‘I’d rather we carried on,’ said Dadda.
‘We’re miles from the valley,’ I said. ‘It’ll be pitch black before we’re anywhere near the path.’
‘Maybe so, but I think that place is best left to itself,’ he said.
‘Ten minutes, Dadda,’ I said. ‘Just while this passes over.’
Between us, we kicked away the drifts that had mounded up against the doors until we could push them inwards, enough to get through the gap. The window shutters kept the place in a grey gloom but even in the half-light it was easy to see that the dining room where Gideon Denning and the Hellenics had played cards and drunk their scotch and raised the Devil from his sleep under the moors had been gutted of its furniture. If the marks they’d smeared on the door that night in late October were still there, as the Gaffer had said they were, then they had been long covered in mould and cobwebs.
It was colder inside the Lodge than it was out in the snow and Dadda went over to the fireplace to see if it was usable.
‘We’ll not get much going in here,’ he said.
It was thick with bird shit and the hearth was piled with the remains of old nests. More were probably wedged in the chimney.
All that we had for fuel was a pair of window shutters that had been brought inside at some point to be repaired and left propped against the wall. Dadda stamped them into pieces and we stacked them in the grate and knelt down to try and blow the flames into life. But they smouldered rather than burned and a foot or two from the hearth it was breath-cold.
‘She’ll have got herself back down to the farm, won’t she?’ said Dadda.
‘I’m sure the others will have found her,’ I said. ‘They’ll look after her until we get back.’
‘It’ll take us a couple of hours, I reckon,’ he said.
‘Dadda, we can’t go anywhere now,’ I said.
‘It’s only five o’clock,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘If we set off soon, we’d be back by seven. Eight at the most.’
‘Eight tomorrow morning more like,’ I said.
‘Give over.’
‘Well, talk sense, Dadda,’ I said. ‘You know what the moors are like in snow.’
‘I’ve lost nine decent animals,’ he said. ‘I want to make sure the rest of them are all right.’
‘They’ll be fine,’ I said.
‘They better not have left them in the bye-field in weather like this,’ he said.
‘What would you have done?’ I said.
‘Taken them into the shed, of course,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s what Bill and the others will have done then, won’t they?’ I said. ‘They’ve all been Gathering for as long as you have.’
‘The ram needs watching as well,’ said Dadda.
‘They have eyes,’ I said. ‘All of them.’
‘Properly watching, I mean, smart-arse,’ he said. ‘They need to know to call Leith if he takes a turn for the worse.’
‘They’ll manage,’ I said.
‘They’d better.’
‘What will you do about the ewes?’ I said.
‘There’s nowt much I can do. I’ve no time to replace them before Tupping,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to wait until next year now.’
‘We’ll build the flock back up, Dadda,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’
He spat into the fire and took another drag of his roll-up and didn’t reply.
It wasn’t just the nine ewes that had died but their offspring and theirs and theirs. Each death echoed on and on.
‘Bill was right, though, Dadda,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It’d be a different story if the Gaffer were still here,’ he said. ‘I’d never hear the end of it.’
‘But he’s not here, is he?’
‘Maybe not in body.’
‘Did he ever bring you here? The Gaffer?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Dadda. ‘And he told me that if he ever found out I’d even been looking for it, he’d take off his belt.’
‘He never took off his belt in his life,’ I said.
‘Figure of speech.’
‘How was he?’ I said. ‘After what happened with the boy?’
I hadn’t yet really asked.
‘He didn’t say much about it,’ Dadda replied. ‘None of us did.’
‘Was he worried?’
‘Course he were,’ said Dadda. ‘How could he not be?’
‘He told you that, did he?’
‘He didn’t need to, the amount he were putting away in the Croppers’ Arms every night,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, you’d think he’d have laid off it for good after what happened.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He didn’t mean to kill that lad,’ said Dadda. ‘He were just trying to put a shot over his head to scare him off. The thing is, he’d been in the fuckin’ pub all evening, hadn’t he? He couldn’t see well enough to piss straight.’
‘It was an accident, then,’ I said. ‘Like you thought it was.’
‘That doesn’t make it all right, John,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t stop him being a drunken owd bastard, does it?’
‘Is that how you want to remember him?’ I said.
‘How else do you want me to remember him?’
‘He was your dad,’ I said.
‘Aye, but he never liked me much,’ said Dadda.
‘Of course he did,’ I said.
‘Then you know less about this place than I thought you did,’ he said.
‘I never saw you arguing,’ I said. ‘Not about anything much.’
‘That’s because you weren’t here,’ he said. ‘He always blamed me for letting you go.’
‘But I was the one who left,’ I said. ‘It was me he fell out with not you.’
‘He never thought badly of you, John,’ said Dadda.
‘He did, Dadda,’ I said. ‘I know he did.’
‘Listen, I lived with him every day,’ said Dadda. ‘He changed whenever he knew you were coming to stay. He were counting the days last week. I heard him telling Musket.’
I didn’t believe him and Dadda could tell.
‘It weren’t me who put the fancy piss-pot in the attic and hung up the mirror,’ he said. ‘He thought the world of you and your lass.’
He took off his cap and put it closer to the fire to try and get it dry. ‘It’s not just the sheep anyway,’ said Dadda. ‘I’ve other things to do.’
‘All the jobs will still be there tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And if it’s Bill you’re bothered about, he’s not going to see Sturzaker before he knows we’re all right, is he?’ I said.
‘Sturzaker?’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You know he’s going to be back down there after what’s happened to the sheep.’
‘He won’t,’ said Dadda. ‘He’s too worried that Sturzaker will tell Dent about the van.’
‘Perhaps he’s right to be worried,’ I said.
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ said Dadda. ‘I thought you were sure Ken Sturzaker was going to keep us dangling for as long as he could?’
‘You know what he’s like,’ I said. ‘If there’s some money in it for him, the temptation might be too much.’
‘There won’t be any money in it,’ said Dadda.
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘It doesn’t matter, John,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Look, Ken Sturzaker’s been listening to owd news,’ said Dadda. ‘Dent’s not going to come to the farm.’
‘How do you know that?’ I said.
He drew on his roll-up and picked a strand of tobacco off his lip.
‘Dadda, how do you know?’ I said.
‘Because he’s already been, John,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘When?’
‘A couple of weeks afterwards,’ he said. ‘The lad the Gaffer shot were Dent’s nephew.’
‘Christ.’
‘And th
at goes no further than these four walls, all right?’ he said.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But how did Dent know to come to the Endlands?’
‘One of the other little bastards who works for him told him that this nephew of his had come here to make a few quid for himself on the side.’
He let the smoke curl out of his nose and rubbed the skin under his eye. He was exhausted.
‘You know most of the time,’ he said, ‘I’d say that Ken Sturzaker were full of shit, but everything he told you about Dent were true.’
‘How do you mean?’ I said.
‘Well, he didn’t seem right bothered about his nephew. It seemed to me that he thought he got what he deserved,’ said Dadda.
‘So that was that?’ I said. ‘They were straight? Him and the Gaffer?’
‘Come on,’ said Dadda. ‘Do you really think a bloke like that’s just going to walk away with nowt?’
‘So what did he want?’ I said.
Dadda looked at me and then at the fire. ‘Grace,’ he said. ‘He wanted Grace. The Gaffer were supposed to take her over to Burnley.’
‘But he didn’t,’ I said, ‘so what’s to stop Dent coming back for her?’
‘Because the Gaffer gave him summat else instead,’ said Dadda.
‘What did he give him?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They sorted it out between them.’
‘The Gaffer didn’t tell you?’ I said.
‘To be honest, John,’ he said, ‘I didn’t ask.’
∾
The snow didn’t stop falling and so there was nothing we could do but wait for the night to end. Musket lay over my feet, Dadda smoked his roll-up and soon that amber pip was the only light in the room.
I slept a little—though I don’t remember how on the cold floor—and when I woke again daylight was starting to rim the window shutters and leak under the door. Dadda coughed and rolled over. The wind had dropped and the moors were silent. I listened for a few minutes, wondering if in all that stillness I might hear Kat calling. But she must have been down at the farm. She would be getting ready with the others to come and look for us.
The fire was almost out and I could see Dadda’s and Musket’s breath as they slept. Without a torch, it had been too dark in the night to search the bunkhouse for anything to burn but now there was enough greyness to at least see that the door had sagged on its hinges and sat a few inches ajar. There seemed to be more brightness in there than in the room where we’d slept and when I lifted the door to open it enough to get inside, I found that one of the shutters had fallen off, letting in the same grubby daylight as the scullery window down at the farm. Outside, it had stopped snowing and under the low cloud the moors stretched away, drift after drift, to the cold sunrise on the eastern edge.
There was nothing much left in the place where Gideon Denning and the Hellenics had slept and screwed. The wooden bunks were gone, the iron coke stove that had kept them warm probably taken for scrap, and all that remained were a few broken chairs at the other end of the room and a powerful smell of decay like there’d been in that toilet in Spain.
The Lodge might have looked solid from the top of the hollow, but it was rotting from the inside out. The rafters had soaked up decades of rain and had grown a blubber of white mould. Over the walls, the plaster glistened with sweat and tall sprays of grass grew where the wooden floorboards had perished. Every plank was streaked black from the leaking roof and looked ready to splinter at the next footfall.
I wondered how long it would take for the whole place to be eaten by the moor. Another hundred years? Two? Maybe longer still. But one day it would be gone. The wind would work the slates loose like old teeth and eventually the rain would finish off what the rising damp had started and gnaw the roof beams until they kinked and fell. The rendering would crack and each winter ice would form in the fracture lines, opening them a little more, levering off the cement in chunks and exposing the brickwork beneath. And that would come undone as well in time and weather. Rain to dissolve the mortar, gales to push the wall into the heather. Perhaps the chimney stack might remain standing for a while, but eventually it would be toppled and its scattered bricks grassed over and then only the fireplace would be left, the bas-relief of grapes and leaping stags around the rim gradually scoured flat. A mysterious structure for future generations to tell stories about.
Someone had been here and recently. A half-empty can of dog food sat open with a spoon inside. There were fag ends and spent matches. Blokes from the village or from over in Wyresdale had perhaps sheltered here while they were out after grouse. Fed their terriers, cleaned their guns, waited for the rain to pass.
But then I came across a car battery, a pair of pliers, a lump hammer, one leather boot and then the other. And the smell in the room was too strong for dog meat.
Behind the scattered chairs, I found someone lying curled up facing the wall, their bare feet turned the colour of aubergines. I waited for them to move or wake up, knowing that they wouldn’t. Nobody lay as awkwardly as that to go to sleep. And it was too cold to have spent the night in just a T-shirt.
Standing at the edge of the stain that had seeped from under the body and dried, I recognised the wild hair and the lobeless ear. I knew that bony nose and (even though the fingers were broken) the hand tattooed with Liz and Grace. But the blood on his skin and on his clothes wasn’t his. Jeff lay in the remains of another man’s body. A man who had been opened up like the ewes we’d found on the moor.
Musket had followed me in by now and after recoiling from the dog food, he began to sniff through the rags of clothing that had been spread across the floor and the flesh that had been scattered into the corner of the room. He barked and looked at me, waiting for permission to eat the fingers that he’d found, each of them banded with a silver ring.
In the other room, I could hear Dadda stirring and calling for me and after kicking Musket out, I closed the door to the bunkhouse as tight as it would go.
‘What are you doing?’ said Dadda.
‘You were cold,’ I said. ‘I thought there might be something we could put on the fire.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We’re not staying. We need to go.’
He knew that at first light the others would come out looking for us again and he didn’t want them wandering miles across the moorland. It was deep in snow already and there was no telling how much more there was to come.
Spring
Days of heavy rain eventually cleared the drifts, leaving the valley muddy and dank. Christmas came and went and then the true winter arrived in January, when the worst was always thrown at us. The farms were cut off, pipes froze, fences were kicked flat by storms, while Musket caught a cold and had to be nursed like an old grandfather.
The freeze lasted well into February, but then the sun began to creep into the valley and the cloughs became dripping grottoes of snowdrops and dog’s mercury. And the river, so long muted by ice, ran loud with meltwater. March gave way to April and the lambs were born into blossom and high cloud. Just as they have been this year.
I’m as bad as Dadda and the Gaffer used to be. I can’t leave the sheep for very long. Mind you, Kat’s no better. She’s less than a month to go with our second child and I tell her to take it easy but she doesn’t listen. She’s so large, she says, that she can’t sleep and she might as well waddle over to the pens and help me with the night shift. She says her presence is calming anyway. The ewes can sense that she’s in the same bind as them.
Liz and Grace have been over most days to muck in and Angela, too, though she gets tired in the afternoons and sits with Adam to help him with the bottle-fed lambs. For years, it’s been his job to look after the runts (just as it used to be mine), and a few more than usual have come along this year. As always, though, he’s a serious worker. He doesn’t coo over the baggy suede skin or the comical little bleatings, he’s determined to turn these spares into good strong animals. But it’s child’s work and he�
��s not going to be a child for ever.
Kat mothers him more than she needs to, especially when he’s near the sheep. She doesn’t like him being in the pens with them at Lambing. She worries that they’ll knock him over and trample on him. But he needs to learn and we’ve made the odd pact of silence so as not to worry her.
Yesterday evening, when we got back from shooting on the Moss, one of the ewes went into labour and only the head of the lamb emerged and not the feet. A bad position for birthing. Their shoulders get stuck. They can die, and the mother too.
I took Adam’s hand and led him into the pen and helped him kneel down in the straw next to me. The ewe shuffled and guttered in her throat and Adam backed away a little.
Don’t worry about her, I said. She won’t bother you if she knows you’re trying to help. Can you feel its head?
I moved his hand and he put his fingers to the lamb’s greasy face.
I have to push it back in, I said, so we can rearrange the legs. That’ll be your job. Don’t worry, it’ll be easier for you anyway. You’ve smaller hands than me.
Once I’d manipulated the lamb back into the uterus, I rubbed Adam’s fingers with jelly and slid one of his hands through the ewe’s vagina. He couldn’t stop his face from curdling at the sensation on his skin and the liverish smell, but he didn’t say anything.
Can you feel its feet? I said.
Yes, he said.
How many?
Just one.
Put both your hands in, I said. It’s all right. Let her make her noise, you’re doing her no harm. Have you found the other one?
He had.
But they’re slippery, he said.
Move yourself closer then, I said. Get a good grip on the ankles.
He shuffled his knees forward, his cheek almost touching the ewe’s rump, his brown eyes wandering and his mouth slightly open as it always is when he’s concentrating on something.
All right, I said. You bring it out now.
He retracted his forearms, his skin covered in syrupy blood and clot, and pulled two small hooves out of the maw of the birth canal. The ewe grumbled and tensed and I held her while Adam worked his knees backwards and drew out the lamb into the straw.
Devil's Day Page 25