by Tom Bullough
“AND I SAW before me,” said Philip the Pant, “a grand expanse of land. A grand, golden land it were, with the cattle fat and the wind in the oats and the soil rich and red where it were ploughed. There was houses set with precious stones, all of them with a good plot of ground, and a castle with tall old spindling spires, and the people, they was all of them happy and smiling. Oh, you would have ached to see it. Ached, you would!”
“Get out, dog!” growled John Llanedw.
“But between me and this beautiful land there was this bridge, see? This long, thin bridge across a shining river. No piers he had. To be honest with you, I was afeared as he would not support me. But then I turned to see where I was stood, and around me I saw only a wasteland: a pit of sin lit by livid flames. Infernal, it were! Infernal! There weren’t nothing but hunger and intoxication and the very worst of human abasement!” Philip rested his hands on the Bible, casting his eyes meaningfully about the chapel. “The people, they was all of them weeping and moaning, and as I turned again to my little bridge, in that moment I did give myself to the Lord. A wave of faith come upon me and I crossed the bridge in safety!”
On the pews and the benches, the congregation stirred and murmured and waited for this latest account of Philip’s famous vision to end. There were muffled sobs from Vera Cwmpiban, whose husband, Walter, the Month’s Mind service was intended to remember. There was laughter from boys where once, when the preachers wept and shouted, there might have been cries of “Amen!” As Nancy Llanedw worked the bellows with long, decisive movements, her round face hidden by dark, curling hair, Etty turned on her stool and set her fingers on the manual. The sheet music was open on the stand, but she kept her eyes on the oblong mirror in which Philip was hobbling down the steps from the pulpit and Idris rose from the big seat beneath him—the rest of the chapel following his lead. With the windows at his back, her husband’s face was more shadow than light. He struggled a little to breathe between the lines, but still his voice rang over the others: Heather Llwyntudor in her fox-fur stole, Albert in his too-tight collar, Ruth in her lipstick and her shoddy Edwardian coat. The smells of the room were shoe polish, hair oil, coal smoke and mothballs. The colours were black and white, or grey where the one had leached into the other. It could not have been to Etty alone that her son stood apart, taller than Idris by some inches now—his dense black hair slicked back from his forehead, his golden face turned up to the cross on the wall.
And, when the waves of ire
Again the earth shall fill,
The Ark shall ride the sea of fire,
Then rest on Zion’s hill.
“Christ, you’re a dirty bugger, Griffin,” Oliver muttered as the two boys filed back down the aisle.
“Oh? Why’s that, then?”
“I seen what you drew.”
“Oh! Noah.” Griffin laughed, peering up at him sideways. He had ceased to grow some two years earlier, but remained as wiry and restless as ever. “Now, let’s face it, boy. He were on that boat for thirteen month. What the hell else were he going to get up to?”
They passed beneath the rickety gallery and wove among the people massing on the steps, spreading into the green-grey graveyard. The day was chill and threatening rain. The smoke of the men was pale against the muckery clouds. As the women gathered round Vera, Ruth and Siân, murmuring memories and commiserations, the two boys leant on the wall by the war memorial—their eyes on a nearby gaggle of girls, their hands in their pockets, since they were not allowed to smoke themselves.
“His boy binna here,” said Griffin. “Vivien, like.”
“He come to the funeral,” said Oliver.
“He shanna come back. You mark my words. What’s he gonna want with bloody Cwmpiban? Got himself the good life in Hereford, in’t he? Nice job. Nice car. Missus. Kids…Christ, if I had a Ford Zephyr you wouldna see me for dust neither!”
“So. You getting soft on old Ruth, then, are you?”
“I’ll be soft on the beasts first.” Griffin grimaced. “Old Walter…Fair play to him, like. He was a good lad, but he wasna no farmer. Cwmpiban’s on her uppers, let’s face it. They’s been leasing fields, what? Five year now? Ruth could be as tidy as you like, and you’d still have to pay me to take the place on…I sure as hell in’t squabbling with Mervyn for the privilege!”
Oliver’s mother emerged from the arch-topped door with her long black coat buttoned up to the neck and her black dress flaring over slim, heeled shoes. Perhaps she had made alterations herself, brought in the waist and lifted the hem. Perhaps it was simply the slant of her eyes, or the colour of her hair, but where others looked awkward in their old-fashioned uniforms, or so it seemed to Oliver, she and her clothes were of a single piece. It was with some pride that he took her arm and followed Idris down the path among the urns and crosses, around the west wall to the back-side of the chapel: the devil’s side, as it was known. Here there were no more than half a dozen graves. One belonged to John the Welfrey, who had shot himself as well as his dog. Another belonged to Oliver’s brother, as they would call him, who had not lived to be baptized. The three of them stood at his unmarked stone. They prayed in silence. They picked fresh daffodils to arrange in the vase.
In the neighbouring field, lambs were calling and jumping, chasing wildly between the hedgerows.
—
“I SAW YOU in the paper,” said Amy Whittal.
“Oh,” said Oliver. He gave a grunt of amusement and whistled up the dog, which was dancing between them, nuzzling him for attention. “Catch us a daisy, Jess! A daisy now. Go on.”
“Not a bad likeness, I thought.”
“Good girl!” He gave the flower a wipe and handed it over. “A little slobbery, but no worse for that.”
“Go on. What’s that one, then?”
“That? That’s speedwell, that is. And that there is chickweed. I do not think the dog would know them, mind.”
“You aiming to be a florist, are you?”
“It is my mother,” said Oliver. “A tremendous one for flowers, she is. Stop a day with my mother and you’ll know them as well as I do, you can be sure of it.”
Amy climbed the stile into the lane, gave a little skip and waited by the hedge as a brown Ford Popular came bowling round the corner, changed gears roughly and turned down the track to the Vron. With his hand on the dog, Oliver found himself for once at the same height as the girl. He saw her bright bay eyes beneath her neat yellow fringe, a patch of powder on the flank of her nose where she appeared to have concealed a blemish. She had not filled much since their primary-school days, but the legs above her gumboots had a new, fluid shape and there was the pressure of breasts in her pale blue pullover. As she started up the slope of Penarth Mount, over the ditch that looped round its base and the sheep racks that made little ditches of their own, he watched her bottom in her pink cotton skirt.
On the summit she waved a stick as a sword—the hawthorns behind her in the low, dark clouds.
“I saw your uncle Ivor yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“He had a calf breach. I went over with Dad.”
“Well!”
“I cannot say that I see the resemblance.”
“By Thy grace and mercy!” Oliver spread his bag on a fallen tree, lit the two cigarettes he had snaffled from his grandmother and put one of them between her lips.
“Mind you,” said Amy, “his boys don’t look a lot like him either. It is Vron blood they have, the both of them.”
Oliver picked up her stick from the grass and hurled it in the direction of the Edw, here more stream than river, which wove its way south between clustered willows and crowds of purpling alders. On the commons the yearlings were coming to the fences. In the fields where the starlings moved like one amorphous being, a tractor appeared from the barns at the Vron—one man shovelling clumps of muck to be shredded by his brother in the grass. Tapping the ash, he sat down beside her, his jacket open on the ornate birds he had sewn onto his waistcoat with h
is grandmother’s assistance.
“I cannot say,” he said, “as I have ever seen their mother.”
“Three parts cow, I’d say.”
“I know one or two like that.”
Amy frowned and punched his arm, which he nursed as if it were broken. She took a shallow pull on her cigarette. “The younger boy, Mervyn. That is her as a man—save for the hair, of course. I’ve a theory that he cannot speak at all. I’ve known him since he was, what, four or five, and I cannot say that I have ever…No, I tell a lie, I have heard him call his dog, but I’ve never heard him speak to another human being. Every Saturday night he comes back from Hundred House, driving all over the lane. We found him one morning asleep in the hedge! Honest to God! We figured he must have stopped for a wee and passed out where he was. I don’t know. You’d have thought you’d hear him cussing or singing or something.”
Oliver slipped an inch or two sideways and felt her hip give minutely as it touched his own. He took the stick from Jess, which was whining, trying to push her nose between them, and as he threw it again he allowed his arm to fall around Amy’s shoulders.
“All the boys are bigger than their fathers,” she said, reflectively. “You wonder where it will end.”
—
IDRIS COULD REMEMBER the ideal Sunday. His mother had been there, so he could not have been more than eight years old. They had been singing, the two of them. They were always singing. From their blanket in the orchard, among the cornflowers and butterflies, they had been able to see the length of the valley where the fields lay dry and, for all of the dark clouds pressing on the hills, not one farmer was tedding or cocking, loading or humping the hay. That was a Sunday as the Lord intended, a day of rest and holy contemplation. If the other farmers worked he would suffer, of course, but they would see the error of their ways. He would have his reward when the last days came.
The door scraped open and the boy entered the kitchen, his streaming hair almost touching the mistletoe as he took a tiddler from the depths of his coat: a mimmockin thing, all legs and eyes, which he dried on a scrap of towel.
“You’re out of bed then, Nana,” he said.
His grandmother coughed and managed a smile. “I was needing a change of scene, I was, Olly.”
“That’s it, little one.” Ethel received the lamb. “Lovely and warm it is by the fire, see?”
“You been to see that Amy again, have you?”
“Might have, Nana.”
“Pretty girl, she is. You going to bring her by here sometime, are you?”
Oliver shrugged. He removed the sacks from his waist and shoulders and hung them from the mantel, by his mud-spattered suit, allowing his raven to perch on his arm, her wings and her beak stretched open in the heat. Already so much steam was boiling from his sweater and his corduroy trousers that he and the women were enveloped in a dull white cloud.
“Two legs, boss,” he said, turning to the table.
Idris sniffed and set down his book. “Has you been smoking again, boy?”
“No no, boss.”
“You’ll be putting my blasted barn on fire!”
“I never, boss! You couldna light nothing out there, in any case.”
“Well,” said Idris, after a moment. “Two legs then, is it?”
“Two legs…Good size calf by the looks of him. Annie is making some work of it.”
“Is it coming the right way?”
Oliver presented two fingers, palm downwards. “Seems OK to me, like.”
“You had best rise some rope, boy. Drink up your tea. I shall come out the beast-house presently.”
Idris moved his toes in the Radox soak, easing the persistent itching of his chilblains. He lifted Foxe to the rain-muted window and found his place in the story of Romanus, the deacon of the church in Caesarea, who had been condemned by the Roman idolaters on the seventeenth day of November, A.D. 303. The man was scourged, put to the rack, torn with hooks and cut with knives. His face was scarified, his teeth were broken from their sockets and his hair was ripped out by the root. And yet he thanked the governor for what he had done—“for,” he said, “every wound is a mouth, to sing the praises of the Lord.”
—
AT 7:06 P.M. the following day, Oliver packed his homework into his satchel, rose from his seat and stood with a hand on the luggage grid—inspecting, in the dim evening light, a poster showing an arch of sand where figures lay scattered or played in the waves and a comely girl in a bathing suit was trying to catch hold of a seacrow. It occurred to him briefly that, in a place like this, even Amy might be induced to remove some clothes, but then the wheels juddered on the points, the rails winced and the Edw Valley women came gaggling around him, as they would every Monday, with their flooding skirts and market baskets. As Aberedw Station appeared out of the silhouetted fir trees, the train slowed to a halt and the passengers fed chattering onto the platform, a few Builth boys in the carriage behind them began to bay and stamp their feet.
“Traitors!” one shouted, as the whistle went.
There was a hiss of steam and a clank of steel—red sparks swimming in the blackening sky.
“Get you here and say that!” David and Jeffrey, the two Trevaughan boys, set out after them, dodging round Oliver and Lizzy Glanedw, running alongside the lurching train. One of them reached inside a window, seemed to land a fist, but he jumped away at the end of the platform and came back, cursing, holding his hand.
It was the first of April, the first day of the new moon, but the clouds lay in broad, dark fields above the Wye Valley. With the confusion on the platform and the red oil lamp on the back of the train now shrinking away beneath Aberedw Rocks, it was some moments before Oliver noticed his grandfather, climbing from his Beetle in the car park, weaving among the people of this muddy little station three miles north of his own. He could see little more than the barrel of his body, the glow of his cigarette, the sky’s faint gleam on his naked scalp.
“I seen you in the paper,” his grandfather said, arriving beside him.
“Famous, I am!” said Oliver.
“Your mother’s proud, I should imagine.”
“She’s read it once or twice, like.”
The women squeezed into an Austin Seven, which ground its way up the bank towards the village, its headlamps fanning over Treallt fields.
A Hillman followed a short way behind.
“Did you…Did you have a word with your grandmother, did you?”
“I had a go, Grandad. I canna say as I got very far.”
“Is she picking up at all, is she?”
“Some,” said Oliver. “I don’t know. It’s still a good day if you see her in the kitchen. It’s her rheumatics, that is the problem, see? She’ll catch anything going, that’s what the doctor says. It is the second time she’s had the pneumonia now.”
His grandfather shuffled his shoes in the chippings. “There is no aim to it, boy,” he said. “I write to her and write to her. I dunno what else I can do, to be honest, save…save coming to see her.”
“Well. You’ll find her in.”
“What do you think, like?”
“I think you’d best give Mother a miss.”
“Are they doing their singing this week, are they?”
“Wednesday. Pant it is, this week. They was up at ours last.”
“Wednesday,” he repeated. “You’re a good lad, Olly.”
As the headlamps faded and the darkness settled, Oliver could see his grandfather a little more clearly—his narrow eyes deep in the folds of his face, his shoulders twisting as he rooted in a pocket of his jacket. He took the cigarettes he offered with a word of thanks. He slipped the clips round the ankles of his uniform trousers, then lifted his bicycle from the wall of the toilet block, flipping the dynamo onto the back wheel, while the new lambs called in the level valley fields and the train’s lamp appeared again in the distance—its spark repeated by a curl in the river.
—
TOWARDS THE END of
Turley Wood, the paler clouds above Cefn Wylfre parted to reveal the moon: a hair-thin crescent, long at the top, which the boss would have said meant rain. Slinging his right leg over the saddle, Oliver slowed and hopped to the ground, the headlamp dying into an ember. He removed his cap, put his hands together, bowed his head and made a wish. Beside him in the Middle Ddole, the creatures were calm. The moonlight shone from the puddles in the track, and since it was not fifty yards to the gate he decided to walk the rest of the way—leaning his bicycle in its corner of the stable before he tramped up the path to the house.
“I binna going to no hospital!” Idris exclaimed.
“For crying out loud, Idris,” said Etty. “Will you please hold still?”
“I binna—”
“Why on earth do you think we pay taxes?”
“I’s blasted if I know!”
Idris appeared to have been flung into his chair. The long grey hairs straggled over his ear, clinging to the clump on the top of his head. His harrowed face was plastered in mud, which continued over the breast of his jacket, covered his hands and stopped abruptly at his gnarled white legs—their hair cut in places by ancient scars, the right calf bloated and twisted in his bunching trousers.
Between the hooks in the kitchen walls hung sheets and pillow cases, shirts and drawers.
“What…What happened?” asked Oliver.
“Thank God you’re back,” said Molly.
“I shall not have the Lord’s name used in vain in this house!”
“I said to you that bridge was dangerous,” said Etty. “Didn’t I, eh? It is too blasted narrow!”
“What do you want me to do, Mam?” Oliver took the heavy, sloshing fountain from his grandmother, who was attempting to lift it with her elbows.