Devil's Day

by Andrew Michael Hurley

  I took her into the kitchen and sat her down while I poured her a glass of water. She looked uncertainly at Grace, who smiled back at her and spun the locket on its chain.

  ‘I take it Ken Sturzaker told Bill where to go, did he?’ said Liz.

  ‘You could say that,’ I said.

  ‘Did they bury Douglas?’ said Grace.

  ‘They did,’ I said. ‘Round the back of the house.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that’ll be an end to it now,’ said Angela. ‘With any luck, the Sturzakers will leave us alone.’

  Grace stood behind Kat and put her arms around her neck.

  ‘Can we go now Uncle John’s back?’ she said. ‘I want to show Auntie Katherine the Wood.’

  Kat tried to drink the water I gave her but she retched and it dribbled down her chin.

  ‘What’s wrong, Auntie Katherine?’ said Grace, sitting down next to her. ‘Is it the baby? Is it making you sick?’

  ‘I felt like that for weeks on end,’ said Angela. ‘I couldn’t keep owt inside me for more than five minutes.’

  ‘I were just the same,’ said Liz. ‘You wonder why you bother, don’t you?’

  ‘Can you feel it moving yet?’ said Grace.

  ‘No,’ said Kat, mopping up the water with her sleeve.

  ‘Can I try?’ said Grace, and before Kat could say no, Grace had her hand on her stomach. ‘There’s something there,’ she said. ‘Its heart is beating.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Liz. ‘It’s probably your own.’

  ‘It’s too early,’ said Angela. ‘She won’t notice that baby moving for another few months yet.’

  ‘Here,’ said Grace, taking Kat’s hand and pressing it to her belly. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ said Kat.

  Grace bent down and listened. ‘It’s stopped now,’ she said. ‘I hope it’s all right.’

  ‘Of course it’s all right,’ said Angela. ‘Get your coat on.’

  ‘Are you coming then, Auntie Katherine?’ said Grace.

  Kat nodded and slipped her hand under the shirt she was wearing, trying to find what Grace had been able to feel.

  From the farm, we drove down the lane and we met Bill and Laurel in the field by the Wood. It was still sheened from the rain but the edges were dry and we walked in a single line to the trees, our reflections passing one by one over the water in the old drinking trough. Grace held Kat’s hand as she led her alongside the hedgerow, telling her how they would come and pick blackberries here in the summer when she came for Harvest. She’d have the baby by then too. And could a baby eat blackberries? Would they like the taste? Did Auntie Katherine like them? She shouldn’t eat them after Michaelmas, though. No one ate them after Michaelmas. The Gaffer had told me the same story every year. How the Archangel Michael had thrown Lucifer out of heaven and into a bramble bush. How, in a rage, the Devil had relieved himself on the berries and turned them sour.

  ‘Come the end of September, Johnny lad,’ said the Gaffer. ‘Whatever’s still in the hedges, you leave for the birds, all right?’ And he’d tell me about the boys he’d known in the village who came blackberrying after school and stuffed their faces and pissed hot blood for a week.

  Angela called to Grace and directed her attention to the geese flying into the valley. They flapped low over the Wood, their calls echoing off the fells, and everyone stopped to watch.

  ‘They come all the way from Iceland, Auntie Katherine,’ said Grace and Kat smiled at her and held back so that she could talk to me.

  ‘You know, they haven’t said a word about last night,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think they wanted to start a debate about it,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s like they never told us at all,’ said Kat.

  ‘What else is there to say?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘I mean, what else is there to say that will make any difference now?’

  ‘I’m worried about Grace,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she knows much more about what the Gaffer did than she’s letting on.’

  ‘No one’s told her anything,’ I said.

  ‘They wouldn’t need to. She’s sharp as a tack,’ said Kat. ‘She worked out that I was pregnant, didn’t she? And she obviously overhears things too.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘You were there when she was showing me her magic trick, John,’ said Kat. ‘How could she have known all those things unless she’d been listening to our conversations?’

  ‘We haven’t talked about those things since we’ve been here,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps we have and we didn’t realise it,’ said Kat.

  ‘I think we’d remember,’ I said.

  ‘You explain it then,’ she said. ‘You can’t, can you?’

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’

  ‘I’m just saying that we need to be careful what we talk about,’ said Kat. ‘Grace is very good at standing quietly in the shadows.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be the first child to enjoy spying on grown-ups,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a game. There’s something not right with her,’ said Kat. ‘That smell on her. And she keeps staring at me.’

  ‘Kat, if you’ve not noticed that she has a crush on you by now . . .’

  ‘Not in that way,’ said Kat. ‘Like she’s weighing me up.’

  Grace was waving her over and calling her name.

  ‘Just help her enjoy the day,’ I said.

  It was tradition that everyone spent the morning of Devil’s Day in Sullom Wood, gathering leaves and skins of bark, acorns and mossy branches. The stuff that would smoke and stink and get into the Owd Feller’s nose to wake him up. It was something for the children to do, something to keep them occupied as they waited for the bonfire and the songs in the evening. Kat was reluctant to leave me, but Laurel took her arm and they went off to help Grace fill the plastic bag she’d brought.

  As they went deeper into the bracken, me, Dadda and Bill headed towards the river to try and salvage what we could from the trees that had suffered in the fire. We’d stockpile what we could in Archangel Back and then come down with trailers to take the wood to the farms.

  The noise of the river increased as we walked through the trees and came to the fringes of what had been ruined. The rain had dampened down much of the ash to a tar-like sludge that wallowed between the stumps. Some of the trees had been burned to charcoal and whatever came away in the hand crumbled to dust.

  Dadda and Bill paced out the range of damage the fire had caused and agreed on it being just over fifty yards. It could have been much worse, but it would still take time to grow back, and would be recorded on the maps for years to come.

  ‘What did they use?’ I said. ‘Petrol?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Dadda. ‘It went up quick, whatever it were.’

  ‘Christ,’ Bill said, looking along the line of blackened trees. ‘It’ll take weeks to cut all this down.’

  ‘Were you hoping to do it in a day or summat?’ said Dadda.

  ‘I just want to get it done, that’s all,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t want to spend any more time in here than I have to.’

  He went away to the trees that had been at the peripheries of the fire, the point at which they’d managed to finally dampen down the flames and beat out the blazing undergrowth with shovels. With a look back toward us, he pulled on the rip-cord of the chainsaw and took off the branches of the beech tree closest to him. They fell heavily, lifting a haze of sawdust and ash.

  ‘Go on, John,’ said Dadda. ‘You go and see to what’s left at the top of the bank.’

  As I’d suspected, what had once been the Greenhollow had been torn open. The silver birch and willow had lost their leaves, the branches scorched to stiff black wires. Those trees that had been already leaning out over the river had collapsed into the ravine, making an ossuary of white trunks below. The top of the Falls was clogged with thickets of charred boughs and the bank where Sam and the others had pinned down Len
nie that muggy afternoon years ago lay heaped with burned wood that still gave off wisps of smoke.

  As he’d spluttered and choked at the edge of the river, I’d been convinced that this would be how Lennie died. It seemed inevitable that Sam would be responsible, too, after all the times he’d kicked and thumped his brother at school. But Lennie had a little while longer to live and once Sam had left, he’d sat and sniffed on the riverbank, dabbing the back of his hand on his nose to look at the blood.

  When he stood up, he winced like an old man and put a hand to his lower back. He looked in the direction Sam and the others had gone but their voices were still there somewhere in the Wood and he didn’t follow them just yet. He could hardly have gone home in the state he was in anyway and he pulled off his T-shirt to wash it in the river. His body was startling to see. Pale and shapeless as the sludge of a burned-down candle. Before long it would be under the earth in the churchyard. No longer his possession. No longer his shame.

  Kneeling by the water, he soaked his T-shirt and hung it dripping on a branch. He washed his face and his hands and made his boy breasts wobble as he wiped the mud off his chest.

  While he waited for his shirt to dry, he picked stones from the shingle and threw them across to the far bank, raising insects, frightening a rabbit. Then his target became the willow tree where I was sitting, the pebbles ripping through the canopy above me and sending down leaves.

  I don’t think he saw that it was me, but sensed that there was someone there watching him again and he peered through the branches.

  ‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  Looking again, he moved back a few paces and armed himself with a bigger rock.

  ‘Is that you, Sam?’ he said, knowing that it wasn’t. ‘Is that you, you fish-eyed prick?’

  He wiped his nose on his forearm and wafted away a bee from his eyeline.

  For a moment or two he hesitated, his arm poised, and then he pitched the rock towards me. It clubbed into the branches and tumbled down with twigs and peels of bark. Another one quickly followed, but by then I was already running through the trees to where the river bent and the water was deep enough for an otter to slip out of sight.

  And did I know how close I was to seeing the boy die now? the Devil said. Did I know that these were the last few days of his life? These trees, this river, they’d be the final things he’d see. This was the place where the world he’d known would vanish and he’d disappear into silence.

  ∾

  We worked for a couple of hours, sawing and chopping and carrying the timber worth saving the quarter of a mile through the Wood to Archangel Back.

  Whether I passed the place they’d taken the boy, I don’t know. It could have been anywhere. Under the fallen leaves, in its autumn silence, the Wood seemed as if it had been undisturbed for centuries.

  The only thing that moved here was Owd Abraham, ambling slowly through the ferns and stopping to look at us before he pressed on in search of penny buns and butter caps. If he’d come across the boy, then there wouldn’t be much left of him by now.

  He’d been poor, Dadda had told me. Hardly dressed for the weather. Nothing on him but a few coins and a couple of fags in a squashed packet. His trainers were coming apart and he had that unwashed smell about him like the old fellers in the Croppers’ Arms who had no wives at home any more. The tattoos on his forearm of crosses and squares looked as if he’d done them himself.

  I felt sorry for him, of course. Who would wish for Sullom Wood as their final resting place? And if he was as young as they said he was, as his ineptitude seemed to prove, then it was a terrible waste of a life.

  A boy he might have been, but he wasn’t naive. He must have considered the potential consequences as he drove up the valley in the dark and yet he’d come anyway. All that had happened was the worst thing he could have imagined. He’d gambled and lost. It was no one’s fault but his.

  He wouldn’t have known what he was stealing anyway. What would he have done with a van full of meatless little lambs? No butcher would have taken them that young. Or if they had then they’d have given him next to nothing for them. He’d have left the farm devastated for the sake of a few notes in his back pocket. Dadda knew that well enough. They all did.

  By the time we were heading out of the Wood and across the Beasleys’ horse field, the others had already gone to pick up the lamb from Beckfoot’s, taking Kat with them. She wouldn’t have wanted to go, but she needed to spend time with them on her own. The more she got to know them, the more she’d understand why they’d done what they’d done back in the spring. They weren’t bad people. They’d done it for the Gaffer’s sake. They’d done it because they loved the Endlands as much as he did.

  It had to carry on. It had to have a future.

  ∾

  Back at the farm, we added a few of the branches we’d brought from the Wood to the bonfire the Gaffer had started to build before he died. It had always been constructed under his supervision into a carefully stacked hive, and he’d often lay a ladder against the mound and climb to the top to rearrange some old pieces of fencing or sawn-up boughs that weren’t quite secure enough for his liking. Always with a fag in the corner of his mouth, of course, flickering with the threat of total conflagration as he gave instructions to us below.

  Kat came out of the scullery door carrying a bucket with two hands and tipped the brown water into the drain. Since they’d come back from Beckfoot’s she and Grace had been skivvying in the kitchen for Angela and Laurel, who always put themselves in charge of preparing and setting out the food on Devil’s Day.

  As Kat went back inside, she passed Grace, who came out of the house with a tray of tea and a hundred questions. When were we going to light the bonfire and what time would the Owd Feller come down off the moors and could she still sing the song? Did we think that her daddy would be home soon? Would Auntie Katherine’s baby be frightened? And what would there be to eat?

  It was a day for children. It always had been. It was a shame that Grace had no one her age to share it with. Something she felt more than ever on Devil’s Day.

  I’d been an only child too, of course, and so were Liz and Jeff, but at least we’d had one another. And even though Jeff ignored me most of the year, he’d side with me at school when the Sturzakers took the piss out of our traditions. Not that it mattered. I looked forward to Devil’s Day more than Christmas and they couldn’t spoil it whatever they said.

  ∾

  The afternoon came to a close in ribs of reddened cloud over the fells. Blackbirds chuttered in the beech trees and the river was loud. For a while, the light glowed coppery around the farm and then the sun began to slide out of the valley, past the holly bushes, over the crags and burning on the ridges.

  Once the last of the daylight had gone we went out and lit the bonfire, inserting burning tapers into the base of the stack so that it lit from the inside out. As the wind got to the flames, they pulsed and spread slowly from the heart, casting our shadows as giants on the wall of the farmhouse.

  There was still no sign of Jeff, but then I wasn’t surprised. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d given his word and then rendered it meaningless. And yet, when—if—he turned up, Laurel would forgive him his trespasses, Liz would let him kiss her and Grace would hang off his neck like a monkey.

  ‘Where is he?’ said Grace. ‘You said that he’d be back before we started the bonfire.’

  ‘Perhaps he got held up,’ said Angela. ‘He’ll be here soon.’

  ‘I want to show him my magic trick,’ she said.

  ‘You can,’ said Liz. ‘When he gets here.’

  ‘But that might not be for ages,’ said Grace.

  ‘Don’t sulk, love,’ said Angela.

  ‘I’m not sulking.’

  ‘Well, get on with it then,’ said Liz, and Grace dipped into the plastic bag she’d filled that morning and began to throw handfuls of leaves and acorns and beechnuts into the flames.
/>   ‘Sing the rhyme, Grace,’ said Angela. ‘Don’t forget the rhyme.’

  Rise, Devil, rise;

  Open your eyes.

  Wake, Devil, wake;

  Eat up all your cake.

  Come, Devil, come;

  Whisky, wine and rum.

  ‘When will he come, the Owd Feller?’ said Grace.

  ‘I told you, when he’s good and ready,’ said Angela. ‘He has to walk a long way, you know.’

  ‘Walk?’ said Grace. ‘I thought he had wings?’

  ‘They’re all crumpled up from him sleeping for so long,’ said Angela.

  ‘But Daddy will be here before him, won’t he?’ said Grace.

  ‘He’d better,’ said Angela. ‘Nobody wants to meet the Owd Feller on the lane.’

  The smoke and sparks drifted away towards the very end of the valley and the willow leaves that Grace had collected from Sullom Wood were lofted up on the hot air, burning at the edges, curling and shrivelling into ash.

  ‘She does keep staring at me,’ said Kat.

  ‘She isn’t staring at you,’ I said.

  ‘She is,’ Kat insisted. ‘Look, just then.’

  ‘She thinks you’re pretty, Kat,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I’ve seen that look on children’s faces a thousand times, John,’ she said. ‘She’s planning something.’

  Once the bonfire was at full tilt and the heat of it had pushed us back to the damson tree outside the scullery, Angela called time and we went into the house to eat. The dogs were brought in from their kennels and Fly, of course, was over-excited by the privilege of being indoors.

  ‘Perhaps I’d best leave her here tomorrow,’ said Dadda, making her lie down like Musket. ‘I reckon she’ll be more bloody hindrance than help.’

  ‘We can’t gather with one dog,’ said Angela. ‘She’s got to learn some time.’