Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  —

  TWENTY MINUTES THE two of them had been here, now the night had come and the battle could wait no longer. The cheers of the crowd had died into murmurs: remarks on the relative lengths of their arms, Mervyn’s advantage in terms of leverage and the dreadful condition of Oliver’s finger, which rose black and askew from their dribbling fists. If anyone was giving odds in Oliver’s favour it was only because they knew his history: the five men he had beaten at a disco in Gladestry, the anvil he had hurled more than sixteen feet one year at the Erwood Show. Mervyn simply would not move. His scalp was red and welling with sweat, his bicep strained at the rolls of his shirt, but he neither met Oliver’s gaze nor tried to ignore it—seeming, if anything, to be gazing beyond him, as if admiring a far-away hill.

  “All right, lads.” Lewis leant on the table. “Let’s break it up now.”

  “Break it up,” Oliver muttered, “and I shall break you up.”

  “Mervyn?” Lewis hesitated. “Funnon, you needs an hospital, you do…”

  For the first time in his life, Oliver looked away. It was one of his rules to lock eyes with his opponent until the other gave—fight or arm wrestle, it had never once failed him—but then he had never faced anyone so inscrutable. He lowered his head until his hair touched his forearm. In his mind he built an arch between his left boot and his right hand, whose jutting finger seemed the pivot of the world. Images came with his tabbering eyelids. His mother again had hair like fire. His son was five, was two, was three—his life thrown into wild disorder. Mervyn’s breath arrived in quick, stale gasps; he had no choice but to breathe it himself. Without stubble, without brows or even lashes, his face appeared to be melting, resolving itself into the long, trench-cut face for Idris—and when he closed his eyes against this terrible vision the images redoubled: Naomi in tears, Cefin as he had first seen him as a baby, dark and screaming and unmistakably his. They were fighting for their children, he saw that now. That was why the old ways no longer worked. The real protagonists were not even here. Cefin was in his distant city. Mervyn’s one boy was working with his uncle Vivien, who would visit Rhyscog barely once a year. That was why Oliver could never capitulate, would die before he allowed his hand to move a single millimetre.

  A HUNDREDWEIGHT MEANT NOTHING to Cefin—not in terms of stones, of which he weighed six, nor in terms of the kilograms they used at school. In terms of the sacks they had brought back at lunchtime, he could move these only by wrapping his arms round their rope-tied necks, jamming his trainers in the barn’s cobbled floor and reversing in a series of jerks. Cefin was not a physical boy—if he had his father’s hue, he had none of his bulk—but still he doubted any boy in his year could have dragged eight of these bloody things all the way up the stairs into the granary. He stood in the hot light falling from the door, while a dog named Blackie pushed her wet-tipped nose beneath the hem of his shorts. What he needed was a machine, or failing that some kind of mechanism to help him. The barn, like the farm, was all but empty. For years he had thought that, with all of this space, his father must have been a millionaire. There was the elevator leading to the white-iced hayloft, but he could never have moved the thing and, besides, he did not know how it worked. There was a long canvas belt in a heap near the swede chopper. There were scythes in a line on the deep stone walls and a set of scales hanging almost above him—their blocks and loops reaching high up to a beam.

  The solution, when it came, was so obvious that Cefin felt foolish not to have thought of it before. Unwinding the rope from its cleat on the door jamb, he lowered the pulley, removed the heavy scales from the hook and speared instead the nearest sack, which, with the hiss of shifting grain, he found he could now lift quite easily. The welder fizzed in the workshop round the corner. He took the canvas belt and speared that too—hoisting the sack some feet into the air before he swung it over the topmost step, tied it to the handrail and let it down.

  The granary was dark and sweltering: a windowless room above the stable—or what his father called the stable, since it housed only the Ford 4000, whose cab was pocked by collisions with the arch. Perhaps it was these that had damaged the wall. As Cefin backed across the oil-slick floorboards, gripping with the cracks, passing through the light streaming thinly from the roof tiles, he cleared a path in scattered bits of mortar and stone. He steered round a pot of grain dyed blue and the stiff, long-tailed body of a rat, and almost trod on a little roll of paper, which, once he had recovered his breath, he opened and angled to inspect.

  ABRACADABRA

  ABRACADABR

  ABRACADAB

  ABRACADA

  ABRACAD

  ABRACA

  ABRAC

  ABRA

  ABR

  AB

  A

  The words were written in faded pencil and around them was a series of signs, which reminded him of horoscopes in the newspaper. One was the sun. Another was the moon. Others were less certain—the paper was almost brown with age—but, wiping the sweat from his glasses with his T-shirt, he made out a couple of three-line stars and the circle and cross he knew from his mother meant a woman.

  —

  SIX YEARS HAD passed since Cefin had last stayed at the Funnon. They had stayed at the Welfrey, of course, he and his mother—once with his grandfather, once with Adrian. But to be with his father alone; Cefin was reminded of a story his mother had written about a boy with a dragon: a vast, winged creature of knotted eyes and knife-sharp teeth. It was not that Oliver had not tried to be nice; he had given him a fishing rod, he had taken him for a ride on his tractor and sat with him and a jigsaw after supper. He was just so big, so alien, with his foreign words and his scar-mapped face—his hair, black as rubber, sweeping onto his shoulders like a film star.

  “We never had no combine when I was a lad,” Oliver told him, leading the way between the silage bales and the drooping trees around the pond. “A binder we used in them days, pulled by a horse, like. I cannot say as I miss the bloody thing. Them days we’d cut before the grain was ripe, not like now. That way it wouldn’t fall, see? We’d leave him plem to ripen in stooks—like sheaves, you know? Like…like bundles.” He opened the gate into the Banky Piece and slung the cutting bar over his shoulder. “Turn them to dry, we would, and a right bloody business it was and all.”

  The sunlight was fanning from the black-bottomed clouds, across the daunting hills and the deep green valley, which seemed to Cefin to belong so completely to his father that he could hardly tell the two of them apart. The shorn sheep grazing the short, mown grass were all emblazoned with his initials. Beyond the brook, on the opposite hillside, the girl continued to drive his father’s tractor—the baler chattering behind her.

  “All right, then.” Oliver turned and looked at him sideways, his dark eyes buried in gathering cracks. “Who helped you? I was joking, I was. You know that, don’t you? I never did mean you to move the damn things. Them sacks weigh a hundredweight apiece!”

  Cefin glanced at his face.

  “The scales!” Oliver said, suddenly. “The blasted pulley!”

  “I thought…that was what you wanted.”

  His father gave a gulp of a laugh, hesitated, then rubbed his head with his claw of a hand. “You canny little bugger! I shouldn’t have thought of that in a million years!”

  It had been his grandmother’s idea to invite Ada, who was the youngest of Griffin’s five children: a surprise for the Pant, whatever that meant. So far that day Ada had granted Cefin three words exactly, talking only to her father and Oliver, and she had passed the entire afternoon on the Fordson—following the straw left by the combine harvester, hopping from the seat to the pedals whenever she needed to stop. She must have seen the two of them climb out of the trees round the stream, but she did not once look away from her work: a sturdy girl with corn-coloured hair, her chin set, jutting in front of her.

  “How do, Panty?”

  “Not so bad, boy.” Griffin humped another bale onto the trailer.
>
  “I ment this thing, or near enough. We should be done afore it comes to rain.”

  “Two hours, I gives it.”

  “Aye, and I’ll say as Cwmpiban wants four.”

  Cefin stood awkwardly next to his father, who lay in the stubble beneath the cylinder of spikes, grunting and wheezing through the bolts he held in his teeth. Compared to the machines he had seen elsewhere, the combine was not much of a size. It was red, or had been, with a steering wheel upright on the roof and a spout on the side where Griffin would fill up the sacks. As Ada baled the final row, tugging the string to empty the sledge, a dark shape swept between themselves and the clouds—the scream of its jets came an instant afterwards; it must have been travelling faster than sound—and she ducked and puckered her face.

  “Thousand foot, my arse!” she exclaimed.

  “Now then, now then,” said her father.

  “I tell you,” said Oliver, “I shall give one of them bloody planes a barrel one day, you see if I don’t!”

  He dragged himself back out of the combine, dropped his spanners in the box and brushed the dust from his denim shirt, which he always wore buttoned up to the neck. He took one of the shotguns from the Ford 4000 and rummaged in his jeans for a couple of cartridges.

  “You ever fired one of these things, boy, have you?” he asked.

  Cefin shook his head.

  “Nothing to it, look. Well, she’ll give you a bit of a kick, I expect, but so long as you’re not leaning on a tree nor nothing she shall not do you no harm. Twenty bore this is, your nana’s gun. Nice little piece.” He crouched down behind him, and Cefin smelt his ripe sweat stink and the chemical reek he’d been told was sheep-dip and better than the carnage you’d get from the blowflies. “You hold her like that, that’s it, lean into her a little, and squeeze the old triggers there when I gives the word—one then the other. Keep her on the corn now. That’s it.”

  The last square of corn stood alone in the golden expanse—its bowed heads rippling although the day was almost still. The others had fetched guns of their own from the tractor: Griffin purple-faced, still in a sweater, Ada’s T-shirt tight enough to show she wore a bra. Had Cefin moved a muscle he might have forgotten where to put his hands, but the barrel was shivering in spite of his efforts; the sweat was collecting between his eyebrows and the frame of his glasses. He felt as he did on sports day at school, poised on the line among the boys who would win, his stomach contorting, his mother at the rope in her tracksuit and Aertex shirt. When a rabbit erupted from the back of the square and set a wild, zigzagging course for a hedgerow, he grabbed at the triggers out of surprise, but the clap of a shot came only from his father as the animal threw its tail over its head and landed twitching on its back.

  “And there’s one for starters,” said Oliver, with satisfaction. He caught the cartridge and dug out another. “Safety catch,” he added, flicking a switch on Cefin’s gun. “Ready now?”

  There was smoke all round them, sweet and blossoming. Cefin staggered with the recoil as if he had been punched. Struggling to right himself, trying to keep the barrel on the wall of the corn, he heard through the ringing silence a voice calling to him by name. Another rabbit had burst into the open—his father was hurriedly trying to reload—and as he turned his gun across the naked slope for a moment, his eye, the safety catch, the little black sight and its weaving course made a single line, the stock jumped again and the white, dancing tail came suddenly apart.

  —

  ETTY ALWAYS DID the clothes on a Monday. Any later in the week and her hands would not recover for the service on Sunday, and even then, especially in the winter, she could bite her lip until she tasted blood before she came to the end of a hymn. She dunked Oliver’s jeans in the scum-covered bath, rinsed them thoroughly and began to feed the colours through the mangle—turning the handle with slow, stiff movements, collecting the water to use on the floor. In the window over the salting stone the clouds were congealing; the creatures were pressing round the fences on the hill. But still, when she heard the noise of the geese, she removed her apron, mopped her face and went to stand on the front doorstep to watch Oliver on the combine, grinding round the corner of the barn. Behind him Griffin drove the Ford 4000 with the children on the trailer among the bales, the sacks and the rabbits swinging from the lade. They reminded her of the floats at Builth Carnival—the four of them parading through the yard, acclaimed by the chickens and the burnskin dogs—and she smiled at the thought and waved to her grandson, who slipped to the ground and trotted towards her: too old for hugs or kisses these days, although really he was no more than a boy, a tadpole where Ada had her first hind legs.

  “I shot a rabbit!” he told her, standing straight in his shorts and T-shirt.

  “You never!”

  “This boy…” Oliver stopped the combine in the lambing shed. He returned to the yard with his belly before him, a swing to his stride whose recent absence Etty noticed only now. “I tell you, Mother, he is a crack shot!”

  “Course he is.” She let her hand touch his shoulder. “You’ll be hungry, I doubt. Do you want a bit of tea, do you? Ada?”

  “Yes, please, Mrs. Hamer.”

  “Yes, please, Nana.”

  Etty looked from the clouds to the low-glancing martins and the chawms around the tyres of the trailer, in which she almost expected to see pink flesh, as she did in the cracks in her fingers. “Best to come on in, by the looks of things,” she said. “The rain shan’t wait for the kettle.”

  The anxiety of the morning was gone—and that was nothing to the days of hay, when they had been slaves to every turn in the weather and the winter waited dark and uncertain. The silage, the combine, these things were like blessings—as the binder had seemed after the reaping that she alone remembered: the long nights working by the waxing moon, its light just enough to see the faces of the men, the grey of the hills, the rabbits by the hedges and the farmhouse white across the valley. Change would come and sometimes for the better, but it was not this, nor the fact that they had brought in the harvest, beating both the storm and Cwmpiban, which sent her lightly back into the kitchen to recover her apron, spoon tea into the pot and take the cake from the oven to sit, still steaming, on a plate on the chipped blue tray.

  —

  IT HAD BEEN so many weeks since Cefin had last seen rain that he could hardly remember how it happened. Beyond the barn the hills seemed vague, as they would without his glasses. There were spots in places in the yellow-brown yard: sudden spiders of water and dust. A drop ran down the side of his neck. With Blackie crawling after them, he and Ada shuffled backwards from the doorstep to sit by the telephone table.

  “You like Def Leppard then, do you?” Ada asked.

  Cefin finished his mouthful. “Don’t you?”

  “Philip likes them,” she admitted. “My brother. I like Madonna.”

  “Well, you’re a girl.”

  “My friend says I look like her.”

  “She’s got hair a bit like you. Sometimes.” Cefin stroked the dog’s neck—her muscles hard beneath the reeking fur. “Do you…want to see what I found?”

  “What is it?”

  He reached in his pocket and extracted the roll of paper.

  Away from the grown-ups a certain fierceness had left the girl’s face. Her lips had parted. Her eyes had ceased to be the slits of her father. She slithered towards him on the seat of her shorts.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  “The granary…Do you know what it is?”

  In this gathering twilight the stars, the moon and the beam-circled sun seemed more mysterious than ever.

  “Magic,” said Ada.

  “Magic?” He smiled.

  “Yeah, and what would you know about it?”

  “How old are you?”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “April…”

  “Mine’s January, so there you are.”

  The hall felt something like the entrance
to a cave. The rain was growing, blackening the yard, scratching an angle from the wall of the barn where the bale elevator was spluttering steadily. The hills seemed to crane in successive waves of shadow, and at the first hint of lightning the wretched dog tried to climb into Cefin’s lap.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  “Of course I’m bloody serious.” She was scowling again. “Move!”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Budge out the way.”

  Cefin shrugged and slid onto the doormat as she took his place, crossed her legs and leant over Blackie, murmuring in her ear. She ran her hands round her neck and along her back, tickled her chin and caressed her nose, and slowly, weirdly, the animal subsided. She lay on her lap like something deflated and appeared to have fallen asleep.

  “Well?” she said, and lifted her eyes.

  “How…did you do that?” he asked.

  “So you believe me now, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well.” Ada checked behind them, her fingers working on the dog’s neck. “Magic’s what it is, if you like it or not. That’s a horse charm, I expect, since you found him over the stable. What you do is you hide him above a door—stick him in the wall is best—then you say a prayer on whatever’s coming through, and there you go, your prayer comes true.”

  “Do you think he still works?” asked Cefin, finally.