Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  “You’re really aiming to use them bloody things, are you?” asked Oliver, arriving on foot, pushing his damp cap back from his forehead.

  Etty ignored him. She returned from the barn with the black plastic roll and dropped it in the yard with a smack.

  “Good hay this lot’ll be!” he insisted. “Give him a few days.”

  “Olly, it has to go in wet, I’ve told you already. Wet and seal it up to keep.”

  “Mam—”

  “It makes no odds. We are doing it anyway.” She pulled out the first of the enormous bags.

  “If it is such a good idea, then how come nobody else is onto it?”

  “Olly.” She looked up, squinting again. “These things weigh a ton. Are you going to get over here and lend me a hand or not?”

  It was only the changes that required discussion, or at least gave the two of them something to talk about. There had been her decision that he should drive all the way to Kelso to buy a Border Leicester ram, when there were tups in their multitudes in Builth every Monday. There had been her decision to buy the New Holland baler, when the money might have finished off the lambing shed. Remove her subscription to Farmers Weekly, it seemed at times, and they might not have spoken in months.

  —

  ETTY DRAGGED THE toy box the length of the landing, wincing as it squealed on the floorboards, leaving little scratches in the polish. Reversing through the door, she shoved it against the old, striped wallpaper she had glued back in place with some success. She stood to breathe—upright again since the operation, which had, after all these years of discomfort in her legs, been over in barely an instant. Besides the dressing table, which she could not move, she had effaced almost every trace of herself from the bedroom: the washstand, her chamber pot, the breach of magazines, even the embroidered Bible verses she had brought with her out of some sense of duty when she swapped rooms with her son on Idris’s death. There were picture books on the bedside chair. There were clothes for a boy in the chest-of-drawers. The impression of her body remained in the bed, however hard she had tried to plump it flat, but it was concealed effectively by the counterpane she had been stitching all winter, with snow-white sheep, a lattice of hedgerows and herself in the yard holding hands with her grandson, while Oliver beamed from his big blue tractor.

  Beyond the chamomile in the vase on the sill, and the window cleaned both inside and out, the hills were as green as the tight little fields.

  —

  THE SILAGE MADE a mountain at the end wall of the barn—regular as honeycomb, the sun in the west on the lip of each bale and the folds converging on the ties. A hen could have hopped from the slit above the hayloft and stepped out onto its summit. Working his way across the final level, Oliver sealed the bags as he had sealed them all—wrenching on the twister to spare the gripe in his back and the finger he had broken on some man’s head the previous weekend, which was going badways and would have to be seen to. From here he could see across the ring of young willows pawing at the pond, sprouting among the stumps of the diseased elms, down the open valley to the white speck of the church in Llanbadarn-y-Garreg. Cwmpiban, he noted with some satisfaction, had burst a tyre on their long-bed trailer and were wearily unloading while one of the girls rolled a fresh wheel down the bank from the yard. The long-horn cattle in the next-door field were watching sleepily. For years now this had been the way between the two farms: a series of battles contended at a distance. Once or twice Oliver had found his hill sheep driven far off their territory, wandering helplessly on the grass for Llewetrog. Once he had found a hole in the wall for the Panneys that neither the weather nor the creatures could have forced. He had himself shot Mervyn’s dog, which had sclemmed into the Long Field and taken four lambs, but even on those occasions when they had met in the lane, each of them daring the other to reverse, they had neither of them uttered so much as a word. Instead they had vied with the lambing and the shearing, the hay and the harvest, rising at three to be the first to finish, and both of them waited and waited for Ivor to die.

  “Olly!” called Etty.

  Oliver grimaced and looked at his hand. “All right, all right!”

  This was the thing about a job like the hay—the silage, as he now had to call it. Tedious as it was, it did at least serve to justify the moment. As he slipped from the bales and tramped up the yard, the chill of tomorrow was back in his belly. With his eyes on the ground he crossed the concrete bridge, kicked his boots against the step, passed the telephone on its table in the hall and climbed the stairs to the transformed bedroom, where his mother was standing at the carcass of her dressing table—its drawers and its mirrors removed. She had done what she could, he noticed that much. The window, free of its moss and its cobwebs, threw perfect diamonds across the patched-up wallpaper. There were toys arranged on the big rag rug he had not seen in thirty years: cars and trains, jigsaws and Noah’s Ark animals.

  The back bedroom, by contrast, was a gloomy little place. The view itself was pleasant enough—the sunlit orchard and the weeded rows of the vegetable garden—but its ceiling was black from a leak in the roof and its air was heavy with the rot in its floorboards. It was all they could do to squeeze the dressing table between the sagging cot, the stacks of magazines and the boxes of worn-out, old-fashioned shoes.

  “Not much fun in here,” said Oliver.

  “It is only for a week.”

  He gave a nod, turned back towards the door.

  “Olly,” said Etty, quickly. She pulled her lips into a kind of smile, arches in her cheeks where there had once been dimples. “I know all this is awkward on you, I know it is…”

  “You’re not wrong there.”

  “You’ll be about tomorrow now, won’t you?”

  “I dunno.” He glanced at his finger. “I’d best get to the doctor, by the looks of things. And there’s the TB testing in the afternoon. I’ve the vet to meet up the Island.”

  “Olly, you told me you’d change it!”

  “Must have slipped my mind.”

  “For God’s sake, I…” She looked away from him, scraping the loose hairs back into her bun. “What am I supposed to say to that, eh? He’s your responsibility, isn’t he?”

  “So I do hear.” Oliver shrugged.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Means as it sounds.”

  “He’s your responsibility, Oliver! End of blasted story.”

  “Oh,” said Oliver. He produced his cigarettes and tapped one on the packet. “Paternal responsibility. Right one to go lecturing me about that now, aren’t you?”

  —

  ABOVE THE SINK and its long-necked tap, a three-day moon showed pale between the bars of the clouds. Etty stood on the kitchen flagstones, their cold air on her naked legs as she could hardly have felt it in a decade. Through the open door she heard the clatter as Oliver lifted the seat in the Land Rover, unbolted the plate and poured red diesel into the dummy tank that Harry had installed in his garage at Llanedw. She listened to his weight in the springs, the thud of the door, the bark of the ignition, and it was only then that she let herself cry—the tears escaping her shut-tight eyes to pool in the lenses of her spectacles.

  There were times, in spite of everything, when she wondered whether Oliver could have been Idris’s son, after all. He had all of his meanness—took a penny prisoner, as her mother would have said—and he was mean enough to her as well. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and looked again at the moon in the window. It was not as if she had not been changed by her husband herself. She had not always inhabited this labyrinth of signs, which brought some meaning to every nest of the swallows or the bees, to the oak leaves coming before the ash, to the phase of the moon when she trimmed the dead ends of her hair and to any of the trimmings she had missed to consign to the fire. In truth, she did not know if a moon concealed by cloud for its first two days still qualified as new, but she had, as ever, quite enough to worry about as it was, so she rose a coin from the biscuit tin on t
he mantelpiece and went outside to stand on the doorstep, where Maureen descended with a puffing of wings and landed gently on her shoulder.

  A raven on the roof; there was another one.

  “Well, old girl,” said Etty. She ruffled her feathers. “Just the two of us again tonight.”

  The dogs were calling for their supper in the kennel. The chickens were poothering along the wall of the barn, on the grassless ground where the old bridge had lain, among the red steel uprights of the skeletal shed at the top of the yard. She waited some minutes for the high clouds to move, but then the moon appeared again—a toenail clipping in the distant blue—and she made her offer of the ten-pence piece, gave her bow and continued down the yard, round the silage stack to the gate for the Banky Piece.

  “Dill! Dill! Dill!” she called.

  It was an evening to the height of music—the furrowing clouds converging on the west, fiery with the falling sun. The valley for once seemed open to its light: a bowl of birdsong, murmurous streams and ripening oats. If only she could have felt it, risen for a moment against the gravity of time, like a buzzard on an updraught, and been a part of it fully. As a girl, she remembered, she had sat by the river on the stretch of grass where her mother now had her picnic tables and watched the teeming rings of the rain with such wonder, such transportation, that the water could be running down her chest before she even noticed she was wet. So what if there were more cuts in the limits and quotas. The Funnon perhaps had never looked more plenteous. Her grandson was coming. The air was sweet with the scent of hay. The farm went on and they had kept their promises. They had not pulled up the hedges. They had not drained the bog with its watercress and ragged robins, its nests for the peewit and the curlew.

  “Dill! Dill! Dill!” she repeated.

  This time the drake gave his quack of acknowledgement and led the ducks out of the trees around the brook—the nine of them waddling in single file, back up the field towards the pond.

  —

  IT WAS NOT that Oliver was fat, of course—not like he had been as a boy. Erect he was every bit as imposing as ever; but that bulge in his shirt in the cramped Land Rover, it showed beneath the frame of his sunglasses and intruded on the evening like his thoughts of his mother and his son. It jarred with the man he saw in his mind, who was lean and indomitable, and black-haired still, if only with the help of a dye bottle. He crawled between hedgerows of pink and white dog roses, driving the daggy Nelsons for the Pant, which Griffin would insist on grazing on the verges as if he had no grass of his own. His mother was right, that was the size of it. She was right about Cefin, as she had been right about the tup, which was, after all, one half of the flock, whose big, white-faced crossbreds had no rival on any farm he knew. No doubt she was right about the silage too—even if, this year, their neighbours would be making hay successfully enough. Oliver might not see his son from one year to the next, but even to think of him made his heart seem loose in his chest.

  In the yard of the old forge in Llanbadarn-y-Garreg, a shaggy-headed man was working on a motorbike. His T-shirt read GET IT TOGETHER, JUNKIE. In the uncut hayfields for Pentwyn, where at least half of the hedgerows had been bulldozed, the only flowers were the red and white clover. Branches were trailing over the Gleision, where once he had come on these summer nights to flick brown trout from their refuges under the bank.

  He never saw the trout anymore.

  “Line ’em up!” Oliver called, striding through the door of the Awlman’s Arms, the buttons restored on his waistcoat.

  “I shall have you tonight, Funnon!” Lewis chuckled and found a glass.

  “Oh, you think so, do you?”

  “Weights, look.” He curled his arm to show off the muscle.

  The locals’ bar reeked of smoke and sheep-dip, with a faint undercurrent of perfume. It was noisy with the wireless, which stood on the shelf beneath the bottles of spirits, its back in the mirror that covered the wall with the black and gold letters of Guinness. Oliver received his beer. He opened his packet of Porky Scratchings and leant against the bar to consider the room: the few lads bunched at the peeling tables, with cigarettes and dolled-up girls—one of whom, he noted, looked quickly away. A lass for Pentremoel, if he was not mistaken, although he had thought her to be about twelve.

  “I seen you made silage,” Griffin remarked.

  “I seen you made nothing.”

  “Dipping we was. Tight as you like they are this year.”

  “Don’t I fucking know it.”

  “Forecast’s fair, in any case. You’s wasting your money, if you asks me.”

  “Time will tell, Panty. Time will tell.”

  “So,” said Griffin, after a moment. “Your boy’s tipping up tomorrow then, is he?”

  Oliver grunted and reached for his cigarettes.

  “By Christ!” Griffin whistled. “I still canna believe as you tupped that girl!”

  “Right then, Funnon!” Lewis poured a couple of pints and headed for the corner and the Pac-Man table they used for their arm wrestling. “Beat me this time and it’s drinks for a week.”

  The ache was gone from Oliver’s back. His finger continued to burn like hell—it looked like a sausage in a golden girdle—but a single beer had given him distance and he was almost able to ignore it. He kept it straight as the two of them sat and he levelled his eyes with his customary purpose. Lewis was old, as old as his mother, but there was a blacksmith under his landlord’s bulk, and the wiles of a charmer, and few men could hold him for long. As the two of them locked hands he threw his weight behind his arm before Oliver had even parted his boots, and it took all of the strength of his left abdominals to restore him slowly to the vertical.

  There were, there had always been, rules to the war with Cwmpiban: boundaries, if only for self-preservation. The farms might compete to finish the hay, but if the weather was kind then they shared the same pressures and kept out of one another’s way. Oliver came to the Awlman’s Arms; everyone knew that. If Mervyn went anywhere, it was the Black Ox in Painscastle, where Oliver had not been since the place burnt down some twenty-five years or so before. When the door swung open, creaking softly, Lewis seized his opportunity. A growl arose in the depths of his chest and, with a sudden roll of the ball of his body, he drove him almost to forty-five degrees. Oliver found himself frozen briefly. His eyes had not left the face of the landlord, but he could see the door beyond his shoulder and it was a moment before he controlled his muscles and drove their hands so hard into the Pac-Man screen that he must almost have shattered the glass.

  “Fuck!” he exclaimed. He closed his eyes and held his breath.

  “How are you, Lewis?” said Mervyn.

  “Cwmpiban.”

  If Oliver’s finger had been healing at all, it was broken again for sure. It was throbbing madly inside its ring—its pain in his head like somebody was pwning on an anvil.

  “How’s your old man?” Lewis asked, wincing, shaking out his arm.

  “Pretty ordinary, to be honest with you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Had another stroke, look. This morning, it was. They’s took him to Hereford…”

  Mervyn had followed him, Oliver realized. He had been waiting and seen him leave. He watched from his corner, cradling his hand, the Pac-Man blinking blue and white beneath his chin. His neighbour must have been all of forty-six years old, but with no hair to lose, no part of his body that could possibly have expanded, he seemed as he had on the first day he ever saw him, in the mist, with Idris and Ivor. Even his trousers with their baler-twine belt, his tartan shirt and dingy brown jacket appeared exactly the same.

  “Right then, boy,” said Mervyn, as he approached. He settled himself in the empty chair. “Let’s see what you got then, shall we?”

  —

  IT SURPRISED ETTY now that Idris had brought the stone to the farm at all—given his superstitions, given his aversion to the little ring of stones on Cefn Wylfre, which was hidden by the fern but still, she suspe
cted, had kept him away from the hill at night as effectively as the mawn pools. It was Oliver who had turned it into a gatepost when the man on the digger broke one of the old ones, clawing back the banks to make space for the shed. He seemed happy to use it however he liked. Herself, she would have been more cautious. For her the stone belonged to the hills. Like them, it was something separate, unknowable—however many times she might have crossed it, back in its days as a bridge. As she flipped the rope from its head and opened the gate by the wall round the abandoned church, she was careful not so much as to touch it, and barely glanced at its lichen-clad sides—its mysterious scratches faint in the marginal moonlight.

  She had wished so many times that, on Idris’s death, they had simply sold their half of the farm, divided the change and gone in search of their separate lives while Oliver at least might have found himself some other line of work. She had been angry, she remembered that. They had sold the pig and the Hereford cows, bought machinery and dragged the Funnon into some distant quarter of the twentieth century, because there had seemed to be no other course, because without children there was no purpose but progress. But always, always by the grace of Ivor, who could on any day, at any hour, have put the two of them over their door.

  Bats were flitting between Etty and the stars. Her slight shadow moved across the colourless flowers: helleborine and green-veined orchids. On Llanbedr Hill, a tractor was returning from the Ox. Its headlamps turned between the yews in the churchyard; its driver’s song was thin beneath the half-asleep rooks. Once she might have heard the rerp of a corncrake in the Rhos, or the churring passage of a nightjar, but those night-time birds were all gone. She entered the church and, feeling her way along the pews, sat down in the same place favoured by her mother, before the pulpit, in the moonlight piercing the shattered roof—falling through the bat-smelling air to the grass and the holly tree sprouting from the flagstones. A regular little dressed-stone building it may have been, some Victorian replacement for whatever must have stood here before, but she had always loved this church. From its porch the valley appeared to be landscaped; the hillsides harmonized in such a way that the first ancient person to worship here, descending perhaps from the forest to the spring, might have chosen the place because it was here that he saw God. Even in St. Mary’s, on her bench at the organ, Etty felt the need to express her prayers—if only in her head. Here alone that need was gone. She could sit and know her thoughts understood as she did not understand them herself.