‘You didn’t let any through, did you?’ said Bill.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You sure?’
‘She said so, didn’t she?’ I said.
Musket sniffed his way in and out of the heather but after a few minutes he stood and looked at Dadda with an expression as close to uncertainty as a dog could manage. What was he supposed to find exactly? There was nothing there.
‘You take these down,’ said Dadda. ‘I’ll go and look for the others.’
‘Don’t you want some help?’ I said. ‘A few more eyes and we’ll find them quicker.’
‘I’ve got Musket, haven’t I?’ he said.
‘We’ll cover more ground if we all go,’ I said.
Dadda looked at Kat and then back at the grouse moor. ‘It’ll be hard going out there,’ he said. ‘I’ve not time to keep waiting for folk to catch up.’
‘Come for them tomorrow then,’ said Bill. ‘They’ll be all right for another night on their own.’
‘They might be even further off by then,’ said Dadda.
‘Give them a day and you’ll find them back where they belong,’ said Bill. ‘I’m sure.’
‘And what if we don’t?’ I said.
‘They’ve never gone this far before,’ said Dadda. ‘Summat’s not right.’
‘If you come back tomorrow, we can all help,’ said Bill.
‘We gather every animal on the same day,’ said Dadda. ‘We always have done.’
‘I’m only thinking of you,’ said Bill.
‘That’s what every bugger keeps telling me,’ said Dadda.
‘We mean it, Tom,’ said Bill. ‘We’ve always pulled together, haven’t we?’
‘Then stay and help us,’ I said.
Bill looked up at the low brown clouds. ‘Use your head, man. If that comes down you won’t see your hand in front of your face,’ he said.
‘Aye, well, until that happens we’ll carry on,’ said Dadda.
Bill caught his arm. ‘Tom, you’ve not failed, you know,’ he said.‘It’s just one of them things. It’s not your fault.’
‘You still here?’ said Dadda.
Bill looked at him and then turned to Kat.
‘Leave them to it, love,’ he said. ‘You’re best off coming back to the farm with me.’
Kat shook her head and Bill kept his hand on offer for a while longer before he put his thumb and finger in his mouth and whistled to Liz on the ridge to let her know that the sheep were on the move.
Dadda got the dogs on to their feet and with a noise at the back of his throat he moved them slowly towards the flock in order to peel them away from the Wall. The sheep at the very edges went first, vocal again, and the others followed to converge into a mass of fleece and black heads, braying and moaning, their heads twitching with a woody knock of horns when Fly got too close.
‘Can’t I take Musket?’ said Bill, as he started walking away. ‘This lass is a bloody liability.’
‘Just keep an eye on her,’ said Dadda. ‘The sheep know what they’re doing.’
Filthy from the mud, their time up here over for the year, they began to stream away towards the ridge, running off the moors as certainly as rainwater.
At Gathering, I tell Adam, two thoughts occur to sheep at the same time. The first is an instinct that jolts them like a spark and makes them run from danger—and danger is in everything but themselves. The second is an urge as deep as the one that usually stops them from wandering past the Wall or readies them for the ram: it tells them that it is time to leave the moors. The growing cold and the shortening days awaken some synaptic conduit that compels them to find shelter and food and they recall in some form the meadowgrass in the bye-field and the path that leads them there.
They resist being rounded up and yet they go so willingly.
‘They know they have to, Johnny lad,’ said the Gaffer. ‘They know that’s the end of them if they don’t.’
And it set me thinking what death—or rather the thought of death—must be like for them. If it was always there in their minds as a buzzing fly, or if it was nothing so loud as that but more a dull throb, like toothache.
I don’t know. Perhaps they have no sense of death at all, perhaps they do what they do without ever being conscious of it, like a tree desiccating its leaves in autumn. I quite envy them really, the simple vessels they have to fill. For them there is only ever the belly the belly the belly, the womb the womb the womb.
∾
If the missing sheep had strayed up Poacher’s Seat, then they’d have stood out on the exposed slope, and if they’d hidden themselves in the holly bushes by Top Pond, we’d have heard them even from this distance. The most likely thing was that the cold weather had driven them across the grouse moor to the old shooting butts where they could stand out of the wind for a while. Musket investigated each clump of fallen stones and jumped down into the hole Dadda and I had hidden in to shoot the stag, but found nothing and went over to the wall of peat where Kat was sheltering out of the wind.
‘I wish I’d brought my binoculars,’ said Dadda. ‘I can’t see a bastard thing up here.’
He was looking beyond the place where the stag had fallen.
‘They can’t have gone over towards Blackmire Edge, Dadda,’ I said. ‘We were there only a couple of days ago, we’d have seen them.’
‘Aye, but what’s made them go off at all, though?’ said Dadda, looking again.
‘It happens sometimes, doesn’t it?’ I said.
‘Aye, one or two every so often, maybe,’ he said. ‘But not nine.’
‘Perhaps whatever sent the deer over this way from Wyresdale scared them too?’ I said.
‘They wouldn’t have gone towards it, though, would they?’ said Dadda.
‘Something’s made them run,’ I said.
He coughed and rubbed his chest. It took longer than usual for him to stop.
‘Jesus, listen to me,’ he said. ‘This is what you’ll sound like in twenty years if you come back here.’
‘It’s just the fags, Dadda,’ I said.
‘It’s nowt to do with the fags,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘It’s this bloody place, it cripples you.’
‘It’s a cough, Dadda,’ I said. ‘You’ll live.’
‘Is this really what you want to bring her to, John?’ he said, looking over to where Kat was stroking Musket’s head. ‘Is this what you want for her? Chasing stupid fuckin’ sheep around the moors all day?’
‘It’s a job,’ I said. ‘There are lots of jobs to do here. If it needs doing, it needs doing.’
‘Look at her,’ he said. ‘A strong wind would blow her back to the farm.’
‘Give her six months,’ I said, ‘and I reckon you wouldn’t know she’d ever lived anywhere else but here.’
‘Six months?’ said Dadda. ‘It’s not even been six days and the place is making her sick.’
‘It’s just the baby,’ I said. ‘Once it’s born, she’ll settle down.’
‘You know there’s one person you can’t ever fool, John,’ he said. ‘And that’s yourself. Don’t waste your time trying.’
He zipped his jacket tighter and pulled up the collar to keep out the wind that came now with a freshly whetted edge.
The stark blue of the morning faded and the sky became overcast. A deeper glooming moved across the moors and then snow began to fall slowly in large feathers. It wasn’t unheard of at this time of year, but it was usually no more than a flurry that came on the back of sleet and soon melted away.
‘Should we go now?’ said Kat, when she came over with Musket.
‘It’ll pass,’ I said.
And if it didn’t, then it would be a useful lesson for her. She needed to see how quickly the weather could change up here. She needed to be caught out by it at least once to learn anything.
‘I tell you what, the weather here, Johnny lad,’ the Gaffer said. ‘I’ve known women less fickle.’
He was right. I�
��ve seen it a thousand times.
Stillness turns to storm.
Hail comes clattering from a springtime sky.
A sudden shower, and then a rainbow hoops the bright wet valley.
Winter melts in an hour.
The summer can end in a torrent. Just as it did the day Lennie Sturzaker died.
∾
The heat that had been settled in the valley for weeks finally cracked one afternoon towards the end of August and clouds rolled in so low and so dark that Dadda and the Gaffer came dashing from the bye-field and the three of us stood in the kitchen with the lights on watching the storm.
The brushed concrete slope from the gate to the lane was a weir of rolling white water and the grass was tugged and shimmied like the weed in the river. The drains in the yard choked and the roof of the house shed the rain in wide, spattering curtains. Thunder broke at ground level, beating into the heart of the fells and down into the earth, thudding again when it echoed off the Three Sisters. All afternoon the valley filled like a bowl, but by the evening the rain started to pass away and the cloud lifted and only the wind remained, ruffling the surface of the flood water and shaking the wetness from the trees. Every slope continued to gush and roar and enlarge the river, which flowed with great purpose, deep and brown, carrying away what the storm had flung into its current.
It was Laurel who came back to the Endlands with the news about Lennie Sturzaker. She’d been in the village visiting Betty Ward and on the verge of driving home when the rain started and forced her to stay for the rest of the afternoon. When it finally petered out, they’d just started on a pot of tea, she said, and she didn’t want it to go to waste, she said, and Betty was halfway through telling her about her sister’s latest infidelities and anyway the lane was two foot under and so she’d stayed put.
As they ate their fruit loaf and rock cakes they heard one of the Beckfoot boys shouting outside and, lifting up the net curtains, they’d seen folk crowding on the bridge. The other Beckfoot lad came out of the butchery still in his apron, followed by Alun in his.
Boots on, Laurel in a borrowed mac, the two of them walked up the lane and joined the Dewhursts, the Earbys and the Parkers, who were all looking over at Arncliffe’s. The Beckfoot brothers had climbed down the muddy bank and were balanced precariously on the wall of the millrace trying to reach Lennie as he rose and sank with the crust of litter, his body knocking against the iron paddles of the wheel. At the top of the slope, where the railings were rusted and the village kids got in to play in the grounds and break the windows, Jackie was saying Lennie’s name as if she were calling for a cat at dusk. The other women there with her touched her shoulders and her hair. And when the Beckfoots finally managed to get hold of one of Lennie’s arms and haul him out she began to scream and no one could watch any more.
Eventually, an ambulance came—always a strange, white creature in the valley—and took Lennie away, passing Ken Sturzaker as he drove back to the village from the abattoir.
‘The poor man didn’t even get to see his boy,’ said Laurel.
‘What the hell was the lad doing playing by Arncliffe’s in that weather, anyway?’ said Dadda.
‘I don’t think he was,’ said Laurel. ‘Betty seemed to think that he must have been in Sullom Wood and fallen in there.’
‘Aye, well,’ said the Gaffer, ‘you go nosing about in places you shouldn’t and that’s what happens.’
‘Have some sympathy, Harry,’ said Laurel. ‘I know you don’t get on with the Sturzakers, but still.’
The Gaffer waved her off and lit a fag.
‘I think we should at least send them some flowers,’ Laurel said to Dadda. ‘Something.’
‘Aye,’ said Dadda. ‘Of course we will.’
‘And perhaps a card too,’ said Laurel. ‘We could all sign it.’
‘We’re not sending them owt,’ said the Gaffer. ‘The lad shouldn’t have been there.’
‘No one’s saying otherwise,’ said Dadda. ‘That’s not the point, is it?’
‘What is the point then?’ the Gaffer said.
‘They’ve just lost one of their sons. A lad our John’s age,’ said Dadda, raising his voice in a way that he rarely did with his father.
‘I’m not having them think that we’re all crying over him down here,’ said the Gaffer. ‘We’d be lying to ourselves, wouldn’t we, Johnny lad?’
He put his hand on my arm and took another drag.
‘Wigton’s have flowers,’ said Dadda, finding some loose change in his pocket to give to Laurel.
‘It doesn’t need to be much,’ she said, looking at me with a sympathetic smile. ‘Just something.’
The Gaffer stood up and sent the coins across the kitchen floor. Then he went out, calling for the dogs.
When the morning of the funeral came around a week later, he took himself off shooting on the Moss and the others made sure they were absent too. Angela kept Liz at home to muck out the pigs and Jim went up to work on the Wall. Bill had been trying to discourage Jeff’s association with the Sturzakers for months and Lennie’s death seemed a good reason to cut the ties once and for all. Laurel could go and sniffle in the pews if she wanted to. As far as he was concerned the Sturzakers were nothing to do with us. What happened to them was not our concern.
There might have only been three of us from the Endlands there at the church but nearly everyone from the village turned out. The Wigtons and the Beckfoots had closed for the morning out of respect and those men who worked the same shift as Ken Sturzaker at the abattoir had been given time off to attend the funeral. All the teachers from the school were there too: Mr Cuddy, Mrs Broad and the usually floral Miss Bibby from the Reception class who was wrapped in black and comforting those children who had preferred to sit with her rather than their parents. They were the same age as I’d been when Mam died and could have had no idea what was going on. They sucked their thumbs, bewildered to see Sam Sturzaker crying, and sat mesmerised by the little box near the altar inside which his brother now lay, not asleep but dead. Gone for good. Such permanence they didn’t understand.
Once the service was over, Ken Sturzaker, Eddie Moorcroft and the Beckfoot brothers carried Lennie out of the church and into the graveyard. On the other side of the boundary wall the river drifted past, going about its business reasonably now; the only evidence of the storm-swell the flattened ferns and hogweed along the banks. But it couldn’t have escaped anyone’s thoughts that Lennie must have floated past here already limp and dead, his body just another thing for the river to remove from the valley, the floodwater conveying him past the school field, past Beckfoot’s and Wigton’s, under the green, echoing bricks of the bridge and on and on until he was caught in the millrace.
As they started to bury him, I wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t been snared and the river had carried him out of the valley, out of the hills. I pictured him being passed from the Briar to the Hodder under Mellor Knoll and then rolling in the confluence where the Hodder met the Ribble by the Jesuit College. And then on he’d go, gliding through Balderstone and Salmsbury and Preston, past the mudflats of the Fylde, the river widening and becoming estuary and estuary becoming sea. And I imagined crabs hanging off his fingers, I imagined eels slipping over his neck and the gulls lifting off from the grey waves as he was taken out on the ebb tide and expelled from England.
After the burial, Laurel and Betty set up trestle tables in the school playground, it being the only space large enough to accommodate everyone, and served tea and sandwiches and orange squash. It was only natural that the smaller children—relieved that it was all over and death, whatever that was, could be forgotten—started to play as they would at breaktime, making ones and twos on the hopscotch grid and weaving away from whoever was on. The grown-ups let them. It was nice, they said, to hear laughter on such a sad day.
After an hour or so, the wake broke up and folk started to drift back to their houses. Ken Sturzaker went off to the Croppers’ Arms
with Eddie Moorcroft and the other men from the abattoir, dragging along the Beckfoot brothers for the drinks they’d been promised after risking their lives in the millrace.
Soon the playground was empty and Dadda held my hand as we went back to where he’d parked.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘Yes, Dadda,’ I said.
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘They’re strange bloody things, funerals.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘You’ve hardly said a word all morning.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘It won’t happen to you, you know,’ he said, as he unlocked the door. ‘If that’s what’s bothering you.’
‘I know, Dadda,’ I said.
‘Accidents are accidents,’ he said. ‘They’re rare enough for you not to worry about, all right?’
‘Yes, Dadda.’
He tapped his wedding ring on the steering wheel as we drove out of the village and into Sullom Wood, and I almost confessed to him that it hadn’t been an accident at all.
∾
The best guess we had was that the sheep had gone off along the line of the Corpse Road, following the most obvious route across the moorland. It would have seemed to them like one of the desire lines they cut through the grass to get to water.
We walked for half an hour, finding nothing. The snow was still falling softly but in the trenches between the peat-haggs the wind set the air swarming with flakes that made it hard to see more than twenty yards ahead.
‘Perhaps we should go back now,’ said Kat.
‘Aye,’ said Dadda. ‘You and John get yourselves down to the farm. I’ll be all right on my own.’
‘I’m not leaving you up here by yourself, Dadda,’ I said. ‘I told you that already. What if something happens?’
‘Like what?’
‘Don’t be obtuse,’ I said. ‘You know what I mean. You might fall or something.’
‘I’ve not fallen up here yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll watch my step, don’t worry.’
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