by Tom Bullough
“You do have a choice, see?”
“Two spare bedrooms there are at the station. You can have your pick. There’s a telephone, and running water, and more coal than you’d know what to do with.”
“You could hop out of bed and straight onto the eight o’clock. You could be at school Monday, easy as that. And you could go on, like, if you wanted. Do your A-levels…”
“Well!” said Oliver.
“You don’t have to decide now.” Molly ran her fingers up one of her sticks.
“Have you spoken to Mam, have you?”
“She won’t have it from us, boy. Perhaps you…Well…”
Oliver turned and leant on his knees, looking past the light-filled cavity of the window to the bare oak body of the altar. There were dull green lines on the wall behind it, reaching down from the cracks in the roof to grow into moss towards the floor. There were memorials among the flagstones, almost illegible from centuries of feet. When he tipped back his head he saw stars in clusters and the moon on the edges of the broken slates.
“Well,” he said. “I cannot leave her on her own, like, can I?”
—
EVEN AFTER A decade of growth, there remained in the outline of Pentre Wood the long, squint-backed shapes of those terrible snowdrifts where the few starving rabbits that had made it through rationing had gone hopping and creeping, nibbling the bark from the exposed branches. As Oliver left the lychgate for the Bryngwyn track, he remembered their shrivelled, picked-clean bodies revealed by the last of the melting snow. He remembered the sheep that had hung from the trees: fleeces empty of all but their skeletons and the foetal skeletons of their lambs.
“Boy!” shouted Idris.
“Yes, boss?” He climbed into the yard.
“What are you upon, you blasted pwntrel? I opens my window and the first thing I hears…”
Once Oliver noticed the keening sheep, he could not believe that he had not heard it before. His mind, it seemed, was in disarray. Thin above the valley, there was the cry of the barn owl in the Oak Piece; the dogs were baying from the Pant to Cwmpiban, joined in moments by Blackie and Jess. Still, under any usual circumstances, the noise of the ewe might have roused him even from his sleep. Fetching the stable lamp from its shelf, he set off into the Banky Piece with Maureen’s feet spread wide on his shoulder and Idris’s torchlight skidding through the grass. A few lambs ran into the shelter of their mothers, burying themselves with flickering tails. A couple of them fell in behind him, their voices raised, as if in accusation. When he came to the brook he lifted the lantern to throw its ring across the chunnering water. He jumped and landed on the muddy pebble beach at the head of the wash-pool, where the ewe was tucked among the flood-striped roots and the long, limp catkins of the alders. In her lee was a lamb in an afterbirth slick—its eyes red pits, its chin so bloody that it might have been feasting on flesh. It fell and managed to stand again. It opened its jaws in a voiceless gargle as Oliver grabbed it by the hind legs and climbed the bank to swing it hard against a rock.
The twitching stopped. The lamb hung still, dribbling blood into the hoof-pocked grass. There was nothing, Oliver knew, that he could have done—the crow would have been here some hours earlier, if it had not been a raven, which he tried not to think about—but it always went bad on him, killing a creature. Laying down the body, he felt in his pocket for the last of his grandfather’s cigarettes. He stood among the trees at the foot of the Panneys, trying to conjure up an image of Amy, while the first sheep to yean, on the hillside before him, watched him with the lantern in their eyes. From here, looking eastwards, he could see no trace of the dingle between Cefn Wylfre and Llanbedr Hill. The hills formed a single, moon-trimmed blackness—as if they had joined. As if they had sealed the valley.
—
IT WAS A wonder, really, how the procedures came back. Moving the washstand to the side of the bed, Etty folded the flannel round her hand and dipped it in the basin. She rubbed up a lather on the carbolic soap and turned to her husband, who was watching her warily, as the soldiers would, from the white towel that covered the pillows and the bolster.
“I shall wash myself,” he repeated.
“You will just get the bed wet.”
She started with his face, working outwards from his eyes to the grey hair slewing over his head. She washed round his ears and continued down his neck, with each stroke using a different part of the flannel, and once she had passed the nub of his larynx she pulled tight the strop on the window catch and started to sharpen the razor. By the door of the barn her father’s car fired and spluttered into life. Its headlamps strafed her face as it turned. For a moment both she and Idris listened to the dwindling engine, and listened for the clatter of the front door latch, then she worried the brush in the shaving soap and painted his cheeks and his chin.
Idris muttered but did not dare to move. He watched Etty sideways as she wiped down the blade, untied the rope from the foot of the bed and fed it through the pulley until his plastered leg was flat on the blanket.
“Oh, he itches!” he said. “Oh, dank me!”
In a mere five days, the sinew of his body had started to soften. As she helped him to sit, to move the towel, a fold appeared among the stone-hard ripples of his belly. There was the slightest slack to the skin of his arm, a little give to the muscles of his chest, where the bullet scar shone white beneath the clavicle.
“No,” said Etty, firmly.
“Now—”
“No.”
“You’re my wife, you are!”
“Idris,” she snapped. She did not look at the swelling in his drawers. “I have not slept more than three hours a night all week. I’m the nurse, the cook, the cleaner and the blasted farmer. I’m damned if I’m going to do that as well!” She took his shoulder roughly and rolled him on his side. “Now then. Oliver. Next week.”
“It is lambing, woman, for dank’s sake!”
“We will be done by the weekend as you know full well.”
“The beasts is kindling. The Sideland wants rolling. It is high time the boy paid his way…He can go to his exams. I said to you.”
Etty soaped the flannel for the nape of his neck, making quick, broad sweeps across his back and the pale, tangled place where the bullet had left.
“If you want a rag,” she said, “there is one on the chair, but I’d be glad if you would wait until I’m gone.”
—
“FED UP WITH SLAVING IN AN OLD-FASHIONED KITCHEN?”
“Payments made to Radnorshire for the financial year ended 31st March, 1956, were £15,440 15s.”
“Out with the….OLD. In with the….NEW.”
“Sixteen-years-old Oliver Hamer (son of Mr. and Mrs. Idris Hamer, Funnon Farm, Rhyscog) still continues to be very successful in the Three Counties Boxing Tournament. A pupil at the Builth Wells Grammar School, he was the winner in his age group in the recent Scott-Paine Boxing Tournament, and later won his fight against the Worcester Amateur Boxing Club. He is now middle-weight champion of Hereford and holds the Builth Shield for the middle-weight class.”
The boy in the photograph wore shorts and a vest. There was a fix to his eyes, a vigour to his proud, strong face. His fists were brought up close to his chest, revealing shadows in his bicep muscles. For a minute or more Etty looked at her son, then she set down the paper and, pulling on her oven gloves, lifted the fountain from its notch above the fire, her boots spread squarely, her thin arms trembling. She sat it on the stool, turned the tap to fill the teapot and ran the rest into the long zinc bath.
The clocks continued.
The bull at Cwmpiban proclaimed his virility.
Finally Oliver arrived in the hall, his hobnails hollow on the flagstones. He ducked for the lintel of the kitchen door, his raven sitting low on his shoulder, having learnt the new dangers of perching on his head. He slumped among his revision at the table, pale as she had seen him, the oil lamp playing on his dishevelled hair.
“You all right
, Olly?” she asked.
“Lost a lamb,” he said.
“It happens.” She put her hands on the back of his chair. “Is Mam—”
“She’s gone.”
It seemed extraordinary suddenly that Etty was able to stand at all, with just two legs and so much to carry. The sensation that came over her was such an unholy tangle that she could hardly tell her exhaustion from her relief from her old, redoubling anger. She and Molly had long ago agreed. There was no going back. Oliver was one thing; he had not been there. He had known her father only cowed and sober. But her mother, she had seen him throw Etty out of her home and hurl her bag down the platform after her. He had thrown Molly out too when she tried to stand up to him, and cursed her to hell as he did it.
She had trusted her to keep her word.
“Do you…want the bath, do you?” she managed.
“I’m…You go first, Mam. Dunna worry.”
“I’ll just fetch your father his tea, then.”
It was the first time Etty had used the word in years. Somewhere in her son’s transformation into this man in scale, it had fallen away from them, like Santa Claus.
“Oh,” said Oliver, and reached in his pocket. He straightened the petals of an Oxford ragwort, heaved himself back onto his feet and slipped its stalk into a buttonhole of her cardigan. “I found her by the railway. New one on me, she is. I did think you might like her.”
OLIVER REMAINED WITH his elbows on the bar top, spinning a shilling whose sphere resolved into the head of Elizabeth II. He followed the rays of the quarter-cut oak, golden beneath the beer mats and the smoke-streaming ashtrays, and once Lewis had emptied the half-drunk glasses into the barrel and returned to his place with a foaming jug, he accepted a refill and slid him the coin.
“Traitors!” shouted the boys in the door.
“I should never have been a farmer,” said Griffin. “I hates fucking sheep, I do.”
“Gran?” said Oliver. “Jimmy?”
“You’re a good man, Olly,” said Granville, his big rings clinking as he passed him his glass. “So. What’s all this traitor business, then?”
There were only men in the Awlman’s Arms. No local woman would ever have been seen here, and those women from off who came peering through the door every so often would rarely last a glance across the smoke-coloured walls, the soot-clouded oil lamps and Locke on his stool looking back at them skute. Besides the demolition gang, who had come by with Oliver to flog a few railway ties, everyone was a regular: the old men by the fire with their dominoes and leather leggings, the husbands and fathers, their caps tipped back on their neat-cropped hair, the various lads of Oliver’s age with hair to the collar, snug-fitting trousers and shirts for the most part open at the neck. They were men from the hills, from Penblaenmilo and Pentremoel, three months of snow still weighing on their shoulders as they watched the Crickadarn boys enter the door, press between the clustered tables, push old Adam Prosser aside at the bar and stand in formation—three abreast and four in the rear.
“Cider!” said their leader, facing down the landlord.
“Two and four,” said Lewis.
“Going to serve we, is it?”
“Going to pay me, is it?” He spread his hairy forearms.
The man took a handful of pennies from his pocket and scattered them tinkling over the flagstones. He looked back at Lewis, who did not move.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Who’s your best boy, then?”
Oliver took a draught of beer, wiped his mouth and lowered his eyes to meet the man’s gaze, working his rings slowly from his fingers. His heart was running but his mind was transparent, perfectly still. He blinked periodically, and did not speak, and when the man grinned and looked back at his friends he knew already he would win.
“How are you, boy?” he asked, at last.
“So who the fuck are you, then?”
“I’m the no-good devil what’s coming to you.”
“Oh? Fancy your chances, do you?”
“I dunna fancy yours.”
“What the fuck is that tie?” The man gave a laugh, and his friends laughed around him.
Oliver tightened the scarlet knot and patted down the vee of his waistcoat. “You hanna heard of fashion in Crickadarn, I suppose?”
“Wop fashion, is it?”
“Do you wanna say that again, do you?”
It was Oliver’s calculation that the man would swing quickly. He saw the squat of his jaw, the strata of his forehead, his thinning brown hair. He kept his feet parted, the toes of his boots alone on the flagstones, and when the man dropped his eyes a single degree he slipped a step backwards so that the ball of his fist went sighing through the smoke before his face. A fresh jibe rose in the pool of Oliver’s mind. He parted his lips, but already the man’s left was leaving his side and he allowed them to turn into a smile. Griffin’s bar stool was about two feet behind him. The next punch came in a blizzard of movement, skimming his chin with a bloom of colour, and he took his step to dodge another, then threw his right into the man’s uncovered belly—sending him grunting to the end of his reach.
The pub by now was in uproar. Another fight was squaring up next to the quoits. There was pwning on the tables, the crash as a glass met the floor.
“Lamp him, Olly!”
“Lay to him, boy!”
It was a fact of chopping wood that if you aimed your axe not for the top of a log, nor even for the bottom, but for the foot of the block—the ground itself—then with no great effort you could split almost anything you met. The man had spirit, Oliver would give him that. He was long-armed, deep-chested, quick enough almost to be good. He even appeared to be thinking now, his fists up, checking the space, moving to trap him against the bar, so Oliver waited one more moment before he sprang himself with a right like the first, to wind, to disorientate, then, as the man’s arms came down, he brought his left on the full through the levels of smoke now weaving and tangling over the ashtrays, and this time he aimed for the back of the man’s head and heard the pipe-stem crack of the bones in his nose even through the voices and the stool that splintered as he fell.
—
“HO! HO-EP!”
Etty swung her plant against the nearest flank and sent the beasts panicking onto the Bryngwyn track—keeping their order as they turned back towards her, close against the oval wall of the churchyard where the snow lay hunched after thirteen weeks and yet another night of rain. They were a wretched lot, for all of the fodder that Oliver had bought them—their faces as dull as the house had become, their haunches making shadows on their red-brown coats. To the rasp of the rooks and the annual crop of ravens, which was one price of having Maureen for a pet, she worked her way along the bank of the prill, beneath the overhanging sycamores, whose pink-shelled buds were bursting on infant leaves and flowers. She came to Hendy and Little Hergest, the herd’s contending queens, their fan-eared princes beside them in the mud, then she looked back at Panda, which was a step apart from the others, her calf on the outside, and although she could see no fault in her breathing, no swellings, no sign of lameness, still she felt a conviction framing in her belly and she moved herself carefully into that space, bringing pressure on the cow while the rest backed anxiously home towards the yard.
“Come in, Jess!” she called. “Come in!”
As the dog closed the movement, Panda and her calf sheered away and galloped up the track, past the end of the churchyard. Etty followed, her gumboots slapping, dragging the gate for the Funnon Field open and propping it on the hanging post to seal the way back. She looked again at the pacing animal, the hang of her horns, the black round her eyes, and this time caught a limp in her hind off leg.
If the spring was due, it was yet to arrive. The sunlight leaking from the bloated clouds still lay almost level with the fields across the valley, snow in the shadows of the contours and the hedgerows. The harrier was falling over Llanbedr Hill, vanishing behind the horizon to rise again in a tumult of sil
ver, as if bouncing on a hidden trampoline, but despite this, despite the bright, sliding whistle of a blackbird and the efforts of the cattle and the rooks, the farm was quiet. The half of their flock that had made it through the winter were squeezed with their few dozen lambs in the Bottom Field and the Middle Ddole. Albert was plodding across the Sideland Field, trailed by crows, scattering grain with every other step: a sight so familiar after twenty-three years that Etty could hardly remember him otherwise. Idris was guiding Blaze around the Long Field, rolling the soil where he had stood in the snow to ward off the helicopter with its bales from the government.
The hills, he had said, must have their rent.
“Bring them on, Nell!” Etty whistled. “That’s it, Jess! Good girl! Bring them on now!”
The cattle bunched, revolving in confusion, but Etty called to them lightly, tapping her stick to get their attention. With the others behind them, Hendy and Little Hergest edged cautiously towards her, then suddenly poured into the Funnon Field, their weight in the wet ground, spreading among the peeping cowslips, the cinquefoil and the domed ant heaps with their red crowns of sheep’s sorrel, capering absurdly, tossing their horns as it dawned on them that their six months’ imprisonment was over.
—
IT WAS OLIVER alone who wore sunglasses cutting—seventy feet above the Wye at Boughrood, his shadow flexing on the churning water. They had goggles, of course—regulation issue from the Western Contractors—but if he was going to work all day in full view of the school, the post office and the houses among the sallies and oak trees on the river cliff, then he would do so with his hair in order, three buttons open at the neck of his shirt, his eyes more fashionably concealed. Boughrood Bridge was a cage of steel: four enormous, two-hundred-foot girders, one for each corner, and a mesh of diagonals in between. It was as big a demolition job as Oliver had known. Straddling one of the topmost girders, he opened the regulators, checked the gauges and looked across this next pair of braces at his mate, Jimmy Owen, who was perched with his bottles on the opposite side, scowling past his heavy leather boots. Beneath them, to the north, a couple of mooching local boys, Jerry Miles and Edward Hughes, were sitting on the frame where the rails had lain, swinging their legs and spitting at the flood-matted islands.