by Tom Bullough
It was only on the ridge that he allowed himself to rest—high above the woods and Pen-y-Garreg Farm, where the mountains rose from the breeze-ruffled feg: precise, close-seeming, promising rain. The encounter with Ivor must have hit him harder than he had realized. Idris took pride in his strength and stamina. He could follow the plough through the span of a day, until the horse himself could hardly stand, and here he was on a lightsome walk home from Aberedw, and he was doubled on a snag by a gaunt little ash tree, panting, wincing with the cramps in his chest. He took out his bottle and drank a little water, listening to the pulsing of the new artillery range on the Epynt; of his household, he alone had not at first taken it for thunder. Below his boots, the stones and the dead fern tumbling into the lowland greens, through the straggling mist of the long Wye Valley, a car passed a lorry on the white-striped road. A train was pulling out of Erwood Station—its steam dissolving from the goods yard, the weighbridge and Michael Evans, the station master, the father for Ethel, who stood plump and alone on the platform.
—
THERE WAS FROGSPAWN in the weepy ground on Cefn Wylfre: clods like tapioca scattered through the puddles, the dots in their bubbles already extending into commas. Even frogs, it seemed, stopped short of the mawn pools: these spaces of blueness cut out of the hilltop, rippling inside the shade of the banks. They were deep, or depthless, Oliver knew that much. Albert, who remembered them as peat diggings, had seen men tie three ladders together and still not manage to reach the bottom. He had seen them haul up the roots of trees—here, where not so much as a wittan or hawthorn had ever been known to stand. Despite the afternoon sunshine, the flittering reeds and the black-budding cotton grass, there was a darkness about this place: something of the corpse candles which Oliver’s mother had seen one night while searching for a sclemming ewe, something of the Lord who dwelt in these hills beyond the walls and the fences. Reversing his cap, murmuring to Maureen, he wove carefully down the thin sheep rack that was the only direct path home from school. He hopped between the tussocks, keeping clear of the soft, grassy banks, which would sink beneath your feet if you took a wrong step and rise to hide any trace of your passing. A couple of plovers lifted from the heather and fled away with flickering wings—dwindling over the isolated fields and the zinc-patched barn and cottage of the Welfrey, where a large black Humber was creeping down the track.
The lambs in the Plock were long-legged, long-tailed—none of them more than three days old—but Jess, Blackie’s puppy, was still in her training and bowled up the field as Oliver approached. She sent the lambs in panic back to their mothers. Rolling and growling, she followed him through the gate into the yard, where the other dogs came wagging to greet him, hard as he tried to remain unnoticed.
“Who won?” called Molly from the flowerbed beneath the sitting-room window.
“What’s that, Nana?” Oliver kept Maureen close to his head.
“Olly, your ear is purple.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well.”
His mother must have been just inside the hall. He hurried on towards the Banky Piece, but had barely reached the cover of the flowering elms before the front door opened and she appeared on the path with her legs in her skirts and her red hair flooding from her headscarf.
“Oliver,” she said. “Were you kept in again?”
“Mam—”
“Show me your hand!” She crossed the long, narrow stone of the bridge.
Reluctantly Oliver took his left hand from his pocket and unfurled his fingers painfully from the palm.
“I’ll rise you some ointment,” his grandmother murmured.
“Have you got something to say for yourself, have you?” Etty demanded.
“He hit me first, Mam.”
“And that makes it fine, does it?”
“He called me a gypo, Mam…”
As his mother arrived in the muddy ruts between the pond and the barn’s gable wall, she seemed for a moment to pause. She stood above him, blinking quickly, her eyebrows drawn above pinched green eyes, and so he continued in a flurry of words:
“I’ll do my jobs. I did come back as soon as I could. I come up-over—”
“It’s not the blasted jobs, Oliver!” Etty interrupted, a sharpness at the edge of her voice. Her cheeks were tight beneath the swarming freckles; hollows traced the shape of her lips. “It doesn’t matter what anyone calls you. It doesn’t even matter that you’ve done your exam. You go to school to learn, you understand? Not to go mucking about and getting into fights. If you don’t learn you are nothing, do you hear me? Nothing!”
—
OLIVER FOUND ALBERT working in the Bog Field, whistling “I Saw a Lady Walking By,” which he always claimed had been written for his wife. He was laying the hedge with his usual, patient attention, cutting the pleachers and weaving the hetherings, but he stopped and turned at the rattle of the gate and watched the boy drop into the grass—his raven, blue and indigo in the sunshine, crossing the field with panting wings to settle on the willow they had pollarded for stakes the previous afternoon.
“How do, how are yer?” he asked, in his best Wilfred Pickles.
He removed his hat to wipe his face—the wispy white hair on the top of his head standing upright like the spines of an urchin.
Oliver grunted, took the spare pair of gloves and pulled one over his bandaged hand.
“You looks like your puppy just grew up a fox!”
“Mam is in a kank.”
“I hearkened her, to be honest with you. Kept back again, is it?”
“Six blasted stripes.”
“By Gar, boy! What did you do? Punch old Willie?”
“Griffin.”
“Griffin.” Albert snorted. “Still having a go, then, is he?”
Besides planting a quick or two, no one could have paid any attention to the bog hedge since the war or even before. The old stakes were rotten. There were glats that Oliver could easily have passed through without so much as touching the sides. Hedging took time; that was the main problem. That and the fact that they would none of them lay unless the moon was on-the-grow—in the bare two weeks between the new and the full—or the fresh shoots would go down before they went up and there would be another lot of work in cutting off the rounded pieces.
“Did the boss fettle Buster, did he?” Albert asked.
“I dunno. He is off round the lambs.”
“I said to him, I said, it is not worth the trouble. I am a man for horses, like, but the horse in’t born as can make these blasted quotas. It is no wonder that old lad’s ready to drop. Get a tractor, I said. Three times the work she’ll do, and if you dunna buy one today you shall just have to buy one tomorrow. They dunna breed the big horses no more. You canna buy the buggers if you wants to.”
Oliver dragged a few blackthorn branches from the ditch, their trailing blossom a cousin for the snow. He tossed the twigs and chippings on the fire, where the billycan was hissing and creaking.
“Albert?” he asked, remembering his question.
“Boy.”
“There was this man we seen this morning. Him and this boy. Big lad. No hair on him. Down by Cwmpiban, they were…”
Albert paused. He weighed his billhook. “Ivor,” he said. “Well. I did wonder when you would rowsel him up.”
“Who are they?”
“Mervyn, the lad is. The younger boy. What’ll he be now, fifteen, sixteen? Five year older than you, I expect.” He moved his tobacco between his cheeks. “I seen them half of the morning and all. I dunna like the looks of it, Olly, to be honest with you. Trouble, it is. You takes it from me. They’s been fencing that farm like they owns the damn place…Ivor and the boss—I tell you one thing, the two of them is as bad as one another. I’ll tell you that for nothing. I said to Idris, I said, you has to give me paid holiday, you do. Paid, mind! And overtime! There is a law now, see? Sixty hour a week I do work for him, and I do stop nights as often as not, and all on ninety-four blasted shillings. The two of us
has our history, like. I only wants my due…Ivor, see, he’ll say as half of the Funnon is his, and Idris, what he says, well, it in’t for ears as young as yours. I dunno. I did think Ivor had given it all up. Married that lass up the Vron, didn’t he? Up Cregrina way? Got himself a farm of his own, like…I tell you, boy, back in the day we used to say as it was Idris and Ivor invented copper wire.” He laughed and tapped in a stake with a sledgehammer. “Found a penny in the yard, see? Went to rise him at the same time!”
“Yes,” said Oliver. “But who is he?”
“Ivor?” Albert frowned. “Well, he’s his brother, in’t he? Dank me, you can hardly tell the buggers apart!”
—
IT WAS THE damp that was the problem, not so much the cold. It had, said the paper and the wireless both, been the wettest February since 1870. One day the water had come down the Cae Blaidd in such quantities that it had entered by the back door and left by the front. They had had to leave their boots on the stairs overnight. It had seeped into Molly’s bones, as it had seeped into the walls and the flagstones, leaving her ankles little better than pivots and her hands like sockets for her sticks. How she had managed to dig the flowerbed that afternoon she could hardly imagine. Just to hold this needle in her crumpled fist, to tack together the hems of this sheet then slice it down its cobwebby middle, required all the effort that she possessed. She had worked less hard unloading the coal when she was station mistress, a woman of position with clothes that did not hang from her limbs like she was some old bwgan in a field. Side-to-middling. Maid’s work. The edge become the centre. There it was, the story of her life.
All sufficient grace!
Never powerless!
It is Christ who lives in me,
In His exhaustlessness.
The prodigal voices of the chapel rehearsal continued in the parlour, Etty’s piano chattering beneath them. The bulk of her Sundays, Molly was able still to persuade one of her friends to fetch her down to the service in Erwood Church, but these alternate Wednesdays there was no avoiding the black-hat brigade with their dreary harmonies and joyless heaven, which, so Oliver had informed her that evening, did not so much as permit animals. Levering herself to her feet, she picked her way between the baskets of eggs for the next day’s market. The letter from her husband remained on the table, among the files of accounts and tax forms, and despite herself she held it to her nose, smelling its memories of coal and iron before she dropped it into the fire—unopened, the same as the others.
She could hear the swede chopper beneath the music as she crossed the thin, uneven bridge, using her two sticks almost in line.
“Olly?” she said, arriving at the door of the barn.
The boy released the handle and the squealing stopped. He shook out his arm.
“How do, Nana?” he said.
“Olly, have you got a minute, have you, please?”
Oliver held the lantern before them as they steered around the puddles in the yard, passing into the moonlight at the corner of the beast-house, where the visiting tractors for the Pant and Llanedw were stopped next to the mixen. From the moment he could walk at all, or so it seemed to Molly, he had walked in this manner—his shoulders set, his boots falling purposefully on one path or another that she herself could barely perceive. The granary to the stable. The pond to the beast-house. It was not, of course, that she had not seen him, that she did not know his daily routine. It was just that he belonged here so completely—it was a distance between them that grew year on year.
The well was pressed against the graveyard, at the top of the Funnon Field, surrounded by a sunken wall. Twelve years earlier, before there had been a baby to contend with, it was all that Molly had known about this farm. The holy well. As Penlan water helped the eyes and Ffynnon Gynydd water was said to grant wishes, so the water at the Funnon was good for rheumatics—although the concave steps were so steep and slippery that the healthiest of visitors might easily have fallen and drowned. Coming to the edge of the hole, she allowed her grandson to help her descend, to untie her boots and unroll her stockings so that she could immerse her feet.
“Christ alive!” she said.
“Nesh, is it, Nana?” said Oliver, smiling.
“Bloody froze…”
“Do you reckon she’d do my hand any good, do you?”
Molly took out her cigarettes, struck a match and smoked with a moan of relief.
With the lantern’s flame on its dribbling walls, the well—the funnon—looked to Oliver like nothing so much as the entrance to an underground world. Beneath the floating scraps of leaves, the reflection of his grandmother’s pressed-shut eyes and the sudden angles of her wrists and ankles, the steps continued between bright green plants, which stirred when she moved and dwindled finally into darkness. Sitting beside her, he peeled off the bandage and sank his bad hand into the icy water. The bats from the church passed overhead—their wings catching the moonlight as they turned. Through the faint hymns in the parlour and the cattle calling for their supper in the beast-house, he heard a new lamb wailing down in the Bottom Field and the consoling chuckle of its mother. He heard the grunts of a ewe to her twins, the growls of another defending her grass and the notes of excitement of the sheep at the cratch in the Bog Field. There were more calls to know than animals on the entire farm.
In the kennel Blackie roused and barked: a sound of recognition, not of alarm.
“John the Welfrey,” said Oliver, with interest. “What is he upon now, do you suppose?”
—
IN THE DAMP-HEAVY parlour, Etty sat between the candles in their fresh-polished brackets, her green eyes turning with the faded staves, falling as soon as the tune was established to the brass plaque shining in the open lid. She did not sing when she was playing the piano—at any rate, not with the chapel singers. She sat straight-backed in her Sunday dress, embellishing the hymn with just enough colour to escape her husband’s censure, while the candlelight shivered on her tight-tied hair, the skin between her freckles and the line of concentration on her still-smooth forehead. At least on these Wednesdays, when they had guests, she was allowed to light the parlour fire. Sometimes, in her practice, she could hardly feel her fingers at all.
As the door creaked open, her foot slipped from the sustain pedal and her last note ended a moment too soon. She looked over her shoulder to see her son, who was nodding to the black-clad figures.
“What did I say to you, boy?” said Idris.
“I know, boss,” said Oliver. “I’m sorry, boss. It is John the Welfrey, it is. He’s down by the pond with Duke and Blaze. There is no heed to him.”
“Welfrey…” sighed Philip the Pant.
“He hanna been the same, look,” said Heather Llwyntudor.
“I shall go down, Idris,” said Etty, quickly. She got to her feet and turned down the oil lamp, whose wick was just beginning to smoke. “It is for the best. If you would all help yourselves to more tea and cake, I shan’t be more than a minute or two.”
Oliver led her down the hall and the path. He held the lantern over the bridge but kept his eyes on the ground, then on the pig in her sty, which he usually checked at around this time, since she did like a sense of being cared for. Down by the gate their neighbour stood flanked by his horses—their brasses lit by the high, gibbous moon.
“How is your hand, Olly?” she asked, softly.
“Not so bad, Mam.”
“I was hard on you earlier…”
Oliver said nothing.
“The auditor had been here, see? It’s not been much of a day. It’s…Of course it’s different if someone’s hit you first. Of course it is. I…I just want to see you get on. That’s all.”
Chapel secretary though he remained, John the Welfrey could not have seen a bar of soap these past three years. He looked like a space, a hole in the night. Since Sarah’s death, Etty had been his only regular visitor—sometimes with her son, sometimes with her mother when the weather was kind—but even Etty was hesitan
t to enter his kitchen, with its fox-like stench and its windows often so encrusted in filth that they admitted almost no light at all. Her visits now were mostly the same. She worked with the besom, the brush and the pail. He neither helped her nor stood in her way—just sat in his chair in his island of dirt, and now and then shoved the branch on the flagstones another inch into the fire.
“Good night, John,” she said.
“Ethel.” John gave a little dip of his head.
“Will you have a cup of tea? Slice of cake?” She waited. “What’s news?”
“The…taxman, he come by today.”
“He came to us all, John.”
“He did come to me, Ethel.”
Etty nodded cautiously. “Will you not come up in the house?”
“You has always been good to me, Ethel,” he said. He remained in the horses’ shadow. “I am grateful. I did want to say so…I brung you the horses, look. I should be glad if you would take them. They is good lads, the both of them. Blaze, he in’t out five year old and Duke, he is no more than seven.” He paused, seeming to sink into contemplation. “The taxman, he did say to me as I shall have to sell them, but, well, I do have the name of the Welfrey, if not a sight more. It is my place. The way I sees it, if I hanna got no horses I canna sell no horses and the taxman he can blasted whistle.”