you know what I mean,’ she said, taking my hands away. ‘I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t say anything, and neither will you.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s been six months and no one’s come looking for this lad, have they?’
‘But someone must be missing him,’ said Kat. ‘Someone will come sooner or later.’
‘Even if they do, there won’t be anything left to find in the Wood. Not after all this time.’
She swallowed and smeared away new tears.
‘What about this Ken Sturzaker?’ she said. ‘He knows something. He said so at the wake.’
‘He’ll have heard half a rumour about nothing much,’ I said.
‘Sometimes half a rumour is worse,’ said Kat.
‘That’s all Sturzaker ever has,’ I said. ‘That’s why no one listens to him.’
‘I still don’t think you should go and see him tomorrow.’
‘I think Dadda would prefer it if I did,’ I said. ‘Then at least there’ll be two of us holding Bill’s lead.’
‘I just want to go home,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ I said. ‘We’ve come to help with Gathering.’
‘I can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘Not now.’
‘But we’re needed,’ I said.
‘What am I supposed to say to them?’ said Kat. ‘After this?’
‘You don’t need to say anything about it,’ I said. ‘Just pitch in and help. We’ve got work to do.’
‘You’re asking me to forget what they’ve just told me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just to leave it in the past where it belongs.’
She started to cry again, wiping her eyes with the sleeves of Liz’s old jumper.
‘What right did they have to put us in this position?’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with us. Why did they have to tell us?’
‘Because we’re Pentecosts,’ I said.
Devil’s Day
It was just unfortunate that the Gaffer had been on duty that night in the lambing shed. If Dadda had got to the bye-field first, or if I’d been there and not back in Suffolk, then it was possible that the boy would still be alive. The slightest hint of noise, a few lights coming on in the house and I’m sure that a novice like that would have turned on his heel rather than put up a fight. Perhaps he would have come back better prepared or mob-handed and tried again, I don’t know. Maybe he’d have stayed away from the valley for good. But it wasn’t really worth thinking about that now. As I’d said to Kat, we couldn’t change anything.
Before she finally went to sleep, she cried for a while longer, telling me that she was glad I’d been at home when it happened, that I wasn’t like the others. I didn’t say so, but I knew that if I’d been here that night I’d have done exactly the same as them. I’d have helped carry that boy into the Wood.
The following morning, we put the Dyers’ dog into the back of Bill’s truck with the wooden cages he and Laurel used to transport their birds to the markets at Christmas and Easter. Despite being left in the cold workshed all night, Douglas was starting to smell, but Bill was determined to go to Sturzaker’s regardless.
‘I don’t know what you’re expecting him to say,’ said Dadda. ‘Even if it were his dogs, he’s not going to hold his hands up and say so, is he?’
‘I want to ask him straight to his face,’ said Bill.
‘You can ask him any way you want,’ said Dadda. ‘It won’t make any difference.’
‘I just want him to know that I know,’ said Bill. ‘All right?’
He changed gear and slowed to clank over the cattle grid at the start of Sullom Wood. The wind was moving the trees as one body and even over the whine of the engine as Bill accelerated again the noise was loud and vast, like the long breaking of a tide. Leaves skirled in the gusts, sunlight came and went, there was rain in the air as the year edged towards its closure. I didn’t want to leave Dadda to face the winter by himself. It was always hard leaving him after Gathering but it would be worse this year. Folk in the Endlands had become used to the rain and the hail, of course, and carried on anyway, but there were times when it was impossible to be outdoors. Times when the cloud came down so low in the valley that the other farms disappeared from view. Then the house would seem empty. Then the ghosts would come. Better that there was talk. Better the sound of a baby crying than nothing at all.
We passed the church—strange to think that the Gaffer was lying there under the blustering larches—and Bill turned over the bridge and drove to the far end of New Row.
Sturzaker’s car was hitched up on the pavement, a battered saloon with balding tyres, the back window plastered with stickers, the driver’s door a different colour to the rest.
‘Good,’ said Bill, ‘he’s in. You let me do the talking, all right?’
We followed him across the road and Dadda reluctantly rang the bell. The windows of the house were fogged with condensation that had mottled the curtains with grey mould. Damp had chewed the wooden sills too and thistles grew in the cracks on the front steps. All the houses on New Row were the same. They must have seemed palatial to the millworkers when they’d first been built but now they would have been better off razed to the ground.
Even at this time in the morning the Sturzaker house was loud with arguments and dogs, and a radio had been turned up to distortion. It was just as well that Mr and Mrs Earby next door were both deaf.
Dadda rang the bell again and Karen, Vinny’s little sister, the youngest of Sam and Cheryl’s offspring, lifted the nets at the front window and grinned at us before squashing her face against the glass, moving her lips like slugs.
‘Jesus,’ said Bill. ‘They should have neutered the fuckin’ Sturzakers a long time ago.’
A shout came from inside and she was hauled away by Jackie, who smiled thinly at us and pulled the lapels of her dressing gown over her cleavage. She called for her husband and the door opened with Sturzaker’s face in the crack that the chain allowed.
‘What do you want?’ he said, trying to keep one of his bull terriers from escaping into the street with his knee.
‘A word, Ken,’ said Bill.
‘About what?’ said Sturzaker, looking at the three of us.
‘About what’s in the back of the truck,’ said Bill.
Sturzaker glanced over the tops of our heads at Bill’s Daihatsu. ‘And what would that be then?’ he said.
‘As if you don’t know,’ said Bill.
Sturzaker turned his eyes to Dadda. ‘Fuck’s sake, Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s half-six in the morning.’
‘Just come and look,’ said Dadda. ‘Then we can leave you in peace.’
The door closed, the chain slid back and Sturzaker came out in his slippers and his overcoat.
Bill opened the back of the truck and lifted the tarpaulin off the dog.
‘And?’ said Sturzaker
‘What do you mean and?’ said Bill. ‘Never mind fuckin’ and. It were your dogs that did this, weren’t it?’
‘Do you know what he’s on about, Tom?’ said Sturzaker.
&nbs
p; ‘Never mind him,’ said Bill. ‘You listen to me. I’m talking.’
‘You’re talking summat, Bill, aye,’ said Sturzaker.
Jackie had come to the door now and called to her husband through gritted teeth. ‘Let them come inside for Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘The whole street doesn’t need to listen, do they?’
Holding her dressing gown closed with one hand and restraining the terrier with the other, she held the door for us as we came in.
‘Is this about the fire?’ she said. ‘Ken’s already told you that it weren’t our Vinny, haven’t you, Ken?’
‘I did try,’ said Sturzaker.
Catching the scent of the farm on us, the little black dog in the hallway strained and barked, setting off the others that came to the gate at the top of the stairs.
‘Take this bloody thing into the front room, Ken,’ said Jackie, and Sturzaker looked up at her and dragged the terrier away.
Jackie had worked at the Croppers’ Arms since the hairdresser’s in town had closed down, the darling of the old boys who heaved themselves on to the high stools at the bar to get a look at the contents of her bingo blouse: eyes down, look in. She was one of the rumours that had attached themselves to the Gaffer over the years. Behind the empty beer kegs in the back yard one night, was it? Or down in the cellar between changing the barrels? No one else had noticed, and I hadn’t said anything to the others, but during the funeral I’d seen her slip in at the back of church during the second verse of ‘O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing’ and slip out again before the sermon.
Without the make-up that she layered on for work, Jackie was almost unrecognisable. Her eyes were puffy and her chin crosshatched with wrinkles. She must have been pushing sixty at least, and helping Cheryl look after Vinny and Karen while Sam was inside was taking its toll. Mind you, she’d looked old ever since Lennie drowned.
‘How are you, John, love?’ she said, as she took us into the kitchen. ‘How’s that wife of yours? The Gaffer used to talk about her all the time in the pub, you know.’
‘She’s fine,’ I said.
‘She must wonder what she’s come to here,’ she said, almost tripping over the pair of yapping dachshunds pawing at her shins. Through the window another dozen dogs jumped and barked in a wire mesh cage in the back yard.
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