by Tom Bullough
—
THE THING ABOUT collies was that they were clever. The old dogs, you couldn’t fault them for heading and driving, but they didn’t have the same eye. Cousing the ewes and their big-boned lambs up the bank beneath the beeches that Thursday morning, Turk and Nell never lost concentration for an instant. Turk, in truth, was given to set; he would lie down sometimes if a sheep merely turned. But the flock knew well enough where it was going and the dogs kept back, their tails at their feet, their ears alert, watching them trot through the pishing rain without a face to be seen among the well-dagged rumps. Since there was nobody to offend besides Hanoch beneath him and a whinchat giving its name from a gorse bush, Oliver sang the chorus of a pop song repeatedly. His mail-order jeans were clinging to his thighs, water was running and sloshing in his gumboots, but his new wax coat had a tall wax collar, which folded tight against the back of his cap. His chest and shoulders would not have been drier in the kitchen. Across the valley, Cefn Wylfre was a murky impression, with the Funnon and the Welfrey scars on its side. At Cwmpiban, Mervyn was topping thistles near the boundary hedge, which neither he nor his father had yet attempted to breach. The rain was sniping through the unfurling fern, shuddering the red globe flowers of the wimberries. As they came to the common and the sheep dispersed among the quarries, the wary yearlings and the bare hawthorns ring-barked by the wintering sheep, Oliver crossed the rutted lane and turned his back to the wind to scrutinize the hilltop: the lambs dog-shaking, their mothers weighted by their wool.
Under the green crowd of larches at the Island, Dick was leading his cow on a bridle—his sister straddling her bony back—so Oliver kicked up the cob and rode to meet them.
“How do, Miss Davies?” He raised his cap to Dilys, who scowled at him from beneath her umbrella, her lank hair blowing across her face. “Where you off to, then? Picnic, is it?”
“Market,” said Dick, with his usual grin.
“Oh?”
“I have had it with beasts, I have, boy. It is the scything, see? Plays merry havoc with my back, it does. I canna cut the bloody hay no more, so, there we are. Maggie has got to go. We shall miss the milk, like, but she’s feeding well enough just now.”
“Well, if you needs a bit of fodder?” Oliver offered.
“You’s a good lad, Olly. We shall just have boughten milk, and shanna be the worse for it, I expect.”
“How’s the old Island?”
“Middling, boy, to be honest with you.” Dick pinched his eyes beneath his dripping hat. “Maesllwch, they dunna want a gamekeeper no more, see? They is none of them shooting, not this new lot, though I says to them, where the grouse goes, there goes the songbirds. The foxes, they’ll be full of it, for sure.” He shook his head. “We do get our pensions, like, but it is only a few bob and the bedrooms do get terrible nesh. I put a bit of zinc on the roof, but the wind come under him, and the windows, they’ll be a hundred year old if they’re a day. Plastic bags, they dunna do for glass, I’ll tell you that for nothing!”
“Maintenance grant,” said Oliver. He kept the reins tight.
“I never could do them blimmin’ forms.”
“I shall have a word with Mam. Very greet with the Ministry, she is.”
“So,” said Dick. He gave a slight nod. “Idris scratting on, is he?”
The umbrella rose an inch or two.
“Not so good, to be honest with you, Dick. It is his lungs, see? Tremendous strain they do put on his heart. That’s what the doctor says…Hanna stopped him bossing me about, mind.”
“Aye.” Dick laughed. “Hard as a toad, that boy!”
The umbrella fell until his sister’s face and her wind-scoured hair were concealed altogether.
Oliver remained with the dogs in the lane and the rush of the rain on his back. He watched the procession continue across Llanbedr Hill: the thin cow lumbering through puddles and over tractor ruts, the umbrella low above the cowering rider, as slowly the three of them became a single space in the rich green heather, black against the shadow of the mountains—hardly to be told from the gaunt little trees.
—
THE GEESE AND the dogs suggested a stranger. Etty moved her bare arm slowly round the bread oven, feeling the heat of the bright yellow bricks, the fine hairs rising from her skin. She set the tins on the long wooden spade and slid them into line on the floor of the oven, brushing a last few embers against the door to keep the heat in the mouth before she fastened the latch, glanced at her clock, hung up the kettle and untied her apron.
“Who’s that, then?” asked Nancy Llanedw.
“Well, if the dogs don’t know…”
“There’ll be visitors, I doubt. Once the word gets about.”
“I suppose there shall.”
At a knock on the door Etty rinsed her hands, rolled down her sleeve, checked her eyes in the mirror in the larder and started for the hall across the flagstones Nancy had scrubbed and finished with milk. The bedroom above her was perfectly still. The chairs in the parlour remained in their arches for the Methodist faithful who observed their Sundays in one another’s houses now that the chapel was closed.
Idris’s best hat was sitting on his chair—as if he had suddenly vanished from beneath it.
“Hello, Mrs. Hamer,” said the woman on the step.
“Mrs. Hamer,” Etty repeated.
Always a big girl, Ruth had grown still more with her children. Her coat was tight across her breasts. Her skirts spread over broad, round hips to tumble finally to the ground. She looked at Etty hesitantly through the sheet of water that fell from her umbrella, a cloth-covered basket on the other arm.
“I wanted to see if I could help, I did,” she said. “I fetched you some food, look.”
“Oh,” said Etty. She glanced beyond her. “Ivor send you, did he?”
“No no. He is up the Vron, he is. I come on my own.”
The rain was drumming on the umbrella’s tight black fabric; it roared in the flem and sighed in the yard, where a bantam and her half-grown chicks were pecking in the grass beneath the eaves of the barn.
“Idris is gone,” she managed. “Not two hours ago.”
“Oh,” said Ruth. “I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“Thank you for the thought, but we are only the two mouths to feed now.”
“If you’s sure…”
“There is one thing, if I may?”
“Anything, Mrs. Hamer.”
Etty took a long breath. Although the doctor had left, she had not quite shed his accent. “When you do see Ivor, I would be grateful if you could remind him of his recent visit. I was at the market at the time myself, but Oliver was present, as was Albert. I would like him please to reflect on his actions, given his interest in the law.”
—
“I SHALL FUCKING kill him!” said Oliver.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
“I shall go by there—”
“You will start, Oliver, by not using that language in front of me.”
“By Christ, I shall throw him bare-arsed—”
“Oliver!” His mother whipped the grass with her plant. “You will control yourself, that’s what you’ll do. You will control yourself and think. What do you suppose’ll happen if you go down there waving your fists? They’ll have an assault charge on you before you’ve made it home.”
Oliver snapped at Turk, which was crowding the cattle, setting just feet from the nearest calf.
“Think!” said Etty. “Monday, Ivor had every card going. He could have sold this farm from under our feet and bought it back at a blasted song. No one in this valley is going to bid against him—no one save us—and he’s got the Vron and Cwmpiban for surety. We’ve only got the Welfrey, and not a lot of that neither. Now we have got ourselves one single card. This whole business, it looks like trouble—that’s the thing, that’s why Mervyn’s done nothing with his blasted gates. You put one more card in his hand and he’s got us, do you understand me? You do your farming and
leave the business to me.”
The rain at last had broached Oliver’s collar; it was leaking down his neck and spreading on his shoulders.
“Yes,” he muttered.
His mother held the gate to seal the Bryngwyn track while he drove the beasts up the Funnon Field, through the poochy rushes beneath the spring. He sent Nell back for Doris—an ill-omened animal that would stray from the herd at any opportunity and had once got stuck to her chest in the bog—then stumped up the slope among the trampled ant heaps and the remnants of the trefoil. By the church, the rain beat the five-pointed leaves of the sycamores. It set the bluebells trembling and him along with them, as if they were hairs on his body. The boss was dead. God knew that they had had their differences, but this was no less than an attack on their farm. It contravened the world’s proper order, its justice, its right and wrong.
The cattle massed at the top end of the yard, chavelling the cud, staring dull-eyed into the rain. Oliver held the gate for his mother to pass, then watched her stalk down the bank of the flem, skirting the herd, her long plant swinging, her headscarf wet around her downturned face. When they had the two flanks covered he whistled to the dogs and closed on the animals, slapping the shoulder of the first that turned, following them slowly as they fed into the beast-house to spare the grass for a day or two.
“Ho-ep!” called Etty. “Ho-ep!”
At the tail of the herd, Doris pitched and wheeled. When Turk darted forwards with a warning bark, she came at him with swinging horns and udder slopping and, breaking past him, cantered to the pond. Running himself, Oliver went to head the animal off. He shouted threats and scattered the geese, and while Doris retreated back into the yard she paced and snorted and tossed her head and, as he approached with arms apart, she tried again to escape down the slope. Diving sideways, Oliver grabbed her horn. She thrashed his arm but he brought her round and, seizing the other, stood before her with his feet spread wide—feeling her heat in his straining hands, staring back into her white-lashed eyes. The muscles showed in her fern-brown neck. With gumboots dragging and quick breaths wheezing in the bridge of his nose, he threw his weight backwards and twisted her big head slowly to the left. He fought for his balance and then, with a lunge, he heaved her sideways, flat on her near side, and before she could make it back onto her feet he knelt on her shoulder and, with both hands joined on her long off horn, forced her head into the streaming ground. The near horn cracked and broke in two. Her wild white face turned dark with mud. As she bellocked and twisted he thrust her head into the underlying stone—three times, four times—until the hulk of her body lay twitching and shuddering.
Oliver rose and, looking around him, jumped knee-deep into the flem. With a grunt he locked his arms beneath the bridge and pitched it out into the yard. It must have been a sod to dig out of the hill. The bloody thing had the heft of two men. It was near enough as tall as himself, deep and straight and distantly red, with scratches running down one of the corners he had once thought the scrabblings of a troll. He had to hoist one side onto his toecaps to get a grip with his fingers, but he managed to lift it as high as his shoulders, and then above his head, and brought the narrow end down on the skull of the beast, which erupted blood from its eyes and its earholes, imploded like a bad egg on a wall.
—
MORE TIMES THAN she could number, Etty had seen her son come home with an eye bruised closed or a finger broken and twisted out of line, but whatever he did she had never had to see it. It had never happened here. Oliver stood above the shattered carcass, his big chest heaving, his stubble-shadowed jaw pushing into the rain. At his feet the dogs lapped at the prill of blood, which was winding its way towards the pond. She stared at the scene with the cattle behind her, hiling their cratches, then she crossed the yard quickly and jumped the flem at the narrow place beneath the parlour window—her breath spasmodic, spots of light confusing her vision.
“I’d best rise the tractor then, boss, had I?” asked Albert from the barn.
In the kitchen Etty seized the newspaper and, by instinct, the wood basket. Turning, she saw a redstart on the sill outside the window, framed in a pane, dipping his head and tabbering his tail as if he wanted to get in. She shouted at him, but he continued to dance, fixing her with his bright black eyes, and she almost ran as she headed for the larder, out of the back door and into the orchard, where the apple trees had been through their pink and the rain-fallen blossom lay white and sunken in the grass. The wood basket. She only carried the damned thing in case Idris saw her and she could pretend to be rising bruns from the woodpile, and she hurled it away into the potato patch before she ducked into the privy and locked the door.
TO KEEP THIS PLACE BOTH CLEAN AND SWEET, said the notice, OPEN THE DOOR AND CLOSE THE SEAT.
Etty was forty-seven years old. Two laps of skin hung loose from her neck; she could flick them with a finger. Her red hair had become dull and pale. As she weed and shivered in the rising stink, the thin, chapped hands either side of the newspaper looked less freckled than mottled.
“Parents. Is your daughter interested in nursing?”
“61 Mediterranean holidays to be won!”
She tore at the string of newsprint squares, wiped herself and looked back at the paper, which showed, drop-spotted, a girl reclining in a two-piece bathing suit—a pair of sunglasses dangling from her hand.
“While your new fridge freezes you can lie out in the sun.”
Above her, the rain was pummelling the thin zinc roof.
THE OAK IN the Oak Piece bore leaves in such numbers that it was only when Oliver climbed the gate into the Funnon Field and passed into its shadow that he could see against the high, hot sun some memory of its whorling skeleton. Thirty-five times now he must have witnessed this phenomenon, this rebirth of the year, and still it seemed to him as unlikely as the dead returning from their graves. A warm breeze fled up the tightening valley, ruffling the tall grass and moon daisies in the Banky Piece, running among the pale-bellied leaves of the great tree, which shimmered, seeming to shiver with pleasure. A lark was trilling somewhere in its depths. A vapour trail passed straight through its crown, like an arrow through a cowboy’s hat.
“Boy, Turk,” he murmured.
He swiped at a horsefly and continued up the slope, following a rack between the ant heaps bleached on the south side, mossy on the north—the thyme on their heads just thinking of flowers. The rain was tough a-coming, as Idris would have had it—the Far Top Field was pale as hay—but the ground beneath his gold-framed sunglasses was pink with loosestrife, purple with self-heal, and he whistled lightly to the raven on his shoulder, which whistled lightly in response.
He was almost at the gate when he stopped and turned, frowning back down the slope towards the funnon, which had grown a few brambles these past few years. A damp, dark hole in the sunlit field, he had thought more than once about fencing it in, since at least one creature had drowned in there. He glanced at the dog, whose ears had risen. He took a few steps in its direction and saw a hat evolving from the shadows—climbing haltingly into the sunshine.
“Oh, hello!” said the girl. “You must be Oliver, right?”
“Might be,” Oliver admitted.
She smiled uncertainly, set down her plastic barrel and wiped her hands on her denim dungarees, which were cut at the thigh so that her legs led bare to her sandals. Since it would have been awkward to have done otherwise, he shook the hand she offered in his big, grubby fist.
“I’m Naomi.”
“Are you, then?”
“I hope you don’t mind my taking some water. I spoke to your mother. She suggested I come here…So. This is Maureen, is it?”
Oliver felt a frown trace across his forehead. He glanced at the raven. “I expect.”
“I know all about you, you see?” The girl tipped back her broad straw hat, looking up at him with blue and dark-lashed eyes. “Dad’s been on about you for years—ever since he first came down here. To be honest, I did wo
nder if he was making you up…”
“Your father…?” said Oliver.
“Martin. Martin Chance.”
“The prof? Isn’t he—”
“Well. He was married once, to my mother. Obviously.”
“Well!” He looked at her again: her face still flushed from the steep stone steps, the rounds of breasts in her glimpse of a T-shirt. “I cannot say as I see the resemblance.”
“He hasn’t mentioned me, then, I take it.”
“To be honest with you, Naomi,” said Oliver. He gave a low laugh—his geography corrected, extended, back in his control. “To be honest with you, the prof doesn’t really hold towards people in his conversation. Not with me, in any case. Things, that is more his line. Bees. Vegetables. Churches. Tree roots. Funny-shaped stones he’s dug up. Barrows it were, last time I seen him. He reckoned he’d found one up Penblaenmilo, though I’ll say it’s just where they used to keep the rabbits. Between ourselves, like.”
“He tells me about you,” the girl observed.
Oliver inclined his head. “Among the other things?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean…”
“I’m pulling your leg, girl.” He smiled and pushed the sunglasses back up his nose. “Got a car here, have you?”
“Yes. In the yard.”
“I’ll lend you a hand with that then, shall I?”
“Well…” She lifted the barrel two-handed, then put it back down. “OK. That would be kind. Thank you.”
“We do have a spare tank down in the barn. I’ll fetch him you up when I gets a minute.”
Taking the handle, Oliver noted the pleasing swell of the muscles in his chest, the breeze in the mouths between the buttons of his shirt. He held the barrel six inches clear of his legs without a tremor or trace of its weight and, flicking the rope from the falling post, followed Turk onto the Bryngwyn track.