by Tom Bullough
—
“OLLY, WE CANNOT.”
“But, Mam, you said!” Oliver clung to the head of the pole.
“Listen to me now.”
“Come you back up the Island, Ethel!” Dick was shouting just to be heard, his face still black from his three-day captivity, his long coat flying from the twine round his waist. “If we canna get the horse in the barn, we shall damn well have him in the kitchen.”
“Dick, my mam’ll be frantic.”
“Mam!”
“Oliver, no!”
The cob and the wittan stood alone in the whiteness, tethered together, vanishing slowly. Four thin drifts covered Reuben’s legs, for all that he still made efforts to stamp. With his broad, bare hands Dick replaced the poles and shovels. He took Oliver by the waist, dodging the west-threshing branches as he lifted him high onto the horse’s back, while Etty tried to catch the stirrup with her boot and then allowed him to help her too.
The wethers had long since returned to their quarry; the fresh-blown snow lay thick on their backs. Flitting like shades among glimpses of hawthorns and drifts that might have been anywhere at all, the dogs closed on their hiding place—driving the sheep before them, stumbling, pitching and struggling to rise when they fell. Etty kicked the cob into the wind, which seemed to pass through her, not troubling to part. A lazy wind, her mother would have called it. Its long notes howled in the branches of the beech trees, thrilled in Oliver’s chest and played on his skin in little tremors. With the ground invisible, they might have been flying. Closing his eyes, burying his face in his scarf, he felt his mother’s arms around his chest and her swollen belly in his back. He felt the warm, smooth curve of the egg in his hand. With his tongue he fiddled with his wobbly tooth. He thought of those storms when the dogs hid, terrified, and he was left alone to run in the yard or to stand on the tump by the porch of the church, where you could see from the Red Hill to Llanbadarn-y-Garreg and watch the dark sky shimmer and blink—the thunder that followed like a summons to some mighty purpose.
It was only from the angle and the movement of the horse that Oliver could tell that the ground was falling. Slowing, slipping in spite of the frost nails, Reuben began to walk in a zigzag, bringing the wind between their cheeks. They were somewhere close to the edge of the gully when, at last, they stopped. Etty shouted instructions at the dogs, but such was the gale that channelled down the dingle that Oliver could hardly hear her himself. She swung him clear onto the uphill slope, where his knees simply buckled as hard as he tried to stand. She dragged her right leg over the saddle, fighting her heavy, ice-stiff skirts, then slipped suddenly forwards and grabbed at the reins so that she and the horse fell together.
Oliver only noticed the men as they came plunging down the bank from the Bryngwyn track. Trapped on his back, Reuben was bellocking, thrashing his legs at the desperate wind. He did not relent even with Albert beside him, bent to his ear and caressing his nose. Idris flung a wether out of his way. He cursed and shrieked at the plaguing dogs, which disappeared back into the blizzard, but although Oliver was slithering towards them he did not seem to look at him once, nor even to register his existence. When Albert persuaded the horse to roll, Idris dropped into the hole in the snow. He found a patch of loose red hair. He dug again and found an arm, and then dragged Etty back into the air, holding her to his chest, stroking her face and kissing her lips until she started to convulse. Such was the snow that covered her clothes that some moments passed before Oliver saw the blood that was soaking through his mother’s petticoats. She tried to sit and turned in his direction, while the boss fell to his knees in the gully—his back to the boy, his chapel clothes white, grey hairs streaming sideways from his head as he closed his eyes and knitted his hands at his chin.
IN THE SILVERY mist the big-bellied ewes flowed out of the yard, squeezed between the gateposts and paused and eddied in the pools of grass and snowdrops on the banks beneath the skeletal hedgerows. Droplets of water clung to their off-white fleeces; they clung to the boy, his cap and the plump black bird on his shoulder, to the dogs, the limping horse and the downy gullies of the pussy willows at Cwmberllan Ford, which sparkled in the glimpsing light as if they were covered in jewels.
“Boss?”
“Boy.”
“Boss, is there ravens in heaven, boss?”
Idris paused. “The Lord do look well upon the raven.”
“Is they in heaven, then?”
“Well, boy. You tell me. What is immortality?”
“It’s an…acquired condition, boss,” Oliver recited.
“Yes…”
“You canna hope for life in the Great Beyond if you hanna converted to the word of the Lord.”
“Very good.”
Oliver frowned. “How do I convert Maureen, then, boss?”
“The Bible, I is sorry to say, is silent upon that point.”
It had, said the wireless, been the wettest February in eighty-two years. Even after a week almost dry, the water continued to roar in the drains; the hooves of the sheep were seething in the puddles. Beneath the oily must of the flock, Idris could smell the cool, damp soil in these more distant reaches of his ninety-one acres—the first, faint song of returning life. His nailed boots clicking on the broken stone, he checked across the shapes of the sheep in the Crooked Slang, in the poochy ground around their cratch. Ahead, he could just make out the heartbeat of a tractor, which he took to be the machine for Cwmpiban. Walter, he supposed, had his morning assignation at the Awlman’s Arms, and since the flock was hurrying past the Long Field—some perhaps were already at his neighbour’s track—he whistled back the dogs and peered between the hedgerows, into the luminous mist. He ran a hand across the withers of his horse, which always grew nervous at anything mechanical, and as a pair of headlamps appeared, not from Cwmpiban but from the direction of the lane, it struck him that Buster was nuzzling him in return.
“Boss?” said Oliver. “Who’s that, boss?”
Ten years must have passed since Idris had last seen Ivor. The man’s bald-headed, bloated-looking son, who leapt to the ground to open the gate and drive his sheep from the Cwmpiban turn, had hardly been old enough for school. What they were doing here, five miles from their own farm, with a box full of fence posts, Idris went cold in the imagining. He watched the boy on the far side of the gate glaring at Oliver with cave-like eyes. He watched Ivor drive through the curtains of the air, his face grown creviced beneath his hat, his attention fixed on his steering wheel. For all the words that were boiling in his mind, Idris could not speak; he could not so much as have whistled to Blackie, his dog, which stood high-eared at Oliver’s feet, her long teats trembling from her belly, while Oliver’s mouth hung ajar in confusion. Idris’s breath was choking, seizing the muscles of his jaw and his shoulders. As the gate swung closed and the tractor vanished towards Cwmpiban, he was clinging to the neck of his crippled horse—nothing more than spittle and mucus escaping his gaping lips.
—
IDRIS DID NOT sing as he followed the valley lane towards Aberedw. He had decided, after long consideration, that he could no longer tolerate spiritual displays. As Solomon had said, there was a time and a place for everything, and there were few sights he found more disagreeable than Joseph Jones the tailor, praying aloud as he made his tour of the farms. Even when he had passed Rhosei Cottage, where Oliver turned right at the crossroads and vanished north into the milk of the morning—the school bell clanking faintly beyond him—there was a chance that Mrs. Price was out in her garden, or that one of the shapes in the neighbouring fields was Bill the Hergest or George Gilfach, and Idris did not so much as hum.
The chapel was the place to proclaim your faith. Outside the sanctuary of its four walls, you had merely, tirelessly to improve yourself, to resist such temptations as were advertised in the newspaper and bend your will to the will of the Lord. If Idris proclaimed anything as, a mile or so later, he crossed the bridge into Llanbadarn-y-Garreg, where shadows streamed fr
om the wittans and the ash trees, it was only his example. He touched his hat to Blanche Lanmorgan, a cousin of some sort on his mother’s side, who was checking her lambs in her one valley field, hard by the little white Church of St. Padarn. He greeted Dorothy, the wife for Albert, who hopped as usual onto her chair to see who was passing their cottage. In the yard of the old forge, Adam Prosser was turning his spokes—the shavings golden in the gathering sunlight—and they swapped a word or two on the weather before Idris continued west, with his work-bowed shoulders, his grand white horse with his crooked hind leg and the two dogs trotting in their wake.
He stopped once more, by the stretch of the Edw known as the Gleision, where a girl named Martha had drowned in his grandparents’ time: an aunt for Dorothy, if he remembered correctly, who had missed the lane coming home in the dark. She had been found the next morning, revolving slowly, a tobacco bag swollen in her hand. Idris did emsin, putting his right hand to his chest. Among the strings of light and the catkin-decked hazels, he considered the rocks where he and Ivor had stood as boys with their salmon gaffs and their blackened faces, the banks they had smeared with giant prints to scare off the water bailiffs. He gazed at the glistening surface of the river, listening to the music of a blackbird, but then a large black car appeared on the lane and he hurried to take Buster’s bridle.
“Who were that, then, do you suppose?” he asked him, watching the red lights blearing at the corner.
There was no trace of Lewis in the smith shop, although the coals were glowing in the forge and the air was stifling with the sulphur of hoof burn. Idris tethered the horse in the pentis. He waited by the breach of iron and horseshoes, where some rearing animal had punched a pair of holes in the ceiling, but once he had named all the brand-marks on the wall—every farm from Blaenmilo to Pencaenewydd—he returned to the lane with his leg-cocking dogs to glower at the sign for the Awlman’s Arms, which showed a man repairing a boot. The valley was tight here, in Aberedw; the sun had yet to emerge from the hilltop and the mist clung thick to the steep, wooded slopes. It dribbled on the bonnet and the mudguards of the tractor stopped on the stones by the inn’s front door: the Fordson Major for Walter Cwmpiban, who spent his days on a stool at the bar while his creatures faltered and his hedgerows untangled into trees.
It was, thought Idris, just his luck to have a drunkard for his only direct neighbour: the man who owned every single field between the valley and his hill-framed farm.
“Old Buster, see?” said the blacksmith, when he finally arrived.
He stood in the smith shop: a stout young man with soot on his face and hands like vices.
“Yes yes,” said Idris.
“I shouldna thought you’d be working him still.”
“He’s not out fourteen, that one.”
“Tight on sixteen, by the looks of him.”
Idris breathed through his ragged teeth.
“He has been worked, like,” Lewis continued. He hung his landlord’s apron from a peg and pulled on his blacksmith’s apron instead, taking the horse’s big, feathered foot between his knees. “Had a splinter in there, has he?”
“We had one from there…Friday, it was.”
“Did you call the vet, did you?”
“Do you know how much that sclem do charge?”
“Poisoned it is, see?” He released the hoof and clicked his tongue, looking back into the wet black eyes half-hidden by Buster’s fringe. “If you wants my honest opinion, Funnon, I’ll say it’s time as he hung up his shoes. Tired, he is. You just got to look at him.”
Idris took no chances with Lewis, any more than he had taken with Lewis’s mother. A purveyor of drink he might have been—and in Idris’s book there were few greater crimes—but he had known a lorry seize when he crossed its path, baffling a mechanic for the rest of the day. He had known men stick a pig on his approach, before the buckets were ready, since everyone knew that he could stem the blood. He had even known him to locate missing sheep in his dreams. Charming was one of those local secrets. Everybody sniffed at it or claimed, if they spoke of it at all, that it was something shameful, consigned to the past—not to be squared with the teachings of the chapel. And yet here was Lewis, a charmer still. To Idris’s knowledge, there was barely a farm in the entire valley that did not have one of his plain brown envelopes or little rolls of sign-patterned paper stuffed into a crack behind the mantelshelf or between the stones above the beast-house door.
He ran his fingers over Blackie’s neck, the morning’s coughing needling in his chest.
“Well,” he said, finally.
“Get yourself a tractor, I would,” said Lewis. “Two cows you’ll keep on the fodder for a horse, and that is your running costs covered for starters.”
“Well,” Idris repeated. “If you can keep a horse going. That’s what my old man always said.”
“It is your farm.” The blacksmith shrugged. He dug in the pocket of his jacket for a pencil. “Well. I can keep you in horses for the time being, like, but this old lad, he shanna be scratting on forever. In’t nothing I can do as is going to change that.”
—
FOR ALL OF his size, Oliver had little aptitude for games. His legs were lost beneath the bulk of his body, which had a tendency to overbalance and made his movements awkward and foolish. The entire business upset his poise. He had agreed to play rounders only because he had been picked by Amy Whittal—the pert and fair-haired daughter for the vet—and he was batting first only because he was the eleven-year-old boy on their team. Bent on his mark in the broad, chipping playground, he swung the bat wildly, dropped it with a clatter and ran out of the shadow of the schoolhouse—his raven, Maureen, flapping at his ear. The fielders were turning and shouting in confusion: boys with pens in the pockets of their shirts, girls with bracelets and flying hair. At second base, Ruth, one of the Cwmpiban sisters, seized the tail of his jacket and tried to trip him over, but since no warning came from his team-mates he dragged her almost to the end of the queue.
“Rounder!” he declared, putting back his shoulders. He took out his comb to tidy his parting.
“No rounder!” said Griffin, from the bowler’s spot.
“Why the bugger not?”
“We canna bloody rise him, can we?”
The schoolhouse was a long and church-like building, its corners trimmed with yellowish brick. One half contained the single classroom. The other was home to the teacher, Mr. Williams, who might have had only the one hand, having lost the other to the teeth of a thresher, but was still a gardener of the greatest passion, with more rosettes from local shows than the rest of the village put together. Beyond the fence at the end of the playground, where the children now were beginning to gather, his vegetable patches were dark with manure; his blue-chipped path was glinting in the mist-cleansed sunshine. The ball was close to the wall of the potting shed, sunk among rows of daffodils and camellias.
“Well.” Oliver shrugged. “You threw him, you rise him.”
“You bloody hit him there!”
“I in’t getting a stripe to rise your blasted ball!”
“Oh! Chicken, is it? Afeared of old Willie?”
“Oh, and you can talk. Last time I seen you get a stripe you was blubbing like a blasted baby!”
Griffin dipped his head like a cockerel: a rangy boy in too-short trousers, fine hair gleaming along his upper lip, which was red in places from his habit of trying to lick his nose.
“What did you say?”
“Olly!” said Amy.
“You take that back, you bloody gypo!”
“Gypo, is it?”
“Well, it is a gypo you looks like to me. You dunna look like the rest of us now, do you, let’s face it?”
The mood in the playground had changed abruptly. The two teams were whispering, forming packs behind each of the boys, while the Infants, who always kept an eye out for fights, gave up picking the skin from their milk and came streaming towards them over the grass. Out on the lane there was
the muttering of a tractor. In a moment, Oliver saw through the gate the same machine he had seen that morning—the same hunched driver and his eerie boy, big and bald and scowling back at him—but then the first punch caught him squarely on the ear and, croaking loudly, his raven launched into the air.
Oliver righted himself to find Griffin pink-faced, his eyebrows knotted, his fists shivering one way and the other as if he were trying to catch a fly.
He felt his eyes contract.
“What the bugger were that, then?” he asked.
He was surprised only that his friend was fighting him again. Griffin had, in truth, grown a fair bit lately—he was almost his own height, and his swing had weight—but where Oliver struggled with football or the Sunday School sports day, fighting was something again. Watching his opponent, his feet felt light. A storm seemed to swell in the workings of his belly. His want to win went far beyond the punch, beyond the playground, the watching children and the fact that Amy, the prettiest girl, had joined his group, up into the heights of the cloud-scratched sky, where Maureen had taken herself to circle with fanning tail and fingering wings, to gaze across the neighbouring hills and the lingering mist in the valleys. Oliver felt the sunlight on his burning ear, his cheek and the side of his nose. He felt the breeze that eddied around them. He knew the place of the other boy’s boots, the lift of his hands, the turn of his head. When Griffin darted forwards, his right coming back, he dodged to let the blow glance away from his shoulder, and his mind converged on a single instant when he brought down his fist like a hammer on Griffin’s temple and sent him crumpling to the ground.
—
BUCKLING THE FRESH wireless batteries in the panniers, Idris turned the horse to the right—the way of good fortune—and led him back through Aberedw, by the council houses where most of the old labourers now seemed to live, past Bryan the undertaker, Mrs. Weale the seamstress, the smith shop, the inn and the Church of St. Cewydd, which showed grand and grey between the green-black yew trees. The last of the mist was melting with the moving air. On the Mill Pitch he passed the telephone box, which had arrived one morning by the turn to the Court—to the consternation of Mrs. Harley the Post Office, who had always been party to every call into and out of the valley. He crossed the bridge above the turbulent river, but then left the lane for the crushed-stone track to Pentremoel, turning again onto a track thinner and rougher still, which tucked up the bank among the shattered cliffs, the flame-shaped leaves of garlic and bluebells and the bare scrub oaks of Hendre Wood. Curious meadows appeared in places, as if they had been levelled by hand. In one a boy with a brace of rabbits was running in alarm towards the root-twisting outcrop where some old prince had once gone to hide, but otherwise the hill seemed deserted. So Idris gave himself to “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”—his voice returning full and rich from the enclosing rocks.